The Author of Liberty: Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy

...the marginalization of Palestinian militants...

...In the early 1790s, some Americans dreamed of making a world revolution by supporting the French...

...From the Indian wars to the Mexican War of 1846 to the Philippine War of 1899 to Vietnam in the 1960s, Americans erroneously believed, just as they did before the Iraq War, that they would be welcomed as agents of political transformation...

...Moderates throughout the region would take heart...

...occupation of Iraq dragged on, George W. Bush declared in April 2004 that the United States is "the greatest power on the face of the earth," and that "we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom...

...After the United States drove Spain out of the Caribbean and the Pacific in 1898, William McKinley's administration, goaded by the would-be imperialists, decided to annex the Philippines and other Spanish possessions in order, McKinley said, "to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them...

...Since the country's founding, Americans have invoked the Bible and Christian, often specifically Protestant, beliefs to explain their role in the world...

...In some instances, of course, reality matches these ideas, but even when it does not, as it usually does not, the apocalyptic mentality can impose itself...

...That was not so much a product of his peculiar psychology but of the circumstances in which he found himself in early 2002—facing an unexpected threat from al-Qaeda, on the one hand, and buoyed by an initial success in Afghanistan, on the other...

...The specific terms of this framework—exactly what kind of world Americans want to create and exactly who stands in the way—have changed over the last two and a quarter centuries...

...Even many religious conservatives— once they have entered politics—have turned from a pessimistic, pre-millennial to a more optimistic, post-millennial outlook on America's role in the world...

...Writing in 1985, Robert Bellah, who pioneered the study of America's "civil religion," criticized the Reagan administration for depicting its intervention in Central America as an attempt to help "democratic angels" who were battling "hellish fiends and brutish men...

...That would entail removing the sources of conflict among the advanced nations and aiding the transition of former colonies to selfgovernment...

...The millennialist framework is too deeply embedded in Americans' understanding of their role in the world...

...Yet on major questions involving war and peace, the idea of a chosen nation, attempting to transform the world in the face of evil, has recurred and played a significant role in justifying and explaining American actions...

...While reserving America's right to defend itself, and (after the Second World War) circling America's adversaries with military bases, these presidents vested the effort to transform the world in an array of American-led international and regional organizations, including the UN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the World Trade Organization...

...Bush saw Saddam as a "madman...

...After his April 2004 speech, U.S...

...These beliefs reflected error and ignorance as well as the blindness that a millennial mentality encourages...

...It argues that the United States should be "realistic" about how quickly and easily it can transform the world in its image...

...The third component of the framework is the idea that the United States, in carrying out its mission, represents the forces of good against those of evil...

...as did the Nazis and the Soviet communists...

...It can also shape the way people see reality, inclining them toward revolutionary rather than evolutionary change...

...This argument can be abused, as it has been by the Bush administration...

...RELIGION HAS ENTERED into Americans' thinking about foreign policy primarily by framing how Americans understand their role and responsibilities in the world...

...The cold war was "Armageddon...

...Jonathan Edwards, the leading figure of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, predicted that "the dawning, or at least the prelude, of that glorious work of God . . . shall begin in America...

...The first is the idea of America as God's "chosen nation"—from Abraham Lincoln's "the last, best hope of earth" to Madeleine Albright's 54 DISSENT / Fall 2005 RELIGION AND U.S...

...FOREIGN POLICY and freedom greet the skies...

...In these and many other statements, Bush invoked religious ideas to justify U.S...

...and the hopes for New England were transferred to the new United States, which, Thomas Barnard declared, "are now His vineyard...

...Clinton's "indispensable nation" became Bush's "unique role...

...Over the last three centuries, America has steadily risen in prosperity and power...

...FOREIGN POLICY dential realism...

...He cautioned against "permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others...

...Wilson didn't think that the United States—or, for that matter, Britain or France—could achieve this alone without perDISSENT / Fall 2005 57 RELIGION AND U.S...

...Although Wilson had a realistic view of World War I, he had an entirely unrealistic view, nourished by Protestant millennialism and by America's decisive role in the war (and by the adulation visited upon him), of the kind of international organization that could be created in the wake of the war and of its possible accomplishments...

...William McKinley's secretary of state, John Hay, described the Indian wars as "the righteous victory of light over darkness . . . the fight of civilization against barbarism...

