gaddis - new conceptual approaches to the study of american foreign relations (dh 1990)

8/10/2019 GADDIS - New Conceptual Approaches to the Study of American Foreign Relations (DH 1990)

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New Conceptual Approaches to the Study

of

American Foreign Relations:

Interdisciplinary Perspectives'

JOHNLEWIS GADDIS

In the summer of 1948, John Von Neumann, the great mathematician

who is said to have invented the digital computer, delivered a series of lectures

at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on the subject of self-

replicating machines. There was no theoretical reason, Von Neumann insisted,

why one could not construct an automaton-a robot--capable, with access to

sufficient raw materials, of duplicating itself. All it

would

need would be the

ability to compare its own dimensions with those of the resources available,

and then make the necessary adjustments. Von Neumann went on to point out,

though, that such machines would lack the capacity for evolutionary

development: that would come only if an automaton bumped up against

something by accident, thereby altering its own shape and creating a new

template from which a slightly different, and perhaps slightly improved, copy

might be made. Without the bump, innovation could not 0ccur.l

Von Neumann's concept of a self-replicating automaton provides a good

model for how academic disciplines develop, for without occasional bumps

against those that lie nearby there is a tendency for fields-and the minds that

inhabit them-simply to replicate themselves, without evolutionary progress.

It might be a good thing for disciplines to consider whether they are in fact

bumping up against their neighbors with sufficient regularity to move beyond

~

*This article was originally prepared for delivery at the annual convention of the

American Historical Association, Cincinnati, Ohio, 28 December 1988. Robert Beisner,

Michael Hunt, Paul Kennedy, and Thomas McComick have provided helpful comments,

for

which the author is most grateful. He would also like to thank the Center for International

Affairs at Harvard University and the Department of History at Northwestern University for

providing opportunities

to

discuss some

of

these ideas, as weII as

his

seminar students

in

the

Contemporary H istory Institute at Oh io University and the Politics Department at Princeton

University, who h ave contributed much t o what is contained here without, of course, bearing

responsibility for the form he has given it.

'The story is told in Freeman Dyson. Disturbing the Universe (New York,

1979).

194-

96;

and in Ed Regis,

Who

Go Einstein's Office? Eccen fricity

and

Genius at

the

Instirute for

Advanced Sludy (New York, 1987). 114-21.

405


2/19

406

DIPLOMATICHISTORY

the

monotony of self-replication; f not, then a wider and more vigorous range

of activity might

be

advisable.

Critics have long singled out American diplomatic history as a field

particularly given to automatous self-replication: we do not, it is alleged,

bump up against other disciplines often enough to allow our subject to

advance very far on the evolutionary scale.2Just

as

we are

said

to preoccupy

ourselves in our research with what clerks wrote to other clerks, so we are seen

when it comes to the training of graduate students as turning out clones who

will dutifully

turn

out other c10nes.~We are said to occupy, in the academic

world, something like the evolutionary niche filled by the crocodile, the

armadillo, and the cockroach: we have been around for a long time and are in

no

immediate danger of extinction; but we are still rather primitive and,

for

that reason, not very interesting.

To

be sure, there are some things we do well. We are very good at

narration, which is to say that we have no difficulty demonstrating a favorite

proposition of the historian Edward Potts Cheyney: that all events,

conditions, institutions come from immediately preceding events,

conditions, and institution^. ^ We are equally good at archival research, so

long as the sources

are

mostly in English. We can hardly be accused of

antiquarianism: when one considers that half

or

more of American diplomatic

historians today are concentrating their research on the period since the

beginning of World War 11 one would have to acknowledge that our

discipline is very much up-to-date.

It

is also probably quicker than most others

to assimilate new evidence; the closely related field of political science has

been particularly slow to do this? But where we are weak-and where we leave

ourselves open to the charge of evolutionary stagnation-is in the area of

generalization.

Generalization is something all historians have to do: one can no more

recapture in historical writing what actually happened

than

one can replicate

on a map what actually exists.*But practitioners in some fields think more

2For a sampling of such complaints see Charles S. Maier.

Marking

Time: The

Historiography

of

International Relations. in

The

Past

before

Us:

Contemporary Hisforicul

Writing

in t h e

United Stutes, ed. Michael Kammen Ithaca, 1980). 335-87; John Lewis

Caddis. The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins

of

the Cold War,

Diplomatic

His tory

7 (Summer 1983): 171-90; and Christopher Thorne, After the

Europeans: American Designs for the Remaking

of

Southeast Asia, ibid.

12

(Spring

1988):

201-8. See also Robert Beisners comment on James A . Field, 11.. American Imperialism:

The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book. American Historical Review 83 (June 1978):

672-83.

S e e

Frank Ninkovich. Interests and Discourse

in

Diplomatic History.

Diplomat ic

4Edward P. Cheyney. Lnw in History and O fher Essays (New Y ork, 1927). 10-1 1.

See. on this poin t, Sa lly

Marks

The World According to Washington,

Diplomutic

Hisfory

11

(Summer

1987): 265-82.

I

readily include myself among those who a n deficient

with respect to foreign languages.

History

13 (Spring 1989): 154-55.

%ad dis, The Em erging Post-Revisionist Synthesis, 171.

See John

Lewis Gaddis, Expanding the Data Base: Historians, Political Scientists, and

the

Enrichment

of

Securiiy Studies.

Infernutionul Security 12

(Summer

1987): 3-21.

The problem is nicely discussed in David Hackett Fischer, Historians Fallacies: T oward

u Logic

of

Hirtoricul Thought (New York, 1970). 65-68; but for ano ther illustration that


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THE

STUDY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS 407

about how to generalize than do others, and in this respect the claim that

American diplomatic history has not progressed very far seems to me justified.

One reason may be that we do not allow ourselves to be bumped regularly

enough by

our

sister disciplines. This essay

is

an attempt to specify some

areas in which our generalizations have not been as sophisticated as they

might have been, and to suggest some ways in which b ~ m p i n g ~p against

other disciplines might enrich what

we

do.

The first such area has to do with

our

tendency to seek synthesis through

reductionism: to assume that the explanation of complex events requires the

identification of single causes,O or, more often, single categories of causes.

For years the dom inant interpretive paradigm in Am erican diplomatic

history was that of the Open Door, the attempt

of

William Appleman

Williams and those he influenced to explain the emergence and subsequent

behavior

of

the United States as a world power almost exclusively in

economic terms. Despite

the

obvious

value

of this approach in establishing

linkages between foreign policy and domestic capitalism,

i t

devoted little

attention to the role

of

party politics, national security concerns, international

draws on recen t advances in the field of fractal geom etry see James G leick, Chao s: Making a

New Science

(New Yo rk, 198 7), 94-96.

9Having become known, at one time

or

another, as an advocate of both lumping and

splitting, I am somewhat hesitant

to

add bumping to the list. but the term does seem

preferable to the only alternative

I

can think of, which is interdisciplinary interaction. For

a defense of bumping from the standpoint of systems theory

see

Heinz Pagels,

The D r e a m

of Reason: The Compuer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity

(New

York.

1988).

l?wo book s that d o quite literally reduce a complex series of events to

a

single cause

are William Shaw cross, Sideshow: Kissinger, N uo n and the Destruction of Cambodia (New

York. 1979). which attr ibutes Khmer Rouge atrocities af ter 1975 to the Nixon

administrations bombing and subsequent invasion of that country

in

1969 and 1970; and

Fraser Harbutt. The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New

York. 1986). which explains the Truman administrations toughening of policy toward the

Soviet Union almost exclusively as

a

response

to

Win ston Chu rchills Ma rch 1946. speech at

Fulton, Missouri.

llW illiam Appleman Williams,

The Tragedy of Am erican Diplomacy

(1959; reprint ed.,

New York, 1972). Other books that followed that volumes emphasis on domestic economic

causation include Williamss own

The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A

Study of

the

Growth and Shaping

of

Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society

(New York, 1969);

also Walter L sFeber.

