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Reviewed by:
  • Surprise, Security, and the American Experience
  • Robert C. Rowland
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. By John Lewis Gaddis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; pp viii + 150. $18.95.

In Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, John Lewis Gaddis compares the response of the Bush administration to the September 11th attacks with the responses to two earlier surprise attacks on the United States, the burning of the White House and Capitol by the British in 1814 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While Gaddis's book, which developed out of three essays presented at the New York Public Library, focuses on comparing the grand strategies developed in response to these attacks, in a more fundamental way it is about the relative importance of force and rhetoric in foreign policy.

In the first of the three central chapters, Gaddis focuses on the response to the British sacking of Washington. He writes of the powerful impact that this event along with other threats had upon perceptions of security in the young nation. He then argues that the strategic response to this situation, which originally was developed by John Quincy Adams as secretary of state for James Monroe, was to combine three principles—preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony—that according to Gaddis would dominate American foreign policy for more than 100 years. By preemption Gaddis means a willingness to strike against failed states or states that might fail. Unilateralism as a doctrine, according to Gaddis, was not mere isolationism, but was a commitment to avoid acting in concert with great European powers. Finally, hegemony was not merely a strategic principle, but the overall goal of the doctrine. According to Gaddis, the United States demanded outright control of predominantly white areas of North America (with the exception of Canada, because of the continued power of the British) and domination through a sphere of influence in the remainder of the Western Hemisphere. Gaddis states frankly that this policy was in part based in "racism" (28) and concludes that for more than a century, "the United States would be quick to rebuff all subsequent efforts by other great powers to establish footholds of any kind, not just in North America, but throughout the western hemisphere. With the single exception of Cuba during the Cold War, it succeeded" (29). [End Page 316]

In contrast to the focus on preemption and unilateralism that dominated American foreign policy after the conclusion of the War of 1812, Franklin Roosevelt developed a very different approach following Pearl Harbor, an approach that would be maintained by Democratic and Republican administrations alike throughout the Cold War. According to Gaddis, Roosevelt's goal was still hegemony, but he relied on very different means to attain that end, a multilateralism built around obtaining the consent of allies based on a strategy of taking the moral high ground in order to create an "asymmetry of legitimacy" (64) in comparison to first the Nazis and then the Soviets. Gaddis notes that from Pearl Harbor to the end of the Cold War, the United States rarely acted unilaterally and resisted "the idea of preemption" (59). By rejecting unilateral action because of the "probable moral costs of striking first" (63), the United States was able to "maintain a sphere of influence" in Europe throughout the Cold War "with the consent of those who lived within it" (60–61).

While Gaddis does not refer to the rhetorical character of the two grand strategies that dominated American foreign policy from 1814 through the 1990s, the symbolic dimensions of the two approaches should be obvious. From 1812 up to Pearl Harbor the United States used the doctrines of preemption and unilateral action to send the message that we were the biggest bully on the block. The underlying strategy might be called a rhetoric of intimidation. In contrast, Roosevelt and those who followed him understood that this strategy could no longer succeed, largely because the United States was no longer concerned with merely our block (the Western Hemisphere), but with the whole world. It was in this context that Roosevelt developed a strategy based upon power combined with moral legitimacy to create a situation in which our allies consented to...

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