Writing in 1972, Gordon Chang remarked, “To establish the relationship between ideas and foreign policy is always a difficult task.” Therefore, he concluded, “it is no accident that it has attracted so few historians.”Footnote ¹ In the intervening years, as diplomatic history fell further out of vogue in the historical profession, Chang's assertion seemed to stand the test of time; there were a few notable exceptions in the work of such eminent scholars as Michael Hunt – who tackled the interrelation of ideas, ideology, and US diplomacy topics – but overall as diplomatic and intellectual history became less relevant, connecting them to US foreign relations seemed like a fool's errand.Footnote ²

The end of the Cold War and particularly the global transformations and new methodologies of the twenty-first century dramatically challenged that perspective. Ideas clearly mattered in foreign policy, as did religion; globalization and an “end to history,” perhaps including a transformation of the nation-state itself, seemed poised to happen. Classes filled and new academic positions and publishing options expanded. Since the late 1990s there has been a move toward global and transnational historical analysis, and what we call the intellectual history of the US and the world. With this shift in academic discourse have come nuanced narrow studies of the complicated ways in which ideas and intellectuals have both reciprocally been involved in foreign relations broadly defined (e.g. to include a wide range of transnational actors, goods, ideas, laws, institutions) and reinvigorated the grand narratives that build on and often synthesize some of this more micro-work.

In short, big, ambitious attempts to examine large swaths of time and space are back for professional historians. Such books, always the domain of popular history, have been accruing professional recognition as well as generating attention from scholars and wider publics. Nowhere, I argue, is this trend more obvious than in the field of the “US in the world” (aka American diplomatic history). David Milne's pathbreaking Worldmaking epitomizes this trend. It argues, following Kennan, that “nothing in international affairs is possessed of stable properties,” and that exploring the foreign policies and debates as either art or science reveals that the “uncertainty of history is the most significant obstacle to approaching foreign policy as a science” (525).

Milne's work joins the best of the recent grand-narrative scholarship in US foreign relations that also attends to the significance of ideas, including work by George Herring, Andrew Preston, Walter Hixson, Elizabeth Cobbs, Richard Immerman, and Walter McDougall.Footnote ³ Like those authors, Milne's study offers key insights and exemplary methods for scholars and students who seek to understand the role of ideas and intellectuals in the US's relations with the world since the 1890s. (Full disclosure: Milne and the author coedited an encyclopedia together.)

This is a compelling and erudite book with a breathtaking sweep. While taking a biographical approach, Worldmaking combines elements of intellectual history with a capacious perspective on foreign relations. The main figures come to life in this narrative. The book moves chronologically from the rise of American sea power and the thought of Alfred Mahan; through the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and World War I's aftermath; thinkers Charles Beard and Walter Lippmann bring us through the 1920s and 1930s and up to World War II; from there the Cold War and George Kennan loom large, with Paul Nitze and Henry Kissinger; then shifting to Paul Wolfowitz; and all the way up to nearly the end of the Obama's second term. Milne has mastered the lives of – and literatures on – all of his central figures. Each chapter, in turn, reveals richly sedimented layers of ideas and insights; they remain attentive to the story of the focal figures while also carrying the broader story of changing US diplomacy and ideas about the US's role in the world forward over time. Tackling complicated thinkers and concepts, and attending to minor distinctions and changes over time is no small feat. Somehow Milne does so with a real elegance and economy of language (though the book clocks in at five hundred pages).

The core conceit of the book is that a biographical approach assists in dispensing with the “tired” binary of idealism versus realism that has been central to many analyses of US foreign relations (16). In its place, Milne suggests art versus science, explaining how some thinkers have been drawn more to artistic sensibilities regarding American diplomacy while others have preferred scientific orientations.

By this Milne does not intend any facile or reductive organizing dichotomy. He does not force figures, thoughts, or moments into this framework when they do not fit. He interprets complex blendings of the arts and science at times, but seeks to place his thinkers on a spectrum of art–science to reveal the sorts of essential intellectual commitment – ways of knowing, evaluating, and acting – that structured approaches to domestic and geopolitical problems large and small and over time.

Milne convincingly makes the case that Wilson, Nitze, and Wolfowitz, steeped as they were in the social sciences, “were more inclined to view the world as ‘makeable’ following the identification and application of tackling complicated thinkers and concepts, and attending to minor distinctions and changes over time, the appropriate patterns and theories” (17). In other words, the “scientific” perspective on diplomacy relies on social-science disciplinary knowledge and dogma. Such thinkers, Milne explains, often have aimed to “transcend history” and “do things that have never been tried” (17). On the other hand, we see in Worldmaking that Mahan, Kennan, Kissinger, and Obama took more of an “artistic” approach. They tended to “believe that the world cannot be treated as a laboratory, that the course of history is unknowable, that policymakers must rely upon intuition and creativity alone … Precedent is essential, and policymaking based on abstract theorizing is dismissed as reckless” (17). In short, such thinking often has been be more about coping “as best they can with a world that cannot be bent to the will of a single nation – no matter how powerful” (17). The opening vignette of the book sets this out strikingly by setting a scientist's view in opposition to that of an artist's conceptualization, when Paul Nitze and George Kennan sparred in rival and remarkably different evaluations of the policy dimensions of US pursuit of a thermonuclear weapon in 1949–50. However, as Milne also shows, Kennan's long life of foreign-policy thought exposes moments of acute lack of pragmatic reasoning as well.

