Speaking of engagement, i hope you will take the opportunity during our interview to doing todays discussion by submitting questions as we go along. You can do that by clicking the q a button at the bottom of your screen. Today, as vicente mentioned, we are joined by my friend robert zoellick, he has served america and served her well across multiple administrations and in a range of key roles in the late 80s he served as counselor to the secretary of the treasury under secretary of state as well as White House Deputy chief of staff. In the george w. Bush years he served as ab and later president of the world bank. Hes received numerous honors the state departments highest award, the treasury departments Alexander Hamilton award, and dod medal for distinguished public service. The American Government werent the only ones, the German Government awarded him the night commanders cross, the Mexican Government awarded him their aztec eagle and chili gave chile abof course the author of a remarkable new book america in the world the history of u. S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, bob, welcome, its great to see you again. Thank you mark, its a privilege to be here with cindy and the first of the series i had the great privilege of considering john mccain a friend, he was a hero, a leader but also a voracious reader. This was a nice way of recognizing that legacy. Thats wonderful. Its really great to have you with us for our first in the series. Beginning with the obvious, what led you to write this book . What was your inspiration . Like senator mccain i always respected the work of henry kissinger, kissinger wrote a book a number of years ago titled diplomacy, and it he used history to talk about Foreign Policy but it tends to be written from european perspective. For years ive been playing with the idea of how might i do something that in some of the ideas and experience from the american perspective. The structure, the approach i took in this book is in the same way cindy mentioned, the book to focus on characters and individuals in leadership. I focused on people and events and the practical work of diplomacy. I suppose one of the other purposes i had is that the field of the diplomatic history as it used to be known as faded a little bit over the years. For understandable reasons people try to bring in different types of perspectives and actors and ideas but it led to a bit of a fragmentation and i wanted to try to draw those back together, there was a history professor at harvard who now will have a good book out on john f. Kennedy, he wrote a piece of saying, this is a way to come back a little bit to political history. Insofar as those subjects subjects are so talk they focus more on the postworld war ii era i want to go back to the first hundred 50 years of american because theres a lot of interesting characters and people and perhaps one of the benefit which is many of those years the u. S. Didnt have overwhelming power by her former secretary matters comment recently that he was troubled with the United States to have total domain dominance. And much of our history we didnt have total domain dominance abi try to focus on methods of diplomacy as well as some people and ideas. Im going to pick up on that last point you just made. May be a slightly contrary point of view, i actually think the subtitle of the book the history of u. S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy in some ways thats not quite on the mark because as i see it its less a history and more a diagnosis. May be what we really have in this great book is we have an explanation for modern audiences of what the various strands of u. S. Diplomacy are. Does not make sense to you . Many books about Foreign Policy understandably are written by scholars and they want to come up with intellectual frameworks or themes i wanted to let the characters tell the story and in the process revive some of the ideas of that experience that have influenced american Foreign Policy, as you see in the stories, some of them come back so the question is, they may appear again. Just to give you two very different examples, one of my only chapters is on Alexander Hamilton where i wanted to talk about economic state graph but also how he connected the diplomacy to the economic design and strategy for the United States but 100 years later i involved a character that many people will not have recalled, Charles Evans hughes even though he almost won the presidency in 1960 four woodrow wilson. Thats a story about arms control naval arms control but also regional security. Yet i think there is lessons one can draw from that topics as diverse as north korea or iran. Its interesting to me that what the book tells me, it isnt a neat progression, you have a chapter on this doctrine or this tradition, turn the page and go to the next one. As you point out, things come in and go out and there is a constant interplay. Just about every review i read in your book includes the following sentence from page 9 of your book b over 200 years u. S. Diplomacy sought out what works even if practitioners stumbled while discovering what they could accomplish. Thats obviously a push for a fragment is in. I want to suggest i think a better or perhaps more nuanced encapsulation Dwight Eisenhower called it a fever pitch in the old cold war defined prudently for the long haul. Jfk learn to deal pragmatically with crises. Ronald reagan set Ambitious Goals yet was willing to negotiate abreally it is less a neat progression of traditions and more a constant interplay or traditions depending on the leader and depending