The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower
Michael Mandelbaum, Thomas Friedman in conversation
For more than 40 years, it has been an enormous privilege and pleasure to have followed the career and especially the thinking of Michael Mandelbaum—from his earliest writings on the virtues of Mutually Assured Destruction and The Nuclear Question as a catalyst for containment during the depths of the Cold War, which I later witnessed myself in reporting across Eastern and Central Europe. Now, as a culmination (though certainly not the terminus) of his illustrious career, he has offered a magnum opus—a tour d’horizon of the history of American foreign policy. Throughout my career, I have believed that the best journalism is one refracted through the prism of history. Imagine my delight to have found him in conversation this week with America’s master interpreter of foreign policy today—Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times. So here, thanks to the National Archives Foundation that hosted this event, is a transcript of their entire conversation, that I am now privileged to be able to bring to our readers of Andelman Unleashed. Do subscribe. It’s worth it!
Thomas Friedman: My name is Thomas Friedman. I'm the Foreign Affairs columnist for The New York Times and it's my pleasure and honor to be here with my teacher and friend, Michael Mandelbaum. Michael is Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus in American foreign policy from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and is author of a fantastic new book The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower. Michael, greetings. \
Prof. Michael Mandelbaum: Tom, It's good to be with you. Thanks to you for taking part in this, and thanks to all of those who have tuned in live, or will be watching this subsequently. This book you can order easily from Amazon or from the Oxford University press website.
Friedman: Michael, let's kick it off with a simple, obvious. but important question, which is, why did you write this book?
Mandelbaum: Thank you. Well, I wrote The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy which in fact covers 250 years from 1765 to 2015—that is from the Stamp Act to the Iran deal—for three purposes. The first is simply to describe and analyze the major events and personalities of those centuries. The second is to address the major controversies in American foreign policy during that period. So in the book, I address such questions as why did the 13 colonies rebel against the British Empire at the end of the 18th century? Why did the Cold War take place? And why did it end as it did? Which presidents were successful and which unsuccessful in conducting American foreign policy? Spoiler alert, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison do not come off well. The third purpose of this book is to draw out the major themes that run through the history of American foreign policy in this period.
What are those themes? Well, the history of American foreign policy, like the history of everything, exhibits both continuities and changes, and it is on the important continuities, and major changes that the book is based. But let me just give you a preview of what those three are without going into any detail. And then we can get back to them in the course of our discussion. There are in my judgment three major continuities. American foreign policy has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic, and as for the changes, the principal change has been the the steady growth in America's power in relation to other countries in the international system. That growth has given the United States four distinct roles in the world, and those roles are reflected in the subtitle of the book. From 1765 to 1865, America is a weak power; from 1865 to 1945, a great power; 1945 to 1990, a superpower; and then from 1990 to 2015, what I call a hyperpower.
Friedman: You say, Michael, that American foreign policy is unusually ideological. What do you mean by that? And why is that the case?
Mandelbaum: By that, I mean that the United States, more than other country, has tried to use foreign policy to promote the adoption of its political ideas beyond its borders. And those ideas have been principally democracy within countries and peace among countries. Now, the United States is not the only country in the world ever to try to promote its domestic political values or indeed ever tried to promote these values. Great Britain in the 19th century did so. In the second half of the 20th century or I should say, since the second half of the 20th century, the countries of Western Europe attempted to do so, and the United States has not always emphasized value promotion in foreign policy. In fact, as I say, in The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, since the beginning of the 20th century there have been two major approaches to foreign policy in the United States—each of them identified with an important president of that period. The first of them is sometimes called realism or realpolitik. It emphasizes power. Its patron and exponent was Theodore Roosevelt; its goal is a stable balance of power in the world.
