ABSTRACT
This book has sought to draw together international relations and history, while focusing on national ideology. It has argued that the Bush administration’s often controversial worldview cannot be fully understood without placing it in the context of the historical evolution of American internationalism. In part, the historical narrative of ideological evolution presented here serves to endorse one of realism’s core principles: as the underlying economic and military potential of the United States has grown, and as international circumstances have called for it, America’s strategic horizons have expanded. This is not the full story, however. The trajectory of steady expansion, involving enormous increases in global diplomatic and military commitment, necessitated the development of an ideological structure to support it. In noting the importance of this element, the book’s analysis finds itself in sympathy both with classical realism and with those varieties of constructivism that have sought to use domestic factors, especially national character and political culture, as an explanatory factor in state behaviour. It is crucial to note that the argument here is not that there is simple his-
torical continuity, though this is to an extent true. It is about change in response to circumstances, but as shaped and constrained by the intellectual legacy of the past. The George W. Bush administration’s strategic worldview displayed continuity from the objectives and assumptions of the Cold War strategy crafted by the Truman administration. That Cold War strategy in turn represented a blending of the Wilsonian and Rooseveltian ideas that formed the foundation of America’s first embrace of global engagement. And going back still further, the incipient internationalism constructed by Wilson and Roosevelt was itself the indirect product of America’s history, though not in the sense of straight continuity of thought: rather, it was an ideological bridge resulting from the need to carry the United States from the Founders’ Era ideology of hemispheric separatism to one of global entanglement. Viewed as a series of interlocking steps, therefore, the argument of the book is that the ideological posture of the United States in the twenty-first century can be linked explanatorily to the nation’s circumstances – and its ideas – during its earliest years. The national and international context of the United States in the years of
the Founders’ Era, and the choices its leaders made in those years, led it to shun conscious involvement with the global balance-of-power order based
upon competing national interests. Instead, it sought separation from the global system, while pursuing a steadily expanding benevolent hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. When circumstances – in the form of its own growing latent power as well as turbulence in the international system – subsequently pushed the United States to accept the status of a global power, it was not prepared politically simply to join the pre-existing balance-of-power order. The nation was culturally predisposed to resist such a move because it would require an outright break with the consensus ideology on foreign policy that had been dominant for several generations. America’s history had rendered the nation ideologically averse to explicit balance-of-power thinking about international order, and unwilling to openly participate in it. The policies called for by changed circumstances were ultimately reconciled
with the ideological principles of the past by making the new American internationalism conditional on the pursuit of radical reform of the international order in accordance with Wilsonian and Rooseveltian principles. This reformist agenda, however, meant not only demanding a more cooperative system of relations between states, but also the pursuit of the internal reconstruction of other nations. The strong causal connection drawn in American minds between liberal democracy within states and the emergence of a new world order between them lent to US foreign policy a prominent universalistic quality with which it has since become inextricably associated. Experienced in relating to other nations only by seeking either ideological detachment or the benign domination of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States sought in its new internationalism to extend the logic of the Monroe Doctrine to the global level. Its engagement with the world was predicated upon the spread of liberal values in an environment of American ‘leadership’. Though the Bush strategy of course represented a response to the particular
demands of contemporary circumstances, it also reflected continuing commitment to this evolved American worldview. As such, knowledge of the national ideological history of the United States is a significant help when seeking to understand the Bush administration’s mindset. The intended contribution of this book lies not merely in observing that an aversion to balanceof-power ideology is a feature of US foreign policy, but in offering this suggested explanation as to why that might be. It also serves to point out that while the Bush strategy’s efforts to address contemporary circumstances gave it qualities specific to the moment of its construction, in its more general propositions that strategy sat comfortably within a very American tradition of thinking about world order.
