In his last years in office, an embattled President George Washington yearned for a time when his nation would "possess the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make us afraid."1 More than two hundred years later, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States had achieved a position of world power Washington could not have dreamed of. Pundits hailed a "unipolar moment."2 Comparisons were drawn with ancient Rome, the only historical example that seemed adequately to describe America's global preeminence.
This volume recounts the rise of the United States from a loose grouping of small, disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast of North America and surrounded by often hostile Indians and the possessions of unfriendly European powers to a commanding position in world politics and economics. It focuses on U.S. foreign policy and seeks to place it in the context of an ever changing international system. It also examines the deeply shaping role played by foreign relations in the evolution of America's domestic institutions and values.
Foreign policy has been central to the national experience from the outset. External assistance was essential to the birth of an independent United States; concerns about international commerce and foreign threats decisively influenced the form of government created in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Foreign policy molded the political culture of the new nation. It was instrumental in securing the young republic's political experiment and the outcome of the Civil War. During the nation's second full century and beyond, it has become even more critical to the prosperity and security of the United States. The enduring idea of an isolationist America is a myth often conveniently used to safeguard the nation's self-image of its innocence. In fact, from 1776 on, the United States has been an active and influential player in world affairs. Foreign policy has had a huge impact on American life.
Americans think of themselves as peace-loving, but few nations have had as much experience at war as the United States. Indeed, beginning with the American Revolution, each generation has had its war. Armed conflict has helped to forge the bonds of nationhood, nurtured national pride, and fostered myths about the nation's singular virtue and indomitableness. From the American Revolution to the present, wars have also set the mileposts on the nation's road to world power.3 America's nineteenth-century conflicts provided the means to conquer a continent and acquire overseas territory. Europe's extended and bloody twentieth-century civil war laid low the traditional great powers, shifting the center of gravity of world politics and economics across the Atlantic to the United States. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of a half century of Cold War left the United States the lone superpower in a unipolar world.
Throughout its history, the United States has taken a distinctive approach toward foreign policy. A set of assumed ideas and shared values have determined the way Americans viewed themselves and others and how they dealt with other peoples and responded to and sought to shape events abroad.
From the birth of the nation—even when there was little cause to do so—Americans have shared a faith in their nation's destiny.4 The Revolutionary generation did not hesitate to use the word empire, although for them the word meant something different from what it meant to Europeans. Jefferson envisioned an "empire of liberty," a necklace of independent republics spread across North America. For the generation of the 1840s, America's Manifest Destiny was to spread across the continent and even beyond. When the United States thrashed Spain in 1898, it signaled to Americans—and others—the mature nation's emergence as a major power. "The greatest destiny the world ever knew is ours," ambassador John Hay crowed from London.5 Amidst the carnage of World War I, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed for the United States what he believed to be its rightful role as world leader. Although his ideas were rejected by Americans in his own lifetime, they lived on to inspire U.S. leaders into the twenty-first century. Such was the nation's power and influence after World War II that the twentieth century came to be called the American Century. In the 1990s, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would refer to the United States as the "indispensable nation."
Americans have held decidedly mixed views about the international order and their place in it. On the one hand, they have been allured by the riches of the world. Their lust for trade with other countries led them to rebel against Britain's mercantilist restrictions in 1775. Early Americans viewed international commerce as essential to their economic well-being and their political freedom alike. Adopting ideas from European Enlightenment thinkers, some even saw free trade as a means to transform the very nature of international life.6 As the nation shifted from a commercial to an industrial economy, foreign markets and investment outlets continued to be seen as crucial to the nation's prosperity and stability. To be sure, Americans have often heatedly debated the importance of domestic versus overseas markets and the priorities to be assigned to the protection of domestic industries or the stimulation of foreign trade, making tariff policy at times a highly contentious issue. Yet from the Revolution to the present, the pursuit of economic self-interest has ensured a high level of global involvement.
