Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

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From one of our leading experts on foreign policy, a full-scale reinterpretation of America ��s dealings� from its earliest days� �with the rest of the world.

It is Walter Russell Mead s thesis that the United States, by any standard, has had a more successful foreign policy than any of the other great powers that we have faced� �and faced down. Beginning as an isolated string of settlements at the edge of the known world, this country ��in two centuries drove the French and the Spanish out of North America; forced Britain, then the world’s greatest empire, to respect American interests; dominated coalitions that defeated German and Japanese bids for world power; replaced the tottering British Empire with a more flexible and dynamic global system built on American power; triumphed in the Cold War; and exported its language, culture, currency, and political values throughout the world.

Yet despite, and often because of, this success, both Americans and foreigners over the decades have routinely considered American foreign policy to be amateurish and blundering, a political backwater and an intellectual wasteland.

Now, in this provocative study, Mead revisits our history to counter these appraisals. He attributes this unprecedented success (as well as recurring problems) to the interplay of four schools of thought, each with deep roots in domestic politics and each characterized by a central focus or concern, that have shaped our foreign policy debates since the American Revolution � the Hamiltonian: the protection of commerce; the Jef-
fersonian: the maintenance of our democratic system; the Jacksonian: populist values and military might; and the Wilsonian: moral principle. And he delineates the ways in which they have continually, and for the most part beneficially, informed the intellectual and political bases of our success as a world power. These four schools, says Mead, are as vital today as they were two hundred years ago, and they can and should guide the nation through the challenges ahead.

Special Providence is a brilliant analysis, certain to influence the way America thinks about its national past, its future, and the rest of the world.

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World Review

Just wow. Mead contends that American foreign policy has been the most successful foreign policy in history and this book is an exploration of what Americans need to do to continue that success into the 21st century.Mead begins by exploring the history of American foreign policy from the founding of the republic to the present. He successfully dispels the myth that the United States spent the 19th century in some kind of virtuous isolation and places many of the political and economic events in a foreign policy context.Just as Mead dispels the myth of virtuous isolation, he seeks a new myth to explain the success of American foreign policy. A myth, he explains, is a way of condensing complex topics into a set of notions which everyone can easily discuss in a reasonably informed manner. His myth is based on our particular strengths as a democracy, the notion that competing schools fight for control over our foreign policy. The result, he claims, is that every portion of our society is represented in our approach to the world.The next chapters describe each of the schools in turn. Mead ends the text with a cautionary but hopeful note about where America needs to go to maintain its success.On top of all this substantive discussion, the book is a compelling read. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews� Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | PermalinkComment�Comment

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