SPECIAL PROVIDENCE: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

SPECIAL PROVIDENCE: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

Jonathan Rosenberg

By Walker Russell Mead. Knopf. 374 pp. $30

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SPECIAL PROVIDENCE: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.

By Walter Russell Mead. Knopf. 374 pp. $30

Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that history matters, and that those who shape today’s American foreign policy must understand the decisions of their predecessors. Only by studying the past, he writes, can we recognize what has made the United States "the most powerful country in the history of the world."

In the book’s intellectual core, Mead sets forth a typology of four "basic ways of looking at foreign policy" that, he argues, have informed the nation’s foreign affairs debates since the founding. "Hamiltonians" seek to link the national government with business and to integrate the country into the world economy. "Wilsonians" believe in upholding the rule of law and in spreading democratic values throughout the world, while "Jeffersonians" are less concerned with democratizing others than with preserving democracy at home. Finally, "Jacksonians" seek above all to maintain the country’s physical security and economic well-being.

Often engaging, Special Providence is filled with details that will be new to many readers. Mead is incisive, for example, on the "special relationship" between Great Britain and the United States, and luminous in discussing the "missionary tradition" that has long informed America’s engagement with the world. And who can quarrel with the notion that policymakers and citizens alike would benefit from knowing more about the American past? Mead’s typology, though, may not offer much of a shortcut to understanding a messy world that cannot readily be reduced to a handful of discrete categories.

More fundamentally, is the past still prologue? When terrorists are willing to use commercial airliners to kill thousands of civilians, when opening a letter can send hundreds racing for antibiotics, and when the United States is forging partnerships with Russia and China, we are in uncharted waters. Mead’s book demonstrates just how starkly the world has changed.

—Jonathan Rosenberg

 

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