And indeed, Roosevelt spent much of his presidency trying to contrive a stable balance in East Asia. The other approach is value promotion—sometimes called idealism or Wilsonianism, after the American President Woodrow Wilson, who was most energetic in promoting this ideal. Wilson wanted to contrive, not a balance of power, but what he called a community of power using the League of Nations that he helped to create after World War One, but that the United States did not join. Now, the two approaches have often conflicted. When they have, America has usually opted to pursue a power-oriented, realist foreign policy. It's usually opted to defend its interests rather than promote its values. And that, of course, is true for almost every country in every part of the world throughout history. But Wilsonianism as the promotion of democracy and peace has since the beginning of the 20th century, and in a way since the founding of the republic, always been important. It's always been on the agenda. Americans have never abandoned, never ceased hoping to be able to make the world over to make it more democratic and more peaceful. And that Wilsonian strain in American foreign policy is one one of the things that makes this foreign policy distinctly American.
You asked incidentally, why the United States is prone to promote its ideals? And I think there are several reasons. One is that the American Revolution was in the service of these ideas. Thomas Paine said we have the power to make the world anew, and that idea has never left America. And the second, we are a country different from other countries because we are not based on a group of people speaking the same language, professing the same religion, who’ve lived on the same territory for generations. This country is made up of people who came from elsewhere, and when they came from elsewhere, they did so for the most part—African Americans always excepted—because they wanted to live in a country based on the principles that are the foundation of the United States. Again, in The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, I call the United States an idea state. And those ideas are the ideas of democracy and peace, A third and final reason that I think, and I say in the book, we have been so committed to these ideas is that we are a nation of immigrants. Immigrants come here because they like these ideas, because they want to live in a country that professes and practices them. And they have kept these ideals alive. Now, they mainly kept them alive in domestic affairs. But because they so thoroughly permeated domestic affairs, they leak into our foreign policy as well.
Friedman: Where would you put Ukraine then on that? Is it an example of this? Is it Wilsonian or Teddy Rooseveltian?
Mandelbaum: The Ukrainian War thus far seems to be one of those cases like World War Two or the Cold War where American engagement is seen to further both American security interests and American ideals. And to the extent that that is true, it is possible to get broad support for a policy. That's also the case as I note in The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy that every American war without exception has provoked dissent and opposition. Of course, it's taken different forms in different wars. For example, in the Revolutionary War, the people who didn't want to leave the British Empire left the 13 colonies and went to Canada. And in World War Two, the fiercest opposition to American direct involvement in the war came before the United States actually got directly involved. The so-called America First movement that wanted to keep America out of the fighting in Europe was strongest before Pearl Harbor. And after the American declaration of war after Pearl Harbor, the America First movement became far less important. But in general, there has always been dissent against American military policies, against American engagement, either directly or as in the case of Ukraine indirectly, in wars abroad. But thus far, this particular conflict seems, for the reasons that I've stated, to command pretty broad American support.
Friedman: In your book you make the point that American foreign policy is also usually economic. What do you mean by that?
Mandelbaum: By economic I mean that more than other countries, the United States has tried to use economic means, economic instruments to achieve political goals. And we see that of course in the war in Ukraine, with the sanctions that the United States and other countries have placed on Russia. But this goes all the way back to the beginning. As we all know, the American Revolution was provoked by taxes that the British Parliament imposed on the 13 colonies that they thought were unjust. An early response to these taxes was to boycott British goods so as to put pressure on the British merchants who were selling them, to get them to put pressure on the parliament to rescind the taxes. And for a while, it actually worked, at least in a few cases. Until the 20th century, the preferred American economic instrument for achieving political goals was trade. But in the 20th century, the United States began to use the export of capital to political purposes. This first began with what was known as dollar diplomacy in the administration of William Howard Taft, and it probably had its finest hour in 1947 with the European Recovery Program, popularly known as the Marshall Plan. America has had recourse to use of capital for political purposes, recurrently, ever since—for example, in the 1990s through the use of the International Monetary Fund. So America has been an economic power in the world, from the beginning in that sense.
Friedman: You know, it's it's a good segue to what I want to talk about, which is the role of democracy. What do you mean by the fact that our democratic character affected our foreign policy? How did that meld in there?
