The USA may be a new country but 220 years is a lot of diplomatic history. In his new book, Professor Dobson has tried to swallow it in one bite. He focuses on the full span of America's foreign relations – from Virginia aristocrats like Jefferson and Washington to the Imperial Presidency of Bush and Clinton. In actual fact, Dobson's alliterative title is rather a misnomer since the book contains a mixture of subject articles and biographies. Biographies are not “concepts” nor are articles on Pearl Harbor or the Boxer rebellion. However, some of his entries are more conceptual – Massive Retaliation or the Monroe Doctrine are instances of this. In his Preface, Dobson states that he intended to stick to ideas but found that he had to include some more concrete articles on events and countries. The result is a straight historical dictionary centring on US foreign affairs, but it is no less useful for that.
Professor Dobson, who is a retired history professor from Oklahoma State, appears to have written this entire book himself. Every author has his own idea about the layout and basic features of a book. Dobson has divided his into five sections, each one based on a period of time. Within each one there are two types of article: the Key Concepts that make up about two‐thirds and Biographies for the rest. As the period becomes more recent, the coverage becomes denser. The text is adorned with illustrations every few pages and with a series of key documents and extracts. These are presented in easy‐reading boxes.
As with so many single‐volume reference books, this one cannot hope to be comprehensive and in places it is rather hit‐and‐miss. But I cobbled together a sample list of twenty foreign policy items and found that the book had articles on 11 of them and index entries on another four: not bad. The index (27 pages long) gives the reader an alternative way to find material. Thus, there are no articles on the Treaty of Portsmouth, Venezuela or the Philippines but one can access them through the Index.
Professor Dobson's policy is to confine his biographies to US figures. This has produced entries on some fairly obscure Americans. Here are just two examples: Robert Wilson Shufeldt, US naval attaché to China in the 1880s and William Walker, a freebooting adventurer who led incursions into Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1850s and got himself executed in Honduras ten years later. These people are probably hard to find out about in any other way so Professor Dobson has done us a service. But puzzlingly, whilst Dobson includes unknown figures like this he misses out people who were in or near the front rank: Colonel House (Wilson's principal foreign affairs adviser), Dean Rusk (who was Secretary of State for eight crucial years) and recent figures like James Baker III and George Schultz. Of course, not all key figures held the top job: Admiral Mahan is a significant figure in the history of America's world role, as is Douglas MacArthur, but neither of them is awarded an article of his own. The professor's choice of biographical profiles is odd.
Two complete classes of persons are omitted altogether from the biographies. Firstly, this policy of keeping the book all‐American has edged out the many non‐American figures who have had real importance in the annals of US foreign policy: Syngman Rhee, Chiang Kai‐Shek, Fidel Castro, Dr Mossadegh, Generals Suharto, Pinochet, Batista, Franco, de Gaulle and Trujillo, and of course, Winston Churchill. However, one appreciates that to have included them all would enlarge the scope of the book enormously and practically necessitate another volume. Secondly, there are virtually no presidents in the book. Martin van Buren sneaks in at page 127, but he is the only one. In his Preface, Dobson stresses the central role of presidents but for the most part, we have to go to the Index to find them. Actually, it is difficult to argue with his decision to omit them from the main body of the book because there is a tidal wave of material on US presidents – and it is readily available too. Dobson has been well advised to give them a miss.
The coverage of the subject entries is fuller than the biographies. There are almost 150 subject entries. The main subjects in US foreign policy are here: the Mexican War, Open Door Policy, Atlantic Charter, and Iran‐Contra, (but not the Evil Empire). All the articles are perfectly readable and written in plain, non‐technical English. The author should perhaps have been more up‐front in defining his terms: for instance, one has to read well into the article on Good Neighbor Policy to find out what it means. I would favour a description or definition of the term as the author's opening shot followed by a more discursive account of the idea in its historical context.
What about the further reading? This is a modest‐sized book on a big subject, so a good bibliography is really important. It is one of the two big pillars upon which a book like this rests, the other being the substantive articles. Professor Dobson does not send us away empty handed because each article is topped off with three or four books dedicated to that subject (it is always good practice to tie further reading to the main entries in this way). But I would have liked more: there is no general bibliography at the end; nor is there a sectional bibliography for each of the five sections. Of course, we know that all bibliographies are out of date as soon as they are printed but history is not like computer science: it is not revolutionised every five years. A second edition would be able to mop up the new titles.
At the end, more appendices would have been helpful in addition to the (very) brief chronology. For example, we could have used a list of secretaries of state and other key office‐holders, a list of treaties and agreements and a list of international conferences.
Summing up, this is not a bad book but in all honesty I wonder what it adds to the list of reference works already in existence. American history is extremely well supplied with historical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. For historical individuals, readers can go to the full American Dictionary of Biography from Oxford University Press. The publisher's blurb claims that Belligerents, Brinkmanship and the Big Stick is “the first comprehensive encyclopedic work to focus specifically on America's extraordinary history of political engagement with the world”.
Yet I myself possess a copy of John Findling's perfectly sound Dictionary of American Diplomatic History, (Findling 1980). Alas, this may be out of print by now. Amongst the merits of Professor Dobson's volume are handiness and readability and I suppose it fills out ABC‐Clio's history list. Apart from that, it offers nothing that is new or special. At ten inches high, it would probably qualify as a large octavo. The work is also available as an e‐book.
