In this two part book review I will first focus on Walter Russel Mead’s Special Providence before turning in part two to Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson’s new The Myth of American Idealism. Why bring together Mead and Chomsky/Robinson? To facilitate a discussion and hopefully produce some insight. Mead represents the thoughtful articulation of a more or less mainstream, relatively positive appraisal of American foreign policy, while Chomsky/Robinson offer a thoughtful leftist critique.
First, Mead’s book. Mead is a foreign policy scholar who has taught at several universities, written for many journals and magazines, and held positions at the mainstream Council on Foreign Relations. He is also cofounder of the centrist New America Foundation. Although his book Special Providence was published in 2001, and thus does not tackle such fundamental issues as 9/11, the Iraq War, and the more recent global populist turn, it is both a powerful overview of the history of American foreign policy and a remarkably prescient look at developments that were just starting to percolate at the turn of the twenty-first century.
To begin with, Mead says, “The United States has had a remarkably successful history in international relations.” (8). He gives examples of successful maneuvering with and against European powers that date back to the American Revolution and on through the Civil War. Mead notes that “within a generation after the Civil War, the United States became a recognized world power while establishing an unchallenged hegemony in the Western hemisphere.” (8).
This culminates, according to Mead, in a situation where in 2001 “the United States is not only the sole global power, its values inform a global consensus, and it dominates to an unprecedented degree the formation of the first truly global civilization our planet has known.” (10). He then goes on to compare this to many of the failed foreign policies of other powers, from misguided follies to immoral conquests. And this raises important questions: What counts as a successful foreign policy? How might one measure this? What counts as a moral foreign policy? We will return to these evaluative questions later. For now we must ask: Why has American foreign policy been so successful, according to Mead?
Mead sees four traditions of American foreign policy, each named after a key figure in American history: Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian. Mead’s thesis is that American foreign policy has been remarkably successful through the effective debate, confrontation, and collaboration between these four competing perspectives. Each of the four have made valuable contributions to American successes and have helped to correct for the shortcomings and blindspots of their rivals. What defines each school?
Hamiltonian: This school, named for Secretary of the Treasury and Federalist Papers coauthor Alexander Hamilton, is focused on using American power to maintain a stable international order for trade and free commerce. Historically Hamiltonians used protectionist policies to build strong American industries but over the course of the twentieth century became the key group in American foreign policy pushing for establishing an international capitalist order, through force if necessary.
Wilsonian: This school, named for President Woodrow Wilson, focuses on spreading democracy and human rights to the countries and peoples of the world, partly through the framework of international law and human rights, partly through armed intervention. Both the Wilsonian and Hamiltonian perspectives are more than willing to bring these imperatives about through military force. They are, more or less, the dominant mainstream perspectives of American foreign policy and empire.
The Hamiltonian and Wilsonian perspectives are internationalist in focus and built around regular armed intervention in service of their goals. In Mead’s words, “politically the first 140 years or so of American independence were not a quiet time in American foreign relations. Virtually every presidential administration from Washington’s to Wilson’s sent American forces abroad or faced one or more war crises with a great European power.” (17).
In the early pages of the book Mead effectively shows how an active, interventionist foreign policy has been a defining feature of American history, even during the supposedly more isolationist 19th century. And of course in the 20th century, as the US became a great power, it famously intervened in Latin America and elsewhere with regularity.
So what about the other two schools? The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian perspectives are more internally focused and as such have been less dominant within the mainstream of American foreign policy. To simplify, one could say that the Jeffersonian perspective is a sort of leftist view and the Jacksonian a right-populist one, whereas the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian perspectives are both centrist.
Jeffersonian: This school, named after President Thomas Jefferson, is concerned primarily with expanding democratic freedom at home and harbors considerable worries over the concentration of state and corporate power, not to mention a skepticism of militarism and empire. As Mead says, “Jeffersonians have worried about the ability of large economic concentrations to infringe on popular liberty.” (179). This means they tend to be focused on reducing corporate power at home and promoting more authentic democracy in the United States. Initially Mead resists categorizing the Jeffersonian school as left-wing. After all, there are right and left Jeffersonians but all are anti-authoritarian and anti-interventionist. Think of the Iraq War of 2003 (which began after Mead’s book): it was opposed both by leftists and right-wing libertarians. Jeffersonian’s fundamentally focus on preserving the American experiment in self-government. He calls it a “defensive spirit.” (181). Indeed, “fewer things were clearer to the Jeffersonians than that the growth of the American republic into an intercontinental empire was a bad business all around.” (184). Yes, and this is why Jeffersonians tend to be left-leaning critics of the foreign policy consensus.
Jacksonian: This school, named after soldier and President Andrew Jackson, is generally a folksy, populist perspective of the right, embodied by figures like Pat Buchanan (and now Donald Trump). Whereas conventional Republicans often combined elements of Hamilton and Wilson, the Trump-friendly right is more Jacksonian. He also says it “is less an intellectual or political movement than it is an expression of the social, cultural, and religious values of a large portion of the American public.” (226). The whole chapter, but especially pages 238-240, offers powerful insight into the history of the populist Jacksonian impulse in American life—indeed, it is a stunning depiction of Trump’s populist appeal today.
