At times frustrating,at other times fascinating, this books makes another contribution to the seemingly endless debate about the West, its meaning and future. Kimmage posits that the United States came to embrace a notion of Western Civilization after World War Two through a collaboration between American politicians and academics. Yet the universities that gave rise to Westernism in the 1950s fired the first salvoes against it in the 1960s and 1970s. The author makes the story complex by showing the oftentimes contradictory ways that the Left and Right have viewed the West. His conclusion brings the story up to the present, with the author asserting that Trumpism represents an internal threat to lynchpins of Western Civilization like liberty and self-government. A brief roadmap for a revival of the West failed to convince me that the concept can surmount the numerous challenges that mitigate against its return to cultural and intellectual prominence.

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC.

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The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy by Michael Kimmage is a book which examines what “the West” really means in terms of policy over decades, and how that concept drove 20th Century policy in the United States. Mr. Kimmage is a college history professor, and served as a member of the secretary’s policy planning staff at the US Department of State from 2014 to 2016.

Books about policy, they don’t sound that exciting, do they?

In order to enjoy these type of books you have to be either a history nerd, a policy hound, political junky, or have some sort of personal stake in the matter. The sad part is that all of us have a personal stake in the matter, but only very few people realize it.
After all, it is “foreign” policy.

The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy by Michael Kimmage is about “the West” and Western civilization as ideas which have driven foreign policy in the 20th Century. I was a bit hesitant to read it because I thought it would be a “rah-rah” type of book which would exalt the virtues which the United States implements (and there are many, despite the bad publicity).
But I decided to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did.

This is a very thoughtful book exploring the contradictions which “the West” is implied and implemented. In this book, “the West” is not a geographic location, but a concept. That concept has been abandoned by both the left, which saw it as white and imperial, and the right, which saw it as too multidimensional.

This ideology was the driving force behind the US intervening in World War II to fight the Nazi menace across Europe, as well as standing steadfast against Communist Russia during the Cold War, as well as many other policies.

The author goes through what this idea meant and how it shaped our nation, and others. He goes to write about what the abandonment of this idea cost the United States in terms of principals, good will, influence, blood, and treasure.

With the current politic situation currently in the United States, I don’t know if this book will convince anyone that we should pick up the ideal of “the West” again, unless one was already pre-disposed to think so. Many people hold steadfast to the idea that America’s involvement in European affairs have ran its course and that standing up to Russia and China no longer merit the ideology.

The Abandonment of the West was an interesting book for me. I was more expecting a book detailing how American foreign policy has shifted from Europe towards the Middle East and Asia. While we do get some of that, this book reads more like a philosophical text often times discussing these very classical European ideas that produced a Western-centric foreign policy in the United States over many decades.

If you have trouble with abstract ideas like I do, you could have difficulties with significant sections of this book but the central idea is that American foreign policy has been based on the ideas of Western Civilization, but this foundation has become shaken with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of other actors demanding that their issues and points of view which exist outside of this Western tradition be accounted for seems strong.

I spent so much time trying to wrap my head around the philosophical aspects of American foreign policy that the nuances of the argument may have been lost on me and I fear that could happen to others as well.

This author is a complete enigma. Prof. Kimmage writes extremely well and his book is thoroughly researched BUT there seems to be no real point to this book. Kimmage attempts to follow in the footsteps of "The Suicide of the West" and "Clash of Civilizations" but he falls way short of the mark.