This insight, coupled to the art–science argument, did make me wonder about the two main figures and competing worldviews I see driving the book from the 1910s to the 1990s, and to the present. In my view, and Milne's, the two archetypal intellectuals in US foreign relations are and were Woodrow Wilson and George Kennan.

Wilson, the first and only President with a doctorate, was a “scientist,” according to Milne. Wilson's Fourteen Points “represent the single most important foreign-policy statement of the twentieth century” (111). Mahan and Wilson's dispute may have been the “first great American foreign policy debate,” which Wilson won in terms of legacy (515). His Fourteen Points, and especially League of Nations, vision embodied the core precepts of what came to be known as Wilsonianism, and yet it also was moored to the “intellectualism” and “scientism” that ultimately made him blind to what was “politically possible” (120). In contrast, Kennan was an “artist.” He was just as sharp as Wilson and equally or more a master of detail. He also lived longer. Kennan rejected what Milne terms “Wilson's sirenical legacy,” reenergized under FDR, and yet propounded the grand strategy of containment that may have been the most demonstrably worldmaking of any concept in US foreign relations (220). The world-shaping events of 1945–49 – Bretton Woods, the UN, the Marshall Plan, NATO – in which Kennan played a part were a “collective masterstroke,” more art than science, according to Milne (525). Yet, like Wilson in many ways, Kennan's intellectualism got the better of him. Dean Acheson's critique of Kennan's lack of “practicality” was spot-on; ultimately it was the impractical, contextual, and artistic oscillations of analysis that sidelined him even as his “flair for prophetic insight” was widely revered in the early Cold War and beyond (264). Worldmaking presents us with a lesson from the duo Wilson and Kennan, scientist and artist, that, despite their many achievements, their propensity for overthinking, for self-reliance, and for extremism undercut the effectiveness of their politics and perspectives, for similar reasons yet despite dissimilar thought patterns.

This example shows how Milne's “art versus science” is useful because, unlike other schemas offered in recent years, and in Milne's hands, it opens up richer, more complicated intellectual portraits of his main characters. He reveals, in another telling example, how the architect of building US sea power, Mahan, was no simple imperialist; he rejected universalist imperialist conceptions of democracy promotion (in part a product of his view of racial–civilizational hierarchies). Along similar lines Milne's analysis generates surprising sympathy for figures like Henry Kissinger and Paul Wolfowitz. In his hands the reader comes to see the deep roots of Wolfowitz's idealism about the potential for democracy in Iraq while elaborating how his anti-Wilsonian antipathy for multilateralism might well have been the undoing of his world-shaping aspirations (61, 443). The writing is crisp, with a sense of humor and an admirable evenhandedness but not neutrality. It is clear, however, that the author sympathizes with the more artistic side of diplomacy, favoring historical precedent and what he depicts as the anti-Manichean pragmatism of a figure like Obama (501).

It is tempting for ambitious scholars to present categories and analytical frameworks to make sense of significant changes over time. It is just as tempting to critique such efforts as simplifications which, even when used most effectively, necessarily reduce historical complexity. Milne's subtle use of the art–science distinction is sophisticated and flexible enough to avoid major critique. Still, there are other options. Alternatives offered in recent scholarship to structure the full sweep of ideas and ideologies in US foreign policy have included schematizations such as Walter Russell Mead's four strands of thought: Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, and Jacksonian. Walter McDougall has offered a duality composed of separate underlying notions, but embodied in an emphasis on a “Promised Land” vision (e.g. unilateralism, Monroe Doctrine) or a “Crusader State” orientation (e.g. Wilsonianism, global meliorism). H. W. Brands proposed something similar in singling out “exemplarism” versus “vindicationism.” Michael Hunt posited that by the turn of the twentieth century three core ideas collectively wielded the most influence over policy and people: national greatness, racial hierarchy, and attitudes toward (the perils of) revolution. Milne's art–science distinction presents a simplicity and a nuance that is at least as compelling and illuminating. Juxtaposing art–science alongside one or more of these sets of alternative explanatory models might yield unexpected results (or, at the very least, would make for an excellent upper-level essay question).Footnote ⁴

Nine central figures and numerous others within their larger networks play major roles in the book. Exploring the people and their overlapping interactions (real, conceptual, or both) makes for revealing insights and drives the narrative of the book's emphasis on the rise of US commercial and military power as a tale of art and the science of American diplomacy. The figures come from formal politics, including Presidents and high-level policymakers, and from the circles of those who generated the ideas that informed policies and worldmaking projects. All undoubtedly are representative to some extent of broader currents of thought; all had significant policy impacts or played an important part in debates over the US's role in the world. However, these core figures are largely elite, are all men, and are all white except Obama. Their selection and the attendant criteria that led to a focus on these individuals and their broader communities of thought leave Worldmaking open to some criticism. For example, while reading the chapters on Beard and Lippmann I couldn't help but wonder: didn't Eleanor Roosevelt's thought and actions relating to human rights and antiracism, and her championing of international law and organization through the UN, warrant more focal attention? And what about the world peace activities of the first American woman Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jane Addams?