on circumstance with different traditions perhaps taking the day. I decided it would be an overwhelming task to write a full comprehensive history and probably less readable. Have already designed this for people who enjoy biographies. As john mccain enjoyed biographies. I think people are away you bring the stories to life. For each person and try to associate it with an episode or a brief era of issues. As well as an idea i try to associate hamilton with economic state graph jefferson was the futurist because for John Quincy Adams of sort of american realism. I tried to come up with a menu of ideas that i think people thinking about Foreign Policy today could look at and say how does that show up here . At the same time you got leaders like Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt known for some soaring rhetoric and big vision and city on a hill and when you look at their greatest accomplishments it was oftentimes that which occurred behind the scenes was incremental and where they had to nudge things along probably with some in patients but in terms of accomplishment their greatest accomplishment. Teddy roosevelt is a good example. If you think about Teddy Roosevelt we often associate him as Lieutenant Colonel who went up San Juan Hill and the great white fleet indeed if you go to the roosevelt room today youll see this picture of colonel roosevelt, steering horse this is the west wing of the white house. Below it is the Nobel Peace Prize. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905a906 for mediating the retro japanese war. Thats interesting because while one often thinks of him in terms of his bully aggression, he used that discipline as a mediator, extraordinary effectively. This is the time for the same active it really have a diplomatic service. Part of one roosevelt does is enlist the support of the german, the french ambassadors to the United States, and groomsmen who was a british diplomat. They see hes a guy who gets things done, hes got a magnetic approach. I think that was one of the great skills of our Alliance Leaders is to pull other countries to our side. I also include in that one the first moroccan crisis, which he mediates. He does it quietly because your predecessors in the Congress Different want to be in european affairs. Thats an interesting incident. Most people wouldnt have heard about it. If you think about it, its one of those aproblems on the periphery of europe that couldve led to ajust as it did in the balkans in less than a decade. Its a good example of sort of his skill set but also how he pulls people together and in the case of reagan, i think many of us admired reagan but we often try to have a sense of what was at the particular skill. I went back and looked closely at reagans political career for people who follow politics often know that he was most noted for best speech in 1964 speech he gave in goldwaters doomed political effort. The representative how reagan came to terms with ideas, in a sense he was fighting the cold war in the battle of ideas. All those years when he was out of office he was quite a careful writer of reeded radio scripts. He would delve into subjects, he would think do and then articulate them in his writing and speaking. He was a friend of mine who served as staff secretary unfortunately now passed away said reagan was offered and noted at the great communicator but in fact he was the great editor. A very skillful writer. Most historians have a hard time quite understanding, how do speeches make the policy . I think the speeches were a key to reagans focus and conviction on big ideas but they also had to be combined. This is the point you alluded to stop by bring in secretary schultz into this chapter because reagan, while great and articulated his position, also love negotiating as did schultz. Explain how the two items fit together and i draw with one other point. President reagan was not a detailed man. Parts of his administration where the people in charge didnt serve him as carefully as in iran or the middle east there could be trouble but as you saw the way schultz in Foreign Policy and my former boss jim baker in the first term with domestic agenda and the second term of the treasury, on subordinates, roosevelt built his own subordinates, will select those subordinates. I think thats also part of an effective Foreign Policy team. In some ways its less about strictly speaking pragmatism and more about something that mario cuomo what said during the campaign aas you campaign in poetry and you govern in a what i wanted to stress from a pragmatic site is that many of the books on Foreign Policy try to put things in categories or models. What i was trying to explain to people is when i was the daily german unification in 1989 or the trade policy or others the models are realism, idealism or offshore balancing or other issues dont take you very far. I was trying to suggest my experience as well as study of Foreign Policy in the United States emphasize people go beyond the intellectual abstractions to the messy facts of trying to solve problems. You know as a member of congress, how do you get other people to get things done and also perhaps except that you get imperfect results far from perfect world. Thats where the practice really incurs. The core of your book is what you refer to as the five traditions. I tried to pull the stories together with some of these traditions that appear over time. The first one is the one i share with senator mccain the importance of north america. Obviously in the 19th century particularly for arizonans a very important part of our