RUTHFULLY YOURS

Readers of a certain age will recall the golden era of American foreign policy after World War II, when U.S. statesmen sought the counsel of our allies and listened respectfully to our enemies; when Washington’s conduct on the world stage was anchored in a bipartisan consensus back home; and when American strategy was stable across years and decades.

Humbug! says former U.S. diplomat Stephen Sestanovich in “Maximalist.” Surveying the foreign policies of 12 presidents, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, this astute, engaging history clears away the misty air that obscures our view of postwar American strategy. There never was a golden age of collaboration and consensus, Mr. Sestanovich argues, and “the history of American foreign policy is the history of what presidents and their advisers do once they conclude that others, at home and abroad, are not likely to be of much help.”

The U.S. attitude toward allied leaders, Mr. Sestanovich shows, has always been marked by a measure of condescension and mistrust. Consider the Marshall Plan. Today Harry Truman’s massive infusion of aid designed to restore Europe’s war-shattered economies is revered on both sides of the Atlantic, and rightly so. Yet the plan’s latter-day admirers generally neglect its main ingredient (aside from dollars): American unilateralism.

At war’s end, Western European leaders still hadn’t been cured of their paranoia and parochialism; only Washington could overcome these ancient forces and pull the Continent together. As George Kennan wrote in 1947: “This would mean that we would listen to all that the Europeans had to say, but in the end we would not ask them, we would just tell them what they would get.” When in 1948 Washington’s proposal for a West German currency was met with French resistance, the U.S. threatened to cut off Marshall funds and launched the Deutschmark anyway, paving the way for a prosperous, pro-Western Federal Republic of Germany.

Foreign policy, moreover, has never been too sacred for Washington’s partisan contests. Obama White House staffers outraged by Congress’s efforts to toughen Washington’s posture in negotiations with Iran would be wise to look back at the battles over U.S.-Soviet détente and the 1972 opening to China. The efforts of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter to stabilize relations with the Communist world over the long term were hampered at home by a coalition of traditional hawks, neoconservatives and anticommunist liberals, including AFL-CIO boss George Meany and the likes of Democratic Sens. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (whom Mr. Sestanovich served as a legislative assistant). Their rhetoric was as passionate, and caustic, as that deployed by critics of the current talks with Tehran: To Moynihan, the cold realpolitik of détente meant nothing less than abandoning “the defense of liberty” itself. “Civility” was as elusive then as it is now.

Another lesson of Mr. Sestanovich’s book is that diplomatic engagement with U.S. enemies is a fool’s errand unless it’s aimed at achieving a deeper strategic purpose. Take Ronald Reagan’s personal diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev. Progressives today point to that diplomacy to defend their own concessions to U.S. adversaries. But such thinking, Mr. Sestanovich suggests, misses the essence of Reagan’s strategy.

For Reagan, the author writes, the purpose of engagement “was to get others to see issues at hand ‘though my eyes.’ Until they did so, he was not prepared to compromise America’s competitive position. (Once they did, of course, compromise became less necessary.)” Thus, while Reagan’s relationship with Mr. Gorbachev grew ever warmer, particularly in his second term, the Gipper gave up almost nothing substantive in their talks. Most issues, from the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe to the fate of Soviet dissidents, were “resolved in exactly the same way: the Soviets folded, and the Americans prevailed.”

“Maximalist” also makes clear that the U.S. has never achieved strategic continuity. American strategy has frequently shifted, sometimes over the course of a single administration, and these disruptions have often proved beneficial to our national security. After a decade of American drift, Reagan came to office with a new formula: “We win, they lose,” the president told an aide early on. The simplicity of this one-liner masked its profundity. The Cold War was no longer something to be “managed” but a moral conflict with a zero-sum outcome. “No previous president had imagined the decisive outcome that he did,” the author writes. “Reagan proposed success.”

Within these shifts in strategy, Mr. Sestanovich discerns a pendulum-like movement between presidents with maximalist instincts and those who prefer retrenchment. Maximalists (Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, George W. Bush ) have “wanted a big package of countermeasures” against threats; retrenchers (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Messrs. Carter and Obama) have set out to “shift responsibilities to friends and allies, to explore accommodation with adversaries, to narrow commitments and reduce costs.”

Along with an overreliance on secondary sources and a sometimes baggy narrative, the maximalism-retrenchment framing device is one of the book’s weaker aspects. This isn’t because such a pattern doesn’t exist (it does) but because the author treats it as somehow inexorable: Maximalists inevitably go too far; retrenchers are elected to clean up after them; then it’s up to maximalists to assert American power once more; and so on. This cyclical approach allows Mr. Sestanovich to bury his own maximalist leanings beneath a layer of equivocal and occasionally dubious judgments (“Carter’s achievements were significant”).

The cycles approach also gives short shrift to the role of ideas and ideology in U.S. strategy. The author calls Reagan “the most maximalist of modern American presidents.” Well, either Reagan’s ideas about man’s yearning for freedom and the nature of totalitarian regimes were correct—or they weren’t. If they were correct, as Mr. Sestanovich’s own otherwise excellent book demonstrates, then they should be followed to their logical conclusion.

Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.