Customer Reviews

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats

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Everyone who reads books on foreign policy should read this book. It is well-argued throughout and gets at fundamentals, rather than just slinging the latest epithets over our latest blunders in Iraq. I don't in every way agree with the author's recipe for liberal internationalism but overall this is a smarter book than whichever other tome you are likely to pick up on foreign policy.

Tyler Cowen

Republicans always win foreign policy debates because Democrats don't even try. Democrats will keep losing until they participate. That's what Yglesias says and he's completely convincing and even entertaining.

Yglesias smartly avoids making a specific foreign policy prescription, other than to follow the general internationalist approach that succeeded from Truman though Clinton. It's not so much that Democrats need to march in lockstep, it's just that they should stop running away. But I'll make my pitch for republican security theory, the idea that security means avoiding the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy. In practice it's pretty much the best of liberal internationalism and the small part of realism that makes sense, but the great thing about it is that it ties together approaches from antiquity to America's founding and all the way to the present.

Lind's The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy is a good read and I think an expression republican security theory.

Deudney's Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village is a tough read, but absolutely worth it.

This book is definitely both highly readable and filled with great insights and ideas into liberal foreign policy. But, rather than put all of your trust in a reviewer you don't know, check out Matthew Yglesias' blog at The Atlantic for a more accurate idea of what the book is like. His blog, like his book, has some of the best political writing around, and is well worth checking out.

This book is an argument that Democrats' problems with foreign policy don't trace back to them not being "tough" enough but instead to their failure to offer an alternate vision. The framework that Yglesias is promoting is liberal internationalism which he ties into to Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Containment, and the first Gulf War.

Much of the book is historical review, one that thankfully maintains the fast pace and wit of Yglesias's blog. Those who enjoy his blog should also enjoy the book, but it's also an excellent introduction to those who aren't already readers. The main value-added versus the blog is the ability to develop support for his ideas at length. He uses this opportunity well, although Yglesias does stick to qualitative analysis of Democrats electoral fortunes. The book contains no statistical analysis over whether Democrats offering a different foreign policy do better than other Democratic candidates.

The specifics of "liberal internationalism" are rather straightforward. Build global institutions, work together with other nations, and try to understand the viewpoints of other nations. He supports the war in Afghanistan but thinks the war of in Iraq was inherently flawed and that complaining about implementation obscures the real problem. That said, the book is not a theoretical treatise. It sits firmly at the intersection between policy and politics and is in fact dubious of the value of big new ideas.

All-in-all it's an interesting read for those dissatisfied with America's recent role in the world and looking for an achievable new direction.

Heads in the Sand can be divided into two parts. The interesting part serve as the bookends to the book. It first offers an overview of the liberal foreign policy tradition (though strangely excludes the Kennedy/Johnson years). The interesting part picks up at the conclusion with Yglesias' discussion of what a sensible foreign policy might be and why being new and interesting is not the end all, be all of policy. If you read this book, I would strongly recommend you read these two sections of the interesting part carefully and ignore the middle of the book.

The middle, the uninteresting part, is largely a recap of the foreign policy debates from 2001 to 2007 and the politics surrounding them. If you followed the news even superficially during that time, it will all seem familiar. Though Yglesias, as an avowed Deaniac, also makes a passionate defense of Howard Dean. Like many progressive Dems in my age cohort (I was in my early 20s in 2004), I was fascinated by the Dean campaign and appreciated his opposition to the Iraq war. But I strongly differ with Yglesias' conclusions that no one really liked John Kerry or that he did not offer a competing foreign policy vision, just Bush-lite. I liked John Kerry. I believed in John Kerry. I didn't "Date Dean, but Married Kerry." I chose Kerry over Dean because I thought Kerry had a well thought out and broad world view. I felt in the end Dean was riding the anti-war express to nowhere. Yglesias also gives short treatment to Kerry's prescription for a "war on terror" that was not just militarily based but included law enforcement, diplomacy, and intelligence. It was the correct view but was largely panned at the time. Kerry stood up for what Yglesias should have wanted, but instead of acknowledging it Yglesias mostly nitpicks Kerry's views. To be fair, Yglesias also acknowledges some failings of Dean's candidacy and I think he is correct that on Iraq in particular Kerry and many other Dems never hit their stride, but I could not help feeling that a vast part of the book was a Dean defense and not a serious discussion of foreign policy.

Ultimately, the book is interesting because it offers up ideas for a liberal foreign policy that is no isolationist or Bush-lite. It is both ambitious and pragmatic. If you read it, enjoy the interesting part and try not to get as caught up in the uninteresting part as I did.

This book is a great first pass at understanding the theories and political situations that have defined US foreign policy in the last decade.

Yglesias carefully lays out his argument that Democrats should re-embrace the principled liberal foreign policy that served the US well in the twentieth century, instead of merely griping about mismanagement of the war in Iraq. He argues that this will not only lead to better foreign policy results, but better success in domestic elections.

In one memorable paragraph, he writes: "Better techniques are always welcome, but what the country needs to replace Bush's current failed strategy is a different strategy, no just another way to implement the same strategy."

Yglesias does make reference to several bits of political theory, especially early on in the book - I dug out my notes from my "Theories of International Relations" class. However, you don't need to take a seminar to appreciate his argument. The book is well documented, drawing on policy papers, commentary, and contemporary reportage to look at the implications and results of American foreign policy.

I've been an avid reader of Matt Yglesias's blog since long before he was assimilated into the Atlantic collective. On one hand, it's hard to take someone seriously as a foreign policy expert when they are no older than I am. On the other hand, he's incredibly smart and persuasive, and given the quality of our country's credentialed foreign policy experts, he's a much needed voice of sanity.

If you're of the opinion that the intergovernmental institutions which are central to Yglesias's liberal internationalism are totally irredeemable, you may not be convinced otherwise by this book. But as a history of US foreign policy in the Clinton-Bush years, it is thorough, insightful, and funny.

The postmortem of the Democrats' 2004 campaign strategy regarding the Iraq War is especially good. As Yglesias makes painfully clear, never has so much political cowardice yielded such counterproductive results.

Yglesias presents a pithy and convincing account both of why our country's foray into Iraq was doomed from the start; and of how the political dynamics of news events, the era, and our institutions all prevented -- and continue to prevent -- the Democratic party from effectively challenging the Bush administration's bellicosity.

Long-time readers of Yglesias's blog may find themselves mostly nodding along to this longer version of a perspective that they have been introduced to over the course of years, one piece at a time. But the book's lack of startlingly counterintuitive novelty should not be regarded as a defect (the same applies to foreign policy, as Yglesias notes). And in any case, it certainly doesn't detract from the importance of the argument being made: it's hard to imagine that, as we deal with the consequences of the Iraq War over the coming years and decades, a more compelling explanation of what made the fiasco possible will emerge than the one contained in this book. Recommended.

If you read Matt's blog, you might wonder if this book was actually written by him. As it lacked his trademark grammatical mistakes. Anyways, this book is fantastic. The only downside is that it is a little jumpy in the first half.

Yglesias puts modern foreign policy in context with historical foreign policy. This book has completely re-framed how I debate with people, with the phrase "traditional liberal internationalism" rolling off my lips. This book is a knockout, I really enjoyed it.