"At a time when political reporting seems intent on shrinking every story about foreign affairs into a battle of hawks and doves, Rise of the Vulcans is a much-needed antidote," writes Daniel Cass in an Opinion Journal review of a new James Mann group portrait of President Bush's foreign policy team:
"Vulcans" was the name given to a group of thinkers and advisers who teamed up with Gov. Bush during the 2000 campaign and who, after electoral victory, assumed top posts in his administration: Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and, of course, Dick Cheney . . . They have helped Mr. Bush pursue the most ambitious and controversial foreign policy of any president since World War II.
Cass compares Mann's book with The Wise Men (1988), Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's study of Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, John McCloy Jr. and the other architects of post-World War II foreign policy:
The Wise Men were products of the American establishment, public servants whose professional lives were shaped by Wall Street and the Ivy League . . . By contrast, the Vulcans made their reputations inside the machinery of government . . .
And they shaped policy very differently from the cautious, legalistic Wise Men who preceded them. In one of the book's best chapters, Mr. Mann describes how, when working for President Ford in the mid-1970s, Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld challenged Henry Kissinger's single-minded pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union. They argued, as did Mr. Wolfowitz, that the spread of freedom, not balance-of-power politics, ought to animate American internationalism.
The result of these intellectual disputes was a schism in the ranks of the foreign-policy elite that persists today. On one side are what might be called the gloomy realists. These are the heirs to Mr. Kissinger who retain a faith in multilateral cooperation, international organizations and the primacy of diplomacy and who worry over whether America has the will and resources for an ambitious foreign policy. On the other side are the Vulcans, who focus on U.S. military strength and urge its use to deter or roll back threats to national security . . .
Mr. Wolfowitz, for his part, emerges from Mr. Mann's narrative as the deepest and most iconoclastic thinker of them all. His critics depict him as a trigger-happy neoconservative, desperate for any excuse to depose Saddam Hussein. Mr. Mann puts the lie to such vaporings.
Comments