The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860-

1898 (Ithaca. 1963); Lloyd C. Gardner.

Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy

(Madison,

1964); Thomas

J.

McCormick.

China Market: Americas

Quesr

fo r Informal Em pire,

1893-

1901 (Chicago, 1%7); Carl P. Pamni, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy,

1916-1923

(Pittsburgh. 1969); Tom

E.

T e d ,

The Tar@ Politics, and American Foreign

Policy, 1874-1901

(Westport, 1973); Edward Crapol,

America for Americans: Economic

Nationalism and Anglophobia

in

the Lure Nineteenth Century

(Westport, 1973); and, after a

lapse of many years in which few such accounts appeared. Daniel M. rane and Thomas A.

Breslin. An Ordinary Relatio mh ip: American Opposition to Republican Revolution

in

China

(Miami, 1986); and Patrick J. Hearden.

Roosevelt Confronts Hitler: Americas Entry into

World War I1

(DeKalb, IL. 1987). One recen t review essay has d escribed Williams, accurately

in my view, as the most influential American diplomatic historian of is generation. See

Gary

R.

Hess. After the Tumult: The Wisconsin Schools Tribute to William Appleman

Williams.

Diplomatic History

12 (Fall 1988): 499.

138-39.


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408

DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

developments, distinctive individuals, or unforeseen events.12 More recently

the search for an admittedly broader corporatist synthesis, while helpful in

deepening our understanding of the 1920sand to some extent the late 1940s,

has nonetheless obscured discontinuities that arose from such equally

important influences as the constraints of isolationism or alarm over

disruptions of the balance

of

power in Europe and Asia.13

Michael Hunt has recently proposed an important new synthesis that

appears, at fist glance, to go beyond the reductionism of Williams and the

corporatists. Objecting to the tendency to posit a single, simple reason for

the origins and persistence of a particular ideology, he identifies three core

ideas as having shaped American foreign policy and the substance of

American life to an unprecedented degree: a quest for national greatness

closely coupled to the promotion

of

liberty,

a

tendency

to

view other peoples

in terms of a racial hierarchy, and the fear of political and social

rev01ution.l~The difficulty here is that Hunt then goes on, in apparent

violation of his own critique of reductionism, to place race at the center of

[the American] world view. Public policy in general and foreign policy in

particular had from the start of the national experience reflected the central role

that race thinking played. But Hunt is also careful to acknowledge that

Americans were hardly unique in their racism.15 The result is to leave us

with an American ideology defined

as

exceptional in terms of a reductionist

category that turns out not to be exceptional at a11.16

I t

is not at all clear

why

the search for synthesis should require

reductionism of the kind that Williams, the corporatists, and Hunt have put

forward: one employs a synthesis in order to generalize about complex

phenomena, to be sure, and that requires simplification. But if that

simplification is achieved by concentrating upon a single category of

phenomena-whether economic, corporatist, or racist-and by excluding

others, then the effect is likely to be what J. H. Hexter has called tunnel

12Th e most balanced recent evaluation of the W illiams thesis and its historiographical

influence is Bradford Perkins, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-Five Years

After, Reviews n American History 12 (March 1984): 1-15; but se e also Lloyd C. Gardner,

ed., Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman

Wil l iams (Corvallis, OR, 1986).

I3See Thomas I McCo rmick. Drift or Mastery?

A

Corporatist Synthesis for American

Diplomatic History. Reviews in American History 10 (Decem ber 198 2): 318-30; also John

Lewis Gaddis. T he Corporatist Synthesis:

A

Skeptical View, Diplomatic History

10

(Fall

1986): 35742; and Michael

J.

Hogan, Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal, ibid. 10 (Fall

1986): 363-72.

14M ichael H. H unt, Ideology and

US .

Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987). 12, 17-18.

Isb id ., 90-91. Even more tenuous, in my view, is Hunts attempt

to

explain post-World

War II development theory as old-fashioned racism in modern garb (pp. 161-62). Equally

crit ical but fa r mo re plausible analyses

of

development theory can be found in

Robert A. Packenham. Liberal America and the Third W orld: Political Development Ideas in

Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton. 1973); and D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms:

The Failure

of

US. ounterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, 1988).

16For a parallel criticism of Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevel t , Cul ture ,

Diplomacy, and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism (Baton Rouge, 198.5). see

Akira Iriye, Exceptionalism Revisited. Reviews

in

American Hislory

16

(June 1988): 293-

95.


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THE STUDY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS

409

history, the tendency to split the past into a series of tunnels, each

continuous from the remote past to the present, but practically self-contained

at every point and sealed off from contact with or contamination by anything

that was going

on

in any of the other tunnels.17Certainly if one is to avoid

that kind of history, the burden would appear to

be on

the historian who

proposes synthesis through reductionism to justify that procedureas explicitly

as possible.18 It is the absence of that explicit justification for excluding

alternative explanations that has too often weakened the search for synthesis in

American diplomatic history.

There is, to

be

sure, the danger of proliferating explanations to the point

of mindless ec le~t ic ism:~~uch a synthesis would

be

no more useful than one

that teeters precariously upon a monocausal base. But surely these are not the

only possibilities. Why should social scientists seek explanations that attempt

to account for a l l n r almost all-detectable phenomena in the first place?

Such things may be possible in the physical and biological sciences, as the

success of theories like relativity, plate tectonics, and natural selection amply

testify. But ours is, after all, a social science, which is to say that it operates

on a far shorter time scale than do expanding universes, continental drift, or

evolution; it also involves unpredictable human beings who, like certain

particles in quantum mechanics, resist appearing in the expected place at the

expected time to do the expected thing. We are left, then, with little choice but

to work with imperfect explanations that aspire to account for something less

than life, the universe, and everything,mand that fact would appear

to

require

openness to a considerable amount of electicism in our search for synthesis.

Other disciplines accept as a matter of course the compatibility of

synthesis with multiple causation. Consider super-string theory, whose

practitioners routinely speculate about the possibility of a post-Einstein nine-

dimensional universe;2l the great man himself allowed for four. Political

scientists regularly incorporate multiple variables into their work?2 and even

17J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Evanston, IL. 1961), 194.

l*One strength of Gabriel Kolkos writing about Cold War origins was his willingness

to

provide an explicit method ological justification for reductionism-whether one agreed

with it

or

not. S ee his

The Politics of Wa r: The World and United States Foreign Po licy,

1943-1945

(New York. 1968). 8.

19 0r . in F ischers catalog of fallacies, indiscriminate pluralism. See Histor ians

Fal lacies , 175-76. For suggestions that postrevisionism in Cold War historiography

commits this error see Warren

F.

&ball, The Cold War Warmed Over, American Historical

R e v i e w 79 (October 1974): 1119-36; Carolyn E isenberg. Reflections on a Toothless

Revisionism. Diplomatic History 2 (Sum mer 1978): 295-305; and Michael J. Hogan, The

Search fo r Synthesis: Economic Diplomacy in

the

Cold War. Reviews in American History

15 (Se [ember 1987): 493-98.

2& he reference is

to

Douglas Adams.

The Hitchhikers Guide

to

the Galary

(New

York,

1979). its successor volumes, and the television series

of

the same name, all of which can

teach quite a lot about interdisciplinary bumping.

21Regis, W h o Got Einsteins Office?, 255-74. makes this speculation about as

intelligible as it is likely

to

get for the layperson.

