Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
Unconditional Negotiations
By J.H. Plumb
The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence
by Richard B. Morris
Harper & Row, 552 pp., $10.00
America may be accomplished in the arts and sciences of mankind, but peace-making has never been her forte. After both World Wars opportunities were lost and complexities created that could easily have been avoided; suspicion and naiveté both contributed their quota of mistakes, yet by Yalta the American government had over a century of diplomatic experience, time enough one might have thought to build up a formidable and confident diplomatic machine. The Founding Fathers, lacking all experience of the diplomatic complexities of Europe, did far better; but then they were guided by principle rather than the pursuit of principle and power, often a poisonous and dangerous mixture that needs a professional sense of historical processes to exploit with any hope of success. Wilson, Roosevelt, and their State Departments lacked historical nous. Fortunately the Founding Fathers did not require an historical sense, for their purpose was both limited and, as political situations go, pure. America wanted to be free, to decide its own fate, to rule itself by institutions of its own devising. For this Americans had fought and died in the fields, woods, and creeks against the most formidable military power the world then knew, a power which had only recently broken france and wrested from her a commercial empire that stretched across the world. To contemporaries it seemed absurd that the Americans might one day win; sooner or later British might must prevail. And America's allies, France and Spain, cared little whether America remained free or not, once they had achieved their own aims to weaken Britain.
Review, 1344 words
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