The Committee of Public Safety

I’m a big fan of historian Walter McDougall. In my opinion, McDougall is in the midst of writing the best series of histories about these United States. The two volumes he has completed thus far are Freedom Just Around the Corner : A New American History: 1585-1828 and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Since he is a generalist dipping into many far-flung domains, devotees of a particular area of focus may be appalled by his conclusions within their chosen bailiwick. As a Mormon, for example, I’d quibble with his portrayal of Joseph Smith, the founder of my faith. However, his treatment is more nuanced than other portraits I’ve encountered. In balance, his judgments are usually sound and balanced, and he’s not afraid to offer them.

Another McDougall book that throws some interesting light onto recent discussions in the stratesphere over American grand strategy is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, published back in 1997 but still relevant. Following an approach that reminded me of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, McDougall identifies two main themes in United States’s relationship with the outside world. Both are referenced in the title of his book: the Promised Land and the Crusader State. The Promised Land theme refers to the earliest tradition in American foreign policy that focused on preserving American liberty from threats abroad, especially those which, by the domestic response they triggered, could lead to internal corruption, despotism, and division at home. The Crusader State theme covers a later foreign policy tradition where America went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The first tradition was the dominant influence for most of the nineteenth century and the second dominated the twentieth and into the twenty-first. McDougall refines these two themes into further subdivisions, identifying four sub-themes under the Promised Land theme and four under the Crusader State theme.

McDougall, with a strong awareness of the impact of religion on American history that shows up in this and many of his other works, relabels the two traditions as the “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of American foreign policy:

Our Old Testament:

1. Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)
2. Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)
3. The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)
4. Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called)

Our New Testament:

1. Progressive Imperialism
2. Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)
3. Containment
4. Global Meliorism

More later…