On the other hand, Americans have often seen themselves as a people apart. The Revolutionary generation rebelled not only against Britain but also against Old World ways. European history formed a "summary of the evils which America has escaped," a Kentucky lawyer rejoiced in the early nineteenth century.7 Americans associated conventional dealings among nations with royalty and found them repugnant. They rejected realpolitik and decried traditional diplomacy, in Thomas Jefferson's words, as "the pest of the peace of the world."8 They saw themselves as heralds of a novus ordo seclorum, a new world order, in which enlightened diplomacy based on free trade would create a beneficent system that would serve the broader interests of mankind rather than the selfish needs of monarchs and their courts. In the early national period, Americans flaunted their distinctiveness by rejecting the trappings of European diplomacy, even the customary formal dress, and by refusing to appoint ambassadors, a rank associated with European royalty. As the United States emerged to world-power status, it made its peace with conventional diplomatic practices. But Americans continued to see themselves as different from their European forebears and as harbingers of a new world order. For Wilson, the Great War more than ever exposed the insanity of European power politics, prompting him to set forth a vision for reforming world politics and economics according to American principles. Open diplomacy, disarmament, freedom of the seas, free trade, and self-determination for nationalities, in his view, would promote peace and prosperity for all peoples.
From Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop's invocation of a "city upon a hill," through Jefferson and Wilson, to George W. Bush's born-again zeal, Americans have continued to see themselves as a chosen people with a providential mission, "God's American Israel," the Puritans called it.9 They have taken pride in their presumably unique innocence and virtue, "the most moral and generous people on earth," in Ronald Reagan's words.10 They have felt a special obligation to extend the blessings of freedom to others. Beginning with John Quincy Adams's and Henry Clay's eloquent debate over U.S. support for the Greek rebellion against Turkey in 1821, they have often disputed whether that mission could best be fulfilled by what Adams called the "benignant sympathy of our example"—by creating a society at home worthy of emulation—or by active intervention.11 Depending on the state of the nation, its position in the world, and the proclivities of its leaders, they have varied in their zeal to spread the blessings of liberty, but they have retained a sense of special virtue and unique destiny.
The ideal of a providential mission has spurred a drive to do good in the world, manifested in the work of merchants, missionaries, and educators, often the advance guard of the nation's foreign policy. It also under-girded the Wilsonian dream of the United States as world leader and a world reformed according to its principles. In the twenty-first century, the extension of freedom has even been declared a basis for U.S. security. "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," George W. Bush proclaimed in 2005. "The best hope for freedom in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."12
This sense of a special destiny has at times also spawned arrogance. Disdain for native peoples and Mexicans fueled America's rush across the continent, pushing the Indians steadily westward to the verge of extinction and wresting from Mexico one-third of its territory. Similar sentiments led to the imposition of colonial rule on Filipinos and Puerto Ricans and to the establishment of protectorates throughout much of the Caribbean. From an ill-fated incursion into Canada in 1775 to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, America's sense of its grand historical mission has even justified spreading the blessings of liberty by force. Certain of their righteousness, Americans have confidently expected to be welcomed as liberators. The ironic result, in many cases, has been to invigorate nationalist opposition.
Attitudes about race have reinforced this sense of cultural superiority. The United States came into existence as a slaveholding nation, and slavery exerted a potent impact on its foreign policy until its abolition after the Civil War. Slavery was supported by pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century ideas about a hierarchy of race that assigned the top rank to white Anglo-Saxons and lower positions to other races based on darkness of skin color.13 Americans' views on race along with their sense of cultural superiority made it easy to justify expansion and empire. In their dealings with "barbarous" Mediterranean and Malay "pirates," "bigoted" and "indolent" people of Spanish descent, and "inscrutable" Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese, nineteenth-century Americans often adopted a highhanded approach based on a sense of racial superiority. Scientific racism was discredited in the twentieth century, but more subtle forms have exerted persisting influence over U.S. interactions with other peoples and nations.
The ideological fervor and messianic streak that have stamped U.S. foreign policy have been balanced by offsetting tendencies. Pragmatism is basic to the American character, and in diplomacy U.S. officials have often manifested a willingness to compromise to achieve vital goals. Indeed, diplomats and policymakers such as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt went further by developing a uniquely American brand of practical idealism, conforming to the nation's professed principles while vigorously pursuing important interests. When they have clung to ideological positions and refused to compromise, as with Jefferson and James Madison in responding to British trade restrictions between 1805 and 1812 and Wilson with the League of Nations in 1919–20, they have met defeat.
