[ 1 ] Introduction
In the heated 2008 Democratic primary, Barack Obama’s national security advisory team chose a pithy formulation to characterize his prospective approach to foreign policy: “pragmatism over ideology.”1 The tagline implied that Obama as president would respond to opportunities and crises with recourse to practical reasoning rather than theory or abstraction. Emphasizing the dangers of ideology in U.S. foreign policy on the campaign trail, Obama consistently reminded voters of one of his own principal strengths in foreign affairs—his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
From Obama’s perspective, an ideologically driven foreign policy ignored practical obstacles, local circumstances, and history. A variant on grandiose Wilsonian ideology had led the United States to pursue an unrealizable abstraction— that military intervention could catalyze a wave of democratization in a region with no history of participatory democracy—and the consequences had been disastrous.
In contrast to Hillary Clinton and every serious Republican presidential candidate, Obama rejected President George W. Bush’s ideological rationale for toppling Saddam Hussein. Bush claimed that a liberated Iraq would eventually foster a more democratic and peaceful Middle East. During the run-up to Bush’s war, Obama denounced the “cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”2
The historian Michael Hunt wrote that ideology is “an interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that reality.” Furthermore, he argued, a truly critical understanding of the “web of ideology” that informed U.S. policy must consider “systematically the dimensions of that ideology, the roots that sustain it and may render it resistant to change, and the precise relationship it bears to policy.” Hunt was responding sympathetically but critically to New Left historians, whose scholarship was indelibly shaped in the 1960s and 1970s by the calamity that was the Vietnam War and who had focused their interpretations of the history of U.S. foreign policy on material drivers
In 2014, after several years in office, Obama offered a blunter, earthier version of pragmatism over ideology: “Don’t do stupid shit.”3 On the ground in Syria, for example, that meant not committing U.S. military power to a civil conflict when the party in power was backed by Russia and Iran. Obama’s choice to break with the so-called Washington playbook—the militarized ideology of the U.S. foreign policy establishment—drew criticism from his national security team and, especially, from his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In the long run-up to her second presidential bid, Clinton registered her disapproval of Obama’s caution in the pages of The Atlantic: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle for a great nation.” It was a mistake to think that ideological struggle ended with the Soviet collapse, Clinton said, because “history never stops . . . nationalisms were going to assert themselves, and then other variations on ideologies were going to claim their space.” In Clinton’s assessment, Obama failed to counter the Assad regime’s aggression, and that had empowered ISIS in Syria and Iraq and opened the space for Putin to fulfill “his vision of Russian greatness” by illegally annexing Crimea in 2014. It was not enough for Obama to avoid doing “something crazy” because the “world in which we are living right now” required a worldview strong enough to contain the hostile ideologies competing for dominance on the world stage.4
[ 2 ] INTRODUCTION
Reportedly, Obama became “ripshit angry” at Clinton’s statement. After all, in the midst of a never-ending ideologically driven war, he asked, how was “don’t do stupid shit” a misguided or myopic foreign policy? In the words of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisor, Benjamin Rhodes, “Who’s exactly in the stupid shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?”5 Of course, that depends on the definition of “stupid shit,” which is where ideology comes in.
Long before Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea, his vast network had begun a strategy that would allow Russia to remain on the front foot. That strategy was sustained ideological warfare. In 2013, Putin’s chief of
In other words, it was a profound miscalculation for Obama and his advisors to think they could transcend ideology and still resolve conflicts on the world stage. Obama’s team looked at Russia in 2014, for example, and determined that it represented no real, material threat to U.S. core interests, even though Russia had invaded Crimea and publicly supported Bashar al-Assad. From Obama’s perspective, by April 2016, Russia was “overextended,” “bleeding,” “significantly diminished” in world affairs, and on the verge of economic collapse under the weight of sanctions. “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence,” Obama said, whereas Putin’s belligerence betrayed his weakness.9 But Obama’s realism—his tendency to overvalue economic factors and material conditions and to downplay ideology—made him underestimate Putin’s wider ambitions in Ukraine and overestimate the coercive potential of economic sanctions. Obama rejected ideology, oblivious to the fact that he was being led by an ideology of economic determinism..
