What America Owes the World
The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy

This book, first published in 1998, is an intellectual and moral history of US foreign policy.

H. W. Brands (Author)

9780521630313, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 September 1998

346 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.7 cm, 0.59 kg

'The book is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject.' International Studies

For two hundred years, Americans have believed that they have an obligation to improve the lot of humanity. This belief has consistently shaped US foreign policy. Yet within this consensus, two schools of thought have contended: the 'exemplarist' school (Brands' term) which holds that what America chiefly owes the world is the benign example of a well-functioning democracy, and the 'vindicationist' school which argues that force must sometimes supplement a good example. In this book, H. W. Brands traces the evolution of these two schools as they emerged in the thinking and writing of the most important public thinkers of the last two centuries. This book, first published in 1998, is both an intellectual and moral history of US foreign policy and a guide to the fundamental question of America's relations with the rest of the world - a question more pressing than ever in the confusion that has succeeded the Cold War: What does America owe the world?

Preface
1. Exceptionalists all! The first hundred years
2. Brooks Adams: Marx for imperialists
3. Walter Lippmann and a new republic for a new era
4. When the future worked and the trains ran on time: Lincoln Steffens
5. Dr Beard's garden
6. Kennan, Morgenthau, and the sources of superpower conduct
7. Reinhold Niebuhr and the foreign policy of original sin
8. God blinked, but Herman didn't
9. On Wisconsin: Madison and points left
10. The brief of Norman's woe: commentary and the new conservatism
11. It ain't over till it's over - and not even then.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]