Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776.

• Author: Raico, Ralph

By Walter A. McDougall

Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Pp. 286. $26.00.

As the title suggests, in this work Walter McDougall, professor of international relations at Penn and Pulitzer prize winner, examines the whole history of U.S. foreign policy, utilizing religious terminology. His examination yields an American "Bible," which happens to be divided into two "Testaments," each containing four "Books."

The "Old Testament," which dominated the rhetoric and "for the most part, the practice," from the founding to the last decade of the nineteenth century, preached the doctrines of Liberty (or Exceptionalism), Unilateralism (often "mislabeled Isolationism"), the American System (or the Monroe Doctrine), and Expansion (or Manifest Destiny). Similarly, in the twentieth century, rhetoric and for the most part practice have been under the sway of a "New Testament" composed of Progressive Imperialism, Wilsonianism (or Liberal Internationalism), Containment, and, today increasingly, Global Meliorism. (The capitalization is McDougall's.) Each of these doctrines remains a part of "the collection of options" available to the United States in its international dealings. (For the record, the author's use of religious terminology and frequent religious imagery is of questionable heuristic value, and it diverts attention from sources of American foreign policy originating far from religious faith.)

McDougall's presentation of the first tradition--liberty, or exceptionalism--is well done. He states that to the Republic's founding generation, America's calling "was not to do anything special in foreign affairs, but to be a light to lighten the world" (p. 20). The Founders "agreed to limit the content of American Exceptionalism to Liberty at home, period" (p. 21). He sums it up pithily: "Foreign policy existed to defend, not define, what America was" (p. 37).

His exposition of the second tradition, unilateralism, presents conceptual problems, however. First of all, if Washington's Farewell Address is its inaugurating document, it is not a tradition separate from liberty, but simply the means of defending the first tradition. Moreover, one of McDougall's main purposes throughout is to show that unilateralism was not isolationism, which in fact never existed. "Our vaunted tradition of `isolationism,'" he states, "is no tradition at all, but a dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies" (p. 40). That the term functions as a smear (and a proven method of forestalling debate) is true enough. But it is hard to see how Washington's doctrine can be equated with McDougall's unilateralism. After all, it is possible to pursue a policy of intense global activism unilaterally.

McDougall tries to debunk the customary isolationist interpretation of the Farewell Address. Washington's advice was that "taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." And he declared, "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible" ("Washington's Farewell Address," in Documents of American History, edited by Henry Steele Commager [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948], 174, emphasis in original). The latter statement, incidentally, was the motto Richard Cobden, the...