Some of those mentioned in Worldmaking but set aside as not sufficiently clear in terms of historical legacy – “traction and longevity,” as Milne puts it – seem of great import, but because they come from the very recent past their historical significance remains uncertain and preliminary judgments are, indeed, hard to make for a responsible historian: Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Still the volume comes nearly up to the present in an adroit analysis of the thought and policies of Barack Obama that emphasizes the “coherence and sincerity of his pragmatic worldview” (510). And then again, going farther back, we might also add a W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Colin Powell, Cesar Chavez, or lesser known figures in government and academia, such as Ambassadors Hugh and Mabel Smythe.

A few of these figures factor into the analysis here, and there is far greater diversity once the book reaches the period of the 1960s and after. This fine book need not and likely could not focus on all of these individuals. But the lack of focal women and people of color, along with non-Judeo-Christian believers, is interesting and worth noting for another reason: it opens up new avenues of insights and criticisms in interpreting the intellectual history of US foreign relations.

The historical development – and the historiography that seeks to explicate it – of US worldviews and diplomacy since the late nineteenth century through the present has generally seemed very much the conceptual and practical province of elite white men. In turn, this line of inquiry prompts the reader, as it does Milne (noting the pernicious effects of “gender discrimination” in formal policymaking, a point confirmed by both Lippmann and Obama), to wonder whether or not the relative demographic narrowness in US foreign-policy thought historically (and in the present?) served to attenuate the discourse of policy options, ideas, and ideologies. Indeed, as Worldmaking shows largely implicitly, and as have scholars such as Kristin Hoganson, Laura McEnaney, Robert Dean, Michelle Mart, Andrew Rotter, Emily Rosenberg, and Frank Costigliola, gendered language and metaphors abound in the historical record for figures like Wilson, Kennan, and Kissinger; as such they are emblematic of embedded worldviews of gender, racial, and other hierarchies that served to frame artistic as well as scientific approaches to American diplomacy.Footnote ⁵ Pointing to these concerns, and rejecting the gendered dimensions of “grand strategy,” Milne optimistically suggests that recent history reveals new possibilities. The “composition of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in particular,” opines Milne, gives hope “that the nation's foreign-policymaking and policy-debating elite might more closely resemble the nation at large” (20). The staffing of the Trump administration, however, has arrested such developments. The events and actions of 2016 and 2017 reveal significant limits regarding an expansion of the intellectual parameters of US foreign policy or politics.

Worldmaking is an exceptional, ambitious, and thought-provoking book. Milne succeeds in the difficult work of establishing connections between ideas, intellectuals, worldviews, and foreign policy. The historical record shows moments that delineated neatly between art and science and other periods where art and science commingled in foreign-policy thought and practice, which, as Milne notes, demonstrates that there is “no clear-cut binary.” The subtleties of this work raise nearly as many questions as they answer. Anyone who seeks to understand the intellectual underpinnings of the US's relationship with the world today, and over the past roughly 130 years, and who seeks to grapple with the ways in which diplomacy is art, science, or a mix of the two, should read this book.

Ambitious in scope and conception, David Milne's Worldmaking, which could also have been entitled The Dangers of Worldmaking, represents a fine work of intellectual history, one that deserves a place in undergraduate syllabi alongside classics by William Appleman Williams, John Lewis Gaddis, and Frank Ninkovich.Footnote ¹ Eschewing the ahistorical categories of realism and idealism that have limited the traditional canon of US diplomatic history, Milne offers his own bête noire, “scientism,” as the original sin of US globalism since the early days of the American imperium. At the other end of the spectrum is diplomatic artistry, what Milne might (but doesn't) refer to as World Accepting. Admittedly, diplomacy-as-art bears more than passing resemblance to traditional historiographies of realism, but Milne historicizes diplomatic artistry as an intellectual process rather than a static, universal state of mind. Taken as a whole, Worldmaking provokes introspection on the dual, opposing impulses that haunt humanity: must we accept the world as it is, or can we act to make it a better place?

