Foreign policy debate

Stanley Hoffman reviews books by Francis Fukuyama, Stephen M. Walt, and John Brady Kiesling in "The Foreign Policy the U.S. Needs" (New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006) John Brady Kiesling is a former Political Counselor at the embassy in Athens who resigned from the foreign service in 2003. His resignation letter held that U.S. foreign policy was no longer compatible with U.S. values or interests. The chapter on public diplomacy in his new book, "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower," argues that "The realistic goal of public diplomacy is not to make America loved...the attainable goal of public diplomacy is to foster an image of the United States that is tolerable enough to ordinary, conventional human beings that foreign governments, whether fundamentalist tyrannies or liberal democracies, can easily afford the political cost of cooperating with the American superpower on terms close to those we seek."