22

For some good examples based on historical research see Theda Skocpo l, States and

Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China

(Cambridge,

England, 1979); Robert Gilpin. War

and

Change in World Politics (Cambridge, England,


6/19

410 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

the two-dimensional models of economists allow for thc operation of more

than

one variable. One would think hat historians. who arc not obliged to U y

to fit what they do within predictive modcls in any event, would

be

more

comfortable with explanatory complexity than anyonc

It

is

all

the more

puzzling, therefore, that the search for synlhcsis in diplomatic history so often

seeks

to reduce reality to one indepcndcnt and a scrics of dcpcndcnt variables: if

X, Y, and 2 happened, it can only be bccause W is back there lurking

somewhere in Professor Hexters

tunnc1.24

A first step toward invigorating the field of American diplomatic history,

then, might be to get beyond

thc

tcndcncy to cquatc synthesis with

reductionism. The purpose of a synthesis, aftcr all, is not

to

exclude but rather

to account for complexity. A little interdisciplinary bumping could remind

us

that, until our explanations bcgin

to

approach the comprchensive rigor

of

a

Darwin or an Einstein,

we

should probably be cautious about framing them in

reductionist tcrms.25

A second

area

in which American diplomatic history lacks methodological

sophistication has to do with what is, in a way, the opposite of reductionism:

it

is the tendency to construct a complex and multifaccted explanation of a

series of events, full of causes intcrsecting and individuals interacting, but then

to apply it in an indiscriminate way.

It

is what one might call

the

crop-

duster approach to history.

An example can be found in Emily Rosenbergs well-written and

innovative book,

Spread ing rhe Amer i c an D ream

which works out an

entirely plausible integrationof Amcrican diplomacy, corporate behavior, and

cultural expansionism that reflects vcry well both multiple causes and internal

contradictions. But she then weakens her analysis by concluding that the

resulting policy-which she calls 1ibcral-devclopmentalism-allowed the

United States to dominate those countries subjected to it in such a way as to

constrict their political, economic, and cultural autonomy. American liberal-

expansionists believed, she writes, that thcre could be no truly enlightened

1981); Michael W . Doyle.

Empires

(Ithaca. 1986); and Aaron Friedberg,

The Weary Titan:

Briluin and the Experience

of

Relarive Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton. 1988).

23For a succinct example of how to incorporate complexity within a readily

comprehensible interpretive framework see Robert

L.

Beisner.

From the Old Diplomacy

1

the New 1865-1900. 2d ed. (Arlington Heights,

IL,

1986).

24Kennerh Waltz has pointed out that the rcductionist commits the

error of

predicting

outcomes from attributes. To

ry

to do that amounts to overlooking the difference between

these two statements: He

is

a troublemaker. He makes trouble.

The

second statement does

not follow from the first one if the attributes

of

actors do not uniquely determine outcomes.

Just as peacemakers may fail to make

p a c e .

so troublemakers may fail

to

make trouble. From

attributes one cannot predict outcomes if outcomes depend

on

the situation

of

the actors

as

well as on their attributes. See Theory

of

lnrernulionaf Po litics (New York. 1979), 6 0 6 1 .

25F0r one such helpful reminder see Stephen H Pelz. A Taxonomy for American

Diplomatic History JOWM~

f Inlerdkcipfinary I l is lory

19 (Autum n 1988 ): 259-76. Even

the so-called hard sciences these days are moving toward an acceptance of complexity and a

certain humility about their ability to replicate or describe it.

See

Gleick, Chaos; agels,

The

Dream of Reason; and Stephen

W.

Hawking. A Brief History of Time: From rhe Big Bang

lo

Black Holes

(New

York,

1988), esp. 1 6 6 6 9 .


7/19


411

dissent against the ultimate acceptance of Amcrican ways, and this faith bred

an intolerance, a narrowness, that was the very opposite

of

libcrality.26

True enough,

no

doubt, for some parts of the world: this interpretation

seems convincing enough when one considers the American role

in

such

countries as Guatemala, Iran, and perhaps South Victnam. Upon reading

Rosenbergs

book,

hough,

my

students wanted to know: What about South

Korea,

or

Japan,

or

West Germany? The American liberal-developmentalist

model was surely as strong in those countries as in Central America, the

Middle East,

or

Southeast Asia; indeed, it was probably stronger because the

force of military occupation, at least for a time, backed it up.

But

far from

constraining the Japanese, the Koreans, and the Germans, liberal-

developmentalism would appear to have transformed them into vigorous

competitors who for years have been beating the original liberal-

developmentalists at their own game. What about Taiwan, or India, or Brazil,

or

Israel, all countries in which American postwar influence was also strong,

but in each of which it produced-because it was hardly the only influence

operating-very different results?

All

of which is

simply

to suggest that the

need for methodological sophistication does not cnd

with

an explanation of the

roots of foreign policy: one must also-if one is to avoid the crop-duster

syndrome-be sensitive to its

applicafion,

ecognizing the virtual certainty

that consequences will vary from place to place and from time to time?7

A peculiar assumption that appears to underlie crop-duster history is

that

influence in intcrnational affairs flows only in one direction: outward from

the United States. The Rosenberg thesis reflects this view; so too do

proponents of the Open

Door

nd the corporatist syntheses,

as

well as

Hunts recent ideological approach. Somehow Amcricans affect what

happens to other nations and peoples, but other nations and people seldom

affect

what

happens to Americans.

Does he existence of acknowledged disparities in political, economic, or

military power in fact cause influence to flow only from areas

of

strength to

those of weakness? The comparative study of empires can suggest answers to

this question, for what

is an

empire if not

a

situation in which those who have

power dominate

those

who do not?

But

Amcrican diplomatic historians-and

especially those who

are

nclined to see the United States

as

an empire itself-

tend to neglect this field. Or at least they seem unaware

of

one

of

the most

persistent themes in imperial history, which is

the

way in which influence can

also

flow from areas of weakness to those of strength.

In

an am bitious study of European empires from ancient Greece through

the end of the nineteenth century,

the

political scientist Michael Doyle has

argued strongly for giving at least equal weight to what he calls pericentric

2 6 h i l y

S.

Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream : American Economic and Cultural

Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York, 1982), 234

27T0

be fair, Rosenberg is aware of this point. Nor did she intend to deal

comprehensively

in

her

book

with the effects of

liberal-developmenuIlism

in the world at

large.

See

ibid.,

13.

The difficulty is that her conclusion leaves the reader with the clear

impression that h e effects of Liberal-developmentalism have been consistently negative

for the countries involved, without providing the proof that would

be

necessary to sustain

that conclusion.


8/19


as well as metrocentric flows of influence. Metrocentric imperialism does

indeed involve the expansion of influence outward from within a society; it is

consistent with the explanations of empire provided by Hobson, Lenin, and

(for a different set of reasons) Schumpeter.

But

Doyle shows convincingly that

influence can also flow from peripheries back to the metropole: those who

are on the receiving end of imperialism can substantially affect its costs by

choosing resistance over collaboration; those who administer imperial

outposts can, through their immediate response to local circumstances,

commit a metropole to peripheral responsibilities it never sought. The effect,

in either situation, can

be

to force modifications in the behavior of even the

most powerful imperial state.28

American diplomatic historians ought not to find this pattern strange.

