Providence Abroad.

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, by Walter Russell Mead (Knopf, 374 pp., $30)

This highly readable history and analysis of American foreign policy offers an answer to a question that was never more pertinent: How has the United States, "with a notoriously erratic and undisciplined foreign policy process, [implemented] foreign policies that have consistently advanced the country toward greater power and wealth than any other power in the history of the world"?

The author, however, has a problem not of his making: Judging from the book's contents, the print run began only a few weeks before September 11. Mead's predicament compares to that of a historian whose prognosis for Russian foreign policy had been written and published a few weeks before Lenin arrived at the Finland Station. The facts are arguably all there in Mead's book; he was even conscious of "the challenges to come in a time likely to be more dangerous and complicated" than anything in the past.

But he also warns about the "consequences of international overreaching," and we have to ask ourselves: Is such a warning really in order, after 9/11?

Our perspective has changed as spectacularly now as it did after Hiroshima. The making of American foreign policy can never be written about in the same way again, because our way of life is changing before our very eyes. There may even be an End of History, of the kind envisioned in the early 1920s by Italo Svevo, an Italian novelist admired by James Joyce:

When all the poison gases [of the war] are exhausted, a man, made like all other men of flesh and blood, will, in the quiet of a room, invent an explosive of such potency that all the explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it. And another man, made in his image and in the image of all the rest, but a little weaker than they, will steal that explosive and crawl to the center of the earth with it, and place it just where he calculates it would have the maximum effect. There will be a tremendous explosion, but none will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering thru the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.

I do not mean to suggest that Mead's ambitious history has been so overtaken by the aftermath of 9/11 that its value is negligible. Quite the contrary: He has described the roots of American foreign policy in a most imaginative and cogent way. But 9/11 has imposed the need for a new foreign-policy strategy, for we are experiencing the full meaning of the ominous words uttered by Bismarck at the tag end of the 19th century: "We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity."

Mead's contribution to history is, nonetheless, significant. He brings us what he calls "a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about American foreign policy," based on several propositions. First, the relationship of the American economy to the international economic system has always been a central concern of American politics; second, globalization has almost always been at the heart of American strategic thinking; and third, the democratic process has helped align the country's foreign policy with its interests in a way that is "superior to anything that individual statesmen, however gifted, could accomplish."

The chief ideas of U.S. foreign policy, Mead writes, can be divided into four schools or approaches, each named after a prominent American statesman. The Jeffersonian school sees the preservation of American democracy as our most pressing interest, at the same time as it resists attempts to impose our values on other countries. The Wilsonian credo is the opposite: It is our moral and practical duty to spread our values globally and to require other countries to accept and practice these values. The Hamiltonian school believes that foreign policy's primary task is to promote "the health of American enterprise at home and abroad"; its adherents early supported a special relationship with Britain and, when the British Empire came to an end after World War II, argued that the U.S. "should take up the British burden."

The last school, the Jacksonians, have a fairly vague credo; in Mead's telling, Jacksonianism represents "a deeply embedded, widely spread populist and popular culture of honor, independence, courage and military pride among the American people." As proof, Mead lists the names of 13 generals and war heroes who became U.S. presidents (he wisely omits from his list Dwight Eisenhower, who was a "Jeffersonian" to the core).

Mead's account of the Jacksonian school has drawn sharp criticism from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Jackson. Schlesinger asserted in the New York Times Book Review that Andrew Jackson "opposed nearly every tenet of Mead's 'Jacksonianism'"- and even quoted an admission from Mead himself that "Andrew Jackson was not a Jacksonian." Whatever the merits may be on this particular quarrel, the deeper problem with this kind of categorizing is that it can easily become a game: If Mead can build a category around one presidency, so can I around another presidency. How might one define the Clintonian school of foreign policy-Priapus as the White Household god?

But this model-building has its uses for the historian turned political scientist: It helps Mead answer the question of why U.S. foreign policy has been so successful. His conclusion is that the competition to influence our foreign policy has had a beneficial effect, much like that of Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand": "The endless, unplanned struggle among the schools and lobbies to shape American foreign policy ended up producing over the long run

a foreign policy that more closely approximated the true needs and interests of American society than could any conscious design."

This is a valuable insight. Indeed, just about the only area in which Mead is seriously deficient is his understanding of Communism and the Soviet Union. "The notion of a monolithic communism was politically mischievous," he writes, "because it effectively prevented American public opinion from understanding the Cold War in any coherent and sensible way." It seems to me, however, that this supposed misunderstanding about the Cold War worked out rather well.