Special Providence: America’s Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

Citation

Richardson, J.G. (2002), "Special Providence: America’s Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World", Foresight, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 56-57. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs.2002.4.2.56.1

This book is a catalogue of the past and, more significantly, what could be a highly useful guide over the years to come in the conduct of others’ relations with the USA. A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in America’s attitudes and actions abroad, Walter Russell Mead analyzes – in a perceptive effort to understand his country’s critics abroad – US policy over the past two‐and‐a‐quarter centuries. In the author’s best American vernacular, he strives to rationalize “both at home and abroad a kind of hayseed image when it comes to foreign policy”.

To that end Mead identifies four competing strategies, or “schools” – approaches usually complementary when the going gets rough – that have emerged since 1775:

1. 1.

   (1) the Jeffersonian school, the thesis that US foreign policy should be more concerned about safeguarding democracy at home than spreading it abroad (and devoid of costly military and economic leadership);

2. 2.

   (2) the Hamiltonian, whose champions believe that a firm “alliance between the national government and big business” will ensure domestic stability as well as “effective action abroad”;

3. 3.

   (3) the Jacksonian, whereby “the most important goal” of the Washington government “in both foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and the economic well‐being” of its people; and finally

4. 4.

   (4) the Wilsonian school, a strategy whose tenet is that America has a “moral obligation and an important national interest in spreading American democratic and social values throughout the world”.

Thomas Jefferson, once diplomatic representative in Paris and later third president of his country, was George Washington’s secretary of state in the 1790s, while Alexander Hamilton was secretary of the treasury and a strong believer in the right and righteousness of a world capitalist system. Andrew Jackson served as seventh president (as a 13‐year old, he had taken part in the war of independence from Britain); he commanded American troops at the decisive battle of New Orleans, the parting knell for British and French imperial intentions south of Canada – and, a half‐century later, of all Spanish aspirations in the New World. Woodrow Wilson is the US leader best remembered abroad as the American instrumental in dismembering the Ottoman and Austro‐Hungarian Empires in 1919.

Author Mead, neither Americo‐ nor Euro‐centric, shows a full awareness too of the Pacific region’s growing influence in the past 150 years. “Japan’s defeat of Russia at the dawn of the twentieth century signaled the definite defeat of [Occidental] racial theories. The European nations and their daughter states around the world would have come to terms with the moral, political, and economic claims of nonwhite peoples as these groups mastered Western technologies and sought redress of their many grievances” (p. 122).

Still in the past, US relations with its nearest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, combined over the generations both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian strategies, with insistent overtones of the Hamiltonian. The Wilsonian compulsion together with the Jacksonian pushed the Americans into the First and Second World Wars, but melded somewhat with the Jeffersonian when America later invented NATO and committed itself at the same time (and, in the process, the United Nations) to South Korea. Yet, by the time of Vietnam, Washington’s strategy became thoroughly befuddled.

Better to be a do‐gooder abroad than at home?

It was the Jacksonian influence, of course, that countered the self‐determination of nations found in Wilson’s 14 points and the altruism implicit in Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a League of Nations. None the less, a generation later, a changing and far harsher world allowed a combined influence of Wilsonian, Jeffersonian and reluctant Jacksonian views to preside at the creation of the United Nations.

With the end of the Cold War 45 years afterwards, a Jacksonian‐Hamiltonian stance took America into the Gulf War while a Wilsonian urge helped shove the USA to the midst of the Balkans, albeit in collusion with a handful of like‐minded allies. Intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia was by now under the guise of a newly‐enunciated humanitarian intervention. But neither the Jeffersonian nor the Jacksonian model, certainly not the Hamiltonian or the provisionally disempowered Wilsonians, could go for intervention in the Africa of 1994‐2001 – humanity compelling or not.

The Hamiltonians did not remain idle, however: not at all. In the arena of industry and trade, it was at US urging that the UN’s General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs went through its various “rounds”, culminating in the 1990s in the establishment of the UN’s World Trade Organization as a concrete interpretation of globalization (and an invitation to urban riots by the antiglobalists).

How much will the events since September 2001 change the American attitudes towards the rest of the world? Although Mead’s book was published just as the New York and Washington incidents took place under al‐Qaeda’s inspiration (so that they are not commented upon), the actions since then in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia and Yemen are a validating indication of how the Jeffersonian‐Jacksonian strategies are likely to prevail in the future, but with probably limited inputs from the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian watchdogs.

Mead’s book is the result of years of probing reflection. It is the only one of its kind, serious and well‐documented besides, and should serve non‐American specialists concerned with their own countries’ or corporations’ or universities or think‐tanks’ training and cultural programming to adapt to constantly changing relationships with this era’s superpower. The message should help them decide their own policies vis‐à‐vis the USA. (Even your reviewer learned much about his own people’s social psychology from strategic analyst Mead.)

Need international relations remain messy in the future? Possibly so, intimates Mead, but the rivalries can be managed. “In order to rebuild an effective strategic consensus …, we must take the old myth of virtuous [American] isolation buried beneath” what he calls the “myth of the Cold War” with a new perspective on the USA – “concerned from its earliest days with the growth and development of world order – with the moral, social, economic and political as well as the security dimensions of that order”. This book qualifies as one to be heeded as well as widely read.