On foreign policy, a call to ditch the grim worldview and reawaken idealism

Heather Hurlburt reviewed Robert Zoellick's America in the World:  A History of US Diplomacy and Foreign Policy in the Washington Post.

If, as Zoellick writes, “the deepest tradition of U.S. diplomacy has been to advance America’s ideas,” what are we to do with the thorny relationship between those ideas and the lived reality of many people under U.S. rule? After our foes and allies alike have watched U.S. law enforcement kill unarmed Black men and bundle protesters into unmarked vans, some reckoning is surely necessary for pragmatic alliance management, to say nothing of actual commitment to the ideals in question.

Here Zoellick’s retelling of U.S. history comes up disappointingly empty. He disposes of Wilson’s record on race by calling it “a serious step backward” in a footnote, and refers to slavery as a problem for U.S. diplomacy but never as a problem for U.S. principles. Jefferson, at least for a time, struggled with the contradictions of his views on race. Some of FDR’s advisers (among them his wife) knew that his stances on Japanese American internment and Jewish refugees, while pragmatic, were deeply wrong. As Travis Adkins and Judd Devermont recently pointed out in Foreign Policy, Cold Warriors both Black and White were painfully aware of the contradictions of their ringing espousal of freedom.

Ducking these hard questions, and others, may be a tradition of U.S. diplomacy that contemporary life — with its need to form diverse coalitions at home and answer to empowered critics domestically and abroad — will no longer allow. Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama, each in his own way, sought to shine the light of U.S. values on some U.S. practices, while retaining a Kissingerian realism toward others. Zoellick makes a strong case that the story of the past can help us make the future better. But in the aftermath of a president who revels in U.S. hypocrisy, as this one does, returning to a polite silence won’t be sufficient on either pragmatic or moral grounds.