Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001,), 345 pp., $30.
THE BRITISH statesman Lord Bryce once remarked that describing American foreign policy was like describing the snakes of Ireland. "There are no snakes in Ireland", he added.
It's an old anecdote but an apt one for Walter Russell Mead, who rebuts Bryce from the outset of his new book, Special Providence. Mead discovers lots of snakes in Ireland--four species, in fact. One species that predominated for decades bore protective coloration, which was why Bryce missed it. But it and the other three have long been active, often aggressive, and very successful in defending and expanding their territory.
The first species--that is, the first school of American foreign policy--Mead calls "Hamiltonian", after the founding Secretary of the Treasury and the most influential advisor to George Washington. Mead's Hamiltonians see the world as a marketplace and perceive the purpose of U.S. foreign policy to be the enhancement of America's position in that marketplace. They are conservatives in the sense of doubting the perfectibility, or even the substantial improvability, of human nature; yet they are optimists regarding the benefits that will accompany the growth of commerce and the institutions that support it. For the first century of America's independent existence, the Hamiltonians advocated cooperation with Britain, the world's leading trader. Upon Britain's decline in the 20th century, they pushed the United States to the van of world trade, but their fundamental belief remained as before: that business was both the raison d'etre of foreign policy and the facilitator of such collateral benefits as peace and stability.
