From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford History of the United States) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This new volume of the Oxford History of the United States tells the story of the foreign relations of the United States from its inception in 1776 to the present day. The author, George C Herring, is the Alumni Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of many books on United States foreign affairs, centering upon the War in Vietnam. Herring's study is nearly 1000 pages in length, but it is not a word too long. In its scope, learning, wisdom, and attempt to be even-handed, it is a joy to read.

Herring tells a long story of a subject with many unexpected turns and changes of perspective over the years. I enjoyed the sense of continuity that this large history brings to its subject. Herring shows how leading ideas and tensions in American foreign policy developed from the beginning of the new nation and both persisted and were transformed as the nation developed. His book encourages the reader to see how United States policy developed in particular parts of the world over time, such as in Latin America, Canada, the Middle East, and Vietnam. This encourages a depth of understanding that cannot be provided from reading the newspapers or even from specialized scholarly accounts of a single period.

The book begins with the Revolutionary era, and the first two of Herring's chapter titles state themes of American history that are repeated many times throughout the study: America's perceived mission "To Begin the World Over Again" and the need to keep the nation strong and prepared so that there are "None who Can Make us Afraid." The theme of mission is tied, broadly, to American idealism and exceptionalism. The theme of strength is tied, again generally, to realism. Herring identifies a combination of these broad traits in, among other ways, the "practical idealism" of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

From the Revolution, the book proceeds through the War of 1812, American expansionism and "Manifest Destiny" in the Mexican War, foreign relationships during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and American Empire, World War I and II, the Cold War and its aftermath, Vietnam, and our nation's current situation in Iraq, among many other recurring themes. The final section of the book on the war in Iraq seems to me rushed. It is difficult to bring a historical perspective to bear upon ongoing, changing events.

Herring pays close attention to transitional periods that are sometimes overlooked, including foreign policy in the Gilded Age and foreign policy in the years between the two world wars, that helped me to understand the larger, better-known aspects of the United States's foreign relations. Commendably, Herring also considers the United States's relationships with the Indian tribes as within the purview of foreign affairs during the time in which the United States expanded across the continent.

In general, Herring writes non-dogmatically and non-polemically. He makes his opinions known but frequently points out other interpretations and ways of trying to understand the history. He seems to admire greatly Woodrow Wilson and his efforts before, during, and after WW I to bring a just peace to a troubled world. Herring also finds much to praise, as well as to question, in figures such as Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Elihu Root, and Franklin Roosevelt. He offers qualified praise for George H.W. Bush, for "the strategic vision of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger" and for the "ability to adapt and adjust displayed by Ronald Reagan."

In the introduction to his study, Herring develops themes such as the relationship between realism and idealism in informing United States foreign policy, expansionism, and the tensions between the Executive Branch, Congress, lobbying groups, and the electorate in the conduct of foreign affairs. Herring is critical of what he perceives as the current unilateralist tendency in American foreign relations and he recommends a course that disclaims American exceptionalism or arrogance. He concludes that "the United States cannot dictate the shape of a new world order, but the way it responds to future foreign policy challenges can help ensure its security and well-being and exert a powerful influence for good or ill."

Herring has written an outstanding addition to the Oxford History of the United States. It taught me a great deal about American history and the American experience.

Robin Friedman

George C. Herring's "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776" is the latest volume of the Oxford History of the United States, but there is a key difference between this book and the rest in the series. This is the one book in the series which is intended to cover a single aspect, i.e. Foreign Relations, while the other works all cover a period of time during the history of the United States. My opinion of this work changed dramatically while reading it. I had read a couple of books from this series before and found one to be outstanding and the other to be only slightly above average, but with the nature of this work being different, I was intrigued into seeing how effective this book would be at covering the subject.

I'll start with the easiest and also probably the least important aspect of the work and that is the organization. Though less important than completeness and accuracy, a poorly organized book can be very trying on the reader. This work attempts to cover Foreign Relations in a chronological fashion in 20 chapters. Each chapter provides a year range for what it covers, so one would expect that it would be fairly straight forward, but that isn't the case. As an example, the first chapter indicates that it covers from 1776 to 1778, but in fact it covers the entire period prior to 1789. Within each chapter it is tricky as well, as the author jumps around within the periods quite a lot, and the reader does have difficulty in following the examples at times. Herring also doesn't stay within the time periods indicated in the chapter headings. Overall though, these issues are minor and by themselves would not lower my rating.

