Historian and the diplomat

There are few discons of moders diplomatic try that do beter get around to quoting the line George Sant tayan's famous that one who do not remember the pre condemned to repeat its mistakes and then proceed to ignore the wine injunction. There are, of course, some people whe appes to believe that in an age increasingly dominated by selence and technology we need no longer concern ourselves with the past. who believe that ours is indeed a new and different age and that we can best solve the problems of our time by casting off the heavy burden of the past.

This book is not for them. This is a book for those who believe in the relevance of past to present, who believe that there is something to be learned from historical experience, and above all for those who insist that we must first know what really happened in the past before we can make useful judgments about it, before we can hope to apply the experience of yesterday to the problems of today and tomorrow.

This is a book primarily, then, about the role of history and his torians in twentieth-century American foreign policy. But this is not a narrowly specialized book for experts. On the contrary, the aim throughout has been to examine the nature of America's experience in world affairs in the broad context of American history, so as to show as clearly and directly as possible what role history-what people knew and thought about the past-has played in the development of American foreign policy since the era of the First World War: for there can no longer be any doubt that our knowledge and understanding of the past have exerted a powerful influence on the shaping of American foreign policy over those years. Whether it was Woodrow Wilson's idea of the nature of the European political system and what in the light of historical experience as he saw it America could contribute to the establishment of a just and lasting peace settlement; whether it was President Roosevelt looking back to the diplomacy of the First World War, seeking to avoid what seemed to be Wilson's most serious mistakes; or whether it was President Truman's awareness that for the United States to return.