Promised Land, Crusader State by Walter McDougall
After finishing John Lewis Gaddis' recent history The Cold War, I thought it might be worth become familiar with American foreign policy on a larger scale. I devoted a good portion of my undergraduate studies to international relations at the theoretical level, with my first semester attendance at Stanley Hoffman's "Ethics and International Relations" being a pivotal moment in my academic (and professional) future.
The next semester I took courses on "The Causes and Prevention of War," "Terrorist Movements in International Relations" (from Louise Richardson, soon to be principal of St. Andrews), and "Sino-US Relations" . After that, the Core Program, the requirements of my concentration, and general curiosity led me further afield from the international relations realm. So while I am conversant in the basic theory (think Michael Walzer), I have some gaps to fill on the history.
I decided to start with Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State, since it purported to be a "reinterpretation of the traditions that have shaped U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to the present," and it sought to do so in just 222 pages. I also thought it important that McDougall wrote the book in 1997; this gave him a few years of distance from the tumultuous decline of the Soviet bloc, but came before the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many books written since those events are in some respects attempting to examine how these recent episodes, especially the invasion of Iraq, fit (or don't fit) into a historical survey of America's place in the world; see, e.g. Robert Kaplan's Dangerous Nation or Niall Ferguson's Colossus. I am hoping that the Oxford History of the United States' upcoming entry on foreign policy, From Colony to Superpower by George Herring, avoids this trap. The early reviews are stellar.
Unfortunately, McDougall's book is an uneven affair. He chooses a strange pseudo-religious framing technique, telegraphed by the title itself. McDougall divides the text into what he calls the "Old Testament" and "New Testament" of American foreign policy. Yet this is not a text about how American faith, or the religious establishment, influenced American foreign policy. There are a few references to this phenomena: the early belief that America was a "holy land," and the motivation for the brief imperialist efforts in the last decade of the 19th century. But that is about it; there is no organized analysis of the growth or decline of religious influence, or the differences of opinion between the various American sects. Indeed, the aspect of recent American foreign policy that most obviously begs for analysis of religious influence (both Christian and Jewish) is the nation's strong support for Israel, yet this gets but a single glancing reference near the end of the text (see Mearsheimer and Walt for that debate).
Moving to the substance of this framework he has chosen, McDougall sets out what he deems to be the eight traditions of American diplomacy:
Our Old Testament
- Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)
- Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)
- The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)
- Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called)
Our New Testament
- Progressive Imperialism
- Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)
- Containment
- Global Meliorism
It is obvious from the list that McDougall is skeptical of the conventional wisdom about several of these traditions. He argues, for instance, that while there is a tradition of Expansionism, Manifest Destiny was a symptom (not a cause) of this tradition, since "American expansion in all its forms long predated the Manifest Destiny craze and continued long after it died." Similar caveats are explored in each of the "Old Testament" traditions.
McDougall is at his strongest in these first four chapters, laying out the basis for American creation and consolidation of its continental and then hemispheric power. The second chapter is particularly interesting; McDougall makes clear that America never had a tradition of "isolating" itself by ignoring global events:
Let us dispense with the term altogether and substitute for it a word that really describes the second great tradition in America foreign relations: Unilateralism. It was a natural, even inevitable corollary of the first American tradition, for if the essence of Exceptionalism was Liberty at home, the essence of Unilateralism was to be at Liberty to make foreign policy independent of the "toils of European ambition." Unilateralism never meant that the United States should, or for that matter could, sequester itself or pursue an ostrich-like policy toward all foreign countries. It simply meant, as Hamilton and Jefferson both underscored, that the self-evident course for the United States was to avoid permanent, entangling alliances and to remain neutral in Europe's wars except when our Liberty -- the first hallowed tradition -- was at risk.
McDougall's analysis becomes much weaker when he turns to the so-called "New Testament" traditions. In these chapters, he has two objectives: to define the tradition, and to show how it was related to the four "Old Testament" traditions. Despite this expanded ambition, McDougall constrains these chapters to the same length as the earlier ones. As a result, both of his objectives remain unsatisfied; the explications of "Progressive Imperialism" and "Wilsonianism" are thin, and McDougall moves too fast through his historical examples to leave sufficient space to connect these traditions to those that came before.
The book is especially uneven when it gets to Vietnam; McDougall saves it for the end, and the "Global Meliorism" chapter almost drowns in pages of minutiae on U.S. efforts in Indochina. This is unfortunate, because it is also the chapter where McDougall directs the strongest criticism toward America's foreign policy. McDougall attacks the basic presumption that America is capable of spreading its values around the world, and the related conviction that America would be righteous in doing so if it could:
The causal connection between poverty and oppression on the one hand, and war and revolution on the other, seems plausible, but obviously not all poor or authoritarian countries threaten their neighbors, any more than all poor people become criminals. In addition, labels like "poor" and "oppressed," "rich" and "free" are so relative as to be practically meaningless. So is the label "democracy." If it just means elections, majority rule, or government by consent of the governed, there is nothing inherently decent about it. Dictators often command overwhelming support. Democracies can trample on human rights and the rule of law. Nor can we assume that all nations prefer democracy, however defined, or are moving toward the same destination. Indeed, to diagnose and prescribe remedies for all other people on earth is nothing less than to mirror the Bolsheviks, who claimed to believe that scientific law was moving the world toward Communism, but acted as though history needed their "help."
Unlike the other chapters, where McDougall regards the diplomatic traditions as misunderstood, this tradition he deems fundamentally misguided. In the late 1990s, many or most would agree. American efforts in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia had been widely criticized, particularly by President Clinton's political opponents in the Republican Party. Based on my attendance in the classes I listed above, particularly with Stanley Hoffman, I was a strong supporter of these humanitarian interventions; in fact, the campaign in Kosovo was what convinced me to join the military. I decided that it was unjust to believe in humanitarian intervention but not be willing to put on the uniform and take part.
McDougall and I were blissfully ignorant that the rise of neoconservatives in the Republican Party would soon turns this dichotomy on its head, leading this country into a crusading invasion of Iraq; in promoting future avoidance of the "Global Meliorism" he bemoans, McDougall considered it obvious that:
[N]o international bureaucracy, much less a single nation, however powerful and idealistic, can substitute itself for the healthy nationalism of an alien people. Almost everyone agrees, for instance, that Saddam Husein is bad for his country. But can Americans be better Iraqis than Iraqis themselves, or presume to tell the Chinese how to be better Chinese? If we try, we can only be poorer Americans.
Fast-forward to the present day. American remains knee-deep in rebuilding Iraqi society five years after toppling Saddam (after justifying the invasion on every premise other than humanitarian intervention), and our president feels obliged to condemn the Chinese for their human rights abuses on the eve of his Olympic trip to their country. McDougall's prescription for American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era has not been heeded. While some will argue that "9/11 changed everything," I doubt McDougall would agree. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, after all, fit his vision of a Unilateralist response (we were helped by allies, but our strategy was not dictated by alliances) on behalf of Liberty at home. It is only with the sideways slide into adventurism in Iraq, based on misguided visions of spreading democracy and freedom abroad, that the lessons of the 20th century were forgotten.
