Past the Water’s Edge

In on sentence in their New York Times op-ed Elizabeth Cobbs and Kimberly C. Field demonstrate that they don’t understand U. S. history or foreign policy:

America desperately needs a new grand strategy — a concise, high-level vision for our role in the world.

The United States does not have a grand strategy and has never had a grand strategy in that sense. Our grand strategy has been an emergent phenomenon that arose from the contending political, economic, and social forces in the country. Walter Russell Mead outlined the dominant forces that have shaped that grand strategy in his book, Special Providence, characterizing them as Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Hamiltonian, and Wilsonian. Another way of looking at them is pessimistic idealist, pessimistic realist, optimistic realist, and optimistic idealist. We are too large and diverse a country for any grand strategy but our emergent grand strategy has been remarkably consistent and persistent over time. Failing to understand that is to fail to recognize how we are different from France, the United Kingdom, or Germany. Or Russia or China for that matter.

To understand how that consensus functions, consider the events leading up to our entry into World War II. Wilsonians had supported our entering the war as early as the Spanish Civil War. Hamiltonians came on board quickly (war is good for business). The holdouts were Jacksonians and Jeffersonians.

That all changed with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jacksonians, without whose support U. S. warmaking would be impossible, immediately changed from disinterest in what was going on in Europe to a desire for revenge. Isolationist Jeffersonians stopped protesting entering a European war in the interest of defending the republic. We were united and that persisted throughout the war.

What we need is not a grand strategy but a consensus. That will never be accomplished by having one imposed by experts, the process experts invariably prefer. What has actually happened over the last 30 years is that Congress has abandoned its Constitutional duties and Hamiltonians and Wilsonians have run rampant. Today’s Wilsonians come in two flavors—neoconservatives who believe they can spread liberal democracy by the sword and liberal interventionists who want to save people, either from their tyrannical rulers or from themselves or each other. Of course so long as they aren’t taxed to pay for our wars, Hamiltonians have no problem with them. As noted above, wars are good for business. If our few lonely Jeffersonians had their way we wouldn’t be at war at all and if the Jacksonians had their way the Middle East would have no cities. You need only look at pictures of Dresden or Nagasaki during World War II to understand the Jacksonian way of war.