INTRODUCTION [ 3 ] and self-interest. Hunt insisted that an “open-minded inquiry into the roots of ideology should leave room for noneconomic impulses, in particular those stemming from racial or ethnic identity, strong nationalistic preoccupations, an evangelical faith, and pronounced regional concerns.”6 Inspired by the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz and political scientists such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, Hunt emphasized the utility of “political culture,” in which “ideologies are integrated and coherent systems of symbols, values, and beliefs” are based on “socially established structures of meaning.” According to Hunt, this approach foregrounds the complexity of ideological formation and guards against finding a “single, simple reason for the origins and persistence of a particular ideology.”7 Hunt warned policy makers and their critics against dismissing or minimizing ideology or assuming they could somehow avoid it (as Obama claimed) by attending to the purported “real substance” of international affairs. Unless they made the effort to untangle the ideological drivers of U.S. foreign policy, Hunt cautioned, they would produce a “false diagnosis of the problems afflicting U.S. foreign policy, a misinterpretation of the roots of the problem and misdirected proposals for solving it.” Instead of the “fresh insights on the problems of U.S. policy that we seek,” they would repeat the mistaken policies of their predecessors.8
the general staff, General Valery Gerasimov, observed that “nonmilitary means” have “exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness” in meeting Russia’s political objectives. Conflicts in the twenty-first century were instead decided in the “information space,” which opened “wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy.”10 While sowing chaos in Ukraine and Syria, Putin had contributed to the rise of far-right populist movements in Europe and the United States. As planned, this ideological warfare wreaked havoc on European domestic politics. It weakened their resolve to oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine, and it cultivated allies for the Kremlin among radical nationalist groups. It also informed the cyberoperations that had an impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.11
Obama may have configured his foreign policy as anti-ideological, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was the underexamined ideologies informing his and his administration’s own worldview that prevented them, at least in part, from anticipating the real, material, domestic, and geopolitical threat Russia posed to U.S. interests, and indeed to world peace.12 2014 was the beginning of a multiyear assualt on Ukraine that culminated in the Russian invasion of February 2022. Ideologies set the terms of engagement; they shape politics; and they are not static. They order and explain the world and project the illusion of controllable outcomes. They define and explain success or failure, justify and set boundaries, and compel sacrifice, aggression, or inaction. And, sometimes, their very function hides the fact that they are ideologies. Foreign policies emerge from and produce ideologies out of necessity.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 is a good example. Issued by James Monroe, conceived in part by John Quincy Adams, and ostensibly designed to forestall European interventionism in the Western Hemisphere, the doctrine arose from and bequeathed enduring variants on imperialism, unilateralism, and hegemonism, developed during a critical period of anticolonial revolutions across south and central America. The dynamic of foreign policies emerging from as well as generating ideologies is further confirmed by the case of the Bretton Woods system of 1944, designed to help the world recover from the Second World War and to avoid the mistakes made following the First World War. The restructuring of the world order—what one scholar calls a “New Deal for the world”—and creation of institutions such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were clearly ideological projections of power, premised on a U.S. leadership role in the postwar world.13 Ideologies are an inborn facet of foreign relations
[ 4 ] INTRODUCTION
In the twentieth century, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser shifted this perspective slightly to make the case that ideology is better understood as worldmaking through reason and language, more of an imaginary set of relationships that do in fact correspond in many ways to real conditions of existence. He wrote that “human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life.” For Althusser, ideology performed the social function of masking the structures of power and naturalizing the hierarchies that supported them. In this sense, ideology defined the real for the subjects of a particular society—or, at least, their lived reality (in Althusser’s terms, the subjects’ “ ‘lived’ relation to the real”). Althusser emphasized the role of the state and social institutions as the “apparatus” that helps to reproduce ideology. One need not agree with all of Althusser’s claims—the English historian E. P. Thompson skewered his theoretical pretensions and political naivete in The Poverty of Theory—to appreciate the impact his work has exerted on subsequent generations of scholars.17
The term ideology has a long and contested history. It was introduced by the Idéologues of the French Revolution. They construed it as a science of thought aimed at constructing a system of ideas that reflected material reality.15
Fifty years later, Karl Marx wrote that ideology instead articulated the relationship between culture and political economy, providing an essential mechanism by which societies managed and reproduced themselves. For Marx, a society’s “legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic” form ensured that members of the different classes viewed their positions in the social system (and the system itself) as natural.16 Marx’s varied positions on ideology almost always revolved around some kind of falsity and obfuscation, which in turn legitimizes capitalist forms of hegemony. This led him to identify and critique what he saw as the ideological superstructures that prop up capitalist society. In short, Marxist views of ideology focus on the way they serve as cover for exploitative economic systems.
