Speaking of foolish consistency, not long ago I finished listening to an hour long radio interview with Andrew Bacevich, presumably part of the tour promoting the release of the paperback edition of his book. I’m not sure whether I’ll read the book or not. Here’s the link. You can listen or download the interview in mp3 format there.
One of the problems with Grand Overarching Theories of History, which apparently Dr. Bacevich has and explores in his book, is that as things change you’re faced with a choice. Either you torture both your theory and the facts until neither mean anything or your theory collapses under the weight of change. Judging from the interview Dr. Bacevich is redefining American exceptionalism as expansionism and expansionism as wanting a better, more prosperous life (economic expansionism).
In the interview Dr. Bacevich characterized American exceptionalism as the idea that the Americans think they have an obligation to spread their values and way of life throughout the world. Maybe that’s what it means now but that’s not what the idea meant when it was first suggested by de Tocqueville nearly 200 years ago and it’s not what it’s meant for most of our history.
Have we always been expansionist? There certainly has been a “Manifest Destiny” strain of American thought since at least the 1840’s. At the time it was construed as a mandate for the United States to cross the continent from coast to coast. I can’t recall anybody ever having asserted that we have a similar mandate outside of the North American continent. There have been occasional spasms of various forms of imperialism, e.g. Teddy Roosevelt’s plain old colonialism, Woodrow Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy”, and George Bush’s desire to spread democracy in the Middle East. I see them more as divergences from the norm rather than the norm. Most of the time I think Americans are blithely uninterested in the rest of the world.
It is certainly not true that the United States has always had an expansionist foreign policy (unless you redefine expansionism so that it means anything whatever). By the standards he’s using Andorra has an expansionist foreign policy.
I’m not sure how Dr. Bacevich explains Andrew Jackson or the Civil War. Jackson changed American politics in such a way that populism became much more important. And the Civil War impressed on Americans that we didn’t want to fight a war within our borders. I’m not sure that you can understand American history without recognizing both of those things.
I, too, have a Grand Overarching Theory of History but, fortunately, it’s one that incorporates change. Technology improves over time; things change; human nature, not so much.
I have a theory too: we live our lives in a shifting nexus of genetics, environment, free will and random chance. Humans are therefore not terribly predictable. And since humans are unpredictable, so are those systems they inhabit.
Which is why life is fun.
This is the main reason I haven’t read Mead’s book on the four types of American foreign policy since it might clutter my historical senses. But at least Mead is talking about competing prototypes, not a single arch.
Dr. Bacevich certainly doesn’t appear to understand “exceptionalism.” His book describes Lincoln as opposed to “exceptonalism” (for his opposition to the Mexican War), but Lincoln relied extensively on American exceptionalism to gather support for the war, i.e. America as the “last best hope of earth.”
Mead sees American foreign policy as having been forged from the interaction of competitive influences in American political thought. At any given time one or the other influence might be dominant but the competing influences gives the policy stability and a certain consistency. It’s an intrinsically dynamic view rather than the static one that Bacevich seems to have.
The Mississippi may change its course from time to time but it still flows from its source up in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.