Conservative Internationalism.

• Author: Abrahamson, James L.
• Position: Book review

Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan by Henry R. Nau, Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2013, ISBN 978-0-691-15931-7, xiii, 321 pp., $35.00 Hardcover, also available as an e-book.

Dr. Henry R. Nau, for more than two years a senior advisor on President Reagan's National Security Council and prior to that Special Assistant to the Department of State's Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, now teaches at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Drawing on his academic and governmental experience, he has written a truly remarkable book accounting for the principal diplomatic successes of four American presidents--Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan--and calling attention to their use of the too often overlooked foreign policy Nau describes as conservative internationalism.

His introduction and first two chapters describe that policy at length and favorably compare it to realism, nationalism, and liberal internationalism. According to Nau, realists and nationalists rely on force and the balance of power to guide foreign policy. They aim to promote stability in the world and defend their nation's sovereign independence while remaining largely indifferent to the promotion of democracy abroad. Liberal internationalists, on the other hand, seek to spread freedom by working through inter-national institutions. They wish to limit threats or the use of force and reliance on the balance of power. (11)

Liberal and conservative internationalists agree on a lot: individual liberty, separation of governmental powers, equal opportunity, and self-government. (14) Moving beyond maintaining a balance of international power, they both seek to promote freedom abroad, i.e. increasing the number of the world's democracies.

Liberals, like Woodrow Wilson, try to achieve that outcome by acting through large international organizations such as the League of Nations or the United Nations. If acting through such bodies at all, conservatives prefer temporary or less centralized arrangements. Nor do conservatives fear the use of force, applying it as needed to make diplomacy work. Liberals rely instead on diplomacy, hoping to make the use of force unnecessary. (23-24)

The heart of Nau's book--though not its longest section--are the four chapters in which he describes conservative internationalism as employed by Jefferson, Polk, Truman and Reagan.

Jefferson used that foreign...