Our

own revolution demonstrated the difficulty a metropole can encounter in

attempting to manage a periphery.29 t certainly made a difference that the

influential citizens

of

Texas, Oregon, California, and Hawaii welcomed

annexation to the United States-which is to say, they collaborated-but

that their Mexican and Canadian counterparts would not have.30 Filipino

resistance between 1898

and

1902 substantially altered American views on the

desirability and the costs of formal empire.31 Difficulties encountered in

Mexico certainly influenced Woodrow Wilsons thinking-and that of the

Republican administrations that succeeded him-on the benefits of military

intervention south of the b0rder.~2And it was the self-desuuctivebehavior

of

Europeans as much

as

i t

was the deliberate calculations of Americans that

transformed the United States into a global economic metropole after World

War I, and into a political-military one

as

well after World War II?3

28Doyle,

Empires, 22-26. Doyles

pericentric framework builds

in

particular upon the

earlier work

of

Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, most conveniently sampled in their

classic book (written with Alice Denny)

Africa and the Victo rians: The Clima x of Imperialirm

(New York,

1961). For

a succinct case study that nicely illustrates pericentrism

see

Gordon

A. Craig and Alexander L George,

Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time

(New Yolk,

1983). 265-68,

on Gladstone, Gordon, and the relief of Khartoum in

1884

and

1885.

29The argument goes back, of course, to Lawrence Henry Gipson. but it has recently

been reincarnated in an imponant book by two political scientists. Robert W. ucker and

David C. Hendrickson.

The Fall

of

the First Bri tish Empire: O r i g k

of

the American Warfor

Independence

(Baltimore,

1982).

3 has long been unde rstood that American continen tal expansion-apart, of course ,

from the t reatment of Indians-did not extend to the point of forcibly annexing unwilling

neighbors. See Frederick M e&, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A

Reinterpretation (New York. 1963). 107-8. 2 6 1 a . also Reginald C. Stuart, United Slates

Expansionism and B r i h h North Am erica, 1775-1871 (Chapel Hill. 1988). esp. x i i . The

prospect of resislance

to

annexation, therefore. could deter

it.

31A point made effectively by the most influential exponent of metrocentrism in

American diplomatic history. Will iam Applernan W f i a m s

in

The Tragedy

of

American

Diplomacy, 46-50.

32Roben

E.

Quirk,

An Affair

of Honor

Wo odro w Wilson and the Occupation

of

Veracruz

(Lexington.

KY 1962), 171;

Arthur

S.

Link,

Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, W ar , Peace

(Arlington Heights, IL.

1979).

12; Dana

G

Munro,

The Uniled States and the Caribbean

Republics, 1921-1933 (Princeton,

1974), 311-83.

33Paul Kennedy.

The Rire and Fall of the Grea t Powers: Economic Change and Military

Confl icf

from 1500

to 2000

(New York.

1987). 327-33.

Donald W. White points out,


9/19

THE STUDY

OF

AMERICANFOREIGNRELATIONS

413

Although early revisionist writing on Cold War origins did tend to take

the view that influence flowed only outward from the United more

recent studies have in fact shifted toward a pericentric emphasis as the

increasing availability

of

archival material has made it clear that governments

in Western Europe,

the

Mediterranean, and even the Middle East generally

welcomed their incorporation within an American sphere of influence, given

the perceived a l temat i~e .~~ith regard to the Cold War in Asia, it was always

difficult to sustain an exclusively metrocentric perspective: where one had

prominent Asian potentates like Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh

Diem, and Douglas MacArthur manipulating Washington, there had long been

reason

to

suspect that influence flowed in both directions, although historians

are

only beginning to chronicle

that

process.

These trends make all the more conspicuous, then, the tendency of

American diplomatic historians to assume unidirectional influence when they

though, that external power vacuums

alone

cannot account for the United Statess emergence

as a postwar superpower: by that logic. Australia, Brazil, India, and Canada should have been

superpowers also See World Power in American History.

Diplomatic Hhtory

11 (Summer

1987): 187.

34See Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

258-75;

Joyce and Gabriel

Kolko, The Limits

of

Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1945-1954 (New

York. 1972). 359-83; Bruce Kuklick.

American Policy and the Division

of

Germany: The

Clash with Russia over Reparations

(hhaca, 1972). 226-31; Thomas G. Paterson,

Sovie t-

American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War

(Baltimore, 1973). 260-67; and, most recently, Lawrence

S.

Wittner,

American Intervention

in Greece 1943-1949

(New York, 1982). esp. 311-12.

35For examples s ee Harbutt. The Iron Curtain; Geir L undestad, America Scandimvia

and the Cold War

1945-1949 (New York,

1980);

Bruce R. Kuniholm,

The Origins of the

Cold W ar in the Near

East:

Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran Turkey and Greece

(Princeton,

1980);

Terry

H.

Anderson,

The United Stoles Great Britain and the Cold W ar

1944-1947 (Columbia,

MO. 1981);

Robert M. Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain

and America

1944-1947 (New York,

1981);

James Edward Miller,

The United States and

Italy

1940-1950:

The Politics and Diplomocy of Stabilization

(Chapel

Hill, 1986);

and,

in

an effective integration of corporatist and pericentric perspectives, Michael

J.

Hogan,

The Marshall Plan: America Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe 1947-1952

(New York.

1987).

See

also

Lundestad. Empire by Invitation? The United States and Westem

Europe,

1945-1952.

JO IU M ~ f Peace Research

23

(September

1986): 263-77;

and John

Lewis Gaddis,

The Long Peace: Inquiries into the

History

of the Cold War

m ew York, 1987).

57-71. In a recent review otherwise critical of American diplomatic historians

for

not

embracing pericentric viewpoints, Christopher Thorne derides the notion, now so

sedulously advanced

b y

the professionally emollient, that the expansion

of

the American

empire which took place immediately following the Second World War occurred strictly by

invitation only. See After the Europeans, 206. I am not aware that anyone has ever

claimed universal applicability for the empire by invitation thesis; the criticism, however,

does afford Thorne the o pportunity to recount a

good

story about the D uke

of

Wellington.

36See, for examples, William Whitney Stueck, Jr.,

The Rood

to

Confrontation:

American Policy toward Chino

and

Korea.

1947-1950 (Chapel Hill,

1981);

Charles M.

Dobbs.

The Unw anted Symbol: American Foreign Policy the Cold Wa r

and

Korea

1945-

1950 (Kent, OH,

1981);

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American

Relations and the Recognition Controversy 1949-1950

(New York. 1983); Michael

Schaller.

The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia

(New York.

1985); Ronald H. Spector,

Advice and Support: The Early Years of the US. rmy in Vietnam

1941-1960

(New York 1985); also, and most recently, Robert J. McMahon. United States

Cold

War Strategy in South Asia: Making a Military Commitment to Pakistan,

Journol of

American History

75 (December 1988): 812-40.


10/19

4 4

DIPLOMATIC

HISTORY

write abou t Latin America. These accounts almost always feature the United

States manipulating its neighbors

to

the south; but the neighbors are never

(or

almost never)

Seen to be

manipulating the Americans. There often follows the

conclusion-stated

or

implied-that Washington bcars primary responsibility

for

the

conditions of economic stagnation, social inequality, and political

repression that pervade

Latin

America, and that only a drastic modification of

u.S.

policy can a lter this situation.37

What seems to

be

involved here is an uncritical acceptance, at times

consciously and at times not, of dependency theory: the assertion that

political, economic, and social conditions

in

Third World countries can

be

understood only within the framework of an inlcrnational system dominated by

mature capitalist economies. These developed states,

it

is argued, employ the

instruments of trade and investment to ensnare their lesser developed

counterparts

into

a pattern of dependency not greatly diffcrent from that of the

drug addict

upon

the drug dealer. The North, by h i s logic, is as responsible

for

the self-destructivebehavior of the South as

the

pusher is for that of

those he manages

to

The difficulty with this thesis-and

w i th

its use as an analytical

framew ork for understanding U.S.-Latin Am erican relations-is that

dependency theory is

now

widely regarded, outside the field

of

American

diplomatic history,

as

a considerable oversimplification. Dependency theorists

allow little or

no room

for the influence of distinctive economic, cultural,

or

political phenomena: despite their apparent sympathy for it, they treat the

Third World as a homogenous and featureless mass. Nor has empirical

investigation borne out their insistence that integration into the world

economy necessarily retards economic growth: indeed, the experiences

of

37Examples include Walter LaFeber. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States i n

Central America (New York. 1984); John A. Findling, Close Neighbors, Distant Friends:

United States-Central American Relations (New Y ork, 1987); Jules R. Ben jamin, The

Framework of

US

Relations with L a h America: An Interpretive Essay. Diplomatic History

11 (Spring 1987): 91-1 12;

and

Stephen G. Rabe. Eisenhower and

h i i n

America: The Foreign

Policy

of

Anficommunism

(Chapel

Ilill,

1988). Exceptions to h i s pattern include Louis A.

