That U.S. foreign policy is now very much in transition is a point widely accepted today. The era of Cold War rivalry is sinking like a fading sunset on one horizon, while a more benign international order is eagerly expected to dawn on the other. Harbingers of change abound. Long rigid political, economic, and ideological structures creak and crack, while new centers of power pose ever bolder challenges to the predominance of the Cold War giants.
This transition naturally generates its own excitement and fascination but also a fair degree of perplexity about the role the United States should play and the national security objectives the United States should follow in this rapidly changing world. Questions about the future are as urgent as they are difficult to answer. On them depend not only today's hard budget decisions but the basic calculus for future policy makers. In this transitional period opinions about the future are diverse. Some observers worry over the decline of the country's international economic competitiveness, with all its ramifications for national security. Others question the wisdom of inherited commitments abroad or argue for a radically revised notion of international security. And still others warn against an excessive optimism about the future and an exaggerated notion of global change.
At a time when Americans need to make choices for the future from a more than usually full range of possibilities, the historical record would seem an obvious and important point of reference-a helpmate to which policy makers and the informed public might well turn. Unfortunately, an examination of those engaged in the debate over American decline and future policy reveals the names of few historians of American foreign policy. Accordingly, the picture of the past invoked by the participants is all too often simplistic or dated. The uses made of George Washington's Farewell Address, nineteenth-century "isolationism," and the waywardness of public opinion in this century (to take but three commonly invoked subjects) are generally off-handed and betray a lack of familiarity with a new generation of historical scholarship.2
The fault for this historically impoverished discourse over current policy lies in part with those historians who are reluctant to step outside their lecture halls and specialized monographs and offer some perspective on current policy options. The fault also lies with those officials absorbed in day-to-day policy and with academics and journalists preoccupied with commenting on that policy. While all three groups have much to gain by adding a historical perspective to their armory of analytic tools, they seem disinclined to give historical studies the systematic and thoughtful attention they deserve. Perhaps they have simply had difficulty deciding which aspects of the literature are germane and whether time invested in historical study will be repaid in fresh insights. Admittedly, the search for such insights can be frustrating. Historians cannot always provide decisive answers to important questions and do not always agree because the evidence on which they rely is often insufficient or ambiguous. But in what discipline is the search for truth easy and the results beyond challenge?
From my perspective as a historian of American foreign relations, I see two important points that should be injected into the current discussion over the future of this country in world affairs. First, the pervasive assumption of national decline found in nearly all arguments is questionable. Second, the developing debate about future policy promises, unbeknownst to the participants, to reopen a great debate as old as the nation itself. To develop these two points is not to claim a monopoly on historical insight and certainly not to resolve the debate over America's future course, but the reflections that follow should temper some of the alarm over decline and set the debate in fresh context by reminding us that its revival brings to an end an aberrant period of national consensus.
The Myth of the Golden Age
Those fixated with American decline have embraced a mythic and excessively heroic reading of the early Cold War. Over the last decade or so, the period between 1945 and 1960 has come to serve as the golden age of American foreign policy, when the United States set aside its hesitations and emerged fully and emphatically in its destined role of world power. Filled with resolve and supported by the public and Congress, leaders in Washington set about shaping the postwar world and repelling the Soviet challenge. Those still advocating Cold War policies have embraced this image of a golden age most enthusiastically. But even some critics of the Cold War have assumed that the United States enjoyed a controlling role in the immediate postwar period. Indeed, both groups have used this supposed highwater mark of American power to measure today's status. 3
This myth of a golden age is, however, historically suspect-and certainly overdrawn. Policy makers during the Cold War's first decade and a half were hardly masters of the international scene, confident and clear in their approach toward the Soviet Union and its allies, or secure in their relationship with the public. Indeed, they encountered serious difficulties on a number of fronts.
Take the postwar territorial settlement in Europe. American policy makers opened this period of ostensible dominance by "losing" Eastern Europe, despite President Harry Truman's public determination not to. Siding in April 1945 with his advisers who saw a "barbarian invasion" in the making, the president repeatedly indicated that he would "make no concessions from American principles or traditions." 4 Even so, by the end of the year the U.S. government had signaled de facto acceptance of a Soviet sphere. No less hostile to the Soviet Union, Republicans attacked the Democrats for this retreat, but during the Eisenhower administration could do nothing to change conditions in Eastern Europe. Indeed, they had to sit with arms folded in 1956 when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising.