Mandelbaum: It happened in that American foreign policy, more than foreign policies of other countries, has been subject to public opinion and popular sentiment. The public has always had a voice in foreign policy and that distinguishes the United States from the great powers of Europe, historically, all the way up until the 20th century and in some cases beyond. Previously, foreign policies were the preserve of the aristocracy and the monarchy. Of course, America had neither. And so, it was the public that had a say and a voice. And public opinion and public sentiment has been extremely important both in starting wars and in stopping them. For starting them, there is a recurrent pattern in American foreign policy in which a dramatic event takes place, usually overseas, but sometimes in the United States, that causes Americans to realize that that the world is more dangerous than they had previously believed—galvanizes the public and creates the demand for a more robust American foreign policy, which sometimes involves war. For example, in 1898 the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor paved the way toward creating conditions and public opinion for the Spanish-American War that year. Then later, the German submarine sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915 completely transformed the American perception of Germany's role in World War One and led to the American entry into that war against Germany two years later.
And of course, most recently we all remember the attacks on Washington and New York on September 11 2001, which led to two American wars—the one in Afghanistan and the one in Iraq. And public opinion has also caused the American government to withdraw forces from countries where it was fighting. The war in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq, all became unpopular, and ultimately the American government had to end participation. I ought to say that in each of those wars, the American public did not reject the reasons for which the wars were being fought, rather, it concluded that the wars had become too expensive and that expenses were denominated in American casualties and so the public decided that it's simply didn't want to pay those expenses anymore. So as I said, public opinion is always important, and one consequence of that is that to other countries, the United States often seems volatile and unpredictable, and other countries make mistakes about the United States. For example, the Imperial Japanese government surely did not believe that the United States would respond to the attacks on Pearl Harbor as fiercely and with the endurance that it did. And Saddam Hussein certainly did not imagine that by occupying neighboring Kuwait, you would galvanize the United States into action causing America to organize an international coalition, send 500,000 troops to the Persian Gulf and oust Saddam's army from Kuwait.
Friedman: One of the things that you talked about in the book and that I've long puzzle about today is how did America get so powerful?
Mandelbaum: After getting its independence, and underlying the reasons for its power, the United States accumulated steadily more territory, more population, and greater economic output. What is particularly important, too, is that the United States more than any other country mastered and continues to master the techniques of the Industrial Revolution which are extremely important for power in the world. The industrial revolution, of course, began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, but by the end of the 19th century, United States was at its cutting edge and has been there more or less ever since. In today's world, the most advanced technological countries have the potential to be the most powerful.
Friedman: Who would you say is number two today? Is it China? Is it the EU? In terms of power.
Mandelbaum: I think today it would have to be China, partly because China is very deliberately and very energetically trying to amass power. The European Union has great potential for being powerful, but it isn't the kind of political unit that is able to muster its resources to make for military power. So China is getting more powerful, and aspires to be more powerful, and as we know, especially from your columns, Tom, China is bending every effort to be on the cutting edge of technology. It's pouring lots of money into high-tech enterprises and presumably also into high-tech weapons. So the military competition, in what is now the fifth era of Americans foreign policy, is bound to be in part, although certainly not exclusively, a competition in perfecting ever more sophisticated military technology
Friedman: An issue has come up around Russia, Ukraine, America. The whole dynamic is: has America ever been an imperial power. The reason I ask that, Michael, is that you hear a lot of people say, well, you know, we should understand how Putin feels. We had our own Monroe Doctrine. How would we feel if Russia were, you know, somehow supporting Mexico against United States right now? Talk about that whole issue. Were we, are we an imperial power and how are we different from Russia in Ukraine?
Mandelbaum: Let me begin by saying a little bit about the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated in 1823. The truth of the matter is first that it wasn't regarded as particularly important when it was promulgated. It got much more important for Americans during the course of the 19th century as the United States became more powerful. Beginning in 1880 or 1881, it has been read in its entirety in every session of the United States Senate. But what was important about the Monroe Doctrine was that the United States didn't enforce it, had no way of enforcing it.
