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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (49292)	10/4/2002 1:44:39 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the article. Here's another interesting view of his....(at least a piece of his mind here...) randomhouse.com Excerpt from Walter Russell Mead's Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World >>>>>>>>>>>>>The tendency to reduce the American foreign policy tradition to a legacy of moralism and isolationism can also be found among the Democratic statesmen who have attempted to guide American foreign policy in the last twenty years. Some, like Jimmy Carter, have embraced the moralism while rejecting the isolationism; others share the Republican contempt for both. The copious and learned books of Zbigniew Brzezinski show few signs of close familiarity with the history of American foreign policy or with the achievements of his predecessors, much less a sense of the traditional strategies and goals that guided their work. Similarly, the memoirs of former secretary of defense Robert McNamara and former secretary of state Dean Rusk rarely touch on American foreign policy before 1941. When former secretary of state Warren Christopher selected and published the most important speeches of his tenure in office, the collected documents contained only one reference to the diplomatic activity of any American before FDR, and that was to what Christopher sees as the failures of Woodrow Wilson's efforts vis-à-vis the League of Nations and human rights. The deep lack of interest in the history of American foreign policy is not confined to high officials. The overwhelming majority of their talented and hardworking colleagues in think tanks, universities, the national media, and government departments that are concerned with developing, carrying out, reporting, and reflecting on the foreign policy of the United States do not know very much about the history of American foreign policy before World War II, do not particularly want to learn more than they already know, and cannot think what practical purpose a deeper knowledge of American foreign policy history might serve.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>Even in the short term, the statesmen who sneered at Wilson did no better than he did. The leaders of France, Britain, and Italy–George Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Vittorio Orlando–did not do very well at Versailles; none of them gained anything of real or lasting value by the peace. The United States was the only true winner of World War I, as it had been the real winner of the Napoleonic conflicts of the previous century. World War I made the United States the world's greatest financial power, crushed Germany–economically, America's most dangerous rival–and reduced both Britain and France to a status where neither country could mount an effective opposition to American designs anywhere in the world. In the aftermath of the war Britain conceded to the United States something it had withheld from all its rivals in two centuries of warfare: Britain accepted the United States as co-monarch of the seas, formally recognizing the right of the United States to maintain a navy equal to its own. Wilson and Warren Harding succeeded where Napoleon and Wilhelm II had failed, and they did it without a war with Great Britain. An American diplomacy that asserted American interests while emphasizing the community of values between the two principal English-speaking nations induced Great Britain to accept peacefully what no previous rival had extracted by force.<<<<<<<<<