Back to Bedrock: The Eight Traditions of American Statecraft

Do Americans indeed suffer from "conceptual poverty" in their effort to construct a post-Cold War strategy? Actually, no less a student of the United States than Andrei Gromyko once remarked that Americans have "too many doctrines and concepts proclaimed at different times" and so are unable to pursue "a solid, coherent, and consistent policy." Only recall the precepts laid down in Washington's Farewell Address and Jefferson's inaugurals, the speeches of John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine with its Polk, Olney, and Roosevelt Corollaries, Manifest Destiny, the Open Door, Wilson's Fourteen Points, Franklin Roosevelt's wartime speeches and policies, Containment in all its varieties, Nixon's detente, Carter's Notre Dame speech, Clinton's enlargement, and the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan Doctrines. Far from hurling the country into a state of anomie, the end of the Cold War has revealed anew the conceptual opulence that has cluttered American thinking throughout this century.

Nor does America suffer, as many pundits assume, from schizophrenia: the dichotomies often drawn between isolationism and internationalism, idealism and realism, are false. The United States has never been isolationist, and none of the above statesmen considered himself either a dopey idealist or a cold-hearted realist. All held that their doctrines were realistic and moral responses to the challenges America faced in their time. What is often seen as a Hegelian clash in the national discourse between theses and antitheses is actually a clash between competing syntheses of what American values and national interests require.

A democracy composed of numerous religious and secular faiths is always at war with itself over matters of right and wrong, prudence and folly. In domestic politics its battleground is the law. In foreign policy the hallowed traditions, the holy writ, instructs the nation.

Americans have a veritable bible of foreign affairs. Its Old Testament, which dominated U.S. diplomacy in the nineteenth century, was designed to deny the world the chance to reshape America, and it canonized the traditions of America's Exceptionalism, Unilateralism, the American System, and Expansionism. Its New Testament, which has dominated U.S. diplomacy in the twentieth century, was designed to give America the chance to reshape the world, and it canonized the traditions of Progressive Imperialism, Wilsonianism, Containment, and what one might call Global Meliorism. The first four traditions reflect the image of America as Promised Land. The New Testament traditions define America as Crusader State called to bring salvation to a world ravaged by revolution and war.

All eight traditions expressed a consensus among Americans about what constituted a moral and rational response to the threats and opportunities they

encountered abroad. But whereas the Old Testament traditions were mutually supportive, the New Testament ones clashed, not only with the first four, but to some degree with each other. The decades of mortal combat against fascism and communism did not encourage meditation on the contradictions in American traditions. But this juncture in world affairs-Shakespeare's "time for frighted peace to pant"-allows Americans to revisit their history, puncture its myths, and ask anew whether the Author of history, be it Progress or Providence, commands them to change the world in order to remain true to themselves, or whether crusading abroad may drain and defile the virtues that made America great in the first place.

FOUNDING ORTHODOXIES

The first myth that must be dispelled is that American Exceptionalism had anything to do with foreign relations. American colonists believed their country was destined to be different and better than the Old World. But historians who spy in this the seeds of an idealistic vision of foreign relations that would come to full flower with Woodrow Wilson are mistaken. From the moment Benjamin Franklin sailed for Paris to seek support for independence, American statesmen played power politics, employing whatever means were required to secure what was truly exceptional about the new nation-its republican liberty at home.

Early American statesmen repeatedly resisted the temptation to pursue a genuinely new diplomacy based on pacifism, idealism, or ideology. The Continental Congress proceeded by dint of espionage, secret arms deals, and a military alliance with Louis XVI (which Franklin was pleased to betray as soon as Britain hinted at peace). Even John Adams, the Puritan of tender conscience, boasted at the conclusion of the treaty in 1783, "We were better tacticians than we imagined." The Constitutional Convention later quarreled at length over the foreign policy powers to be granted the executive branch. But the framers and The Federalist were silent on how the federal government should behave toward foreign lands and people. Foreign policy was to be the shield and sword of American Exceptionalism, not an expression of it.

During the wars of the French Revolution, Americans were deeply divided as between Britain and France. Federalists feared the spread of French radicalism to America, and Democratic Republicans feared British monarchism and plutocracy. But heated as the debates between the parties were, almost no one opposed Washington's neutrality policy. All understood that to make foreign policy on the basis of ideology would drag the nation into wars abroad and tear it apart at home.