In this well-documented and ably crafted volume, Stewart Patrick manages both to paint an unusually broad canvas of American diplomatic history and to give this familiar subject a fresh and largely persuasive look. He does so by paying homage to a litany of past theorists of the American embrace of multilateral institutions during and after World War II before identifying the gaps and insufficiencies in their arguments and offering some valuable supplementary theories of his own. This is a balanced, nuanced, and sensible account of why the United States first turned to the establishment of global institutions to carry out important aspects of its international agenda and then retained considerable faith in them despite the Cold War and their frequently disappointing performance. As Patrick tellingly points out, the American attraction to multilateralism both preceded and outlived its devotion to containment policy as the best way to discourage Soviet expansionism. (The difference, of course, is that the latter completed its task and was no longer needed.)

Patrick's theoretical construct is both a strength and a liability in terms of presenting a compelling narrative. On the plus side, he respectfully outlines the main claims of a number of prevalent explanations for the prominent and persistent place of liberal institutionalism in post-1945 U.S. foreign policy. He appreciates that realism, neorealism, hegemonic stability theory, rational choice theory, exceptionalism, and even Marxism offer parts of the answer. In his view, however, none can account either for the timing of the U.S. shift, given that many of these conditions applied to unilateralist or isolationist America before the war, or for the continuing drive to bolster multilateral institutions through most Republican and Democratic administrations to this day. He offers constructivism, aptly in this reviewer's opinion, namely, the enduring role of ideas and identity in shaping U.S. policy choices, as the most persuasive theory to explain the post-1945 continuity. To his credit, however, he does not rely on a single theory to carry all of the weight of his layered and nuanced argument. Usefully, he compares the U.S. determination to create and preserve a relatively open and universal postwar multilateral order to the more cautious and narrow perspectives of some key allies.

Although Patrick's methodological and theoretical construct works well on the whole and adds value to earlier accounts of this subject by other authors, it also tends to direct the focus of his research in some directions and away from others. For instance, while he is surely right to suggest that the United States had more ardor for a relatively open and universal postwar order than the United Kingdom and France, he does not address why the allies have tended to be more multilateralist at several points since the ebbing of U.S. enthusiasm for the United Nations and other multilateral instruments.

No doubt he is right to stress the place of ideas and identity in giving U.S. policies a distinctively American cast. However, the somewhat light and episodic treatment of U.S. domestic politics in the book downplays the extent to which America has always been a place of competing ideas and identities on these issues. The rejectionists are as much a part of the American political landscape as the multilateralists. There have been several prominent and recurring strains in American thinking about multilateral engagements, with none dominant for more than brief periods, because contention has been the rule more often than consensus. In this realm, American political culture has been, well, multicultural.

Early on, Patrick identifies three “contending approaches to U.S. global engagement”—liberal internationalism, great power internationalism, and isolationism—in the early twentieth century, from 1900 to 1940 (pp. 9–10). As the book contends, and few would doubt, World War II then changed U.S. foreign policy irrevocably. Isolationism all but disappeared. But what became of the other strains? What new varieties appeared after the hot war receded and the cold one appeared in its place? For all of the valuable insights offered on how U.S. views toward international institutions were adjusted for the Cold War environment, the book never returns to the task of labeling and explaining the major postwar strains in U.S. foreign policy. This leads to some confusion. When first introducing the three contending approaches, the author asserts, with some justification, that “the clash of these countervailing impulses [apparently including isolationism] explains the longstanding U.S. ambivalence toward global engagement over the past century” (p. 8). So World War II did not change everything after all? Since the remainder of the book highlights the continuity of the multilateralist impulse into the present century, the ambivalence piece—which to this reviewer is central to an understanding of U.S. policy—gets lost in the rest of the narrative.

For instance, while Patrick deserves credit for his extensive account of the failure to get the International Trade Organization (ITO) off the ground in the late 1940s, he puts far more weight on London's reluctance to give up imperial preferences than on Republican opposition to the establishment of such a formal trade organization. It may well be, as he put it, that “ideologically, economic multilateralism appealed to both American liberals and conservatives, since it relied primarily on the free market—rather than statism or collectivism—to address pressing social challenges” (p. 126). But he could be clearer about why Republican legislators were so much more comfortable with the looser GATT regime than with the multilaterally negotiated ITO for which the Truman administration had expended so much diplomatic effort and political capital. As he notes, the GATT was more “flexible,” “pragmatic,” and “informal” (p. 258). It was also less institutionalized. In his words, “the fact that it was an informal arrangement among contracting parties, rather than a supranational organization, made it palatable to sovereignty-minded members of Congress” (p. 258). In the postwar period, “the United States discovered that its dedication to procedural multilateralism … undercut its ability to achieve substantive multilateralism” (p. 254). Fair enough, but these trenchant observations suggest that the American embrace of multilateralism was partial and conditional. More could have been said about what kinds of norms, procedures, and institutions fit the American model of multilateralism and which did not. And why had the “sovereignty-minded” legislators failed to get the message about the new postwar era?

For this reviewer's tastes, the book goes too far in its characterization of prevailing thinking in Washington during the war as optimistic about the future of Soviet-American cooperation, as determined to make the United Nations the centerpiece of Western security policy, and as committed to an open, rule-based, liberal, and egalitarian world order. If so, then why did the United States insist that it would not belong to a world body in which it could not veto proposed peace and security actions? What is egalitarian about permanent membership in the Security Council? If the UN was to be so universal, why did its charter include several “enemies” clauses and its membership exclude the axis powers? True, Washington had more than its share of optimists in those days, but there were plenty of well-placed skeptics, too. Ironically, they included then–Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was assigned to take the lead in selling the Senate on an organization in which he had little faith. In May 1945, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew wrote privately that the veto would leave the UN “powerless to act against the one certain future enemy, Soviet Russia.” Moreover, the rosy picture presented publicly by an administration determined to win public and Senate support did not always fully reflect the more nuanced and pragmatic calculations of postwar planners and high-level policymakers.

As with any big book, The Best Laid Plans presents some small points to question as well. The suggestion that Washington's Farewell Address “set a unilateral, even isolationist course” (p. 3) seems overdrawn. Nor would one necessarily label those preferring that active U.S. engagement be limited to the Western Hemisphere “isolationist” (pp. 8–9). David Mitrany and functionalism might have deserved at least a passing reference. The UN Secretary-General is appointed, not elected, and the League of Nations did have a strong secretariat and even some durable agencies affiliated with it (p. 95). The U.S. Senate gives its advice and consent; it does not ratify treaties, leaving that to the president (pp. 98, 147, and 279).

These minor complaints aside, there is much to commend in this fine volume. It is thoughtful, engaging, sweeping, and unusually well crafted. In an insightful and concise conclusion, Patrick notes that “between 1940 and 1950 the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations chose to embrace a hard-headed vision of liberal internationalism consistent with American political culture, informed by the lessons of American history, calibrated to achieve U.S. interests, and conducive to enduring U.S. global leadership” (p. 326). Well put; well done.