Thus, the next president must find ways to convince Iran that America possesses the capability to carry out a successful strike. If Iran could be persuaded that the operation would be successful, the United States would not have to carry out the strike at all, because Iran would come to the negotiating table rather than run the risk of military action.

I quote from a sophomore essay in Princeton's undergraduate foreign affairs magazine, in part because it presents this mind-set so clearly. The  claim that Iran will not come to the negotiating table is dubious; it is not Iran but the current administration which is unwilling to negotiate. However, since it is doubtful Iran will concede anything, the point is less than it might be.

But what interests me is the confident assumpttion: we can rely on the Iranian government, or indeed a statesman in general, not acting contrary to the immediate material interest of his state.  From that we go into this application of game theory, and the art of making offers Iran can't refuse.

I don't blame a sophomore for believing this; it is a novel and illuminating picture of the world, and I'm sure some of the eminent realists Woody Woo has been hiring lately present it with great vigor; the only problem with it is that it does not describe reality; and there are all too many, no longer sophomores, who believe it.

Statesmen do act in ways harmful to the immediate net interest of their states; five empires willingly engaged in war in 1914; three of them were destroyed, and the gains to the survivors scarcely made up for the loss of capital and lives in the fighting.  It would be interesting to make up a history of the world made up of such cases; it might, with enough cynicism, include almost all of human history. But I mean more than this; all parties in WWI vastly underestimated the costs, and overestimated the chances and profits of victory.

Statesmen have chosen to go to war (and do other things, but war is the most obvious) when it was obvious when they did so that it would cost more than the terms of peace they were being offered. The current Gaza disaster may be an example,  both sides of it; but there is an even clearer instance from our own history:

James K. Polk offered to buy California and New Mexico before the Mexican War; if he got his deal, he wouldn't go to war. He made the same mistake our sophomore does; his diary notes that he did not expect to have to fight, because the Mexicans would settle. They did not; they lost; they had to give up the same land, for less money. And it was predictable this would happen; the British minister in  Mexico City, and the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, both warned them, and recommended they give in.

Realists may say that all concerned had no choice: if they ducked the war, they would fall from power anyway. I'm not sure that's true; there's an argument that Ehud Barak and Labor are doing best from this war, for example, not Kadima. But this does not save the argument we began with; Ahmedinejad may be similarly forced to fight rather than surrender the national pride.
 

This long-delayed survey of George Herring's From Colony to Superpower   starts with Chapter V, which begins with the term of Martin Van Buren. At this point, there are loads of fascinating detail, from the acquisition of "Parker" Island in the Pacific (his source says Barker; is Baker Island correct?), the first non-contiguous posession of the United States, to the reaction of Van Buren to real revolution in Canada in 1837.

The island was a use of the Guano Act, one of the less savory pieces of American legislation, which permitted the United States to annex uninhabited islands with -er- guano all over them.

Van Buren stayed pretty well out of the Canadian revolution, even though the United States had tried to recruit Canada twice before, in 1775 and 1813. Even when the British burnt an American ship in American waters, just because it had been hired by Canadian revolutionaries, Van Buren stayed calm and filed a protest. It may have helped that the Caroline was owned by the Van Rensselaers, New York Whigs for whom the New York Democrat in the White House had no reason to do special favors. Instead he sent Winfield Scott, poor man, to tramp the border, often on his own, and keep both sides under observation. 

The chapter begins with the observation that slavery and expansion marched hand in hand; but I'm not convinced. While it offers a wide spectrum of attempts to expand in the interests of slavery, only the acquisition of Texas, as a ready-made slave state, actually happened. The efforts of three American diplomats to walk off with Cuba, the brief tenure of William Walker of Tennessee as President of Nicaragua, and the attempts to intervene in Yucatan all fizzled. (Walker might have had a better chance if he hadn't tried to expropriate Vanderbilt's local subsidiary, mind you...)  The efforts to extend American protection to Hawaii  had nothing to do with slavery.

But the centerpiece is Polk. It is conventional to quote the jibes of his opponents against this dark horse, but I still like Schlesinger's take: Polk came into office with a four-point platform and got all of them done: a lower tariff, the creation of government Treasuries to keep the Federal Government's cash, California, and  the American claim to "Oregon", which meant everything between California and Alaska. Polk accomplished all four, and took politics out of the process by pledging not to run for re-election in 1848 and making his Cabinet pledge not to run either.

He would have done  well to exact the same pledge from his generals. Herring says, on the same page, that Polk viewed  Scott and Zachary Taylor as political rivals; rivals for what? Polk wasn't running; but both generals ran the war as the first step of their Presidential campaigns. Taylor marched all over northern Mexico inviting largely pointless battles to keep himself in the news; and in due course was elected in 1848.

Herring gives great weight to Polk's errors. He found himself out on a limb, where he nearly was trapped into going to war for British Columbia, to which the United States had no claim to speak of; fortunately both sides compromised at the last minute on the present frontier. But close observation of almost any diplomatic history will show similar blunders; what counts is whether you recover from them. 

More interesting is Polk's calculation that he wouldn't have to go to war with Mexico. He offered to pay for California, and the land eastward to Texas. under slightly more generous terms than the eventual treaty. The Mexican decision to refuse this certainly cost them a war, and gained them no material benefit whatsoever, after a predictable defeat; Polk counted on the Mexicans acting for the immediate material benefit of their State, and there were voices (the British minister; Lucas Alaman, the former foreign minister)  who urged them to do so. But the Mexicans didn't take Polk's offer;  resentment over Texas, fear of Protestantism, and national pride prevented them.