history with our neighbors and borders also in the 20th century, we almost went to war with mexico in 1960, the germans tried to draw mexico into world war i to take back arizona and new mexico and texas for some reason they left out california. If you think about the cuban missile crisis the big Nuclear Showdown in the cold war is taking place in the caribbean in the same sphere. Is think about nafta where senator mccain was also a leader, that was much more of the trade agreement trying to reorient mexico changing from the one party system to more outward oriented environment. I would take it a step further, if you ask what Many Americans are interested today and Foreign Policy they might give you topics such as immigration or topics such as economic development. Of the five traditions you have in the book i think this is the one often overlooked. Often time in discussions people look a Long Distance forgetting that the Common Market that is canada mexico u. S. As well as other countries is a great power and great importance. Its interesting when you think about it every president up to donald trump and since jimmy carter has taken their first overseas trip to canada or mexico. Teddy roosevelt went to panama on his first trip and donald trump the businessman, he may not have gone to canada or mexico the first overseas trip in his first trade deal obviously focused on canada and mexico. Even if it hasnt been front and center for us, it obviously has been quietly a fundamental part of our strength and Foreign Policy. I hope so. I think this will be one of the issues debated because focusing on building a wall is a little different than trying to unite the north american region as one set of partnerships. Another one of the traditions i dont think is thought about enough is what you term as public and congressional support. Obviously most americans think of Foreign Policy as solely the part of the portfolio of our chief executive absome of the outcomes might have been different. To the extent your book has a hero, i would submit that senator vandenburg is probably that hero. He talked a great deal about not a bipartisan Foreign Policy but a nonpartisan Foreign Policy. He is one that i wanted to bring back from the distant midst of the past. And parts of the reason you mentioned its a theme and try to draw in through the chapters from the start when i look at ben franklin trying to negotiate our independence in the revolutionary war i note the challenge and relations with congress abfranklin responds and says, i dont know of any Peace Agreement that didnt find some people with complaints. He said i think blessed are the peacemakers belongs to the next life, not this one. I think in vandenburg it was part of the chapter i wrote about the creation of the alliances in the 1947b9. This is an area thats been written about but i wanted to try to draw in some characters, a little less known. The other is will clayton, set up much of the economic side. Vandenburg was a newspaper editor from michigan, in some ways he was a mentor for gerald ford. He also wrote histories, he was a good writer, i he had a Great Respect for hamilton. It was interesting window you which you would know well is about the challenges of Foreign Policymaking from the congress. He really comes to the fore in terms of helping truman after 1945. He has to maintain his political standing as an Opposition Leader has to be an opponent but he does it while legislating. That chapter is full of wonderful insights on how he brings things together. areferred to his doctrine of political transubstantiations, which is based on the christian concept of communion and the transforming the bread and the wine into the body and the blood but vandenburg ab referred to vandenburg in this in a humorous way and said the way vandenburg was work as he would start off skeptical about a proposal then he would find one element, not necessarily the poor one but make a big deal of it and then he would come up with a fix inevitably the vandenburg amendment. The process he draw together his colleagues instead of builds party support. We could see him do this time after time. One that i found particularly striking the constitution refers to the advice and the consent of the senate on treaty but congress normally comes in on the consent part not the advice part. In 1948 the Marshall Plan was just getting going but was clear we would need a security arrangement to complement it, both to deal with the soviets but also reassure the french and other europeans as germany the new west germany was brought in. Vandenburg puts together on his own insights six paragraphs of what would be a potential resolution to guide the executive branch on negotiations. He holds a couple days of closed sessions with the Senate ForeignRelations Committee going through these paragraphs and in the process outlined the approach to change americas historical reluctance to join allies. Hes being quite careful, hes trying to learn the lessons of Woodrow Wilsons failure about the Constitutional Authority and Congressional Authority and also the role of the un and regional agreements because he had been a key in bringing the un into form. He was a good vote counter and for executive Branch Partner and my staff somebody who knows how to bring your colleagues along. The larger point, as you identified, throughout American History there are key members of congress often in the senate but sometimes as you know in the house who step up and play a role in this. Course i was thinking about senator mccain and this when i work with senator mccain in the 90s, this was in