Today, we share an excerpt from a video discussion moderated by Jacob Kildoo (full interview here). Jacob had the opportunity to sit down with Thomas R. Parker to discuss Parker’s book, American Presidents in Diplomacy and War: Statecraft, Foreign Policy, and Leadership.
JK: Tom, could you talk a bit about some of the overarching themes of your book? That is, what is it that makes for successful foreign policy after all?
TP: Well thanks very much for the question. I think it has to do a lot with personality. I think that the individuals who tend to be more successful are people who can analyze a situation in a dispassionate way and not let their emotions get carried away, and then they can go through a series of options on any given subject and choose a reasonably good one. Then, the second part of what makes for successful statecraft—because it’s not just an intellectual exercise, like I just described—but it’s seeing a policy through. And there it becomes a little less analytical, and [there’s] a little more emphasis on determination, attention to detail, [etc.]. And so there’s kind of two prongs there, I think: you analyze situations and then you move forward once you’ve decided what to do, in a determined way, sometimes in an implacable way, to see a policy through. I think those are two somewhat different aspects of personality needed to be successful.
JK: So maybe sort of a theory and then a practice component?
TP: Yeah—but not to be so theoretical as in the academic world, but [one] has to be dispassionate and thorough and prudent in the sense of looking at all sides of the issue. There’s a nice quote from Edmund Burke, who was the British parliamentarian back in the late 1700s, which I used [in the book]—he warned about the dangers of the violence in the French Revolution. He said that prudence is the god of this lower world. Prudence is the god of this lower world. And what he meant by that is not an excessive sense of caution, but just being wary and looking at a given issue and trying to parse it in all its various aspects.