A Hegemon's Coming of Age
A Brief History of U.S. Foreign Relations
Article Summary
A new book presents the complex and lively history of the evolution of U.S. power abroad.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on 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
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This approach makes sense. Diplomatic history, a useful genre that is too often neglected, is a necessary precondition for the study of the United States' engagement with the world. But the American state more frequently reflects, rather than shapes, the forces in American civil society. It was not U.S. diplomacy, for example, that determined U.S. policy toward the Indians or expansion into Texas but the demographics and settlement activity of the American people. The people acted; the diplomats followed -- often reluctantly. The United States' tradition of a relatively weak and decentralized state combined with an unusually well-organized and dynamic civil and commercial society means that the policies of the state reflect only a small part of the activity of the society. Accordingly, one must go beyond diplomatic history to make sense of the United States' role in the world.
But if diplomatic history is too narrow, a study of U.S. foreign relations that rooted itself entirely in the history of American society would be impossibly broad and unfocused. How much must a history of U.S. engagement with the world say about Azusa Street, Hollywood, and suburban sprawl? Herring's approach allows him to keep much of the order and economy of a traditional diplomatic narrative history, but he is able to escape the confines of that approach from time to time and launch out into the broader story of the social movements that led U.S. foreign engagement in various ways. The result is a book that never loses its narrative drive, that tacks swiftly and effectively between diplomatic and social history, that covers the topics of traditional diplomatic history well, and that makes it all look easy.
From Colony to Superpower has other virtues as well. Like Kagan in Dangerous Nation, Herring looks at the United States' relations with Native American peoples as important elements in its encounter with the rest of the world. Neglect of this history has been due to both a general historical amnesia and a Eurocentric view of U.S. foreign policy. In fact, many of the traits, good and bad, that Americans would show in their later dealings with the rest of the world first appeared in their dealings with the native peoples of North America.
Herring also casts light on two eras in U.S. history that are relatively poorly understood, even by well-educated readers: U.S. foreign policy between the American Civil War and the Spanish-American War and U.S. foreign policy between the two world wars. His description of the period between President Woodrow Wilson's retirement in 1921 and President Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933 is particularly timely and useful today, when the economic dimensions of U.S. policy have come so vividly to the fore. Policymakers need a much better understanding of the record (including the shortcomings) of U.S. economic diplomacy in the era before Bretton Woods. A sympathetic and well-organized, but not uncritical, account of the arms control diplomacy of the period is another valuable contribution; one cannot but be grateful to a historian who gives Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who presided over the first major naval arms limitation conference, something close to his due.
TAKING SIDES
If the treatment of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles and of the diplomacy of the 1920s shows Herring at his best, his account of the Truman administration disappoints. Herring clearly sympathizes with the revisionist view that Harry Truman's simplistic and moralistic use of history, erratic judgment, and hard-line diplomacy were partly responsible for the Cold War. This is a respectable, although minority, view among U.S. historians, and virtually all agree that these traits were real and, at times, damaging. But partly, no doubt, because constraints of space prevent Herring from developing his argument fully, his treatment of the Truman administration appears both weak and tendentious.
His treatment of the suppression of the communist insurrection in Greece is particularly troubling. Between 1947 and 1949, the United States, without committing combat troops, helped the Greek army win a brutal civil war against a communist insurrection that was heavily supported by Yugoslav President Marshal Tito and enjoyed occasional support from Joseph Stalin. The United States' firmness eventually led Stalin to abandon his support for the Greek Communists. That, in turn, led to one of the great Western successes of the Cold War, when Tito broke with Stalin in part over the Kremlin's failure to back the Greek Communists.
Herring's treatment of this episode is startlingly ungracious. He charges the Truman administration with "ignoring the essentially domestic roots of the insurgency, blurring the authoritarian nature of the Greek government, and greatly exaggerating the Soviet role." Moreover, the victory "came at a great cost": 100,000 people died. And in any case, his indictment continues, the United States' ultimate success was as much due to mistakes made by the insurgents as to anything Truman did.
But this misses many points. The nasty, incompetent, and corrupt Greek regime, for all its many faults, was clearly a better alternative for the Greeks than communist rule. A communist victory in Greece would have been a major victory for the Kremlin, regardless of the insurgency's "domestic roots." Turkey would have been isolated, and Communists in Italy, Germany, and France would have been encouraged at a critical time. People die in wars; a communist victory in Greece would surely have led to more deaths and repression in Greece, and U.S. policymakers at that time could reasonably fear that a lost civil war in Greece would lead to more civil wars and many more deaths in other countries at risk.
