THREE RING SHOW:

Ignoring history bad U.S. strategy (Austin Bay, 08/05/2004, San Antonio Express-News)

Consider the historical record: 1814, Washington burns in one of the final acts of the War of 1812; 1941, Pearl Harbor is attacked and America can no longer avoid World War II; Sept. 11, 2001, and America can no longer treat the war on terror as a problem for police.

The years 1814, 1941 and 2001 each revealed inadequacies in American homeland defense.

The James Monroe administration (with John Quincy Adams as primary architect) implemented the post-War of 1812 strategy intended to thwart future attacks on the American mainland — and not simply along the East Coast. Franklin Roosevelt's administration devised the grand strategy to secure America during WWII and its long aftermath.

What became the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny guided American statecraft throughout the 19th century. FDR's coalitions, with the United States as central player, won WWII and became the cornerstone of the 20th century's international state system. Monroe implemented the first and FDR the second "grand strategies" in U.S. history.

George W. Bush's administration has formulated and is implementing the third.

That's the nutshell version of Surprise, Security and the American Experience, by Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis. It's an insightful, nuanced, scholarly book that should leave the Bush administration's most rabid critics choking on their scorn.

We might think of these three as concentric circles: first we declared that our national security extended to the entire Western Hemisphere, then to the entire West, now to the entire globe. And the singularly American notion of what makes us secure is that all nations conform to liberal democratic norms.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 5, 2004 1:21 PM