Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776

National Review, Sept 1, 1997 by Jeffrey Gedmin

THE end of the Cold War unleashed a series of debates among policy-makers and foreign-policy experts over emerging international trends and correct American responses. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History, arguing that liberal democracy's victory was a final triumph over the ideologies that had cursed the planet for the past couple of centuries. Henry Kissinger has insisted that the post - Cold War world is reverting to a multipolar condition; that geopolitics will continue to define the international system. While Edward Luttwak has made the case for geo-economics as the defining theme of the new world order, Samuel Huntington contends that deep cultural divides, "a clash of civilizations" among Muslim, Confucian, Hindu, and Western societies, is destined to define the foreseeable future.

Walter McDougall is less concerned about the nature of new threats and challenges. Rather, in his new book, McDougall seeks to clarify the debate over how the United States should adjust, whatever the future might bring. What principles ought to shape American foreign policy? A Pulitzer Prize - winning author, historian, and professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, McDougall contends that Americans have rich traditions to guide them. As editor of the foreign-affairs quarterly Orbis, he has tired of "sterile" debates and "the flip way pundits and politicians [toss] around terms like 'isolationism' and 'Wilsonianism."' He replies here with an engaging account of "eight discreet traditions" that have shaped America's way of facing the world.

The first four traditions -- liberty at home (exceptionalism), unilateralism, the American System (Monroe Doctrine), and expansionism (Manifest Destiny) -- make up the "Old Testament" of this history. In place between 1776 and 1898, these traditions, McDougall writes, were "designed by the founding fathers to deny the outside world the chance to shape America's future." Early on, he tips his hand as to which principles he believes ought to guide our foreign policy.

McDougall wants to explode myths. He begins with George Washington's Farewell Address, in which the first President cautioned against foreign entanglements. Washington's warning was, according to McDougall, the start of America's venerable tradition of unilateralism -- a tradition, he tells us, that is often mischaracterized as isolationist. For McDougall, "isolationism" is the "dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies."

American exceptionalism was never about pursuing moral or otherwise idealistic foreign policies, McDougall argues. On the contrary, from Washington and Hamilton to Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams, America's early leaders understood it as the obligation to "defend the states from foreigners." Exceptionalism meant "Liberty at home, not crusades [abroad]."

There was "a logical progression," McDougall argues, from exceptionalism to expansionism. The progression was always defensive in character and had nothing to do with the impulse "to reform (or dominate) a wicked world." The Monroe Doctrine was meant neither to secure the independence of Latin America nor to provide a pretext for North American imperialism, he contends. Whether in countering attempts of the European powers to "come over to America" by way of countries to our South, or in "pre-empt[ing] European bids for influence over the vast unsettled lands that remained in North America [Manifest Destiny]," the chief objective of American foreign policy was to protect the promised land. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own."

Just as McDougall reveres the early traditions of American foreign policy, he laments the shifts that have taken place since the end of the nineteenth century. This "New Testament" -- progressive imperialism, Wilsonianism, containment, and global meliorism --reflects, to a great extent, America's inability to reject the "do-gooder impulse." These modern traditions have focused on giving "America the chance to shape the outside world's future."

The terrible chain of events, when the U.S. went "off the rails, in terms of its honored traditions," began for McDougall in 1898 with America's war with Spain. "Imagine," he writes, "the American people and government allowed themselves to be swept by a hurricane of militant righteousness into a revolutionary foreign war, determined to slay a dragon and free a damsel in distress." It was the very temptation "Washington and Hamilton scorned, Jefferson and Madison felt but resisted, and John Quincy Adams damned with eloquence." Still worse, Wilsonianism, with its "vision of saving the world, lurked just around the corner."

McDougall approves of twentieth-century containment and admires its success -- the defeat of Communism -- even if "its implications were worrisome." But he regrets deeply all that was spawned by twentieth-century idealistic crusaders from Wilson to Lyndon Johnson, from Kennedy to Carter to Clinton (in Vietnam, for instance, "Kennedy's men were wedded," McDougall writes, "not to the tactics of Korean-style containment, but to those of global meliorism").