John Prados: Diplomatic History in the Bush era
[John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author of 'How the Cold War Ended: Debating and Doing History'(Potomac Books, forthcoming).]
Apart from all the other excesses of the Bush Years there may be special problems for diplomatic history and historians. To some degree this is rooted in the changing dynamics of international relations but it also has a policy aspect. When the diplomatic history of the presidency of George W. Bush comes to be written these problems will have to be taken into account. In consequence farmers laboring in the fields of history will face new and daunting challenges.
Gone now is the florid hope—myopically optimistic that it was—that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history. Less than two decades afterwards the world is quite different but remains very much an international enterprise—a diplomatic enterprise among other things—its vibrant history still to be captured. To record these events and divine the reasons for them historians are going to need new tools, or perhaps to change the ways in which we deploy the more traditional tools in our kit. Doing history will be harder, but it can be equally useful and even more rewarding. What follows is a reflection on this theme.
First to the dynamic factors. Wearing my hat as a political scientist I would observe that the role of the nation state on the international stage is weakening. Hopes for an American ascendency—empire, unique superpower, call it what you will—proved ephemeral and perished in the flames of George Bush’s foreign adventures. The international system, no longer exhibiting the bipolarity of the Cold War era, is not quite multi-polar either. Three key global developments have threatened the span of control the nation state has long enjoyed. The first is technological change, which has accelerated the pace of every kind of phenomena, from evolving crisis to monetary flow. Nation states are slow to respond and increasingly lack dominance over the requisite factors at the center of rapidly evolving situations. The second is a new empowerment of belief systems, whether they be political, religious, cultural, or ethnic. Ingrained beliefs, increasingly strident, are supplanting rational calculation as motivators for action. Very often these belief systems are transnational in nature but even where they are not they generate centrifugal forces that loosen the bonds within nation states and among alliances. The third key factor is a loosening of international norms for permissible behavior, which magnifies the dimensions of horrors as well as reducing the acceptability of national countermeasures. Needless to say these factors operate in tandem with each other and further complicate efforts to respond. The incredible rise in the importance of so-called “non-state actors” and the increasing prevalence of failed states stands in testament to these dynamics.
What does this mean for diplomatic history? Much of our work has operated from a state-central perspective. Historians analyze national policies, study factors influencing a state’s institutions, survey the evolution of a nation’s culture, and so on. A nation’s response to crisis or war, the state’s approach to international diplomacy, its military strategy, its intelligence apparatus—all are elements historians typically study in isolation even while nations and their institutions are increasingly operating to cope with the systemic elements that are transforming the globe. Diplomatic history is thus in danger of focusing on just one part of the dinosaur.
The emerging history of the Bush administration provides a good illustration here. President George W. Bush took office with every advantage. The United States was the unquestioned superpower—some said “hyperpower” or fantasized about empire. Bush enjoyed economic prosperity built on the efforts of his predecessor, military might, national security primacy second to none. But Bush pandered to political and ideological groups in his base, weakening his advantage. When a non-state actor—Al Qaeda (working in service to a different ingrained belief)—challenged America with its attacks, President Bush responded with a generalized escalation, initiating what he called the “Global War on Terror;” and invading Iraq. In both those endeavors he utilized means beyond the permissible, manipulating intelligence to create a casus belli, torturing prisoners to extract information. The military engagements themselves resulted in an overstretch of U.S. power, while Bush’s methods horrified allies and weakened the fabric of international support for U.S. actions. Once Bush’s pandering on economic policy, along with rapacious international and domestic businesspersons, combined to produce a market collapse, American supremacy went into eclipse. Because the consequence of globalization had been to create a tightly intertwined global marketplace, a Wall Street crisis was capable of triggering a global near-depression, further impacting other countries’ views of the United States...
Read entire article at Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Apart from all the other excesses of the Bush Years there may be special problems for diplomatic history and historians. To some degree this is rooted in the changing dynamics of international relations but it also has a policy aspect. When the diplomatic history of the presidency of George W. Bush comes to be written these problems will have to be taken into account. In consequence farmers laboring in the fields of history will face new and daunting challenges.
Gone now is the florid hope—myopically optimistic that it was—that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history. Less than two decades afterwards the world is quite different but remains very much an international enterprise—a diplomatic enterprise among other things—its vibrant history still to be captured. To record these events and divine the reasons for them historians are going to need new tools, or perhaps to change the ways in which we deploy the more traditional tools in our kit. Doing history will be harder, but it can be equally useful and even more rewarding. What follows is a reflection on this theme.
First to the dynamic factors. Wearing my hat as a political scientist I would observe that the role of the nation state on the international stage is weakening. Hopes for an American ascendency—empire, unique superpower, call it what you will—proved ephemeral and perished in the flames of George Bush’s foreign adventures. The international system, no longer exhibiting the bipolarity of the Cold War era, is not quite multi-polar either. Three key global developments have threatened the span of control the nation state has long enjoyed. The first is technological change, which has accelerated the pace of every kind of phenomena, from evolving crisis to monetary flow. Nation states are slow to respond and increasingly lack dominance over the requisite factors at the center of rapidly evolving situations. The second is a new empowerment of belief systems, whether they be political, religious, cultural, or ethnic. Ingrained beliefs, increasingly strident, are supplanting rational calculation as motivators for action. Very often these belief systems are transnational in nature but even where they are not they generate centrifugal forces that loosen the bonds within nation states and among alliances. The third key factor is a loosening of international norms for permissible behavior, which magnifies the dimensions of horrors as well as reducing the acceptability of national countermeasures. Needless to say these factors operate in tandem with each other and further complicate efforts to respond. The incredible rise in the importance of so-called “non-state actors” and the increasing prevalence of failed states stands in testament to these dynamics.
What does this mean for diplomatic history? Much of our work has operated from a state-central perspective. Historians analyze national policies, study factors influencing a state’s institutions, survey the evolution of a nation’s culture, and so on. A nation’s response to crisis or war, the state’s approach to international diplomacy, its military strategy, its intelligence apparatus—all are elements historians typically study in isolation even while nations and their institutions are increasingly operating to cope with the systemic elements that are transforming the globe. Diplomatic history is thus in danger of focusing on just one part of the dinosaur.
The emerging history of the Bush administration provides a good illustration here. President George W. Bush took office with every advantage. The United States was the unquestioned superpower—some said “hyperpower” or fantasized about empire. Bush enjoyed economic prosperity built on the efforts of his predecessor, military might, national security primacy second to none. But Bush pandered to political and ideological groups in his base, weakening his advantage. When a non-state actor—Al Qaeda (working in service to a different ingrained belief)—challenged America with its attacks, President Bush responded with a generalized escalation, initiating what he called the “Global War on Terror;” and invading Iraq. In both those endeavors he utilized means beyond the permissible, manipulating intelligence to create a casus belli, torturing prisoners to extract information. The military engagements themselves resulted in an overstretch of U.S. power, while Bush’s methods horrified allies and weakened the fabric of international support for U.S. actions. Once Bush’s pandering on economic policy, along with rapacious international and domestic businesspersons, combined to produce a market collapse, American supremacy went into eclipse. Because the consequence of globalization had been to create a tightly intertwined global marketplace, a Wall Street crisis was capable of triggering a global near-depression, further impacting other countries’ views of the United States...