Promised Land, Crusader State

...interests by preventing Europeans from establishing new footholds on the North American continent...

...McDougall calls these four diplomatic traditions the Old Testament of American diplomatic history: "The Old Testament traditions were coherent, mutually supportive, and reflective of our original image of America as a Promised Land, a New Israel, set apart for Liberty under God...

...In their view, American Exceptionalism was entirely the product of the civil and religious liberty Americans enjoyed at home...

...Another fan of Progressive Imperialism was Woodrow Wilson...

...American Unilateralism, the second diplomatic tradition McDougall discusses, is also widely misunderstood...

...McDougall Houghton Mifflin / 286 pages / $26 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan A ccording to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter A. McDougall, American foreign policy suffers from the intellectual equivalent of Multiple Personality Disorder...

...How was it possible for Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century to stray so far from the foreign policy traditions of the Founders...

...Rather, it is "a purposely vague proclamation of U.S...

...It is frequently equated with isolationism, despite the fact that the word "isolationist" does not even appear in American public discourse until the 1890's, when expansionists like Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan used it to describe their critics...

...But after fifty years of Containment (the "warfare" state) and Liberalism (the welfare state), American society is in serious trouble...

...But McDougall argues that most of the senators who opposed the League of Nations were, like Wilson, good internationalists...

...This simultaneous emphasis on caution and commitment strikes just the right note—something McDougall surely would have noticed had his otherwise excellent book devoted a bit more attention to the Reagan administration and its foreign policy achievements...

...It was not meant to be exceptionally idealistic or moral in its own right...

...But if Americans were never isolationists, they did believe in steering clearof what Thomas Jefferson called "entangling alliances," lest these enmesh the U.S...

...Between 18oi and 1904 the U.S...

...But the problem with realism, as Henry Kissinger pointed out three years ago in Diplomacy, is that it is unsuited to the modern American temperament...

...In his second term he sought to teach mankind how to overcome war itself44 McDougall takes an obvious delight in shattering long-held misconceptions...

...The foreign policy approach McDougall advocates is known as "realism...

...Promised Land, Crusader State seeks first to identify, then to evaluate these contending traditions...

...Franklin's contemporaries expressed no moral qualms about his double-crossing their French ally...

...Leading imperialists like Roosevelt, Beveridge, and Willard Straight were all Progressives...

...Expansionism is the fourth diplomatic tradition identified by McDougall, and it, too, was undertaken by far-sighted statesmen like James K. Polk, America's eleventh president, to defend vital U.S...

...Unlike British foreign policy, with its long balance of power tradition, or its French counterpart, with its ceaseless quest for grandeur, there is no single doctrine or tradition that defines America's approach to foreign affairs...

...McDougall confirms that this view is not entirely false: "The first American diplomats, like the Bolshevik ones in the 1920's, made a point of eschewing fancy dress, titles and entertainments, and all manner of protocol, so as to be walking, talking symbols of Republican piety...

...Instead, there is a wide variety of approaches, some of them mutually contradictory, that have developed over the years and are invariably cited in times of crisis...

...At home and abroad, we have become a nation of reflexive dogooders—witriess our devotion to the New Testament traditions McDougall so deplores...

...The result is a masterful overview of American diplomatic history and a powerful—but finally unconvincing—brief for a policy based on "realism...

...The question is not whether we can return to the austere doctrines of an earlier age (probably not), but rather, whether we can devise a moderate, measured and prudent version of Global Meliorism capable of advancing the cause of freedom in the world without entangling us in hopeless crusades...

...Such measures, it was widely held, would seriously compromise domestic liberty...

...McDougall takes an obvious delight in shattering long-held misconceptions...

...through a League of Nations that would replace the balance of power system...

...McDougall attributes their apostasy to the influence of Progressivism...

...It is intellectually coherent, tough-minded, and assertive...

...The classic example is Benjamin Franklin, who in order to conclude a military alliance with France, solemnly promised never to make a separate peace with Britain—a vow he immediately broke the moment an opportunity to negotiate with the British presented itself...

...To avoid being made "the bubbles of foreign speculation," as John Quincy Adams strikingly put it, Americans determined that when they did act abroad it would be alone, and on their own terms...

...Unilateralism, in short, was the logical corollary of Exceptionalism...

...It is generally believed, for example, that the Spanish-American War marks a terrible departure from America's heretofore idealistic and progressive diplomatic history...