...Although George Kennan would later embrace a strict realism, his theory of cold war containment was pru60 DISSENT / Fall 2005 RELIGION AND U.S...

...By his second term in office, Theodore Roosevelt had abandoned the imperial strategy and sought instead to position the United States as a mediator between the other warring imperial powers...

...FOREIGN POLICY sisted that "as this war had drawn the nations temporarily together in a combination of physical force, we shall now be drawn together in a combination of moral force that will be irresistible...

...AS BUSH'S FOREIGN policy in Iraq failed to meet its initial expectations, foreign policy experts in Washington put forth an alternative version of international politics called "realism...

...Yet the critics who point to the influence of the role of religion in Bush's foreign policy still have a point...

...It would lead, administration officials maintained, to democratic regimes in Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia...

...In fact, there was nothing exceptional about Bush's resort to religion...

...In 1971, Nixon put aside his own demonizing of "Red China" and sought to normalize relations...

...Pollack's book had the imprimatur of the Council on Foreign Relations and was written in the style of the dispassionate expert, but its conclusions were informed by an apocalyptic view...

...During the early years of the nineteenth century, the Civil War, the 1930s, the 1970s, and even the early 1990s, many Americans believed that they were better off seeking salvation at home while avoiding what Jefferson called the "exterminating havoc" beyond America's shores...

...The chosen people—whom Edwards and Mather had identified with the Visible Saints of New England's Congregational churches—became the citizens of the United States...

...During the Second World War, Roosevelt told Congress, "We on our side are striving to be true to [our] divine heritage...

...Bush simply made the Protestant roots of this outlook more explicit by his references to the "Author of Liberty" and the "Maker of Heaven...

...Jacksonian Democrats wanted to build a continental Christian civilization against the opposition of "red demons...

...In its founding statement, it argued for a "restrained and focused foreign policy [that] will best protect the liberty and safety of the American people in the twenty-first century...

...In 1963, Kennedy looked beyond the "long twilight struggle" of the cold war and backed a test ban treaty with the Soviet Union...

...Government officials make mistakes all the time for perfectly mundane reasons...

...But the United States has certainly been far better off with a democratic Europe than it was with a Europe divided between autocracies and democracies, and it would be better off still if other parts of the world followed Europe's example...

...A shorter version of this essay has appeared as a policy brief for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...FOREIGN POLICY petuating imperialism and provoking a nationalist backlash...

...In the late 1890s, the young Theodore Roosevelt and other imperialists, writing in the wake of the American victory in the Spanish-American war and ignoring ample evidence of discord in the world, maintained that the race to carve up colonies was leading to a more peaceful, prosperous world...

...That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned...

...The First World War was "the war to end all wars...

...There have, of course, been times when this outlook did not prevail or when it was seriously challenged...

...The British had similar illusions from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century...

...Success in world politics," Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History, "necessitates a disavowal of the pretentious elements in our original dream, and . . . requires a modest awareness of the contingent elements in the values and ideas of our devotion, even when they appear to us to be universally valid...

...That's not because the religious framework has been genetically transmitted to Americans, but because America, unlike Britain, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, has yet to suffer a crushing setback to its hopes...

...He spurned working through international organizations— whether to protect the environment, prosecute war crimes, or wage war—except on a purely ad hoc basis and under American control...

...During most of the nineteenth century, American foreign policy was principally concerned with continental expansion and with acquiring lands formerly occupied by Indians and Mexicans...

...And in 1987, to the consternation of many conservatives, Reagan signed an arms control agreement with the country he had once called the evil empire...

...Woodrow Wilson was initially a proponent of American imperialism, but, chastened by his own unsuccessful intervention in Mexico in 1914 and by the outbreak of the European war, he developed a new strategy for transforming the world...

...I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein...

...As a result, successive generations have passed on the belief that the United States has a special role in the world...

...Woodrow Wilson saw America's leadership in the new League of Nations as leading to the "liberation and salvation of the world...

...Many high officials have invoked an American "mission" or "calling" to "further freedom's triumph...

...What has differentiated their foreign policies is how each of them attempted to make good on this commitment...

...Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appear to have been determined even before September 11 to oust Saddam Hussein in order to assert American power in the oil-rich Middle East...

