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.

Mead's second school of foreign policy is the "Jeffersonian", which arose about the same time as the Hamiltonian, and in opposition to it. The touchstone of Jeffersonian thought is democracy, which occurs, the Jeffersonians judge, not as some happy side effect of commerce, but only as the result of careful cultivation. Where the Hamiltonians are pessimists regarding human nature but optimists regarding the institutions of commerce, the Jeffersonians are just the opposite. They revere the individual and fear that institutions, especially those of commerce, will corrupt personal virtue. For this reason they have been skeptical of intercourse with other nations; better to perfect democracy at home than risk it in the hurly-burly of foreign relations. Their enemies have called them isolationist; Mead prefers the term nationalist. But, however labeled, the Jeffersonians have put the domestic interest so far ahead of the international interest as to convey the frequent impression of indifference, even hostility, t o the world beyond American shores.

The "Jacksonians" have a similarly domestic orientation, although they have been the driving force behind some of America's most energetic assertions of interest and power abroad. Where the Jeffersonians have tended toward elitism, handing down democracy from above, the Jacksonians are populists, viewing democracy as arising from the people themselves. In contrast to the diffident nationalism of the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians brandish a belligerent nationalism, quick to take offense, punctilious as to honor, untroubled by the denial of rights to foreigners and other lesser breeds beyond the law. The most militant of the four schools, the Jacksonians have consistently supported spending for defense, and have never been reluctant to use the weapons once purchased. Yet their aim in fighting has been American victory, not the salvation of the world. Perhaps the world is redeemable, perhaps not; but the Jacksonians waste no time on such airy questions, as their sole concern is for the vigorous defense of Amer ican honor and interests abroad.

Mead's fourth school is the "Wilsonian", which believes that the world can be saved, and that America is called to save it. Named, of course, for the President who promised to make the world "safe for democracy" and championed the League of Nations, the Wilsonians have often allied with the Jeffersonians, for like the Jeffersonians, the Wilsonians hold democracy to be the highest social value. But where the Jeffersonians fear that contact with the world will debilitate democracy at home, the Wilsonians fear that debilitation will come from a lack of contact. To save itself, America must save the world.

MEAD'S TAXONOMY is not entirely original, and he does not claim that it is. His Hamiltonians and Wilsonians are, respectively, conservative and liberal internationalists, while his Jacksonians and Jeffersonians are conservative and liberal nationalists. Sliced differently, the Hamiltonians and Jacksonians are internationalist and nationalist hawks, respectively, while the Wilsonians and Jeffersonians are internationalist and nationalist doves.

So why go to the trouble to invent new names for old categories? For two reasons. First, Mead wants to underscore the honest inconsistencies of actual history, as opposed to the spurious clarity of theoretical constructs. Readers, he guesses, will find it easier to accept the contradictions when considering them within a category named for Thomas Jefferson, for example--who was nothing if not inconsistent--than in some disembodied liberal nationalism.

The second reason is more to the basic point of the book. Mead has written a history of American foreign policy that, more than most histories, looks forward as much as it looks back. Mead is the senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he wrote this book on commission for the Century Foundation; by inclination, affiliation and subvention he is interested in charting a path for American diplomacy into the future. On this subject--as on most others--he is engagingly frank. American foreign policy, he says, has operated on myths in the past, including the myth of virtuous isolation in the 19th century and the myth that the Cold War represented a break with American tradition. V/hat America needs at present, and what he essays to provide, is a myth for the 21st century. The book is his conjuring effort, and his labels represent a self-conscious calculation that he will have better luck selling it--the myth primarily, but no doubt also the book--if it comes with familiar hand les.

He is probably right: in their reflexive regard for the Founders and the other great figures of their past, most Americans will be more comfortable with a foreign policy identified with Hamilton or Jefferson or Jackson or Wilson than with some sterile offspring of political science.

Yet, whatever the brand-name appeal of his nomenclature, there are some serious historical problems with it. Anyone with any sensitivity to history cannot help shuddering to read of "Wilsonians" living and busy long before Woodrow Wilson was born. And though it has often been noted that Jesus would not recognize much of what has been called Christian, one would like to think that Jefferson, for instance, would hold the beliefs that Mead calls Jeffersonian. Jeffersonians, Mead says, make almost a fetish of constitutionalism; yet the most important foreign policy action of the Jefferson Administration, the purchase of Louisiana, was one for which Jefferson himself could find no constitutional authorization. Swallowing his scruples, he went ahead and closed the single best deal of America's national life.

