The Union Strikes Back

With the exception of a book tracing speculative bubbles and fiscal regulations through American history, it is hard to imagine a more germane subject than the antecedents of United States foreign policy. The George W. Bush years blew the cover off its more aggressive dimensions; as an unnamed official in that administration famously surmised in 2004, “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Did we ever.

Historians and pundits alike have been scrambling to make sense of it all, inevitably betraying and sometimes avowing their own ideological chips in the not-so-great game. Neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan stress the longue durée of American expansion and assertion, which they see as nothing to be ashamed of or surprised by. Writers on the Left, for their part, follow a trail opened by William Appleman Williams and long associated with Noam Chomsky in order to unearth the “sorrows” of imperialism. Comparisons between the contemporary United States and the waning days of Rome have become commonplace in these circles. Barack Obama’s election has done little to change the diagnosis: overreach and decline.¹

What is doubly refreshing about David Hendrickson’s new book is its frank declaration of an ideological home—“a blend or synthesis of constitutional realism and liberal internationalism”—along with its sincere devotion to history for its own sake, as opposed to history as handmaiden to either Right-wing hectoring or Leftist despair (p. xv). “While I have my sympathies and antipathies with the various protagonists we shall meet along the way,” he writes, “I have tried to write with a modicum of detachment.” His book centers on the “play of ideas,” or rather of paradigms, that American policymakers and theorists employed from the creation of the federal republic to the U.S. entry into World War II (p. xi). Broadly put, these paradigms were: Union, or the pursuit of a working peace between disparate states inhabiting a middle ground between anarchy and dominion; Nation, or the dedication to a cohesive, powerful state that could assert itself at home and abroad; and Empire, or the belief in the right or duty of the United States to project its own version of freedom across the continent or globe, by force if necessary. The interaction of these sensibilities in public discussion forms the root and branch of Hendrickson’s forty-three (!) chapters. It is a delightful ride, and a deeply instructive one as well.

In his early chapters, Hendrickson shines a new light on the familiar figures and canonical articulations of early American foreign policy. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson appear as two varieties of an internationalist viewpoint that was widely shared among eighteenth-century cosmopolitans. Both had a deep regard for the rule of law rather than force in domestic or global affairs, and both deployed a blend of persuasion and coercion on behalf of the new nation. They parted ways, however, when identifying the causes of war. While the Republicans emphasized the internal constitution of states—they shared Paine’s assessment that kings made war while people wanted peace—the Federalists pointed to the enduring facts of human nature and political geography. So long as nations lived apart from one another, they were certain, independent people would settle disputes by force of arms.

To avoid that fate within North America was the singular challenge for statesmen during the sectional crises of 1798, 1809, 1815, 1819, 1833, 1850, and 1860. Before 1815, these broils concerned issues of foreign policy proper: whether to align with France or Britain or neither, and whether to press for neutral rights through war or embargo. But after the second Anglo-American war, the dynamic of sectional strife turned westward, revealing not only the irrepressible struggle over slavery but also the vexed issue of imperialism. “There are far more denunciations than defenses of empire and imperialism in the American tradition,” Hendrickson insists (p. 14). How, then, did...