American foreign policy

Studies in intellectual history

Jean-Francois Drolet, James Dunkerley

• Verlag: Manchester University Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526116536
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: North American History

This book offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America's engagement with the world during this period. The collection is organised chronologically and looks at the work of intellectuals who have written both in support and critically about US foreign policy in various geographical and historical contexts. This includes Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz and many other such thinkers and practitioners who have contributed in shaping the ways in which we have come to think of US foreign policy over the years. The book will be of significant interest to students and academics within the fields of US foreign policy analysis, international relations and intellectual history.

1 Jeremi Suri

The strange career of nation-building as a concept in US foreign policy

The people of the South should be the last Americans to expect indefinite continuity of their institutions and social arrangements. Other Americans have less reason to be prepared for sudden change and lost causes. Apart from Southerners, Americans have enjoyed a historical continuity that is unique among modern peoples. The stream of national history, flowing down from seventeenth-century sources, reaches a fairly level plain in the eighteenth century. There it gathered mightily in volume and span from its tributaries, but it continued to flow like the Mississippi over an even bed between relatively level banks.

Southern history, on the other hand, took a different turn in the nineteenth century. At intervals the even bed gave way under the stream, which sometimes plunged over falls or swirled through rapids. These breaks in the course of Southern history go by the names of slavery and secession, independence and defeat, emancipation and reconstruction, redemption and reunion. Some are more precipitous and dramatic than others. Some result in sheer drops and falls, others in narrows and rapids. The distance between them, and thus the extent of smooth sailing and stability, varies a great deal.¹

These two opening paragraphs from C. Vann Woodward’s monumental 1955 book the Strange Career of Jim Crow capture the simultaneous invisibility and presence of race in American history over the course of three centuries. On the one hand, the history of the United States is a continuing story of liberty, capitalism and democracy. On the other hand, the hatred and violence of racial prejudice disrupt this promising story and expose its many contradictions, limitations and inhumane costs. One can think of Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency as a continuation of this pattern: a promising democratic narrative accompanied by degrading hatred and violence. For Woodward, the American South was (and it remains) the region of the country where the clash of duelling historical perspectives is most evident. In these terms, it is the region with the strangest career.²

Similar things can be said for the long history of American foreign policy, especially as it relates to the Global South – what geographers called the Third World a generation ago. From the American War for Independence in the late eighteenth century through to the ‘War on Terror’ more than two centuries later, ideas of self-governance, popular sovereignty and open trade have driven American foreign policy. These ideas underpin foundational policy statements from Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918, to George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address of 2005. Each defined American principles and power as alternatives to tyranny and empire. Each anticipated a progressive world where diverse societies would come to look, at least in their political and economic organisation, more like the United States.³

When pressed by foreign challengers and domestic critics, the only alternative to some form of nation-building that American leaders could imagine was disaster for the United States. For Americans, a world of competing systems has always seemed perilous. Balances of power and international structures for cooperation have always appeared unreliable. That was the interpretation of the First World War shared by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt – the perception that continual great power competition breeds war. Wilson and Roosevelt sought to tame the wilds of the international system by making it operate in ways more like the American system, with the United States at the centre, of course. Wilson and Roosevelt sought to avoid future wars by making societies – friend and foe alike – follow basic American principles for democracy and free market exchange.⁴

As Woodward explains, the ubiquitous disappointments and deviations from principle have not diminished American resolve. Even as he withdrew US forces from two unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Barack Obama affirmed American nation-building hopes. Although he rejected unilateral American military occupations of foreign societies, President Obama remained committed to encouraging and, when necessary, forcing reforms in governments that depart from ‘civil’ assumptions about self-government, openness and security. This was especially the case when Americans confronted a new challenge to their vision of liberal democracy and regional stability from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The brutality of ISIS symbolised a deeper evil: extreme anti-modernism and anti-secularism fused with anti-Americanism.

In the seminal foreign policy speech of his second term, delivered at the US Military Academy on 28 May 2014, President Obama rejected ‘realist’ suggestions that American foreign policy should focus on core material interests and abandon its broader, more problematic ideological agenda. ‘I believe’, the President explained, ‘that a world of greater freedom and tolerance is not only a moral imperative, it also helps to keep us safe.’ President Obama echoed his predecessors in affirming an ‘indispensable’ world leadership role for the United States:

America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism – it is a matter of national security. Democracies are our closest friends and are far less likely to go to war. Economies based on free and open markets perform better and become markets for our goods. Respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror.⁵

What a strange career for American foreign policy ideals! How can they remain so strong, even among those who see their failures in places like Iraq and Afghanistan? The criticisms of President Obama circulate primarily around the application of these ideals, not their articulation or importance.⁶ Like the views of race analysed by C. Vann Woodward, the assumptions about purpose and principle in American foreign policy are sufficiently protean to bend and adjust in different times, but endure in their core influence on decision-makers. They are the basic parameters for the American global imagination. They are the bedrocks on which Americans build toward the world they expect to resemble their own.

