The Great Debate in U.S. Diplomacy
MARSHALL, CHARLES BURTON
WRITERS and WRITING The Great Debate in U.S. Diplomacy Dream and Reality: Aspects of American Foreign Policy. By Louis J. Halle. Harper & Brothers. 327 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Charles...
...He recounts brilliantly our unplanned and aberrant acquisition of the Philippines in consequence of the Spanish-American War and our consequent involvement in East Asian affairs...
...He must give us another book to serve as sequel to the present volume...
...He makes devastating comments on the practice of ghost-writing in diplomacy...
...a problem not peculiar to the U.S...
...So men are tempted either to turn away from the task as being altogether too vexing and unsatisfactory or else to delude themselves into the faith that the next answer will give a final solution—nationalist utopianism on the one hand and international utopianism on the other—while others keep on having to generate the courage to look for answers even in face of the knowledge that all answers tend to come unstuck...
...Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Visiting Research Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace LOUIS J. HALLE capped long service in the State Department with a year at the National War College and then an appointment to the Policy Planning Staff...
...This sounds good, but I have known policy-makers who were philosophers first and whose usefulness seemed to be more harmed than helped by that fact...
...Halle's book brings us through the first two phases...
...I am certain that he makes a false point in asserting that the British Parliament left the issues of foreign policy alone up to the time of World War I. I may be overlooking some other defects, but they are slight in comparison to the multiple virtueee The book is a first-rate job, combining scholarb thoroughness...
...It has gone on in the U.S...
...Halle manages to be brilliant even when not persuasive...
...It consists of 25 brief chapters intended not so much to detail the story of United States relationships with the world but rather to shed light on, and give focus to...
...Halle makes plain that he is using the American experience only to exemplify a general predicament: Human nature is simply inadequate for the business of relating a politically organized people to the rest of world...
...He arrived near the close of the Staff s significant and interesting period and stayed on for a while into its dull season...
...stacles inherent in the fact of revolutionary Russia as a part of the equation...
...Diplomacy Dream and Reality: Aspects of American Foreign Policy...
...Halle makes much of a detached and dispassionate approach to the problems of security and aggression...
...Halle recommends that the policy-maker "be a philosopher first...
...The relevant factors tend to be too huge to be expressed in terms of the evidence of the senses...
...So is his treatment of the way the Americans derived a deluding general principle from their own experience and thus raised self-determination to the level of an absolute principle...
...He says, "I am, myself, disposed to believe that all good and all evil are to be found in each of us, as individuals or as nations—that we are all like Shakespeare's Anthony, like his Macbeth or his Lear...
...The facts of one juncture too often become the fictions of the next...
...It stops short of the phase of the argument just now opening, for this book is an exercise in history rather than a prediction...
...He should tell us what to do about the ever-growing numbers of fledging states which have come into statehood without its internal attributes...
...While praising the hook for its notable qualities, one must also take account of some deficiencies...
...The present book, Dream and Reality: Aspects of American Foreign Policy, grew out of a lecture series presented at the latter distinguished institution...
...Several aspects of the current scene require the attention of his discerning intellect...
...Certain circumstances bring out the good, others bring out the evil...
...Such an insight into shared guilt tells us a great deal on how to regard the problem of violence in general, but not much on hew to deal with the assailant who may be beating us over the head...
...WRITERS and WRITING The Great Debate in U.S...
...Yet this proposition, philosophically sound as it may be, gives little light on how to counter evil manifested in action...
...That one, too, has been settled more or less in favor of the coalitionists, and now the argument appears to be shifting to a choice between either pinning our faith on negotiation as a magical way out of the confrontation with the Communists or facing up to the necessity of retaining the existing power balance...
...Then he left for academic life—at the University of Virginia for two years and then, since 1956...
...rare judgment and a charming style...
...at the Graduate School of International Studies in Geneva...
...since the beginning, and its classic form was the contention between isolationism and involvement...
...There are many other facets, and Halle has a vivacious time with all of them...
...I suspect that Halls overconstruss the cause-and-effect relationship between the Open Door Notes and the Pearl Harbor debacle...
...In such a work as the one at hand they make reading about foreign policy really a sheer delight...
...This is true enough, I suppose, in municipal as in international affairs...
...Some of us try to correct them by holding them to the standards of what we call the facts...
...Here are the basic elements of the great debate...
...Abstractions tend to get out of hand...
...I think he oversimplifies in implying that the Western powers could have easily and soberly made a satisfactory peace in Germany after World War II if they had just left the heady stuff of unconditional surrender alone...
...That argument got settled more or less on the side of recognizing the necessity of involvement, and the debate then shifted to issues of method between the radical nationalists and the coalitionists...
...these relationships—and this they do in a distinctive and valuable way-Halle's insights and urbanity used to show through even in bureaucratic papers...
...It would be good to have him discuss the difficulties and paradoxes of trying to make a fountain of legitimacy out of transient combinations of votes in the United Nations General Assembly, and the hocus pocus now being engendered concerning the establishment of an international rule of law as a way out of our world problems...
...Halle writes of the discrepancy between assumptions and requirements...
...What he gives us here, however, is more than enough of substance and wisdom for one book...
...We should like his comments on the current assumption that economic aid to the underdeveloped countries will somehow cause the answers to all of their other problems to fall into place...
...He knocks the daylights out of the myths of hemispheric solidarity...
...the interpretation overlooks the oh...
...So we must resort to abstractions...
...His explanation of the historic roots of the isolationist impulse is brilliant...
Vol. 42 • June 1959 • No. 25