As a skilled biographer, Milne is empathetic (but not sympathetic) to his subjects: nine scholar–politicians who have shaped US foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. Far from being a set of nine isolated essays, Milne's book reconstructs fascinating dialogues (both real and imagined) between intellectuals from a wide array of chronologies and ideological perspectives. While most of the book's protagonists evince a touch of both human impulses, artistry and scientism, Worldmaking clearly comes down on the side of the artist diplomats. According to Milne, artistry is better attuned to the making of foreign policy in a complex world, and he frequently credits the artist diplomats for correctly predicting the persistence of evil and competition in international relations. This conclusion occasionally led me to question whether or not Milne successfully escapes the tautology of realism, since even the most staid artist diplomats should be recognized as historical agents in their own right. They do not just try to predict the future, but rather act to shape foreign policies in line with their own ideological assumptions about nationalist competition and a reified nation-state.

Implicit here is the paradoxically fraught relationship between nationalism and internationalism, an issue dealt with in recent books as diverse as Julia Irwin's Making the World Safe and Mark Mazower's Governing the World.Footnote ² Milne's book especially echoes Mazower's, both in erudition and in their shared pessimism toward scientific and legal internationalism. Worldmaking also flows nicely from Milne's own 2005 debut, America's Rasputin, in which Walt Rostow's (pseudo)scientific globalism is blamed for having created the intellectual fig leaf for the US's artless violence against Vietnam.Footnote ³

One of the book's juiciest debates emerges in the first two chapters, between the militaristic nationalist visions of Alfred Thayer Mahan and the (social-)scientific approach of quintessential worldmaker Woodrow Wilson. Milne portrays Mahan as an Open Door free-trader, but I would argue that the concept of mercantilism would better describe Mahan's obsession with naval supremacy and his distaste for multilateral cooperation. I also hesitate to join Milne in ahistorically crediting Mahan for correctly predicting the coming US empire of aircraft carriers and military bases. That he based his analysis on past case studies of realist nation-states cannot be denied, but Mahan can hardly be considered to have been an uninvolved observer. As an artist diplomat, Mahan's powerful advocacy played a participatory role in the rise and persistence of nationalist competition, a pair of bloody world wars, and the emergence of the heavily militarized American century.

As Milne concedes, there was more to US globalism than aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. Scientist diplomats like Woodrow Wilson saw the world as a laboratory, a place in which the future could be engineered into something less brutal and self-destructive. Milne concedes that Wilsonian optimism helped to shape US foreign policy throughout the twentieth century, and he correctly identifies Wilsonian scientism as the ideological fuel that propelled many of Washington's furthest-flung interventions since 1917. But he also quickly returns to the artist diplomat Theodore Roosevelt, whose Mahanian militarism was based on a fundamentally more pessimistic view of world affairs. Worldmaking wisely invests significant time in the bitter debates between Wilson and Roosevelt. I was struck, for example, by the raw presentation of Roosevelt's chauvinistic populism and his anti-intellectual disdain for Wilsonian internationalism, particularly during the former President's Bull Moose period. Such posturing was nothing new in the history of nation-states, but I worry that Milne's effort to historicize realism as artist diplomacy unintentionally obscures a third, less elegant, tendency: aggressive hypernationalism as embodied by post-presidency Roosevelt and, more recently, by Donald J. Trump.

One of the strengths of Worldmaking is that Milne is comfortable with nuance and therefore does not dwell on dogmatic theoretical categories. This is especially evident in his one-off chapter on Charles Beard, a foreign-policy dissident whose interwar anti-imperialism contained more than a hint of anticapitalist nationalism. (Milne calls Beard the book's “most conventionally patriotic” subject (136).) Worldmaking interprets him within the tradition of scientism, noting that Beard imagined a better world, one in which US foreign policy was less dictated by monetary greed and the crusading impulses of false messiahs such as Wilsonian internationalism. This chapter stands out not only due to Beard's conflicted stance toward diplomatic art and science, but also because it is the one chapter whose protagonist was almost completely isolated from the foreign-policy decisions that fueled the rise of US globalism. Indeed, this chapter might best be interpreted as an unheeded warning against all major tendencies of American foreign policy: historicist artist diplomacy; forward-looking scientist diplomacy; and the rank, xenophobic strand of American nationalism from which Beard labored to distance himself.

If the category of nationalism is underdeveloped in Worldmaking, it may be due to the long shadow of the Cold War. As Ninkovich has argued, “Wilsonianism was internalized to the degree that its modernist character as historical interpretation was forgotten. In a reversal of traditional geopolitical logic, Wilsonianism became the cold war's realism.”Footnote ⁴ In Milne's language, this meant that the anticommunist Cold War liberal consensus created a situation in which scientific optimism was sometimes indistinguishable from a more artistic approach to winning the conflict. Milne's chapter on Walter Lippmann traces how this intermingling of past and future played out in a set of schizophrenic foreign-policy positions taken by Lippmann during his long journalistic career. Perhaps the most brilliant pundit in the mid-century United States, Lippmann's artistic breadth led him on a meandering path from socialist idealism to Bull Moose populism prior to World War I, from Wilsonian internationalism to Mahanian militarism in the interwar period, from Popular Front World War II realism to quintessential Cold War liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s, and finally to his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War in the years leading up to his death in 1974. What wove these threads together was Lippmann's unromantically callous desire for US global grandeur, in whatever ideologically convenient form. More comfortable on the think tank circuit than in the ivory tower of academia, Lippmann's activist approach found expression in the liberal internationalist journal New Republic, whose founder called it “radical without being socialistic … pragmatic rather than doctrinaire” (177). Milne's chapter on Lippmann may well be the book's best, as it tacks neatly from empathy to irony in laying out the career of the American century's most flexible and omnipresent public intellectual.

