The first laser-guided bombs operated on what was known as a “bang bang” guidance system. After the bomb’s sensor detected a laser designator’s reflection off a target, its fins would all flip in one direction, and then all in another. After zigging and zagging back and forth, the bomb would, in theory, hit the illuminated point. Yet as the Wikipedia entry notes, “This type of guidance may be less efficient at times.”
The thesis of Maximalist is that American foreign policy works on bang bang guidance. In Stephen Sestanovich’s recounting of the big foreign policy decisions from 1947 to the present, American presidents have either been “maximalists,” seeking to exert American power and influence on an unruly and turbulent world, or “retrenchers,” seeking to pull back and build policies for the long haul. In the former camp are Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; in the latter are Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, and George H. W. Bush occupy the uneasy middle, which is not unrelated (in the author’s view) to their inability to gain two full terms in office.
Sestanovich tells the story of the big choices—the Marshall Plan, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan revival, and Iraq prominent among them—with verve. This is not, and does not avow itself to be, a work of archival research, although Sestanovich draws heavily on the magnificent Foreign Relations of the United States, the massive compilation of documents pertaining to the making of foreign policy that is probably the best official historical work done by the United States government. But he tells the tales with the sensitivity and insight of one who has seen government up close, in both the Reagan and Clinton administrations. He does not mention his own experiences, but they clearly shape his feeling for the chaos of policy-making and his empathy with those who engage in it.
If the author has a case to make, he also has one to tear down—namely, the idea of a harmonious foreign policy consensus in the heyday of the Cold War, in which clear-sighted statesmen all agreed on a path. Not so. George Kennan thought it possible to cut a deal with Moscow that would leave Germany and Japan, among other countries, “uncommitted as between the two worlds,” and went so far as to think that American withdrawal from Europe would “stimulate a disposition on the Soviet side to do likewise.” John Foster Dulles inadvertently triggered the Suez crisis through his relentless advocacy of a scheme for the United States to finance the Aswan High Dam for Egypt’s dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser. John F. Kennedy threw away his victory in the Cuban missile crisis by promising to withdraw American missiles from Turkey and then running a cover-up to prevent word from leaking out. And far from having conducted the crisis to avoid force, Kennedy’s advisers, including his brother Robert, saw the blockade as merely a prelude to a military attack.
Indeed, one of the more interesting features of Sestanovich’s potted histories is the poor light that they shed on most presidential advisers. For example, Lyndon Johnson comes off as much wiser than his assistants in his apprehensions about the direction the Vietnam war was going, although Sestanovich notes that his domestic agenda—in particular, his fear and loathing of Robert Kennedy, a potential presidential challenger in 1968—drove an unseemly amount of his Indo-china policy. But nothing compares to the savaging that Henry Kissinger receives at Sestanovich’s hands: It is a tale of bullying weak allies, toadying to the Chinese, claiming credit for Nixon’s ideas, and sneering at beleaguered human rights figures such as Andrei Sakharov.
Yet presidents and advisers alike founder sooner or later, going too far either in reaching for the stars or in pulling back: “Just like the maximalists they scorn, [retrenchment presidents] overdo it,” Sestanovich writes. That is a judgment he passes on the current administration as well, albeit in modulated tones.
Any argument based on dualism is bound to have its difficulties. Sestanovich’s own lucid narrative makes it clear that all presidents were often ambivalent in their desire to exercise American power and influence and yet not overreach. By focusing on the most dramatic and controversial decisions, Sestanovich elides those aspects of continuity that are also features of American foreign policy but that undercut his thesis—such as the war of ideas against communism waged by Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy; the opening to India begun under Clinton and pursued by George W. Bush and Obama; the gradually deepening and institutionalized intelligence and military links with Israel since 1948; and the shift of strategic emphasis to the Persian Gulf begun under Carter.
Moreover, ideas such as “retrenchment” are relative, not absolute. It is a bit of a stretch to talk about Eisenhower reducing defense spending to 10 percent of GDP as being retrenchment, when current projections might take us down to slightly over 2 percent if the Obama administration has its way.
Still more problematical, any history of American foreign policy runs the risk of two kinds of solipsism. First, in their depiction of wavering, indecision, cluelessness, and inconstancy, disapproving historians and practitioners seem to forget that few, if any, countries exhibit anything but in their external affairs—and when they do, it is usually the result of a morbid condition, such as Britain’s steady contraction of influence and power since 1945.
Second, and more serious, American writers too often underplay the importance of all other actors in international politics, actors whose moves, or whose convulsions, compel a response from Washington. If the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghan wars all became bloodier and more protracted than expected, it has a great deal to do with the behaviors of the Soviet Union, Iran, and Pakistan, all of whom decided, for reasons of their own, to take on the United States. If Ronald Reagan shifted from confrontation to accommodation with the Soviet Union, then (as, to be fair, Sestanovich notes) it had everything to do with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, an idealistic apparatchik who sensed, if he did not fully understand, that the Soviet Union was terminally decrepit.
Nor can domestic considerations be ignored. If Kissinger did, indeed, behave in some of the unseemly ways Sestanovich describes, it had at least something to do with a domestic environment, barely imaginable now, of upheaval and riot. Kissinger’s memoirs’ understanding of what happened to the United States in the late 1960s and early ’70s may be distorted, but they are subjectively accurate in capturing his dismay at what was happening to America’s intellectual elites, her cities, and her social cohesion. And that, in turn, shaped Kissinger’s approach to foreign policy.
Sestanovich is a troubled maximalist: “How to enjoy the benefits of maximalism without going too far—this is the recurrent dilemma of American policy,” he writes. He has no doubt, however, that the United States should err on the side of doing too much rather than too little. His narrative and argument are important, and not only because the Obama administration has been demonstrating, with a recklessness all its own, the limits of retrenchment. Other voices, on both left and right, argue that the United States is too dumb, too incompetent, or too poor to provide global order. Even more dangerous, some argue that that the world and this country will do just fine without American leadership, which breeds far more trouble than it prevents.
The author of Maximalist disagrees. Through his life experience and study, Sestanovich offers a case somewhat at odds with his book’s central argument, because he is an able and eloquent expositor of a mainstream, generally bipartisan, American foreign policy that tends towards maximalism. On the whole, that approach, which dates back to Theodore Roosevelt if not earlier, has served us well—even if it occasionally operates on bang bang guidance.
Eliot A. Cohen, counselor of the Department of State during 2007-09, teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