...It was precisely the sort of temptation that Washington and Hamilton scorned, Jefferson and Madison felt but resisted, and John Quincy Adams damned with eloquence...

...Nonetheless, American diplomats of the revolutionary era never let Republican piety stand in the way of their cold-blooded pursuit of the national interest...

...dispatched its navy and marines to Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Latin America no times—hardly the behavior of an isolationist nation...

...So was the Monroe Doctrine, another venerated American diplomatic initiative that is frequently cited and almost as frequently misinterpreted...

...McDougall points out that the doctrine had nothing to do with an American crusade to help Latin Americans secure their independence...

...Like their counterparts, these later traditions are widely misunderstood...

...in Europe's wars and force us to raise, and pay for, large armies and navies...

...McDougall believes that only by rededicating ourselves to the diplomatic traditions of the Old Testament—all built around the need to defend and enhance Liberty at home—and repudiating most of the "do-gooder" traditions of the New Testament, can we hope to halt our moral and cultural decline, and commence our national rehabilitation...

...Exceptionalism meant Liberty at home, not crusades to change the world...

...While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change," Reagan said, "we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them...

...traditions, the only thing wrong with the imperialist era was what everyone took for granted was right: the war to end war in Cuba...

...They were justifiably worried, however, that the League violated American sovereignty...

...Nor was it, as left-wingers sometimes claim, a high-sounding justification for Yankee imperialism...

...These four New TestaOur Place in the World The American Spectator • July r 9 9 7 67 ment traditions McDougall calls Progressive Imperialism, Wilsonianism, Containment, and Global Meliorism...

...It was his stubborn refusal to address their concerns—not American isolationism—that doomed the League...

...Ronald Reagan spelled out such a conservative Global Meliorist agenda in his 1982 "Westminster Speech," wherein he committed the United States to assisting the growth of democracy around the world...

...determination to defend whatever vital interests it had, or might in the future identify, in the Western Hemisphere...

...s* 68 July 1997 • The American Spectator...

...S tarting with the Spanish-American War of 1898, however, American statesmen grew enamored of a "New Testament" in foreign affairs, whose traditions "were far less coherent, clashed with each other and with received Old Testament wisdom, and reflected an image of America not only as a Promised Land, but as a Crusader State called to save the world...

...Keeping the Western Hemisphere off limits to European powers was another way of safeguarding American Exceptionalism...

...But he reserves his greatest scorn for what he calls Global Meliorism, which takes Wilsonianism one step further and seeks to teach mankind not only how to avoid war, but also how to progress economically, culturally and politically...

...In terms of U.S...

...The sole New Testament diplomatic tradition McDougall approves of is Containment, which simply reflects America's determination to defend its vital interests by working with regional powers to maintain the balance of power in Europe and Asia...

...Such a crusade was strongly at odds with the views of the Founding Fathers, who "flatly denied that the United States ought to be in the business of changing the world,lest it only change itself—for the worse...

...JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...McDougall maintains that the Vietnam War was Global Meliorist at heart—a doomed attempt to transplant Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam...

...The belief that enlightened American power could bring the benefits of liberty and civilization to Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Panama "came as easily to the Progressives as trust-busting, prohibition of child labor, and regulation of interstate commerce, meatpacking and drugs...

...Not surprisingly, McDougall has even less use for Wilsonianism than for Progressive Imperialism...

...Take, for example, the notion of American Exceptionalism—the myth that the Founding Fathers, turning away in righteous anger from the corruptions of the Old World, embarked on a moral, idealistic foreign policy to underscore the exceptional nature of their new republic...

...Both, in his view, promote quixotic, ideology-driven crusades and saddle America with burdens it can ill afford...

...Wilson's own project for perpetual peace," writes McDougall, "was keenly provincial, since it presumed to transcend all the clashes of interests and values and the different historical experiences of every nation on earth...

...leading Progressives like Jacob Riis, Gifford Pinchot, and Robert La Follette all supported the Spanish war and the insular acquisitions...

...Wilsonianism has become our second New Testament diplomatic tradition—and indeed Wilson has attained an almost Christ-like stature in American history, crucified by "isolationist" opponents for his idealistic internationalism...

...In his first term in office, the 28th president sought to teach Latin Americans how "to elect good men" by constantly intervening in their affairs...

...In fact, McDougall argues, the war—undertaken to liberate the Cuban people from the Spanish "monster" — inaugurated the progressive era in American diplomacy: Imagine: 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...

...foreign policy was meant to be "the shield, sword and lawyer's brief for American Exceptionalism...