In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster Dulles might seem welcome for hawks and doves alike. Indeed, Dulles’s tenure as secretary of state during the first six years of the Eisenhower administration could be viewed – even by the harshest left-wing critic of American imperialism – as a useful and reassuring point of reference, despite its narrow anti-communist dogma and too cavalier approach to the dangers of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. After all, the Eisenhower administration extricated the United States from President Truman’s stalemated Korean War and started no major new wars before the end of Eisenhower’s second term in January 1961. Dulles and Eisenhower, unlike Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, were well-read and widely travelled sophisticates.

Yet Bevan Sewell’s recounting of Dulles’s life and career does little to restore faith in any sort of innate or learned American talent for keeping the peace, either in the short or long term. If anything, given his glaring limitations of perspective and philosophy, Dulles could be simply viewed as having been lucky – lucky in his elite family connections and fortunate that the more critically minded and politically independent Eisenhower ran the country’s foreign policy without listening much to his subordinate.

The grandson and nephew of two secretaries of state, ‘Foster’ Dulles wasn’t short of ambition and energy. But it’s hard to believe that such a pedestrian writer and thinker would have got as far as he did without knowing the right people – and by representing the powerful corporations that were his clients at the establishment Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Despite the idealistic excitement of being part of the US delegation during Woodrow Wilson’s temporary triumph........

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