National Mood and American Foreign Policy: A Suggestive Essay

Abstract

DIPLOMATIC HISTORIANS ARE PAINFULLY AWARE OF THE DIMINISHED state of their field. Where fifty, forty, and even thirty years ago the history of international relations stood at the forefront of the profession, diplomatic historians are now struggling to keep history faculties from downgrading or even eliminating the field. The reason, as most diplomatic historians would agree, largely rests with diplomatic history. Though the field can boast of quiet achievements, it has lacked the wave of transforming research that has informed social history in general and the history of American slavery and the prenational experience in particular. Where social historians see themselves opening new avenues of inquiry, their diplomatic counterparts ask, What's Wrong with American Diplomatic History? and see themselves as part of a field that is Marking Time. Yet the fact that diplomatic historians are fretting over the state of their art is a good sign. Revitalization will not come from ceremonial pronouncements on the relevance of their field. It depends, as many acknowledge, on finding fresh perspectives or defining more imaginative approaches to the study of why and how nations have acted toward one another. This essay is one suggestion for advancing that effort.1 American diplomatic historians might do well to reexamine major questions from an American Studies perspective or in the context of cultural change. More specifically, they need to explore how national mood or feelings generated by internal tensions registered on foreign affairs. A great deal has been written about economic forces and the influence of elites in