I sometimes wonder if authors write books specifically for me. Walter Mead's Special Providence is one such book. It discusses American foreign policy under the broad washes of Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian doctrines. It also asks why is American foreign policy blind to its own history, presuming it all started with WWII, when American politics and even the American nation was so reliant on American politicians getting the foreign policy right.

One quote caught my eye. What we Australian foreign policy watchers would call realism or real-politick, Mead calls Continentalist. This is the 19thC elitist "grand state" foreign policy advocated by the likes of Bismarck, Richelieu, etc. Unlike the messiness of democratically driven foreign policy there is an inherent level of amorality in Continentalist foreign policy:

Anyone can be immoral, but the accomplished amorality of diplomacy is more difficult to acquire. As a habit of mind it is generally confined to elites, partly because its possession usually leads to successful careers.

Again, Continentalists are not wrong to observe a tendency in democratic states for public opinion to oscillate between a naive belief that the international world is simply a larger version of the domestic arena, a space that can and should be run on the same principles as the local church or at least the neighbourhood hardware store, and a disillusioned conviction that there are no principles, not even any pragmatic ones, in international life.

In other words, democracies tend either to rise above or sink below the morality appropriate to the international scene.

Mead's analysis is a bit simplistic and in overly black and white terms in order to make his point. But the apparent amorality, even Hobbesian state, of international order and democracy's trouble in coming to terms with that amorality is a good point.

It is interesting to note that international liberalism tries to bring a morality to foreign affairs by introducing the blunt truth to diplomatic relations rather than the sins of omission and bluff in diplomatic communication. Australia's two best advocates of it, Doc Evatt and Sam Burton, practiced a very pure version of international liberalism in the late 1940s. It did not last as the realpolitick, realism or continentalism of the cold war intruded - creating a binary international diplomatic environment.