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Contemporary American statecraft should be based empirically on the existence of a polycentric world and the role of multilateral institutions within it.

In foreign policy, the Trump administration has appeared to depart from long-standing norms of international behavior that have underwritten American primacy for decades in a more interdependent and prosperous world. In this book, a diplomat and a historian revisit that perception by examining and reproducing several of their own essays during the past twenty years. The essays reveal that Trump's style exaggerates tendencies towards unilateralism already present in the actions, if not the policies, of previous presidents, and in their neglect of three imperatives: collective security, regional integration, and diplomatic imagination. It is not too late, however, to remedy the problem by learning the lessons of the recent past. -- How Did We Get Here? -- Global Challenges -- National Policies -- Regional Problems -- Regional Solutions -- What Have We Learned?

Understanding the post-Cold War era—or whatever people may call it someday—has spawned a cottage industry in the past few decades. Yet surprisingly few of these attempts have grappled with the near disappearance of one of the cardinal principles of the twentieth century: collective security. This book traces that disappearance in time by revisiting several essays written from the mid-1990s to the past few years, and asking how so many of the lessons learned during the twentieth century were nearly forgotten by the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

There is a story about an American bureaucrat in the 1980s who wrote a strong memorandum warning of the dangers the Soviets posed to the strength of the Atlantic Alliance. His boss reprimanded him ...

‘Great Power competition’ is back in vogue in Washington, DC. American politicians and military planners currently use the term to describe a successor reality to the globalist rhetoric of the past...

Diplomacy’s role in foreign policy is hampered by multiple understandings of what diplomacy is and does. A broad definition of diplomacy holds that it encompasses more than the promotion of peaceful international relations. Instead, it applies to the sum of those relations—peaceful, hostile, and everything in between. Thus, foreign relations—so long as they involve the interests, direction, and actions of a sovereign power—may be regarded as being synonymous with diplomatic relations, whereby foreign policy relates to the theory and practice of setting diplomatic priorities; planning for contingencies; advancing strategic, operational, and tactical diplomatic aims; and adjusting those aims to domestic and foreign constraints. This conception of diplomacy is functional: it emphasizes the roles of diplomats and recognizes that many other people perform these roles besides official envoys; and it illustrates that diplomatic settings—and the means, methods, and tools of diplomacy—undergo continuous change. The basic mediating purpose of diplomacy, however, has endured, as has much of its institutional apparatus—embassies, ambassadors, treaties, and so on. This is likely to remain the case so long as there are multiple polities in the world, all having to relate to one another.

Thomas Niles served as a United States foreign service officer from 1962 to 1998. His service included three terms as ambassador: to Canada, the European Community, and Greece. He reflects here on the continuities in the diplomatic profession, and, in particular, on embassies, during a period of notable historic change. While many of the protocols and responsibilities of embassies remained more or less the same as they had been for over a century, there were hints that those, too, were about to change in unforeseen ways, even calling into question the central role of embassies as representing and serving the nation-state, as the other articles in this issue discuss. Nevertheless, to this ambassador, at least, even dramatic changes in technology, politics, and culture rarely happen all at once; and the institutions and the people adapting to them may be more cautious or durable than they sometimes appear in retrospect.

Lewis Einstein (1877–1967) was a little-known diplomat who became one of Theodore Roosevelt's closest advisers on European affairs. Roosevelt's attraction to Einstein derived not only from a keen writing style and considerable fluency in European history, literature and politics, but also from his instinct for anticipating the future of European rivalries and for the important role the United States could play there in preserving peace. The two men shared a perspective on the twentieth century that saw the United States as a central arbiter and enforcer of international order—a position the majority of Americans would accept and promote only after the Second World War. The relationship between Roosevelt and Einstein sheds light on the rising status of American diplomacy and diplomats and their self-image vis-à-vis Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

As any European schoolchild from the late 19th or early 20th century would have known, imperial rule had precise geographic expression. World maps were colored accordingly, the best known probably being that of the British Empire, with swathes of red stretching across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. Political, military, and even economic authority, in other words, could be plotted visually. Maps and projections varied, of course, and the colors occasionally blurred along the margins; but the existential power of maps was indisputable. Imperial rule did not count for much unless it appeared on paper. To Americans the importance of maps presented a curious problem. The popular basis for American nationalism -- not only in the United States, but throughout the Americas -- was for much of the 19th century a renunciation of the "Old World" of Europe and an affirmation of a romantic conception of what had been known since the age of exploration as the "New World." With the American revolutions, the New World obtained meaning as a political project alongside its earlier incarnations as a religious and social experiment. The...

This article traces the chronology of the interwar decline of European influence and power, arguing that its origins outside Europe are to be found as much in the paradoxical status of inter- national administration of colonial and post-colonial areas as in the direct challenges posed to European stability by revisionist states in the early 1930s. It demonstrates that an inherent ambiva- lence toward the interwar colonial world and its relationship to Europe presaged and conditioned the collapse of Europe’s own balance of power.

