The Audacity of American Foreign Policy

In recent years scholars who have endeavored to survey the entire history of the foreign relations of the United States have often worked in teams and produced multiple volumes. ¹ Given the enormous number of books and articles that have been published in the last few decades about different facets of U.S. foreign relations over a span of more than two centuries, it is a daunting challenge even to keep minimally abreast of recent scholarship. It is therefore a remarkable achievement for a single author to have mastered so much of that scholarly production and to have distilled it into a highly readable narrative, as George Herring has in this magisterial and handsomely produced volume.

Herring, professor of history emeritus at the University of Kentucky, is so consistently fair-minded and restrained that his book may leave some readers with the impression that it "lacks a conceptual framework" and does not present a direct argument. ² Yet in his succinct introduction Herring clearly articulates several basic arguments: that foreign relations have deeply shaped U.S. institutions and political culture; that domestic politics, public opinion, and values in turn have shaped a distinctive approach to foreign policy; that the idea of an "isolationist" tradition in America is a myth that obscures the real tendency to unilateralism; and that there has been persistent tension between Americans' extensive economic involvement in the world and their self-image as a people apart.

While Herring does not neglect the role of material interests in the history of U.S. territorial and commercial expansion, he highlights how "assumed ideas and shared values have determined the way Americans viewed themselves and others and how they dealt with other peoples" (p. 2). This overarching perspective leads Herring repeatedly to point out the tension between Americans' self-images and their relations with foreign peoples: he contrasts Americans' views of themselves as peace-loving to the numerous wars they have fought; he challenges exceptionalist claims to virtuous difference from other powers; and he criticizes American self-deception, hypocrisy, and moral self-righteousness. Herring's fluid narrative sometimes overshadows development of these major themes, but in almost every chapter there are pointed reminders of the arguments put forward at the outset. To cite just one instance: after describing General Andrew Jackson's conquest of Florida in 1818, Herring observes that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams's defense of Jackson's conduct "provided a classic example, repeated often in the nation's history, of justifying an act of aggression in terms of morality, national mission, and destiny" (p. 148).

Herring's story starts in 1775 with Tom Paine's exposition of "basic principles that would shape U.S. foreign policy for years to come" (p. 11). Beginning the narrative with the revolution against the British empire may unintentionally reinscribe American exceptionalism by neglecting the deeper colonial origins of a distinctive American approach to foreign policy and by overstating the departure ushered in by the Revolutionary War. Although Herring briefly glances back to the French and Indian War, he does not consider the ways that earlier wars between British colonists and Native American peoples reflected and shaped fundamental and enduring assumptions about the superior virtue of "civilization" to "savagery" and about the invincibility of a chosen people with a providential mission. While Herring notes in passing that "Americans inherited from the British deep-seated prejudices" (p. 22), he does not delve into the wider and deeper inheritance from the British experience.

As he narrates the history of U.S. foreign relations from the diplomacy of the American Revolution through the wars of the early twenty-first century, Herring takes forthright stands on many of the controversies that have embroiled diplomatic historians. Disagreeing with the interpretations presented many decades ago by Samuel Flagg Bemis and Richard B. Morris, Herring concludes that the favorable settlement of the American Revolutionary War "owed much less to America's military prowess and diplomatic...