Dangerous Conflation?: A Review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

32 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 Dangerous Conflation? A Review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century Frank Ninkovich Robert Kagan is best known as the author Of Paradise andPower (2003), an analysis of American and European views of international relations that features the much-quoted tag line, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." As one of the signers of the Project for the New American Century letter to President Clinton inJanuary 1998 that recommended forcible regime change in Iraq, he is also known as a neoconservative advocate of a muscular foreign policy. With the recent appearance of DangerousNation:America's Foreign Policyfrom ItsEarliestDays to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 2006), the first volume of his revisionist history of U.S. foreign relations, the word on the historical grapevine is that the book is a rebuttal to liberal internationalists who view the Bush administration's foreign policies as a historical aberration. Though it could easily be interpreted in diis way, I will try to review the book on its merits as a work of history. Kagan's ambitious goal is to demolish the narrative of discontinuity, the leap from isolationism to world power that has become second nature in the way we think about die history of U.S. foreign relations. Specifically, he wants to dismande "the pervasive myth of America as isolationist and passive until provoked." His book is "more about expansion and ambition, idealistic as well as materialistic , than about isolationist exemplars and cities upon hills." From earliest colonial times, he asserts, Americans were involved actively in a career of expansion —commercial, cultural, territorial, and ideological —so much so that the die was cast by die time of the Revolution. "By 1776," he says, "the ambitions driving Americans toward their future overwhelming global power were already in place." If anything, these appetites were enhanced by the universalist ideology upon which the republic was founded, which assured that "foreign policy and national identity were intimately bound togetiier." This propensity to aggressive idealism did not rule out hardheaded calculations of national interest whose net effect was isolationism. But isolation and nonentanglementwere merely tactics that could not be upgraded to basic principles because "American liberalism was inherendy entangling." This argument combines and recasts elements of older interpretive traditions. William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin School of diplomatic historians long ago articulated a continuity thesis diat portrayed the U.S. as an ideologically driven expansionist republic, though in their telling it was a story of imperialism in which the nation was propelled outward principally by economic "open door" motives . Kagan does not neglect economic factors or material pursuits; indeed, he often highlights the imperatives of the marketplace. But economic growth is forced to compete for space in his story with even more potent and mutually reinforcing drivers of expansion : idealism and power. Kagan's emphasis on power and principle also has interpretive precursors in the realist tradition that Kagan's ambitious goal is to demolish the narrative of discontinuity, the leap from isolationism to world power that has become second nature in the way we think about the history of U.S. foreign relations. first emerged among diplomatic historians in the 1950s. He would agree with the realists that the desire for power is universal, but he parts company with their tendency to see American idealism as a regrettable congenital defect whose symptoms, left untreated , flare up from time to time and needlessly inflict much pain and suffering. For Kagan, idealism is integral to the nation's identity. Thus Americans conceived of themselves from the get-go not only as the rightful heirs of the British Empire, but also as a universal nation whose ideological principles "transcended blood ties and national boundaries ." Though future American conflicts would trumpet America's attachment to ideals, he acknowledges that at times this tendency "cast a harsh glare upon the hypocrisies of a nation that proclaimed universal rights yet did not universally honor them." This criticism, which is repeated in a number of places, suggests that practice should have been squared with principle, in contrast to the...