Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage)

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Most Americans believe the United States had been an isolationist power until the twentieth century. This is wrong. In a riveting and brilliantly revisionist work of history, Robert Kagan, bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power, shows how Americans have in fact steadily been increasing their global power and influence from the beginning. Driven by commercial, territorial, and idealistic ambitions, the United States has always perceived itself, and been seen by other nations, as an international force. This is a book of great importance to our understanding of our nation’s history and its role in the global community.

Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

robert kagan responds December 18, 2006
67 out of 74 found this review helpful

Just for the record, I began this book in 1996 and finished 90 percent of it before the Iraq War began. I'm amazed that anyone can imagine I wrote this book in less than two years.

5 out of 5 stars

An eminent read October 24, 2006
43 out of 48 found this review helpful

In this provocative and insightful book the author delves into the history of American foreign policy and proposes the radical suggestion that internationalism is far more in America's historical blood than isolationism. We have been accustomed to think that isolationism, based on Washington's reference to avoiding European alliances, is the national pastime, and it certainly was in certain periods and championed by certain voices. However this book shows that a radical sense of the puritan secular ethic, combined with anti-colonialism led America to challenge the world and that in her history America has always espoused special unique values such as capitalism and democracy. The Civil War is seen as a jumping off place for true American power.

This book is not a minute history of American expansion but concentrates on its major theorists and pushers such as the South's view towards expanding to the tropics under Jefferson Davis, Polk, Blaine and others. However there are major oversights. The role of mapmakers and explorers such as Fremont is ignored and it appears there are no maps in the book which makes reference to foreign policy problematic.

American foreign policy is fascinating and this book helps to dust off the 19th century, which has been viewed as a time of American isolationism and inward ignorance, and reshape our view to see it as a time when American theories were laid down that put the groundwork together for the policies of Wilson and FDR, as well as Reagan, Kennedy and Bush.

A brilliant work, a needed contribution.

Seth J. Frantzman

4 out of 5 stars

A Neoconservative History of American Foreign Policy December 21, 2006
36 out of 43 found this review helpful

In this new book by Robert Kagan - the first in a projected two-volume study - he tells us that America, unlike previously believed, was never an isolationist or inward-looking "city on the hill," but rather an expansionist power pursuing a "universalistic nationalism." The latter sounds like a contradiction in terms but Kagan does a masterful job in explaining it.

For those who read "Of Paradise and Power," the present volume will cover some of the same issues and will again seem like a defense of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. To an extent it is, though not explicitly. What Kagan is attempting to do is to show that America has always been an aggressive - dangerous - nation. This volume covers foreign policy from the time of the Puritans to the end of the nineteenth century. (Another good book on this subject is by John Lewis Gaddis in "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience.")

Kagan argues that Americans were always aggressive, not so much in their acquisiton of colonies, but in their quest to remake the world in their own image. America achieved nationhood with the Declaration of Independence, which claimed "universal natural rights." This was something totally new. Not only was this the founding declaration of nationhood, it was also, according to Kagan, the founding document of American foreign policy. National interests became universal interests. The danger of declaring that one's national interests are universal has been amply displayed by our current administration. Universal natural rights are an alien concept in most foreign lands.

This American sense of righteousness played a large role in the Civil War. Lincoln explicitly invoked the principles of human rights and the government's right to promote and defend them in his execution of the war to end slavery.

This same righteoussness was drawn upon, perversely, in America's westward expansion and its dislplacement of the Indians. The mission to "civlize" was a manifestation of the desire to spread liberal values. This was of course very hypocritical and Kagan is not supportive of it, he is describing some of the motives behind the desire to remake the continent.

Kagan's thesis is that America's expansion was not about territory alone but also about spreading "liberal republican" values. Liberal as Kagan uses the term refers to individual rights free from government control. This is not liberalism as it is understood in America today, usually meaning more government intervention. Kagan's liberalism is to be understood in the original sense as Adam Smith used the term. Individuals unconstrained by government or tradition were free pursue weath and property to their fullest. It was right for America, and Americans believed it was right for everyone. Kagan views this kind of untrammelled liberalism as a good thing, others, however, view us as a dangerous nation.