The United States said, ‘European great powers stay out of the Western Hemisphere.’ But the United States didn't have the military power to keep them out. The country that did have the military power was Great Britain. Great Britain was the master of the world's oceans. The Royal Navy could prevent any country from projecting power across the Atlantic Ocean, and that's what Great Britain did. Now Great Britain was very active in the Western hemisphere in the 19th century. It controlled Canada. But in addition in Latin America, it had very close economic ties, and it had what some historians have called informal empire. It didn't govern Latin America, but it did dominate their trade, and that was fine with the British. They didn't want to govern Latin America, which meant that they were happy with the arrangement that the United States preferred—keeping other European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. And that means that the United States was what economists sometimes call a free rider on British power. The United States was the beneficiary of British naval power without having to pay for it.
Being a free rider is common in international affairs, and we see it today in Europe. The smaller European countries are the free riders on American military power. Now, the way you get to be a free rider is to join NATO, and that's why the smaller countries of central and eastern Europe are so anxious to do so. Getting back to the question of empire. The word imperial now has an all-purpose meaning. It's thrown around to mean, you're big and strong and by the way, I don't like what you're doing. But the dictionary definition of empire, the proper definition at least in my judgment, and the way I use it in The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy is control of the will of foreign peoples outside what is considered your own territory. And in that sense, the United States was an imperial power briefly.
It got control of the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American War. It had a kind of suzerainty over Cuba through the so-called Platt Amendment, and it also annexed at the same time, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Well, Philippines got its independence in 1946, Puerto. Rico is a territory. The Platt Amendment has been revoked, but the United States maintains the naval base on the island of Cuba in Guantanamo. And so, therefore, I would say that in the strict sense of the term United States has been an imperial power, but compared with the great empires of Europe, the American empire was short-lived. It was kind of half-hearted. It was small. Americans didn't care very much about it, in some ways couldn't wait to get rid of it. And so it doesn't loom large in international history and it didn't loom large, unlike the European empires, in the day-to-day political life of the United States.
Friedman: What went wrong in the role war played in driving, shaping American foreign policy?
Mandelbaum: War has served as a kind of midwife for the transition from one American international role to the next. So that for example, the war of independence, what we call the Revolutionary War, made the United States independent and thus able to conduct its own foreign policy. The Civil War paved the way for the American emergence as a great power in the world. American participation in the winning coalition in World War Two left it as one of the two superpowers in the world along with the Soviet Union. And the American-led coalition's triumph in the Cold War left the United States as the sole hyperpower. Incidentally, the term hyperpower comes from French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, who called America, l'hyperpuissance.
Let me say two other things about America and war. The first is that although the United States has fought a number of serious wars—12 by my count—I don't think it can rightly be called a warlike country because in each of those wars America had at least in its own mind, defensive motives. Now it wasn't always seen that way by other countries, but I think there is a case to be made that in every American war, the United States was acting defensively with one important exception, and that exception is the Mexican war of 1846 to 1847, which was a war of territorial conquest. And as a result of this, what is now the southwestern part of the United States and most of the West including the state of California came into the union. The other point that I would make about war, is that the United States has been unusually fortunate in having, during its most important wars, three superior commanders in chief. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington was an adept battlefield commander, and his skill consisted mainly in avoiding battle with the superior British forces—battles that the Continental Army would have lost. The Americans really only fought a couple of major battles and happened to win them. And in addition, Washington himself served as a potent symbol around which the Continental Army and the inhabitants of the 13 colonies, rallied in support of the new nation.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln understood what the military requirements of his political goal was. He found a general who could implement the appropriate strategy, namely Ulysses S. Grant, and he persevered to a successful conclusion, despite the terrible cost of the war. Finally, in World War Two, Franklin D, Roosevelt had a series of very difficult strategic judgments to make, and he made those decisions in a way that aroused controversy both at the time and subsequently. And yet, as I say in The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, in my opinion the decisions that he made were the right ones. But first, between the fall of France in May 1940 and American entry into World War Two in December 1941, for 18 months he sent as much help, especially military equipment, as he could to the British as they fought Nazi Germany. And after June 22nd 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and a war between the Soviet Union and the Nazis began, Roosevelt extended assistance to the Soviet Union as well—despite the fact that it wasn't altogether popular in the United States. Then once the United States entered, the war Roosevelt decided to concentrate American military efforts in the European theater. He pursued a so-called Europe-first policy, despite the fact that the war had begun with an attack from Asia.
