Paul Kendall: Why America Is Dangerous

Paul Kendall: Why America Is Dangerous

In his recent book entitled "A Dangerous Nation," Robert Kagan presents a provocative history of US foreign policy and its relationship both to America’s perceptions of power and to the American national character. It is a very timely book because global surveys of public opinion consistently rate America unflatteringly, as the most dangerous nation on earth.

This should not be surprising. Kagan argues that America has always been a dangerous nation, initially because of our revolutionary ideas and later because we gained the power to impose our will upon others.

Last month this column asked how a new president might transition our foreign affairs away from its myopic focus upon terrorism and its assumption of US super-power status. A number of suggestions were offered, but the truth is that any significant change in direction will depend as much upon the American public’s perception of our nation’s power as it does upon a president’s vision and leadership abilities. So the threshold question that will face the new president is, "Does the American public accept the fact that our nation no longer has the capability to impose its will upon others?"

Kagan’s review of American history illustrates the importance of this question.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the danger that our nation posed to the world was primarily confined to North America. It started with our notions about liberty and free enterprise, which led first to our independence from England and then to our expansion into the lands of Native Americans, France, Spain, and Mexico. As we grew, the threat of our ideas became more global. Our successes gave intellectual, diplomatic, and moral support to revolutions against monarchs and autocrats in Europe and to the Latin American struggles for independence from Spain and Portugal.

After the hiatus of the Civil War, our domestic economy renewed its rapid growth and our overseas commercial activities greatly expanded, especially in the Pacific and in Latin America. To protect these increasingly important foreign interests, we began constructing a powerful, ocean-going navy. And as that navy grew, America’s perception of its power changed. We began to perceive that the US now had the ability to influence events in the rest of the world; and believing that we had that capability, we used it. This made America a different kind of dangerous nation.

The first display of this came in an 1895 boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana, when President Cleveland asserted that the US should be the sole arbiter of all disputes within the Western Hemisphere, and Europe acquiesced. Then in 1898 President McKinley gave a second reason for our intervention in world affairs. He proclaimed that the US had a "moral obligation" to protect oppressed peoples, and so he justified going to war with Spain over Cuba. The resulting US occupations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, together with the annexation of Hawaii—all in 1898—confirmed our new-found power and our arrival as a great nation on the world’s stage.

Unfortunately, from this columnist’s perspective, a consequence of that arrival was that we demoted to second place in our foreign policy the original source of our danger: our ideas about individual liberty, democracy, and self-determination. The subsequent use of our power became less a threat to autocrats and oligarchs than to civil rights advocates, fledgling democracies, and independence movements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Most recently, our over-confidence in that power has led to the misadventure in Iraq, the mishandling of Afghanistan, and the loss of influence among our traditional friends and allies.

The critical questions now before the nation therefore are, do we still believe that America has the capability to bend the rest of the world to its will? Or are we beginning to realize that just as our economic strength is diminishing, so too has our military power become insufficient to assure our nation’s security and prosperity?

President Whomever in 2009 will certainly be asking these same questions. If he/she believes that the American public, the press, and Rush Limbaugh are debating the questions, then he/she will enter the White House with the way prepared for change. The public will have already moved from an unquestioned acceptance of America’s role as the world’s rightful leader and arbiter to a position of openness as to what America’s new role should be. President Whomever’s vision and leadership abilities would then prove critical to the public’s acceptance of a different policy and strategic framework for pursuing our well-being.

If he/she is successful in changing the foundation of our international relationships, however, our new President will not have changed the nature of America’s national character. As Kagan points out, we are and will remain an out-spoken and aggressive people with radical ideas about liberty and opportunity. These ideas will continue to stir imaginations around the globe, and in this constructive sense America will always be a dangerous nation.

Paul Kendall, a semi-retired private investor and resident of Braintree, has traveled widely and lived in South America. He has studied foreign policy at American University in Washington, D.C. and focuses on issues of national security and U.S.-Latin American relations.