A Nation Like All Others, by Warren I. Cohen (preface)

A NATION LIKE ALL OTHERS A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS

WARREN I. COHEN

PREFACE

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reader, there are two magnificent histories of American foreign relations, beginning to end: George Herring’s From Colony to Superpower and the New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, which I edited and to which William Weeks, Walter LaFeber, Akira Iriye, and I contributed volumes. Both remain excellent sources, beautifully written, well documented, with superb bibliographies.

They have one major drawback consistent with their quality: both run over a thousand pages.

Many years ago, Daniel Boorstin asked W. Stull Holt to write a short history of American foreign relations for a series he was editing (which included William Leuchtenburg’s classic Perils of Prosperity). Stull kept waiting for the war in Vietnam to end, and when it finally did, the old World War I fighter pilot was too close to the end of his life to complete the task. As his student, I’ve long felt that the responsibility for picking up that challenge was mine. Stull, a die-hard supporter of the war in Vietnam, would not have liked this book, but he always tolerated my deviances— even my sympathetic treatment of the revisionist historians he despised.

Without apology, I offer herein an interpretive essay, minus the scholarly paraphernalia I’ve demanded from my students and of the authors whose books I’ve reviewed over the past fifty-odd years. The reader who OR T H E I N TE R E S TE D

P R E FA C E

wants more is advised to refer to the Herring and Cambridge History volumes.

In the course of writing this book, I happened to read David Bromwich’s Moral Imagination—which he defines as “the power that compels us to grant the highest possible reality and the largest conceivable claim to a thought, action, or person that is not our own.” Empathy for the Other is not commonly thought of as an essential element of foreign policy, a requirement for would-be policymakers, the men and women recruited to serve the national interest. My use of Bromwich’s ideas is regrettably reductive, but they do help provide focus for my evaluation of the foreign policies of the United States and of its leaders. I, like Bromwich, am concerned with the relationship between power and conscience.

Like many—if not most—Americans, I grew up as a confirmed believer in American exceptionalism, in the United States as a force for good in the world. I felt that strongly when I enlisted in the U.S. Navy sixty-one years ago. And although I can think of no other nation with a role more exemplary, it has saddened me over the years to recognize the abuse of power of which our leaders have been guilty—the lack of moral imagination that has permeated American foreign policy from colonial times through these last years of my life, from the many years of aggression against Native Americans to the present mismanagement of affairs in the Muslim world. And, sadly, the fact that more than 40 percent of the American people would support the candidacy for president of a man like Donald Trump—and elect him—suggests that a nation like all others is composed of a people like all others.

In brief, I hope my readers will share in the exhilaration I still feel when I think of Europeans cheering when the Yanks came to liberate them in both World Wars—and the shame of being reminded of the mistreatment of Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of Vietnamese in the twentieth, and of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in the twentyfirst. Ours is a nation with the power—and often the will—to do great good, and too often the power to do evil as well. I pray that President Trump will amaze the world with a hitherto hidden capacity for moral imagination.

Finally, had Nancy Bernkopf Tucker lived to read this manuscript, her challenges, as always, would have resulted in a better book. xii

praise for A Nation Like All Others “A lively, well-written history of America’s foreign policy and diplomacy from 1776 to the present. This is a superb synthesis, in places quite provocative in its arguments, and a signal accomplishment.”

Georg e Her r ing , University of Kentucky “A Nation Like All Others is a book like none other. Warren I. Cohen offers an authoritative but brief overview of American interactions with the wider world from the founding of the nation to our present day. He covers all the major events with acute observations about the sources of policy, compelling judgments of decision makers, and thoughtful ruminations about how things fit together (or not). This is an opinionated survey of American trials and tribulations, delivered as a single narrative with largerthan-life protagonists.”

Jer emi Sur i , University of Texas at Austin “In this brief and illuminating account of U.S. foreign policy from Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution to Donald Trump and ‘America first,’ Cohen displays the wisdom and insight that have made him one of the country’s most admired chroniclers of American diplomacy. Lamenting the nation’s loss of its moral compass, Cohen deftly probes the economic, strategic, and domestic political imperatives that make it so difficult to reconcile the exceptionalism he cherishes with the realism he admires.”

Melvyn P. Leffler, University of Virginia “Cohen’s lucid writing and distinguished scholarship have settled key questions in the history of U.S.-Asian relations, and he does the same here in magnificently relating four hundred years of U.S. relations with the world. Gemlike portrayals of Ben Franklin through McKinley (the 1890s marked ‘the point of no return’ for Americans) to Obama will attract students and general readers alike.”

Walter LaFeber, Cornell University “Cohen’s deep scholarship and incisive writing have combined to make him for decades the leading historian of American foreign policy and diplomacy. This book succeeds in taking the reader concisely through the full sweep of America’s relations with the rest of the world.”

Jame s Mann , scholar-in-residence, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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