Roosevelt decided, and this was very controversial, that the first American military operation of World War Two should take place in North Africa, and it did. It's called Operation Torch. His military advisers objected on the grounds that attacking a German force in North Africa was a distraction from the main business of defeating the Germans by getting to the German homeland. But Roosevelt believed, and I think in retrospect he was probably right, that in order to sustain public support for the war, the American public had to see its army in action in the calendar year 1942. Finally, Roosevelt decided on June 1944 as the date of the great cross-Channel crossing—the American, British, Canadian invasion of France, known as Operation Overlord—and indeed D-Day, as it came to be called, took place on June 6th. He made this decision despite the fact that one of his two, great wartime allies, Joseph Stalin of Russia, had insisted on launching that operation before then, and despite the fact that his other great wartime, ally, Winston Churchill of Great Britain was eager to postpone the crossing perhaps indefinitely. Let me add one other thing about their wartime leadership. And that is that all three were very good at what is the most important job of a wartime Commander in Chief and often the most difficult one, and that is keeping the American public committed to the fight.
Friedman: You alluded to Jefferson and Madison not being your favorite foreign policy presidents when we started. Give me your two favorites and who do you think were the two most overrated or least successful.
Mandelbaum: I do think that the big three Washington, Lincoln, and FDR were the greatest because they had the main opportunities for greatness. I might also say that one of my favorite foreign policy presidents, although he doesn't get a lot of credit, is the first George Bush—George H.W. Bush. I thought he handled the challenges that he faced very very well. In response to the collapse of communism in Europe, he did very little, which was exactly the right thing to do. There's an old saying in war, when your enemy is destroying himself, don't interrupt. And Bush was very good at not interfering, but also in reassuring the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States would not seek to take advantage of what was happening in the communist world at Russia's expense. And he also also very judiciously handled the first Gulf War. He evicted Saddam from Kuwait, but he did not send American troops to Iraq itself, in part because he feared what would happen when the United States did, and precisely what he feared did happen when the United States did send troops to Iraq in the second Gulf War. So, George H.W. Bush is a foreign policy president who I think is underrated.
Now let me say something about Madison and Jefferson. Like I do say in the book although there is competition for the distinction, I think they may have been the two least competent leaders of American foreign policy. Why do I say that? Well, both had to cope with a particular problem that's been forgotten now, but was important at the time. In the early years of the 19th century, Britain was waging war with Napoleon's France, and its major strategy was to use its maritime supremacy to blockade France. It didn't want any ships reaching France, including American ships. And so it intercepted them. The Americans objected that their rights as a neutral party were being violated. George Washington sent representatives to London. They worked out a compromise. It was enacted by the Senate, the so-called Jay's Treaty, then Chief Justice John Jay being the chief American negotiator.
It happened again when Thomas Jefferson was president. Jefferson also sent a negotiator to London. Jefferson's negotiator also worked out a compromise, but Jefferson rejected it. He said that it didn't meet all of America's requirements. It didn't fully uphold America's neutral rights. And he wasn't going to have anything to do with it. What then was he going to do? He decided in order to punish the British to implement an embargo, but the embargo was on American exports. Other countries, other leaders embargo countries with which they are at war in order to punish them. Jefferson embargoed his own country. He thought that American goods were so valuable to the British that not having them, the British would give up and acede to the American position on shipping. Well, of course, it didn't work that way. The British ignored him. American, merchants, especially in New England, were furious. There was a lot of bootlegging and violating the embargo, and Jefferson finally had to withdraw just as he was leaving office. But his successor and protege, James Madison, had to do something, so he felt, about the British interfering with American neutral rights, and so not being able to think of anything else and really with encouragement from some hawks in Congress, he declared war on Great Britain in 1812.