Perez. Jr., Intervention, Revolution, and Politics in Cuba, 1913-1921 (Pitlsburgh, 1978);

Michael Grow, The

Good

Neighbor Policy and Authoritarianism in Paraguay: United States

Economic Expansion and Great-Power Rivalry in Lo t i n America during World War I

(Lawrence, 1981); and a recent account by a retired diplomat. Frank McNeil. War and Peace

in

Cenfra l America (New York, 1988). See also a brief acknowledgment of the problem by

Stephen Rabe. Marching Ahead (Slowly): be Historiography

of

Inter- American Relations,

Diplomatic History

13 (Summer 1989):

316.

38The most influential sbteme nt of h i s lhcory can

be

found in articlcs by Andr6 Gunder

Frank and Dale L. Johnson in Dependence and Underdevelopment: Lot

in

Americas Political

Economy ed. James D. Cockcroft , Andd Gundcr Frank. and Dale

L.

Johnson (Gardcn City.

NY. 1972). esp. 3-45, 71-1 11,

321-91;

but see also Susann e J. Bodcnhcimer. Dcpcndcncy

and Imperialism: T h e ROOISof Latin Amcrican Underdevelopment, Politics and Society 1

(May 1971): 327-57. Imm anu el Wallcrstcin has extended this theory to international

relations as a whole

in

The Modern W orld System: Ca pitalk t Agriculture and the Origins of

the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century

New

York. 1974). and The Modern

World System

11:

Merc antilism and the Consolida tion

of

the European World-Economy,

1600 1

75 (New York. 1980). For the influence of dcpcndency ihcory on the writing of

American diplomatic historians see Lester D. Langley, Fire Down Bclow: A Re view Essay on

the Central American Crisis, Diplomatic Ilistory 9 (Spring 1985): 161-67.


11/19

THE STUDY

OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS

415

nations like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore suggest considerable

evidence to the contrary. Nor do the dependency theorists explain how we

could be sure that,

if

the oppressive presence of mature Northern capitalism

should someday disappear, the states of the South would then find their way

to social stability, econom ic equality, and political democracy.39 In short, to

write history on the basis of dependency theory is to combine the worst

features of the reductionist and crop-duster approaches, in that complex

phenomena

are

educed to a single cause, but the resulting conclusions

are

then

indiscriminately applied.

The world is a diverse place, and the United States-whether for good or

i l l-controls only a small portion of what goes on within it. American

diplomatic historians could overcome much of their alleged lack of

sophistication by recognizing that fact, by turning their attention to the task

of specifying those areas into which this countrys influence, in all of its own

diversity, does extend, and by distinguishing those as precisely as possible

from the ones in which it does

not.

A third problem that causes American diplomatic history to suffer from

methodological impoverishment is cultural and temporal parochialism:

we

tend to assum e that the experience of the United States in time and space is

unique and therefore defining: we

seem

to think that the experiences of other

nations at other times and in other parts of the world can shed little useful

light upon our own.

American exceptionalism is, of course, nothing new; indeed, this

countrys most defensible claim to being exceptional may lie in the tenacity

with which

we

believe that we are. No one could deny that certain things in

the historical experience of the United States are unique, just as would be the

case-unexceptionably-with any other country.

But

it is interesting that

American diplom atic historians, who can be quite critical of exceptionalism

when they encounter it in the diplomats about whom they write, find it so

difficult to free themselves from that tendency in their own work.

Consider the narrow framework within which diplom atic historians have

treated the role of the United States as an em pire. They have not hesitated to

portray American diplomacy in imperial terms$O and in my view, properly

so: the Founding Fathers themselves used the term empire without

39F0r a sampling of critiques of dependency theory see Packenham, Liberal America and

the Third World, 353-58: Tony Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The U nited States, Great

Britain, and the late-industrializing world since 1815 (Cambridge, England, 1981). 68-84;

David Ray, The Dependency Model of Latin American Underdevelopment: Three Basic

Fallacies,

Journal of Interamerican Studies and Wo rld Affairs 15

(February 1973):

4 20;

and.

on Wallerstein, Steve

J.

Stem, Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the

Perspective

of

Latin America and the Caribbean,

American Historical Review

93 (October

40Consider the following book titles: The Rising American Empire and Empire and

Independence (Richard Van Alstyne), Imperial Democracy (Ernest R. May), Empire on the

Pacific (Norman Graebner), The Roots

of

the M odern American Empire and Empire as a W ay

of

Life (William Appleman Williams), The New Empire (Walter LaFeber). Creation

of

the

American Empire (LaFeber, Lloyd Gardner, and Thomas McCormick), and The Imperial Years

(Alonzo L. Ham by).

1988): 829-72.


12/19

416

DIPLOMATE HISTORY

embarra~srnent;~~xpansion in the nineteenth century took place on a scale

sufficient to merit the adjective imperial by any standard; and in the

twentieth century disparities

of

economic and military power have placed the

United States in a hegemonic position with respect to much

of

the rest

of

the How often, though, have those who write about the American

imperial experience considered it in comparison to, and in light of, the

experiences of other empires?

Two books that illustrate how

useful

such comparisons can be are Tony

Smiths The Pattern of Imperialism and Philip Darbys Three Faces of

Imperialism:

not only

do they

illustrate the role pericentric as well as

metrocentric forces played in the emergence of the United States as a world

power; they also show how studying the rise and decline of the British Empire

can shed new light

on

American foreign policy

in

the Cold

Warp3

Michael

Doyles comparative study

Empires

hardly mentions

the

United States, but it

is filled with insights that bear on the American experience, as is Robert

Tucker and David Hendricksons The Fall of the First British Empire.44

But

despite the heavy reliance on historical research that characterizes each of them,

every one of these recent books is by a political scientist.

N o

American

diplomatic historian that

I

know of has, at least within recent years,

undertaken anything approaching these studies in terms of comparative sweep

and analytical rigor.

Or consider the history of American geopolitical thought. The work of

James

Hutson

and, more recently, Daniel Lang, has made it clear that the

Founding Fathers approached international relations very much in the tradition

of European realpolitik: the combination

of

idealism and naivete that Felix

Gilbert once detected in their thinking was, i t now appears, somewhat

41See Marc Egnal.

A Mighty Empire: The Origins

of

the Americon Revolution

Ithaca,

1988); also the first paragraph of The

Federal&,

in which Hamilton writes

of

the debate over

the Constitution comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the

UNION,

he safety and welfare

of

the parts

of

which it

is

composed, the fate

of

an empire in

many respects the most interesting in the world. See

The Federolisr

New

York,

n.d.), 3.