United States policymakers have also been swayed by what Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence called a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Their determination to live up to their ideals and concern for their standing before at least some other nations have at times put checks on the nation's more aggressive tendencies. Wars and military occupations have produced revelations of atrocities and torture, provoking political backlashes that forced changes in policy. As Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's amoral "realism" demonstrated, policies can not survive indefinitely without some foundation in the nation's most cherished principles. "The American conscience is a reality," columnist Walter Lippmann wrote at the height of the Cold War. "It will make hesitant and ineffectual, even if it does not prevent, an un-American policy."14
Unilateralism, often mistakenly called isolationism, has also formed a powerful and enduring strain in U.S. foreign policy. From the outset, Americans chose not to isolate themselves from the world, preferring to reap the wealth offered by commerce with other countries. The term isolationism did not come into common usage until World War I. But a unilateralist approach seemed natural and essential to people who saw themselves as morally superior and understandably feared entanglement in Europe's wars and contamination from its cancerous politics. The turbulent experience of the infant republic in fending off foreign threats underscored the urgency of abstaining from Europe's alliances and wars. Unilateralism also derived from geography. The United States was "blessed among nations," French ambassador Jules Jusserand observed in the early 1900s: "On the north she had a weak neighbor; on the south, another weak neighbor; on the east, fish, and on the west, fish."15 Indeed, through much of the nineteenth century and beyond, geography conferred upon the United States an advantage few nations have enjoyed—the absence of major foreign threat—permitting it to avoid binding foreign commitments and to expand and prosper with minimal distraction from abroad. This free security has made the nation highly sensitive to threats, so that when they occur Americans have sometimes exaggerated them.
As early as the turn of the twentieth century, some Americans began to argue that a world reduced in size and made more dangerous by advances in military technology rendered traditional policies outdated. But it would take the Second World War and especially the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to shatter the notion that the United States was safe from foreign threat. During the Cold War era, an embattled nation turned unilateralist ideas on their head. The historical experience of free security helped to generate an exaggerated sense that the United States might be threatened by events anywhere. During the heyday of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy could even declare tiny Guyana in northern South America vital to U.S. security. The United States took on commitments to scores of nations, established military bases throughout the world, and provided billions of dollars in economic and military assistance to allies. Such was the power of the unilateralist tradition, however, that even after a half century of global commitments, it resurfaced in the radically altered international environment of the post–Cold War era.
Unilateralism served the United States well during its first century and a half, but it also bred a certain smug parochialism and a suspicion of international institutions, as well as indifference and even hostility toward other cultures and peoples. In part as a result of their historical separation from the mainstream of world affairs, historian Fredrik Logevall has observed, Americans were spared the necessity of negotiating and making concessions to survive and prosper. They have never been "wholly comfortable in the messy world of European style politics and diplomacy, with its emphasis on pragmatic give and take leading to imperfect solutions."16
America's democratic political system has also given a distinctive cast to its foreign policy. Political parties originated from the bitter internal struggle over ratification of the Jay Treaty with Britain in 1794. Since that time, foreign policy has often been the object of fierce partisan dispute. Party differences have sparked vigorous debates over the nation's role in the world. At times, partisan politics have obstructed effective diplomacy. On other occasions, opposition parties have put needed constraints on policymakers and helped rein in ill-advised policies.
As in most other countries, U.S. foreign policy has normally remained the province of elites, but leaders must pay heed to the democratic process. On occasion, an aroused public has pushed the government to act. Interest groups focusing on issues like armament or disarmament, human rights, and trade issues have relentlessly promoted their agendas. Huge influxes of immigrants have flooded the United States at various times in its history and produced ethnic constituencies that, from the Irish in the late nineteenth century to the modern-day Cuban and Israeli lobbies, have sought to sway the government to adopt policies favoring their countries of origin, sometimes producing initiatives that run counter to broader U.S. interests. More often, public indifference or apathy has created impediments for policymakers, bringing about in the twentieth century sustained and increasingly sophisticated efforts to inform, "educate," and manipulate public opinion. At times, policymakers have resorted to distortions and lies to sell their programs. They have exaggerated foreign threats to gain public and congressional support. Having done so, they sometimes boxed themselves in, forcing a vigorous response to perceived dangers to avoid the risk of domestic political backlash.
