The National Interest

RICHARD NEUSTADT and Ernest May, in their classic work on statecraft, Thinking in Time, tell a revealing anecdote about the early months of the Carter administration. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and his team were jetting off to Moscow with a secret, dramatic proposal for deep cuts in nuclear weapons by both sides. Vance was filled with optimism about the chances of an arms-control breakthrough. Only one official expressed any pessimism—Leslie H. Gelb, Vance’s assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs. Gelb bet Vance a dollar that the proposal would be rejected without so much as the politeness of a counterproposal. As it turns out, Gelb was right—the Soviets were annoyed by the absence of any advance work and rejected the proposal outright. Gelb left the administration after two years and ended up voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Fast forward thirty-two years. Another Democratic administration is coming to power after a wholesale rejection of eight years of Republican rule. Gelb is now the personification of the foreign-policy community. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent and columnist for the New York Times, and followed that with a successful stint as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served in two administrations in senior Defense and State Department posts, was director of the Pentagon Papers project and recently advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Gelb possesses enough gravitas to sink a battleship. Now he has written his magnum opus, Power Rules.

In an effort to avoid seeing history repeat itself as farce, Gelb has penned a “how-to” manual for Barack Obama and his foreign-policy team. He has set a high bar for himself, consciously patterning his book after Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Ordinarily, such a risky gambit is a gift for the reviewer—the author will have inevitably hoisted himself with his own petard, and the reviewer can show off all of the ways in which the book du jour falls short of the famous Florentine’s masterwork. Fortunately, in this case the ready critique is not so easy. It is to Gelb’s credit that Power Rules is striking more for its similarities than its differences with The Prince. Like Machiavelli, Gelb gets to the nub of hard truths about power and statecraft in a complex world. He tackles how to deal with adversaries, cajole recalcitrant allies and manage domestic rivals in matters of foreign policy. Power Rules misses the mark on occasion—but compared with the glut of grand-strategy books currently in circulation, it is a damned sight better than most.

POWER RULES most clearly echoes Machiavelli in its awareness of the linkages between domestic politics and international relations. In his listing of uncomfortable truths, Gelb notes that in one’s choice of political allies, “[Moderates] make for weak allies in crises, where the day usually goes to the passionate, ruthless, and most undemocratically organized.”

One wonders how many allies Gelb will have left once this book hits store shelves. In the juicier bits of Power Rules, Gelb is unsparing in his assessment of the U.S. foreign-policy community. Thomas Friedman, his successor at the New York Times, and Richard Haass, who took over for him at the Council on Foreign Relations, take it on the chin at various junctures, as Gelb wittily explains why the world is neither flat nor nonpolar, rebutting each of those men’s own personal slogans. He also notes that these doctrinal disputes do not amount to much on the big questions: “While foreign policy experts usually battle each other over policy, they tend to follow presidents to war together.” Lest one think that Gelb is picking on think tankers alone, he lets journalists have it as well: “Journalists suffer from a further disadvantage in covering the range of foreign, security, and international economic issues: they are not, as a group, overburdened with background and knowledge in these subjects.” Furthermore, Gelb posits that journalists act in a procyclical fashion. When presidents are popular, they are treated with kid gloves; when they are unpopular, the media will dogpile on with unabashed glee.

In general, Gelb evinces a bemused disdain for the nonpresidential components of the foreign-policy machine. Not surprisingly, therefore, Power Rules argues that both domestic and foreign observers underestimate the power of the president in foreign-policy matters:

Presidential power over the making of foreign policy rests not only on formidable constitutional and political strengths, and on the deference given to the president as commander in chief, but also on the weakness of his competitors, whose limitations are generally underestimated, especially by themselves. The cast includes the think tanks, the nongovernmental organizations, the media, the lobbies, and the executive branch bureaucracy.

WHEN HE’S not entertaining us with his commentary on the foibles of the elite, Gelb is outlining his own advice, quite obviously based on his definition of power. And this is one of the greater services of the book: going back to a realpolitik definition of power. This is not as simple as it sounds. He again has to take on his foreign-policy-community colleagues. Enthusiasts of “soft power” like his former–Carter administration cohort Joseph Nye believe that persuasion is an element of power. Neoconservatives like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer are more comfortable with a definition that confines itself to the application of military force and the exercise of will. The number of power definitions has now metastasized beyond control, to the point where the term possesses a Potter Stewart–like quality—people only know power when they see it.

Gelb will have none of this conceptual fuzziness: “Persuasion, values, and the use of force can and often do flow into power, but at its core, power is psychological and political pressure.” Power Rules takes care to distinguish this definition from either persuasion or the use of force. Persuasion only happens if power is successfully wielded. And one only has to use force if power has failed. Gelb does state that while force should not be ruled out in crisis situations, if the situation has gotten that bad, it probably means power resources alone were not enough. In late 2002, for example, the Bush administration’s rhetorical and military threats successfully secured a unanimous Security Council resolution to authorize aggressive WMD inspections in Iraq. The 2003 invasion, on the other hand, represented a failure of power to change Saddam Hussein’s behavior.

In his advice about the exercise of power, Gelb raises some warning flags and issues some cautionary notes. He praises the role that deterrence can play in dealing with America’s adversaries, noting that it “has worked on almost all occasions when presidents positioned it clearly and firmly.” And at this point it applies most immediately to Iran. Bottom line, though he’d rather Tehran not have nuclear weapons, he is not overly concerned with the possibility. Gelb argues that America’s deterrent capability will limit their utility beyond the self-preservation of the regime.