INTRODUCTION [ 5 ] because, in Hunt’s words, “to move in a world of infinite complexity, individuals and societies need to reduce that world to finite terms.”14 It is these “finite terms”—and the history of the larger implications of reducing the world to them—that this volumeOnexplores.Ideology
This volume shows that U.S. foreign policy is ideological in each of these three senses. As the French Idéologues conceived it, ideology functioned as a self-conscious system of ideas constructed by experts. As Marx believed, it reinforces and naturalizes hierarchical structures of capital and operates through forms that privilege particular and historically situated interests, while at the same time presenting those interests as natural, universal, and moral. And, in Althusser’s terms, it relies on “a system (with its own logic and rigor) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society.”18 Because of his influence on our understanding of language and its role in shaping reality, Althusser’s framing opens up a broad field of inquiry.19
To name two examples from this book, Emily Conroy-Krutz and Daniel Immerwahr analyze representations of empire in popular culture, tying them into the larger framework of meaning with historical resonance and agency. In chapter 10, Conroy-Krutz turns to nineteenth-century missionary magazines with youth sections that manifested a Christian nationalist and evangelical destiny for American children in its pages. In chapter 21, Immerwahr mines George Lucas’s cinematic universe to excavate the tension between tradition and modernization in his films. Immerwahr states that Star Wars and Indiana Jones evince an ideological reaction to the inherently hostile growth of the military-industrial complex during the Vietnam era and the ways that the United States marshaled that technological empire against “traditional” societies. In both examples, the vehicle for the ideology—the magazines and the movies—purposely reproduced identifiable and historically trenchant ideologies related to American empire while generating some unexpected outcomes. The legacy of the French Idéologues is also discernible in this volume. In chapter 19, Daniel Bessner examines the ideological motives behind the objective “scientific” inquiry of certain think tanks. The founders of the RAND corporation set out to institutionalize a progressive vision of the militaryintellectual complex in which experts “scientifically” deduced the guiding principles for U.S. foreign policy. From its origins, RAND expressly pursued the kind of ideological production imagined by the French Idéologues.
[ 6 ] INTRODUCTION
In chapter 15, Penny Von Eschen examines the U.S. neoliberal reaction to Soviet collapse, its attempt to secure international hegemony by marshaling the tools of capital to dominate the post–Cold War landscape, and the alternative ideologies that developed to contest that worldview. Conforming to ideology in the Marxist sense, U.S. foreign policy after the Cold
INTRODUCTION [ 7 ] War sought to shore up a liberal-capitalist world order that privileged its own historical interests. By equating “freedom with the free market,” Von Eschen argues, the authors of this policy fortified structural hierarchies of capital and accomplished the “ideological work of constructing unregulated markets and U.S. power as natural.”
Although ideology as the “science of ideas”—studying ideas, their origins, and their development, in line with the notions of the French Idéologues—arose in the eighteenth century, the ways in which many of the scholars in this volume tend to examine ideology is more in keeping with the approaches and assumptions of the twentieth century and how historians tend to examine ideology. That is to say, the contributors do not always agree on definitions, or moments of false consciousness. But they do tend to characterize ideology as a system of ideas or a method of thinking— individual as well as collective—that assists in discerning interests, ascertaining principles, and justifying actions.20
Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations has an ambitious aim. We have brought together some of the foremost specialists in U.S. intellectual history and U.S. foreign relations to show how ideology shapes the United States in the world.21 The essays in this volume explore the specific ideologies that produced discrete foreign policies and the concepts that these foreign policies in turn reinforced and reproduced. The contributors also examine the “intermestic”—the vital intersection of the international and the domestic—to identify the ideological functions of U.S. foreign policy at home and to trace these policies and their embedded ideas as they operate abroad. Together we map the vast ideological contours of U.S. foreign policy: the concepts, their impacts, and their repercussions.
A New Field, a New History
The contributions to this book have been developed collaboratively with a central goal of establishing the state of a new field. A new area of diplomatic history has emerged in the past decade that explores the roles of ideas, ideologies, and intellectuals in U.S. foreign policy. Often referred to as the “intellectual history of U.S. foreign relations,” this field has generated scholarship on people, groups, and ideas usually considered outside the bounds of traditional diplomatic history. With a focus on human rights, antiimperialism, the culture of “wartime,” missionary movements, indigeneity,
At the outset, we asked our contributors a few questions to guide their exploration, a mode of common inquiry to connect the chapters. There were methodological questions: What is the most coherent way to tell this history? What approaches most accurately reveal the influence and impact of ideologies? What about the conception, transmission, and reception of ideas and ideologies?