Lippmann's artistic contortions were instrumental, but the adherence of George Kennan and Henry Kissinger to diplomatic artistry was essential to both policymakers’ very nature. Never comfortable in the political spotlight, Kennan was more of a gadfly to power than its apologist. The most elusive character in Milne's study, Kennan is also the book's most devoted historicist. Meanwhile, Kissinger emerges in Milne's narrative as something of Kennan's foil. Media-obsessed and dogged by a globalism from which he futilely tried to escape, Kissinger's larger strategic flexibility was rivaled only by that of Walter Lippmann. Unlike Lippmann, however, both Kennan and Kissinger rejected Cold War liberalism in important ways, and neither betrayed an ounce of sympathy for the crusading scientism of their worldmaking contemporaries.

The most important of these nagging crusaders was Paul Nitze, who viewed the artistic realism of Kennan and Kissinger as defeatism. Returning to the scientism of Woodrow Wilson, Nitze's career-longevity approached Lippmann's. Taking over for Kennan as the director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff (PPS) in 1950, Nitze transformed the office from that of a solitary humanist scholar to one of social-science collaboration. Milne draws a straight line of scientism from Nitze's PPS staff to his founding role in the anti-detente Committee on the Present Danger, which played a central role in the ascendence of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1981.

Riding this wave of late and post-Cold War triumphalism, Paul Wolfowitz similarly employed neo-Wilsonianism to advocate for US military predominance on a sufficient scale to directly shape the future of the world. Wolfowitz's arch-scientism, and his decades-long obsession with overthrowing the government of Iraq, provides generous fodder for Milne's most critical (and longest) chapter, in which the perils of crusading worldmaking are on clear display. Whether or not such a blow-by-blow narration of the origins of the Iraq War fits in this book, the Wolfowitz chapter, along with the earlier one on Nitze, forecloses any suspicion that Milne sympathizes with scientism in US foreign policy. Instead of trying to make the world a better place, US diplomats should be content with “recognizing that ‘evil’ is a permanent fixture” in world affairs (516). Milne caps off his book with a plea that US policymakers temper their idealism and merely do “the best that any nation can do” to make the world a marginally better place (526).

Milne's model artist diplomat, humble and restrained, is Barack Obama, whose inclusion in Worldmaking may well become the book's most controversial decision. A testament to Milne's courage as a historian, it also strikes me as his weakest chapter. Throughout the book, Milne sides cautiously with the artist diplomats, and he concludes with sharp admonitions against the crusades of scientistic diplomacy. According to Milne, Obama's realism follows a tradition forged by Kennan and Kissinger. (Unfortunately, Obama's alleged artistry is not contrasted here with that of Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt.) It is true that Obama exercised flexibility, particularly in his second term when he resisted foreign-policy urges to double-down against Syria while simultaneously opening doors to Cuba and Iran. But this seems less Kissingerian than paleo-Wilsonian. Perhaps Mario del Pero is correct to call it a “post-imperialist” hodgepodge of activism, humanitarianism, multilateralism, and restraint.Footnote ⁵

Unlike Milne, I have the advantage of writing this review with knowledge of the results of the 2016 presidential election. Harkening back to the xenophobic militarism of Theodore “Bull Moose” Roosevelt, Donald Trump represents the kind of artist diplomat who should make even the most pessimistic realist yearn for a dose of optimism in foreign affairs. The world cannot be perfected, it is true, but surely we can fight for a future that offers something better than class-blind nationalist competition and racial division. Milne's art–science dyad may not be a flawless replacement for the stale realism–idealism framework, but it undoubtedly moves our field in the right direction. Worldmaking is, in short, the most brilliant and sweeping analysis of US foreign policymaking that has appeared in a generation.

The plan of Milne's work seems clear enough: a historical tour of twentieth-century US foreign relations (the titular “diplomacy” is a misnomer) by means of a series of expressive figures of the zeitgeist, starting with Alfred Mahan (the imperial/ist turn of the century), continuing with Woodrow Wilson (embodying himself, as it were), Charles Beard (the “isolationist” interwar period), Walter Lippmann (World War II, the beginning of globalism and security), George Kennan (early Cold War), Paul Nitze (the mature Cold War), Henry Kissinger (detente and realpolitik) Paul Wolfowitz (neoconservatism, stretching all the way from Carter to George W. Bush), the end pretty much today with Barack Obama (suitably postmodernist pragmatism). It's an ambitious plan and a well-written book; but it doesn't work.

