The making of a hawk

In historian Walter Russell Mead's terms, I have gone from being a Jeffersonian to a Wilsonian. In his new book, "Special Providence," Mead provides a highly useful map of the schools of thought that have guided American foreign policy throughout the country's history, dividing them into the two above, as well as Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. Mead's graceful analysis, which seeks out the wisdom and flaws in each of these schools, has won strong praise from astute foreign policy practitioners like Richard Holbrooke and fellow historians like Douglas Brinkley and Ronald Steel, and deservedly so. His provocative theoretical architecture and lively writing style give average Americans the opportunity to examine the assumptions behind the country's foreign policy decisions, from the calamitous to the heroic.

Jeffersonians, as Mead defines them, shun foreign entanglements, particularly wars, which they perceive as the greatest threats to our precious and fragile democracy. Named after our third president, who feared for the future of our democratic experiment in a perilous world, Jeffersonians dread the corruptions of a militarized society, recoiling at Cicero's admonition to a Roman jury, that "the law shuts up when weapons speak." Among the Jeffersonian school's more illustrious proponents, according to Mead, have been some of the "most distinguished and elegant strategic thinkers in American history -- men like John Quincy Adams and George Kennan -- as well as passionate and proud democratic isolationists" and anti-imperialists like Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, Ralph Nader, historian Charles Beard, libertarian thinkers such as the scholars at the Cato Institute and, he reveals in the book's conclusion, Mead himself. Jeffersonians cringe at the Wilsonian argument that tempests like Kosovo and Rwanda cry out for our intervention, that "the American national interest in an orderly world coincides with the country's moral duty." In contrast, Jeffersonians, who see the world as dangerous and unreformable, heed Adams' eloquent 1821 declamation that America should not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

The Jeffersonians' greatest weakness -- and it's a glaring one, Mead concedes -- is their tendency to be on the wrong side of history. The Jeffersonian camp, which urged American neutrality far too long into the rise of the fascist juggernaut, was deeply discredited by World War II as well as by its opposition to the Cold War. Jeffersonians rose to prominence again with the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam, but their ascendancy was short-lived. "In the 1980s many Jeffersonians had convinced themselves that American power was fated to decline," observes Mead. "The obvious upsurge in American international standing and economic power of the 1990s took them aback. Largely isolated in opposing the Gulf War, Jeffersonians took another blow when the war ended in an easy victory with neither the heavy casualties nor the political problems that many of them had predicted. When the Balkans interventions did not end in unmitigated, clear disasters, Jeffersonian croaking about the dangers of intervention, the arrogance of power, and the costs of imperial overreach had lost most of their credibility. Jeffersonians continued to cry wolf in the 1990s, but fewer and fewer people listened." If he had not already sent his book to the publisher, Mead would surely have added the Jeffersonian bleating about an Afghan military morass and massive civilian casualties to his list of this school's intellectual failures.

The Wilsonians and Hamiltonians are the two internationalist camps in Mead's map, and he says they represent the current thinking of the foreign policy establishment. But since the Hamiltonians concern themselves almost exclusively with the creation of a global financial order within which American business can prosper, rather than with military matters, we need not dwell on this school here. The Wilsonians, named for the president who believed the United States had a moral and practical duty to spread its values through the world, are according to Mead "more interested in the legal and moral aspects of world order than in the economic agenda supported by Hamiltonians." The origins of this school predate President Woodrow Wilson himself, observes Mead, stretching back to the Christian missionary movement of the 19th century which lobbied Washington to adopt progressive policies toward China, Siam, the Ottoman Empire and other far-flung outposts. But it began its triumphant reign during the Woodrow presidency.

