Charles Hill was with the state department for many years, and he is now the ambassador in residence at Yale. His thesis: you can't really understand statecraft using the reductive methods that dominate the social sciences.
Instead, you need the big picture, and the big picture comes to us more often in literature or history than in any of the social sciences. The arguments in the books are not well organized; I often got lost as his transitions are a little sloppy, and I was reading carefully. But it's worth the read anyway because a) I think Hill is right and b) the whole book is like being in conversation about statecraft with an erudite man who has vast experience in the subject, and who likes the same books as you do. He made me think about Aeschylus and Xenophon in new ways. A lovely reading experience.
I can't quite figure out if his chapter on America is weak because I am not as well-versed as I should be on US literature, outside of the Federalist Papers, where the discussion is entirely too short, or whether the discussion is really weak. It could be both; Hill is one of those people who gets cranky about he calls the dismantling of the canon, and acts like reading a book outside of the dead white males will kill you. I have never understood this perspective. I don't get why including more people into your reading and education, rather than fewer, makes for a better 'canon' of literature. I'm capable of reading both Mark Twain and Toni Morrison. Thus the movement is towards inclusion rather than dismantling.
And here is Charles Hill talking at the Hoover Institute about the book in a five series of videocasts. These are well worth watching, even if I think Hill goes off the rails a bit at some points.
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