HOW WE ROLL:

A new history of American foreign policy suggests that intervention is in the country’s blood: a review of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 by George C. Herring (Gabriel Paquette, The National)

George Herring’s colossal history of US foreign relations has earned fully-deserved praise for its staggering erudition, lucid prose and brisk style. It offers far more than a litany of long-forgotten diplomats and treaties. Instead, Herring persuasively suggests, the US has been embedded fatefully in international politics since its inception. France and Spain, eager to strike a blow at their increasingly dominant rival Britain, lent massive support to a ragtag group of improbable rebels from 1778, support without which their insurgency would have been suppressed. Foreign affairs are not a sideshow of American history, Herring demonstrates, but one of its chief determinants. [...]

Herring harbours no illusions concerning the arrogant self-fashioning of American power, from John Quincy Adams’s allusion to the “benignant sympathy of our example” to Madeleine Albright’s reference to the “indispensable nation”. One of the most refreshing qualities of his book is its demonstration that racial prejudice, cultural chauvinism and unabashed opportunism have shaped US external relations since the republic’s infancy. Herring disabuses his readers of long-entrenched historical myths about America’s supposed pacific age of innocent isolationism before its turn to robust involvement in global affairs. Intervention, not isolation, has been the prevailing tendency in US foreign relations. Indeed, America’s aspiration to intervene beyond its borders has been unconstrained by the actual limits of its authority and resources.

The Crusade pauses periodically, but never ceases.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2008 6:33 PM