...God, Senator Albert Beveridge declared during the debate over the annexation of the Philippines, had "marked the American people as His chosen nation to . . . lead in the redemption of the world...

...The first generation of Americans, for instance, saw themselves creating what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire of liberty" against the opposition of Old World tyranny...

...WHAT HAS distinguished the most successful from the least successful American policymakers has been their ability to focus on America's objectives, as given by the millennialist framework, while still retaining a complex and non-apocalyptic view of means and ends, capabilities and challenges...

...Political scientist Hans Morgenthau wrote in Politics Among Nations that "the state has no right to let moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, in itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival...

...the cause of the oppressed against the oppressor...

...He wanted the advanced nations to work cooperatively in international organizations to guide the former colonies toward self-government and to prevent the outbreak of wars among themselves...

...The best that we have achieved as a people, a people that really has brought hope to millions all over the world, is tied up with our sense that we are a special people, that ours is a noble experiment upon which much depends .. . Reinhold Niebuhr, who described himself as a "Christian realist," makes a similar point in analyzing America's entry into World War I. Rejecting critics who charged that "making the world safe for democracy" was "moral cant," Niebuhr wrote: "For the fact is that every nation is caught in the moral paradox of refusing to go to war unless it can be proved that the national interest is imperiled, and of continuing in the war only by proving that something much more than national interest is at stake...

...By defeating England, or seizing Texas from Mexico, or driving the Indians out of the Black Hills, or defeating Kaiser Wilhelm and then Adolf Hitler, or even driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the United States would secure not merely a temporary reprieve from further conflict but a triumph of civilization, a new world order, and an end to war...

...Clearly, the invasion cast a shadow, but not one that encouraged democracy in those two countries...

...During World War I, Wilson's secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, championed the strategy of transformationthrough-example in opposition to direct intervention...

...Jefferson and George Washington both conceived of continental expansion as the basis for what Washington called a "rising American empire...

...But Bellah cautioned against alternative foreign policy doctrines that abandon "the notion of any divine mission" in favor of "the practical pursuit of national interest": That advice . . . presumes a nation other than the one in which we live...

...But this dissenting faith has run up against the success of the American dream...

...There are a host of reasons why the administration went to war...

...He conjured up an image of a deranged Saddam at the end of his life using nuclear weapons to revenge himself on the United States or Israel...

...During the height of this hysteria, Reinhold Niebuhr, a supporter of Harry Truman's cold war policies, took aim at the mentality that America's millennialist view was nurturing...

...After the collapse of Oliver Cromwell's revolution in 1658, they transferred their hopes to the New World...

...New England, Cotton Mather wrote in 1702, is "the spot of Earth, which the God of Heaven spied out as the center of the future kingdom...

...In the 1930s, many Americans saw Europe as beyond redemption...

...During the Second World War, Roosevelt rejected plans, based on a view of Germany as inherently evil, for dismembering and deindustrializing the country...

...That meant that Saddam might unleash destruction on the United States even if he and his regime were destroyed in the process...

...And in May, Bush again asserted that encouraging "freedom's advance" is the "calling of our time...

...Clinton's commitment to "democratic engagement and enlargement" became Bush's pledge to "the spread of freedom...

...There have been significant variations in the use of the framework—by isolationists, for example—and even explicit repudiation of it by what I will call the "strict realists...

...Where Bush differs from Clinton (and from his own father), however, is in the way he applied this framework to the development of foreign policy...

...DISSENT / Fall 2005 61...

...In 1899, McKinley ignored reports from military men in the field in deciding to spurn the Filipino independence movement...

...In the early 1990s, some Americans worried that their country had fallen behind Europe and Japan and was no longer capable of world leadership...

...FOREIGN POLICY sion...

...IN THE WAKE OF the September 11, 2001, attacks, George W. Bush fully embraced the same overall view of America's role as his predecessors...

...Our mission is to implant hope in the breast of humanity," he said, "and substitute higher ideals for the ideals which have led nations into armed conflicts...

...Historian Ernest Tuveson once argued that Marxism—with its stages of history culminating in revolution and communist utopia—was itself a product of Protestant millennialism...

...Similarly, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine in September 2002, Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key administration ideologue, predicted that after Iraq became "the first Arab democracy," it would "cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world...