The Third World proved even less manageable. In the late 1940s Truman and his secretaries of state, George Marshall and Dean Acheson, tried-unsuccessfully-to stem the revolutionary tide on the Chinese mainland. Dwight Eisenhower ran up against the same limits of American power in 1954. As the French position in Indochina collapsed, the president entertained proposals for U.S. armed intervention, but ultimately bowed to a communist takeover in North Vietnam. Where the United States employed military power, as in Korea between 1950 and 1953, it fared only moderately better. Despite its decision to use American forces to meet the North Korean invasion in June 1950, the Truman administration never formulated a clear definition of its war aims. Late in the summer military success led Washington to embrace a policy of Korean reunification (an early attempt at rollback of communism). But Chinese intervention in the fall forced the Truman administration to back off and settle into a limited war to restore the status quo ante.
Cuba offers a close-to-home example of the travails of the early Cold War policy.
There our man in Havana was overthrown in 1959 by insurgents aligned with Moscow.
Resentful over this intrusion in our sphere, President John Kennedy tried but
failed to get rid of Fidel Castro in 1961, and as part of the Cuban missile
crisis settlement the next year acquiesced in the penetration of the U.S. sphere
by offering assurances that there would be no more invasion attempts.
Throughout this period Washington had considerable difficulty in formulating
a coherent strategy to cope with the threat from the Soviet bloc. Part of this
confusion can be traced to the rise of the national security bureaucracy, a
massive presence with which policy makers continue to struggle today. Truman
was but the first president to fail to establish control over these bureaucratic
fiefdoms. But the national security bureaucracies were not only unwieldy organizations;
they created problems for presidents in other ways-by calling attention to the
limits of policy and to the gaps between the president's professed goals and
his available resources and by openly lobbying for the additional resources
needed to meet these goals. 5
Containment, the pivotal American Cold War doctrine, itself harbored some striking ambiguities. Was it to be limited to Europe and Japan or extended to the defense of freedom around the world? Should the implementation of containment depend primarily on diplomatic and economic tools, or was the military to play a prominent role? 6 Within the overall containment puzzle nuclear weapons proved an important but especially difficult piece to fit in place. Truman drifted into a policy of massive retaliation before moving on to a greater reliance on conventional forces. 7 Eisenhower, for his part, resurrected massive retaliation, but from the start recognized that the Soviet nuclear weapons program would soon nullify the American advantage. Any lingering illusions about the utility of nuclear weapons in dealings with the USSR disappeared in 1956 with the president's discovery of significant American vulnerability to Soviet attack. 8 While presidents grappled with grand strategy at one level, operational nuclear strategy developed at another. Even Eisenhower failed in his efforts to link the two. 9
Along with ambiguities in containment and incoherence in nuclear strategy went the frustrating experience of having the American technological lead repeatedly nullified. The United States gained an initial advantage in July 1945 when it produced and successfully tested the first atomic bomb. Within four years, however, the Soviet Union had broken the nuclear monopoly and in 1953 showed that it would also join the competition to develop and produce hydrogen weapons. By the mid- 1950s competition had extended to delivery vehicles, with the Soviets challenging the American advantage in long-range bombers and testing the first intercontinental missile. The pattern of the arms race was firmly set, driven by a technological imperative that neither Washington nor Moscow could control or afford to ignore.' 10
Not surprisingly, setbacks abroad and nuclear vulnerability at home left the American public in a state of alarm. The Cold War consensus which had guided the public depended on a perception of the world as starkly and dangerously divided. As if this view were not frightening enough, the public soon became convinced that sinister foreign forces had penetrated American society and were responsible for such otherwise inexplicable reverses as the loss of the nuclear monopoly and China. The resulting intolerance, to become firmly linked to the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, distorted American political life, intimidated foreign affairs specialists, and rattled policy makers for over a decade. But oddly the alarm, at least among the public, was accompanied by an aversion to paying the costs of containment. In the late 1940s Truman found his hands tied by political opposition to the higher taxes that even a modest program of containment required. And while the Korean crisis finally allowed him to increase defense spending, it also revealed the public's reluctance to sustain distant, limited wars-a lesson policy makers would have to relearn in the wake of the 1965 intervention in Vietnam. 11
Policy makers were no more immune to feelings of alarm than was the public. They expressed those feelings privately as well as publicly. To take one of the most striking examples, the prologue to the secret National Security directive, NSC-68, is filled with apocalyptic references to the threat the Soviet system posed in the spring of 1950. Not only was the country "mortally challenged" and in "deepest peril," but "civilization itself' was at risk. 12 Indeed, the Truman administration's record offers little that could be construed as a serene sense of mastery or security. Conditions did not change when the Republicans assumed power; in fact, their fiscal conservatism gave rise to doubts about the high costs of containment. Eisenhower feared that excessive defense spending might gradually erode the vitality of the economy and thus hurt America's security potential over the long haul. Accordingly, he decided to reduce the costs of containment and initiated a rethinking of strategic policy to achieve that goal. 13 As he left office, Eisenhower broadened his critique. He warned that the defense budget was generating a military-industrial complex whose concentrated and unchecked power could pose a danger to the American political system.
