Worldmaking The Art and Science of American Diplomacy [Paperback]

A new intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the present

Worldmakingis a compelling new take on the history of American diplomacy. Rather than retelling the story of realism versus idealism, David Milne suggests that U.S. foreign policy has also been crucially divided between those who view statecraft as an art and those who believe it can aspire to the certainty of science.

Worldmakingfollows a cast of characters who built on one anothers ideas to create the policies we have today. Woodrow Wilsons Universalism and moralism led Sigmund Freud to diagnose him with a messiah complex. Walter Lippmann was a syndicated columnist who commanded the attention of leaders as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Charles de Gaulle. Paul Wolfowitz was the intellectual architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraqand an admirer of Wilsons attempt to make the world safe for democracy. Each was engaged in a process of worldmaking, formulating strategies that sought to deploy the nations vast military and economic poweror sought to retrench and focus on domestic issuesto shape a world in which the United States would be best positioned to thrive.

Tracing American statecraft from the age of steam engines to the age of drones, Milne reveals patterns of worldmaking that have remained impervious to the passage of time. The result is a panoramic history of U.S. foreign policy driven by ideas and by the lives and times of their authors.

David Milne tells the story of the hundred or so years when a sequence of public intellectuals shaped the discourse and practice of U.S. foreign affairs with confidence and ?lanand guided America to its place as the worlds No. 1 power . . . That Mr. Milne succeeds, and brilliantly, is due in no small part to the vivacity and jargon-free clarity of his prose. But he also has a clever, thoughtful thesis that, while developed with great brio, he ló$