Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Hardcover)

by John Lewis Gaddis (Author)
Key Phrases: United States, Cold War, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The post–September 11 strategy of the Bush administration is often described as a radical departure from U.S. policy. Gaddis, one of America's leading scholars of foreign policy and international relations, provocatively demonstrates that, to the contrary, the principles of preemption, unilateralism and hegemony go back to the earliest days of the republic. Gaddis resurrects the 18th-century idea of an "empire of liberty": whether as a universal principle or in an American context, liberty could flourish only in an empire that provided safety. The British burning of Washington in 1814 highlighted American vulnerability to certain forms of surprise attack. In consequence, Gaddis recounts, John Quincy Adams developed a strategy of seeking control over the North American continent with minimal coercion, but through preemptive action where necessary. The attack on Pearl Harbor extended the concept to global dimensions, eventually expanding the U.S. sphere of influence exponentially. The events of September 11 extended the concept of preemptive action even at the expense of sovereignty when terrorism is involved. Gaddis describes this latest expansion of American power in response to surprise attack as a volatile mixture of prudence and arrogance. But instead of the usual caveats, he recommends the U.S. continue on an interventionist course, and he has no qualms about calling America the best hope of liberty in the eyes of most of the earth's inhabitants. The ability to question all values that is liberty's essence depends, he finds, on defending certain values—unilaterally and preemptively when necessary, but not randomly. This compact, provocative history of an idea-in-action has the potential to alter the U.S.'s collective self-image.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Historian Gaddis places U.S. reaction to 9/11 in the context of national security policy. In 1817, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, reacting to the burning of Washington, D.C., by British forces during the War of 1812, inaugurated three policies to secure the nation as it grew: preemption --the U.S. would react swiftly and forcibly to attacks; unilateralism--the U.S. would reject alliances requiring response to unforeseeable developments involving other nations; hegemony--the U.S. would predominate in the Western Hemisphere. Polk in the Mexican War and McKinley in the Spanish-American stretched the limits of preemption, and Wilson's internationalism foundered on unilateralism, but the enormously popular Franklin D. Roosevelt significantly altered security policy by allying for World War II and crafting postwar developments, including the UN, to expand U.S. hegemony worldwide. Gaddis argues that George W. Bush in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq attempted FDR's exploitation of multilateralism but ultimately elected preemption ("shock and awe") in the service of global hegemony. Even Bush's staunchest opponents stand to be edified by Gaddis' impressive presentation. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (March 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674011740
• ISBN-13: 978-0674011748
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #525,819 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Puts the U.S. Response to 9-11 in Historical Perspective, May 29, 2004

By	Jeffery Steele (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews

After 9-11, when the Bush administration began laying out the framework for a new strategy to deal with security threats to the United States, several scholars and commentators judged elements of the nascent strategy to be without precedent in American history. John Lewis Gaddis, a scholar who has written extensively about the history of U.S. national security, argues otherwise. Rather than an unprecedented strategy, Gaddis says the Bush administration has put forward a security framework that reaches back into the nineteenth century for its central ideas.

This short book, which was based on a series of lectures Gaddis presented at the New York Public Library in 2002, builds its case of an evolving U.S. security strategy around three events: the 1814 burning of the White House by the British, the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and 9-11. Gaddis argues that each of these events forced the U.S. to change its strategy to fit the new circumstances of the time. Bush's recent unilateral policies after 9-11 and FDR's multilateral response to the U.S. entry into WW2 (that was also the basis of the U.S. Cold War strategy) are familiar to most readers, but it is Gaddis's description of John Quincy Adams and his nineteenth century strategy (one that was largely followed by almost all American presidents until 1941), and the comparison of Adams's strategy with Bush's, that is likely to spark the reader's interest.

Gaddis makes the case that Bush's so-called "unprecedented" strategy combining preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony finds its precedents in Adams's policies. Like Bush, Adams felt it necessary to occasionally preempt neighboring states, non-state actors (Indians), and even failed states (Spain's faltering hold on its colonial possessions). Like Bush, Adams felt unilateralism was sometimes necessary to secure America's long-term interests. And finally, like Bush, Adams sought U.S. hegemony; the only difference between the two presidents was one of degree; Bush seeks to maintain U.S. global hegemony while Adams had to make due with the goal of regional hegemony in the Western hemisphere.

Gaddis does not claim that the Bush administration borrowed consciously from Adams, and the scholar concedes there are differences between the nineteenth and twenty-first century security environments for the U.S. He maintains, however, the similarities are striking enough to note. He also argues that there is a common thread to American strategy passing from Adams to FDR to Bush: whenever Americans have felt threatened, their response has been to take the offense, not to play defense; to expand, not to shrink behind walls; to confront and overwhelm, not to flee.

