Henry A. Kissinger

      A society’s national strategy defines the goals it seeks to achieve and the contingencies it attempts to prevent. It unites a people’s core interests, values, and apprehensions. This effort is not an academic undertaking, nor an element in a particular political platform. If it is to be effective, it must be embedded in the convictions and actions of a society over a period of time.

      For the United States, the development of such a strategy has been a complex journey. No country has played such a decisive role in shaping international order, nor professed such deep ambivalence about its participation in it.

      The United States was founded in large part as a conscious turning away from European concepts of international order. The founders declared independence during the heyday of the Westphalian international system, brought about at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The premises of this system were the sovereign control of states over their territories, domestic structure as the prerogative of the government—hence a doctrine of non-interference in other states’ affairs—and an equilibrium between the great powers (expressing itself in the concept of a “balance of power”).

      The Founding Fathers skillfully used this system to establish American independence and security. Yet they stood intentionally aloof from it, declining to send fully empowered embassies to European courts. The European balance of power was useful to the new country, but not to the point of participating in its practical conduct. Rather, the United States relied on Britain to play the role of balancer and used the resultant equilibrium to ban a European role in the Western Hemisphere via the Monroe Doctrine.

      When the United States reentered European affairs during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson announced America’s war aims as a rejection of Westphalian principles. He denounced the balance of power and the practice of traditional diplomatic methods (decried as “secret diplomacy”) as a major contributing cause of war. In their place he proclaimed the objective of self-determination as the organizing principle of the coming peace. As a result, the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, abandoned many of the established principles of the balance of power and of non-interference in domestic affairs. With the map of Europe redrawn, the United States thereupon withdrew from day-to-day global diplomacy.

      When the United States assumed a global role in World War II, it did so in pursuit of historic objectives—preventing Europe or Asia from falling under the domination of a single power, particularly a hostile one. When this heroic undertaking succeeded, many Americans, including some in government, expected to be able to withdraw from the conduct of global policy.

      Yet America was now the dominant country in the world. Concern with the balance of power shifted from internal European arrangements to the containment of Soviet expansionism globally, turning the international order operationally into a two-power world. The United States had emerged as the essential guarantor of allied security and international stability. Particularly in the North Atlantic region, America concentrated on mobilizing resources for an agreed mission. Washington saw its role as the director of the common enterprise of countering a specific challenge to peace, rather than as a participant in an equilibrium.

      After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system gradually grew more multipolar. China emerged as a global economic power with an increasing military capacity. Traditional power centers ended periods of isolation, colonial rule, or underdevelopment and began to play influential international roles. Something like a global version of Westphalian diplomacy began to emerge—an equilibrium balancing the sometimes-compatible, sometimes-competitive aims of multiple sovereign units.

      Through all these transformations, the United States has been torn between its faith in its exceptional nature and global mission, and the pressures of a public opinion skeptical of open-ended commitments in distant regions. The ideal of universal democracy-promotion, if adopted as an operational strategy, implies a doctrine of permanent domestic engineering across the world. Yet the prevailing American view has regarded foreign policy as a series of episodes with definitive conclusions; it recoiled from the ambiguities of a historical process in which goals are achieved incrementally, through imperfect stages.

      As America evolved from a peripheral exception to international order to an essential component of it, it has been obliged to meld its noble ideals with a concept of the national interest sustainable across decades, administrations, and historical vicissitudes. America’s moral convictions are essential to its national purpose and to popular support for its policies. An understanding of equilibrium, and a distinction between essential tasks and long-term aspirations, is necessary to sustain American efforts in a world of disparate cultures and multiple centers of power. America’s ability to balance and synthesize these elements will define its future, and importantly shape twenty-first-century prospects for world order.

      Conrad Black has brilliantly traced this evolution and framed thought-provoking questions about America’s world role in the coming decades. He has related domestic to international pressures, and evoked the key events, strategies, and dilemmas inherent in America’s rise. Through thoughtful sketches of the key actors—especially the presidents—and their policies, he has provided a book that will be indispensable reading for those who want to understand the past as well as sketch a roadmap for the future.

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       THE ASPIRANT STATE, 1754–1836