But as for foreign policy, Mead characterizes it is a form of realism, not overly concerned with international law, norms, or human rights, but rather focused on “honor, concern for reputation, and faith in military institutions.” (245). Jacksonians believe the US “must be vigilant, strongly armed. Our diplomacy must be cunning, forceful, and no more scrupulous than any other country.” (246). They are not isolationists; however, “in the absence of a clearly defined threat to the national interest, Jacksonian opinion is much less aggressive.” (245-246).
Thus, Jacksonians are not particularly interested in constructing and maintaining a world order. Mead points to opposition to American intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s among both Jeffersonians on the left and Jacksonians on the right. Jeffersonians worry that democracy is undermined by the military and corporate imperatives of empire; Jacksonians worry that we will spend unnecessary blood and treasure mucking about in some place we don’t belong—hence they sometimes team up to oppose action abroad.
But Jacksonians are not pacifistic. If the US is attacked, like at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11, they can become the most supportive force for military action. In the aftermath of 9/11 neoconservatives were able to mobilize Jacksonian support for the War on Terror. But two decades later Jacksonian opinion seems to have moved back to a reluctance to waste American lives intervening directly in the Middle East.
What is the upshot of this analysis? For Mead, the debate and competition between these four perspectives has led to considerable success in American foreign policy. Here is, in sum, what Mead sees as the fundamental triumph of 20th century American foreign policy: Winning the Cold War and presiding over the international political and economic system as its undisputed leader. “It contained the Soviet Union and brought about the collapse of the European communist system without fighting a nuclear war.” (54). In a sense Mead’s praise of American foreign policy sounds similar to that of David Runciman in The Confidence Trap. Democratic policy can often be complex and look like a mess but democracies tend to muddle through even the worst crises and on to success after success.
What are some criticisms of Mead? The biggest, at least for those of us on the left, is that he too often euphemistically passes over the realities of empire, which sound mild enough when seen through the lens of words like intervention, order, regime change, and the like. The reality is a fair bit uglier. Nearly constant war-making, support for murderous dictators, and interference in other country’s elections are just some of the realities of empire when you peel back the rhetoric of “stability” and “interventions.”
Mead, to his credit, criticizes many elements of European imperialism and certain American injustices, like supporting Pinochet in Chile. But this points to a fundamental difference between the mainstream and the leftist perspective—are these features of American empire, like supporting dictators, overthrowing democracies, etc., regrettable aberrations or systemic features of American foreign policy?
According to Mead, the idealistic Wilsonian perspective, but really all mainstream parts of American foreign policy, “see Wilsonian ideals as defining the norm of American foreign policy, and interpret its other aspects as unfortunate and temporary deviations from it.” (171). Yes, this does seem to be the dominant narrative in the US. But how does it relate to reality? When you actually start to run through the many military interventions in American history they start to look less like aberrations and more like fundamental features of maintaining imperial order. And if overthrowing governments we dislike (including democracies), waging regular wars, nurturing a massive national security state, sending weapons abroad, and occupying countries, are the everyday cost of empire, they demand a serious (and morally informed response). This Mead largely fails to do. And it is here that the leftist critique of American foreign policy makes it case. (We will explore these questions in detail in the Chomsky/Robinson book review).
How does Mead see foreign policy? His account of American foreign policy is generally idealist, in that competing schools of thought seem to be the biggest drivers. Yes, he recognizes that there may be economic factors, competing interests, elite machinations, and so on, but seems to suggest American foreign policy is primarily the outcome of a pluralistic competition of ideas among elites.
In his words, “each of the four schools that together represent the American foreign policy debate makes distinct contributions to national power, and each is well matched with the others—capable of complementing one another and of flexibly combining in many ways to meet changing circumstances.” (311). And this is a powerful and evocative way to explain and understand that history.
He finishes with an assessment of how the foreign policy elite has become increasingly out of touch with ordinary Americans and how this may have consequences in the future. For a book published in 2001 it has some prescient insights into the budding populist rebellion that was then still lurking beneath the surface.
It’s a well-written and thoughtful assessment throughout. But as mentioned above, the account is also somewhat amoral. Mead recognizes that the US makes some strategic mistakes but this in itself is not a moral critique. When he does recognize that the US has done something morally wrong it seems like these policies are dismissed as minor departures from a broader trend of (relatively unproblematic) success. But the critique from the left presses much harder here: Was the Vietnam War, for instance, a regrettable mistake or an unjust war? How one answers the question is not a trivial matter.
A different concern, regarding his typology: Where do neocons fit into his four-part scheme? How about the broader category of national security hawks? These seem to combine elements of Hamilton, Wilson, and Jackson, but is this the most helpful way to see them? These questions matter, though I leave them hanging for now.
Overall Mead is most interested in an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the four schools he identifies and less in a condemnation or celebration of any school. As for his own opinion, he concludes by defending a sort of chastened, non-leftist Jeffersonian perspective, one that embraces American world dominion but seeks to do so at the least possible cost and with as little military intervention as possible.
In part two I will turn to Chomsky and Robinson’s new book, which offers a leftist alternative to Mead. In that review I will also consider whether their perspective can fit into Mead’s four-part schema, most likely as a radical left Jeffersonian argument, one very distinct from Mead’s.