For better, for worse: How America's foreign policy became wedded to liberal universalism

Global Society

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 499-519

  Quinn, Adam ^a   Cox, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FOREIGN POLICY; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; LIBERALISM; MILITARY INTERVENTION; PEACE PROCESS; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY;

NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 35048859191     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: 1469798X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600820701562728     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. "For Declaration of War against Germany", Address to Congress, 2 April 1917; Speech at Coliseum, Sioux Falls, S. Dakota, 8 September 1919. Taken from War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses and Public Papers (eds. Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd) (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002; reprinted from 1927), Vol. I, p. 16; Vol. II, p. 55.
2. Letter to Henry Ford, 9 February 1916, in Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches (New York: Library of America, 2004, p. 700).
3. The literature which sets out the meaning of the liberal peace and seeks to argue its validity is too vast to list here, and others have doubtless been more comprehensive elsewhere in this special issue. The understanding this article has of the term stems chiefly from, inter alia: Michael W. Doyle, "A More Perfect Union? The Liberal Peace and the Challenge of Globalization", Review of International Studies, Vol. 26 (suppl.) (December 2000), pp. 81-94
4. "Three Pillars of the Liberal Peace", American Political Science Review, Vol. 99, No. 3 (August 2005), pp. 463-466
5. "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1983), pp. 205-235
6. John M. Owen, "Democratic Peace Research: Whence and Whither", International Politics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 605-617
7. idem, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace", International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 87-125
8. David E. Spiro, ∫:THe Insignificance of the Liberal Peace", International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 50-86
9. Oliver P. Richmond, "Understanding the Liberal Peace", St Andrews Papers in Peace and Conflict Studies, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of St Andrews, available: (accessed 10 March 2006). The term "liberal peace" can be used to describe both a condition of peace within a single state, and also between one state and another, both attributable to the effect of a liberal political and economic order. Much of this debate traces back to Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace, as adapted first by Doyle and subsequently others to make an argument about modern international affairs.
10. Evidence of these policy positions can be found in a great number of official pronouncements by each administration. In the case of the Bush administration, the National Security Strategy of November 2002, and the president's Second Inaugural Address of 20 January 2005 provide notably strong statements on the subject.
11. James Madison, "Number 10", in Max Beloff (ed.), The Federalist (London and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 41-48.
12. The interpretation in this section is drawn from a wide variety of readings, including the following: Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Battleground of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)
13. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage, 2002)
14. Charles S. Campbell, From Revolution to Rapprochement: The United States and Great Britain, 1783-1900 (New York: John Wiley, 1974)
15. James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (London: Purnell Book Services, 1976)
16. Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: A Concise Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
17. Marie B. Hecht, Odd Destiny: The Life of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Macmillan, 1982)
18. Gilbert Lycan, Alexander Hamilton & American Foreign Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970)
19. John Lamberton Harper, American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
20. Irving Brant, The Fourth President: A Life of James Madison (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1970)
21. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)
22. Max Lerner, Thomas Jefferson: America's Philosopher-King (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996)
23. Lawrence S. Kaplan, Jefferson and France: An Essay on Politics and Political Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)
24. Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949).
25. Primary sources consulted include: Alexander Hamilton, Writings (New York: Library of America, 2001)
26. Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984)
27. James Madison, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999).
28. Hamilton left office himself before the end of Washington's second term, but he retained a large measure of de facto power through his influence over the cabinet of his loyalists which Adams inherited from his predecessor. It was Adams' dismissal of two cabinet secretaries during the quasi-war with France, having realised their loyalties lay elsewhere than with him, which led to the final break between the president and the Federalist leader.
29. George Washington, "The Farewell Address", in the George Washington papers, Available: (accessed 10 March 2006).
30. "First Inaugural Address", in Jefferson, Writings, p. 494.
31. For the original proclamation, see "The Monroe Doctrine", in Richard Maidment and Michael Dawson (eds.), Key Documents (Bath: Hodder & Stoughton Educational/Open University, 1999), pp. 301-302.
32. For due context, see Bemis, John Quincy Adams, pp. 363-408.
33. The War of 1812 between the United States and Britain had many causes, including the defence of neutral shipping rights, objections to impressment of seamen, and arguably the desire for territorial expansion at the expense of British Canada, but it was decidedly not conceived as a pro-French gesture, or as one aimed at furthering revolutionary movements in Europe. By that time Napoleon Bonaparte was established as Emperor of France and the prospects for an imminent wave of republican revolution in Europe had long since been discounted by even the most visionary Americans.
