Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
7 (Fall 1992). ISSN 0882-228X

The Historiography of American Foreign Policy

William B. Pickett

The history of American foreign relations reflects an evolving nation and often competing conceptions of history. The milestones have been the European discovery of the American continent five hundred years ago, the colonial decision to seek independence from Britain together with the French decision after the battle of Saratoga to recognize the American Revolution, and by the turn of the nineteenth century, the movement of the United States to world power.

From the outset, historians have debated these events from different perspectives. The first American historians, trained in German universities, tended to look at American history in its smallest detail, as befitted their training. Then the events of 1898 moved them to consider justifying the Spanish-American War and President McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippines. In subsequent years the ideas of the Progressive era turned their attention to economics. Economic interpretation persuaded them to look closely at the reasons for American intervention in World War I (and later World War II). In the 1960s, debates generated by the cold war and the war in Vietnam brought the so-called cold war revisionist interpretation. This view announced that instead of citizens supporting presidential and parliamentary government and free enterprise, American corporations controlled foreign policy. Even during times of relative calm, as between the world wars, American businessmen spread economic influence and political hegemony to all parts of the world, an endeavor termed open door imperialism (after the American open door policy toward China in 1899-1900). Similarly, the huge power that accrued to the United States as arsenal to the allies and arbiter of the peace following the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 did not, according to this view, bring the pursuit of human rights and liberty redeemed, but rather an arrogant nation imposing its will on others. The revisionists said this unfortunate tendency resulted in the involvement and, by 1973, defeat in Vietnam. This view lent perhaps an unduly economic aspect to the history of American foreign relations. It nonetheless stimulated willingness to ask questions and draw lessons.

The debate continues but in recent years has become less acrimonious. The term “post-revisionist” has come into vogue as a way of describing newer interpretations. Pointing out American mistakes while acknowledging the failings of other nations and ideologies, students of American foreign relations are now writing about motives and methods of policy makers and limits placed on them by geography, population, economy, bureaucracy, and culture. They seek information and historical cause in such places as the archives of the department of commerce; trade, labor, and public information organizations; pacifist groups; multi-national corporations; the United Nations Organization; oral history interviews; medical records; and the archives of foreign countries as well as the National Archives and America’s presidential libraries. Historians also have sought the assistance of other humanities and social sciences disciplines.

Books on the history of American foreign relations are far too numerous to mention in detail here. For a sense of the debate between conventional and revisionist historians about the meaning of American foreign relations in the twentieth century, the reader should consult Robert H. Ferrell’s American Diplomacy: The Twentieth Century (1988)* for the conventional school and William A. Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (rev. ed., 1972)* for the revisionist position. The following list of books, organized by events&emdash;usually wars or attempts to avoid them&emdash;contains seventeen titles that combine scholarship with good reading. Where possible it lists paperbacks, marked as above by asterisks.

In outline, the defining events of American diplomacy include first a newly discovered region of the world as seen by the European navigators&emdash;the Western Hemisphere&emdash;and secondly a nation beholden to others but struggling to separate itself from them in association with Great Britain, the principal empire of the time. Gradually, with population growth, territorial expansion, and industrialization, came stature as a nation, and by 1898 a place on the world stage; see Christopher Columbus: Mariner (1955)* by the late Samuel Eliot Morison, one of America’s most admired historians. A more recent book on the Revolutionary War and the treaty ending it (and accompanying recognition of the new nation) is Jonathan R. Dull’s A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (1985). The individual who has written most extensively on the War of 1812 is Reginald Horsman, whose The War of 1812 (1969) is best on its subject.

Many observers consider the Monroe Doctrine to be the first and&emdash;in the nineteenth century&emdash;the most important American diplomatic principle. Through the Doctrine the United States first asserted interests in the Western Hemisphere. Dex-ter Perkins’s The Monroe Doctrine (1955) is excellent. The United States under President Polk gained people and land in the 1840s. David M. Pletcher’s The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (1973) is the authoritative account of these events. The supreme test of the nation’s values and institutions was, of course, the Civil War, set out in James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)*. Finally, the nation’s appearance in the world was in fair part the accomplishment of Theodore Roosevelt, whose personal growth appears in Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979)*.

Intervention in World War I should have made American power and accompanying responsibilities evident to all, but the American people seemed blinded by denial until their reluctant participation in World War II. Two books evaluate American foreign relations in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time of intervention in Europe: Robert H. Ferrell’s Woodrow Wilson and World War I: 1917-1921 (1985)* and his Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1952)*. The coming of World War II appears most satisfactorily in Wayne S. Cole’s Roosevelt and the Isolationists: 1932-1945 (1983) and Donald Watt’s How War Came (1990)*. Perhaps the best account of strategy and diplomacy of the war (also the shortest and easiest to read) is Morison’s Strategy and Compromise (1958).

The outcome of World War II, unlike that of the previous World War, was responsibility and commitment to prevent the return of aggression. Perhaps deception caused by postwar prosperity, a monopoly of nuclear weapons, and ignorance of the importance of battles on Germany’s eastern front caused America to discount the Soviet contribution to victory in Europe and not to see the extent of the Russian sacrifice. This lack of understanding, combined with suspicion of Stalin and the latter’s suspicions of the West, resulted in the cold war. One of the key persons in creating postwar foreign policy was General George C. Marshall, organizer of the U.S. war against the Axis and later secretary of state and secretary of defense. For outbreak of the cold war and American participation see Mark A. Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century (1989)*. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (1982),* explores the purposes and methods of the United States in the postwar world. Finally, the nation’s fall from grace, as it were, appears in what has become the standard account of the nation’s greatest failure of diplomatic and military policy, George Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (2nd ed., 1986)*.

Demise of the Soviet Union (bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism in the country of its origin) restored confidence in U.S. principles. But the decline in American strength appeared in its economic and social problems at home and was, in a sense, heightened by the vitality of the European and Asian economies in the 1980s. The United States, while leading the temporary coalition against Saddam Hussein’s aggression in the Middle East, found itself once again dependent on cooperation of others. Indeed, the nation seemed to be casting around for what to do in a world that was less fearful of nuclear holocaust but at the same time much less predictable. Retrospective evaluations of the position of the United States in the contemporary world appear in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987)* and Gaddis’s recent collection of essays, The United States and the End of the Cold War (1992)*.

William B. Pickett is the author of a recent biography of the Indiana senator, Homer Capehart, and a forthcoming biography of the nation’s thirty-fourth president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He has published many articles and essays on American foriegn relations and teaches at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana.