America’s failures over the past few decades are not the inevitable result of history. Most were clear failures of statesmanship. The emergence of China as a world power, military adventurism in the Middle East and elsewhere, the economic policies that led to the 2008 crash, shipping our industrial base overseas, the de-policing movement that has led to rampant crime, the insane responses to COVID, the end to enforcing the country’s borders—these were all choices made by the American governing class.

With his new book, Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill, John Burtka proposes a return to classic “mirrors-for-princes” literature in order to produce wiser decisions from American officeholders. (The book is dedicated, in part, to “the forty-seventh president of the United States upon your inauguration.”) The president and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Burtka laments the loss of this tradition of advice to rulers, which particularly thrived in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—perhaps best known from Machiavelli’s The Prince. Throughout history, Burtka notes, “[a] well-timed letter from a theologian or a court minister—or the presentation of a celebrated text upon accession to the throne—could be the best or even the only hope of simultaneously abating vices and educating an emperor