The Persistence of Limits
This brief review of the early postwar period should temper any notion that that era was a golden age of international mastery, policy coherence, and national self-confidence. It is, therefore, hard to imagine why we should want to hold this period up as the standard by which to measure ourselves today, or for that matter why we should look back nostalgically to the conditions prevailing then. A more nuanced appraisal would give confusion and failure a place alongside successes such as the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the rehabilitation of Japan. By the same token the proponents of decline have to acknowledge the strikingly successful exercise of American diplomacy represented by such recent achievements as détente with the USSR and rapprochement with China.
What this backward glance does reveal is that our power to control developments abroad and to dominate great power relations has always been circumscribed. These limits have applied even when after World War II we enjoyed marked relative advantages in economic power and military technology. That we are more sensitive to our limits today is understandable. Our economy, in which we have long taken great pride, has not only suffered a sharp decline relative to the other major industrial countries but has also felt the damaging effects of budget and trade deficits and low rates of saving and productivity growth. Not surprisingly, these developments have left us with a sense of malaise. 14
The crusading spirit of the Cold War--along with the moral energy and sense of alarm that once energized our foreign policy--has faded, and our willingness to question foreign policy costs has increased. But so deep is the American impulse to construct our identity and to measure our health as a nation in terms of our world standing that we are left unsettled by the passing of a seemingly heroic age, uneasy with the prospect of national decline, and unhappy with the loss of purpose in foreign policy. The limits to American power today are real--and a genuine cause for concern--but in addressing our current global problems it will do no good to embrace a simplistic picture of the past.
Competing Visions of National Greatness
No less than the prevailing notion of American decline, the current preoccupation with redefining the objectives of American foreign policy deserves to be subjected to historical examination. While it may be tempting to see a resurgence of isolationism behind this preoccupation, this interpretation suffers from too narrow a perception of the relevant foreign policy past and underestimates the historical significance of the developments we are witnessing. What we are seeing is the renewal of a long-standing and fundamental debate over the place of the United States in the world, a debate with intimate ties to our guiding notions of American nationalism and identity. Those engaged in the current debate along with those perplexed about the future may find some reassurance in the notion that the consensus prevailing during the Cold War was abnormal. In fact, the current state of contention represents a reversion to the historical norm.
Since the founding of the nation, foreign policy has repeatedly given rise
to heated and far-ranging public debate. 15 Often depicted as a contest between
outward-looking "realists" and know-nothing "isolationists,"
that debate might more appropriately be described as a struggle over how to
define American greatness and how in turn to use foreign policy to achieve that
greatness. Though the specific issues have varied over time, these are the fundamental
questions to which the participants
have repeatedly returned.
The debate first emerged in the 1790s following the renewal of the Anglo-French rivalry--a rivalry which set the new nation at risk. At that time Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson stood for two distinct notions of foreign policy, one activist and grandiose in its vision, the other restrained and cost-conscious.
Hamilton and his later disciples sought to harness foreign policy to their concept of America's mission-the promotion of American power in the world and the exercise of that power in the interest of freedom. They conceived of the United States as a dynamic republic with broad international interests. They believed that the vigorous promotion of liberty abroad was a good in its own right as well as a stimulant to vigorous liberty at home. This vision committed Hamiltonians to the building of a strong federal government and to the exercise of American power overseas in ever-broadening scope and scale as mounting national resources permitted.
