Commissioned Book Review: Robert B. Zoellick, America in the World: A History of US Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
| Author | Can Donduran |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211031858 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(2) NP27 –NP28
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1031858PSW0010.1177/14789299211031858Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
America in the World: A History of US
Diplomacy and Foreign Policy by Robert
B. Zoellick. Boston, MA: Twelve, 2020. 560 pp.,
£28.99, ISBN 978-1538761304
Since the field has been thoroughly treated,
studying US diplomatic history is a challeng-
ing task itself, a challenge that Robert Zoellick
does not hesitate to take on. As a seasoned dip-
lomat and the former President of the World
Bank, Zoellick’s book offers a commanding
narrative and detailed history of American
diplomacy. If ‘history is the memory of the
states’, as wisely stated by Kissinger (1973:
331), this book, with all its controversial
assumptions, is a bold attempt to shift the
foundations of America’s diplomatic memory.
Zoellick’s ‘stories about the history of
American diplomacy’ (6) provide readers with
an unconventional perspective regarding the
country’s international behaviour since the
Revolution. The chronologically organised and
comprehensive scope is the book’s greatest
strength. Encompassing every watershed for-
eign policy issue, from the efforts of America’s
first diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, to the unor-
thodox vision introduced by President Trump,
the book places self-interest imbued with prag-
matism at the heart of America’s foreign policy
initiatives. Instead of viewing US foreign pol-
icy, despite the general tendency, oscillating
between extroversion and introversion, the
author suggests a more instrumentalist and
result-centred framework for the analysis. He
underscores five distinct and persistent tradi-
tions in American foreign policy: (1) establish-
ing superiority in the Western hemisphere; (2)
ensuring access to foreign markets as the defin-
ing element of US engagement in world affairs;
(3) the increasing reliance on alliances; (4) the
indispensable sensitivity of American deci-
sion-makers to public opinion and, as a corol-
lary, Congress and (5) the unwavering belief in
the self-defined American exceptionalism
entailing a lofty purpose.
The insightful analysis shaped by a reform-
ist attitude regarding the interwar years, a
somewhat obscure period of US foreign policy
and the author’s tendency to focus on relatively
peripheral aspects and less well-known figures
is remarkably illuminating. Likewise, the
emphasis on ‘strategic reference points -about
geography, economics, power and politics’
rather than often misleading ‘doctrinal labels’
(444) helps to place landmark issues on a solid
foundation. Only such an inclination accounts
for the gist of the global American involve-
ment without reducing its strategies to simplis-
tic terms. However, the book’s focus
disproportionately remains on the distant past,
ironically overlooking the last three decades
that coincide with the period when the author
held government offices under two Republican
administrations. Besides the impression that
we are faced with a typical revolving door oper-
ator, switching positions in the think tank uni-
verse, government offices and academia,
Zoellick’s silence about this period deprives the
book of valuable insights from an insider, mak-
ing it hard to distinguish from many other ‘sto-
ries’ of US foreign policy and creating a sense
of disconnection between the past and present.
More importantly, the author’s conviction
in pragmatism as the principal guide of US
foreign policy blinds him to its essential
source of inspiration. While helping to tran-
scend many conventional analytical tools, the
book’s five-dimensional approach towards
America’s international undertakings imposes
implicit limits to the analysis by leading it to
secondary areas. By unnecessarily expanding
the focal point, Zoellick overlooks the core of
the American foreign policy tradition. Indeed,
US foreign policy, from the outset, has had a
pendular behavioural pattern, oscillating
across a policy spectrum ranging from moral-
politik to realpolitik. Swings, feeding off an
inherent values-interests dilemma, may occur
between engagement and disengagement or
isolationism and internationalism. Therefore,
the perennial dichotomy concerns the guiding
principle of foreign policy. Losing sight of this
values-interests binary as the genuine tradi-
tion-building element of American diplomacy
To continue reading
Request your trial