42Doyle insists upon the distinction between imperial and hegemonic power,

defining the former

as

involving the metropoles political control over the internal and

external policy-the effective sovereignty-of [a]

.

subordinate periphery, while in the

latter situation international inequality allows a state to control much or all of the external,

but little or none of the internal, policy

of

other states. He acknowledges. though, that the

study of empires shares much ground with the study of international relations [which includes

hegemons], both in method and

in

conception.

See Empires ,

12-13.

43Smith,

The Pattern

of

Imper ia l i sm

Philip Darby,

Three Faces

of

Imperialism: British

and American Approoches

to

Asia

ond

Africo,

1870-1970 New Haven, 1987). See also

Friedburg,

The Wea ry Titan,

for another example of how the British experience can

be

made

relevant to that

of

the United States.

@Doyle.

Empires :

Tucker and Hendrickson,

The

Fall of

the First British Empire.

The

latter two authors note that those familiar with the whole of the European imperial

experience and the historiography that has emerged to account for this experience cannot fail

to

be

struck by the existence

of

common explanatory categories across the whole field of

modem empire, a fact that reflects the existence

of

common intellectual problems. See

The

Fall of

the First Bri tbh Empire,

6.


13/19


417

e ~ a g g e r a t e d . ~ ~ut how many historians of American foreign policy have

attempted to pursue that argument against exceptionalism through the latter

three fourths of the nineteenth century and into the

first

half of the twentieth?

How did it happen that a wholly unexceptional variety

of

European realism

came to inform this nations diplomacy at its birth, then disappeared, only to

be reincarnated a century and a half later in the minds

of

Hans Morgenthau,

George F. Kennan, and Reinhold N i e b ~ h r ? ~ ~t is difficult to believe that

exceptional characteristics can

so

suddenly replace unexceptional ones, and

then in turn and with equal abruptness

be

replaced by them: a more plausible

explanation might link the intensity of American realism to shifting

perceptions of threats to the nations security. But who, among American

diplom atic historians, has attempted this?47

Or consider the extent to which historians of American foreign policy

have neglected so elemental a matter as the perception of space and time in

relation to the conduct of diplomacy.48There is no reason to assume that all

n a ti o n s-o r all individuals within nations-perceive space and time in

precisely

the

same way

on

all

occasions.

One

reason a thinly populated and

politically divided group of North American colonies was willing to take on

the worlds most powerful nation after 1763 was that their inhabitants saw

space and time as working for them: not only would the task of supplying an

army across an ocean hamper

the

British: it seemed unlikely, as well, that an

island could ever permanently subdue a c0ntinent.4~But by the 1840s, as

Thom as Hietala has show n, Americans had come

to

view space

as

closing in

on

them and time as working against them:

i t

was fear as much as self-

confidence, he argues-fear manifesting itself in racial, econom ic, and

geopolitical terms-that motivated the anxious aggrandizement of the late

45James H. Hutson, John A d a m and the Diplomocy

of

the American Revolution

(Lexington. KY 1980); Daniel

G.

Lang.

Foreign Policy in the Eorty Republic: The Law

of

Notions and the Balance of Power (Baton Rouge, 1985). Gilberts argument, of course,

appears in To the Farewell Address: Ideas

of

Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton,

1961).

460ne

of the few attempts that I know

of

to consider whether realism continued to

shape American foreign policy after the early national period is Alan Dowty, The Limits of

American Isolation: The United States and the Crimeon War (New Yo , 1971). It is no

accident that Dowty trained as a political scientist under Hans Morgenthau at the University

of Chicago.

47A few are beginning to think along these lines, among them Thomas R. Hietala,

whose work is discussed below. See

also

Kinley Brauer, The Great American Desert

Revisited: Recent Literature and Prospects

for

the Study of American Foreign Relations,

1815-61. Diplomatic History 13 (Summer 1989): 395-417. One important effort to take

seriously the phenomenon of mid-nineteenth-century realism is, of course, Norman

A.

Graebne rs classic documentary collection, Ideas and Diplomacy: Readings in the Intellectual

Trodifion

of

American Foreign Policy

(New

York,

1964).

48F0r

a remarkable illustration

of

how shifting spatial and temporal perceptions can

be

linked to the conduct of d iplomacy see Stephen Kern, The Culture

of

Time and Space,

1880-

1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983).

49See Egnal, A Mighty Empire. 6-15; Tucker and Hendrickson. The Fall of the First

British Empire, 229-31;

D.

W. Meinig, The Shaping

of

America:

A

Geographical P erspective

on

500

Years of History: Atlantic America.

1492-1800

(New Haven, 1986), 381-83; and

Esmond Wright, Franklin of Phitodelphia (Cambridge, MA, 1986). 173-83.


14/19


Jacksonian period.50Robert L. Beisner has identified a similar shift in spatial

and temporal perceptions in the transition from what he calls the old

paradigm

to

the new in latenineteenth-century American foreign policy.51

But

precisely how did Woodrow Wilson come

to

view

a

German victory

in World War I as likely

to

endanger the United States? What was it in the

behavior of Germany and Japan in the 1930s that evoked comparable fears in

the mind of Franklin D. Roosevelt? How, specifically, did American and West

European leaders see their nations interests as threatened by what the Soviet

Union

was

doing in

Eastern Europe

after 1945?52 t is easy enough to show

that nation A saw nation B as a threat, but only rarely do we specify u s t

what

t

was n Bs behavior that nation A considered threatening. And threats

are themselves a matter of perception: what one nation finds threatening,

another may

n0t.53

Some attention

to

how policymakers think about space and time might

help in dealing with such issues. Perceptions, after all, are to a large part

shaped by the spatial and temporal context within which individuals-and

n a t i o n s - e ~ i s t : ~ ~he world can look a

good

deal more ominous if one views

space and time as working against rather than in ones favor.55Paul Kennedys

account of how the British came

to

feel this way prior to World War I could

provide an interesting standard against which to contrast Wilsons thinking

between 1914 and 1917.56Waldo Heinrichss new account of the coming

of

World War I emphasizes the

important

but oddly neglected fact that Roosevelt

50T hom as R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late

Jacksonian Americo (Ithaca, 1985), esp . 8-9, 255-72. These arguments are by no means

new, as George B . Forgie has pointed out in

a

critical review of Hietalas book, A nxiety and

Expansionism in the 1840s.

Reviews in American History 15

(March 198 7): 38-43. But

Hietala has,

I

think, brought them together in an impressively nonreductionist synthesis

organized around the argument that security was by no means free in the 1840s or, by

implication, at any other point in the so-called era of free security. The best-known

countervailing argument is C. Vann Woodward. The Age of Reinterpretation,

American

Hktorical Review 66 (October 1960): 1-19.

51Beisner.

From the

Old

Diplomacy to the New.

Beisners use of paradigm s

is

in turn

drawn from Thomas S.Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Rcvoluiiom. 2d ed.

Chicago,

1970).

52My own attempt

to

answer this last question appears in The Long Peace,

20-47.

53Political scientists, drawing upon the field of cognitive social psychology. have

begun to examine the nature of th reat perception. See, n particular, Deborah Welch Larson,

Origins

of

Containment: A Psychological Explanation

(Princeton, 198 5), esp. 24-65; and

Robert Jervis, Perceiving and Coping with Threat. in Psychology and Deterrence, ed.

Robert Jervis. Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein (Baltimore, 1985). 13-33.

54See Kern, The Culture

of Time

and Space, 2.

55Richard Ned Lebow has argued, on the basis of historical evidence, that the single

most important consideration leading states to provoke con frontation s with othe r states is

the expectation by policy-makers

of

a dramatic impending shift in the balance of power in

an adversarys favor. See

Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis

(Baltimore. 1981),

62.

