The four schoolmasters.

• Author: Brands, H.W.W.
• Position: Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001,), 345 pp., $30.

THE BRITISH statesman Lord Bryce once remarked that describing American foreign policy was like describing the snakes of Ireland. "There are no snakes in Ireland", he added.

It's an old anecdote but an apt one for Walter Russell Mead, who rebuts Bryce from the outset of his new book, Special Providence. Mead discovers lots of snakes in Ireland--four species, in fact. One species that predominated for decades bore protective coloration, which was why Bryce missed it. But it and the other three have long been active, often aggressive, and very successful in defending and expanding their territory.

The first species--that is, the first school of American foreign policy--Mead calls "Hamiltonian", after the founding Secretary of the Treasury and the most influential advisor to George Washington. Mead's Hamiltonians see the world as a marketplace and perceive the purpose of U.S. foreign policy to be the enhancement of America's position in that marketplace. They are conservatives in the sense of doubting the perfectibility, or even the substantial improvability, of human nature; yet they are optimists regarding the benefits that will accompany the growth of commerce and the institutions that support it. For the first century of America's independent existence, the Hamiltonians advocated cooperation with Britain, the world's leading trader. Upon Britain's decline in the 20th century, they pushed the United States to the van of world trade, but their fundamental belief remained as before: that business was both the raison d'etre of foreign policy and the facilitator of such collateral benefits as peace and stability.

Mead's second school of foreign policy is the "Jeffersonian", which arose about the same time as the Hamiltonian, and in opposition to it. The touchstone of Jeffersonian thought is democracy, which occurs, the Jeffersonians judge, not as some happy side effect of commerce, but only as the result of careful cultivation. Where the Hamiltonians are pessimists regarding human nature but optimists regarding the institutions of commerce, the Jeffersonians are just the opposite. They revere the individual and fear that institutions, especially those of commerce, will corrupt personal virtue. For this reason they have been skeptical of intercourse with other nations; better to perfect democracy at home than risk it in the hurly-burly of foreign relations. Their enemies have called them isolationist; Mead prefers the term nationalist. But, however labeled, the Jeffersonians have put the domestic interest so far ahead of the international interest as to convey the frequent impression of indifference, even hostility, t o the world beyond American shores.

The "Jacksonians" have a similarly domestic orientation, although they have been the driving force behind some of America's most energetic assertions of interest and power abroad. Where the Jeffersonians have tended toward elitism, handing down democracy from above, the Jacksonians are populists, viewing democracy as arising from the people themselves. In contrast to the diffident nationalism of the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians brandish a belligerent nationalism, quick to take offense, punctilious as to honor, untroubled by the denial of rights to foreigners and other lesser breeds beyond the law. The most militant of the four schools, the Jacksonians have consistently supported spending for defense, and have never been reluctant to use the weapons once purchased. Yet their aim in fighting has been American victory, not the salvation of the world. Perhaps the world is redeemable, perhaps not; but the Jacksonians waste no time on such airy questions, as their sole concern is for the vigorous defense of Amer ican honor and interests abroad.

Mead's fourth school is the "Wilsonian", which believes that the world can be saved, and that America is called to save it. Named, of course, for the President who promised to...