Then there were questions of premise and definitions: What counts as an ideology and does it matter? Do we distinguish between the intentional and the incidental production of ideology? Does the source or site of ideological production matter? If so, how? The diversity of views across the contributors on how best to define ideology is revealing. The concept is unveiled in a fascinating variety of ways.
Looking beyond the usual suspects of highly placed policy makers, contributors illuminate the role of previously neglected figures and groups and consider ideologies that not only influence U.S. foreign policy but also challenge prevailing assumptions about the nation’s global purpose. In a series of brief, incisive chapters, Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations demonstrates how varied and disparate ideologies, from before the birth of the republic to today, have indelibly shaped the foreign and domestic affairs of the United States. Exploring Ideology
[ 8 ] INTRODUCTION
science diplomacy, racism, white supremacy, Black internationalism, peace activism, and gender—to name a few key examples—this scholarship has already stimulated a fresh look at the historically explicit (if underexamined) intellectual architecture of U.S. foreign policy. It has excavated theories of nationalism, internationalism, liberal interventionism, isolationism, neutrality, realism, and grand strategy as they inform U.S. foreign relations. We bring these new contributions to the scholarly literature together in a single volume for the first time.
Then there were questions of context, both historical and political: Does a country’s political system provide a distinctive cast to its foreign policy? What effect might an institutionally democratic-republican political system and the attendant ideas of representation and republicanism have on U.S. foreign policy or in similar systems? Did the reality of constant U.S. military engagement have a formative role on the ideologies shaping U.S. foreign policy?
Writing about ideologies forces us to turn abstract (and sometimes unreal) concepts into subjects. How do we ground our analysis in human actors and material agents while acknowledging the real and material agency of ideas? In this book, we define foreign policy and foreign relations very broadly, to include a wide range of actors, texts, and topics outside the narrower confines of “diplomatic” history. And it is worth asking whether that approach also illuminates what we still might be missing.
In the first chapter, Matthew Kruer traces the historical tension between Indigenous and white colonial notions of subjecthood in the British empire. Treating subjecthood as “an ideology, an imaginative construction of the proper order of things that naturalizes relations of power and guides collective action,” Kruer explores the “improvisational forms” Indigenous subjecthood took in an effort to safeguard Indigenous interests. In the seventeenth-century colonies, Indigenous groups leveraged the political designation of “subjecthood” to gain agency (legal rights as well as protections) with colonial British power, which incidentally created a mechanism for British authorities to intercede and exert imperial control over the colonies. As conditions changed in the eighteenth century, white colonial subjects, who enjoyed a different kind of subjecthood under British law, increasingly imagined their interests were in conflict with the interests
INTRODUCTION [ 9 ]
The book is divided into five sections that explore how ideology interacts with five broad categories: people, power, the international, democracy, and progress. Ideologies and the People Part 1, “Ideologies and the People,” contains four chapters that delve into the interplay between people and the state: how “subjecthood” functioned as a lever to gain power and agency with a colonial state; ideological assimilation (in the guise of “civilization”), citizenship, and state sovereignty; the agency of the subject in the democratic imaginary; and the role played by women in shaping U.S. public culture.
What are the moments when ideology forecloses options or debate? And overall, what are the pivotal moments for the crucial ideologies explored in this book? (Revolution, wars, and peace, to be sure—but what about other moments, turning points, acts, decisions, movements, and eras beyond the most obvious social and international relations ruptures?)
In the final chapter of part 1, Katharina Rietzler focuses on female actors and analyzes the role of women public intellectuals in debates on U.S. foreign
[ 10 ] INTRODUCTION of Indigenous subjects. When this ideological attitude shifted into a more “populist persuasion” in the 1760s, it turned to violence, resulting in the Paxton massacre of 1763. And most significantly, it inspired what Kruer argues came to be the “racially coded definitions of citizenship” that dominated the United States after independence.
In chapter 2, Benjamin Coates explores how U.S. presidents have deployed “civilization” as an ideological justification for particular actions. He contends that civilization “has functioned both as an ideology that reads difference as backwardness, and as a political language that justified domination on the grounds of universal values.” Unlike ideologies such as “freedom” or “manifest destiny,” which carry a distinctly American flavor, “civilization” is European in origin and universalist in implication, raising provocative questions about the nation’s place in the world. Coates concludes bracingly that “while ‘civilization’ projects peace and inclusion, its invocation has in practice often accompanied exclusion and violence.” In a world that is heating to a point of no return, portending civilizational collapse, Coates also wonders whether the time has come to expand our conception of civilization to encompass the nonhuman realm.