How it might have worked is perhaps a more interesting question than why it fails to do so. Nevertheless, it is only proper to begin with Milne's intentions and execution. First, his own pitch notwithstanding, this is not an “intellectual history” (nor, for that matter, really a history of “intellectuals”). It engages not at all with the subfield in question, in terms either of the constitution of the object of inquiry or of its methodological and theoretical problems. The title, “worldmaking,” indicates at first sight some phenomenological approach, but it turns out to be referring, literally, to attempts at forming the world and the two ways, art and science, that are said to differentiate the figures invoked on that score. Artists and scientists (take your pick) is a division that overlaps with, but also cuts across, the hackneyed older one between idealists and realists; but in effect nothing determinate seems to follow from the taxonomy. It looks artificial – not irrelevant, perhaps, but not very telling either, rather as though Milne had superimposed it as an afterthought. All we get otherwise by way of analytical framing is the positing of “ideas,” “authors,” and “context,” coupled with the intention to “identify, explain, and critique” these ideas. On what conceptual grounds, in what precise way, this will produce “an intellectual history of U.S. foreign relations” (9), Milne does not say. The “ideas” here are in any case not extensively treated or indeed separated analytically from “policy.” A lot of the “story” (a symptomatic term) consists rather of potted histories of US foreign relations as a policy problem, sometimes augmented by straight summaries of, say, the ins and outs of the events of the war of 1898, at once too detailed and not detailed enough. Meanwhile, the precise role of the strictly biographical material (birth, family, education, career and so on) remains unclear. Milne's substitute for theory and method, his narrative device (one might almost say trick), is to impose what he calls a “dialogic” lineage on the proceedings: the successive figures all seem to talk to each other, either appropriating or departing from the previous exemplars in the lineage. “Mahan,” for example, reappears rhetorically throughout as though his shadow hovered over the entire trajectory as a constant reference for the subsequent figures.

One can see the problem. Who is included depends, a certain longevity aside, on who makes narrative sense in the larger scheme of things. There is otherwise no obvious criterion of selection. Some are Presidents, some are policymakers, some are pundits or historians. I am myself less troubled by this heterogeneity than by Milne's lack of a strong perspective on the constellation. One does wonder, however, why a discredited, auxiliary and not very interesting figure such as Wolfowitz is called upon to serve as a conduit all the way from Kissinger to Obama. Milne, as he is obliged to do, takes Wolfowitz seriously as a thinker and so makes him the central character of a chapter of no less than seventy pages. Wolfowitz's “fine dissertation” in 1972 on desalination and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is thus said to be “grounded in multiple Hebrew-language sources and propelled by nuanced and sharp analysis” (394). As it happens, Milne is relying here for his judgment on a secondary source, James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (2004). The dissertation actually features few Hebrew sources and is by the standards of political science strikingly devoid of theory and modelling. Overwhelmingly about policy in the technical mode of cost–benefit analysis, it is not devoid of interest on nuclear proliferation; but “nuanced and sharp”?

“Critique” does come into play but not in any sustained fashion. The account of Mahan's navalism, which sets up the ensuing narrative, is a case in point. Mahan was not a one-trick pony, but he had said much of what he had to say in his epochal book of 1890. Milne, however, gives him high marks for prescience (a key word of approbation in his lexicon): Mahan foresaw the ramifications of the US as a world power. Yet his naval legacy was in fact already debatable by the time he died a couple of months into World War I. In part, this had to do with his singular fixation on battleships and limited understanding of technological change (Milne is not much interested in actual navies). Relatedly and more decisively, Mahan was a profoundly ahistorical historian of naval power. History serves for him as a repository of deeper, timeless lessons: “there are certain teachings in the school of history which remain constant and therefore can be elevated to the rank of general principles.”Footnote ⁶ Distill those principles, then, and you have the prescriptive key to the future (witness said rise of the British). Seen from that angle, Theodore Roosevelt's navalism should not be conflated with Mahan's, whatever his effusive praise for the latter (and intermittent divergencies on actual policy). Roosevelt's instincts were always historicist, not least because of his naturalism – things famously “evolve” and may well turn into something quite different – but also by temperament. A general principle today is followed by a very different one tomorrow, “righteousness” always excepted.

One could go through every figure here and critique Milne's critique but the overall point is rather that it is the importance of the included as included that comes to the narrative fore and along with it evaluations that tend to be altogether too judicious in tenor. To be sure, Milne cannot quite bring himself to make Wolfowitz come out well; and he seems not to like Henry Kissinger much in the end. Still, there is something too safe and middle-of-the-road-ish about the proceedings.

