Dangerous Nation?

Neoconservative Robert Kagan has penned a new book on American imperialism that was reviewed today in the New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

The thesis of Kagan’s book, titled Dangerous Nation, holds that early America’s regard for power politics as “alien and repulsive” is groundless.

Wheatcroft takes exception to this premise and so do I.

Granted, America took its Manifest Destiny very seriously, and arguably pursued it as fanatically and ruthlessly against the Indians as the Germans did their own version against the Slavic East. But there is a significant difference, I think, between continental and global expansionism. As Wheatcroft argues — convincingly, I think — Americans, with a few noteworthy exceptions, ”really did withdraw from the temptations and perils of the world.”

There were exceptions, like the astonishing story of the campaign against the Barbary pirates of North Africa (the Islamofascists of 1804?), when the whole American fleet sailed 4,000 miles to the Mediterranean and the Marines landed on the shores of Tripoli. For all that, by the time this book ends, and for nearly two decades more, no American infantry battalion ever set foot in Europe, and the only great war the American people had ever fought was against each other.

And let’s not forget that from the 1860s to the 1880s, Chile had a larger navy than the United States — a fact even Kagan concedes — hardly evidence of a nation that has harbored imperial ambitions from its very beginning.