Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter McDougall reinterprets the traditions that have shaped U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to the present in “an entertaining and iconoclastic fashion” ( Philadelphia Inquirer ).
In a concise analysis, McDougall divides American diplomatic history into two stages, which he calls “Old Testament” and “New Testament” phases.
The “Old Testament” phase, which ran from the Revolution to the 1890s, centered on protecting and perfecting America within. The “New Testament” phase, from the Spanish-American War to the present, is more interventionist, featuring competing ideals of containment, expansion, and meliorism. Within the “testament” phases, McDougall goes on to further categorize eight conflicting schools of thought.
Conversational in tone and highly educational, readers will appreciate McDougall’s astute observations and overview of American foreign policy. Crucially, McDougall contends that by projecting U.S. standards and ideals onto other countries, the U.S. repeatedly overextends its resources and pays too a high a price for assuming such risk. — Book promo @ goodread.com
The Founding Fathers recognized the sheer unlikelihood of their undertaking, the temptations of power, and the risk that in a free society every vice might flourish.John Adams even expected that sooner or later America, like Israel and Judah and Athens and Rome, would lay down the burden of freedom, succumb to decadence, hubris, even self-hatred, and enter its decline and fall.
Global Meliorism is simply the socio-economic and politico-cultural expression of an American mission to make the world a better place. It is based on the assumption that the United States can, should, and must reach out to help other nations share in the American dream. The modal verbs “can, should, and must” in turn imply the assumptions that the American model is universally valid, that morality enjoins the United States to help others emulate it, and that the success ofthe American experiment itselfultimately depends on other nations escaping from dearth and oppression. These notions can be found early on in our national discourse, but they did not triumph in policy until Americans had wrestled from 1912 to 1950 with a revolutionary world and come to believe (as LBJ said) that “we have the power, and now the opportunity to make that dream come true.”
I’m at RV City today for work on Desperado. Hopefully I’ll get the window channels replaced and get the basement door re-hung (and it will stay hung). The A/C is a different story. It has been working for the past few days when I run it for 2.5-3 hours and has not shut down. I think(?)there is a thermal switch issue but I don’t see that this unit has such a switch. I’ll be talking to them at RV City but I don’t know if there is any way to test a switch.