Special Providence: American Policy and How It Changed the World.

• Author: Mosettig, Michael D.
• Position: Imaginary Isolationists

SPECIAL PROVIDENCE: American Policy and How It Changed the World by Walter Russell Mead Knopf, $25.00

I'TS PRETTY REMARKABLE IF A NEW book about American foreign policy that barely mentions terrorism, much less Osama bin Laden, can stand up after September 11. This one does, brilliantly.

Walter Russell Mead, a prolific and engaging writer, has produced a history of American foreign policy turning upon American ideas and practices since the days of the Founders. At its core is a myth-breaking proposition that the U.S. has been actively, and mostly successfully, involved in the world economically and diplomatically since the early days of the Republic. American isolationism, the author argues, is a myth propagated to rally public opinion for engagement in the early days of the Cold War. The time spans when the U.S. seemed out of sync with the world, for instance in the decades after World War I and to some degree in the post-Cold War decade, are not the product of isolationism but the consequence of domestic gridlock among the four major schools of American policy. The author reminds that there would have been more than the necessary two-thirds of the Senate ready to ratify U.S. membership in a League of Nations with powers equivalent to the current United Nations had President Wilson been prepared to negotiate with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. It was this deadlock, not the small bloc of isolationists, that scuppered ratification.

The gridlock theory is as pertinent as any in explaining why the 1990s now starkly loom as one of the great wasted opportunities of American foreign policy. China proved remarkably resistant to the lure of democracy, while Russia and other former Soviet republics had trouble absorbing democracy or capitalism. American public support for humanitarian interventions was shaky at best. The post-World-War-II consensus for expanded free trade began melting after NAFTA gained narrow congressional approval in 1993. Congress only finally committed to paying back UN dues after the September 11 attacks. So much for the New World Order. Mead acknowledges he is on tricky ground with conventional historiography when he propounds his four-schools matrix. To over-simplify a highly textured presentation, he basically divides policy impulses among Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians, and Jacksonians. The first two are globalist in outlook, the Hamiltonians to promote primarily economic engagement, the Wilsonians to promote American...