Ecosystem modeling, a pillar of the systems ecology paradigm (SEP), addresses questions such as, how much carbon and nitrogen are cycled within ecological sites, landscapes, or indeed the earth system? Or how are human activities modifying these flows? Modeling, when coupled with field and laboratory studies, represents the essence of the SEP in that they embody accumulated knowledge and generate hypotheses to test understanding of ecosystem processes and behavior. Initially, ecosystem models were primarily used to improve our understanding about how biophysical aspects of ecosystems operate. However, current ecosystem models are widely used to make accurate predictions about how large-scale phenomena such as climate change and management practices impact ecosystem dynamics and assess potential effects of these changes on economic activity and policy making. In sum, ecosystem models embedded in the SEP remain our best mechanism to integrate diverse types of knowledge regarding how the earth system functions and to make quantitative predictions that can be confronted with observations of reality. Modeling efforts discussed are the Century ecosystem model, DayCent ecosystem model, Grassland Ecosystem Model ELM, food web models, Savanna model, agent-based and coupled systems modeling, and Bayesian modeling.

Ideology is the proper concern of all historians of US foreign relations. Its relevance rests on one simple insight of fundamental importance. To move in a world of infinite complexity, individuals and societies need to reduce it to finite terms. Only then can they pretend an understanding of their environment and have the confidence to talk about it and the courage to act on it. All activities, whether individual or collective, require that simplifying clarity. Policymakers, or for that matter anyone confronting the world, get their keys to “reality” in the same ways that others in their culture do. A process of socialization begins in childhood and continues even as experience confirms or reshapes outlooks and influences behavior. Thus every foreign relations historian, like it or not, constantly comes in contact with the problem of ideology.

Of the many possible definitions, I favor one that identifies ideology as “an interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that reality.” Ideologies relevant to foreign affairs are in this sense sets of beliefs and values, sometimes only poorly and partially articulated, that make the world intelligible and interaction with it possible. This broad notion launches historians on a quest for ideas that give structure and meaning to the way policymakers and their people see the world and their country's place in it. This definition does not embody some ultimate truth. It is rather one plausible approach to understanding particular historical moments and personalities that deserves testing against other definitions of ideology.

Arriving at a definition is by itself an important step, which immediately alters the frame of reference. For those studying policymakers, the question becomes “not whether they have an ideology but to what ideology they subscribe; not whether ideology makes a difference but what kind of difference it makes for the shaping of their intentions, policies, and behavior.” But the question applies with no less force to the policy establishment, the media, public intellectuals, interest groups, and the public in general. The basic premise that ideology matters and that it is neither simple nor rigid suggests the importance of identifying fundamental notions (for example, about human nature, the constituents of power, and national mission) that policymakers and the public carry in their heads.

Ideology is the proper concern of all diplomatic historians. Its relevance rests on a simple proposition of fundamental importance: To move in a world of infinite complexity, individuals and societies need to reduce that world to finite terms. Only then can they pretend an understanding of their environment and have the confidence to talk about it and the courage to act on it. Policymaking, like any other individual or collective activity, requires that simplifying clarity. Policymakers get their keys to “reality” in the same ways that others in their culture do. Policymakers are formed by a socialization that begins in childhood and continues even as they try to retain those keys or to discard them as a result of experience in making decisions.

Thus, every diplomatic historian, like it or not, constantly comes in contact with the problem of ideology. Those intent on a better understanding of its importance and complexity may turn to a rich, suggestive body of literature. Part of that literature comes from political scientists preoccupied with the problem of definition. Their work catalogs the senses in which ideology is used (some twenty-seven according to one count) and sorts through the variations in meaning. Historians will find these writings particularly helpful in formulating a working definition with the greatest utility and applicability to their concerns. Those who think of the concept of ideology as unproblematic will see the importance of being explicit about what it is and what it does, while anyone inclined to downplay the role of ideas or to regard them as freestanding may well reconsider after encountering definitions with clear interpretative promise.

Though most often remembered as a catch phrase, “The American Century” stands as one of the purest distillations of that twentieth-century vision of the world transformed in the American image. The notion of an American Century articulated by Henry Robinson Luce in a February 1941 Life editorial offers an inviting point of departure to reflect on a turbulent century of U.S. engagement in East Asia and to sketch some of the defining features of U.S.-East Asian relations over the past century. This essay begins with a brief treatment of the ideological impulse that shaped Luce's – and arguably the dominant American – approach to the region. It continues by tracing the travails that his crusade encountered there and by identifying the main sources of those travails. It concludes by suggesting alternatives to Luce as the prophet of the American project in Asia.

The Luce vision

When Luce addressed his countrymen in 1941, he did so as a therapist disturbed by national malaise. He found them “unhappy,” “nervous,” “gloomy,” and “apathetic.” To calm their “foreboding” about the future, he prescribed emulation of the moral certitude and commitment displayed by the British. Their decision to stand up to Hitler, Luce announced, had banished national “nervousness” and even “all the neuroses of modern life.” Luce traced his own country's malaise back to the rejection of the internationalist path on which Woodrow Wilson had embarked in 1919.

“Revising Postrevisionism” Revisited

BRUCE CUMINGS

After Diplomatic History published my essay, “‘Revising Postrevisionism,’” I got the impression that John Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn P. Leffler, and others I had criticized had trouble working up enthusiasm for what I had said. Perhaps they felt like the German composer Max Reger who, upon reading a critical review, wrote to the critic as follows: “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.” Or perhaps they would agree with Samuel Johnson when he said, “I found your essay to be good and original. However the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.”

In the time that has since passed, Gaddis's distaste has grown not just for my essay but for the journal and the editor who published it: Now (not before, but only now) he thinks that sound editorial policy at DH has given way to incivility, unbalanced judgment, and unfair procedure. It is a pity, because my essay was not so much a critique of John Gaddis or Mel Leffler as of the discipline of diplomatic history, and especially the keepers of the field. Those I singled out included my acquaintances, my friends, and people I do not know, as well as Gaddis and Leffler. It was in a sense an old, anachronistic critique, one I could have imagined myself writing in the 1970s or early 1980s.

Gordon A. Craig recently warned “historians are really more interesting when they are writing history than when they are talking about it.” Craig is undoubtedly right, but diplomatic historians, gripped by a long crisis of confidence, have had little choice.

Our remarkably sustained exercise in self-reflection and self-criticism spanning the last two decades was a defensive response to the pointed criticism, if not wounding indifference, directed at diplomatic topics by a historical profession in transformation. Social historians flogged diplomatic history, and political history more generally, for seemingly old-fashioned methods and concerns, especially the tendency to identify with the political elite and to ignore the links between policy and the patterns of privilege and power within American society and culture. The new cultural history added its own charges: epistemological naiveté and an impoverished sense of the importance of language for an understanding of both historical evidence and historians' discourse. Those with a strong theoretical bent consigned diplomatic historians to the role of the hewers-of-wood and the drawers-of-water in their world of international relations theory. The historians were to toil in the archives, constructing detailed case studies on which real social scientists were to raise grand explanatory structures that would account for the enduring patterns in international relations and that would command the respect of policymakers.

The steady reflection on the state of the field, which has built to a crescendo in the last year or so, has been beneficial.