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Americans have always struck outside observers as being a bundle of contradictions. Europeans from Tocqueville on have noted how, in the strange world across the Atlantic, forthright materialists are consumed with spiritual ardors while the mantra of liberty sounds forth from compulsive conformists. From Latin American angle, such beguiling paradoxes shade into dangerous duplicity. Smiling agents of free trade wind up demanding dictatorial governments; the proud pioneers of national liberation forbid "old Europe" from meddling in the hemisphere, the better to turn it into a Yankee domain run on the economics of colonialism.
So too, George Herring's massive survey of American diplomatic history runs along a double track, supplying enough evidence along the way to allow the reader to decide whether the whole amounts to contrapuntal music or clinical bipolar disorder. Perhaps a biological metaphor is most apt, for over its 230-year course of development, American foreign policy has evinced a distinctive consistency that argues the operation of a determinative DNA. One strand is composed of a persistent idealism that wishes the United States to be a blessing to thers—at the same time tending to regard these others as either dangerous sophisticates (Europe) or benighted primitives (most everybody else). Refreshingly free of hypocrisy, then, appears to be the other strand, the raw pragmatism that drives Americans to pursue their national self-interest much like any other country.The problem—or the intrigue—is that the two strands make a genuine double helix, inseparably intertwined. Pragmatism by definition involves adjustment to reality, but the "reality" of a given situation is framed by the idealism with which it was sighted in the first place. Then too, "idealism" itself is composed of mixed quantities: one part good will, one part willed blindness and thus pretense, one part calculated public-relations appeal, thus cynicism—a cynicism that can then invoke the rationale of pragmatic adjustment to cloak both the pragmatism and cynicism with the moral warrant of ideal intentions.
Nor, in Herring's telling, does one strand really work without the other. If the high-mindedness of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter ran aground, first bungling in its innocence, then overcompensating with rationalization, to end in fatal ambiguity, the ruthless realism of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ran that administration out of office, its proud amorality turning out to be naïve given American sensibilities. The winners in Herring's account are those presidential and diplomatic eagles who are wise enough to hunt only land-able fish, to stay out of the range of other hunters' guns, and to remember that their breed must evoke in American hearts something of the disciplined and noble.
Refusing to choose between the motifs of innocence and imperialism, Herring tries instead to explain how and with what consequences each has fueled the other. The light interpretive touch befits his volume's place in the Oxford History of the United States, which aims to blend thorough treatment and engaging style to bridge the divide between scholarly expert and interested reader. That mandate elevates narrative over analysis and runs the risk of settling interpretive differences at the dead middle of the road. Herring avoids that pitfall by clearly setting forth his own conclusions on controversial points, pointing the reader to divergent opinions in the notes.
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