Customer Reviews

Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage)

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Just for the record, I began this book in 1996 and finished 90 percent of it before the Iraq War began. I'm amazed that anyone can imagine I wrote this book in less than two years.

In this provocative and insightful book the author delves into the history of American foreign policy and proposes the radical suggestion that internationalism is far more in America's historical blood than isolationism. We have been accustomed to think that isolationism, based on Washington's reference to avoiding European alliances, is the national pastime, and it certainly was in certain periods and championed by certain voices. However this book shows that a radical sense of the puritan secular ethic, combined with anti-colonialism led America to challenge the world and that in her history America has always espoused special unique values such as capitalism and democracy. The Civil War is seen as a jumping off place for true American power.

This book is not a minute history of American expansion but concentrates on its major theorists and pushers such as the South's view towards expanding to the tropics under Jefferson Davis, Polk, Blaine and others. However there are major oversights. The role of mapmakers and explorers such as Fremont is ignored and it appears there are no maps in the book which makes reference to foreign policy problematic.

American foreign policy is fascinating and this book helps to dust off the 19th century, which has been viewed as a time of American isolationism and inward ignorance, and reshape our view to see it as a time when American theories were laid down that put the groundwork together for the policies of Wilson and FDR, as well as Reagan, Kennedy and Bush.

A brilliant work, a needed contribution.

Seth J. Frantzman

Robert Kagan's "Dangerous Nation" is a comprehensive and often eye-opening book regarding U.S. foreign policy since pre-Revolutionary War days. Thrusting an arrow into America's notion of "manifest destiny", Kagan sets out, and ultimately succeeds in relating the news that we Americans aren't as noble as we might have thought. Clearly and concisely, the author tells us why.

With a timeline as his narrative outline, Kagan begins with a look at America in its infancy, emphasizing a national tentativeness about foreign entanglements as the country tried to build on the successful outcome of the Revolution. England, France and Spain, of course, formed the triumvirate of foreign powers sometimes allying with the United States but often at odds with us. Kagan is very good at describing the balancing act that the early presidents had to achieve with regard to these European nations.

As much time as the author spends with the Founding Fathers, this really is more of a book about the actions and reactions of the United States in the nineteenth century and with it, two key figures emerge...John Quincy Adams in the early part of the century and James G. Blaine in the latter part. Both Secretaries of State had vision, insight and political knowledge as to the benefits and pitfalls in which the country might find itself. While much of "Dangerous Nation" is not historically new to American history buffs, there are some added, fascinating insights. Kagan spices up a couple of chapters with a comparison of the foreign policy positions of the administrations of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison... two men who had widely differing views on how aggressive the United States should be in its outlook on the world. That Democrats and Republicans changed hands in the White House four times in four successive national elections (thereby wrenching foreign policy to and fro) is a great side theme.

Kagan ends his first volume (volume two is to be written) with the onset of the Spanish-American War, perhaps, as he puts it, the most popular war in the nation's history. By this time, the United States was already a world power and this was reflected in the nation's attitude toward freeing Cuba from Spain, pushing the frustrated President McKinley (who wanted to stay out of war) into finally taking action.

If history is one of life's great lessons, there are many times in "Dangerous Nation" that one reads about the foreign policy mistakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are clearly repeated in America's intervention in Iraq. Overreaching, an effort to establish democracies where they may not be wanted and a will to impose our "goodness" as a nation are just some examples. Robert Kagan has offered a wonderfully thorough book in "Dangerous Nation" and I highly recommend it, especially for its look at how United States foreign policy has been viewed over time from within our own borders and from without.

In our current public debate, intellectual laziness often causes us to support this or that position with certain favorite quotes from the Founding Fathers, stripped of their historical context. How many times do we need to hear about Jefferson's "wall" separating Church and State brought into a discussion about a woman's "right to choose"? How many times has Washington's exhortation "to avoid foreign entanglements" -- in his 1796 Farewell Address -- been quoted to us when the topic is "what to do" in Bosnia, Kosovo or, lately, in Iraq?

Clearly, Robert Kagan is tired of these quotations, which stop all argument, too. The fulcrum of his book is Washington's Farewell Address. He spends the first 120 pages of his book preparing the historical context of this speech from the French-Indian War to 1796, and spends a full 20 pages explaining all of the foreign entanglements a fledgling America had already involved itself during 1796. In effect, Kagan modifies Washington's "rule" of foreign policy by making the case that Washington argued not to eliminate all foreign entanglements, but only those, which were not in America's "interest." The trick since then has been to decide, which entanglements were in America's interest and which weren't.

It is instructive to know that Kagan began this book in 1996, before publishing "Paradise and Power." Not only was 1996 the 200th anniversary of the Farewell Address, but also a special moment in American history when Americans were so tired of "history" and "foreign entanglements" that it looked like we would never want to or have to "entangle" ourselves again. At the same time, we were forced to watch the genocide in the Balkans go unstopped by both a "weak" Europe and an "indifferent" America.
Of course, this moment in history is explored in depth in "Paradise and Power," but it informs "Dangerous Nation."

While I must admit that I still have 100 pages to go in Kagan's book, the reason is twofold: on the one hand, the book is exhaustive in detail and in creating context; and, on the other hand, the book is somewhat exhausting to read, such that I can only manage about 30 pages per day.

Nevertheless, the book must be read due to it's unique perspective on American history. Kagan definitively demonstrates that the American mission has been messianic, interventionist, and idealistic from its Founding.

In this new book by Robert Kagan - the first in a projected two-volume study - he tells us that America, unlike previously believed, was never an isolationist or inward-looking "city on the hill," but rather an expansionist power pursuing a "universalistic nationalism." The latter sounds like a contradiction in terms but Kagan does a masterful job in explaining it.

For those who read "Of Paradise and Power," the present volume will cover some of the same issues and will again seem like a defense of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. To an extent it is, though not explicitly. What Kagan is attempting to do is to show that America has always been an aggressive - dangerous - nation. This volume covers foreign policy from the time of the Puritans to the end of the nineteenth century. (Another good book on this subject is by John Lewis Gaddis in "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience.")

Kagan argues that Americans were always aggressive, not so much in their acquisiton of colonies, but in their quest to remake the world in their own image. America achieved nationhood with the Declaration of Independence, which claimed "universal natural rights." This was something totally new. Not only was this the founding declaration of nationhood, it was also, according to Kagan, the founding document of American foreign policy. National interests became universal interests. The danger of declaring that one's national interests are universal has been amply displayed by our current administration. Universal natural rights are an alien concept in most foreign lands.

This American sense of righteousness played a large role in the Civil War. Lincoln explicitly invoked the principles of human rights and the government's right to promote and defend them in his execution of the war to end slavery.

This same righteoussness was drawn upon, perversely, in America's westward expansion and its dislplacement of the Indians. The mission to "civlize" was a manifestation of the desire to spread liberal values. This was of course very hypocritical and Kagan is not supportive of it, he is describing some of the motives behind the desire to remake the continent.

Kagan's thesis is that America's expansion was not about territory alone but also about spreading "liberal republican" values. Liberal as Kagan uses the term refers to individual rights free from government control. This is not liberalism as it is understood in America today, usually meaning more government intervention. Kagan's liberalism is to be understood in the original sense as Adam Smith used the term. Individuals unconstrained by government or tradition were free pursue weath and property to their fullest. It was right for America, and Americans believed it was right for everyone. Kagan views this kind of untrammelled liberalism as a good thing, others, however, view us as a dangerous nation.

I cautiously approached this book having read some other professional reviews in fear that it might be too much a literary essay and hence non-readable. I have been very pleasantly surprised and recommend it to anyone who might like to look at where we (American) have come from in terms of getting involved in "other people's business".
I thoroughly enjoyed the way Kagan shows the contrasting opinions, often in the same founding father's mind. I too am often in a quandry as to where we should mind our own country's business and where our responsibilities as citizens of the world come into play.
Kagan does a good job of examining how we've come from the world of the Monroe Doctrine (not exactly what I thought it was) to policemen of the world (actually only up to the turn of the Spanish American War).
Now I'd like to see a similar appraisal of the past 100 years.

