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“War presidents” are hardly exceptional in modern American history. To a greater or lesser extent, every president since Wilson has been a War President. Each has committed our country to the pursuit of peace, yet involved us in a seemingly endless series of wars—conflicts that the American foreign policy establishment has generally made worse. The chief reason, argues Angelo Codevilla in Advice to War Presidents, is that America’s leaders have habitually imagined the world as they wished it to be rather than as it is: They acted under the assumptions that war is not a normal tool of statecraft but a curable disease, and that all the world’s peoples wish to live as Americans do. As a result, our leaders have committed America to the grandest of ends while constantly subverting their own goals.
Employing many negative examples from the Bush II administration but also ranging widely over the last century, Advice to War Presidents offers a primer on the unchanging principles of foreign policy. Codevilla explains the essentials—focusing on realities such as diplomacy, alliances, war, economic statecraft, intelligence, and prestige, rather than on meaningless phrases like “international community,” “peacekeeping” and “collective security.” Not a realist, neoconservative, or a liberal internationalist, Codevilla follows an older tradition: that of historians like Thucydides, Herodotus, and Winston Churchill—writers who analyzed international affairs without imposing false categories.
Advice to War Presidents is an effort to talk our future presidents down from their rhetorical highs and get them to practice statecraft rather than wishful thinking, lest they give us further violence.
- Sales Rank: #1062719 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-03-24
- Released on: 2009-03-24
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Writing explicitly for an audience that is already familiar with international affairs, Codevilla (The Character of Nations) draws on examples from ancient Greece through the Iraq War to provide a road map for future foreign policy in this accessible but didactic book. In a series of chapters arranged thematically around concepts that include the language of politics and the effectiveness of diplomacy, the author takes issue with the realist, liberal nationalist and neoconservative schools of thought and their ruinous counsel that dominates contemporary international politics, instead advocating a commonsense approach that emphasizes mastering the basic skills of diplomacy and statecraft. Codevilla appeals to the Monroe Doctrine and 19th-century American approaches to foreign affairs while condemning contemporary policy that he believes has failed to secure a lasting peace. Codevilla writes intelligently on topics as diverse as the affect of economic sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s and contemporary relations between Russia and Georgia, but his highly critical style can sometimes be abrasive. (Feb.)
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Review
Publishers Weekly
“Accessible… Codevilla writes intelligently on topics as diverse as the affect of economic sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s and contemporary relations between Russia and Georgia.”
Library Journal
“Veteran international relations author Codevilla…questions basic assumptions that have guided U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson tried to make the world safe for democracy… Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.”
American Spectator
“Machiavelli could not have written a better book to give advice to ‘war presidents.’”
Claremont Review
“Compelling reading… bracing and intelligent.”
FamilySecurityMatters.org
“[An] expansive and important work…[Advice to War Presidents] should be required reading for Senators and their staff as an essential primer to the arcane world of arms control.”
First Principals
“A refreshingly unashamed conservative critique of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy, especially with regard to war and the use of force.”
About the Author
Angelo M. Codevilla has taught political theory and international relations at Stanford, Princeton, and Georgetown University and is presently a professor of international relations at Boston University. He is the author of nine books, including The Character of Nations, The Arms Control Delusion, and a new translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent book with a few caveats
By Joseph M. Hennessey
I will not even pretend to be a military or diplomatic professional; after all, the book was not really only for [future] war presidents, or Professor Codevilla would have only sold a few to some egocentric wannabes. I am in the well-read amateur/highly interested citizen category, to which i think the book is pitched.
Usually, I think the best way to write a book review is to find the author's premise, and then assess whether s/he accomplished what s/he set out to do. On p. xii we read "Losing wars while winning battles is hard and rare. Yet American presidents and their advisers have managed to do just that for nearly a century. This requires explanation. This book is about dissecting ruinous counsel about war and peace. In the course of clearing rubbish, I hope to uncover sound principles and distill them into advice for future war presidents." On that scale, I would assert that the author completely succeeded in "dissecting" and "clearing," and uncovers and distills principles only slightly less successfully, probably because the future is so, well, unpredictable.
Note that Codevilla generally wrote about US foreign policy sorrows and joys for about the past century. Woodrow Wilson is one of his main bogeymen, and for good reason, getting us into all sorts of trouble for his quixotic quests, which were really being led by his wife and advisers at the end of his regime. But I wish Codevilla had more firmly pinned the tail on the elephant, William McKinley, for it was during his regime that the United States made a sharp U-turn from the wise, prudent 'no entanglements' uber-policy of Washington and successors. McKinley rushed us into the too-easy Spanish American War, largely because the Catholics in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines needed to be Christianized/Protestantized, and we have been building ships, bases and a quasi-empire ever since.
