"Who Are We?"

All political debates oversimplify. American debates about foreign policy oversimplify more than most. Ever since F.D.R., all presidents have branded their opponents "isolationists." Critics of presidents have styled themselves "the peace movement." Even debates about the debates oversimplify, for example by portraying choices as between "realism" and "idealism."

Actual foreign policy issues are rarely so simple. They usually involve complicated trade-offs, marginally greater military security, for example, versus marginally greater resources for domestic investment. American foreign policy issues present peculiar complications. The now-unfashionable doctrine of "American exceptionalism" contains an element of truth. As Bradford Perkins writes in the opening volume of this splendid Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations:

The driving forces in American foreign policy both are and are not like those of other nations. They include the same emphasis on national self-interest, the same intrusion of the larger culture, the same distortions, sometimes minor, sometimes substantial, of the view of world events seen through a prism of national but not universal values. But each of these forces, or factors, also has a peculiarly American character.

American foreign policy issues have historically involved one question not asked in the same way elsewhere: Who are we? The French, the Germans and the Japanese may find it hard to decide how far their national interests are coterminous with those of their farmers. Though writers in each country anguish over national identity, France, Germany and Japan have well-defined cultures, with inherited notions of common interest related in various ways to older notions of dynastic interest, confined more or less to people in one area who speak one language. The British self-conception is more vague; differences between Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher bear witness. But Britain chooses between only two or three personalities (Commonwealth and Empire versus "this earth, this England"). The United States chooses among many.

WHOSE AMERICA?

The American problem of self-definition dates back to the American Revolution. Earlier, Americans had begun, like the Scots, Welsh and some Irish, to think of themselves as Britons. While they agitated for London to pay more attention to their local concerns, they spoke of the interests of the crown as "our interests."

After the Revolution, Americans never settled into a comparable consensus. Even now, many Americans think of the United States less as a nation than as a kind of alliance. The federal system nourishes such a conception. Until the Civil War, "the United States" was customarily a plural noun. Only since the 1860s have Americans said, "The United States is . . ." In the 1990s, with regard to trade agreements, many members of Congress say openly that their duty is to defend their districts or states, not the interests of the nation as a whole.

For other Americans, the United States has been more than a nation. Thomas Jefferson saw a community of interest among republics. To some Jeffersonians, this community could be one of independent republics. To others, it meant a United States adding cubits to itself, as in the expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century (an early, more literal policy of "enlargement").

A different version of this larger United States found some community of interest wherever it saw an open door for trade and investment. This was less Jefferson’s "empire of liberty" than a more old-fashioned empire with a metropolis and dependencies, but it differed from European empires in the extent of commitment to populations nominally entirely independent. Witness Grover Cleveland’s threat to go to war with Britain on behalf of Venezuela if Britain refused to arbitrate a boundary dispute or F.D.R.’s stubborn refusal to modify his insistence that Japan respect China’s territorial integrity.

Yet another and even larger United States was that of Woodrow Wilson. In Wilson’s conception, a community of interest linked all governments committed to peace. To him, peace was a precondition for both democracy and capitalism. As Akira Iriye writes, "Democracy at home and peace abroad . . . were two sides of the same coin." Out of this conception grew the staple definition of American interest after World War II: the preservation of "peace-loving nations."

Some Americans, however, thought of the United States as a self-contained nation whose interests were primarily those of the people within its borders. John Quincy Adams is an example. He said of America, "She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Later, others held a similarly limited conception of the United States: William Jennings Bryan, Henry Wallace, Robert A. Taft.

The Cambridge History taken as a whole illustrates the extent to which foreign policy debates in the United States have really concerned the definition of the nation. Anti-interventionists of 1917 and 1941 shared John Quincy Adams’ conception of America. To them, to go to war in Europe seemed insane. Interventionists had different conceptions, some of which were Jeffersonian or Wilsonian. Insanity to them was to refuse to fight for fellow democracies or other peace-loving peoples. The aftermath of the Cold War finds these competing conceptions still alive.

SEEKING WHAT?