By LEON HADAR • October 18, 2012

"In Blind Oracles, his study of the role of intellectuals in formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, historian Bruce Kuklick equated these scholars with the “primitive shaman” who performs “feats of ventriloquy.”

We tend to celebrate foreign-policy intellectuals as thinkers who try to transform grand ideas into actual policies. In reality, their function has usually been to offer members of the foreign-policy establishment rationalizations—in the form of “grand strategies” and “doctrines,” or the occasional magazine article or op-ed—for doing what they were going to do anyway.
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Contrary to Kupachan’s narrative, as the historian John Darwin argues in his masterpiece After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, Europe’s rise to pre-eminence was not a moment in the long-term ascent of the “West” and the triumph of its superior values. “We must set Europe’s age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context,” Darwin writes, and recognize that there was nothing foreordained about Europe’s rise—or its current decline. Great powers like the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, the Manchus, the Russians and the Soviets, the Japanese and the Nazis have risen and fallen for reasons all their own. Today the Rest may be rising. But it has never been anyone’s world."