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Bishop's Book Review

 

Promised Land, Crusader State
By Walter A. McDougall
(1997: Houghton and Mifflin) 286 pages

 

Walter A. McDougall is a professor of History and International Relations at The University of Pennsylvania. He has written a book that both John Kerry and George Bush should read. In Promised Land, Crusader State, McDougall convincingly divides our 200+ years of Foreign Policy into eight movements. Four of those movements see this country’s place in the world as an Old Testament “Promised Land” and four of these movements see America as a New Testament like “Crusader State.”

Summarized briefly, the prevailing theme of American foreign policy until about 1898 was “Promised Land.” The notion was that America was a “city on a hill” and to preserve our republic at home required physical and emotional distance from the world. Indeed, we felt largely in those days that to change the world was impossible and dangerous to us! Since the Spanish-American War, with some interludes, another idea, the “Crusader State” idea has reigned supreme. Under this notion our ideals of democracy needed to be exported. The prominent change agent in this shift of policy is represented by Woodrow Wilson. His own missionary evangelical Protestantism was a huge factor in this megashift of the American understanding of ourselves and the world.
Most recently, our “Crusader State” ideas have been secularized so as a nation we today export an economic-political system over any propagation of the Christian impulse. World War II was a successful crusade, Vietnam was not. McDougall talks negatively of a “Mother Theresa Foreign Policy” where naive idealists see our foreign burden as “social worker to the world.” He calls on our national leaders to be swayed little by emotions in our foreign policy but to see it in rational self interest terms. A romantic notion of the world is dangerous he believes. Always, American foreign policy must be in the tangible American interest and that is how it must be measured.

Thomas A. Skrenes
Bishop

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