Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776.

THE end of the Cold War unleashed a series of debates among policy-makers and foreign-policy experts over emerging international trends and correct American responses. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History, arguing that liberal democracy's victory was a final triumph over the ideologies that had cursed the planet for the past couple of centuries. Henry Kissinger has insisted that the post - Cold War world is reverting to a multipolar condition; that geopolitics will continue to define the international system. While Edward Luttwak has made the case for geo-economics as the defining theme of the new world order, Samuel Huntington contends that deep cultural divides, "a clash of civilizations" among Muslim, Confucian, Hindu, and Western societies, is destined to define the foreseeable future.

Walter McDougall is less concerned about the nature of new threats and challenges. Rather, in his new book, McDougall seeks to clarify the debate over how the United States should adjust, whatever the future might bring. What principles ought to shape American foreign policy? A Pulitzer Prize - winning author, historian, and professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, McDougall contends that Americans have rich traditions to guide them. As editor of the foreign-affairs quarterly Orbis, he has tired of "sterile" debates and "the flip way pundits and politicians [toss] around terms like 'isolationism' and 'Wilsonianism."' He replies here with an engaging account of "eight discreet traditions" that have shaped America's way of facing the world.

The first four traditions -- liberty at home (exceptionalism), unilateralism, the American System (Monroe Doctrine), and expansionism (Manifest Destiny) -- make up the "Old Testament" of this history. In place between 1776 and 1898, these traditions, McDougall writes, were "designed by the founding fathers to deny the outside world the chance to shape America's future." Early on, he tips his hand as to which principles he believes ought to guide our foreign policy.

McDougall wants to explode myths. He begins with George Washington's Farewell Address, in which the first President cautioned against foreign entanglements. Washington's warning was, according to McDougall, the start of America's venerable tradition of unilateralism -- a tradition, he tells us, that is often mischaracterized as isolationist. For McDougall, "isolationism" is the "dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies."

American exceptionalism was never about pursuing moral or otherwise idealistic foreign policies, McDougall argues. On the contrary, from Washington and Hamilton to Jefferson, Madison, and John Quincy Adams, America's early leaders understood it as the obligation to "defend the states from foreigners." Exceptionalism meant "Liberty at home, not crusades [abroad]."

There was "a logical progression," McDougall argues, from exceptionalism to expansionism. The progression was always defensive in character and had nothing to do with the impulse "to reform (or dominate) a wicked world." The Monroe Doctrine was meant neither to secure the independence of Latin America nor to provide a pretext for North American imperialism, he contends. Whether in countering attempts of the European powers to "come over to America" by way of countries to our South, or in "pre-empt[ing] European bids for influence over the vast unsettled lands that remained in North America [Manifest Destiny]," the chief objective of American foreign policy was to protect the promised land. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821: "America does 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 only of her own."

Just as McDougall reveres the early traditions of American foreign policy, he laments the shifts that have taken place since the end of the nineteenth century. This "New Testament" -- progressive imperialism, Wilsonianism, containment, and global meliorism --reflects, to a great extent, America's inability to reject the "do-gooder impulse." These modern traditions have focused on giving "America the chance to shape the outside world's future."

The terrible chain of events, when the U.S. went "off the rails, in terms of its honored traditions," began for McDougall in 1898 with America's war with Spain. "Imagine," he writes, "the American people and government allowed themselves to be swept by a hurricane of militant righteousness into a revolutionary foreign war, determined to slay a dragon and free a damsel in distress." It was the very temptation "Washington and Hamilton scorned, Jefferson and Madison felt but resisted, and John Quincy Adams damned with eloquence." Still worse, Wilsonianism, with its "vision of saving the world, lurked just around the corner."

McDougall approves of twentieth-century containment and admires its success -- the defeat of Communism -- even if "its implications were worrisome." But he regrets deeply all that was spawned by twentieth-century idealistic crusaders from Wilson to Lyndon Johnson, from Kennedy to Carter to Clinton (in Vietnam, for instance, "Kennedy's men were wedded," McDougall writes, "not to the tactics of Korean-style containment, but to those of global meliorism").

Where does this leave us? It is easy to sympathize with McDougall's contempt for the most foolish offspring of fuzzy-headed Wilsonianism and global meliorism. George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and other realist critics have rightly admonished Wilsonians for their naive belief in the efficacy of international institutions and law. Jimmy Carter duped himself into thinking that foreign policy was philanthropy, and "failed to advance U.S. strategic or meliorist interests." President Clinton's early efforts seemed to suggest that foreign policy would be conducted as "social work," as Michael Mandelbaum put it. McDougall agrees. So far, so good. McDougall despises the crude label of "isolationism" and makes a spirited case for a more nuanced approach to this strand of American foreign-policy thinking. "The pure isolationist is a mythical beast," he writes. Perhaps.

Yet while McDougall rejects the simple dichotomies of those who divide the world into "isolationist" and "internationalist" camps, he fails to acknowledge that there may also exist degrees of activist foreign policy short of the soft-headed, indiscriminate interventionism that is so easy to caricature. What is more, the distinction between meddlesome crusades in "pursuit of abstractions such as liberty, democracy, and justice" and a foreign policy conducted in the service of "the national interest" is frequently not as clear cut as McDougall seems to suggest.

It is arguably easier, for instance, to grasp the folly of nation-building in Somalia than it is to dismiss the U.S. interest in Bosnia, on a continent where America has fought two hot wars and one cold war in this century, where the credibility of NATO and American leadership is at stake, and where the neglect of Bosnia's outgunned Muslims against Serb aggressors could adversely affect the U.S. relationship with the strategically important Islamic world.

It is easy to dismiss unrestrained, utopian notions about righting all the wrongs in a dangerous and complex world. It is another thing to suggest, as McDougall does, that values do not matter in American foreign policy. A majority of Americans disagree. Or that the values of foreign regimes have no bearing on their approach to dealings with the United States. While it may not constitute an immutable law of nature, there is validity to the generalization that democracies tend not to go to war with one another -- a compelling reason why the superpower America has an interest in fostering the spread of democratic ideals. If pro-democracy forces eventually prevail in China, for instance, can there be any doubt that the United States will have less reason to worry about this rapidly growing power?

McDougall is no isolationist. He supports NATO and the U.S. -Japanese alliance as means to prevent new regional hegemonies that would threaten American interests. Yet his case for a minimalist, "realist" foreign policy -- his argument that we must make our foreign policies "as lean and mean as they once were" -- ultimately rings hollow. For what does recent history, handled in the skimpiest portion of his book, actually show?

One wishes that McDougall had discussed the 1991 Gulf War -- an intervention wrapped tightly in a cloak of strategic and moral interests. His passing reference to President Bush's "talk of a new world order" and pursuit of a "containment strategy" is not entirely convincing. Conspicuously absent from McDougall's work is an analysis of Reagan's foreign policy (Reagan and "Reaganites" receive but five brief mentions in this book). McDougall admires the father of containment, George Kennan. Yet Kennan saw in Reagan's crusading foreign policy "the unfailing characteristics of a march toward war." Kennan was wrong.

In contributing to the demise of the Soviet Empire, Reagan pursued an activist foreign policy, where interest and ideals were inextricably linked. In fact, Reagan's Cold War success ought to suggest that the marrying of interests and clear moral purpose is not always as futile and destructive as McDougall would have us believe. Indeed, some crusades are worth pursuing -- in the national interest.