...In The Threatening Storm, Kenneth Pollack rejected the idea of deterring Saddam without an invaDISSENT / Fall 2005 59 RELIGION AND U.S...

...Bush's belief that America has a "mission" or a "calling" from the "Maker of Heaven" to spread freedom around the world puts him in a mainstream of American foreign policy...

...These exaggerated fears led policymakers to ignore Sino-Soviet tensions for at least a decade and to discount the strong nationalist element in communist movements in Vietnam and Latin America...

...And during the debate over whether to invade Iraq in 2003, Bush administration supporters counterposed the young Theodore Roosevelt's imperial strategy to a Wilsonian strategy of seeking "liberation and salvation" through international cooperation...

...First, it is specifically rooted in the Protestant millennialism that was brought to America from England in the seventeenth century...

...Theodore Roosevelt's generation envisioned the spread of AngloSaxon civilization against the opposition of barbarians and savages...

...As a result, any pessimism about the future, any restrictive view of America's role in the world has periodically given way to the more expansive millennialism of Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan, and Clinton...

...Where these peoples have been defeated or have abandoned their millennial hopes, the United States has retained its own...

...IN ADDITION TO its formulation in explicitly religious terms, the framework is religious in two other important ways...

...One can argue that the framework itself, prudentially adapted to reality, could achieve results that accord with what strict realists would call the national interest...

...America's more difficult moments— and those of George W. Bush's presidency— have come when its leaders have allowed religion not only to shape their vision of the future but also their understanding of the present...

...Still, the Bush administration's mistakes echo a pattern that runs through American history...

...News and World Report commented, "Listening to President Bush's religious rhetoric, some Americans may wonder if they elected a president or a pastor...

...foreign policy: the idea of "calling," for example, has its origins in Calvinist theology...

...In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, however, as Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan began to carve the world into colonies, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other prominent statesmen and intellectuals advocated that the United States seek to transform the world by becoming an imperial power—not simply by establishing a model republic on the continent, but by seeking what Roosevelt called the "domination of the world...

...George W. Bush began with a more pessimistic view of America's role, only to embrace a full-blown version of Protestant millennialism after America's military success in Afghanistan...

...During the last century, most of the heated foreign policy debates have been between proponents of these competing strategies for changing the world...

...In the late eighteenth century, America's founders transformed this biblical millennialism into what historian Nathan Hatch has called America's "civil millennialism...

...During the early cold war, many American officials, stunned by the Soviet Union's acquisition of the bomb and its domination of Eastern Europe, succumbed to a view of the Soviet Union as the demonic center of a seamless world conspiracy...

...Wilson's vision of a new millennium blinded him to enduring conflicts in Europe and Asia...

...During the 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon said that America had come "into the world 180 years ago not just to have freedom for ourselves, but to carry it to the whole world . . . " And in his second inaugural, Reagan described Americans as "one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and hopeful world...

...In short, it is the cause of heaven against hell—of the kind Parent of the universe, against the prince of darkness and the destroyer of the human race...

...More to the point, Bush repudiated Wilson's liberal internationalist strategy for bringing about global democracy...

...That could eventually happen, but it was certainly not an immediate result of the invasion...

...From the nation's founding until the 1890s, most American policymakers believed that the best means to transform the world was by example—by creating what John Winthrop called a "city on the hill" that all nations could emulate...

...In Great Britain, on the eve of the Versailles peace conference, Wilson in58 DISSENT / Fall 2005 RELIGION AND U.S...

...In 1777, for instance, Abraham Keteltas, a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army, declared that what was at stake in the war was "the cause of trust against error and falsehood...

...A few arrests at home fed fears that this conspiracy threatened not only Western Europe, but also Phoenix, Boise, and San Diego...

...Washington was not arguing for what would later be called isolationism...

...One, inspired by European practices and theories, has enjoyed considerable support in international relations departments and at the mid-levels of the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency...

...They translated Protestant millennialist doctrine into the language of American nationalism and exceptionalism...

...At best, they see foreign policy as a means of carrying out "God's commission" to evangelize the world before the seven violent years of tribulation take place...

...Americans have been driven to make foreign policy decisions by a range of considerations that don't necessarily fit within the framework—acting sometimes in immediate self-defense (for instance, after the September 11, 2001, attacks) as well as for broader economic or geopolitical reasons...