Jefferson was critical of a Hamiltonian foreign policy because it ignored, even endangered, the primary obligation of a good society-to preserve the welfare of its own people. Those who articulated this view in the 1790s, as well as those who did so later, would not have thought of themselves as isolationists in either political or economic terms. To those schooled in the classical experience, imperial aspirations and commitments were deadly to republican ideals. These Jeffersonians believed that efforts to transform the world in the American image carried high costs--above all, a dangerous concentration of political power in the executive branch and a waste of resources sorely needed at home. Rejecting a forceful policy of global transformation as a destructive illusion, they argued that the United States' world role should be to act as a model for--not a guarantor of--others seeking freedom.
Echoes of the first debate sounded throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They were heard as the United States became a continental power-especially in the 1840s during the debates over the Oregon territory and the Mexican War. They came to the fore once more as the United States established its hemispheric dominance and entered the competition for overseas empire, most strikingly in the 1890s. And they were revived in the controversies surrounding America's entry into World War I and, later, its participation in the League of Nations.
The last major round in the great debate played out on the eve of America's entry into World War II. Woodrow Wilson had solidified the American claim to great power status but at the expense of creating a backlash in the interwar period. By the 1930s, familiar doubts about the wisdom of entanglement in European quarrels and about the pursuit of overseas empire were again being clearly and forcefully articulated. Skeptics stressed the costs to republican ideals and to the welfare of the common man. From the Senate William E. Borah and Gerald Nye cautioned against meddling in the affairs of other peoples and against assuming that the United States could control events in a dangerous world. The noted historian Charles Beard offered a critical examination of the idea of the national interest, proposed pursuing an open door at home rather than abroad, and lashed out against Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts to drag the country into war. And Charles Lindbergh, the most popular spokesman of the major anti-interventionist group, America First, charged Roosevelt with embarking on a crusade whose costs at home would be enormous and whose ultimate goals abroad were beyond reach. 16 Each of these individuals in his own way thus carried forward a set of concerns voiced by earlier Jeffersonians.
Our conviction, still unshaken, that World War II was a "good" war conditions our view of this last round in the great debate, making it difficult even today to think of the prewar "isolationists" as part of a chain linking the older debate to the one taking shape in our own time. This biased picture of prewar isolationism can be traced back to the efforts of the ultimate victors in the great debate of 1937-1941 to discredit their defeated but still outspoken foes so as to prevent a recurrence of the prewar debate. Samuel Eliot Morison and other establishment historians championing historical objectivism took aim at Beard's professional credentials, painting him as a mean-spirited, partisan critic of Roosevelt and a narrow-minded, naive interpreter of the national interest. 17 Lindbergh for his part was reduced to a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. Charges that "isolationism" was an outmoded outlook whose proponents were blind to evil in the world, indeed to some extent implicated in it, carried considerable credibility in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the discovery of Hitler's death camps and served to silence or at least marginalize critics of the emerging postwar foreign policy orthodoxy.
The resulting picture of the isolationists, one with which we still live, is a caricature. The so-called "isolationists" recognized that the United States had long been firmly tied to other nations economically, diplomatically, and culturally. Theirs was not a sweeping or indiscriminate challenge to those ties. What they did question, however, was the wisdom of involvement in European rivalries.
To be sure, American economic power proved easier to mobilize and more decisive on the battlefield than Lindbergh and other foes of intervention had predicted. But on the other hand, the war did carry costs at home that the "isolationists" had consistently warned about-increased national debt, lives lost and disrupted, and the concentration of power in what would come to be called the national security state. Moreover, they proved prescient, indeed "realistic," in their warning that American entry into the global war would not lead to the freer and more secure world that Roosevelt and other interventionists dreamed of. Roosevelt's policy would instead serve to expand America's international burdens and deepen its involvement in the affairs of other nations without increasing its security. Alarmed by the rise of a new Hitler and honor-bound to defend freedom, policy makers were soon trapped in a rivalry with the Soviet Union and China and in interventions in the Third World. Costs mounted and security proved elusive. 18
The Great Debate Renewed
The Vietnam War shattered the Cold War consensus, and the voice of a new generation of skeptics began to be heard. Criticism focused first on America's involvement in Vietnam, but commentators were soon taking direct issue with Cold War principles and offering alternatives that they themselves sometimes characterized as "neo-isolationist." In general terms they criticized Cold War policy for leaving the domestic front in such scandalous disrepair. They pointed to evidence that the U.S. economic base was eroding. They produced statistics that demonstrated a failure to provide for our citizens, as measured by such scales of welfare as infant mortality, poverty and homelessness, access to health care, and levels of education. And they uncovered data that suggested a high degree of political apathy if not alienation. Corrective measures, these critics warned, would require America's collective energy and resources and would sharply curtail its foreign policy initiatives. Policy makers, they concluded, should henceforth pay closer attention to the domestic opportunity costs of their foreign policies.