5 out of 5 stars

U.S. foreign policy as seen around the globe January 14, 2007
27 out of 28 found this review helpful

Robert Kagan's "Dangerous Nation" is a comprehensive and often eye-opening book regarding U.S. foreign policy since pre-Revolutionary War days. Thrusting an arrow into America's notion of "manifest destiny", Kagan sets out, and ultimately succeeds in relating the news that we Americans aren't as noble as we might have thought. Clearly and concisely, the author tells us why.

With a timeline as his narrative outline, Kagan begins with a look at America in its infancy, emphasizing a national tentativeness about foreign entanglements as the country tried to build on the successful outcome of the Revolution. England, France and Spain, of course, formed the triumvirate of foreign powers sometimes allying with the United States but often at odds with us. Kagan is very good at describing the balancing act that the early presidents had to achieve with regard to these European nations.

As much time as the author spends with the Founding Fathers, this really is more of a book about the actions and reactions of the United States in the nineteenth century and with it, two key figures emerge...John Quincy Adams in the early part of the century and James G. Blaine in the latter part. Both Secretaries of State had vision, insight and political knowledge as to the benefits and pitfalls in which the country might find itself. While much of "Dangerous Nation" is not historically new to American history buffs, there are some added, fascinating insights. Kagan spices up a couple of chapters with a comparison of the foreign policy positions of the administrations of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison... two men who had widely differing views on how aggressive the United States should be in its outlook on the world. That Democrats and Republicans changed hands in the White House four times in four successive national elections (thereby wrenching foreign policy to and fro) is a great side theme.

Kagan ends his first volume (volume two is to be written) with the onset of the Spanish-American War, perhaps, as he puts it, the most popular war in the nation's history. By this time, the United States was already a world power and this was reflected in the nation's attitude toward freeing Cuba from Spain, pushing the frustrated President McKinley (who wanted to stay out of war) into finally taking action.

If history is one of life's great lessons, there are many times in "Dangerous Nation" that one reads about the foreign policy mistakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are clearly repeated in America's intervention in Iraq. Overreaching, an effort to establish democracies where they may not be wanted and a will to impose our "goodness" as a nation are just some examples. Robert Kagan has offered a wonderfully thorough book in "Dangerous Nation" and I highly recommend it, especially for its look at how United States foreign policy has been viewed over time from within our own borders and from without.

4 out of 5 stars

Refreshing Look at Early American Foreign Policy December 22, 2006
17 out of 20 found this review helpful

Robert Kagan begins this first volume of his history of American foreign policy by arguing that the Puritans' concept of America as a "City on a Hill" had less of an impact on the nation's development than the culture of "aggressive expansionism" and "acquisitive materialism" that developed along the Chesapeake Bay. This is the first, but not the last, myth that Kagan takes great relish in demolishing in this important new book on America's relations with the rest of the world up to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War.

Kagan's argument is that the notion that the United States was an isolationist power uninterested in world affairs until recently is dead wrong. He contends that the United States always had a keen interest in world affairs and in promoting its agenda abroad. And not just any agenda -- Kagan rejects the idea that the early architects of American foreign policy were motivated principally by national interest. Instead, spreading classical liberal economic and political ideas around the world was the main aim of Americans from the beginning.

One of Dangerous Nation's strengths, as it was with Kagan's last book ("Of Paradise and Power"), is the clarity and force of his writing. He uses vivid, yet succinct, language to communicate his ideas. The book is also enjoyable for the spotlight it shines on less well known incidents in American foreign policy, such as the American confrontation with Germany over Somoa in the 1880s. There are so many interesting little corners of this book, such as Kagan's argument that the United States' foreign policy could hardly fail to be unique because its republican institutions were answerable to its citizens for their safety and prosperity; his explanation as to why the ebb and flow of American expansion resulted, in part, from the nation's debate over slavery; and his description of the views of America from abroad, which were at times hopeful that the United States might bring a new order of things to the world and at other times fearful as to what that new order would be.

The quibble that I would have with his book is that some of the ideas he works so hard to debunk sometimes seem to be little more than straw men. Much of the book sets up, as its antithesis, the idea that America had NO interest in the world and wanted NO relations with the rest of the world. Such a premise is easy to knock down, because then any American who even expresses an interest in something that happens outside the nation's borders easily refutes it. Kagan can therefore raise his argument and easily "prove" it, for instance, with reference to the fierce debates over the Napoleonic Wars.

Nevertheless, the book is a great romp through the first one hundred plus years of American foreign policy. I look forward to Volume II.

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