Foreign Policy Continuity: War Finds Us

Abstract

Abstract : In recent months, a chorus has emerged to blame (or credit) President Barack Obama for sustaining many of the signature national security policies of his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Yet anyone puzzled by the similarities between the foreign and defense polices of Presidents Bush and Obama would do well to cast a glance backward, for this is hardly the first time we have heard such complaints. During the Cold War, and even before, a revisionist critique of American national security policy gained traction on the political left and, in some instances, among conservatives as well (interwar isolationists on the right, for example). Writers and historians like Charles Beard and, during the Vietnam-era in particular, William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber, offered up relentless denunciations of policymakers who, as Williams put it in his classic book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, defined safety in terms of conquest-or at any rate domination. Far from chalking up this propensity to current events, the revisionist school traced a pattern of American militarism all the way back to the nation's founding. Thusly defined, it did not matter who presided over U.S. foreign policy. The revisionists insisted, with a Marxian tinge, that America's foreign and military policies operated on autopilot. Prosperity, idealism, open markets, consumption, geopolitical heft, sheer avarice? the revisionists did not always agree on what accounted for the continuities in U.S. foreign policy, but they did agree that almost nothing would budge its course. With respect to the post-war era, their analyses do not stand the test of time. They fundamentally misread and misconstrued the foundation of U.S. national security policy from 1947 to 1990, attributing far greater significance to America's supposed appetite for expansion than it deserved, and all but ignoring the thermonuclear contest in which the United States had become trapped.