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Adamsian Unilateralism vs. The Bushian Imitation
Review by Norman A. Graebner*
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 150. $18.95 cloth.)
"In this small volume John Lewis Gaddis seeks to attribute U.S. policies following 9/11 to three American diplomatic traditions: preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. He attributes these three principles to John Quincy Adams. At the end Gaddis condemns the Bush policies as a total denial of the more modest and realistic Adams tradition."
This small, elegantly-published volume comprises John Lewis Gaddis's 2002 Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures at the New York Public Library. Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett professor of History and Political Science at Yale University, and a leading student of American diplomatic history. On such a grand occasion as the presentation of these lectures, one might expect of John Gaddis a well-executed performance with a certain degree of originality. The lectures focused on the 9/11 crises and the decisions that followed. For those decisions, Gaddis finds precedent in three historic diplomatic principles: preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. For the post-9/11 national insecurity he finds precedent in the British attack on Washington in August 1814, demonstrating that the United States, vulnerable to attack from afar, would thereafter seek security in the expansion of its borders and its interests.
For Gaddis it was John Quincy Adams who framed the strategy of preemption—the need to prevent possible enemy assaults by striking first. At issue for Adams were the Indian raids into Georgia from Spanish Florida; he approved Andrew Jackson's pursuit of the marauding Indians into Florida, meting out punishment on Spanish soil. But Florida was contiguous territory, the threat was immediate, rendering the American response admissible under international law. There was no danger of Spanish retaliation, and Madrid recognized its responsibility. Adams's preemption of 1818 was no precedent for the U.S invasion of Iraq.
Adams's unilateralism was no greater precedent for American behavior following the 9/11 crisis. Adams embraced the notion that the United states reserved for itself the right to act independently from Europe. That decision reflected the times when American and European interests did not converge and Europe was internally balanced, posing no danger to U.S. security. There was nothing strange in the Monroe Doctrine's precept—framed by Adams—that the United States abjured all involvement in European affairs and expected Europe to reciprocate. Adams ridiculed the popular crusade of the early 1820s to rescue Greece from Turkish tyranny. As he declared in his famed July 4, 1821 address, the United States does not go abroad in search of dragons to destroy.
For Adams, American isolationism was not absolute; it was an admonition that America not engage some distant country militarily that possessed the power of retaliation. Adams was equally constrained in his ambitions toward the Western Hemisphere. He refused to involve the United States in the Latin American revolutions against Spain and Portugal. The new states—he averred—would free themselves or they would not deserve independence. His concept of American hegemony was equally limited. He claimed U.S. primacy on the North American continent, but he made no effort to acquire Canada, Texas, California, or Mexico. He opposed the Mexican War even as earlier he opposed the War of 1812. Adams's world was one of acute diplomacy, not war. His strategy was clear: he sought to maximize the clear political and geographic interests of the United States; he had scant concern for Latin American affairs and none for the politics of Europe.
For Gaddis, following Adams, the United States pursued a largely unilateral, isolationist course in its relations with Europe until the 1930s, then returned to a unilateralist approach under Presidents Clinton and Bush. But he attributes repeated U.S. actions abroad, especially in the Western Hemisphere, as examples of preemption, but preemptions against what? Indians threatened the western frontiers, but what countries posed dangerous and immediate threats to Texas, California, or Oregon, or even to U.S. interests in Latin America and the Caribbean? There were other, more direct, interests driving America's expansive policies than external threats.
Quite properly, Gaddis attributes Washington's aggressiveness and growing involvement in world affairs after 1945 to the rise of American power in a world becoming increasingly pacifistic with the taming of both Germany and the U.S.S.R. In his final chapter, Gaddis dissects the American reaction to 9/11. December 7, 1941, was no precedent; the source of the Pearl Harbor attack lay in Japan and the cause in the unresolved problem of China. The terrorist assaults on New York and Washington on 9/11 left no addresses for retaliation, nor scarcely a clue as to the motivations that incited them. Still, the unprecedented fears unleashed unprecedented ambitions, one feeding on the other.
Gaddis, following the events that followed 9/11, suggested that the initial reactions found precedent in Adams's strategies of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. But as the Bush policies unfolded, Gaddis, like the U.S. academic community generally, became more and more critical until finally, in a thorough rejection of the Bush policies, he acknowledges that Bush and Adams reached the parting of the ways. Adams's concern with defending U.S. borders from pirates and Indians was hardly synonymous with Bush's determination to free the entire world of terrorists. What other nation, Gaddis asks, would aspire to such a goal? Where would the American empire expand in response to another such attack? He concludes: "The self-servingness reflected in these reflections suggests the need for Americans themselves to reflect, long, hard, and carefully—as Adams would have wished them to—about where their empire of liberty is headed."
December 5, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Norman A. Graebner is the Randolph P. Compton Professor of History and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia. The recipient of numerous awards and honors during his long academic tenure, Professor Graebner's distinguished teaching and scholarly achievements include the Thomas Jefferson Award of the University of Virginia, the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth professorship at Oxford University, and election to the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many scholarly publications are Empire on the Pacific (1955); The New Isolationism (1956); Cold War Diplomacy (1962; 1977); Ideas and Diplomacy (1964); The Age of Global Power (1979); America As A World Power (1984); and Foundations of American Foreign Policy. He has co-authored and edited several leading textbooks and numerous monographs as well as some 130 articles, essays, and portions of books. For thirty years he served as Contributing Editor of Current History. Back