Triumph Without Victory

The title of Walter Russell Mead’s long-awaited reinterpretation of the entire course of American foreign policy since the founding of the Republic is derived from the sarcastic observation usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.” It is not that Mead agrees with the 19th century German chancellor. To the contrary, “Special Providence” derives much of its intellectual force and originality from Mead’s indignation over the fact that not only have foreign observers--from Bismarck to Charles de Gaulle--wrongly concluded that the United States has never had a foreign policy worthy of the name but that, even more important, many if not most Americans have joined in what he calls this “wholesale dismissal of the country’s foreign policy traditions.”

Mead is keen to set the record straight. His book is an impassioned effort to debunk the view of such American Bismarckians as Henry Kissinger, who once wrote that “America’s journey through international relations has been a triumph of faith over experience.” Mead is equally dismissive of the assumptions of an American liberal establishment that has tended to reduce the country’s foreign policy debate to a straightforward quarrel pitting idealists like themselves, isolationists and realists like Kissinger against one another.

For Mead, the reality has been both more complex and more interesting. Far from being a story of muddling through, merely reaping the benefits of benign geography or even sheer dumb luck, American foreign policy has been “more successful than the conventional wisdom acknowledges, [and] has played a much more central role throughout American history than many Americans believe.”

In fact, Mead goes much further. He is convinced that the United States’ rise to global preeminence over the course of the last 200 years was produced in very large measure by what might be called a peculiarly American way of foreign policy. If its advantages have failed to be understood or appreciated, Mead argues, this is because the template for thinking about international relations has been that of continental Europe. However, while it may have made sense for a Bismarck or a Napoleon to see foreign relations through the prism of traditional military security preoccupations, given the geostrategic realities a France or a Germany faced, it makes no sense in the American context. And in any case, given America’s extraordinary success, Mead asks almost plaintively, why should the American approach, which was, historically, to emphasize money and trade, be viewed as in any way inferior?

Mead’s early 21st century effort to manumit the American foreign policy tradition from its thralldom to a more prestigious but less effective European model is oddly reminiscent of the attempt of 19th century American writers or 20th century American musicians to free their arts from blind subservience to Old World models. Perhaps inevitably, this at times leads Mead to paint a picture of such transcendent American success as to flirt dangerously with the jingoistic.

Mead is conscious of this danger, writing defensively in his introduction that “Special Providence” should not be interpreted as a “triumphalist” work. But though it is in many ways a remarkable accomplishment and is never less than thought-provoking, the book is marred precisely by a certain triumphalist tone. Mead may have used the Bismarck quote about a special providence ironically, but his chapter on the future of American foreign policy opens with the quite unironic assertion that “the special providence shaping American policy for success bore the fingerprints of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.”

Because Mead is rightly convinced that many of the most important tendencies in American foreign policy can be traced to the Founding Fathers--above all to Jefferson, Hamilton and John Adams--and because the thought of Adam Smith pervades so much of early American political thought, there is nothing particularly controversial about this ascription of influence. What is troubling is Mead’s glorification of America’s rise to power. It is not that one wants him to be a revisionist or to have produced the diplomatic historian’s equivalent of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” But Mead’s argument would carry more weight had his historical evocation of the U.S. rise to global hegemony been more inflected with a tragic sense of history.

After all, Balzac’s insight that “behind every fortune lies a great crime” applies as much if not more to states as to private wealth, and one might have thought that a thinker as knowledgeable and skeptical of received wisdom as Mead would have more readily shouldered the burden of darkening the picture of America’s rise by more extensive references to both the genocide of the native peoples of North America and the peculiar institution of slavery.

This moral lapse is particularly frustrating because Mead’s template for understanding the American foreign policy tradition consists of schools of thought that he characterizes as Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian. It is a useful approach that allows Mead, as he chronicles the ways in which these four traditions have been in opposition but have also complemented one another, to offer an original synthesis of U.S. foreign policy. And yet at the very least, one might have hoped that Jefferson’s identity as a slaveholder and Jackson’s always brutal and sometimes genocidal campaigns against various Indian tribes would have seemed more germane to Mead than they seem to have.