In chapter 3, Michaela Hoenicke-Moore examines a realm that is woefully understudied in the history of U.S. foreign relations: the views of ordinary people. Through revealing firsthand testimony, Hoenicke-Moore explores how ideologies and concepts such as universalism, national security, and a sense of mission were apprehended and acted upon at the grassroots level. Responding to the historian Robert Westbrook’s appeal to look for the articulation of important ideas not only among intellectuals and elites but within the more broadly conceived civil society, Hoenicke-Moore demonstrates that ordinary Americans were better informed and more attentively involved in the major debates on U.S. foreign policy than is generally recognized. She observes that a bottom-up approach reveals a diversity of foreign policy perspectives “that defies conventional binaries of isolationism/ internationalism, elites vs. masses, hawks vs. doves, Republicans/Democrats, or even, conservatives/liberals.” Interestingly, one ideology that does recur frequently throughout her sample—although it is never defined as such by the letter writers—is realism. This revelation presents an irony that George Kennan and Walter Lippmann—those unabashed elitists and realist skeptics of participatory democracy—would have found surprising.
INTRODUCTION [ 11 ] policy and international affairs during the three decades after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the aftermath of the expansion of the franchise, elite women mobilized to incorporate knowledge of international affairs into female citizenship. From the mid-1920s, women also emerged as public intellectuals commenting on international affairs, even though some institutions such as elite think tanks or universities excluded them. In the 1930s and 1940s, women were interviewed on the radio, gave talks, and taught at universities and colleges. Sometimes they referred to themselves as “lady authorities,” secure in their knowledge that they had a receptive audience for their public speaking and writing on international affairs. From the late 1940s, however, this largely liberal internationalist women’s public culture had to contend with an emerging counterpublic: conservative women who challenged the notion that liberal internationalists were “speaking for all women.” Centering “gender” and “publicness,” the chapter explores how women were constructed and constructed themselves across the political spectrum as responsible but international citizens in the era before international relations was professionalized as a discipline.
Ideologies of Power Part 2, “Ideologies of Power,” consists of five chapters that examine the dynamics of power within four interconnected themes: economics, race, empire, and unilateralism.These chapters explore connections among the radical free trade tradition, the antislavery movement, and anti-interventionism; trade imperialism (in the guise of “free trade”) and hierarchies of power on the international stage; antislavery politics and the antebellum critique of imperialism; and the ideology of fear and insecurity as instrumental to U.S. intolerance for global threats. Permeating so many facets of U.S. power is an impulse toward freedom of action that takes ideological shape in the unilateralism that so often justifies and modulates its application.
In chapter 5, Marc-William Palen explores the divide between economic nationalists and economic cosmopolitans in U.S. history—something of a live issue today. He focuses specifically on the ideology of Cobdenism, which encapsulated the insights of Richard Cobden, the powerful British parliamentarian who led the overthrow of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846 and helped to guide Britain’s adherence to free trade principles in the century that followed. As Palen demonstrates, Cobden and Cobdenism were
inspired by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and David Ricardo’s theory of competitive advantage, and it advocated foreign policy restraint, the pursuit of peace, and a principled opposition to slavery. After “freeing the world from slavery,” Palen writes, “freeing trade was but the next universalist step in the emancipation of humankind.” Unsurprisingly, Cobden’s American devotees included antebellum abolitionists in the industrializing Northeast.
[ 12 ] INTRODUCTION
In chapter 6, Nicholas Guyatt upends the notion that John Quincy Adams—President Monroe’s secretary of state, author of the doctrine that bears his name, and the sixth president of the United States—was an antiimperialist. During a lecture to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1846, Adams declared that Great Britain had the “righteous cause” in its tawdry war with China over the opium trade. In seeking to outlaw the trade of opium—British imports had addicted millions of Chinese to the drug— Adams suggested that China’s leaders were committing an “enormous outrage on the rights of human nature,” chief among which was the right to free trade. Guyatt uses Adams’s speech as a springboard to discuss American ideas about world order in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in reference to Britain’s conception of international law, and the likely role of the United States in expanding and enforcing it.