And John Meanheimer has suggested, also on the basis of historical

investigation. that conventional deterrence works best when the defenders can convince

aggressors that they wil l not be able to achieve a quick and cheap victory. See Conventional

Deterrence (Ithaca, 1983). 203 -6.

56Kennedy. The Rise and Fall

of

the Grea t Powers. 224-29. Se e also idem , The Rise of

rhe Anglo-German Antagonism.

1860-1914 (London, 1980).


15/19

THE STUDY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS 419

in

1941

had two potential threats to deal with at the same Michael

Sherry and Alan Henrikson have suggested that shifts

in

the spatial thinking

of American strategists at the end o f World War

I1

played a role in altering

their view of the Soviet Union from one of ally

to

adversary.58And it seems

very likely that an important shift in temporal thinking must have taken place

as the Eisenhower adm inistration came into office in

1953:

otherwise it

is

difficult to account for the new chief executive's abrupt abandonment of the

period

of peak

danger concept which, since the drafting of NSC-68 three

years earlier, had assumed time

to

be working against the United

States

and its

allies to such

an

extent that if nothing was done a Soviet attack was thought

certain to occur by 1 9 X 5 9

Overcom ing spatial and temporal parochialism requires being willing to

undertake comparative studies. Historians are not particularly receptive to

this

approach: we tend to assume that the comparativist cannot know as much

about a particular subject as the specialist does, and we are correct in assuming

that.

But

the specialist is less likely than the comparativist to ask interesting

questions; even more important, the comparativist alone can draw upon a

range of empirical

evident-xtending

across space and through time-to

suggest answers. If it is true that good history is as much a matter of

providing less

than

definitive answers

to

difficult questions

as

it is a matter of

answering easy questions thoroughly-and I tend to think it is-then the

techniques of the comparativist would appear to have

as

great a claim upon our

attention as

do

those

of

the narrativist.60

One consequence of the spatial and temporal parochialism of American

diplomatic histo rian s-an d their resulting reluctance to approach their subject

from a comparative perspective-is systemic innocence:

it does

not often

occur to us that the United States is and always has been part of an

international system, the characteristics of which add up to something more

than just the sum of its ~ a r t s . 6 ~he mixture

of

astonishment and acclaim that

greeted Paul Kennedy's The

Rise

and Fall

of

the Great Powers when it

appeared late in

1987

is surely a reflection of systemic innocence. The book

advances what should have been an unsurprising argument: that because the

~

57W aldo Heinrichs,

Threshold

of

W ar: Franklin D . Roosevelt and American Entry

into

W o r l d W a r

I

(New York, 1988). For interesting observations on how recent a phenomenon

such simultaneity really is see Kern,

The Culture

of

Time and Space,

67-81.

58Se e Michael S. Sherry.

Preparing for the Next Wa r: American Plans for Postwar

Defense,

1941-1945 (New Haven, 1977 ), 45 -46 ; Alan K. Henrikson, America's Changing

Place in

the

World From 'Periphery' to 'Center'? in

Center

and

Periphery: SpofiafVarialion

in Politics,

ed. Jean Gottmann (Beverly Hills, 1980), 73-100, also Gaddis,

The

Long

Peace ,

59The two strategies are compared in Gaddis,

Strategies

of

Containment,

89-109. 127-

63; but see also McGeorge B undy,

Danger and Survival: Choices aboui

the

Bomb

in the First

Fijty Years (New York, 1988), 291.

6oFor

an excellent brief statement of how comparative history

differs

from narrative

history see Skocpol,

States and Social Revolutions,

xiv.

61The best brief discussion of international systems and how their characteristics differ

from

those

of the states that make them up is in Waltz,

Theory

of

International Politics,

79-

1 0 1 .

21 29.


16/19

420 DIPLOMATICHISTORY

United States exists within a larger sysicmic contcxt, its cxpcricnce as a great

power may replicate that of other grcat powcrs in the past.62 But it took a

historian of European diplomacy and slralcgy

to

see this; Amcrican diplomatic

historians have been remarkably slow

to

incorporatc systemic pcrspectives

into their own work.

The reason almost certainly lics

in

our prcfcrcnce for narration over

generalization. We are

far

more comfortablc ucating history as a linear

than

as

a cyclical phenomenon, and hcnce w e tcnd

not

to recognize systemic

phenomena-which often have cyclical characteristics-when we come across

them. Preoccupied with the progrcssion from tree to trcc, wc lose sight of the

fact that we are part of a forest.

As a result, some important books have gone unwritten. One is a history

of

the

American conception of national security from the achievement of

independence to the prescnt that would seck to answer the following question:

Was this nations isolationism the product of a conscious dctcrmination to

avoid European political entanglcments,

or

was it the largely unconscious

consequence of an unusually stable world ~ r d c r ? ~ ~hcrc systemic instability

has developed-whether in the recurring wars

of

the eighteenth century, the

wars of

the

French Rcvolution and Napolcon, World Wars

I

and 11,or h e Cold

War-the effect has bcen sooncr or later to compromise American

isolationism.64Who really decided our fate, thcn: oursclvcs,

or

the workings

of

an international system we only dimly undcrst~od?~~

A

second

book that has yet to be written would rclate American foreign

policy to the sources of international systcmic slability. Thcre is,

as

yet, no

consensus among theorists on what brings that condition about: Hans

Morgenthau saw stability

as

coming from carefully balancing multiple sources

of power, but Kenneth Waltz has found bipolarity to be more stable than

multipolarity; still others such as Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Gilpin

have suggested the need for a single stabilizing hegemon bcfore order can be

achieved.66 The point here is

not

who is right, but rathcr that American

62Kennedy.

The Rise and FaN of the Great Powers,

esp . 514-35. For the reception of

Kennedys book and its place within the framework

of

what has now come to be known as the

decline school see Peter Schmeisser. Taking Stock: Is America in Decline?

New

York

Times Magazine.

17 April 1988.

63James Chace and Caleb Carr have reccntly come close with their

A m e r i c a

Invulnerable: The

QUS I or

Absolute Securityfiom I812 1 Star Wars

(New York, 1988). but

the book lacks the compa rative persp ective that would he lp to explain how-if at all-

American thinking about national security differed from h a t of o h c r countries, or the extent

to which international systemic influences shaped it.

@C raig and G eorge,

Force and Statecrafi.

3-13 1, provide a conv enicnt overview

of

how

the international system has evolved since the seventeenth century.

65The author of a classic work on isolationism. Sclig Adlcr. long ago took a stand on

this issue: American isolationism. he suggested, was like glaciation. in that it could exist

only under certain specific and relatively infrcquent climatic conditions. See

The Isolationist

Impulse: I f s Twenfiefh-CenturyReaction

br ew York. 1957).

471.

66Waltz,

Theory of Infernafional Polifics.

134-38. 163-70; Hans

J.

Morgenthau,

Politics among Nations: The Sfruggle

for

Power and Peace,

5th ed. (New York. 1973). 167-

221; Charles

P.

Kindleberger,

The World in Depression,

1929-1939 (Berkeley, 1973), 291-

308;

Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Poluics

(New York, 1981). 144-54; and idem,

The Political Economy

of

International Relations

(Princeton, 19 87 ), 72-80.