In fairness, he acknowledges them. But he dismisses anxieties about what he calls the “Jacksonian record of racism,” insisting that, in Jacksonian America, “the belief that color is no bar to membership in [its] community of honor is advancing rapidly.” And about the relationship between Jeffersonianism and slaveholding, Mead is even more discreet, contenting himself with the remark that while “Jefferson could write the Declaration of Independence and hold slaves, the ideas that he unleashed have gone beyond him.”

The problem here is twofold. Mead is of course correct in insisting that ideas evolve and, though he might have made more of an explicit effort to do so, his argument that both the Jacksonian and the Jeffersonian traditions of American political thought are rich and worthy and can in no sense be reduced to their worst attributes is unquestionably correct. Where the first difficulty arises is that if these schools have mutated so profoundly--particularly in the case of the Jacksonian tradition--is not Mead’s entire taxonomy itself open to question? In other words, calling something Jeffersonian or Jacksonian or Hamiltonian or Wilsonian but then saying that in effect the men in question would either not have recognized or else might have rejected many of the directions their traditions had taken has a somewhat forced quality about it. Are there really four traditions in American thought on international relations, or is it simply a convenient way for Mead to summarize a far more complicated historical reality?

It is not reassuring to see that, appropriately enough, Mead is obliged to present a series of complicating divisions within each of the four schools as well as to anatomize the overlaps between them. For at that point, the reader begins to wonder whether Mead’s categorization is an aid to understanding or an impediment to it. At the very least, it seems to lead Mead to oversimplify. And in the end, in the brief prescriptive coda to his book, Mead, while largely aligning himself with a kind of wised-up, desentimentalized Jeffersonianism, insists that “there is no school whose perspectives we can afford to lose.”

He insists that the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians are right about the U.S. having global interests and duties but that their solutions are sometimes rash. The Jeffersonians, he says, are correct in fearing international overreach. He is less taken with the policy prescriptions of the Jacksonians but insists that their “cultural, social, and religious vibrancy and unorthodoxy is one of the country’s most important foreign policy assets.”

Mead may be right on all these points. The question that he neither poses rigorously enough nor answers satisfactorily is whether the new synthesis that would draw on these strains in American political thought that he recommends is actually possible or, instead, whether the four schools are so intertwined as to be largely indistinguishable to anyone but the historian of ideas. It would be one thing had Mead simply written a book of intellectual history that sought to revalidate America’s conduct of its foreign policy. But, by his own admission, the project’s scope goes far beyond that.

“The United States,” he writes at the end of his book, “needs a grand strategy that is rooted in the concrete interests of the American people, that respects and serves their moral values, and that at the lowest possible cost in blood, treasure, and political concentration of power secures their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

And indeed, it does; though in fairness, about what democratic nation or people could this not be said? But it is not just that, in his more grandiloquent moments, Mead tends to revel so heedlessly in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism as to provoke anxiety at least in anyone who remembers the Prophet Isaiah’s words about princes, power and vanity.

The more immediate difficulty is that Mead’s vision is one in which, in effect, four schools of thought, each valuable in its own way, can be harnessed to make the American future as bright as its past. Assume Mead’s contention is correct that all four schools have in the past contributed to the success of what he rightly calls the American foreign policy system. This hardly means they will be reconcilable in the same way in the future.

It is here that the intellectual danger of Mead’s taxonomy really becomes apparent. He is a brilliant scholar, and he has produced a book of enduring value as both a work of intellectual genealogy and a stimulating reevaluation of some of the roots of America’s rise. But the obverse is that Mead’s essentially irenic account of American history, manifested, above all, by the absence of its tragic dimension from the pages of “Special Providence,” leads him to gloss over the possibility that these ideas may not always be complementary. The post-Sept. 11 debate over security versus rights is only one early manifestation of how important and worthy ideas can be inimical to one another.

And Mead writes as if he assumes that the American past really is a good guide to the American future. But while it would be reassuring to believe this, it is by no means clear that this is the case. The reason is simple: The policy debates of the last 200 years that Mead anatomizes took place at a time when the nation-state was preeminent. And yet surely it is anything but clear whether even a country as powerful as the United States has the power to determine its own future in terms of its own political traditions in a world where, from migration policy to financial flows to environmental issues, most problems and most solutions are transnational. Will America be the exception in this way too? Mead often writes as if the answer is clearly yes, but that hardly seems likely.