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SYMBOLIC POLITICS AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS: PAST AND PRESENT Robert Dallek he emergence of the United States as the premier power after World War II stimulated curiosity about the history of American foreign policy. Eager to ensure that the country did not repeat past blunders overseas, scholars probed for answers to why America had fought a seemingly pointless war with Spain, committed itself to Utopian goals in World War I, retreated into political isolationism in the twenties, denied obvious international dangers in the thirties, and held unrealizable hopes of international cooperation during the forties. Historians explained these misdeeds in a variety of ways: as resulting from a reverence for the rule of law, an excess of Protestant evangelism, a tradition offree security ignoring the importance of power, an imperial drive to make the world safe for Capitalism and American power, a preoccupation with domestic politics, and the use of external events to promote internal control. In one degree or another, these explanations have their merits. But they leave me unsatisfied. After two decades of reading, thinking, and writing about American diplomatic history, I remain uncertain about what accounts for past crusading fervor, visions of eternal peace, denials of basic realities, and overblown fears in response to events abroad. To expand our understanding of these matters, we need to look at them in a somewhat different way. We would do well to consider the hidden side of American foreign policy. I do not mean conspiratorial schemes pursued Robert Dallek is professor of history at UCLA. His essay is drawn from his two most recent books: The American Style ofForeign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), and Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 1 2 SAIS REVIEW by unscrupulous men but rather those subjective influences that makers and backers offoreign policy barely glimpse themselves. We might profit from paying more attention to mood, tone, milieu, or a climate offeeling that almost imperceptibly insinuates itselfinto concrete ideas and actions. More precisely, I am interested in the ways Americans have given foreign affairs symbolic meanings or made them into something other than what they actually were. For most Americans the external world has been a remote, ill-defined sphere that can be molded into almost anything they wish. More often than we might care to think, this attitude has translated into foreign policies which have relieved and encouraged a nation struggling with domestic concerns. None of this is to suggest that political, strategic, and economic interests played no part in what the United States did abroad. These substantive matters,-especially after World War II, loomed large in the country's overseas actions. But material and psychological or symbolic aims are not mutually exclusive. In our approach to foreign affairs, style and substance have always gone hand in hand. The fact that I have so much less to say in this essay about traditional influences on foreign policy than about the psychological ones is not meant to suggest that I wish to replace one explanation with the other. My objective is to expand our understanding of American foreign affairs by looking at them from another perspective. What I have found particularly striking in pursuing this idea is how consistently domestic mood or climate of feeling is registered in all its complexity on foreign policy. It is well known that before 1945 the country's shift from an agricultural, rural, largely homogeneous society to an industrial, urban one with a heterogeneous population spawned economic, political, and social unrest. It has been less clearly recognized that this development also found release in actions overseas. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that during these years foreign policy was less a reaction to events abroad than to conditions at home, where economic, political, and social change substantially blotted out overseas affairs, making them for the most part an irrational extension of internal hopes and fears. After World War I, for example, when social cleavages between city and town, foreign- and native-born, agitated the country and heightened longings for a homogeneous America, foreign affairs reflected both these trends: Economic nationalism and political isolationism expressed the...

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