It was probably the most misbegotten war the United States had ever fought. The British at first paid very little attention because they were busy fighting Napoleon. But when in 1814 Napoleon's campaign in Russia turned into a fiasco, for the first time Britain could concentrate on North America. They sent an expeditionary force, which among other things burned the city of Washington DC. It was a complete disaster for the United States. The Americans sued for peace. Peace was finally concluded in 1815, and the Americans gained nothing from the war. So it was a lot of effort, a lot of pain for nothing whatsoever. Interestingly, Americans remember that war, if they remember it at all, and most of us I suspect don't, as the occasion in which our national anthem was written. A Baltimore lawyer named Francis Scott Key saw the British bombard Fort McHenry in his native Baltimore, wrote a poem about it, which was set to music, and we played it ever since on public occasions. So every time you stand for the national anthem you are remembering the War of 1812, and it doesn't deserve to be remembered for any other reason.
Friedman: Michael, to wrap up just a simple question—has American foreign policy been successful these 250 years?
Mandelbaum: A very important question, and my answer in the book is as follows. In its first three eras, American foreign policy was remarkably successful. As a weak power, the United States did manage to defend its independence and expand across the North American continent, while keeping out, or having the British Navy keep out the European powers, preventing them from interfering. In its career as a great power, it was part of the two coalitions that won the two biggest wars in all of history—World War One and World War Two. As a superpower, it led the coalition that overcame the Soviet Union. So for those three eras, we were remarkably successful. In the fourth and most recent era, the era of American hyperpower, however, the United States was not successful. Why was it unsuccessful? Well the United States certainly made errors of foreign policy in widening the decision to expand NATO in the 1990s against the wishes of Russia—and the Russian president was a would-be democrat. And certainly the war in Iraq did not go the way Americans hoped and believed it would.
There was, I think, a larger problem. During its era as a hyperpower, the United States had one major project. It tried to foster and install both directly and indirectly a particular kind of government with countries all around the world. That was our kind of government. The government that was democratic, that respected the rights of people, that has the institutions necessary for economic prosperity, and above all it was at peace with its neighbors. And that was an admirable goal and a sensible goal in the sense that a world in which every country had such a government would be a much better world—not only for us but for everybody in the world we have now. But there was and is a problem that tripped us up. Having such a government is not straightforward. A country that has such a government needs to have certain preconditions. It needs to have a certain set of dominant values. It needs to have a particular series of institutions. It needs to have some history of experience in operating those institutions. Not every country has them and the countries where we try install this kind of political system, especially the ones that we occupy directly, and the countries such as Russia and China where we tried indirectly to encourage the formation of a democratic rights-protecting rule, did not have the pre-conditions. So we failed. The United States in some ways, in my judgment failed in its major project in its fourth era as the global hydropower because it undertook what turned out to be Mission Impossible.
Friedman: You know, it's really interesting, Michael the way you've done it—weak power, great power, superpower, hyperpower. In the first three we were a balancing force, basically balancing Russia, balancing Nazi Germany, balancing Britain and France, and others—a kind of classical Kissingerian role. In the hyperpower phase, we went from balancer to revolutionary in a way and we weren't able to sustain that.
Mandelbaum: In that period, there was a paradox. In the era in which the United States had the most power, it was the least successful. Absence of the need to balance was part of the reason. In all the other three eras we had countries that could at least potentially do us harm, and that imposed a kind of caution, a kind of prudence, a kind of restraint. In the era of hyperpower, we were in effect America unbound. That led to overconfidence and overreach.
Friedman: Interesting. This was fantastic. Thank you very much for your time. Would you hold that book up one more time? Because I know everyone wants to go right to their computer now. Go to amazon.com, click on The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hydropower, and buy it now. And read my column tonight in the New York Times, which is going to use the book as a starting off point to discuss the Ukraine war.
Thank you, Michael. Thanks to the National Archives. Thank all of you for listening here and throughout the Milky Way galaxy, order it now. See you soon.
Mandelbaum: Many thanks, Tom. Thanks to all who are watching.