Robert Kagan begins this first volume of his history of American foreign policy by arguing that the Puritans' concept of America as a "City on a Hill" had less of an impact on the nation's development than the culture of "aggressive expansionism" and "acquisitive materialism" that developed along the Chesapeake Bay. This is the first, but not the last, myth that Kagan takes great relish in demolishing in this important new book on America's relations with the rest of the world up to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War.

Kagan's argument is that the notion that the United States was an isolationist power uninterested in world affairs until recently is dead wrong. He contends that the United States always had a keen interest in world affairs and in promoting its agenda abroad. And not just any agenda -- Kagan rejects the idea that the early architects of American foreign policy were motivated principally by national interest. Instead, spreading classical liberal economic and political ideas around the world was the main aim of Americans from the beginning.

One of Dangerous Nation's strengths, as it was with Kagan's last book ("Of Paradise and Power"), is the clarity and force of his writing. He uses vivid, yet succinct, language to communicate his ideas. The book is also enjoyable for the spotlight it shines on less well known incidents in American foreign policy, such as the American confrontation with Germany over Somoa in the 1880s. There are so many interesting little corners of this book, such as Kagan's argument that the United States' foreign policy could hardly fail to be unique because its republican institutions were answerable to its citizens for their safety and prosperity; his explanation as to why the ebb and flow of American expansion resulted, in part, from the nation's debate over slavery; and his description of the views of America from abroad, which were at times hopeful that the United States might bring a new order of things to the world and at other times fearful as to what that new order would be.

The quibble that I would have with his book is that some of the ideas he works so hard to debunk sometimes seem to be little more than straw men. Much of the book sets up, as its antithesis, the idea that America had NO interest in the world and wanted NO relations with the rest of the world. Such a premise is easy to knock down, because then any American who even expresses an interest in something that happens outside the nation's borders easily refutes it. Kagan can therefore raise his argument and easily "prove" it, for instance, with reference to the fierce debates over the Napoleonic Wars.

Nevertheless, the book is a great romp through the first one hundred plus years of American foreign policy. I look forward to Volume II.

Be prepared to be shocked (and awed) because Robert Kagan posits some of the most controversial theories about the United States' foreign policy including:

Washington's Farewell Address: a speech not for the ages, but one only intended for the first few years of the young republic
Monroe Doctrine: much debated, but not implemented, because of the issue that tore apart the nation in the second quarter of the 19th century
Hawaiian Statehood: applied for annexation to the United States in the first half of the 19th century, but because it fell south of the Missouri compromise line, and thus would be classified as a slave state, refused, and had to wait more than 100 years to join the nation as a state
The Spanish-American War: perhaps the most popular war in U.S. history?
Kagan takes us on an exhaustive, exhausting thrill-ride through the foreign policy decisions of the United States from its pre-Revolutionary War era to the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. (The reader will have to wait for the next volume to find out what happens in the twentieth century.) Forget your dull high school history books; what you'll find here confounds the complacent reader who can name the Battles of each of our wars, but not the battles that were fought before, during, and after the bloodshed.
The saddest, most shocking section of the book focuses on the issue that eclipsed America's external focus of terroritorial expansion in the 19th century as it imploded in the years from the 1820's to the 1860's: slavery. Kagan describes a time when the United States stood alone among the nations of the world as our shameful sin, slavery, was denounced by intellectuals and the common man throughout the rest of the world community. We were founded on a belief that all men were created equal, and indeed had certain inalienable rights, yet we were hypocritically ignoring the denial of rights to our fellow human beings toiling in our own backyards.
The war that erupted between two sections of the country, sections as diametrically opposed to each other as the primary colors of red and blue, was the most wretched, hard-fought, emotionally-charged conflict in our history. And the aftermath was just as devastating as the lead-up to the war, with the South feeling itself to be an occupied country, with its "colored" population hardly any better off than they were before the War.
Kagan introduces us to characters who were the rock stars of their time (Bono, for example, not Britney). John Quincy Adams emerges from the shadow of a much-respected Founding Father father to become the leading abolitionist in public office. And William Seward, who, alas, has gone down in history attached to the unfortunate moniker "Folly," is revealed as one of New York State's (and the nation's) most principled, distinguished statesmen. (And Seward's Folly? Hardly. The 20th century Cold War would have heated up to a boil if Russia had still maintained a presence in the North American continent.)
Perhaps the biggest revelation in the book concerns the Spanish-American War, over the issue of Cuban independence. Cuban rebels, in an attempt to repel the Spanish, ceased working in any industry in an effort to force the Spanish out; the Spanish, playing hardball, removed hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their homes and settled them in (re)concentration camps, where as many as 300,000 are believed to have died from starvation. The citizens of the United States, Kagan maintains, demanded military action, fueled not by revenge for the sinking of the Maine, not by the lurid stories of the so-called yellow journalists, but by humanitarian concerns.
Heroes and villains, brilliant minds and darkest hearts, Kagan introduces you to a country, a people, who struggled to create a society that reflected the very best in human achievement, sometimes attaining it, sometimes not.

