America in the World is a collection of key US diplomatic documents from the Spanish-American War to the Biden administration. While valuable for students, it has been critiqued for its document selection and lack of focus on technology’s role in diplomacy.

If history be a curated compilation of documents, and the historian that curator of agreed upon facts, then it falls to publications such as this to keep the lay public and scrambling students cribbing for exams focused and informed on Clio’s legacy. But the added benefit of having original documents reproduced in anthologised form, frosted with sharp overviews and explanatory notes, enables readers to draw their own conclusions.

America in the World first appeared in 2014 and has been retouched and bulked to include documents from the Trump and Biden Administrations. It begins with the stirring, predatory expansionism that led the US to war against Spain and covers the relevant events of what might loosely be called the biggest hits and occasional mishaps of the US imperium.

The topics covered are of little surprise: the debates on empire; the role of wide-eyed Wilsonianism and its scolding counterpoint, isolationism; World War II and the Cold War that sprung from it; various Cold War engagements (Korea, Vietnam); the brake of détente and its abandonment; the end of the Cold War and globalisation, followed by the period known as the War on Terror, rounded off by the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.

The book’s format is not new, keeping to a formula that yielded such collections as Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis’s 1978 compilation Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 and Joseph M. Siracusa’s The American Diplomatic Revolution: A Documentary History of the Cold War 1941-1947 from the same year.  They tend to be boons for students, supplying them a convenient dash and sprint for those who might otherwise linger and labour over the dense, forested Foreign Relations of the United States series.  As valuable as those volumes are, any general historical collection cries for variety, and telegrams will suffice, to some extent.

However convenient and useful such a reference text is, quibbling over document selection is bound to take place. Criteria regarding selection is not an unimportant question. Generally speaking, the documents in this collection tend towards the political, diplomatic, and ideological, drawn from presidential and congressional pronouncements, journalistic commentary, and some relevant punditry. This is in keeping with those who made the selection.

At times, a potpourri inclination seems to strike the editors. Document 14.9, for instance, features the views of Robert Kaplan, given grand powers of insight to warrant the inclusion of his April 1994 article from The Atlantic Monthly. Undoubtedly, the pull of environmental factors on politics is hard to discount (they are now all powerful), but the rationale to include this item is unclear.

Intelligence assessments are also tricky matters in assessing relevance of detail and clarity of thought. They may reveal an institutional tendency, or merely individual idiosyncrasy. Why pick a document (document 13.8) with no clear author other than it being described as “An early CIA assessment of Gorbachev’s Economic Agenda” from September 1985? What would have been fascinating was to consider documents that showed, conclusively, that the CIA did not know much about what was going on in the Soviet Union, let alone that the ailing state was lying on history’s death bed. Along with virtually everybody else, intelligence officials were mere spectators to its demise in real time on Ted Turner’s Cable News Network.

Any reviewer is also bound to have issues with omissions, as understandably necessary as these must be. The technological feature, if one can call it that, of US civilisation, is conspicuously lacking.  There is, for instance, little by way of documentation on the emergence of the Internet, or the digital titans that grew from the militarily nourished soils of Silicon Valley. These have, in their own way, exerted a formidable hold on the US political and diplomatic experience, often far more than missiles and mayhem.

The role of technology and its somewhat tetchy relationship with diplomacy has another, neglected aside. The publishing efforts of WikiLeaks, the radical, digital outfit that posted uncensored classified US documents of a military and diplomatic nature on its website, is a case in point. Such actions, fuelled by leaks, propelled the Trump administration to commence legal proceedings against its Australian founder, Julian Assange. To avoid extradition to the United States from the UK, the publisher eventually pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917. Regrettably, none of the WikiLeaks documents feature in the selection, the authors possibly preferring to stay away from the thorny status of such material.

With the mandatory quibbles uttered, this collection deserves its rightful place as a well-ordered reference text, a convenient port of call for anyone keen to see the innards of historical evolution. For the US, those innards are particularly rich.

This is a review of Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence and Andrew Preston (Eds.) America in the World: A History in Documents Since 1898, Revised and Updated (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.