Other historical judgments are equally problematic. Mead suggests that Charles Francis Adams, the American ambassador to Britain during the Civil War, stood in a long line of U.S. diplomats defending American commercial rights on the high seas when he complained to the British government about the British construction of warships for the Confederacy. While true on its face, this interpretation gets the underlying meaning just backward. The Civil War was that rare case m Anglo-American history when the United States was the aggriever on the subject of maritime rights, and Britain the aggrieved. Adams' real complaint about the Alabama and the other warships was that they violated British neutrality and would prolong the war.

When, in speaking of American westward expansion, Mead says that "many of the Indian wars were caused less by Indian aggression" than by white land hunger, he is being entirely too kind to the white settlers. When he asserts that the Battle of New Orleans was "perhaps the most decisive battle in the shaping of the modern world between Trafalgar and Stalingrad", the emphasis clearly has to be on the "perhaps." Jackson's victory at New Orleans was soul-satisfying to Americans, but it came after the treaty ending the War of 1812 had been signed, and it had no effect on the war's outcome. Gettysburg, Tsushima Straits, the Somme and a score of other battles had far more significance. Mead's exegesis of the Monroe Doctrine is provocative to the point of perverse; to suggest that it foreshadowed NATO by registering a commitment to the balance of power in Europe would have astonished its author, John Quincy Adams.

Then there are the problems of taxonomy, of who gets classed where. When Mead calls Martin Luther King, Jr. a Jacksonian, one wonders whether he is pulling the reader's leg. This student of Gandhi, this apostle of nonviolence, this advocate of racial equality as philosophical kin to the hotheaded, dueling slave-master? (And when Mead characterizes Andrew Jackson as "enormously well read", one can only ask, compared to whom?) To apply the Jeffersonian label to Ronald Reagan, on grounds of Reagan's support for human rights, makes one wonder who wouldn't be a Jeffersonian, on Mead's logic. Reagan's was the administration whose point-person on human rights, Jeane Kirkpatrick, got her job on the strength of an essay advocating support of merely authoritarian good dictators (of the Right) against the bad totalitarian dictators (of the Left).

Yet most of Mead's provocations are more positive. In calling Wilsonians the Trotskyites of the American Revolution and the Jeffersonians the Stalinists, he makes a point that readers will not soon forget (unless they never knew why Trotsky wound up with an ice pick in his skull. For those who do not grasp the doctrinal wars of the 1930s, Mead provides crib notes--but they will still miss the meaning of the analogy). When he says that Jeffersonians and Jacksonians are both attached to the Bill of Rights, but the former give highest priority to the First Amendment while the latter prefer the Second (or alternatively, that Jeffersonians join the ACLU while Jacksonians join the NRA), he is being glib but not simplistic. When he dubs the United States the "Britain of Britain", in that what Britain was to continental Europe the United States was to Britain, his logic requires some thought but finally makes sense. When he considers the disadvantages democracies labor under in conducting diplomacy, and says, "A dem ocracy can, so to speak, easily have too many drinks and then pay a sordid call on a prostitute; it is much harder for a democracy to maintain a cultivated mistress in a fashionable apartment", he nicely captures the distinction between the adolescent immorality to which democracies often resort and the far more studied amorality of autocracies.

Mead is also persuasive in accounting for the striking contrast between the historic success of American foreign policy and the failure of foreigners--and many Americans--to recognize that success. By any measure, American foreign policy has been the most successful of any great power in history. Two centuries ago the United States hardly rated consideration in world affairs; now it bestrides the globe like no country before it. To skeptics who point out that American power has resulted from America's favored domestic position, especially its control of a large part of a very blessed continent, the obvious rebuttal is that such control came about through the effective conduct of an active and often bellicose foreign policy.

So why have observers failed to give American diplomats due credit? Britain's Bryce was not alone among foreigners in his dismissal; Germany's Bismarck sneered that God has a "special providence" for fools, drunks and the United States of America. (In borrowing Bismarck's jibe for his title, Mead employs it against the Iron Chancellor.) The Europeans failed to appreciate American diplomacy, Mead argues, because it did not conform to the European model of "continental realism'', the pragmatic, security-preoccupied diplomacy of Talleyrand and Metternich (and Henry Kissinger, who is the object of numerous oblique, and sometimes direct, stabs by Mead). American diplomacy has not been unpragmatic, Mead argues, but its pragmatism has been infused with a larger dose of ideology, and especially of economics, than the Europeans were used to. Continental diplomats (and English aristocrats like Bryce) disdained economics; and if Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, America was a whole continent of them.

