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Do You Have Questions About Foreign Policy?
Some of you may remember, because I’ve mentioned this often in interviews and podcasts, that my book about Margaret Thatcher began with an offhand comment from my brother. The comment, specifically, was, “You know what you should do, Claire? You should write a book about Margaret Thatcher.”
The other day, my brother said, “You know what you should do, Claire? You should write a book about foreign policy.”
“Foreign policy?” I said. “It’s not as if no one’s written one before.”
“Yeah, but a lot of people are still really confused.”
Okay, fair enough.
He thought that a book that focused on answering some fairly basic questions, in a readable, interesting way, could be successful. He asked, for example, how many people really understand all the tools of foreign policy that fall between “total withdrawal from the world” and “nuking it.” He thought people might like a book that explains–for example–what a démarche is. How the United States uses weapons sales as a tool of policy. How many diplomats we have, and what they do all day. Foreign aid as a policy tool.
I’m just not sure: Is there a need for that kind of book? My brother’s instincts are usually pretty good, but when I look at everything that’s been published about US foreign policy, I’m just not sure what another book would add.
Perhaps you could help me refine that idea. What have you always wanted to know about foreign policy? Do you think I’d be the right person to answer those questions? Do you think that’s a good idea for a book?
Published in General
Lord Palmerston said,“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”
Perhaps, this could be your theme. How do nations define their interests? What are the tools they employ to advance them? And, how has the US vs other powerful nations throughout history differed in defining and advancing its interests?
Foreign policy seems to be game theory played by non-mathematicians. With predictable and disastrous results.
A good primer is in order.
Yes, but the one thing game theory can not tell you is – to what end?
Write the book, it has a guaranteed audience here. Someone asked about the State Department-there should be a chapter on the relation of the national interest to the State Department’s behavior. Career “diplomatic” personnel have been sabotaging conservatives’ foreign policy initiatives for decades.
Angelo Codevilla’s To Make and Keep Peace — Among Ourselves and with All Nations seems a good primer. He certainly goes after game theorists and realists. His podcast interview at Library of Law & Liberty, discussing the book, is worthwhile.
What I would love is if Claire were possibly to write a review of the book…
Jon in SC, are you familiar with Dorothy Dunnett? She wrote two linked series of historical novels set in Renaissance Europe. “The House of Niccolo” and “Lymond Chronicles”. Once you start, you’re hooked.
I actually had a foreign policy related memory and dug around to verify it. Senior year of undergrad –due to a story too long to tell–I was 6 years out of high school and finally staring my last year of undergrad. I had completed all my required work and had a few free electives. I signed up for a course with a favorite professor called “U.S. Foreign Policy.” I loved the lectures and discussion but dropped after 3 weeks, right before the first paper was due. Why? Because I wanted to drink regularly with my suite-mates on top of the school library–and I couldn’t do that and make a good grade.
Claire, if you write the book I promise to buy it, read it, and remain sober most of the time while reading it.
I’ll second that! I miss the days of having both Claire and her father on Ricochet — they’re in fact the main reason I joined Ricochet in the first place.
Thank you, everyone. I just walked in and saw these comments. I meanwhile spent the day scribbling notes about foreign policy, by hand, on the train to and from Brussels. (Brussels in November is just as grim as you’d imagine.) If anyone had stolen my handbag and found those, I suspect he would have been puzzled.
I’ll join this conversation again in the morning, my time. After a night’s sleep I’ll look over my notes to see if perhaps I had any good ideas. Then I’ll look over the comments carefully to see if anything in particular comes up as a theme or matches my notes. Perhaps together we can come up with a sharp line of attack.
I truly appreciate everyone’s reactions. They’re very helpful.
Why should we assume and act as if Iran doesn’t already have an operational nuke or two or three, purchased from Pakistan or N.Korea? And is there any evidence that Israel of behaving as if they do?
(Ok, that isn’t a question within the ambit of the book you envision, but I’ve been looking for some place where I can shoe horn-in this query…)
I’ve always been amused at the pompous elites in this country, people like Bill Clinton, that mock the rubes and Philistines out in the countryside for their distorted view of foreign aid. The “rubes” think we spend about 15% of our budget on foreign aid while the smartypants set knows it’s only a stingy 1%. I’d like to see a breakdown of what is accounted for as foreign aid – does it include the billions we allow illegal aliens to send home? Does it account for the bend-over-backward interpretations of “free trade” deals we negotiate and tolerate with other countries? Does it include the trillion dollars we allow China to embezzle through currency manipulation? I have a feeling the rubes are a lot closer to the mark than the elites.
The comment caused me to listen to the podcast. It was great and IMO is spot on with regard to what should be our underlying foreign relations policy and approach.