By dividing foreign policy powers between the executive and legislative branches of government, the U.S. Constitution added another level of confusion and conflict. The executive branch is obviously better suited to conduct foreign policy than a larger, inherently divided legislature whose members often represent local interests. George Washington set early precedents establishing presidential predominance. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the growing importance of foreign policy and the existence of major foreign threats have vastly expanded executive power, producing what has been called the imperial presidency. Congress from time to time has asserted itself and sought to regain some measure of control over foreign policy. Sometimes, as in the 1930s and 1970s, it has exerted decisive influence on crucial policy issues. For the most part and especially in the realm of war powers, the president has reigned supreme. Sometimes, chief executives have found it expedient to seek congressional endorsement of their decisions for war if not an outright declaration. Other times and especially in periods of danger, Congress has witlessly rallied behind the president, neglecting to ask crucial questions about policy decisions that turned out to be badly flawed.
America's peculiar approach to foreign policy has long bemused and befuddled foreign observers. Referring specifically to the United States, that often astute nineteenth-century French observer Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracies "obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence." They "abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice."17 In the early years, European diplomats tried to exploit the chaos that was American politics by bribing members of Congress and even interfering in the electoral process. More recently, other nations have hired lobbyists and even public relations experts to promote their interests and images in the United States.
Despite claims to moral superiority and disdain for Old World diplomacy, the United States throughout its history has behaved more like a traditional great power than Americans have realized or might care to admit. United States policymakers have often been shrewd analysts of world politics. They have energetically pursued and zealously protected interests deemed vital. In terms of commerce and territory, they have been aggressively and relentlessly expansionist. They exploited rivalries among the Europeans to secure their independence, favorable boundaries, and vast territorial acquisitions. From Louisiana to the Floridas, Texas, California, and eventually Hawaii, they fashioned the process of infiltration and subversion into a finely tuned instrument of expansion, using the presence of restless Americans in nominally foreign lands to establish claims and take over additional territory. When the hunger for land was sated, they extended American economic and political influence across the world. During the Cold War, when the nation's survival seemed threatened, they scrapped old notions of fair play, intervening in the affairs of other nations, overthrowing governments, even plotting the assassination of foreign leaders. From the founders of the eighteenth century to the Cold Warriors two hundred years later, they played the great game of world politics with some measure of skill.
Popular notions to the contrary, the United States has been spectacularly successful in its foreign policy. To be sure, like all countries, it has made huge mistakes and suffered major failures, sometimes with tragic consequences for Americans—and other peoples as well. At the same time, it has sustained an overall record of achievement with little precedent in history. In the space of a little more than two hundred years, it conquered a continent, came to dominate the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean areas, helped win two world wars, prevailed in a half-century Cold War, and extended its economic influence, military might, popular culture, and "soft power" through much of the world. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had attained that "strength of a Giant" that Washington longed for.
Ironically, as the nation grew more powerful, the limits to its power became more palpable, a harsh reality for which Americans were not prepared by history. The nation's unprecedented success spawned what a British commentator called the "illusion of American omnipotence," the notion that the United States could do anything it set its mind to, or, as one wag put it, the difficult we do tomorrow, the impossible may take a while.18 Success came to be taken for granted. Failure caused great frustration. When it occurred, many Americans preferred to pin it on villains at home rather than admit there were things their nation could not do. Despite its vast wealth and awesome military power, the United States had to settle for a stalemate in the Korean War. It could not work its will in Vietnam or Iraq, nations whose complex societies and idiosyncratic histories defied its efforts to reshape them.
The emergence of a new twenty-first-century threat in the form of international terrorism and the devastating September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon underscored another hard reality: that power does not guarantee security. On the contrary, the greater a nation's global influence, the greater its capacity to provoke envy and anger; the more overseas interests it has, the more targets it presents to foes, and the more it has to lose. Weaker nations can deal with a hegemonic nation by combining with each other or simply by obstructing its moves.19 Even America's unparalleled power could not fully assure the freedom from fear that George Washington longed for.