Julian Zelizer has written a comprehensive history of the major U.S. political/military engagements around the world during much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Impressive in its scope, Zelizer throughout juxtaposes the thinking and analyses of executive branch policymakers with the politics of the time, posing throughout his history the four key questions raised in the book’s introduction:

1. 1. Do Congress or the President drive national security policy?

2. 2. Do Democrats or Republicans hold the national security advantage?

3. 3. How big do Americans want their government to be in order to defend their security? and

4. 4. Should the United States go it alone or stress multilateral strategies?

Not surprisingly, the answers to all four questions are: “It depends.” Indeed, at the end of the book, Zelizer states, “The next generation of presidents and congressional leaders will certainly confront the same four basic issues that have shaped history since World War II: the balance between congressional and executive power, the partisan advantage on national security, the size of government the nation is willing to tolerate in the pursuit of peace and security, and the benefits of a unilateral as opposed to a multilateral approach to foreign relations” (506).

This humble projection avoids postulating a grand unifying theory, but after 500-plus pages, one would have hoped for a conclusion with a bit more bite. The reason, though, is clear. Though a mile wide, Zelizer’s history is only an inch deep. It reads like a compendium of nearly a hundred years worth of daily newspaper headlines, almost like scanning through an old microfiche collection of the New York Times’ front pages. Zelizer reports the main events occurring on the world’s stage, some of the give and take between the executive branch and the Congress, as well as the fundamental policy analyses that led to the decisions eventually reached by presidents, and he is to be commended for this, but rarely does he (or can he, given the book’s reach) look beneath these fundamental facts to get at the underlying factors motivating the various actors.

As a result, the book’s fundamental conclusion, at least according to the publisher’s publicist, that “partisan fighting has always shaped American foreign policy and the issue of national security has always been part of our domestic politics,” is trite and comes as no surprise to any halfway serious student of foreign affairs.Footnote ¹ There is nothing in it that will surprise political scientists or historians that cover these types of events, even though it does make a very readable introductory text on national security policy.

Too little attention is paid to the roles played by personalities and bureaucratic infighting, the influence of constituencies to whom the Congress and the executive branch pay special attention, as well as the role of money—in the form of campaign contributions, hired lobbyists, etc. These are not deliberate omissions. Zelizer clearly understands their importance, and sometimes mentions them in passing, but he simply cannot devote the time and space necessary to truly explain why the various decisions were taken and what was the real explanation for each, given the span of history that he is covering. But the consequence is to present events at a superficial level, producing a book that is more journalistic than analytic. To give just a few examples:

• • In chapter 5, on how the Republicans used the China issue to regain the high ground on national security, there is only a brief paragraph (page 88) noting that the Republican Right received support from an informal network dubbed the “China Lobby,” but pages are devoted to the intellectual debate among conservatives about the pros and cons of rebuilding the national security apparatus, and about the give-and-take in the Congress. The story of how the United States became wedded to, and several times almost went to war over, and might yet in the future go to war over, the defense of a corrupt regime that had just been soundly defeated and expelled from virtually all of its own territory is a fascinating one, in which Washington influence peddling, campaign contributions, journalists “crusading” for special interests all play key roles. Zelizer reports on the intellectual and political superstructure of the issue—he does not have the time to get at the real forces at work.

• • In chapter 6, on the defense debate in the 1950s, in which the Democrats under Candidate John F. Kennedy, re-regained the national security high ground, there is a brief paragraph on the defense industry and a few examples of its benefactors in the Congress (page 126), but the specific links are not drawn when the events of the decade are discussed. For example, Zelizer notes that Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson was known as the senator from Boeing, but fails to note that as the manufacturer of the Minuteman ICBM, Boeing (and Jackson) had a particular interest in promoting the concept of a “missile gap” and the need therefore for the United States to build far more ICBMs at a faster pace than had been envisioned by the Eisenhower administration. Aiming for Jackson’s support for his presidential aspirations, Kennedy of course had very special reasons to find Jackson’s position appealing.

• • In chapter 11, which describes the shift in the Republican party from Nixon’s “pragmatic” policies to the more idealistic conservatism of Ronald Reagan, the extraordinary role Henry Kissinger played and the power he accumulated on the National Security Council is barely mentioned and then, only in the context of Kissinger’s ability to delay support for Israel during the 1973 war because of the President’s “incapacity” during the Watergate crisis. In fact, this is a fascinating story involving a major clash of personalities between Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and the frantic efforts of the Israeli lobby to get the Department of Defense out front on the issue, which cannot be discussed given the level of analysis necessary to cover the sixty-plus years that the book spans.

Zelizer concludes the volume with the following paragraph: “The biggest challenge for the new generation of policy makers who operate in the post-9/11 world is to harness the best incentive that democratic politics can produce, using the political pressures to better gauge public sentiment, stimulate public debate, and design the policies that will strengthen the nation against real and dangerous threats.”

This is dangerous advice. After 9/11, the primary democratic incentive for politically motivated individuals was to show the public a strong response to the attack. The policy makers of the George W. Bush administration then listened to one source of political pressures, the neocons, who sold them a totally bogus depiction of the political situation in Iraq and the ability of their candidate, Ahmed Chalabi, to take over and stabilize the country once the U.S. military threw out Saddam Hussein. They indeed stimulated public debate, but the politics of the day, compounded by the intelligence community’s misjudgments and the administration’s distortions about Iraq’s weapon programs, precluded expert assessments of the likely outcome of an invasion of Iraq and what would be needed to contain ill-effects. As we now know, the resulting policies embroiled the United States in two civil wars, antagonized our allies, and caused this nation to be viewed as a pariah in large parts of the world, thus weakening, rather than strengthening, the nation against real and dangerous threats.

While recognizing that partisan politics, vested interests, and individual players constrain and sometimes shape policymakers’ choices, it behooves the latter to analyze the objective realities of international situations as best they can, define the best course of action to protect the nation’s interests, and then see if that course can be accommodated by the underlying political realities, or if the latter, over time, can be persuaded to accept what is necessary for the nation’s security. The former seems to be the course adopted by President Obama with regard to Afghanistan; the latter was the course followed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in preparing the nation for the necessity to join the fight against the Nazis. In my view, Zelizer’s prescription would stand the policy process on its head—putting politics first, the nation’s objective interests second. As Zelizer shows, politics have always played a role in national security policy; they have never stopped at the water’s edge. The nation would be ill-served, however, if its leaders made politics primus inter pares in their deliberations of how to respond to foreign threats and opportunities.