Oh! Well, it certainly can be that. But the primary reason I appreciate the Europa Universalis franchise is that you can trade your way to glory, or coalition-build, or export culture, etc. and (to bring this back to the OP) it’s all in the context of a remarkably large, detailed database of actual historical events. So much so the Europa Universalis II manual includes a plea to players not to report Bohemia going Protestant 100 years before the Protestant Reformation as a bug.
Ms. Claire, there are several possible titles that might draw attention that occur to me.
I am good for five copies + the Audible version. Go Seahawks!
Claire,
I’m sure there is another good book to be written about foreign policy, and I’m sure that you are capable of writing it, but it the question you address is the dispute between “total withdrawal from the world” and “nuking it,” then I would suggest rhymes and pictures. Maybe pictures of monkeys or turtles. For example,
I do not like those in Iran.
I do not like their “nuke us” scam.
I do not like them hating Jews,
Or even hating me and youse.
I do not like that Kim Jung Un.
I’m happy that he’s dying soon.
I do not like the mean jihadists,
Who just want to de-cap-ee-tat us.
I do not like that dumb UN.
They’ll only screw us once again.
And if you won’t just launch the nukes,
Then on the ground, please give me boots.
If you want good sales, figure out a way to make it into a diet book, or include vampires having sex.
It would make for a short book, but you could pose the question, “Why wasn’t the State Department shut down, the building demolished, and the ground plowed under with salt after the Venona decrypts were declassified, and the level of Communist penetration at State revealed?”
Alternatively, you could document the failures and shortcomings of State since WWII. That book might turn out slight longer … 8^)
Well it largely depends on what you would be interested in writing about, does it not?
For example, I suspect a populist work examining our foreign policy could be rather successful. But would you be interested in penning such a work?
Why does US foreign policy appear so incoherent? Why does the State Department take views that clearly seem at odds with US interests? What is motivating the officials making such decisions?
Most voters have little understanding of US foreign policy and for good reason, actions taken are more often than not deliberately confusing and the reasons given for such intentionally evasive. A tome which clarifies could have a substantial audience.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll check it out. Always on the lookout for good historical books, biographies, and such including recent events. Just finished Norman Schwarzkopf”s biography. It’s surprisingly good.
I’m having a slight feeling of overwhelm looking at these questions, because I asked. You answered. So I feel I should at least try to answer all the questions to which I might have an answer right here, on this thread. But there are at least fifty excellent, serious, separate questions, none of which may be answered “yes” or “no.”
I wonder if I could ask your forbearance and and say that I’ve made a note of all of these questions, and that I’ll try to suggest how I might answer them, or say, “I honestly don’t know,” over the coming month. But I can’t answer all of them, in a serious way, today. They’re big questions and good ones. I’d probably be insulting everyone’s intelligence if I tried to whip off glib responses. If my instinct is right, we’ve all had enough of having our intelligence insulted on this subject.
Saying, “Well, I don’t have a quick response,” is no fun, I know, but it’s a serious proposal. And I do have a response to many of these questions.
Would all the people who asked good questions here find that reasonable?
Don’t forget Harry Dexter White, “our” guy at Treasury, working for the Soviet Union while “negotiating” Bretton Woods. I can’t even type that without becoming nauseous.
Back to the point: I would hope that any book on American foreign policy covering the Soviet era would indeed account for State’s corruption by the Soviets.
I would read a book that factually debunks both the notorious “arc of history” and the false notion that individual leaders don’t materially alter events in a macro sense, and that helps refine and redefine the meaning of History as something more precise than a winner’s narrative.
I would mostly love to read one that in a concise and chronological manner explicates the singular role of Western Civilization, why it still dominates, why it is worth cherishing and how important it is for everyone to have a solid grounding in the classical liberal arts, to the degree they’re able, in order to appreciate our forebears.
A book that corrects the PC narrative by comparing the major influences in the last two thousand years on civilizational development, and ranks those influences, would help us evaluate the usefulness or importance of contemporary players.
Accomplish all three goals for a Trifecta!
You know, I wish for the first time that Ricochet had some way of separating a thread out from the rest and turning it into a sub-category that could be organized into a set of subtopics–because the questions on this thread are really very close to the list of questions in my notebook. I’d love to use this thread, over the course of the coming several weeks, as a basis for expanding my thoughts on each of these questions, and in that way get your further thoughts on them, too. But I’d like it to go in the direction of getting more organised and detailed, not more distracted and diffused. Any ideas about how to do that? I could start separate topics in the main feed under each question/heading, but I think that would be an abuse of my ability to start topics in the main feed: I’d be turning Ricochet into an all-foreign-policy-forum for days on end, and I don’t think that would be entirely appreciated by everyone.
I wonder how easy it would be to set up a separate forum on the members’ feed?