He also observes that the dynamics of power politics have changed over the past century. The ability of the weak to resist the strong (on the weak’s turf) has grown rapidly in recent decades. A hundred years ago, any colonial power could have subjugated Somalia with a minimum of fuss; in the twenty-first century, despite prior efforts by the United States and United Nations, a stateless society persists in the Horn of Africa.

Military power is waning in importance at the same time that economic power has taken central stage. The paradox, for Gelb, is that economic power is a more slippery instrument of statecraft. He correctly observes that the coercive application of economic power—through sanctions—is much less effective than the military statecraft of yore. Power still matters, but its application has become more complex and constrained.

Then there is the question of which states have power and just how much. According to Gelb, there are two tiers of powerful actors that truly matter. The United States occupies the first tier alone. Eight states possess middleweight power status: China, Japan, India, Russia, Great Britain, France, Germany and Brazil. While the international system is still hegemonic, what matters is the “mutual indispensability” between America and the Eight:

As powerful as the United States is, it can’t succeed in solving or managing a major problem without the cooperation of other major countries . . . as full partners; and . . . those increasingly powerful countries can’t succeed in solving key problems without America. We swim together or sink apart. That is now beyond argument.

None of these observations are especially earth-shattering, but they do have the very real virtue of being true. Gelb takes care to distinguish between mutual indispensability and multilateralism. Mutual indispensability is a fact of life that cannot be wished away. Multilateralism is one possible way of coping with this fact of life—and, according to Gelb, usually not the best arrangement for accomplishing anything.

GELB IMPARTS some very wise counsel in these pages, but he is far from omniscient. Despite his desire to be a modern-day Machiavelli, there are moments when Gelb is not Machiavellian enough. For example, he takes a strong stand in favor of using American power to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing. He tries to base this argument on a logic of self-interest, claiming that inaction leads to the spread of violence and the rise of refugee issues and economic problems. He concludes, “Those spillovers do touch our economic and material interests.” This is an empirically dubious claim. The depressing but true fact is that the genocides committed in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur barely affected American strategic interests. The ethnic cleansings in Bosnia and Kosovo mattered to the United States only because they impinged on NATO—and, not surprisingly, this was the one region where the United States took action. Ironically, there is a more realpolitik reason to advocate taking action—Machiavelli’s dictum that a leader should avoid being hated by as many people as possible. Hegemons that allow mass slaughters on their watch are sure to incur some serious hatred.

There is also a touch of historical revisionism within the pages of Power Rules. Gelb clearly wants to motivate the book by pointing to the strategic ineptitude of past presidents. The result is a bit too much of the plague-on-all-houses kind of writing. Power Rules talks about how “we all drifted on and about these past two decades” in terms of foreign policy. This assertion overlooks the significant gains made—the reduction of interstate and intrastate violence and the expansion of economic globalization, to name two obvious trends. Gelb bashes George W. Bush and Bill Clinton with equal fervor, but it is foolish to assert that they committed blunders of equal magnitude. The blood and treasure expended on a war of choice in Iraq far exceeds the collection of Clintonian blunders. To demonstrate the persistent power of the United States, Gelb highlights the fact that the lame-duck Bush administration still organized the emergency G-20 summit in November. This elides the fact that the summit was really the idea of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The biggest problem with Power Rules, however, is the paradox about economic power. Gelb repeatedly asserts that economic power is increasingly important, while bemoaning the lack of understanding in the American academy about political economy. The trouble is that Gelb’s erudition on this subject is a bit limited. He writes about ending America’s dependence on foreign energy without any comprehension for why this is a near-impossible task. He supports a strong American economy—well, gee, which American doesn’t?

The biggest unanswered question in Power Rules is how the importance of economics affects the president’s ability to wield power. As I mentioned, Gelb claims that the president has greater latitude to deploy foreign-policy resources than is commonly understood. While this might be true of military power, it most certainly is not true for economic power. Gelb acknowledges that domestic politics prevented President Bush from supporting planned takeovers of several ports on the eastern seaboard—including New York City, Newark and Philadelphia—by Dubai Ports World and of Unocal by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Both were scuttled in the end.

The president of the United States might be the commander in chief, but he is not in control of economic statecraft. Presidents must deal with a recalcitrant legislature on matters of trade agreements and fiscal policy. On the monetary front, the president is not even the most important American actor—it’s the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Beyond the public institutions, presidents are always at the mercy of markets when gauging their economic strength. Gelb is correct to point out the complexities of exercising economic power. He never comes to grips with the fragmentation of authority on this dimension, though.

Gelb’s failure to dissect the political economy of power is not a failing unique to him; he shares this flaw with many. He himself observes, “You need a microscope to spy other than passing references to economic matters in writings by legendary figures of foreign policy such as Machiavelli, Otto von Bismarck, and Henry Kissinger.” At least Gelb appreciates that foreign economic policy is a subject matter that merits further inquiry.

POWER IS a relative measure, and so is the evaluation of books about power. No magnum opus can cover it all. No foreign-policy maestro can know everything. The geopolitics are the principle and undeniable strength of Gelb’s new book, an area not often known for clarity of thinking. Here then is hardheaded and frank advice from a major player in the field. Compared to the piles of books being churned out about America’s place in the world, Power Rules belongs in the top tier. Gelb intended this book as a long letter to President Obama; I fervently hope that the intended recipient reads it carefully.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a senior editor at The National Interest. His next book, Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, will be published by Brookings Institution Press in April.