Book Review: American Foreign Policy

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- "Special Providence; American Foreign Policy and How It Changed The World," Walter Russell Mead, is the most original and probably the most important book to have been written on American foreign policy in decades.

Published by Knopf, (400 pages,$30) comes from one of the liveliest and most incisive minds of the think-tanks, with credentials from both the liberal World Policy Institute and the establishment Council on Foreign Relations. Untrammeled by dogma, Mead likes to think outside the box.

Noting that America traditionally preferred to buy its expansions with cash (the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska) rather than blood, Mead suggested a decade ago that the best solution for Russia's impoverishment and American security could be for the United States to buy Siberia.

With this book, Mead is not just thinking outside the box, but fundamentally redefining it. Mead starts from the arresting but obvious assertion that the foreign policy of the world's richest and most powerful and influential nation must have been doing something right. So obvious that most commentators have missed it, preferring to nitpick the problems and challenges and occasional disasters, America's current eminence means we should view those who achieved it with humility and respect.

Most foreign policy assessments seldom get beyond two of the past architects of America's global achievement. They suggest that Theodore Roosevelt's well-armed march to great power status represents one alternative, balanced by Woodrow Wilson's law-based internationalist idealism. They balance American power against American decency, might against right, in a simplified moral universe that seldom seems quite to fit with the way the world works and the challenges it throws up to modern United States governments.

While preserving Wilson's idealism, the missionary and do-good tradition that is locked so deeply by education and religion and cultural pride into the national character, Read ditches this tired Roosevelt-Wilson cliché and goes back to the national roots. He identifies three distinct foreign policy traditions that date back to the early years of the republic, and points to the ways they have endured into our own day.

There is the Hamiltonian tradition, named after the first Secretary of the Treasury, who believes that the business of American foreign policy is business, to encourage trade and manufactures and prosperity. And as the world's leading exporter and leading creditor, dominating the global financial markets, successive Republican and Democratic presidents since World War Two have supported free trade.

In backing the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference, the Free Trade Association of the Americas, the Uruguay Round and the World Trade Organization, the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations blend in retrospect into a common Hamiltonian strategy.

Then here is the Jeffersonian tradition, which argues that American interests are best served by defending democracy at home rather than by trying to extend it abroad. They are skeptical of the Hamiltonian school of exporters and traders as apologists for big business against the interests of the ordinary American. They mistrust Wilsonian idealism as all too likely to become costly and dangerous crusades.

Finally there is the Jacksonian tradition, and Mead is the first to identify and define it. Named after Andrew Jackson, the Indian fighter and populist President who took on the banks and won, its core is a belief in the physical security of the American people. It does not go looking for fights, but once a fight starts, it is utterly ruthless in achieving victory, but then magnanimous to the defeated.

The Jacksonians, with their roots in the early 19th century frontier, have defined the American way of war. It is characterized the decimation of the Native Americans, Sherman's March to the Sea and the demolition of German and Japanese cities in World War II. Dresden and Hiroshima and Agent Orange are then balanced by the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of the German and Japanese enemies into democratic allies.

Mead's central point is that these traditions were seldom deployed exclusively as U.S. foreign policy, but usually operated in harness. The Jacksonians of WW-II and NATO were teamed with the Hamiltonians and Wilsonians of the Marshall Plan, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The role of the Jeffersonians, sometimes maligned as isolationists, is in Mead's thoughtful view crucial. By shrinking from crusades and by their caution over big government spending big money, they impose what Mead calls "a strategic elegance" on the process, requiring the Hamiltonians and Jacksonians to achieve their strategic goals at the lowest possible cost and risk.

The challenge now, he suggests, is to persuade the Jeffersonians that that the United States is so inextricably involved in the world that "American leadership is a required course, not an elective."

After Sept. 11, they may need less persuasion. But Mead warns: "If Jeffersonians blind themselves to this reality, and confine themselves to sniping at the moral inconsistencies, blunders, and costs of American foreign policy, and attempt to revive a contemporary version of the myth of virtuous isolation, they will achieve, perhaps, an illusion of the purity sought by their Pilgrim forebears, but they will betray the values they cherish."