The Foreign Service Journal, October 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2013 57 A Growing Problem The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed Marvin Kalb, Brookings Institution Press, 2013, $29.95, hardcover, 280 pages. Reviewed by Aurelius (Aury) Fernandez For over half a century, Marvin Kalb has contributed a steady stream of perceptive and straightforward reports and analysis as a diplomatic correspondent, moderator and commentator; a resident scholar at Harvard, George Washington University and the Brookings Institution; and a pro- lific author. Here he delves into a topic he has touched on in many of his 12 previous books: the elusive nature of presidential national security commitments. As he explains, such undertakings have led to misunderstandings, miscal- culations and mistrust among our allies and adversaries all over the world—and the American public. That theme comes through loud and clear in Kalb’s chapter headings, which usefully distinguish between commitments (without quotes) and “commitments” (with quotes). A formal declaration of war by Congress is obviously the clearest way to deliver a definitive statement of U.S. support for an ally, but such declarations have become vanishingly rare. (The last congressional declaration of war was passed on Dec. 8, 1941, in response to Pearl Harbor.) Instead, U.S. defense com- mitments have come to take other forms, ranging from exchanges of presidential letters to detailed defense pacts. While Kalb covers the arc of history fromHarry Truman to Barack Obama, his main focus is on U.S. dealings with South Korea, South Vietnam and Israel. I partic- ularly commend the chapter Kalb devotes to the exchange of presidential letters