While critics publicly chipped away at the intellectual foundations of the Cold War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger quietly undermined it from within. They cast aside the lingering view that the Soviet Union and China were ideological threats and instead set out to treat them as great powers whose standing in the world required mutually beneficial accommodation. And Jimmy Carter moved U.S. policy further away from its Cold War principles by giving priority to universal human rights, nonproliferation, and global environmental protection.
All these moves away from the earlier orthodoxy stirred opposition from some quarters and created uneasiness in others. The Committee on the Present Danger, an articulate and influential set of Washington insiders, was one of the most effective opposition groups. Organized in the mid-1970s, it found in Ronald Reagan a soulmate and in his 1980 presidential campaign the talk of restoration that its members longed to hear. 19 Some mainstream, bipartisan groups devoted to public education soon fell into step. For example, in 1981 the Atlantic Council launched a campaign of ideological revitalization aimed at a younger generation for whom Cold War verities and the lessons of Munich carried less and less meaning. Its literature called on the nation to rally behind and promote abroad the values of Western civilization.
Another bipartisan group, the Foreign Policy Association had also drifted away from stark anti-communism, but it could not cut its ties to Cold War formulations. The association's 1988 "Great Decisions" series posited as the central task of American policy the promotion of "global peace and economic well-being," without indicating how the United States should pursue those goals, without estimating what the costs might be, and without considering the odds for success. 20
The Reagan administration was soon buffeted by these intellectual crosscurrents. While its rhetoric reflected a nostalgia for the Cold War, its actions were tempered by the erosion of that war's consensus. The American public showed no stomach for military intervention in Central America, forcing the White House to carry out its policy there surreptitiously. Nixon's China policy was continued. And eventually even Reagan accepted an accommodatjonist approach toward the Soviet Union. The tension continues within the Bush administration. Surprised by dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, disoriented policy makers have begun to search for some new guiding vision with the same coherence and power to command as the old. During his first months in office, Bush launched his administration on an elaborate attempt at policy definition, but the best result he could offer was a vague assurance that "America will do all it can to encourage" democracy and freedom. 21
The Future Needs a Past
Caught up in a full-blown conceptual crisis, policy makers and foreign policy commentators have, not surprisingly, looked nostalgically to the past. Unfortunately, they are looking to the wrong part of the past and for the wrong thing. It seems that they cannot see beyond the Cold War; they cannot get their minds off the notions of restoring a consensus lost beyond recall and maintaining the United States as some abstract "Number One." They remain fixated on the supposed threat from a revived "isolationism" and on the need to reaffirm "international commitment." They fail to see that an old debate has sputtered to life over the last decade and a half and that it has restored a tension long at the heart of American policy. Now foreign policy activists will have to address the domestic costs and international consequences of their programs (and not simply assert that world stability requires American leadership), just as their critics must explain precisely what sort of cautious foreign policy they would have accompany their campaign of domestic renovation.
Looking back on American diplomatic history can help bring a long-simmering debate into focus. Basic disagreements over foreign policy have marked the nation's history, and those disagreements have arguably served a positive role. They have given Americans the chance to consider what values they live by and what purpose guides their foreign policy. What does it mean to be an American? What dreams animate and unite us as a nation? How is foreign policy to serve those dreams? Is the world primarily a threat to the realization of our ideals at home or a stage for acting them out? Those are time-honored questions that the citizens of a democracy should consistently confront and debate. And as we do so, we should study the answers our political forefathers have advanced. By carefully weighing their alternative visions of America, we can play our own role in the great debate in a more self-conscious and effective way. The result to be hoped for is a foreign policy that will safeguard our security and our ideals without alienating the public, bankrupting our economy, undercutting social stability, or undermining our treasured political institutions and values.
