Permanently interventionist America?

• Author: Steinberg, James
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Dangerous Nation By Robert Kagan Alfred A. Knopf Press, 2006, 544 pages

Thucydides observed that "History is Philosophy teaching by examples." Ever since his time, political theorists have studied history to seek enduring truths about the nature of man in society, and about the forces governing relations between nations. Invariably, the search for meaning in the past has shaped the preoccupations and controversies of the present. Each generation brings to the study of the history its own dominant questions and concerns, and seeks support in dusty archives for positions that will inform and shape contemporary debates.

It is in this tradition that Robert Kagan, one of our premier contemporary political theorists, has turned his eye to a re-examination of the history of American foreign policy. In the first of a promised two volume study, Kagan sets out both to explore the roots of contemporary American foreign policy and to challenge some of the prevailing assumptions about the nature of America's past international conduct. The result is a rich, well researched and masterfully written book which, not surprisingly, reflects the concerns and perspectives that will be familiar to readers of Kagan's other works--both scholarly (Of Paradise and Power) and polemical (in the pages of the Weekly Standard).

Kagan's avowed purpose is to challenge the supposed conventional wisdom that the America's founders set the United States on a course of isolation and disengagement in foreign affairs, a tradition which (so the mythology goes) was maintained with consistency until the end of the 19th century, and formed the backdrop of the contentious debates over U.S. entry into the First and Second World Wars. This caricature of the conventional wisdom is a bit overdone--many commentators have previously demonstrated convincingly that Washington's creed of "no entangling alliances" was a far more sophisticated strategy for the infant nation than simple disengagement. But the power and uniqueness of Kagan's historical research is the deep connection he explores between the domestic political debate about the nature of the American Republic and the liberal values that it embodies, and the foreign policy implications that partisans of competing views drew from those conceptions.

Kagan's purpose is not primarily an academic effort to correct the historical record. Rather, he seeks to mine history for insights into contemporary problems. He calls the period of...