This is an excellent book, concise and strikingly persuasive. It makes the Bush case for a new U.S. strategy better than the administration itself has made it, and yet Gaddis is not a Republican supporter. By giving historical precedents to the controversial tenets of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony, Gaddis attempts to show that Bush's new security framework is less radical than many now fear.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grand Strategy and its Discontents, December 31, 2004

By	Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The surprise attack of September 11 brought about, in the eyes of many learned observers, a radical shift in American national security policy. Since World War II and up until the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a policy of containment and deterrence. During the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse, there was a feeling that democracy and capitalism would eventually triumph everywhere; the Clinton administration reasoned that the US "only needed to engage and the rest of the world would enlarge the process."

In response the 9/11 attack the Bush administration formulated a new strategy, outlined in the national security speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. This speech called for a new strategy which looked like a departure from American tradition. The key elements of this new strategy were preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. In the beginning, it was little noticed; however, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, people began to examine this strategy more closely.

Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, in this short and well-written little book, argues that this was not a new policy, in fact it had deep roots in American history that go back to the earliest days of the republic. Gaddis demonstrates that after the British attack on Washington DC during the War of 1812, the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams asserted the same three principles. Preemption was the rationale for Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida, the "failed state" of its day being a haven for marauding Seminoles, runaway slaves and profiteering pirates. With the diminishing authority of the Spanish in Latin America, the US sought to restrict the influence of other European powers in the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was a unilateralist declaration even though the US did not have the means to enforce it without the backing of the British navy. And in the end, the policy of John Quincy Adams was to be the predominant power in the Western Hemisphere, or at least on the North American continent - a hegemon in all but name.

Preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony was indeed a US strategy up until World War II. The US was seeking merely to assure its security by keeping the European powers out of the hemisphere. Most Americans believed it was a mistake to seek an oversees empire as the brief foray into the Phillipines proved in the early part of the 20th century.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was forced the build alliances with the Soviet Union and other great powers in order to defeat Germany and Japan. It was thus necessary to forgo preemption and unilateralism in deference to the alliance. During and after World War II, the US took the lead in building multilateralism institutions - a multilateral system that not only ensured American hegemony, but made it desirable at the same time. Forgoing preemption gave the US the moral high ground, which it maintained until the invasion of Iraq.

The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq had all the elements of a grand strategy: preemption, unilateralsim - when multilateralism failed - and American hegemony. There was also an innovation to this strategy: there would be an active promotion of democracy in the Middle East. This idea swayed many liberals to the cause, including members of the media and the academic community.

The problems with this strategy became apparent after the invasion. They are too numerous to go into and obvious to anyone following the news. The mistakes made during the occupation leaves the Bush Doctine with only a few remaining supporters. The failure to enlist the great powers, not to mention many of the smaller powers, destroyed our status as a benign hegemon and jepardizes our moral high ground.

Gaddis does an excellent job of explaining the grand strategy and showing that it has precedents in history, better than Bush or anyone in his administration. However, he does not show that this strategy is justified, morally or legally, and he does not seem to fully appreciate that many of our friends and allies find this strategy frightening and repugnant. They do not call us arrogant for nothing.

Nevertheless, the jury is still out. Immediately after the invasion, it looked as though one regime after another would fall in the region, along the lines of the dominoes of Eastern Europe. At the present writing, with the Iraqi elections approaching, a decent outcome seems remote and a civil war possible. Yet, there are stirrings of hope and change elsewhere in the Middle East, such as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The upheaval in Iraq is also creating debate that did not exist before in Egypt and the Gulf States. The pendulum may again swing the other way and the grand strategy may be working inspite of itself.

43 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of American foreign policy, May 27, 2004

By	N. Tsafos (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For all that has been written about the American reaction to September 11, who could have thought that a mere 128 pages could offer a sweeping and refreshing look into America's historic quest for security-and to do so while demonstrating the relevance of that historical exercise for the present.

John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University, aims at "an admittedly premature effort to treat, as history, an event that remains inescapably part of our present": the September 11 attacks on America and the Bush Administration's response to them. The product is an intellectual and historical tour de force, which dissects the American desire for security by looking at what its government did the last two times it was faced with a similar predicament: after the British burned the White House and Capitol Hill in 1814, and after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The three dominant themes employed (or conceived) by John Quincy Adams were unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony. Roosevelt's reaction to Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, rested on multilateralism and a rejection of preemption; ironically, he still achieved the third: hegemony. The book then proceeds to carefully craft an analysis (and critique) between those two historical precedents and President Bush's reaction after September 11.

It is hard to imagine another book that can look so clearly and refreshingly at the major security issues confronting American foreign policy at the time; and to do so in so few pages. Nor is it imaginable that anyone could have summarized in a single paragraph his or her suggestion about what America foreign policy should be aimed at (no spoilers here: read the book). Yet, this is precisely what one will encounter reading "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience."