Book Review: Advice to War Presidents, By Angelo M. Codevilla

     
 

Sunday

February 21, 2010  

     
 

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Book Review:

 

Advice

to

War Presidents

 
 

by Angelo M. Codevilla

   316 pgs. with notes and index 

published 2009

(Angelo Codevilla, a Senior Fellow at

The Claremont Institute,

is a former naval officer

and is now a professor of

International Relations at Boston University)

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This book is an informative, tightly argued, detailed, and passionate indictment of the misguided American foreign policy of the twentieth century. The book also takes to task precisely the elite and academic international affairs culture persisting in Washington which produced the mistaken policies.

     
 

In the overarching structure of this book, Codevilla parses our last one hundred years of international relations by dividing the relevant schools of thought that have finally emerged into three: Liberal Internationalists, who believe uncritically in the virtues of international organizations such as the UN, then Realists, who believe in seeking out “moderates” in other countries to forge detente-style truces, and, last but not least, Neoconservatives, who believe somewhat more in the use of force than the other two, and who seek to spread democracy far and wide in order to ensure the freedom of Americans all the better.

   
 

Now, Codevilla argues against all three of these twentieth century schools. He believes that the foreign policy of America’s first century of existence is the best rule of thumb for us in international affairs today, largely because that older style does not evince the “global meliorism,” the “global betterment,” so characteristic of our policies at present. Our diplomats in this era, consequently, in the haze of their mistakes, have become more concerned with pleasing foreigners than with pleasing Americans, and we have needlessly lost much blood and treasure for this — we have actually been more at war this way than if we had just pursued self-interest normally.

     
 

Within the present system, consequently, we are constantly at war. We should, on the contrary, Codevilla argues, give up global meliorism, stop worrying about making the globe ”safe for democracy,” and just get back to basics. There’s a reason that the League of Nations failed, and a similar reason why the UN is a witches’ brew of corruption: international organizations don’t have a chance of working. All nations have their own particular self-interest, and if you put all these scattered paradigms together, it’s just hopeless. Too many of these nations will simply use the international organization in question to pursue various self-interested, nefarious designs, making a mockery of the organization. Nothing can stop that eventuality.

     
 

But, back in the day, in the eighteenth century, that is, our American diplomats, who were wiser, more grounded men, only worried about making peace our way, in our immediate self-interest, and only used “engagement,” as it’s called today, as a last resort. To utilize endless negotiation as an official policy was not in their nature, and negotiations as ends in themselves were unheard of. But today they are the norm, exasperatingly. We accept peace at any price today, to our shame. For Codevilla, on the other hand, diplomacy fundamentally is the quiet art of simply informing your opponent what will happen to him if he does not cease and desist. And in foreign policy, by the way, if you don’t mean it, “you better shut up.”  No empty rhetoric has a place in competent diplomacy, no idle threats, no moral posturing: just mean what you say, and go through with it. Codevilla sums up by stating, in a wonderful phrase, that “competent diplomats don’t threaten, they warn.”

     
 

Ever since the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, Codevilla continues, we have been influenced in our international relations by made-up concepts about foreign people’s desires, about America’s global role, and about, most of all, what the wider world is really like. All this has passed for wisdom. Liberal Internationalists think you can administer and bureaucratize the world into peace, Realists that you can find all the moderates until all the extremists are gone, and Neocons that the world is a titanic contest between totalitarian governments and the global populace of democracy lovers, such that everyone, everywhere, infallibly wants American-style democracy.

     
 

But none of this is true, for Codevilla. Our diplomats today have unfortunately set aside real diplomacy in favor of an imaginary diplomacy in which all the people of the world want the same thing, a world in which, essentially, there are no foreigners. Codevilla definitely sees all three schools as being guilty of these misconceptions. We have given up true “statecraft,” the pursuit of our immediate, national self-interest, and taken up the fantasy that we can “renovate the world.” Not good. We have experienced endless trouble because of this, and we should stop the needless, impossibly futile, destructive policies that are based on this fiction.

   
 

Codevilla has written an immensely convincing, compelling book. To say it repays the effort of reading it is a major understatement. And its goal is ambitious — to change America’s present way of conducting itself in international affairs. I, for one, hope the book succeeds in this.