...And the adversary became English tyranny and an Old World Catholicism that was trying to destroy "the church in the wilderness...

...Wilson was foiled by opposition at home and abroad, but his overall approach was at least partly adopted by American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton...

...These statements by Bush administration officials were, of course, for public consumption, but administration officials made similar statements privately to academics and journalists...

...Instead, they conceived of a large federation of equal states and citizens that by its size and population would command the attention of, and serve as an example to, other nations...

...Its aim was to "make the world safe for democracy" by dismantling the imperial system, which Wilson blamed for the war...

...This was not simply a way of condemning his inhumanity toward his own citizens, but of endowing him with attributes that threatened global havoc...

...The second is the idea that America has a "mission" or a "calling" to transform the world...

...ALTHOUGH STRICT realism is popular among political scientists, it has never gained a foothold in the national debate over foreign policy...

...In September 1991, Republican Pat Buchanan evoked religion in opposition to George H. W. Bush's focus on foreign policy, "What doth it profit a nation if it gain the whole world, and lose its own soul...

...What sets this president off from some of his more illustrious predecessors is that in making foreign policy—a task that requires an empirical assessment of means and ends—he has been guided both by the objectives of Protestant millennialism and by the mentality it has spawned...

...At a speech in Nashville, Tennessee, in August 2002, Cheney claimed that as a result of Saddam's ouster "extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad...

...JOHN B. JuDIs is a senior editor of the New Republic, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author most recently of The Folly of Empire (Scribner, 2004...

...This view was not so much a repudiation of Protestant millennialism as a variation of it, rejecting a transformative role for America, but 56 DISSENT / Fall 2005 RELIGION AND U.S...

...On the eve of war with Mexico in 1846, a New York poet wrote that Mexicans would greet American conquerors with the shout, "The Saxons are coming, our freedom is nigh...

...I acted," Bush would later say, "because I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman...

...Wilson was the first president to argue that the spread of democracy would make America safer and more prosperous...

...To a greater extent than his immediate predecessors, Bush has also allowed the millennialist framework and its accompanying mentality to color his view of reality...

...Its practitioners believe that policy decisions should be based strictly upon calculations of national interest and aimed only at maintaining a favorable balance of power...

...FOREIGN POLICY "indispensable nation," to George W. Bush's claim that the United States has "a unique role in human events...

...Americans who want to influence our foreign policy have to recognize the existence of a guiding framework inherited from Protestant millennialism...

...As one State Department official quipped prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush White House would probably not have decided to go to war if the Gulf's main product were kumquats instead of oil...

...It discourages complex distinctions and shadings in favor of generalities and absolute dichotomies...

...His was a strategy based on what his supporters called a "unipolar" vision of the world...

...and Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and their successors wanted to create a global democratic order against the opposition, first, of imperial Germany, then of fascism, and then of communism...

...The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy drew together political scientists with policy analysts from the Cato Institute, the New America Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...The other kind of realism is a prudential version of Protestant millennialism...

...In his inaugural address, Adams thanked an "overruling Providence which has so signally protected this country from the first...

...OST OF THE GREAT debates in American foreign policy have not been about the framework itself, but about how America should act to transform the world according to its ideal image of itself...

...Second, Americans approached these grand objectives, and the obstacles that seemed to stand in their way, with a religious mentality, characterized by an apocalyptic outlook characteristic of seventeenth-century Protestant millennialism...

...There are three key components of this framework...

...The United States shouldn't worry about spreading freedom, but about making its citizens safe and prosperous...

...How the United States can best encourage that to happen is another question entirely...

...That has made for some stirring oratory, but it has detracted from a clear understanding of the challenges facing the United States...

...In 2003, the Bush administration ignored its own military experts, intelligence services, and allied experts in planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq...

...The annexation of the Philippines led to a four-year war that claimed the lives of more than four thousand Americans and more than two hundred thousand Filipinos...

...And that certainly includes critics of George W. Bush...

...A case in point was the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq...

...and a generous appreciation of the valid elements in the practices and institutions of other nations though they deviate from our own...

...This experiment with imperialism proved ill-fated...

...Over the last fifty years, at least two different foreign policies have been called "realist...

...At other times, and particularly after the shock of a new overseas threat or the euphoria bred by a success at war, American officials have become captive of the religious mentality handed down from Protestant millennialism...

