A Hegemon's Coming of Age
A Brief History of U.S. Foreign Relations
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From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776
Oxford University Press
2008
1056 pp.
9780195078220
$35.00
Anyone who has written a one-volume history of U.S. foreign policy deserves the gratitude -- and the sympathy -- of everyone engaged in the study and teaching of this perplexing subject: possibly the most complex, vital, and, relative to its importance, understudied discipline in world history today. Such authors deserve our gratitude because a one-volume study of the United States' engagement with the world is so necessary to readers and, especially, to teachers. They deserve our sympathy because such a book is difficult, if not impossible, to write well.
George Herring's well-written and lively book, part of the Oxford History of the United States series, may turn out to be one of the last attempts by a leading scholar to compress a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the United States' foreign relations into a single volume. More than 230 years have passed since the Declaration of Independence; the United States has been the most powerful country in the world since World War I ended, in 1918; and since the end of World War II, it has consciously assumed responsibility for the maintenance of the global economic and political system. A lot of water has passed over the dam.
It gets worse: the story is fiendishly complex. In all the long history of the civilized world, only a few countries and cultures have had anything like the impact of the United States on religion, politics, technology, and culture. Like ancient Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, and Arabia, and like more modern Spain and the more modern United Kingdom, the United States has shaped the way people have worked, fought, prayed, and played in many places far from its shores. Because the American era coincided with (and indeed helped cause) the technological and economic revolutions of the twentieth century, the impact of the United States has spread faster and deeper than did the impact of its predecessors.
To take only one, little-appreciated statistic: in 1900, approximately nine percent of the population of the global South was Christian. By 2000, 24 percent was Christian. And just as U.S. missionaries have been the primary (although far from the only) agents in spreading this faith, the distinctively American religion of Pentecostal Christianity (born in Los Angeles at the Azusa Street revival of 1906) has been the largest and most energetic element in the greatest expansion of any religious faith in documented history.
The Los Angeles revival that launched Pentecostalism took place a few miles from where, in the next decade, the studios and back lots of Hollywood would touch off another revolution in global culture. And if the Azusa Street and Hollywood revolutions were not enough, Los Angeles was the first great world city shaped by the automobile. Pentecostalism, Hollywood, and drive-in living are all the products of just one U.S. city; to comprehend the global impact of the whole country is more challenging.
No one-volume or even five-volume work could do justice to this story. Yet the effort must be made. Without at least some understanding of the United States' relationship with the world, the history of the twentieth century makes no sense. Writers must comfort themselves with G. K. Chesterton's observation that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
COMPRESSED VOLUME
Most of the criticisms usually leveled against a book like From Colony to Superpower must be set aside. It is pointless to carp that Herring leaves this or that out; ruthlessness is the first quality a U.S. historian must possess, and the essence of the task is to cut. Not enough about religion, not enough about women, not enough about the poor, not enough about intellectuals, not enough diplomatic history, not enough about technology? It is idle to whine. To satisfy one such critic is to make a dozen more; making room for a fuller treatment of one subject means skimping somewhere else. The novel has been defined as a long prose narrative that has something wrong with it; a one-volume history of U.S. foreign relations can be defined as a long prose narrative that omits vital points.
The most successful short accounts of the grand sweep of U.S. foreign relations published in recent years have taken a different path. Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State and John Lewis Gaddis' Surprise, Security, and the American Experience concentrate on a handful of themes, using them to illuminate the long-term development of the United States' world role. (So does my own Special Providence.) Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation is the first volume of a projected two-volume series; Kagan uses the luxury of the extra space to mix more narrative with what remains, at least in the first volume, a tight and schematic overview of ideological unities that link the disparate strands of his story into one coherent, if still incomplete and abstracted, chronological account.
Herring has taken a more historiographically conservative stance than McDougall or Gaddis and produced a book that stays close to the canons of conventional diplomatic history even as it ventures occasionally into broader social themes. The book's subtitle holds the key: this is a history of U.S. foreign relations -- broader than a history of U.S. foreign policy, narrower than a history of the United States' foreign engagement.
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