BOOK REVIEW: POWER RULES BY LESLIE H. GELB

Pasadena Sub Rosa ^ | April 8, 2009 | Wayne Lusvardi

[WayneLusvardi]

Book Review: Leslie H. Gelb, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, Harper-Collins Publishers, 2009.

by Wayne Lusvardi

The 15th century ambassador of the city-state of Florence, Italy, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote:

“There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.”

Whether Leslie H. Gelb's book Power Rules falls into the first or the second of Machiavelli's three types of intelligence is the question to be answered in this book review.

Gelb relates what he understands for himself as a political moderate about U.S. foreign policy based on decades of working for Presidents on both sides of the political spectrum. Gelb is ex-President of the Council on Foreign Relations. His book emulates Machiavelli's book The Prince as a guidebook on foreign policy. In fact, Gelb even addresses a Letter to Our Elected Prince (Obama) as a preface to the book.

Using Gelb's favorite concept about U.S. foreign policy, this book is "indispendable" and should get a wide reading across the political spectrum. He disabuses just about every camp of foreign policy -- hard-dumb, soft-smart, and globalist-economic -- of their preconceived notions about foreign affairs. Instead he opts for what he calls a common sense approach.

But unlike Machiavelli, Gelb's approach is based on non-necessity or non-imperatives (i.e., choice). Contrary to Machiavelli, Gelb says war is rarely necessary, as necessity is prone to being invented. Gelb is thus a postmodernist Machiavellian, no matter how otherwise realistic and commensensical he is.

Despite that I couldn't put this well-written book down I am sorry to say that it is a disappointment not by what he wrote but what he didn't. For in singling out the invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush II for special criticism Gelb never answers the elusive question of our time: if Bush's invasion of Iraq and his policy of pre-emptive warfare was such an obvious failure why did Machiavelli write “There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others”? Gelb loves to invoke Machiavelli to legitimate his book but unfortunately for us only selectively so. He sidestepped this issue.

Gelb offers six excellent chapters of rules for exercising power. However, while Gelb is certainly aware in his book of how foreign states (Saudi, Jordan, Iran) harbor, fund, and arm shadow terrorist networks both within and outside their countries, he frustratingly doesn't offer any guidelines of how to deal with them. Gelb puts so much emphasis on cooperation with other nations that are our allies or our rivals that he fails to answer what we do when they are also our ally-enemies? For example, how do you open a door of negotiation to a nation that is threatening to deploy nukes that also is willing to starve its own people (North Korea)? Or how do you deal with Saudi Arabia that is our ally but perhaps a faction of Saudi princes helped support the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

Gelb isn't naive. He just fails to address this paradox although he criticizes conservative foreign policy thinkers as simplistic and unable to handle complexity. Ironically, Machiavelli is embraced by conservatives more than liberals.

Machiavelli wrote in Book II, Chapter 9 of his Discourses the following: "this method of starting war has always been common among the powerful and among those who still have respect for both their own word and that of others. For if I wish to wage war upon a prince with whom I have long-respected treaties, I can attack one of his friends with more justification and excuse than I can attack the prince, knowing for a certainty that if I attack his friend he will either resent it (and I shall fulfill my intention of waging war upon him) or not resent it, in which case he will reveal his weakness or lack of faith by not defending one of his dependents. Either one of these two alternatives suffices to lessen his reputation and to facilitate my plans." In other words, is the Iraq War an indirect war waged against both neighborhing Iran and Saudi Arabia? Gelb doesn't say. But if it is an indirect war then the reasons why Bush failed at devising a public justification for the war become more apparent. Gelb's approach may be commensensical, non-ideological, and aversive of what he calls "demons," but it isn't too deep.

I got the feeling from reading the book that Gelb is ingratiating himself with the new Obama Presidential administration, not for a job (like Machiavelli did with the Lorenzo de Medici), but to disabuse the Obama team of their notions of soft power and that all you have to do in foreign policy is negotiate. If so, Gelb has his own double Machiavellian motivation to slip some medicine into the dog food while playing doctor by criticizing his last patient (Bush) for not taking his medicine.

It is plausible that a faction within Saudi Arabia wanted to provoke the U.S. to fight their war for them against Iraq. We have known for a long time that the Saudis view the U.S. military as a mercenary force at their command due to their control of oil prices. We know that 19 of the 21 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi. Wasn't it the Chinese war strategist Sun Tzu who wrote to get others to fight your wars for you? If this was the case, Gelb offers no understanding of how the U.S. should deal with such a situation. Should it have negotiated, gone to war with Saudi Arabia and cut its own economic lifeline of oil, or what? We don't know because Gelb is stuck on answers that are obvious and full of common sense rather than those that everyone seems to want to avoid like some sort of dark family secret.

The book jacket is filled with endorsements mainly by liberal foreign policy critics who have embraced Gelb's book as a sort of vindication of their criticisms of Bush's actions and policies by the dean of foreign policy. Gelb, however, is above the fray, but almost to a fault. That is because he leaves some of the most tantalizing and prescient propositions of Machiavelli about the Iraq War unanswered. Instead he has opted to write a book that casts a pox on everyone's houses -- which is greatly needed.

In the end, however, I am afraid that I have to put Gelb's book in the second category of Machiavelli's as he "appreciates what others can understand" more than he casts light or depth on what we don't understand. Nonetheless, don't miss reading this excellent book. It is a *necessity,* even if it is your choice.