JAMES BRYCE, a future British ambassador to the United States, wrote at the end of the nineteenth century that the role of foreign policy in American life could be described the way travelers describe snakes in Ireland: there are none. At the time, however, most Americans would have taken issue with Lord Bryce's claim that the United States had no foreign policy worth noting. Americans of the day widely believed that their gov ernment maintained an active, indeed global, foreign policy. And with good reason. The Spanish-American War had just ended, and U.S. forces were still waging a bitter war against guerrillas in the Philippines. Debates raged about whether the United States should annex Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and if so, on what terms. It was a time, in fact, when many Americans were struck by a sense that the United States was coming of age in the international arena. That Lord Bryce, a British diplomat, would have discounted and minimized the importance of U.S. foreign policy despite such events is perhaps not surprising. But the fact that so many important American writers and thinkers today would join him in a wholesale