Before pursuing that, I want to register two particular disagreements because they happen to be close to my own concerns. First, Milne discusses extensively, as indeed he should, Lippmann's devastating dissection of Kennan's “X” article; but he says little about the central issue, that which becomes the defining feature of the emerging Cold War, viz. Kennan's refusal to accept the Soviet Union as a legitimate actor in international politics. Milne himself, sotto voce, appears in fact to subscribe to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s abnormality thesis, the quintessential Cold War position based on Kennan's early analyses of Moscow as some kind of regime beyond the pale. Yet Lippmann was, of course, right and Kennan was wrong, as the latter soon realized. In effect, the USSR was a far more “realist” power in 1947 than the US – but then again realistic agreements would have undermined the actual project at that point, which was less about the Soviet Union and more about open-ended license to globalism. Milne's own position is in fact measured support for the indispensable nation as suitably modified by “wisdom.” (I should add in passing that “containment” in Kennan's formulation was not a “strategy” as nothing strategic followed from the imputation of DNA-like expansionism on the part of the Soviet Union. Lippmann saw that. “Containment” could give rise to “strategies” – shall we say – but was no strategy in itself, merely the logical notion of resistance.) Second, Milne quotes from NSC 68 as though it was written by Nitze, though he also recognizes that others contributed. No source is offered (the book is spottily footnoted). The fact is that we still do not know who wrote what, except that, ironically, it was John Paton Davies who put down the notorious passage about instrumental ethics (viz. let's do whatever we need to as long as it's not counterproductive). I venture to guess, however, that virtually none of the heavy, quasi-abolitionist rhetoric (c.f. the ubiquitous notion of Soviet “designs”) really comes from Nitze, an intelligent man who liked charts and figures and very simple premises but was anything but gushing in his language.

I also think, in passing, that Milne might have been more generous about “prescience” in the late Beard, the only “leftwing” figure here, in a manner of speaking. Thus the conventional plotline here about Beard's wayward isolationism and increasing marginality permits no room for his moment of truth in the diagnosis of Roosevelt's move to the imperial presidency in 1940–41. Beard was right about that, whatever one thinks of the political substance of Roosevelt's position.

Once we enter the Cold War, Milne's inside/outside becomes more obvious and detrimental to the argument. That is, from then on we are – judiciously – in the business of handing out grades for “prescience” and “wisdom” as opposed to excess and immoderation inside the realm of policymaking, all of which severely limits the degree of criticality involved. It becomes history of and for the Beltway. Thus by the end we find Milne offering editorial assessments of the present policies of Barack Obama, whose pragmatic judiciousness I think he finds congenial. We are in the world not of history, but of the New Republic or The Atlantic.

The question, then, is what happens to the argument, indeed the very character of the argument. Milne, amidst the sensible and not so sensible, seems in search of one. The art/science division is too vague to generate an articulated analysis, which is what this kind of exercise requires. What I have in mind as an alternative is not a Ninkovich (though it has its virtues), i.e. a central concept followed by a sequence of filling in the blanks, what Mahan liked to call “subordination.” What I have in mind instead is a second-order reflection, following from an initial set of concerns systematized into a problematic (e.g. what kind of issues or set of problems one is confronting or trying to transcend). The second-order aspect would come into play in figuring out the proverbial conditions of possibility for something to count (for example) as a viable “American policy” in the first place. Lippmann and Kennan (and in a different vein Mahan) operated in a civilizational frame, centered on the North Atlantic. They had no truck with what is often dubbed, with a bad term, “American exceptionalism.” Arguably, then, their foundational concepts and frame opened up for a very different range of possible policies than, say, Nitze or Wolfowitz, or even Kissinger (whose realism was not civilizational). Yet, unlike Kennan, Lippmann always remained politically on the inside, capable of nigh-on Nietzschean “forgetting” of previous standpoints (and errors) if the situation so required. A certain sociology of knowledge could then have been applied, the social position (if not class) and the mediated ways in which that circumscribed what could be said and argued.

Milne does not follow that route. He duly notes the biographical background (to condense, Wilson/preacher's son, Kissinger/German refugee, Obama/Indonesian childhood) and how the subsequent issues of policy are approached, ultimately on the basis of the distinction between art and science. At the dimming of the day, one is left wondering, again, what in fact governs this whole “story.” A basic design problem is the lack of density, so to speak; intertextuality and dialogue stretched out over more than a century. Collective biography can yield a certain morphology of the moment in question. One thinks of Warren Zimmerman's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (2002) and Patricia O'Toole’s Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (1990): Mahan, John Hay, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root in Zimmerman's case; Henry and Clover Adams, John and Clara Hay and Clarence King in O'Toole's. Milne's sequential work of more than five hundred pages necessarily lacks that kind of “thick description.” It also lacks the alternative, a certain ruthless conceptualization. It is hard to tell a story about a century of US foreign relations through a series of individuals so that it will tell us something deeper.

In September 1963, President John F. Kennedy sent Victor Krulak – a major general in the US Marine Corps – and Joseph Mendenhall – a senior Foreign Service officer – to South Vietnam to report back on the progress that was being made in combating the National Liberation Front insurgency. Krulak presented an upbeat assessment of the situation on the ground and praised President Ngo Dinh Diem's steadfast leadership. Mendenhall portrayed the military situation as bleak and emphasized popular discontent with Diem. A perplexed President Kennedy observed, “You two did visit the same country, didn't you?”