As we emerge from the Cold War and face an uncertain future, history offers
us both solace and guidance. It teaches us to feel less alarm about our purported
decline. It also tells us that the current division over policy is not a cause
for worry or a sign of national disarray but an opportunity for clarifying our
goals and our purpose in world affairs. History for once holds out encouragement
and hope.
Footnotes
1. I owe thanks to Richard Ulin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to Jim Lobe at the University of Washington for the opportunity to try out before a general audience the ideas on which this paper is based. Paula Hunt, Mark S. Mahaney, and O. Arne Westad gave me the benefit of their criticisms.
2. Paul Kennedy leaps to mind as a notable exception. But it should be kept in mind that he is a specialist in European international relations and was, in any case, constrained in his treatment of the United States in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), xv-xxv, 347-437, and 514-35, by a thesis about "imperial overstretch" initially derived from the history of the British empire.
3. See, for example, Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 22-24, 96; I. M. Destler, Leslie H. Geib, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy, revised edition (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), passim but esp. 15-18, 28-29; Great Decisions 1988: Foreign Policy Issues Facing the Nation (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1988), 7; Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, 515, 529; and Charles W. Maynes, "Coping with the '90s," Foreign Policy, no. 74 (Spring 1989): 42-43.
4. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1967), 232.
5. See Charles Neu, "The Rise of the National Security Bureaucracy," in Louis Galambos, ed., The New American State: Bureaucracies and Policies since World War II (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 85-108. Unfortunately, in his conventional concern with reforms that would ensure presidential control over the national security bureaucracy, Neu overlooks the latter's constructive roles.
6. Much of the debate over these questions goes on within the virtual cottage industry that diplomatic historians have built on Ambassador George Kennan's career. For a review of the most recent products, see Stanley Hoffman, "Mr. X," New Republic, October 2, 1989, 35-38.
7. See David A. Rosenberg, "American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision," Journal of American History, 66 (June 1979): 62-87.
8. See U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), 581; and Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: Norton, 1981), 311-12.
9. See David A. Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960," International Security, no. 7 (Spring 1983): 3-71; and H. W. Brands, "The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State," American Historical Review, 94 (October 1989): 963-89.
10. Marek Thee, Military Technology, Military Strategy, and the Arms Race (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
11. See John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973).
12. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 238, 240.
13. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. 2, 588-89.
14. The popular economic decline thesis has drawn critical attention. See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, "The U.S.-Decline or Renewal?" Foreign Affairs, vol. 67, no. 5 (Winter 1988/89): 76-96; Francis M. Bator, 'Must We Retrench?" ibid., vol. 68, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 93-123; and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., in "Symposium," SAIS Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter-Spring 1990): 37-40.
15. I draw heavily for the discussion that follows on my Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), chaps. 2, 5, and 6. For new interpretations of the early decades of American policy, see Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), esp. chaps. 5-6; Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Kinley J. Brauer, "The United States and British Imperial Expansion, 18 15-60," Diplomatic History, 12 (Winter 1988): 19-37; and Brauer, "The Great American Desert Revisited: Recent Literature and Prospects for the Study of American Foreign Relations, 1815-61," ibid., 13 (Summer 1989): 395-417.
16. See Robert J. Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Charles Beard, The Idea of the National Interest (New York: MacMillan, 1934); Beard, The Open Door at Home (New York: MacMillan, 1935); and Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
17. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 304-309.
18. For appreciations of the isolationists' realism, see Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 11; and Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
19. Samuel F. Wells, Jr., Sounding the Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat," International Security, 4 (Fall 1979): 149-51.
20. The Teaching of Values and the Successor Generation (Washington, D.C.: Atlantic Council of the United States, February 1983); and Great Decisions, 1988, 5, 9. See also Charles C. Krauthammer, "The Price of Power," The New Republic, February 9, 1987, 23-25; and Morton M. Kondracke, "The Democracy Gang," ibid., November 6, 1989, 18-23.
21. New York Times, May 25, 1989, 4.
Michael H. Hunt is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), and has written extensively on the history of Sino-American relations.