There is a case for having diplomats trained as scientists. Paul Nitze, the arms control strategist and negotiator, used to explain how the United States needed to approach the USSR by using a diplomatic version of Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity: "Light can be both wave and particle at the same time"; the United States should have to be adversarial and accommodating at the same time. Strobe Talbott, expert on foreign relations and former classmate to Bill Clinton, was once praised for having established the diplomatic equivalent of impedance matching, a process used by electronics engineers, in the strategic dialogue he conducted with his counterpart Jaswand Singh following India's nuclear testing in 1998. The two countries were on different planes, but the current between them somehow got through.
But this case for the diplomat-engineer is seldom made. More often than not, it is considered that the statesman and his close kin, the diplomat, should be trained in the humanities. Charles Hill, a diplomat turned educator and a lover of great books, takes as his aim "the restoration of literature as a tutor for statecraft". The argument of his book is that the world should recognize high political ideas and actions of statecraft as aspects of the human condition that are fully within the scope of literary genius, and ones that great writers have consistently explored in important ways. For Charles Hill, the international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest ideas of the human condition are played on. Even literary works read and praised for insights on personal feelings and intimate matters, such as Jane Austen's Emma, possess a dimension wholly apt for statecraft--in Emma's case, the gathering and misanalysis of intelligence. Conversely, when literary works take up matters of statecraft, images suggest that the foundation stone of world order is located in marriage and the family.
For Charles Hill, political science proves inadequate in dealing with "the great matters of high politics, statecraft, and grand strategy". Political scientists are experts who ignore the reality of politics in search of "scientific" answers to some trivial or obvious aspects of a problem. Political science by self-definition must confine itself to a narrow band of problems, capable of scientifically replicable solutions--leaving the biggest questions beyond its reach. Neither can history provide the answer to the issues at hand. Historians have the pleasure of dealing with all the facts known to all the participants of any past event. But the statesmen of the time must make decisions when knowing only a small portion of what is happening. Neither historians nor political scientists can deal with the complexity of true strategy and statecraft.
As the author claims in Grand Strategies, statecraft cannot be practiced in the absence of literary insight, without a "grasp of the ungraspable" that only literature allows. Decisions in diplomacy must be taken before all the facts are in, when all the implications cannot be known. That is why diplomacy must be practiced as one of the humanities and informed by all of humanistic learning, with literature at the apex. The dimension of fiction, and of poetic license, is indispensable to the strategist who cannot, by the nature of the craft, know all of the facts, considerations, and potential consequences of a situation at the time a decision must be made, ready or not. Literature lives in the realm grand strategy requires, beyond rational calculation, in acts of the imagination.
Charles Hills begins his literary grand tour with Homer's epic of war between assembled Greek warriors and the citadel of Troy. In the Iliad, Achilles has retreated under his tent and Odysseus is sent by Agamemnon on a diplomatic mission to convince him to join back the fray. But Odysseus violates two fundamental laws of diplomacy. He doesn't follow his instructions to the letter, putting aside the demand that Achilles bow down to Agamemnon as a token of allegiance. And he doesn't report back to Agamemnon accurately, stating that Achilles is still bursting with anger whereas the Greek hero agreed to consider the request carefully. In any case, Odysseus' diplomatic mission to Achilles, and his later trials on his way back to Ithaca, demonstrate that diplomacy precedes the state, and may count among the oldest trades humanity has ever practiced. Halfway between the myth and the epic, Aeschylus's great trilogy The Oresteia locates civilization's origin in the creation of the state. The drama tracks the aristocratic house of Atreus, disintegrating under a curse that demands revenge down the generations until Orestes, in Athens, is the central character in a transition from the primeval cycle of revenge to civil society based on judicial order.
There is a literary genre that takes at its subject the foundation and preservation of a polity. This genre is the epic, and its evolution through the ages provides the Ariadne's thread that runs throughout the labyrinth of great literary works. Epic stories come in verse or in prose, and they may stick to fact and realism or give leeway to the powers of the imagination. But they all have a state-making quality: the hero's fate is closely linked to the birth of a nation, and it is told with the benefit of hindsight by the heirs to that national tradition. Epics are political narratives that tell the story of a state before history began, through the trials of one individual who shoulders the destiny of a community without knowing that all his wanderings and chance encounters will ultimately make sense.
Every classic epic involves a visit by the hero to the Underworld, where the experience will reveal to him his true, fated mission. Reaching the nether region requires contact with a vegetation symbol, like Virgil's Golden Bough, and a guiding companion. Charles Hill finds that same narrative structure in many works of fiction, from the classic narrative poems of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton to the modern novels of Jonathan Swift, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The descent to the underworld, and the walk in the woods that precedes it, infuse the political order with a mythical element that sustains it. To be legitimate, any political system must at least hint at the underlying divinely founded order.
Although Charles Hill is mostly preoccupied with works of fiction and poetry, he also suffuses the text with his real-life experience. He was a direct witness when Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew visited Harvard in 1970 and when, in front of anti-war protesters and New Left faculty, he declared: "If the U.S. were not fighting in Vietnam, Singapore would be gone by now". The author concurs and adds that "not many years later, the emergence of the Asian Tigers as successful states in the global economy would prove Lee correct." The author also refers to his close relationship with Henry Kissinger, who shared the same literary tastes and passion for history. Kissinger poked fun at State Department officers who had never heard of Cardinal Richelieu, or misquoted Thucydides without having read The Peloponnesian War. Clearly the community of grand strategists and readers of ancient epics is an exclusive club. On the other hand, being steeped in books does not necessarily make one a more enlightened statesman. During the epoch-making visit to China in 1972, Mao received Nixon and Kissinger in his private room full of books and manuscripts, a location which looked more like the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of a political leader. But Chairman Mao is certainly no model for Charles Hill, who was trained as a China watcher during the horrendous years of the Cultural Revolution.
Charles Hill has a good knowledge of the literary canon, as he revisits the masterworks "every schoolboy used to know" but nobody now remembers, such as the long march of the Ten Thousand in Xenophon's Anabasis. His command of diplomatic history also enlightens the text, as when he retells the story of the Telegram from Ems that Bismarck rewrote and leaked in order to trick the French into declaring war to Prussia. To be true, the connections that the author establishes between works of fiction or poetry and the course of history are sometimes tedious, and we get the impression that the author writes about certain works just because he likes them for their literary value, which is fine. The parallel he draws between T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points is rather far-fetched, even though he is right to draw attention to the literary dimension of what he considers "the most influential document in American diplomatic history".
Based on Hill's lectures at Yale, the book leaves the reader with a long list of suggested readings, including the masterworks whose reading one always postpone, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, or Whitman's Leaves of Grass. But a reader's humanistic culture is always a work in progress, and Charles Hill is no exception: the misspellings in his quotes of Rimbaud's volumes suggest that his French could need a little refreshing. Perhaps more than the classics, I was drawn to the works of contemporary fiction that he refers to in the book, and which I have added to my reading list. These are Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, David Stacton's People of the Book, and Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch. Readers' feedback on these books would be most appreciated.
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