In chapter 7, Matthew Karp examines U.S. antislavery politics and empire in the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on the 1850s Republican Party and how its leadership understood the relationship among slavery, imperialism, and what might today be termed “global development.” Contrary to historians who identify antislavery positions as a fig leaf to justify the expansion of empire and exploitive capitalism, Karp contends that in the United States “opposition to bondage also produced a significant critique of imperialism—in its proslavery American and aristocratic European forms— and the rudiments of an alternative vision of global order, based crucially on political democracy and the protection of free labor.” Karp explores these ideas as they were expressed by leading Republicans William Seward, Charles Sumner, and Carl Schurz alongside antislavery thinkers Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips. Karp makes a persuasive case that both the
Following the decimation of the Jeffersonian proslavery southern position during the Civil War, it was American Cobdenites who opposed U.S. economic nationalism and foreign policy interventionism in the decades that followed. The movement’s apogee arrived in the 1930s when Secretary of State Cordell Hull—nicknamed the “Tennessee Cobden”—sought to pursue Cobdenite goals regarding free trade.
Part 3, “Ideologies of the International,” encompasses four chapters, each of which explores a distinct ideological system of representation built to
Civil War and “the reconstruction of the former Confederacy should be understood as episodes in international relations.” The popular ideology that someone like Seward espoused—combining a strong commitment to “free labor and democracy—both at home and abroad”—helped shape the violent manner of slavery’s end in the United States.
The final chapter of part 2, chapter 9, explores a counterpoint to the sorts of fears Preston lays out: the pursuit of unilateralism. For Christopher McKnight Nichols, this unilateralism characterizes a constellation of ideas about how U.S. power should function. Fundamentally, this power should serve American interests single-mindedly, and the nation ought to be able to pursue those interests without constraints—whether that takes the form of a binding alliance, international law, or other external force. Nichols identifies and untangles the “long, deeply rooted history of unilateralism as an ideology and as an enduring strain in the constellation of foundational concepts that have informed and shaped U.S. foreign policy from the nation’s earliest moments.” Nichols concludes with a claim that can well be applied to other concepts and practices analyzed in part 2 and across this volume: “unilateralism does not have to amount to an ideology in order to function ideologically in U.S. history.”
In chapter 8, Andrew Preston examines “fear and insecurity” and centers on a paradox that has been evident since 1945: How is it that the United States, one of the most secure and powerful hegemonic nations in history, has been so beset by fear when considering its place in the world? Protected by two vast oceans to the east and west and with generally friendly (or at least, relatively weak) immediate neighbors to the north and the south, the United States has nonetheless been a surprisingly skittish nation.
INTRODUCTION [ 13 ]
Preston observes that, ironically, this tendency to fear the worst was never more acute than when U.S. power was at its height, through the middle decades of the twentieth century. From this psychological frailty (writ large) stem large consequences for the world system. Whereas most states attempt to manage or mitigate threats through diplomacy and other nonmilitary means, Preston explores how the United States too often attempts to preemptively eliminate them, even when the threat is inchoate or even sometimes phantom.
Ideologies of the International
—MARK PHILIP BRADLEY, EDITOR OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW in U.S. foreign relations history, featuring not only presidents and diplomats but also will have an enduring impact on teaching and writing in foreign relations history.”
“A dream team of historians of U.S. foreign relations, under the masterly guidance of Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne, has rehabilitated the concept of ideology for a new historiographical moment. The results are indispensable. Each of the parts is superb, and the whole is more than their sum.”
—KEISHA N. BLAIN, AUTHOR OF UNTIL I AM FREE: FANNIE LOU HAMER’S ENDURING MESSAGE TO AMERICA
—THOMAS ZEILER, COAUTHOR OF GLOBALIZATION AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY scholarship for years to come.”
—KELLY J. SHANNON, AUTHOR OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND MUSLIM WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS important.”
DAVID MILNE is professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia. His Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (2015).
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—MARY DUDZIAK, AUTHOR OF WAR TIME: AN IDEA, ITS HISTORY, ITS CONSEQUENCES CHRISTOPHER M C KNIGHT NICHOLS is professor of history and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for Inter national Security Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (2011) and Rethinking American Grand Strategy (2021).
—SAMUEL MOYN, AUTHOR OF NOT ENOUGH: HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN UNEQUAL WORLD tional framing of diplomatic history, the essays powerfully demonstrate how ideology shapes the interplay between domestic and global affairs.”
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS . NEW YORK CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU