August 2005 Newsletter
Searching for Monsters: John Gaddis on Adams II, Roosevelt II, and Bush II
by Andrew J. Rotter
Colgate University
Exercises like this one, in which a handful of scholars comment on a recent, controversial book by a leading figure in their field, bring to mind the expression “lèse-majesté” (thumb ing the nose at a sovereign, or better, the immortal wisdom of Dr. Seuss:
Hop, hop.
We like to hop.
We like to hop on top of pop. 1
“Pop” in this case is John Lewis Gaddis, the prolific Yale historian whose small book Surprise, Security, and the American Experience is the subject of discussion here. It typifies the erudition of Gaddis’s work and the grandeur of his vision that he quotes frequently from Shakespeare. It typifies the mild subversiveness required of those asked to serve as Gaddis’s interlocutors that one of them, at least, resorts to quoting Dr. Seuss.
I accepted this assignment with ambivalence. On the one hand, I have profound disagreements with most of Gaddis’s books. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War seems to me to understate the contribution of American ideology to the polarization of the world after 1945; Strategies of Containment convinced a generation of undergraduates (wrongly, in my judgment) that George Kennan had actually differentiated between “perimeter” and “strongpoint” defense; the titles The Long Peace and We Now Know bespeak callousness and overconfidence respectively; and The Landscape of History seems a bit forced, with its discussion of fractal geometry and marmite spilling on the motorway. And yet I like all these books and have assigned several of them over the years. I like them because Gaddis takes documents seriously and reads them carefully, because they are analytically rigorous even if wrongheaded, because they are written with conviction and elegance and sometimes humor, and most of all because they are ambitious and provocative, eschewing the trivial and avoiding the hairsplitting that make monographs in diplomatic history so often dreary. I admire Gaddis for having the courage to be boldly mistaken.
This brings us to Surprise. Gaddis argues that the response of the George W. Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was not a sharp break with past practice but had precedent in history, and specifically in the diplomacy of John Quincy Adams. The United States has always sought to guarantee its security by expanding rather than contracting or “hiding,” as Gaddis puts it. What was already an impulse—James Madison exhorted Americans to “extend the sphere” in Federalist No.10—was codified by Adams, whom Gaddis properly calls “the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century.” 2 Following the traumatic burning of the Capitol and the White House by the British in 1814, Adams developed three principles meant to assure America’s future security: preemption (hit potential enemies before they hit the United States), unilateralism (do not assume that other states care much about U.S. security—if need be, smite enemies alone), and hegemony (establish control of the immediate environment to deny possible enemies a foothold nearby). For the most part presidential administrations through the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth followed Adams’s example. Americans “preempted” Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, and Latin American dictators and revolutionaries. They avoided alliances even unto the Great War, which they entered, as Gaddis notes, not as allies but “associates” of the Triple Entente states. And they permitted no other nation to encroach on their North American possessions or claims, thus ensuring their hegemony on the continent.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is the subject of Gaddis’s second substantive chapter, not only maintained U.S. hegemony but laid the groundwork for extending it. He did so in part by abandoning Adams’s principles of preemption and unilateralism. FDR obviously failed to preempt the Japanese and thereafter refused, for a variety of reasons, to strike first at the Russians, even as it became clear that U.S. and Soviet postwar policies would be at serious cross-purposes. Unilateralism seemed to him obsolete in a world of great danger, and, as Gaddis points out, particularly inappropriate in light of American expectations that Europeans would “do most of the fighting” against Germany. 3 Besides, if after the war the European allies would concede U.S. hegemony in order to ensure their own recovery and protection, there was no point in paying the escalating costs of unilateralism. The Cold War coalition successfully contained Soviet power without resort to all-out war and kept the United States at the forefront of world power, though not so brazenly that the allies resented it.
With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the Bush administration returned, as if by instinct, to the Adams strategy. It launched preemptive strikes on Afghanistan and Iraq, tried for multilateralism but went ahead largely without it when it attacked Saddam Hussein, and sought a global U.S. hegemony linked to universal values, including democracy, which it was determined to implant everywhere. As "misunderestimated" as Prince Hal, Bush proposed a sweeping doctrine that promised to destroy terrorism at its source, effect regime change in states that harbor terrorists, and midwife democracy into being in places where it now exists only as a fond wish or a remote abstraction. All this Gaddis discerns in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" (NSS), dated September 17, 2002. Gaddis is not uncritical of the Bush vision. He regrets the administration’s inability to create an international coalition for the invasion of Iraq, worries that Bush has remained attached to the seismic strategy of “shock and awe,” and, what is most significant, acknowledges that the scope of Bush’s plans goes well beyond anything imagined by Adams and indeed, borders on arrogance. But it is the unabashed paean to military service and patriotism with which Gaddis concludes his book, coupled with his apparent admiration for the “grandness” of Bush’s strategy, that lingers at the end, and not his particular criticisms of the administration.
My reservations about Gaddis’s argument begin with his characterization of Adams’s diplomacy. In the first place, it is unlikely that Adams would describe his strategy as “preemptive.” Though Adams was, as Gaddis notes, entirely willing to use Andrew Jackson’s punitive incursion into Spanish and Seminole Florida in 1818 for his own diplomatic purposes, he did not initiate the expedition, nor did he follow it up with others elsewhere on the continent. In fairness to Jackson and Adams, the Seminoles had raided Georgia and then retreated back to Florida; Jackson’s incursion was more hot pursuit than preemption and was more decisively for cause than the Bush attack on Iraq 185 years later. As Gaddis knows, Adams (not Jackson) planned for tightly regulated expansion on the North American continent, seeking an empire bound together by a system of internal improvements and the careful stewardship of the federal government. Gaddis quotes Adams’s dictum from his famous July 4, 1821 speech: “We go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Elsewhere in the speech Adams is, if less memorable, even more direct: “She [the United States] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.” Thus Adams would disallow not only preemption but also intervention on behalf of, say, democracy—surely a principle to which Americans have always clung. Apart from an interest in taking Cuba, Adams resisted thinking that American institutions could jump water. He would probably have been horrified at William McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippines in 1898 and appalled at the Nietzschean antics of Theodore Roosevelt.
As for unilateralism, Gaddis is right to note Adams’s pivotal role in spurning George
Canning’s offer and going it alone with the Monroe Doctrine. Like everyone else, Americans have always preferred to act without constraint in foreign relations. That preference is less a principle than a truism. In the United States, the desire for unilateralism antedated Adams. But playing nicely with others is sometimes necessary for all but the most powerful nations, and Adams frankly reveled in a good negotiating session, in which he could flaunt his knowledge of history and his sharp wit to good effect. According to Adams’s diary, “the most important day of my life” was not the day Monroe announced his doctrine or even his own wedding day: it was the day in 1819 on which he and the Spanish diplomat Luis de Onís signed the Transcontinental Treaty. Over the next 120 years there were dozens of treaty agreements between the United States and a variety of nations, made in the best tradition of John Quincy Adams; they indicate that FDR was not altogether breaking precedent when he determined to work with allies during World War II.
That Adams pursued U.S. hegemony on the North American continent there can be no doubt. Adams’s commitment to expansionism, in fact, long preceded the British attack on Washington in 1814, and he was, as a contemporary described him, an “amphibious animal,” who coveted the North Atlantic fisheries and maritime trade along with lands to the west. But establishing a “preponderance of power” on a continent without effective rivals is very different from attempting to gain hegemony over peoples on distant continents. I do not agree with Gaddis that had “ Adams lived to see the end of the Cold War, he would not have found the position of the United States within the international system an unfamiliar one.” 4 I think he would have been saddened and alarmed by the extension of American power, at least in its military form. Adams believed that the United States was destined to expand over much of North America because European imperialism on the continent was a spent force —and a good thing, too, for it was, he wrote, “a physical, moral, and political absurdity” that nations so far away from North America should hold colonies on a continent occupied by a strong nation. Means mattered as well. Disappointed that he could not wrest Texas from Spain by negotiation in 1818-19—he might have had it, but colleagues in the Monroe administration and Congress failed to support his demand for it—he nevertheless recoiled when, near the end of his life, he saw President James Polk go to war with Mexico to preserve the annexation of Texas and extend the Texas boundary south. Mexico was, in Adams’s view, a monster needlessly confronted.
The Bush administration argues that democracy is a universal good, a thing that all people crave and for which they, and we on their behalf, are prepared to sacrifice. Democracy is supposed to be the natural result and close relative of freedom. The United States should thus work to undermine or overthrow regimes that oppress their people and prevent them from practicing democracy. “We are confident,” Bush said in a March 8, 2005, speech, “that the desire for freedom, even when repressed for generations, is present in every human heart.” Some of Bush’s critics argue that this is not true: not everyone wants democracy or believes it is the concomitant of freedom. Respect for cultural difference or the sovereignty of other states ought to give the United States pause before it seeks to place democracy elsewhere.
