The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy

"The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy

By Michael Mandelbaum

(Oxford, 610 pages, $34.95)

Anyone perplexed by America's jumbled response to the sanctions on Russia might wonder whether there are some principles that guide our relations with the world. Should the United States, a doughty republic oceans away from the carnage, feel a commitment to distant Kyiv? How far should its commitments extend? At what risk to itself? And to what end? In "The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy," Michael Mandelbaum shows us that history helps us address such questions, shedding light on political battles fought in Washington and the heartland between idealists and realists, Know Nothings and internationalists.

Mr. Mandelbaum, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins, has written a book so lucid on a subject so sprawling that it could be read with profit by someone only mildly curious about America's foreign entanglements and yet also be a source of inspiration to anyone steeped in the arcana of world affairs. Laudably devoid of dogmatism, it portrays in chronological sequence the "ascent" of the U.S. from, first, its origins as a "weak power," then as a "great power," next as one of two "superpowers," to its present condition as the world's sole "hyperpower" -- though we cannot be sure for how long, given China's rise.

The book -- Mr. Mandelbaum's 17th -- opens with the unarguable assertion that a country's foreign policy is shaped by its economic and military might. Mr. Mandelbaum contends, however, that the U.S. has always been different from other nations and that its power was never the only determinant of its foreign policies.

Historically, in his view, three "distinctive properties" of American policy stand out: first, the "desire to disseminate" its own political ideas; second, the frequent recourse to "economic leverage" to secure its goals; and third, the "democratic character" of its global relations, in which public opinion exerts a defining influence on policy makers, especially before or during wars. In his pithy formulation, U.S. foreign policy has always been "unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic."

Mr. Mandelbaum divides America's foreign relations into four distinct ages. In the first -- 1765-1865 -- the U.S. was a fledgling power, focused on survival and consolidation. It fought four wars, only one of which -- the war against Mexico -- saw it in the role of the stronger party. The Mexican War (1846-48) was also, Mr. Mandelbaum tells us, most unusual in being waged in pursuit of territorial expansion alone, with President Polk acting as "the agent of Manifest Destiny." In this sense, the war didn't advance the values that Americans "had aspired to spread beyond their borders since the republic's founding."

The next age -- 1865-1945 -- kicked in at the end of the Civil War. Great powers can "project" themselves beyond their borders, and the U.S. joined their ranks -- while Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, losers in the Industrial Revolution, dropped out. The 50 years after Appomattox saw the U.S. change from a nation of rural farmers to an urban industrial republic, teeming with new immigrants who reinforced the idealistic character of the country's foreign policy. The mass production of consumer goods propelled the economy to unmatched heights. Although it took the U.S. time to overcome a "deep Jeffersonian" aversion to an expansive foreign policy, it emerged after World War II as the global hegemon, a status it inherited from a knackered Britain.

The Third Age -- 1945-90 -- is the most comprehensive in Mr. Mandelbaum's book. The U.S. finished the war with the biggest economy, the most important currency, the most powerful military -- and the atomic bomb. But the era came to be defined by America's rivalry with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, and the two "idea-states" (as he calls them) embarked on a global "contest of systems." This gave rise to new terms in the foreign policy lexicon: "superpowers" and "Cold War," as well as the concept of "the West." As the world looked for pragmatic ways to live with the bomb, the idea of detente arose, for which Mr. Mandelbaum hands due credit to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Nixon also gave the world a "major geopolitical shock" with America's befriending of China. Mr. Mandelbaum dates the start of the decline of the Soviet Union to this rapprochement. And once President Reagan set to work with his "aggressive tactics" toward Moscow, the Cold War came to an end. A "peaceful community of prosperous democracies" -- of which the U.S. was leader -- had "confounded the doctrinal expectations of Marxism-Leninism."

The Fourth Age -- 1990-2015 -- feels unfinished, and why Mr. Mandelbaum chooses 2015 as the endpoint is never entirely clear. In the first decade in the post-Cold War world, the U.S. was hyperpotent. International relations became "more peaceful than ever before in modern history, which froze in place American supremacy." (Or so we thought.) These years vindicated "the optimism of the liberal theory of history." (Piquantly, Francis Fukuyama, with his end-of-history thesis, merits no mention in the book.) Then events took a nasty turn: 9/11 occurred, which led to 15 years of American setbacks. For the first time in history, Mr. Mandelbaum tells us, the U.S. neither achieved its goals nor expanded its power.

The book ends with a grand tease. The U.S., we're told, now finds itself in a new age of foreign policy -- its fifth -- in which it is locked in ever more unyielding conflict with China. What will be the scope and terms of this rivalry? Mr. Mandelbaum has a scholarly distaste for conjecture, so he doesn't tell us. Readers will wish he'd come out and said that we now face a new period of superpower antagonism, this time with a foe much wealthier than the Soviet Union but also one with no true ideology beyond brute nationalism. A Pax Sinica, should it come, promises to be the stuff of nightmares. America's foreign policy faces its most daunting challenge yet.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society.” [1]

1.  The Ascent To Hyperpower
Varadarajan, Tunku. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 29 June 2022: A.15.