17/19

THE STU YOF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS

42 1

diplomatic historians have played no role at all in this debate. And yet the

theorists, whatever their persuasion, would all agree that the United States has

played a major role in determining when international equilibrium has been

achieved in this century. American diplomatic historians are selling

themselves and their readers short by remaining aloof from this discussion,

which concerns nothing less than the nature of this countrys involvement

with the rest of the ~ o r l d . 6 ~

A third unwritten book-again reflecting the importance of systemic

perspectives-might deal with that hearty perennial in the history of American

foreign relations, the domino theory. We have traced clearly enough where

the idea came from: indeed, the term Munich mentality has long been a

synonym for it.68But no diplomatic historian that I know of has been willing

to pursue two obvious questions about the domino theory: is it unique, and

is it correct? Answering the first question would require some comparative

history, but that ought not to

be

too difficult. Thucydides himself provides as

good a description of domino thinking

as

we are likely to find; and there is

reason

to

suspect that such attitudes have existed in overextended empires ever

since.69 More difficult is the question of whether dominoes really do fall,

which is to say, whether nations bandwagon when confronted with what

appears to be superior strength. But a careful new study by the political

scientist Stephen Walt argues persuasively that they tend not to, that

balancing against threats is the more frequent pattern of behavior than

bandwagoning before them?O The point may require further research to

confirm, but the Walt book-and Thucydides-provide ample evidence of

how much a student of domino theories could gain from a systemic

perspective.

In some ways, the most intriguing research going

on

now about the

behavior of international systems grows out of the fields of game theory and

political economy. It suggests that limited forms of cooperation between rival

great powers may emerge, even under conditions of anarchy; that states do,

over time, learn to behave like corporations-or professional football teams-

67For an excellent brief introduction to the literature, especially written for diplomatic

historian s, see Ole R. Holsti. Models of Interna tional Rela tions and Foreign Po licy,

Diplomatic History

13

(Winter

1989): 15-43.

Another helpful guide

is

Patrick M. Morgan,

Theories and Approac hes t o International Relations: What Are We to Think?, 4th ed. (New

Brunswick,

1987).

68 Fo r the origins see, among others, A rthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Bitter Heritage:

Vietnam and American Dem ocracy,

1941-1966

(New Y ork,

1967);

Ernest R. May, Lessons

of

the Past: The Use and Mbus e

of

History in American Foreign Policy (New York.

1973),

esp.

80-86;

also Patrick M. Morgan, Saving Face for the Sake of Deterrence, in Jervis,

Lebow, and Stein, eds.,

Psychology and Deterrence,

125-52.

69Your empire is now like a tyranny, Thucydides has Pericles telling the A thenians in

427

B.C.: It may have been wrong to tak e it; it is certainly dangerous

to

let it go. See

The

Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Baltimore,

1954), 161.

See also, on domino

thinking among the seventeenth-century Spanish Hapsburgs, Kennedy, The Rise and Fall

of

the Great Powers,

51.

M yths of Emp ire, an important but as yet unp ublished manu script by

the political scientist Jack Snyder, compares domino thinking in Great Britain, Germany,

Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States at various points in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries.

OStephen M. Walt, The Origins of Allionces (Ithaca,

1987).


18/19


in

that they contend vigorously (most of the time) without trying to kill one

another and without destroying the environment in which they

This theoretical finding-that competition and cooperation can themselves

coexist-could take

us

a long way toward explaining how, against all

expectations, the Soviet-American ivalry that has now extended over four and

a half decades

has

yet to produce armed conflict: a little interdisciplinary

bumping here could pay particularly handsome dividends

for

historians of the

Cold War?*

To be sure, American diplomatic historians are not alone in their

parochialism about international systems: there is a disconcerting tendency

among the systems theorists themselves

to

give little attention to how their

respective findings might mesh. How, for example, do the cycles of great

power rise and fall that Paul Kennedy has identified relate to the hegemonic

stability cycles of Kindleberger and Gilpin? How might these, in turn, tie in

with the possibility that international cooperation can emerge under conditions

of anarchy,or with the role nuclear weapons have played (whatever it is)73 in

ensuring stability? There is, in short, some danger here of paradigm

f ra t r i ~ i d e ; ~~merican diplomatic historians willing to inform themselves

about these discussions might

be

in a good position to help stave off that

catastrophe by subjecting these hypotheses to the good old-fashioned test of

empirical evidence.

If we are to play that role, though, we will have to get over our own old

sense that once

w e

have paid obligatory deference to Cheyneys principle-

once we have established what came after what-our responsibilities are over.

For the fact is that there

are

cyclical as well

as

linear patterns in history; there

is system as well as sequence. And just as the physicists have come to

see

light as having the qualities of both particles and waves, so we too should

accept rather than resist complementarity, and learn

to

make the most of i t75

71See Robert Axelrod,

The Evolution of Cooperation

(New York, 1984); Kenneth

A.

Oye. ed..

Cooperation under Anarchy

(Princeton, 1986); and for a clear summary of this

w or k- de sp it e the accompanying mathematical formulas-Michael Nicolson.

Formal

Theories in Internafional Relations

(Cambridge, England, 1989), 26-51.

72A

decided weakness of my own effort

to

explain i s phenomena in

The Long Peace is

the failure to draw on i s literature; i s does, however, illu stra ~e ll

too

clearly my

point

about d isciplinary parochialism.

73A

new and very interesting b o k by the political scientist John Mueller, Refreat

f r o m

Doomday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York, 1989). suggests that it has been

minimal, that wars between great powers are becoming obsolete quite apart from any

influence that nuclear weapons may have had on that process.

74For more on this admittedly arcane concept see John Lewis Gaddir. Great Illusions.

the Long Peace, and the Future of the International System, in

The Long Postwar P eace: The

Sources of G reat Power Stability,

ed. Charles W Kegley (forthcoming).

7 5 A most elegant interdisciplinary bump in this direction, is Stephen Jay Gould,

Times Arrow, Times Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time

(Cambridge. MA, 1987). The term complementarity is Niels Bohrs. See Richard modes,

The Making

of

the Atomic

Bomb (New York. 1986). 131-32. For an intriguing application

of

this idea to the world

of

contemporary affairs

see Strobe

Talbott,

The Master of fh c Game:

Paul Nifz e and the Nuclear Peace

(New York. 1988). esp. 35-36.


19/19

THE

STUDY

OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS 423

For those who will seek out its patterns, history does have a certain-

although limited-predictive utility. It is not like mathematics and chemistry,

where the repeated combination of variables in the same amounts and under the

same conditions will always produce the same result. It certainly is not, in and

of itself, a guide to the future: those who have sought to use history in this

way-by assuming that

the

future will replicate the past-can count on only

two certainties, which are that it will not and that they will be surprised as a

consequence.

But history can serve something of the function a rear-view mirror does in

an automobile. One would not want to drive down the road with eyes glued to

the mirror because sooner or later one would wind up in the ditch.

But

the

mirror is useful in determining where one has been; it is even more helpful in

revealing who, or what, is coming up from behind, a consideration of some

importance in what is still a competitive international environment. It makes

a difference whether it is the geopolitical equivalent of an aging Volkswagen

or a Mack truck.

History can also make one aware of those long-term patterns that tend to

hold up across time and space: that great powers do rise and fall; that empires

do overextend themselves; that there is a relationship between solvency and

security; that individuals are rarely automatons; that events have complex

In a world that continues to be dangerous-but often in ways we have

least expected-there is

no

question that this expansion

of

immediate

experience, this awareness of long-term patterns, this rear-view mirror

approach to

the

problems we face; that all of this has the potential to make

diplomatic history relevant. Indeed, it could

be

the most relevant

of

all the

branches of history

as far

as policymaking is concerned. The only real question

is whether we diplomatic historians-a pretty unimaginative lot, to be

perfectly honest about it-are capable of seeing our discipline in sufficiently

expansive terms to allow that to happen.

76For

a particularly convincing essay illustrating the importance of looking at history

in this w ay

see

Paul Gagnon, Why Study History?

Atlantic Monthly

262 (November

1988):

43-66.

gaddis - new conceptual approaches to the study of american foreign relations (dh 1990)

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