34. This section's interpretations regarding the thought and times of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt are derived chiefly from: Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and his Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
35. and idem, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
36. Edward H. Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955)
37. and idem (ed.), Wilson's Foreign Policy in Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957)
38. Anne R. Pierce, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman: Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003)
39. Harley Notter, The Origins of the Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937)
40. Arthur S. Link, The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson and other Essays (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971)
41. Kendrick A. Clements, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992)
42. Sidney Bell, Righteous Conquest: Woodrow Wilson and the Evolution of the New Diplomacy (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1972)
43. Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).
44. Primary sources for Wilson: Woodrow Wilson, War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses and Public Papers, Vols. I and II (eds. Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd) (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002; reprinted from 1927).
45. On Theodore Roosevelt one should see: Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001)
46. idem, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, Random House, 2001)
47. Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956).
48. Primary sources: Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches (ed. Louis Auchincloss) (New York: Library of America, 2004)
49. Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (ed. Brian M. Thomsen) (New York: Forge, 2003).
50. For comparison of the two men see J. M. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
51. For the latter, Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Peace.
52. Quoted in Notter, op. cit., p. 371.
53. These arguments of Wilson are gradually drawn out and then repeated throughout his writings, but a good starting point in studying his making of the case for intervention is his call for the declaration of war: "For Declaration of War against Germany", Address to Congress, 2 April 1917; War and Peace, Vol. 1, p. 16.
54. It would be wrong, of course, to portray such liberal thought as the exclusive preserve of Americans; the idea of a peace based on popular sovereignty was already well advanced on the British left, e.g. in the form of the Union for Democratic Control. Only in the United States, however, were such ideas made the central pillar of government policy.
55. He repeatedly made the point, for example, that the United States had no problem with the German people, only the state apparatus which was malevolently misdirecting them into war.
56. Theodore Roosevelt believed that mass disarmament was the road to ruin, and that the wartime Allies needed to maintain their ties and their armaments. Wilson had more faith in the capacity of "moral force" alone, expressed through the League, to deter aggression.
57. The internationalists were victorious, that is, against their isolationist opponents within American politics.
58. X [George F. Kennan], "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", Foreign Affairs (July 1947)
59. in James F. Hoge Jr and Fareed Zakaria, The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World; Essays from 75 Years of Foreign Affairs (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 155-169
60. The "Long Telegram", 22 February 1946, available: (accessed 10 March 2006).
61. National Security Council Paper No. 68 (NSC68) in Maidment and Dawson, Key Documents, pp. 327-346. Kennan, of course, went on to be a "realist" critic of Cold War policy, though one can argue his views shifted after his departure from government.
62. Anne R. Pierce, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman: Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003).
63. For the most extended exposition of Kissinger's realist take on US policy, see Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1995). Kissinger himself admits that his approach is at odds with the historical thrust of US policy making, and laments that fact.
64. That there is a certain amount of overlap between the ideologies of Wilsonianism and neoconservatism is a point which has been made many times, the reasons for this hopefully being clear to the reader from much of what has been said here.
65. A position staked out in its classic modern form as early as Norman Angell's The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to the National Advantage. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913).
66. Richmond, "Understanding the Liberal Peace", pp. 7-14.
67. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1972)
68. idem, The Contours of American History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
69. See Michael Cox, "Whatever Happened to American Decline? International Relations and the New United States Hegemony", New Political Economy Vol. 6, No. 3 (2001), pp. 311-340
70. idem, "The Empire's Back in Town: Or America's Imperial Temptation - Again", Millennium, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2003), pp. 1-28
71. idem, "Empire by Denial: The Strange Case of the United States", International Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 1 (January 2005), pp. 15-30.
72. This qualified character of American conceptions of democracy is a point made repeatedly in Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi (eds.), American Democracy Promotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
73. For confirmation of this view see Michael Cox, US Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Superpower without a Mission? (London: Pinter/ Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995).