The Myth of the Water's Edge

Barry Blechman
Journal of Policy History, Volume 22, Number 3, 2010, pp. 374-377 (Review)

Published by Cambridge University Press

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barry blechman

The Myth of the Waters Edge

Review of Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National SecurityFrom World War II to
the War on Terrorism by Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Basic Books, 2008)

Julian Zelizer has written a comprehensive history of the major U.S. political/
military engagements around the world during much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Impressive in its scope, Zelizer throughout juxtaposes the thinking and analyses of executive branch policymakers with the
politics of the time, posing throughout his history the four key questions
raised in the books introduction:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Do Congress or the President drive national security policy?

Do Democrats or Republicans hold the national security advantage?
How big do Americans want their government to be in order to
defend their security? and
Should the United States go it alone or stress multilateral strategies?

Not surprisingly, the answers to all four questions are: It depends. Indeed, at
the end of the book, Zelizer states, The next generation of presidents and
congressional leaders will certainly confront the same four basic issues that
have shaped history since World War II: the balance between congressional
and executive power, the partisan advantage on national security, the size of
government the nation is willing to tolerate in the pursuit of peace and security, and the benefits of a unilateral as opposed to a multilateral approach to
foreign relations (506).
This humble projection avoids postulating a grand unifying theory, but
after 500-plus pages, one would have hoped for a conclusion with a bit more
bite. The reason, though, is clear. Though a mile wide, Zelizers history is only an
inch deep. It reads like a compendium of nearly a hundred years worth of daily
newspaper headlines, almost like scanning through an old microfiche collection of the New York Times front pages. Zelizer reports the main events occurring on the worlds stage, some of the give and take between the executive branch
and the Congress, as well as the fundamental policy analyses that led to the
the journal of policy history, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2010.
Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2010
doi:10.1017/S0898030610000151

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decisions eventually reached by presidents, and he is to be commended for

this, but rarely does he (or can he, given the books reach) look beneath these
fundamental facts to get at the underlying factors motivating the various
actors.
As a result, the books fundamental conclusion, at least according to the
publishers publicist, that partisan fighting has always shaped American foreign policy and the issue of national security has always been part of our
domestic politics, is trite and comes as no surprise to any halfway serious
student of foreign affairs.1 There is nothing in it that will surprise political
scientists or historians that cover these types of events, even though it does
make a very readable introductory text on national security policy.
Too little attention is paid to the roles played by personalities and bureaucratic infighting, the influence of constituencies to whom the Congress
and the executive branch pay special attention, as well as the role of moneyin
the form of campaign contributions, hired lobbyists, etc. These are not deliberate omissions. Zelizer clearly understands their importance, and sometimes
mentions them in passing, but he simply cannot devote the time and space
necessary to truly explain why the various decisions were taken and what was
the real explanation for each, given the span of history that he is covering. But
the consequence is to present events at a superficial level, producing a book
that is more journalistic than analytic. To give just a few examples:

In chapter 5, on how the Republicans used the China issue to regain

the high ground on national security, there is only a brief paragraph
(page 88) noting that the Republican Right received support from an
informal network dubbed the China Lobby, but pages are devoted to
the intellectual debate among conservatives about the pros and cons of
rebuilding the national security apparatus, and about the give-and-take
in the Congress. The story of how the United States became wedded
to, and several times almost went to war over, and might yet in the future go to war over, the defense of a corrupt regime that had just been
soundly defeated and expelled from virtually all of its own territory is
a fascinating one, in which Washington influence peddling, campaign
contributions, journalists crusading for special interests all play key
roles. Zelizer reports on the intellectual and political superstructure of
the issuehe does not have the time to get at the real forces at work.
In chapter 6, on the defense debate in the 1950s, in which the Democrats
under Candidate John F. Kennedy, re-regained the national security
high ground, there is a brief paragraph on the defense industry and a few

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examples of its benefactors in the Congress (page 126), but the specific
links are not drawn when the events of the decade are discussed. For
example, Zelizer notes that Senator Henry Scoop Jackson was known
as the senator from Boeing, but fails to note that as the manufacturer of
the Minuteman ICBM, Boeing (and Jackson) had a particular interest
in promoting the concept of a missile gap and the need therefore for
the United States to build far more ICBMs at a faster pace than had
been envisioned by the Eisenhower administration. Aiming for Jacksons support for his presidential aspirations, Kennedy of course had
very special reasons to find Jacksons position appealing.
In chapter 11, which describes the shift in the Republican party from
Nixons pragmatic policies to the more idealistic conservatism of
Ronald Reagan, the extraordinary role Henry Kissinger played and
the power he accumulated on the National Security Council is barely
mentioned and then, only in the context of Kissingers ability to delay
support for Israel during the 1973 war because of the Presidents incapacity during the Watergate crisis. In fact, this is a fascinating story involving a major clash of personalities between Kissinger and Secretary
of Defense James Schlesinger and the frantic efforts of the Israeli lobby
to get the Department of Defense out front on the issue, which cannot
be discussed given the level of analysis necessary to cover the sixty-plus
years that the book spans.
Zelizer concludes the volume with the following paragraph: The biggest
challenge for the new generation of policy makers who operate in the post9/11 world is to harness the best incentive that democratic politics can produce, using the political pressures to better gauge public sentiment, stimulate
public debate, and design the policies that will strengthen the nation against
real and dangerous threats.
This is dangerous advice. After 9/11, the primary democratic incentive for
politically motivated individuals was to show the public a strong response to
the attack. The policy makers of the George W. Bush administration then
listened to one source of political pressures, the neocons, who sold them a
totally bogus depiction of the political situation in Iraq and the ability of their
candidate, Ahmed Chalabi, to take over and stabilize the country once the
U.S. military threw out Saddam Hussein. They indeed stimulated public
debate, but the politics of the day, compounded by the intelligence communitys misjudgments and the administrations distortions about Iraqs weapon
programs, precluded expert assessments of the likely outcome of an invasion

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of Iraq and what would be needed to contain ill-effects. As we now know, the
resulting policies embroiled the United States in two civil wars, antagonized
our allies, and caused this nation to be viewed as a pariah in large parts of the
world, thus weakening, rather than strengthening, the nation against real and
dangerous threats.
While recognizing that partisan politics, vested interests, and individual
players constrain and sometimes shape policymakers choices, it behooves
the latter to analyze the objective realities of international situations as best
they can, define the best course of action to protect the nations interests, and
then see if that course can be accommodated by the underlying political realities, or if the latter, over time, can be persuaded to accept what is necessary
for the nations security. The former seems to be the course adopted by President Obama with regard to Afghanistan; the latter was the course followed by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in preparing the nation for the necessity to
join the fight against the Nazis. In my view, Zelizers prescription would stand
the policy process on its headputting politics first, the nations objective
interests second. As Zelizer shows, politics have always played a role in national security policy; they have never stopped at the waters edge. The nation
would be ill-served, however, if its leaders made politics primus inter pares in
their deliberations of how to respond to foreign threats and opportunities.
Henry L. Stimson Center

NOTE
1. Letter from Cassie Dendurent Nelson, Assistant Director of Publicity, Basic
Books, August 2009.