One of America's great myths is that the US has always been isolationist, only rarely flexing its muscles beyond its borders.
Not so: in the first half of a two-volume study of American foreign policy, Robert Kagan argues that even in the colonial era Americans restlessly pushed westward.
At every turn, Kagan shows how a policy of aggressive expansion was inextricably linked with liberal democracy. Political leaders of the early republic developed expansionist policies in part because they worried that if they didn't respond to their clamoring constituents—farmers who wanted access to western land, for example—the people might rebel or secede.
Also provocative is Kagan's reading of the Civil War as America's "first experiment in ideological conquest" and nation building in conquered territory. He then follows American expansion through the 19th century, as the U.S. increased its dominance in the western hemisphere and sought, in President Garfield's phrase, to become "the arbiter" of the Pacific.
Kagan may overstate the extent to which contemporary Americans imagine U.S. history to be thoroughly isolationist; it's a straw man that this powerfully persuasive, sophisticated book hardly needs.
Despite its emphasis on "liberal" acquisitiveness and ideological righteousness as the molders of American diplomacy, the deeper theme running through this book has to do with the ways that power does not merely permit but actually defines foreign policy objectives. Kagan acknowledges that, as the United States acquired more power, it simultaneously acquired an "expanding sense of both interests and entitlement." What's more, "as perceived interests expanded, so did perceived threats and the perceived need for even more power to address them." As the nation grew more powerful, its dreams became desires; desires became necessities; necessities became imperatives; and imperatives led to empire -- in the fullest sense of the word. Power, in short, constitutes its own self-feeding perpetual-motion machine that relentlessly drives America's -- or any state's -- international behavior. And when a nation arrives at the point in its history when it believes itself to possess unmatchable power and harbors no doubts about the scope of its interests or the rightness of its cause -- when it represents an "armed doctrine," cocksure and implacable -- what dangers does it court for itself, as well as for others?
