ABSTRACT
During the Vietnam War a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) lamented that the America they believed in had ‘broken their American heart’.1 Images of the skin of Vietnamese children being seared by napalm dropped from US planes contradicted the fundamental principles upon which the nation was built. The conception of America was then, as well as before and after, tied to its place in relation to the rest of the world. A sense of special mission was linked to the foundation myth of the nation. As one historian has explained this myth asserted, ‘God put America in a position of supremacy because its long-term purpose was to influence other nations to emulate it.’2 The role of the United States in global conflict has, therefore, played a crucial role in deepening American national identity. Whether by distancing itself from the corruptions and violence of the Old World or by intervening to ensure the preservation of freedom and democracy, American foreign policy was intrinsically connected to America’s sense of itself. The space available in this chapter precludes an attempt to survey American foreign policy in any detail – such an effort would require a singularly devoted and weighty volume. The focus here is on how American identity, national myth and sense of mission impacted on US involvement in three major twentieth-century conflicts: the First and Second World Wars and Vietnam. Some of the themes explored below will be picked up in the chapter on America and the ‘war on terror’ in the post 9/11 world. In his farewell address of 1796, President Washington warned his
fellow Americans to avoid permanent alliances with other nations and to steer clear of foreign entanglements. In 1823 President Monroe expressed a policy which was later to be coined the ‘Monroe Doctrine’. This nationalistic statement established two separate hemispheres, the New World and the Old World. Monroe asserted that the United States would not accept any further attempts at colonisation by the
European powers in the New World. He also assured these powers that the US would not interfere in their internal affairs or in their existing interests in the Americas. These statements established what many see as the traditionally isolationist position of American foreign policy. Nevertheless, this isolationist perspective was directly shaped by the circumstances in which the United States found itself in the nineteenth century. There was a desire to stay away from European wars and entangling alliances in order to protect the fledgling Republic. A nation struggling with the kind of internal tensions that would eventually lead to civil war was not in a position to engage forcefully on the international stage. The basic ideals of America’s founding myth, that it was an exceptional
nation, ‘the last best hope of earth’ as Lincoln stated, remained constant throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the US became an increasingly important player on the global stage, however, a debate developed over how the nation’s mission should be implemented. A sense of isolationism provided an increasingly weak echo of nineteenth-century conceptions because the nature of American power in the world changed in the twentieth century. Loren Baritz wrote that ‘a whisper runs through [American] history that the people of the world really want to be like us, regardless of what they or their political leaders say’.3 Twentieth-century debate was largely based around how much, if any, diplomatic and military force the United States should use to influence or break the hold of undesirable regimes and their leaders. Whichever path was chosen, ‘in the American mind their ultimate goals have been substantially identical: to create the necessary conditions in the outside world for the achievement of America’s national purpose’.4