Throughout their history and into the present, Americans have shown a remarkable (perhaps stubborn) capacity to support the frequently contradictory urges toward national self-interest and democratic transformation at the same time. Both sentiments are sincerely believed. For most leaders and citizens they are two sides of the same coin. When they obviously contradict, as in the many dictatorial regimes the United States has defended, then Americans believe the trade-off is temporary. When popular groups assert control over formerly repressive regimes, including repressive regimes the United States has supported, Americans tend to side with the revolutionaries. We saw this most recently in the ‘Arab Spring’ revolts of 2010–11.⁷

Contradictions between material self-interests and ideological preferences do not detract from the importance of both phenomena. It is their co-dependence as true belief, not hypocrisy, that defines the repeated idealism of American power in action. Just as nineteenth-century slave-holders seriously believed in freedom, twenty-first-century advocates of American primacy embrace democratic ideals. Contradictions reinforce faith, and they encourage an aspiration to synthesis between ideals and interests in a predicted future.

The historical teleology of American nation-building

The strange career of American international ideas includes countless debates about policy, political party and ideology, but it replicates similar ‘end of history’ expectations. One can read claims about an end to ‘normal’ history in the words of Washington, Wilson, Bush, Obama and most other American leaders. They acknowledge the messy and complex elements of past international behaviour, but they assert that the United States can transcend, improve, simplify and ultimately redeem an unsatisfactory inheritance. This is the essence of American exceptionalism – the claim to stand above history. The popularity of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ essay in the United States during the late twentieth century captured this post-historical element of the American foreign policy faith.⁸

The post-historical presumption is what has led many observers to emphasise the millennial streak in American thinking. The United States has fought its wars to end all wars. It has invested in foreign societies to raise them to what Americans perceive as a mature level of development. Washington has advocated for democratic and capitalist governance as the only viable system for peace and prosperity. The keywords of ‘democratisation’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘development’ have recurred throughout the history of American foreign policy. They have gone together as a triad for the American vision of well-maintained nation-states in a world imperilled by disorder (anarchy) or tyranny (empire). The keywords served as building blocks and touchstones for an American-led alternative to inherited international history.⁹

American foreign policy thinking has been post-historical and decontextualised. The particularities of a specific culture, geography or ethnic mix matter only in tactics, and not as strategic goals for US leaders imagining global trends toward common nation-building. The universalism of the American project is striking in its asserted ‘opportunity for all’, and also in its homogeneity of expectations for the behaviour and outlook of non-American citizens. American foreign policy, in this sense, replays the Republican universalism about free institutions and labour that Northerners brought to the post-Civil War South, according to C. Vann Woodward. In both contexts – at home and abroad – American universalism has always been remarkably limited in its range of accepted opinion. It has been idealistic and inclusive, but also self-interested and incapable of addressing local diversity. Making freedom real for challenging and unique circumstances has been very difficult for Americans thinking in universal terms. Americans embrace diversity, but they seek ultimate universality. The frame for policy debate has therefore been quite narrow. That has not changed in the twenty-first century.¹⁰

The mechanisms producing (and enforcing) this historical teleology have differed greatly from one era to another, but a common nation-building vision has exerted strong and consistent influence on each generation of US policy-makers. American leaders have imagined a legible world of nation-states like their own, emerging from empire, anarchy or other conditions in-between. Scholar David Hendrickson calls this the position of ‘union’, meaning a belief in the political legitimacy of government institutions that represent an identifiable nation of people in a distinct territorial setting.¹¹ Political scientist Daniel Deudney looks back to a longer tradition of ‘republican’ security theory in the classical world that, filtered through the American founders, invests authority in governing institutions that ensure order against violence (external and internal) and protect basic citizen interests.¹²

Drawing on Hendrickson, Deudney and, and others, I have argued that the experience of ‘union’ and ‘republic’ in early American history became codified in a default American repertoire for nurturing familiar-looking nation-states in foreign spaces, especially during moments of threat and uncertainty. From the American Civil War through to interventions in the Philippines, Germany, Vietnam and Afghanistan, one can see a pattern of American efforts to create national identities and modern representative states that had previously experienced deeply contested and divergent histories. American actions have almost always included military force, but they have extended into economic aid, legal advice and cultural influence as well. These nation-building efforts have produced a very mixed record, including startling successes in Western Europe and Japan after 1945, abject failures in places like Vietnam, and many results in-between.¹³

Although some American leaders (including presidents Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush) have sought to depart from this inherited nation-building programme, they have found themselves returning to this same vision when they have most needed a policy response for rising threats. Nation-building is so deeply rooted in the American psyche and political rhetoric that it re-emerges, like a comfortable and familiar song, during moments of uncertainty and confusion. Nation-building is indeed part of the national anthem: the self-proclaimed ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ forged in a war against empire.¹⁴

Based on their own experiences at home, Americans have trouble imagining a just and stable international political order that looks like anything but their own system of governance and representation. Despite the popularity of cultural relativism and ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: thinking about America in the world over the longer run
• 1 The strange career of nation-building as a concept in US foreign policy
• 2 Race, utopia, perpetual peace: Andrew Carnegie’s dreamworld
• 3 Carl Schmitt and the American century
• 4 Realist exceptionalism: philosophy, politics and foreign policy in America’s ‘second modernity’
• 5 The social and political construction of the Cold War
• 6 Chaotic epic: Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order revisited
• 7 Paul Wolfowitz and the promise of American power, 1969–2001
• Index