...It looks toward immediate resolution of conflict through an Armageddon-like event and discourages the postponement or modification of ultimate objectives...

...THE UNITED STATES IS not the only country to have imagined itself bringing on the millennium...

...the cause of righteousness against iniquity...

...This religious mentality can inspire dedication to a difficult goal, and it certainly did so during the Second World War and the cold war...

...In his "Farewell Address" in 1796, Washington warned against involving the United States, which was a minor power, with either side in the European struggle...

...Fundamentally, the cause of expansion is the cause of peace," Roosevelt wrote in 1899, justifying the annexation of the Philippines...

...And more important, did they allow religious beliefs not only to define America's ultimate objectives, but also to color their understanding of the challenge that America faces in achieving them...

...The American economy has always seemed to recover its buoyancy...

...the cause of pure and undefiled religion against bigotry, superstition, and human inventions...

...During the 1930s, isolationists mixed a lingering commitment to changing the world by example with a distaste for the world and all its works...

...A millennialist mentality was also evident in the administration's belief that invading Iraq would set off a chain reaction that would transform the entire Middle East...

...This view of America and of world history has a correlate in a dissenting version of Protestant millennialism—introduced to the United States in 1859 by English theologian John Nelson Darby and made popular among fundamentalists and Pentecostals—which holds that the world will end before the millennium and that the primary responsibility of Christians is to lead sinless lives so that Jesus will "rapture" them out of the world before the final, climactic wars take place...

...he wanted to ground the country's ultimate objectives in a sober appraisal of America's power and of foreign threats...

...Indeed, it has laid the basis for the greatest American foreign policy disaster since the war in Vietnam...

...Administration members continually referred to Saddam Hussein as "evil...

...Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire...

...Presidents from John Adams and Andrew Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan attributed America's role to "Providence" or "Destiny...

...victories in war blotted out the memory of past failures...

...During and after the First World War, Wilson resisted the widespread perception that German ambition was the sole cause of the war...

...and the end of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries...

...In his inaugural address in January this year, Bush declared that the United States had been given a "mission" by the "Maker of Heaven" and "Author of Liberty" to spread freedom and democracy...

...Obviously, this framework doesn't fully explain why the United States has adopted one foreign policy rather than another...

...But an apocalyptic mentality certainly played a role in giving strategic urgency to what had formerly been a secondary concern...

...And George W. Bush declared at West Point in May 2003, "We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name...

...What bizarre notions would run through his mind as he confronted his own mortality without having achieved any of his grandiose visions...

...In 1942, Roosevelt warned that in the war with Germany and Japan, "There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil...

...What strategy did they pursue in order to spread freedom...

...Similarly, neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick's essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards," while rejecting the Carter administration's human rights diplomacy, did not reject the spread of freedom as an overall objective...

...The millennium became a thousandyearreign of religious and civil liberty where, in Timothy Dwight's words, "Peace and right DISSENT / Fall 2005 55 RELIGION AND U.S...

...The English Puritans originally believed that England was to be the "new Israel"— the site of the millennium and of the climactic battle of Armageddon predicted in the Book of Revelation...

...FOREIGN POLICY retaining the view of America as the place where the hopes of humanity stand the best chance of being realized...

...In short, many presidents before Bush have invoked religious concepts or quoted the Bible to justify or explain a foreign policy dedicated, they claimed, to the spread of freedom and democracy...

...According to this apocalyptic outlook, major international conflicts involving the United States will be resolved through a cataclysmic transformation, not gradual or subtle change...

...Bush, his top advisers, and some part of the foreign policy elite began to see the world through the prism of Protestant millennialism...

...In addition, Americans would expect the conflict to be sudden, quickly concluded, and transformative, with the opposition capitulating to the superior force and virtue of the Americans...

...Certainly, one can attribute these errors of judgment to factors other than America's millennial heritage...

...Neither envisaged a colonial empire along the lines of the British...

...And America will do its duty...

...Bush has often been criticized for invoking religious belief in this manner...

...Many members of the policy elite, including former Clinton administration officials, shared some version of this outlook...

...Some of Bush's supporters have described his foreign policy as "Wilsonian," but what he shares with Wilson—a commitment to global democracy—he shares with most of Wilson's successors...