Bush's Foreign Policy & American History

Yesterday I argued that American foreign policy under the Bush administration did not represent, pace his critics, a break with the policies of previous wartime presidents. Today I've come across a lively and informative email exchange between Niall Ferguson and Robert Kagan last week at Salon.com. They debated the question of America's empire and, as a base for discussion, recent books by John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead.

At one point Kagan writes:

"Sept. 11 may have aroused Americans to take a series of military actions, but the actions themselves are hardly surprising or unprecedented, much less out of character— as Gaddis so persuasively explains in his essay. It is widely asserted, especially by those hostile to the Bush administration, that Bush has engineered a 'revolution' in American foreign policy, with such presumably radical inventions as the idea of 'pre-emption,' or by flouting the U.N. Charter and bypassing the U.N. Security Council, or by a willingness to take action 'unilaterally'— i.e., without the approval of Paris and Berlin. But as Gaddis notes, pre-emption, a certain tendency toward unilateralism, and a proclivity to expand power and influence in response to threats all have deep and enduring roots in American history."

The exchange is a worthwhile read, as you might expect from such thoughtful scholars.