The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War.

• Author: Joffe, Josef

Is America just a nation among nations or novus ordo seclorum? That is the ur-question, and since the days of John ("Citty upon a Hill") Winthrop in 1630, Americans have never stopped asking themselves what sets them apart from the rest. Rightly so. America was different then, and it still is.

First, by dint of history. America started from scratch at a time when the other powers had been around the block a few times, for several hundred years, in fact. As late-comers, Americans were bound to ask new questions: how to fit into the power game, what cards to play, or whether to play at all with those corrupt potentates they had fled to build the "New Jerusalem."

Add to this geography. None of the others could even dream of a time-out option. Not to play was to perish; only Britain, with the world's nastiest navy and a nice stretch of ocean for a border, could occasionally stay aloof. But for the young republic it made sense to believe, as Washington put it, that "our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course."

Practically from Day One, the United States enjoyed a surfeit of deterrence power (later multiplied by nuclear weapons) that set it apart. Tocqueville still has it right: "Placed in the center of an immense continent... the Union is almost as much insulated from the world as if all its frontiers were girt by the ocean." This permitted a grand strategy as different from that of France or Germany as was the Rhine from the Atlantic Ocean.

Finally, ideology. America had spun off from the Old Continent like a new planet from the sun. Neither feudalism nor royalty, neither papacy nor empire, weighed down this eager child of the Enlightenment.(1) A nation indelibly stamped by Locke and the philosophes would obviously look through a prism quite different from Richelieu's or Palmerston's. George III's ex-subjects believed, in Paine's words, that they would "begin the world all over again." And to the rest of the globe, they trumpeted, as did Madison, that they knew "but one code of morality for man, whether acting singly or collectively." No raison d'etat for these folks.

In Europe, only Immanuel Kant talked that way, but he did not have much clout at the Prussian court. Over here, they fervently believed it - and rightly so. Wasn't America, soon pushing aside Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Indians, the most successful polity under the sun? Wasn't that proof of divine grace? And a mandate to improve retrograde races round the world - also known as "manifest destiny"? And so President McKinley just had to hold on to the Philippines: "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them."

Compare that to Frederick the Great's rationale for attacking Austria in 1740: His troops were "ready" and his coffers "well filled" so that "ambition, interest and my desire to be talked about" could carry the day. His was an absolutist state, and America a democracy - that was the biggest difference of them all. When the Richelieus planned their wars, they did not have to go on "Meet the Press", or testify before Congress. The national interest was what they said it was.

But American leaders had to slug it out with their public ab initio. Even before 1776, that made for passionate foreign policy debates that the late-starting democracies of Europe would only confront in the twentieth century. Hence the hoopla and hyperbole. The first official act of U.S. diplomacy, the Declaration of Independence, was one long plea before the court of the "opinions of mankind" - overargued, overwrought, and overladen with philosophical obiter dicta. And so it went. Until this day, such ringing rhetoric strikes foreigners as phony or corny. It is never just "We want" or "We shall." It is always some universal idea of righteousness, justice, or redemption. And no wonder: Unlike the others, America is a "creedal" democracy, one bound to imbue its oratory with a strong religious flavor (and fervor).

So, America is different. But how "exceptional" should it be? These are the questions around which Walter A. McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State revolves. To set up his argument, he re-slices the historical pie in a novel way. First he cuts it in two halves, and then into four pieces each. The first half he labels the "Old Testament." The four slices, from 1776 to the 1890s, are: "Liberty, or Exceptionalism", "Unilateralism, or Isolationism", "The American System, or Monroe Doctrine", "Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny." It was "all about Being and Becoming", about denying "the outside world the chance to shape America's future."

The "New Testament" has dominated the twentieth century. It "preached the doctrines of Progressive Imperialism, Wilsonianism, Containment, and Global Meliorism, or the belief that America has a responsibility to nurture democracy and economic growth around the world." The New Testament was about America shaping the outside world.

This book is a joy to read because, as The Economist rightly puts it, McDougall "combines breadth of vision with merciful brevity. He is erudite and consistently interesting." Moreover, Promised Land, Crusader State is a handy breviary of all those great quotes from Washington to Wilson you always need, but can never find in one place. But why this new "periodic table"; why two testaments?

Because McDougall wants to draw from history a moral for the here and now. Basically, his is a "Jewish" argument: The Old Testament had it right, and the New one, though full of nice ideas, was an unnecessary and misguided departure. The Promised Land phase was proper and fitting, the Crusader State was - and is - a perilous aberration. Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams were the true prophets because they would venture forth only to protect the precious gift that was America's alone: liberty and...