I thoroughly agree with him that a truly realistic, as opposed to a materialist/realist foreign policy, would have a much more profound, sympathetic appreciation for the place of religion in international dynamics. Exactly because western Europe and the two coasts of the US have become largely secularized, means that we have a huge blind spot, a tin ear, in that regard, and have to study extra hard to comprehend the 3/4 of the world that is religious.
Underlying the Professor's 'advice' is a Machiavellian and Hobbsian philosophical foundation, unpleasant in interpersonal relations, but world politics ain't beanbag.
I enjoyed Codevilla's terse and sometimes pungent prose, and highly recommend this book.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Unconventional Wisdom
By Book Guy
Another eye opening book from Angelo Codevilla. His views on foreign policy are likely to be so different from what you normally hear on the Sunday morning shows that reading this book is a breath of fresh air.
Unfortunately, I can only give this book 4 stars because Professor Codevilla fails in his discussion of the "Surge" in Iraq. He essentially characterizes it as a continuation of the unrealistic occupation he has criticized since 2003. However, the Surge is actually a great example of exactly the sort of realism Codevilla advocates (as opposed to the sterile Scowcroftian variety). Al Qaeda in Iraq represented the Islamist movement in the Arab world, a force Codevilla has elsewhere recognized as a real response by the Islamic world to their corrupt secular regimes. As the mosque represents the only surviving element of civil society, and the Islamic world takes its religion seriously, the Islamist movement is readily comprehensible as a political force.
In Iraq, rather than wishing things were other than they were, we allied ourselves with the enemies of our enemies, who were more than willing to work with us to kill them. Unlike Codevilla's pretended epistemological uncertainty, in the real world, the ex-Baatthist and tribal levies in the Sons of Iraq (while perhaps not who we would want serving on our local school board) were clearly the enemies of our enemies, and more than willing to kill them. Our enemy, Al Qaeda in Iraq, by word and deed had made clear that they would fight to the death and commit any outrage to gain control of Iraq. Their atrocities had the effect of causing many in the Islamist movement to reconsider their approach. About this, everyone on the ground, Iraqi and American, was in agreement. At a certain point, you can't continue to discount the eyewitnesses.
Leaving aside the question of to what extent Saddam's regime had encouraged the Islamists to make war against America, by the time of the Surge, Saddam was long dead, and the Sons of Iraq were no more willing to fight for his cause than the Germans were for Hitler in 1948. The Islamists were our real enemies because, by the time of the Surge, they and only they had committed themselves by word and deed to the destruction of the West in general and America in particular. Who can argue with this? It is one thing to say the Islamist movement was infected and directed by the Arab and Pakistani intelligence services - it is another to suggest that the movement is without independent existence.
Similarly, his discussion of the Sadrists and Mahdi Army is inadequate, because these forces are clearly Iranian proxies. The Islamic Republic is the child of the Islamist movement, although Shia rather than Sunni, and successfully in control of the Iranian nation state. While the unwillingness to accept that we were at war with Iran can and should be criticized, what is the point of criticizing an alliance with those in Iraq who wanted to fight them? Similarly, Codevilla would agree that, if we are afraid Iraqi Shiites will fall under the control of Iran, this suggests that Iran is our real enemy and that we make war against them as well (which he advocates elsewhere in his book). Similarly, Al Qaeda in Iraq were also quite clearly funded by, and proxies for, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, who were using them to achieve their own objective of advancing Wahabist Islam in an effort to stabilize their own regimes and to keep jihadists from attacking Saudi princes. Like Laurent Murawiec, we can call on America to be realistic about friends and enemies in Saudi Arabia.
This realism about friends and enemies is precisely what Codevilla has called for in numerous other places in his work. That he discounts it in actual practice in Iraq unfortunately appears to be the Washington game of "not invented here": since Codevilla did not call for a significant change of counterinsurgency tactics, believing any such change futile and counterproductive, when it worked, he was unable to admit his own error. I think part of this has to do with his unfortunate tendency to read mainstream media sources like the NY Time uncritically, as if this were still a time when journalists could be trusted to report the news in the news sections of the paper, regardless of what was opined in the op-ed pages. Actually speaking to U.S. soldiers on the ground revealed a very different story.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating - more than a little bit frightening as well!
By The Reviewer Formerly Known as Kurt Johnson
I was first introduced to Angelo Codevilla through his American Spectator article, America's Ruling Class. I wanted to know more about the man, so I checked with my library and found a copy of his book, Advice to War Presidents. In this fascinating book, the author points out that since the Wilson administration just about every U.S. President has had to lead the country during a time of war. According to Mr. Codevilla, the U.S. diplomats were partially responsible for the war, and they inevitably botched it - losing the peace that the military leaders had won. In this book, the author examines the history of America statecraft in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and then he goes on to show what correct statecraft should look like.
Overall, I found this to be a fascinating book. It's more than a little bit frightening to learn just how out of touch with reality our diplomats and other leaders are, and how their failures have made our position in the world worse and worse over the years. This is a very interesting book, and I hope that American leaders present and future read it...for all our sakes!
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