"Fashionable though it has long been to scorn the Treaty of Versailles, and flawed though that instrument undoubtedly was, one must note that Wilson's principles survived the eclipse of the Versailles system and that they still guide European politics today: self-determination, democratic government, collective security, international law, and a league of nations," writes Mead. "Wilson may not have gotten everything he wanted at Versailles, and his treaty was never ratified by the Senate, but his vision and diplomacy, for better or worse, set the tone for the 20th century. France, Germany, Italy and Britain may have sneered at Wilson, but every one of these powers today conducts its policy along Wilsonian lines. What was once dismissed as visionary is now accepted as fundamental. This was no mean achievement, and no European statesman of the 20th century has had as lasting, as benign, or as widespread an influence."

Wilson's own war may not have brought about the world he envisioned, but most subsequent Wilsonian interventions through the 20th century and into the 21st -- from World War II to the Balkans to Afghanistan -- have helped extend the rule of peace, justice and democracy. And the commitment to "nation building" in war-ravaged countries, which is an essential corollary to the Wilsonian philosophy of military engagement, has also brought harmony to the world, from post-war Japan to Kabul's new U.S.-supported transition government. President Bush himself, who scorned Clinton nation-building in Haiti and the Balkans during last year's presidential campaign, has since Sept. 11 become an ardent convert to this strategy, as well as an overnight fan of Wilsonian-style multinational consultation.

Wilsonianism's greatest difficulty is determining where to draw the line on its humanitarian impulse. As Mead points out, in a benighted and violent world, the calls for American action can be endless. He paints a chilling picture of what a society dedicated to serving as the world's policeman can become: "A global hegemon leads a hard and busy life. Are the tribes revolting in Kabul? Is a coup brewing in Manila? Is piracy on the upswing in the South China Sea? Are Arabs bombing Israelis (or vice versa) in the Holy Land? A global hegemon must determine if any of the thousands of crises that occur in any random decade post a threat to the hegemonic order ... Moreover, the capital of a hegemon is invariably a place of secrets, many of them dirty. There are secret agreements with allies, the secrets of military planning, the secrets of a vast and active intelligence community and a web of agents. Many of the hegemon's allies are not particularly nice. In most of this sad world's bloody struggles, both sides are crooked, both drenched in blood, and neither attracted to the cause of liberty, virtue or anything else that goes beyond personal and clan ambition. Inevitably the hegemon enters into arrangements with murderers and thugs; inevitably the hegemon seeks to make its allies more effective at murder and thuggery than their opponents.

"This is no Jerusalem, no 'City upon a Hill'", a dismayed Mead cries out. "This is Babylon; it is Nineveh. It is the Augean stables, not an honest republic."

Serving as the world's centurion also repeatedly puts the global power's own citizens in the line of fire. And, particularly in a society like the United States that has abolished its military draft, this life-threatening service falls disproportionately on that class of society that Colin Powell calls "economic cannon fodder." Mead has a different way of characterizing this group. Most of those who serve in the American military come from what he calls the Jacksonian wing of American society -- the descendants of Scotch-Irish warrior clans who settled largely in the South and on the American frontiers (now the Sunbelt) and the subsequent waves of immigrants who adopted this group's ardent pro-Americanism and rugged individualism. The motto of this populist and patriotic school, named for the war hero and champion of the common man, could well be "Don't Tread on Me." Jacksonians believe "that the U.S. should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when other nations start wars with the United States, Jacksonian opinion agrees with Gen. Douglas MacArthur that 'There is no substitute for victory.'" This culture, whose heroes over the years have been men like Gen. George Patton, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, George Wallace and John McCain, puts a high premium on self-reliance, courage, honor and military service, which, Mead writes, is viewed by Jacksonians as a sacred duty. When the rest of America "dodged the draft in Vietnam or purchased exemptions and substitutes in earlier wars, Jacksonians soldiered on, if sometimes bitterly and resentfully. Failure to defend the country in its hour of need is to the Jacksonian mind evidence of at best distorted values and more probably contemptible cowardice. An honorable person is ready to kill or to die for family and flag."

Next Page: Jacksonians have greater moral authority, because they fight and die

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