Dangerous Nation, by Robert Kagan, has a brilliant premise, namely that, rightly or wrongly, the United States has always had an expansionist policy - in spite of our own belief that we are essentially isolationists, or even have been so at times. Kagan sums it up best. "Americans have cherished an image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof, only sporadically and spasmodically venturing forth into the world. This self image survives, despite four hundred years of steady expansion and an every-deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite innumerable wars, interventions, and prolonged fate. Even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony, expanding its reach and purview and involvement across the continent and then across the oceans, Americans still believe their nation's natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference, and insularity. (But Americans) have not anticipated, therefore, the way their natural expansiveness could provoke reactions, and sometimes violent reactions, against them."

Kagan makes some great points about U.S. expansion despite our national belief of the opposite. His writing in this volume (which ends at the Spanish-American War, with a second to follow on the 20th Century) is erudite. Often, however, the reader is led astray and wonders where the author is going - and the answer is really nowhere, simply making sometimes quite long winded comments that are off message. In essence, Kagan is a brilliant thinker, has a very sustainable premise but is only an adequate writer. A book for those highly interested in a fairly radical view of American foreign policy, over a long period of time.

This is the first of a two volume history on American foreign policy. It starts with the beginnings of the nation and concludes after the Spanish-American War. This is not a comprehensive work- all American History teachers will find significant omissions. However, the author provides details and motives that are generally absent from the typical survey course.

There is a common perception that America has only been prominent in world affairs since WWII- that we have intentionally avoided the petty squabbles of European royalty and concentrated on improving the nation. To the extent this is true we can thank geography and common sense- not some master plan engineered by Washington. America has always been a player in foreign affairs if our interests were aroused. Indeed, we had a foreign policy (blast the Brits) before we had a nation.

Several themes resonated over many generations. One was the realization by thinking people everywhere that America was bound to be a dominant world power. In our infancy we were seen as a dangerous nation. Our treatment of Indian tribes and neighboring countries were not viewed as domestic transactions by the rest of the world. Too often, we were rightly seen as the young giant eager to kick butt to gain respect.

The practice of slavery influenced every aspect of our foreign relations. Up to the Civil War, Southerners were only interested in expansion if it would allow slavery. Of course, speaking as equals with foreigners of color was out of the question. Slavery nullified our every moral claim in other nation's eyes.

Kagan's critique of causes of the Spanish-American War is quite good. He makes a case for our entry on humanitarian grounds, though many events propelled the seemingly inevitable clash.

There is a persistant theme that has shaped the conversation of war throughout history and is doing so today. That's the general tendency of non-military people to advocate armed force to solve disputes. They are balanced by veterans who have seen war and are more apt to urge restraint. If wars go badly, only the combat veterans are allowed to disagree with policy. Non-vets cling to hawkish proposals for fear of being dismissed as wimps. Of course it makes little sense, but such is the code. And yes, I can think of a few politicians and pundits that should have been shot at forty years ago.