Walter A. McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America's Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the bookjacket: "McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive faith that 'Godis on our side' has inspired U.S. foreign policy ever since 1776. The first comprehensive study of the role of civil religion in U.S. foreign relations over the nation's entire history, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy explores the deeply infused religious rhetoric that has driven an otherwise secular republic through peace, war, and global interventions for more than two hundred years" From the text: "Aged baby boomers recall growing up in an era when Americans boasted of never having lost a war. That was before they began to wage unwindable wars against abstractions such as poverty, drugs, and tyranny, not to mention third-rate countries they were too foolish to leave alone and too rule-bound to defeat. [] The U.S. homeland has so far been spared another catastrophic attach. But it is dubious how much the Afghan and Iraqi wars contributed to homeland security, while any victories have been pyrrhic and have added $5 trillion to the national debt. [] The only excuse to be made for the strategic insolvent bequeathed by the Bush 43 administration is that gave the public what it demanded. For Americans at large behaved the way they always do when demonic foreigners dare to interfere with their pursuit of happiness. They demanded disproportionate vengeance and perfect security, while pretending their government's wars were part of a universal crusade. Far from being sui generic, the administration's response to 9/11 and the public's response to that response were altogether predictable. As Adman Garfinkel concluded, 'At its core, the /11 decade has not been about what others have done to America; it has been about what we Americans have done to ourselves, here in our transcontinental, open-air church we call a country.'" Id. at 15-16. "On September 12, 2001, work began on a national security Presidential Directive (NSPD) that called for the 'elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life.' On September 14, 2001, Bush said, 'Our responsibility to history is already clear, to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.' On September 20, 2001, the president insisted, 'You are either with us or with the terrorists' and declare the war 'will not stop until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.' In 2002 Bush's State of the Union address, West Point graduation speech, and new National Security Strategy fleshed out the new agenda. Since the United States now possessed unprecedented and unequal strength and influence, it was time to 'translate this moment of influence into unilateral strikes to confront threats before they reached America's shores; to confront the Axis of Evil, comprising Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. In January 2003 Bush proclaimed, 'Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.' The utopian rhetoric peaked in Bush's second inaugural address, which referred forty-seven time to liberty and freedom and committed America to 'the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." "Oscar Wilde observed that the fanatic's worst vice is sincerity. But the only ones possibly fooled were Americans themselves, who were persuaded to compromise personal freedoms, rights, and protections in the apparent belief that terrorists posed a greater threat than the Soviet Union's thirty-five thousand nuclear warheads. To name terror the enemy rather than terrorist organizations, to claim jihadis hate the West only for its liberty, and to speak of a contest between freedom and tyranny were simplifications at best. To speak of draining the swamps of Islamo-fascism through democratization of the whole Muslim crescent was mad." Id, at 23-24. Yet, now with the great con Donald J. Trump as president, viewing ISIS and what he calls Islamic Extremists as existential threats to America, and no interest in encouraging democracy, Americans will be less free, less secure, and will have countless horrors done to others in their name.).
Walter A. McDougall Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) (From the book jacket: "Promised Land, Crusader State is an iconoclastic reinterpretation of the traditions that have shaped U.S. foreign policy from 1776to the present. [I]t exposes the myths that obscure the real meaning of such concepts as American Exceptionalism, Isolationism, Manifest Destiny, Wilsonianism, and Containment. Taking up the torch of George Kennan, . . . Walter McDougall proposes nothing less than to cleanse the vocabulary of our post-Cold War debate on America's place in world affairs. Looking back over two centuries he draws a striking contrast between America as a Promised Land, a vision inspired by the 'Old Testament' of our diplomatic wisdom though the nineteenth century, and the contrary vision of America as a Crusader State, which inspired the 'New Testament' of our foreign policy beginning at the time of the Spanish-American War and reaching its fulfillment in Vietnam. To this day, the two visions and these two testaments battle for control of the way America sees its role in the world.").
