Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (review)

Originally delivered as the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures at New York Public Library, the essays in this slim volume offer some historical perspective on American national security policy following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which John Gaddis rightly calls "a national identity crisis" (p.10) as well as a challenge to regnant security doctrines. Surprise, Security, and the American Experience is a characteristically judicious and thought-provoking book from a distinguished historian of American diplomacy, though, because of its provenance and format, its necessarily skeletal argument is often more suggestive than conclusive and is occasionally misleading.

Gaddis's central thesis is that "for the United States, safety comes from enlarging, rather than from contracting, its sphere of responsibilities" (p.13). He perhaps too ambitiously attempts to explain almost all of America's diplomatic history in terms of that doctrine. He traces the origins of the doctrine to another "surprise" attack, the British burning of the Capitol and the White House on 24 August 1814. The principal architect of the doctrine, says Gaddis, was Secretary of State (and later President) John Quincy Adams, whose methods were simple: preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony.

On each of these counts, so the argument goes, another son of a former president, George W. Bush, has simply reclaimed the tradition of Adams, "the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century" (p.15). Preemption "sounds new only because it's old: It's a nineteenth-century concept, rooted in concerns about security along the nation's expanding borders" (p.86), especially the problems posed by pirates, marauding Indians, foreign plotters, and the vulnerable "derelict" regimes (what today would be called "failed states") in places like Florida, Texas, and California that gave them shelter. Modeled on Adams's advice to President James Monroe to abjure Britain's offer of collaboration and proclaim the Monroe Doctrine as a singularly American precept, Bush's unilateralism in Iraq and elsewhere thus "reflects a return to an old position, not the emergence of a new one" (p.26). As for hegemony, Gaddis claims that Adams, who meant for the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere, would have found entirely congenial President Bush's pronouncement at West Point in 2002 that "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge" (p.30).

Never mind that Gaddis's description of the core American diplomatic technique is excessively reductionist, even for the nineteenth century. (For example, John Quincy Adams's son, Charles Francis Adams, while serving as ambassador to Britain during the Civil War, had more instruments in his diplomatic tool-pouch than preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony.) Gaddis intends his explication of Adams's principles to remind readers that national security is such a compelling priority that daring and even morally ambiguous means may be necessary to achieve it. This is a sobering truth, and the historical lesson is well taken.

Yet Gaddis's account of Bush's atavistic reversion to Adams's nineteenth-century nostrums will no doubt be interpreted by some readers as legitimating the entirety of the Bush reaction to the September 2001 attacks, including the administration's mission and methods in Iraq. That lesson can be drawn only by distorting or ignoring the history of the twentieth century, its latter half in particular. History does not merely produce a grab bag of available precedents. It also accumulates, generating the ever-evolving patterns of behavior, values, and institutions that compose the delicate stuff from which truly useful historical analogies must be carefully crafted. Gaddis, who has elsewhere written with great insight about twentieth-century American diplomacy, surely knows this. But an untutored reader might be forgiven for taking this slight tome as an apologia, on historical grounds, for Bush's diplomatic record.

Gaddis might have averted that problem by dwelling at greater length on Woodrow Wilson, who understood that history by his day had irretrievably carried the world, including the United States, well beyond the framework in which Adams had so shrewdly maneuvered...