Gaddis lists a series of Bush’s post-9/11 foreign policy accomplishments: “a modest improvement” in the American and world economies; more discussion in Arab countries about the possibility of political reform; a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia and their redeployment elsewhere in the Middle East and Eastern Europe; and an increase in pressure on the authoritarian governments of Syria and Iran. (Recent elections in Iraq and Palestine and street demonstrations in Egypt and Lebanon may provide even better news, though it is not yet clear who will emerge as political victors in those places.) But against all this must be weighed the mistrust generated across the globe by perceived American arrogance; the rapid fall in the value of the American dollar and the escalating price of oil; the continuing instability in Afghanistan and the awful violence in Iraq; and the ongoing specter of al Qaeda terrorism directed against the United States and its allies, made worse, not better, by the invasion of Iraq.
This final point deserves a bit of elaboration. Gaddis implies that he agrees with Bush’s explanation for the 9/11 attacks. “They hate our freedom,” is how the president puts it; Gaddis says that the United States is “an irresistible target for those few whose aspiration is to kill hope.” 5 It is surely true that religious extremists—Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Jewish—associate freedom with license and deplore what they see as an absence of decency at the core of expansive American culture. But “those few,” along with many others in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, resent not America’s freedom or hope but its power, and in particular the way that power is deployed. They mistrust its fickle use: yes in Iraq, eventually in Yugoslavia, a bit in Haiti, no in Rwanda, the Congo, and Darfur. They fear it as provocative, as in Kuwait and Korea, and they fear its possible withdrawal (same places). They dislike its seeming arbitrariness—pressure on the Palestinians but not the Israelis, on the North Koreans but not the Chinese. Most of all, they are angry that Americans use their power to buttress reactionary regimes, as in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, that they kill civilians, and that they humiliate and torture prisoners. They believe Americans use their power to destroy rather than build, and they do not hate freedom or the promise of hope so much as they want Americans genuinely to honor them.
Thus, the Bush administration plans to spread democracy everywhere because it is universally desired, while some of the administration’s opponents deny that democracy is wanted everywhere. There is a third position. Perhaps all people do want democracy or at least want to have the freedom to try it out. But democracy and freedom must grow in native soil and remain self-generating. They cannot be fabricated and imposed by outsiders or they will reflect the attitudes and institutions of outsiders rather than the deepest hopes of recipients. Thus the United States would be better advised to serve as an example of freedom and democracy than to seek to impose its values by force. This is a liberal adaptation of John Winthrop’s admonition to his fellow Puritans on board the Arbella at Massachusetts Bay in 1630. He called upon them to create a “City on a Hill,” a place of godly virtue to be admired and imitated by others. A just nation is an influential nation. That is not always enough, of course. A nation must have a foreign policy. It ought to treat other nations with respect, aim at consistency, offer help and advice when and where it can, and use force only as a genuine last resort. There is nothing wrong, as Dean Acheson once put it, with a nation having “a gun or two around at a critical moment” in case its security or interests are threatened. Still, the United States would do better to make its foreign policy from the inside out. A United States free of repression, race and gender discrimination, nagging inequality and poverty, and a policy of remanding terror suspects to regimes certain to torture them, would do more for the spread of freedom and democracy than a column of tanks rolling down a Baghdad street.
In all likelihood John Quincy Adams would agree. Adams was not always a paragon of virtue. He was a grouch who enjoyed a negotiating adversary’s discomfort. He supported Britain’s Opium War with China, and while I disagree with Gaddis’s view that Andrew Jackson’s policy toward the Indians “was a predictable extension of Adams’s own thinking,” the hands with which Adams manipulated the Native American population were far from clean. 6 But Adams developed a strong moral opposition to slavery, a monster at the heart of the union that demanded destruction. Above all, he thought carefully about patriotism, like John Gaddis. His conclusion: “I disclaim as unsound all patriotism incompatible with the principles of eternal justice.” Those are words worth pondering in this age, as in every other.
The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Frank Costigliola and Carl Guarneri, who
read and commented on this essay.
1 Dr. Seuss, Hop on Pop (New York, 1963). In a speech given at Penn State University-Delaware County on April 2, 2002, President Bush said, “Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of ‘Hop on Pop.’”
2 John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience ( Cambridge, MA, 2004), 18.
3 Ibid., 50.
4 Ibid., 30.
5 Ibid., 116.
6 Ibid., 18.
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