POWER RULES

Council on Foreign Relations maven Gelb (Intervention and American Foreign Policy, 2001, etc.) channels Machiavelli in this set of prescriptions and proscriptions on the world beyond America’s shores.

The author’s latest is modeled—thinly—on The Prince, couched in occasional hortatory utterances to “our elected prince.” He is quick to warn, however, that he is not fishing for a job in the Obama administration, since the two dominant political parties “have made me not partisan, but just a bit surly.” In the hands of, say, Kissinger, a Machiavellian take on the world would be truly Machiavellian, but Gelb takes a milder stance. In the place of exhortations to eliminate opponents and their families and sow their fields with salt while denying everything plausibly, Gelb encourages the president to “break the hold of television and particularly cable news on the public debate”; to “be seen as above petty politics”; to fix “dependence on foreign resources such as oil and the mountains of accumulated foreign debt.” That’s all commonsensical, as the subtitle advertises, though none of Gelb’s counsel goes beyond the expected wisdom. Between the too-sparse lists of dos and don’ts come more straightforward glosses, including a tip of the hat to the Kissingerian notion of linkage, which joins two issues that may or may not be related and “adds bargaining power to both.” Gelb demonstrates a clear command of big, gnarly issues, and his overall take on where the elected prince’s principality stands is anything but cheery. Having enumerated countless slips, flaws and flubs, he closes by observing that “we can already see the United States of America…beginning to decline…and on the path to becoming just another great power, a nation barely worth fearing or following.”

Meaty reading for policy wonks.