The second issue for a work like this is completeness. I don't think that it is too surprising that trying to cover the entire history of U.S. Foreign Relations in a book, even one which is close to 1,000 pages, would be problematic. There clearly have to be things which would be left out. That being said, my feeling after the first two chapters was that the author was doing a very good job of covering the topic, but this perception began to change at the end of the third chapter and the start of the fourth. There is a decent discussion of the War of 1812, but absolutely no discussion at all of the second war with the Barbary States. This appears to get worse throughout the 4th chapter, though this is not a period that I have studied recently, but I have spent a great deal on the period covered in chapter five (1837-1861) and the gaps are very problematic. This problem gets worse as continues as the interactions with other countries become more detailed and complex and it simply isn't possible to cover them in the detail needed.

The last issue, accuracy, is by far the most important, as the lack of specifics and the so-so organization could still allow this to be a decent overview of the subject. I became worried when the author discussed Manifest Destiny, which he then referred to as a "sectional rather than national phenomenon, its support strongest in the Northeast and Northwest and weakest in the South, which supported only the annexation of Texas." While I strongly disagree with the statement that Manifest Destiny had its strongest support in the Northeast and Northwest, I do have to allow that such a statement is largely subjective opinion and that the author may well have reasons for believing that (though he doesn't make any attempt to support it). On the other hand, the statement that the South only supported the annexation of Texas is not just wrong, but it shows a complete lack of knowledge and understanding of the history of the United States prior to the Civil War.

Fortunately, the author proceeds to cover the historical events which refute his own statement, and so the statement is puzzling and unsupported, but not a complete indication of failure on the author's part to provide a reliable history. He does discuss the South's efforts to turn the territories into slave states, the use of the annexation of Texas to get a war with Mexico which allowed the U.S. to take those territories. He also discusses the South's plots and attempts to annex Cuba, additional parts of Mexico, Central America, and even part of South America in an attempt to gain more slave territory. All of these things and more are evidence that his statement was fundamentally wrong, but one cannot judge an entire book on a single sentence.

In the 10th chapter, "'A New Age': Wilson, the Great War, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1913-1921" Herring makes a mistake of omission, stating "...in the face of Germany's U-boat attacks he (Wilson) eventually--and reluctantly--concluded that intervention was necessary to defend his nation's rights..." Once again, this is rather sloppy history. Herring seems to ignore the Zimmermann Telegram intercepted by the British which showed the Germans attempting to foment war between Mexico and the United States as a key event in Wilson's decision to go to war. Germany renewed its unrestricted U-boat war at the start of February, and the British presented the intercept showing that the Germans were attempting to get the Mexicans to declare war on the U.S. should the U.S. declare war on Germany as a result of the U-boat strategy. However, as with the statement about the South only wanting to annex Texas, when Herring gets down to the details of the situation he gets it correct, but one again questions the reason for the initial statement.

There are additional events which are either barely mentioned or completely left out which one has to wonder about as well. The situation with Somoza in Nicaragua gets only a very small mention. There is no discussion at all of Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. One would have thought that nothing went on between Iraq and the U.S. between the first Gulf War and the pre-emptive invasion in 2003, and George W. Bush's focus on China prior to the tragedy of September 11th is also not mentioned.

On the positive side, Herring treats no President as perfect. Though he seems to have a very positive view of what Wilson was trying to do, he has more than a few bad things to say about him. The same is true for Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Those who idolize any of the Presidents will probably think that they are not receiving proper credit. For myself, I prefer to have the bad with the good, and so I appreciated his efforts at being even-handed.

To finish, I question why this book was needed for the series. Certainly foreign relations were covered in the other books in this series that I have read, so this volume duplicates that effort to a certain degree. The fact is that one can't discuss foreign policies without also discussing the domestic conditions under which they were formed. For me, this book's value is limited to being a one volume history of the U.S. foreign relations, but that serious historical studies require much more detail, and you get much more of that detail in the other volumes of the series. Ultimately this is a difficult book to rate, some of it is extremely well done, but there are also significant weaknesses.

(This review is based upon an uncorrected advance reading copy)
George C. Herring's monumental opus on U.S. foreign policy is one of the finest historical treatises I have read in the past thirty years. Among the works which Herring approaches in terms of comprehensive content and beauty of expression are Samuel Eliot Morrison's Oxford History of the American People and James McPherson's brilliant Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States). This book is a true milestone.

Herring's work is not only broad in scope, but laden with significant insight and couched in some of the finest historical writing I have encountered. This title in the venerable Oxford series is the only topical volume. At first I questioned whether foreign affairs deserved to occupy its own niche in the series, but now I see why. Viewing the sweep of American history through the lens of foreign affairs has provided a flood of new insights and connections. This is a first-rate study, and ought to occupy a central position in academic literature for a generation.

