The strange career of nation-building as a concept in US foreign policy

The opening chapter of the volume approaches the peculiar US vocation for nation-building on a global scale from the perspective of domestic experience. Jeremi Suri uses the study of the post-Civil War South by C. Vann Woodward to provide for non-Americans a sense of the ideological interstices and remarkable longevity of this feature of American “exceptionalism”. Writing outside of the idiom but with full sympathy for its constituent parts and continuities, Suri describes a deep US civic culture that celebrates self-governance, popular sovereignty and open trade on an uninterrupted continuum from home to the rest of the globe. Denied the normal components of national identity, American elite and popular cultures have, from Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 to Obama’s West Point speech of 2014, sustained a form of millennial conviction to universalise domestic beliefs. These ride above the particularities of culture, geography or ethnic encounters that necessarily confront a global power and which perforce cause alterations in tactics, but rarely for any length of time the broader strategic idiom. Equally, Suri, argues, the contradiction between national self-interest and the need to construct states and societies along recognisably US lines is repressed through narrow, ‘unionist’ perspectives. It is almost as if the American public imaginary cannot conceive of an allowable ‘other’, even though the efforts at self-fashioning undeniably create a multitude of victims.

Paul Wolfowitz and the promise of American power, 1969–2001

The study of foreign policy and international relations often takes ideas as rigid and fully formed, being assigned to individuals and categories of school without much attention to the processes by which they change calibre and gain or lose traction. David Milne’s politico-intellectual biography of Paul Wolfowitz from 1969 until he took up service in the administration of George W. Bush focuses precisely on the vagaries as well as the consistencies in the evolution of his thought. Many of the shifts and deepening convictions derived, of course, form the experience of observing and implementing US policy in the latter stages of the Vietnam War and thereafter. Milne takes us through the phases of Wolfowitz’s political evolution up to the moment of 9/11, showing that the “War on Terror” cannot simply be attributed to the trauma of that event; there were many existing tributaries that played into the Bush doctrine, and these have not always been given the recognition they deserve.

Race, utopia, perpetual peace: Andrew Carnegie’s dreamworld

Duncan Bell considers the extraordinary vision of an “Anglo-world” developed in the last decades of the 19th century by the Scots-American magnate Andrew Carnegie. Bell situates Carnegie’s writings of the 1880s and 1890s in the context of what he describes as “social dreaming on both sides of the Atlantic”, both in terms of Utopian literature and in those of more politicised theses current in elite intellectual circles: “democratic war” (HG Wells and William James); “empire peace” (JA Hobson and DG Ritchie), and “racial peace”.

Introduction: thinking about America in the world over the longer run

For all their bragging and their hypersensitivity, Americans are, if not the most critical, at least the most anxiously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the inadequacy of something or other – their national morality, their national culture, their national purpose. This very uncertainty has given their intellectuals a critical function of special interest. The appropriation of some of this self-criticism by foreign ideologues for purposes that go beyond its original scope or intention is an inevitable hazard. But the possibility that a sound enterprise in self-correction may be overheard and misused is the poorest of reasons for suspending it....

The social and political construction of the Cold War

In this chapter, the political theorist Tracy B. Strong revisits intellectual debates over the origins of the Cold War. Strong sketches out the political and conceptual dimensions of the main domestic and international factors that are deemed to have led to the emergence of the Cold War, providing a fresh account of how the different pieces interact with one another, and emphasising the key moments of indeterminacy and uncertainty that are often ignored in the mainstream literature. Through a close analysis of debates and developments within the American Left during the early to mid 1940s, he shows that the dynamics in American society during this tumultuous period were much more complex than is usually assumed; it was also sufficiently diverse to have made other geopolitical outcomes highly conceivable. In the end, the policy path chosen by the United States was determined in great part by the ideational frameworks that were on offer at the time to make sense of an otherwise highly confusing set of events. Herein lies the historical importance of ‘strategist-intellectuals’ like Henry Luce, Henry Wallace, George Kennan and Paul Nitze.

Carl Schmitt and the American century

During the past two decades or so, the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) has been read both as a mediated source of intellectual influence on the American political establishment and as a vehicle for radical criticism of this same establishment. In his contribution to this volume, Jean-Francois Drolet offers an analytical reconstruction of Schmitt’s interpretation of American foreign policy on the backdrop of this apparent paradox in the reception of his legacy in America and Europe. His analysis engages with a wide range of well-known and less well-known texts, in which Schmitt reflects on some of the key pronouncements and moments in the history of US foreign policy. While working his way through these studies, Drolet draws particular attention to the philosophical prisms through which Schmitt came to conceptualise the relationship between technology, political violence and ‘values’ in the formulation of American foreign policy during the second half of the twentieth century.

Chaotic epic: Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order revisited

As a core interpretative text of the immediate post-Cold War period, The Clash of Civilizations acquired an almost infamous status amongst liberal circles on account of a perceived melange of cultural essentialism, conservative realist thinking, and a confidently negative appraisal of world trends. In this chapter, James Dunkerley reviews the initial, often critical reception of Clash of Civilizations and seeks to explain why the text has continued to enjoy such widespread attention. He agrees with the view that, alongside Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, it forms part of distinct ‘moment’ following the collapse of the USSR and the complex challenges of the USA becoming, at least transiently, a ‘unipolar power’. However, he also identifies the continued salience of the text in Huntington’s often adept assessment of regional political trends, even when these are entirely divorced from his underlying civilizational thesis.

Realist exceptionalism: philosophy, politics and foreign policy in America’s ‘second modernity’

Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams reflect on one of the most persistent and controversial themes in the intellectual history of US foreign policy: American exceptionalism. But the exceptionalism under investigation here is not the familiar account inspired by a mixture of early modern Puritan theology and nineteenth century expansionist myths of Manifest Destiny. Rather, their main concern is with a second strain of exceptionalism that took shape during the first half of the twentieth century, in response to a series of political crises triggered by a variety of phenomena such as the rise of mass society, bureaucratization, atomization, secularization, social differentiation and changes in modes of economic production. In this later form, what is exceptional was the ability of American institutions to cope with the political, economic and socio-cultural challenges that led to the backlash against liberal modernization in European states during the 1930s and 1940s. The main thesis that the authors then proceed to develop is that the origins and evolution of the American realist tradition must be re-interpreted in the context of this second exceptionalist moment in US history.