From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (2 page)

With a masterful recounting of Paine's story, Herring launches his grand narrative. It is a rich tale of the continuing interplay between soaring ideals and gritty reality, aspiration and compromise, accident and purpose, and the will of the United States and the often contrary will of countless other international actors. And it is a tale of the halting, even muddled, progression of the United States from a struggling state trying to establish its authority over the still-raw North American Atlantic seaboard to a sophisticated "hyperpower" whose influence reached into every corner of the planet, for better or for worse.

The infant nation's first diplomatic task was to protect its experiment in representative government from foreign interference. As George Washington's fabled Farewell Address made clear, it was essential to that task that the nation be ever vigilant against "the insidious wiles of foreign influence," that it avoid the entanglements of foreign alliances or even partiality to any other power, and that it recognize the limits to its own capacity and adapt its foreign policy to its abilities as well as to its ideals and its interests. Yet, Herring writes, Washington also dreamed of a time when the United States would "possess the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make us afraid." He and others in the founding generation envisioned an America that would usher in a
novus ordo seclorum
(new order of the ages) in the international as well as in the domestic sphere. But they knew that theirs was not the generation that could hope to achieve such an extravagant goal.

The next immediate task of American diplomacy was to advance the project of continental expansion. As Herring brilliantly shows, North America in the nineteenth century was not a vacant wilderness awaiting pioneers to tame it. It was, rather, an arena of international intrigue and a cockpit of sometimes explosive rivalries. At various times British, Spanish, French, Russian, and Mexican contenders clashed with the Americans for dominance over the continent—as did the several Indian tribes that warily watched white encroachment on their ancestral lands. Indeed, it is
among the many strengths of Herring's account that he insists on understanding Indian policy as foreign policy, with immense consequences for both national security and national expansion. He also explodes the common assumption that Americans were uniquely peace-loving. As he pointedly observes in his Introduction, "each generation has had its war."

By the nineteenth century's close, the United States had consolidated its grasp on its continental domain and began to look outward with ever-swelling ambitions. The Spanish-American War of 1898 and President Theodore Roosevelt's dispatch of the "Great White Fleet" on a world-girdling show of strength in 1907 heralded the arrival of a potential new great power on the international stage, even as the world was rapidly growing more interconnected and more volatile. But many Americans carried into the modern era the habits of inwardness and the tendency to take national security as a free gift of Nature that had prevailed in the Republic's first century. Some wanted to maintain that posture indefinitely. Others, including Roosevelt, yearned to see the nation seated among the circle of great powers that presumed to arbitrate the world's destinies. Still others, conspicuously including Woodrow Wilson, hearkened back to the transformative dreams of the Founders. As Wilson put it in 1914: "What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great nation? Are we going to play the old role of using that power for our aggrandizement and material benefit only?" As Herring shows, those simple questions have overhung the foreign policy of the United States ever since, as successive generations of Americans have continued to question whether and how, and to what ends, American power should be exercised in the international arena.

Wilson's questions came into especially sharp focus in 1945, when World War II's conclusion deposited the United States, in Winston Churchill's memorable phrase, "at the summit of the world." America now came into the fullness of its powers, not merely as one among many international players, but as an increasingly influential hegemon that led the way to the most sweeping transformations in international institutions, norms, and behaviors since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. How history managed to cast the United States in that role, and how well or badly it played its part, are lucidly analyzed in the pages that follow.

Herring also treats the reader to a parade of colorful personalities who have shaped America's diplomacy: a trio of Adamses, including John, the dour second president who contrived to avoid taking an overmatched United States into war with France; his shrewdly prudential son, John Quincy, the author of the Monroe Doctrine and the cool realist who
declared the United States "does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy"; and the silky diplomat Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln's cunning and diligent minister to the Court of St. James during the Civil War. We also get a pair of Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin), a brace of Bushes (father and son), and numerous generals and admirals, as well as various missionaries, journalists, theorists, traders, settlers, and adventurers who put their mark on the nation's relationships with others.

The highest aim of the
Oxford History of the United States
is to bring the very best historical scholarship to the widest possible readership, in books that are at once original, analytical, and narratively compelling.
From Colony to Superpower
satisfies all those criteria handsomely. It is an exceptionally welcome addition to the series.

David M. Kennedy

From Colony to Superpower

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