Diplomacy has long been regarded as one of the more traditional subjects of historical scholarship. This chapter explains how one woman's work contributed to the high tone and stylishness of American diplomacy at the peak of its twentieth-century influence. Chief among diplomacy's settings since the eighteenth century were the salons where elite society gathered. The salon of Evangeline Bruce was one of the most continuous and, according to contemporary accounts, celebrated. In London in the 1960s, 'Vangie Bruce' was named the 'Number One American hostess by rank and ability'; in Washington. She was dubbed "The Fourth Mrs. B" after Washington's three legendary salonnieres, Mildred Bliss, Virginia Bacon and Marie Beale. She described herself, as people would describe her, as a diplomatic professional, partners in every sense of the word. The French would say that a salon is like-minded people getting together to converse on literature, art, history and politics.

It has often been said that the era of the nation-state is a thing of the past. It was overtaken—gradually—by globalization. This change also has made its way into the writing of history. The predominance of anti-national history—that is, a historiography that rejects the normative emphasis on the nationstate—is now a fact, at least in Europe and much of the Americas. There are more local histories that emphasize the subnational; regional histories that emphasize the supranational; international histories that emphasize the multinational; and global and universal histories that emphasize all the above. And, thanks to the teaching and scholarship of Akira Iriye, there is a recognized field of transnational history that encompasses every one of them.

Revealing the essence of diplomacy rests, ultimately, on knowing the hearts, minds and mores of diplomats. For all that their ranks have leveled during the past two centuries, they are still quite distinct and different from the rest of us. Their mental wiring—that is, their grasp of cause and effect, their sense of opportunity and of space and place, their ability to imagine peace in and across multiple settings and periods of time, their sensitivity to the shades of leverage—is, in the better examples, a rare gift and a calling that lies somewhere between art, science, politics and morality. This gift is what discriminates between the old and the new, and allows for the preservation of one amid the embrace of the other.

The “New Diplomacy” of the twentieth century was invented in reaction to the “Old” Just as the latter was not so comparably old, the former was not really new. Most of its tenets—enumerated in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points—were renditions of widely held views, particularly in Britain, the United States and the liberal circles of Europe. That did not detract from New Diplomacy’s success after 1945. It made itself—and international politics—more acceptable to popular, nominally democratic, governments; it reintroduced and reconciled a system of European power politics to a global setting; it preserved peace in Europe itself by devising a communitarian, collaborative language for diplomacy without discarding the balance of power; and it recast geopolitical problems as “functional” issues, which diminished their tendency to start wars.

The latest iteration of the New Diplomacy is a work in progress. Most of its promoters overlook continuities in diplomatic theory and practice. Yet they underscore an important, timeless, point: diplomacy adapts. It must do so by mastering not only new technologies but also different “structures” of international relations, which have become, since the 1970s, less national and more “global” With no more European empires and no Cold War, today’s world appears disordered and disorderly. A perfect global community does not yet exist. Nor does global diplomacy. Someday if it means to succeed, it will need to be as sensitive, cautious and creative as its predecessors.

“Old Diplomacy” is not really that old: it dates from the Renaissance in Europe and lasted to the end of the nineteenth century. Its strengths were its preservation of order and peace; its code of conduct; and its capacity for self-regulation. Its weakness was its generally closed, opaque nature. Its eclipse after the First World War was some time in coming—about thirty years—yet many of its ways and attitudes persist today.

“If words counted, we should win this war.” Winston Churchill's prediction is now the historical consensus. His speeches, and his capacity for speechmaking, are regarded by many people to have been...

In the time since our 2010 workshop, the European Union has generated a good deal of drama. A serious debt crisis in Greece was repeated in Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. It threatened to undermine the basic fabric of not only the Eurozone but also of the entire European project, according to some pessimists. Commitment to the implementation of drastic, but much-needed fiscal reforms stood against the idea of European solidarity and a radical, Europe-wide growth plan. The many reform steps that the member states agreed on brought partial remedy but most were concluded under considerable time pressure, in which global markets instead of parliamentary procedures dictated the speed and direction. What they did bring was greater power of oversight for Brussels, yet at the time of this writing, it is still unclear how and if the sovereign debt crisis will be resolved on a more permanent basis. Much of the commentary about the crisis, which in fact came to seem less like a crisis than a saga over the course of 2011 and 2012, placed the blame for it on two sources, primarily: the after effect of the 2008 global financial collapse and the structural flaws of the Maastricht Treaty. The latter case relates directly to the various themes and problems raised in the preceding chapters. To recapitulate the standard, although oversimplified and perhaps overdrawn calculus of German reunification: it was meant to take place within a stronger European institutional structure, which the Treaty of Maastricht and the various NATO-related promises – described in detail in Frédéric Bozo’s chapter – were supposed to bring about. Specifically, it also meant the adoption of a new currency – the Euro – that, largely on French insistence, Germany had to support and, largely on Jacques Delors’s insistence, Europe had to embrace as the means to counter Margaret Thatcher’s push for a liberalized internal market. Both went against the instincts of many people, particularly in West Germany where a strong Deutschmark and various forms of protection were sacrosanct, but Helmut Kohl agreed to the compromise. © Cambridge University Press 2013.