Promised Land, Crusader State
by Walter A. McDougall
Houghton Mifflin. 286 pp. $26.00
We Americans do not have a very long history, but we make ample use of what we have. To a remarkable degree our debates over foreign policy are littered with historical references and rationalizations. Seeking to justify some contemporary initiative, American politicians are far more likely to invoke the names of George Washington and Woodrow Wilson than are their English and French counterparts to quote Castlereagh or Clemenceau.
Such history-mongering may not be inaccurate or irrelevant, but it does tend to be selective and oversimplified. As we confront the beginning of a new century, and a new stage in our nation’s career as a world power, we have good reason to contemplate our past; but, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall explains in his provocative new book, the annals of American diplomacy yield no simple answers to the problems of our day.
In surveying two centuries of America’s engagement with the world, McDougall makes quick work of the usual morality tales in which wise “realists” wrestle with woolly “idealists,” or farsighted “internationalists” triumph over backward-looking “isolationists.” The past, he makes plain, is far more complicated than that. Although often differing over the means, Americans have always sought to combine an attention to the realities of power with a concern for moral principles. And they have never embraced either a full-fledged commitment to international law and organizations or a total withdrawal from the rigors of world politics.
In place of these simple dichotomies, McDougall identifies eight distinct American foreign-policy traditions, each of which emerged at a particular moment in the nation’s history but then “outlived the era that gave it birth, [and] entered the permanent lexicon of our national discourse.” Far from being straightforward and clear-cut, our heritage is rich and dazzlingly diverse. The reason for much of our current confusion is not that “we lack principles to guide us,” McDougall writes; rather, “because we have canonized so many diplomatic principles since 1776 . . . we are pulled every which way at once.”
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McDougall apportions his eight traditions into two groups, which he calls respectively “Old Testament” and “New Testament.” Of the two halves of this foreign-policy “bible,” McDougall clearly prefers the first, and the story of the progression from Old Testament to New, to extend the biblical metaphor, most closely resembles that of the Fall.
As McDougall tells the tale, the American people began life in an earthly Eden and for the first 120 years of their history, from the revolutionary founding to the turn of the 20th century, pursued a set of policies in keeping with a conception of themselves as the inhabitants of a “Promised Land.” Their first leaders thus sought to preserve the nation’s hard-won liberty and independence by resisting the allure of democratizing crusades (“Exceptionalism”); forgoing lasting alliances with foreign powers (“Unilateralism”); and acting to exclude the European empires from the Western hemisphere once and for all (“The American System,” or the Monroe Doctrine).
Over the course of the 19th century, the American people also expanded across the continent, driven not only by a “primordial . . . commitment to liberty” but by a desire to “preempt European bids for influence over the vast unsettled lands that remained in North America.” McDougall sees this impulse (which he dubs “Expansionism”) as an outgrowth of the three earlier traditions. It is only at the turn of the 20th century that the “Old Testament” ends and trouble begins. When the U.S. went to war with Spain in 1898 and seized possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, it entered into a phase of “Progressive Imperialism” and began to go badly off the rails.
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The trouble with progressive imperialism, as McDougall sees it, is not so much that Americans took territory by force as that we did so in a fit of “militant righteousness,” propelled by a “do-gooder impulse” and by the conviction that we could and should use our growing power directly to make the world a better place. From here it was but a small step to “Liberal Internationalism”: the seductive but arrogant and ultimately disastrous idea, promulgated by Woodrow Wilson, that the United States could single-handedly transform the character of international politics and legislate an end to war. The failure of Wilson’s vision forced the United States to move on to “Containment,” which McDougall regards as having been necessary, largely successful, and, at least in its initial, limited form, broadly consistent with earlier American traditions of prudent power politics. Finally, containment was transmuted in the 1960’s into “Global Meliorism,” a misguided notion according to which the “United States alone possesses the power, prestige, technology, wealth, and altruism needed to reform whole nations” by “promoting democracy, defending human rights, and fostering economic growth.”
It is this last foreign-policy tradition for which McDougall reserves his greatest scorn. On it he blames the failed American crusade in Vietnam, the floundering and disasters of the Carter years, and the Clinton administration’s inclination to practice social engineering on a global scale.
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McDougall’s analytic presentation of two centuries of American history offers much to admire. For sheer intellectual interest, I would single out his explanation for the wrong turn (as he sees it) taken by U.S. foreign policy at the beginning of this century. Where others have emphasized growing material resources as the motive force in the outward expansion of American interests and ambitions, McDougall stresses the role of changing ideas and, in particular, the rising faith in science, the declining belief in original sin, and an increasing acceptance of the importance of earthly good works. These social currents combined, he argues, to make Americans “easier prey than before to apostles of progress who itched to reform the world.” This novel thesis, developed somewhat summarily here, deserves a book all its own.
But there is also much to quarrel with in Promised Land, Crusader State. McDougall’s treatment of the period following World War II is problematic. Especially trying is his effort to separate containment, of which he approves, from global meliorism, on which he frowns.
McDougall sees the Vietnam war, for example, as a grand meliorist crusade. But the initial American involvement in that country was driven not by an abstract desire to reform the world but by the belief, mistaken or not, that there were hard strategic issues at stake, including U.S. credibility and the balance of power in East Asia. On the other hand, the willingness of the American people to sustain the policy of containment for a half-century cannot itself be said to have derived primarily from hard-headed prudence. Rather, its genesis was a strong moral conviction that Communism was inherently evil and deserved to be opposed and, if possible, defeated. The Reagan administration, about which McDougall says almost nothing, combined crusading zeal and power politics in a unique and potent blend. Giving credit for all the successes of the past half-century to containment while blaming the errors and excesses on global meliorism is, in the end, unpersuasive.
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Similar difficulties underlie McDougall’s discussion of the choices before us today. He is certainly right to warn against the dangers of attempting to remake the world. But the thrust of his analysis, and his closing, Kennanesque warning—Americans should “remember that charity begins at home [and] husband the rare liberty and fragile unity our ancestors won”—would seem to point the way to a drastic reduction in America’s world role. After all, if the “Old Testament” traditions were so superior to their successors, why not return to them, building liberty at home, preserving order in our hemisphere, and acting only occasionally and unilaterally when threatened?
From this conclusion, however, McDougall shrinks. While the United States, he argues, should not increase its responsibilities, neither should we abandon those we already have. Seeking to bring the far-flung commitments of the cold war into alignment with the more modest traditions of earlier periods, he suggests that existing foreign ties “should be thought of less as violations of Unilateralism than as extensions of the American System to the opposite shores of the two American oceans.” This is, to say the least, conceptually awkward—and it will prove impractical to boot.
The course McDougall appears to recommend, a policy of inertia which seeks simply to preserve the status quo because it seems less risky than abandoning it, may itself prove increasingly difficult to sustain. After all, the costly, often troublesome structure of alliances, institutions, and global military capabilities which today’s leaders have inherited was built in a moment of extreme urgency and profound anxiety. Nothing remotely like it had ever existed in the preceding century-and-a-half of our history. In the absence of a threat, or of some new, positive vision, popular support for these accouterments of American power will inevitably dwindle and the radius of our influence will diminish. Whether this will leave us better off is uncertain at best. As in the 1920’s, introversion could hasten the emergence of unseen dangers.
Still, even if we reject as unrealistic McDougall’s inclination to steer America back toward the earthly Eden of its past, Promised Land, Crusader State provides an excellent starting point for what remains an essential task: examining our present circumstances, consulting our past, and developing a new foreign-policy tradition for the uncertain age we have already begun to enter.
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