My thanks go to Christopher McKnight Nichols, Thomas C. Field, and Anders Stephanson for engaging so closely and thoughtfully with my book, and (unlike Kennedy) I am pleased that it elicited quite different reactions. Clearly, I hope that Stephanson is Krulak and Nichols and Field are Mendenhall, but only time will tell if Worldmaking endures or is evanescent. This roundtable does allow the conversation about the book to continue for a while longer, for which I am most grateful.

Nichols describes the book as “pathbreaking” and Field as “the most brilliant and sweeping analysis of US foreign policymaking that has appeared in a generation.” These words of praise, coming from individuals whose scholarship I deeply admire, mean a great deal to me. At the other end of the scale, discerning little that is worthy of praise, Stephanson identifies my politics – “middle-of-the-road-ish,” apparently – and faults the book on these grounds, while critiquing my conceptualization, as any stalwart contributor to the New Left Review should. Rather than engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of each reviewer's critical points, which is highly wearying in this format, I have identified and responded to a salient aspect from each.

Christopher Nichols is right to observe that “the attendant criteria that led to a focus on these individuals and their broader communities of thought leave Worldmaking open to some criticism.” In making casting decisions, I tended to select individuals who developed a distinctive thesis about what constituted America's proper role in the world. But I also favored individuals who clashed with one another – in print or in person – to give the book its narrative drive (or “trick,” as Stephanson censoriously describes it). I am acutely conscious that I chose nine men (of whom eight are white) and attend to the reasons why in the introduction. What proportion of chapters might have focussed on women and non-white actors without skewing the reality that twentieth-century “worldmaking” was an overwhelmingly masculine and white milieu? As I wrote in the introduction, I wanted to clearly depict “the gender discrimination present in foreign policymaking, academia, and journalism throughout the twentieth century, and which persists – more subtly – to this day. ‘Grand Strategy’ is a masculine discourse (one of its many problems), and this has discouraged female participation, or worked against women who have entered that realm” (19).

Yet I do accept Nichols's point that I might have devoted more time to considering Eleanor Roosevelt's contribution to the debate on human rights and international law or the peace activism of Jane Addams. With regard to racial diversity, I might also have explored the careers and contributions of “W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr.,” and of Cesar Chavez. Bringing in a greater variety of perspectives need not have undermined the book's narrative drive. And in focussing closely on these nine individuals I sometimes consciously and unconsciously replicate their blind spots. Thomas Field astutely proposes The Dangers of Worldmaking as an alternative title, and some of the danger stemmed from the protagonists’ narrowness of outlook partially born of their milieu – an absence of empathy, and a disregard for lives lost and damage wreaked in the global South. I believe I have shown in part how this happened, but I should have introduced more dissenting voices excluded from the corridors of power. Nichols is right to note that “relative demographic narrowness in US foreign-policy thought historically (and in the present?) [has] served to attenuate the discourse of policy options, ideas, and ideologies.”

Although his review is broadly positive, Thomas Field raises concerns about the section that worried me the most before writing it – the final chapter on Barack Obama. My initial preference was to discuss the Obama administration as part of an epilogue but my editor persuaded me otherwise. In most respects I am glad that he did, because it likely allowed the book to reach a wider audience. But the reality of writing on a presidency in progress is a challenging one for a historian – for analysis often withers in the face of unfolding events. In this sense Anders Stephanson is correct to observe that “we are in the world not of history, but of the New Republic or The Atlantic.” (For what it is worth, the only magazine I wrote for during Obama's presidency was The Nation.)

Perhaps my assessment of Barack Obama's foreign policies is too generous. But my previous two chapters (which took me three years to research and write) focussed on Henry Kissinger and Paul Wolfowitz. There was likely some accumulated goodwill waiting to be spent. But I also happen to believe that Obama's foreign policies will age well. His pragmatism was well suited to the era and challenges he faced.

Anders Stephanson does not consider Worldmaking a work of intellectual history. Yet the Society for US Intellectual History gave the book an “honorable mention” for its annual book prize in 2016. It is possible, I suppose, that the professional association devoted to the study of US intellectual history has misidentified the book.

Broadly speaking, what Nichols and Field identify as virtues – the art-versus-science framing, deployed and developed in a non-reductive fashion – Stephanson criticizes as flaws. Stephanson does not believe that individual lives and ideas allow us to apprehend deeper historical patterns and faults the book for being undertheorized. While I disagree with Stephanson's review, I do respect the fact that he sketches out an alternative. Not all critical reviewers have the confidence (or word count) to do this and it offers a glimpse at what a Stephanson-penned intellectual history of US foreign policy would look like:

If this is what Stephanson means by “ruthless conceptualization,” then I feel less bad about failing to achieve it. The structure I employed was also shaped by my desire to write a book that people might read.