A. Wess Mitchell, Great Power Diplomacy. The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025. £30.
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
Blurbed on the back by Allison, Hanson, Ferguson, Mead, Westad, Luttwak and Bew, this is an account of the significance of diplomacy as a force for good, and, in particular, of its value as a tool of strategy. Mitchell, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2017 to 2019 under Donald Trump, and author of The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire (Princeton University Press, 2018), is a co-founder of the Center for European Policy Analysis in 2005, and co-founder of the Marathon Initiative in 2019, co-chair of the NATO 2030 Reflection Group, co-author of The Godfather Doctrine (2009) and of Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (2016). A conservative Realist, he was identified in particular with arguing that America should focus on great-power competition rather than Middle-American nation-building, pressed hard for European deterrence by means of greater defence efforts, and argued that America’s allies should take a greater burden in the Western alliance.
His new book is both interesting and limited. It is interesting because of his inherent argument and thanks to his experience and his engagement with a wide-ranging literature. The book is also limited because of its failure to engage as a history with most of history, notably those of China and India. Indeed, aside from the repetition of the baleful tendency of so many to try to use history to prove a point in the present, there is something quaintly dated in his account of history. This is disappointing because he is clearly both bright and learned. So forget the idea that this covers the use of diplomacy as a tool of general strategy by ‘history’s most legendary empires’ for there is no coverage for example of the long pattern of Chinese interaction with its neighbours to the north. Here it would be more useful to focus on Thomas Barfield’s The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989) and indeed to have looked at a more recent Barfield book, published like Mitchell by Princeton, his Shadow Empires. An Alternative Imperial History (2023).
The detailed case studies suffer occasionally from being written at a remove, in part because of the usual problems of ahistoricism when looking at the distant past. For example, for medieval Western Europe, it would have been instructive to assess the role of the Church and of Papal diplomacy. Possibly, there is also a degree of confidence that could be qualified. For example, ‘the idea of a Habsburg-Bourbon alignment had surfaced occasionally … but never been adopted as policy’ (p. 281 footnoting p. 112). I am not sure I would go so far given the attitudes and policy of Philipp Ludwig Wenzel von Sinzendorf, ambassador to France in 1699-1701 and Court Chancellor from 1715 to 1742, and notably so in the mid-1710s and late 1720s. It is of course a standard problem of brilliant generalists, the revenge of the particular. You can stop and assess statements here and ask: ‘Franklin Roosevelt’s freewheeling with Stalin inadvertently spurred the spread of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe’ (p. 229). Well, I have no brief for Roosevelt’s stance, not least his criticism of Churchill, but I do not think that Stalin required Roosevelt to support this ‘spread’. His army had provided it and concern about keeping attack, by land and/or air, at bay helped underline the need to a glacis, while Stalin’s long-term hostility to Poland also played a major role.
It is more instructive to turn to the discussion of diplomacy and, in particular, to assess Mitchell’s argument that ‘obituaries of classical diplomacy … were premature’ (p. 15). He focuses on periods leading up to potential wars and argues that the need for diplomacy in strategy is inversely proportional to the amount of efficacy of military strength. Thus, diplomacy emerges as a useful expedient in bridging gaps. More specifically, Mitchell suggests that diplomacy gives the state an advantage in influencing the factor of time in strategic competition. His definitions and dictums are worth considering, notably two:
‘The essence of diplomacy in strategy is to rearrange power in space and time in order to achieve its utmost political aims while avoiding tests of strength beyond eh states ability to bear. This role is indispensable, timeless, and cannot be performed by any other instrument of state…effective diplomacy relates power back to a national mission that is greater than the state itself and transcends profane power politics. Great states … seek survival for reasons that are not purely material but cultural, spiritual, and particular to their histories. Alone among the instruments of state power, diplomacy provides a medium for connecting the exercise of power to a higher sense of purpose in the world. It seeks to transmit not just the “how” but the “why” of power’ (p. 18).
These are very different and invite discussion. The latter relates to the distinctive Realism Mitchell returns to throughout the book in his case studies and then again in his concluding chapter ‘The Necessity of Diplomacy’. In the face of what he sees as a misleading progressivism, Mitchell argues that the selfish Realism of national safety and prosperity makes possible international order, and that this is the route that should be taken. It would have been instructive had he pursued his theme beyond Nixon, and notably into the last quarter-century, for the general arguments of this book deserve teasing out both in terms of the experiences of the present and with reference to the extent to which the multiplicity of states may make Mitchell’s equation highly problematic.
In addition, Mitchell seriously underrates the issues involved in determining national interests. Moreover, ‘a higher sense of purpose in the world’ covers a wide range of drives, operative at international, national and sub-national levels, and some of those drives have a millennial character that raise questions about Mitchell’s discussion of diplomacy. He assumes not only that state-centred diplomacy is inherently rational, which is problematic, and possibly far from ‘Realist’, but also that it can and should take precedence over other means and agencies of state relationships. The decline of diplomacy as an autonomous separate agency is, in part, a consequence of the importance of international relations in presidential-type governmental systems.
Ideology and politics also affect the debate about how to respond to the understanding of contexts, and, notably, and, in part separately, of the apparent need to act; for implementation is a key facet of policy. Also implementation frequently drives policy: rather than policy and strategy creating and causing the tactics of implementation, it is often the events of the latter that feed back. This is not least because, in international relations, many powers have agency while numerous factors are at play.
There is much food for thought in this book, and hopefully Mitchell will press on to consider recent years in print. In doing so, his knowledge of that period will prove more pertinent than an account of the past that is overly selective.