Random insights:

1. Among the many delights in reading this superb book, was the personal discovery or rediscovery of a number of "demigods" of American foreign affairs. Though I have previously read biographies of most of these men, Herring's study places them in an entirely new light, so that I see, as it were, the Himalayan Peaks for the first time under a clear sunrise. My preconceived notions were almost all dashed. These monumental figures include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and (shockingly) Ronald Reagan. Beside these great figures, Herring reveals a number of men of second or third magnitude--Townsend Harris, Elihu Root, Dwight Morrow, Henry Stimson and Dean Acheson to name a few--and further figures of great tragedy, including Nixon and Kissinger, and the Bushes, father and son. All of this illustrates one of Herring's central theses, that "...the United States has been spectacularly successful in its foreign policy...." (page 9) but has also made monumental blunders.

2. My appreciation of the towering role of Benjamin Franklin in U.S. foreign policy was one of my early shocks in reading this work. Herring paints Franklin's mission to Paris during the revolution as one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of American diplomacy. Indeed, his diplomatic mission may have been "decisive to the outcome of the Revolution." (page 19) It was above all the way Franklin "packaged" himself that helped him achieve the crucial goal of obtaining French war financing and ultimately drawing them into the war. He "he presented himself to French society as the very embodiment of America's revolution, a model of republican simplicity and virtue. He wore a tattered coat and sometimes a fur had that he despised. He refused to powder his hair. His countenance appeared on snuffboxes, rings, medals, and bracelets, even (it was said) on an envious King Louis XVI's chamber pot." (page 19) He was a master showman, publicist, and propagandist at age seventy. He mastered what we now call "spin" to utmost advantage.

3. Another insightful part of the book were the sections dealing with the service of John Quincy Adams, first as Monroe's secretary of state and later as President in his own right. Adams is shown as towering above his contemporaries and imprinting the department of state with deep traditions, forms and systems that held sway for nearly a century. Adams was the true organ expressing the expansionist doctrine credited to Monroe. He spent most of his early life in European capitals, and was fluent in six European languages. As secretary of state, he regularly rose before dawn to pray, then swim in the Potomac, "clad only in green goggles and a skullcap." (page 138). He was an ardent expansionist, setting his eye on all of North America. "That the United States in time should acquire Canada and Texas, he believed, was as much the law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea." (page 139) As President from 1825 to 1829, he continued to pursue it this North American doctrine of expansion.

4. Among the best historical writing in this book is the chapter entitled "A Dose of Arsenic " dealing with ante-bellum foreign policy. The chapter, which could be published on its own strength as a monogram, takes its title from a May 1846 quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson's diary, "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." Herring's insight is that it was the "the cancer of slavery within U.S. society, that, when linked with disposition of the territory taken from Mexico, poisoned the body politic, provoking the irrepressible crisis that eventually sundered the Union." (page 176) The conquest of vast new lands in the war with Mexico brought to the fore the pressing question of whether new slave states would be created. It was this issue which tore the nation apart.

5. I very much enjoyed Herring's section on Woodrow Wilson, who "towers above the landscape of modern American foreign policy like no other individual, the dominant personality, the seminal figure."

6. Herring writes very perceptively of the heights and depths of Nixon's and Kissinger's contributions to foreign policy. They were really an "odd couple," who devised one of the most imaginative and radical and daring plans in history to achieve stunning diplomatic breakthroughs. The trouble, according to Herring, is that their method involved "shutting out the foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress, and indeed the nation, acting in secrecy and often with great dramatic flair." (page 760). In 1972, "their year of triumph," they pulled off breathtaking achievements, including grandly staged summits in Moscow and more incredibly in Beujing. Ultimately, according to Herring, it was their method of acting in secret, sidestepping the foreign policy apparatus, that lead to their undoing.

7. Ultimately, the only criticism I have of this work is Herring's thesis that future U.S. foreign policy must abandon the "religious" or "spiritual" underpinnings of her history. He argues correctly that one of the chief underlying tenets of U.S. foreign policy has been "...the ideal of a providential mission..." in the minds of the American people since the days of the revolution, and the sense that America has always clung to a "... sense of special destiny..." in the world. (page 4). Herring surprisingly disavows this foundational underpinning, concluding that "Americans must `disenthrall `themselves, to borrow Lincoln's apt word, from deeply entrenched ideas about their country and its place in the world. They must `think anew and act anew'. They must case away centuries-old notions of themselves as God's chosen people." (page 963).