“The American Way of Foreign Policy
By Michael Mandelbaum
Oxford, 184 pages, $29.99
'What is distinctively American about American foreign policy?" Michael Mandelbaum asks. How does our conduct of foreign relations differ from that of, say, China, France, India, Israel, Japan or Russia?
It's a pertinent question, particularly in these times of ideological turbulence in the White House and the Democratic Party. Does American exceptionalism -- whose hallmarks are a still-proud belief in egalitarianism and entrepreneurship -- extend to matters outside our domestic affairs? Historically, have we been less transactional than others in our dealings with foreign nations, less inclined to ask what's in it for us before we respond to events elsewhere?
Mr. Mandelbaum answers all these questions in "The American Way of Foreign Policy," a wise little book, accessible to nonspecialists, that should become a quiet, unflashy classic.
This book, his 19th, is an offshoot of Mr. Mandelbaum's "The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy" (2022), which traced the evolution of America's external relations from around the time of independence to 2015 -- a period during which the U.S. grew from a hesitant, fledgling power, focused on its own survival, to its current condition as a "hyperpower" (the China challenge notwithstanding).
That earlier book floated an eye-catching thesis that Mr. Mandelbaum now fleshes out fully: that U.S. foreign policy is, indeed, distinctive, being "unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic."
Mr. Mandelbaum, a professor emeritus of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins, writes that the U.S. "has its own political personality," one that has shaped its foreign policy over time. He says, in fact, that the U.S. is "an international outlier" in its dealings with others. North Korea is an outlier, too, as is theocratic Iran; but Mr. Mandelbaum intends to be positive in his characterization of the U.S. as singular.
What does he mean by "outlier"? There are, we are told, three features that distinguish American foreign policy. First, it is ideological -- often deliberately so -- in comparison to others. The goals of American foreign policy tend to extend beyond the defense of territory, the conquest or defeat of others, or the gaining of political or economic advantage. When it steps outside its own borders, the country's idealism can often augment its realism.
America has, Mr. Mandelbaum writes, "sought to disseminate" its values abroad, the foremost among them political, religious and economic liberty.
There is, he says, a "strong evangelical bent" to its extraterritorial ventures, the fruit of North American Protestantism.
The author calls this "American exemplarism," the foreign-policy twin of exceptionalism.
America's foreign relations have "proceeded on the assumption" -- drawn from the Enlightenment -- that "political conditions everywhere can, should, and will be changed for the better." While we can observe this impulse at work throughout American history, the country only acquired the ability to shape political conditions abroad -- to project itself beyond its own borders -- after the Civil War. The Spanish-American War of 1898 could be said to be the first successful example of an ideological intervention, the earlier Mexican War (1846-48) having been fought purely in pursuit of territorial expansion -- the last such external war of acquisition this country was waged.
"While hardly a pacifist country," America has, Mr. Mandelbaum writes, tried to establish peace and nonbelligerency as "a permanent condition of international affairs." The author would remind opponents of classical American ideals that almost all of this country's external entanglements have come as a response to perceived dangers to national security (World War II or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) or in defense of peoples threatened by ideologically un-American forces (the interventions in Korea or Vietnam in response to belligerent communism). This has led to episodes of nation-building, which Mr. Mandelbaum would prefer to call "state-building," some of which (postwar Germany or Japan) have been more successful than others (Afghanistan and Iraq).
An ideological foreign policy can sometimes backfire, as happened in the propping up of "Friendly Tyrants" in the Cold War, where successor regimes (in Iran and Nicaragua) proved implacably hostile to the U.S. The mullahs did not forgive us our support for the shah, nor the Sandinistas for Anastasio Somoza. But all the while -- and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union -- America has pursued "a clear preference for the way nation-states ought to be governed: democratically."
The second strand of distinctiveness in American foreign policy might be said, at present, to be under some strain, given President Donald Trump's obsession with tariffs. For the most part, however, the U.S. has historically "spurned mercantilism," or the use of power to pursue economic advantage. It has, instead, "reversed the mercantilist relationship by deploying economic instruments in pursuit of political goals," Mr. Mandelbaum writes. These include both punitive sanctions and economic incentives in the form of access to trade and capital.
The U.S. has, the author says, seldom used military victories as an opportunity to grab naked economic benefit. After the first Gulf War, he points out, the U.S. "did not attempt to seize the region's oil fields for itself, which would have been the classical mercantilist approach."
This perspective could be open to challenge with the ousting of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, after which advantages for U.S. oil companies were wrested from his hand-picked successor.
The third extraordinary feature of U.S. foreign policy is its democratic nature and its sensitivity to domestic public opinion. In other countries, Mr. Mandelbaum writes, "a small circle of officials" tend to dominate foreign relations, paying scant heed to "what the people of the country have thought or wanted." The U.S. is emphatically different in this regard, the author says. "Embedded in the Constitution's beginning is its basic premise: that the people have the right to decide questions of public policy." Americans make their views known thanks to the First Amendment, lobbying groups and regular elections. Mr. Mandelbaum isn't persuaded by critics who contend that this constant looking back over their shoulders by U.S. policymakers "degrades the effectiveness of the nation's foreign policies beyond its borders."
While polls taken over generations have shown that Americans in peacetime are less focused on foreign affairs than they are on domestic policy, it is evident that the weight accorded to the world beyond our borders changes in times of war.
The Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars were consequential enough to contribute to the defeat of incumbent parties.
And it is almost certain that President Trump has tempered his prosecution of the Iran war because he feared that the economic costs, and the possibility of casualties if he sought to wrest free by force the Strait of Hormuz, would have a negative impact on the Republican Party's midterm performance this November.
Mr. Mandelbaum's book, while not blind to the flaws and glitches of U.S. foreign policy, is upbeat and celebratory. The enviable compound of ideology, economics and democracy that has produced this country's foreign policy has, by the 21st century, enabled American political ideas to make "deep inroads into the political life of the planet." As the U.S. prepares to face a mercantilist, expansionist and almost scornfully undemocratic China -- whose foreign policy might be said to be the exact opposite of our own -- this advantage could prove priceless.
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Principles of Power. Varadarajan, Tunku. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 July 2026: C9.
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