The Global Republic: America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power by Frank Ninkovich, and: American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson, and: The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy: 1770 to the Present Day by Michael L. Krenn (review)

American Global Hegemony, Its Apologists, and Its Critics

In 1898, pursuant to an order from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt to be ready for offensive operations in the Philippines, Admiral George Dewey sailed seven ships into Manila Bay and smashed the Spanish squadron there. Yet the U.S. ability to project its power into islands closer to home was still so limited that Roosevelt's famous volunteer cavalry regiment, the "Rough Riders," had to leave its horses behind in Florida and fight on foot in Cuba. One hundred and twenty years later, the U.S. Navy provocatively sails its warships not only past the Philippines in the increasingly fortified South China Sea but also into the range of Russian missiles off the Black Sea and Baltic Sea. Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers are engaged in military operations from the Middle East and Africa to Eastern Europe, while U.S. diplomats work to draw ever more nations into the NATO alliance and U.S. politicians impose economic sanctions on more countries that defy American demands or wishes.

How should the rise of the United States from continental dominance to global hegemony be explained? One approach has been to emphasize supposedly unforeseeable responses to explosive events or foreign assaults, from the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898 through the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon by Islamist militants in September 2001. According to this "orthodox" school of thought, a fundamentally peace-loving nation has been repeatedly jerked out of its preferred "isolationism" or its consumerist preoccupations by external threats that have required it to maintain increasingly costly overseas positions. Thus, the U.S. war against Spain in 1898 and its subsequent acquisition of overseas colonies were not a culmination of U.S. territorial and economic expansion but an aberration from American ideals and traditions—the first of several occasions when chance events and a small number of agitators (from "jingoes" to "neocons") wrenched the United States onto an atypical path.¹

The main rival to the orthodox school has been the "revisionist" or "New Left" interpretation presented most influentially by William Appleman Williams in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). The heart of U.S. foreign policy, Williams argued, was a drive to open doors throughout the world to American exports. Following Secretary of State John Hay's articulation of an "Open Door Policy" toward China, the U.S. continuously pursued a strategy of non-colonial imperial expansion around the world. Although Williams emphasized the pursuit of economic interests, he did not expound a strict economic determinism. Instead, in one of his most valuable contributions, Williams presented American visions of foreign markets and fields for profitable investment as parts of a multifaceted worldview that also encompassed Protestant idealism, missionary programs of reform, and a crusading spirit. Williams went too far in downplaying threats from foreign powers, arguing that only the definition of U.S. well-being in terms of overseas economic expansion generated conflict. And with pit bull tenacity Williams insisted that the drive for an Open Door to the markets of Eastern Europe had caused the Cold War with the Soviet Union despite a lack of evidence to support that thesis. Yet The Tragedy of American Diplomacy continued to shape scholarly thinking about U.S. foreign relations for decades, as reflected in the publication of 25^th and then 50^th anniversary editions.²

Three strikingly different...