Americans did not disdain economics, but neither did they generally recognize it as part of foreign policy. The single most consistent goal of the U.S. government in its dealings with other countries has been the protection and expansion of American trade. Occasionally this has required such obvious and undeniable instruments of traditional statecraft as warships, as during the War of 1812 and World War I. But more often it has proceeded quietly, by commercial treaties, reciprocal trade arrangements, and the operation of such impenetrable (to the popular mind) institutions as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Until the anti-globalization protests of recent years, the activities of the economic diplomats rated little notice or respect--sometimes even from those who hired them. "I don't give a shit about the value of the lira", once shouted Richard Nixon, Kissinger's partner in Metternichian realism.

Moreover, during the half century of the Cold War, economic diplomacy often took a back seat to matters of grand strategy. As nuclear warheads and intercontinental bombers and missiles shrank the oceans, American diplomacy came to resemble the diplomacy of continental Europe. Partly for this reason, but also because of the enormous impact of the two world wars on the psyche of at least three generations of academics (among many others), "realism" dominated discussions of international affairs. The histories and politics of individual countries appeared to play little role in determining their actions on the world stage; all that mattered was the configuration of the international system and the power vectors that resulted from it. The unexpected end of the Cold War cast considerable doubt on the more formulaic expressions of the realist paradigm, which certainly had not predicted any such thing; and during the decade since, economics has returned to the main stage of international affairs. No longer the Rodn ey Dangerfield of diplomacy, it now risks becoming the scapegoat for sins it never committed. The politics of protest aside, the resurgence of economic diplomacy allows authors like Mead to rediscover its importance for an earlier era.

AS BIG-PICTURE history, Mead's book works reasonably well, although it is definitely not for those unfamiliar with the subject. He makes four passes over the ground of American foreign policy, once for each of his schools. The effect, at times, is Rashomonian, with each group perceiving the critical moments of American diplomatic history differently. For Hamiltonians, World War I represented the transfer of economic hegemony from Britain to the United States. For Wilsonians it signaled an opportunity--sadly squandered--to remake the world in America's democratic image. The Jacksonians responded viscerally to the insult of German submarine attacks, while the Jeffersonians worried, rightly, about what the military mindset fostered by the war would do to American civil liberties.

Mead is persuasive in contending that the history of American foreign policy can be understood best in terms of the interaction of his four schools, although it is not obvious why four should be a magic number. A social scientist might see, behind Mead's great-man labels, a pair of orthogonal axes, measuring, respectively, nationalism versus internationalism and conservatism versus liberalism. But social scientists are constrained by what can be printed on the page. (Mead's one graphic is a chart showing the prior foreign policy experience of American presidents, which effectively makes his point that presidents before the Civil War had much better training in diplomacy than the presidents of the 20th century.) Mead presumably could have identified three schools, or five, or six.

He might also have said more about how and why the schools interacted as they did. At times, the schools all pointed policy in the same direction. In December 1941, for instance, everyone wanted war: Jacksonians because American honor had been violated, Jeffersonians because American democracy was in danger, Hamiltonians to protect American economic interests, Wilsonians to redeem the world from militant fascism. For much of the Cold War, the indicators were similarly aligned. But on other occasions--at the end of the Spanish-American War when the Senate had to decide whether to annex the Philippines, in 1968 after the Tet offensive in Vietnam--the schools clashed. Why the winners won is something Mead too often leaves unexplained.

This is particularly important in evaluating the moral of Mead's story. After covering 200 years of American history (800 if one counts the four crossings of the ground he undertakes), Mead unveils his prescription for the 21st century. Frankly, it is rather disappointing. After all the work Mead has done, the reader expects a sophisticated synthesis, something combining the strengths of the author's four schools. Instead Mead offers merely a modernized Jeffersonianism-- and not modified all that much. His hero turns out to be John Quincy Adams, whose most famous statement of policy asserted that while America is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all people, she is "the champion and vindicator only of her own", and that while "she might become the dictatress of the world, she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit."

Mead is entitled to his opinion, and America could do far worse than to find another John Quincy Adams (for secretary of state, not president). But Mead's recommendation would be more compelling if he had shown that the Jeffersonian view has clearly outshone the others, or that the other schools have led America astray. In any event, Mead's own evidence strongly suggests that all four schools will be always with us--regardless of what pundits and American diplomats might desire--for they reflect profound aspects of the American character.

At one point, in a discussion of the influence of missionaries on American diplomacy, Mead distinguishes between the foreign policy of the American people and the foreign policy of the American government. There will always be a foreign policy of the American people--or rather four policies, by Mead's count. The task of American leaders is to negotiate among these policies, not to try--vainly--to select one above the rest. After all, there are definitely snakes in Ireland, and none of the species is endangered.

H.W. Brands is the author, most recently, of The Strange Death of American Liberalism (Yale University Press).