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Date Posted: 02:25:07 12/29/01 Sat
Author: Christopher Layne
Subject: Masters of the Universe

Foreign Policy
Masters of the Universe
'Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World' by Walter Russell Mead

_____Online Extra: Chapter 1_____ • This feature allows you to read the first chapter of a new book. This week's selections are "Bad Elements" by Ian Buruma, "The Birds of Heaven" by Peter Matthiessen and "Special Providence" by Walter Russell Mead.




Sunday's Book World, as well as daily reviews, news and features, can be found on our Books page. The Washington Post Book Club gives you access to discounts, discussions, special events and more.



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Reviewed by Christopher Layne
Sunday, December 23, 2001; Page BW06

SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
By Walter Russell Mead
Knopf. 374 pp. $30
Notwithstanding its title, Walter Russell Mead's Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World is mostly about the domestic politics of American foreign policy. It is also, as Mead concedes, a call for the United States to pursue a grand strategy in the 21st century. The United States, he claims, must be "the gyroscope of world order" because America's "national security and prosperity depends on the health of the world system."
Since the country emerged from World War II as the preeminent power in international politics, American grand strategy has been one best described, in the political scientist David Stiegerwald's words, as liberal realism. In Mead's terminology, liberal realism is the marriage of the Hamiltonian belief that U.S. power and prosperity are tied to America's role in maintaining an open international economic system, and the Wilsonian belief that by exporting its liberal democratic institutions and values, the United States can create a peaceful and stable world order in which its security will be enhanced.
For most of the Cold War era, the foreign policy elite was able to muster a domestic consensus behind the liberal-realist grand strategy. Mead's central argument is that this purportedly essential strategy today is endangered by the absence of a domestic consensus about the role of the United States in the post-Cold War world. Specifically, he worries that Jacksonians, the populist middle class, will form a domestic coalition with so-called Jeffersonians, those who are skeptical about U.S. engagement abroad, and thereby render unsustainable a grand strategy of U.S. engagement and global preponderance.
Special Providence is a flawed book. As an exploration of American foreign policy's intellectual underpinnings, it suffers by comparison with other works, such as Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State, Michael Hunt's Ideology in American Foreign Policy and Michael Hogan's Cross of Iron. But this is a quibble compared to the new book's major weaknesses.
Special Providence is underpinned by a jarring contradiction. Although the book extols the beneficial effects of democracy on U.S. foreign policy, Mead wrote it because he fears that unless a new myth, or "paradigm," of America's foreign policy traditions is created, the democratic process will cause his preferred grand strategy to be abandoned. This could happen, he fears, because the "Cold War myth" subsumed rather than rejected the pre-World War II myth of America's "virtuous isolation"; that is, it conceded that isolation was an appropriate policy before 1940-41 but argued that, for the sake of Realpolitik, changed postwar geopolitical conditions required the United States to abandon isolation and contain the Soviet Union.
The Cold War myth was just that, he says, because it obscured the real thrust of U.S. grand strategy after 1945: the creation of an American-dominated world order based on Hamiltonian and Wilsonian precepts. Because the Cold War myth obscured from the American people the real purposes of U.S. power, Mead fears they will conclude that the disappearance of the Soviet threat means that it is O.K. for the United States to shirk its asserted responsibilities, and return to what he sees as the illusory comfort of "virtuous isolation."
Mead is correct about two things. First, the present international economic order -- summarized in the catchwords "interdependence" and "globalization" -- has not arisen spontaneously. It is part and parcel of America's geopolitical predominance in the international system since 1945. An open international economy cannot exist absent the geopolitical stability imposed by a a single global power. Whatever its economic benefits may be, in grand strategic terms this is a problematic policy. First, there is the unpleasant fact that other states feel threatened by the power of a dominant state, which is why, in modern international history, all previous contenders to this status have been defeated by countervailing coalitions. Second, the strategic consequence of economic openness is the diffusion of wealth and technology to other states, which perversely makes possible the emergence of the very powers that eventually will seek to contain or overthrow the dominant power. Third, to provide a secure environment conducive to international economic openness, the dominant world power must undertake extensive military commitments abroad, fight occasional wars, and assume responsibility for maintaining stability in turbulent regions (such as the Middle East).
The second point about which Mead is correct concerns the need for a debate about America's future grand strategy. Given the risks to the United States of seeking to maintain its current global dominance, the merits of that strategy should be examined in comparison with its chief rival, which is not isolationism (a useless, ahistorical pejorative) but a realist balance of power strategy (which scholars call off-shore balancing).
Why hasn't such a debate occurred? Here, Mead's book, underwritten by the Century Fund, unwittingly provides the answer. Pillars of the foreign-policy establishment, such as the Century Fund, are not interested in supporting research that asks hard questions about the first principles of U.S. grand strategy. They fear that such studies would call into question the wisdom of the grand strategy they favor. So instead they fund unoriginal scholarship that purports to validate the grand strategic conventional wisdom. Books like Special Providence are the result. •
Christopher Layne is an associate professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Miami.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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