Gaddis: Diplomacy

"A first step toward invigorating the field of American diplomatic history, then, might be to get beyond the tendency to equate synthesis with reductionism. The purpose of a synthesis, after all, is not to exclude but rather to account for complexity." (410)

A second area in which American diplomatic history lacks methodological sophistication has to do with what is, in a way, the opposite of reductionism: it is the tendency to construct a complex and multifaceted series of events, full of causes intersecting and individuals interacting, but then apply it an indiscriminate way. It is what one might call the "crop-duster" approach to history." (410)

"Weakens her analysis by concluding that the resulting policy - which she calls 'liberal-developmentalism' - allowed the United States to dominate those coutnries subjected to it in such a way as to constrict their political, economic, and cultural autonomy." One must be sensitive to its application, recognizing the virtual certainty that consequences will vary from place to place and from time to time.

"Somehow Americans affect what happens to other nations and peoples, but other nations and people seldom affect what happens to Americans."

Does the existence of acknowledged disparities in political, economic, or military power in fact cause influence to flow only from areas of strength to those of weakness? - A comparative study of empires.

These trends make all the more conspicuous, then, the tendency of American diplomatic historians to assume the unidirectional influence when they write about Latin America." Move away from dependency theory where political, economic, and social conditions in the Third World can only be understood within the framework of an international system dominated by mature capitalist economies.

A third problem that causes American diplomatic history to suffer from methodological impoverishment is cultural and temporal parochialsim: we assume the experience of the United States in time and space is unique and therefore defining - experiences of other nations at other times and in other parts of the world shed little useful light upon our own.

Attention to how policymakers think about space and time might help in dealing with such issues. Perceptions after all are to a large part shaped by the spatial and temporal context within which individuals and nations exist. Overcoming spatial and temporal parochialism requires being willing to undertake comparative studies. historians are not particularly receptive to this approach and tend to assume that the comparativist cannot know as much about a particular subject as the specialist.

The United States is and always has been a member of the great power system. America's contribution to international stability, American perceptions of fear, look at the domino theory.

For those who will seek out its patterns, history does have a certain - although limited - predictive utility. it is not like mathematics or chemistry, where the repeated combination of variables in the same amounts and under the same conditions will always produce the same result. It certainly is not, in and of itself, a gudie to the future: those who have sought to use history in this way - by assuming that the future will replicate the past - can count on only two certainties, which are that it will not and they will be surprised as a consequence.

History like a rear-view mirror. History can also make one aware of those long-term patterns that tend to hold up across time and space: that great powers do rise and fall; that empires do overextend; there is a relationship between solvency and secuirty; individuals not automatons; events complex.