The Audacity of Hope

alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions—and that the wonders of globalization
might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread of pandemics, and terrorism.
In other words, our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the globe. At
times, American foreign policy has been farsighted, simultaneously serving our national
interests, our ideals, and the interests of other nations. At other times American policies
have been misguided, based on false assumptions that ignore the legitimate aspirations
of other peoples, undermine our own credibility, and make for a more dangerous world.
Such ambiguity shouldn’t be surprising, for American foreign policy has always been a
jumble of warring impulses. In the earliest days of the Republic, a policy of isolationism
often prevailed—a wariness of foreign intrigues that befitted a nation just emerging
from a war of independence. “Why,” George Washington asked in his famous Farewell
Address, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our
peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or
caprice?” Washington’s view was reinforced by what he called America’s “detached
and distant situation,” a geographic separation that would permit the new nation to
“defy material injury from external annoyance.”
Moreover, while America’s revolutionary origins and republican form of government
might make it sympathetic toward those seeking freedom elsewhere, America’s early
leaders cautioned against idealistic attempts to export our way of life; according to John
Quincy Adams, America should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” nor
“become the dictatress of the world.” Providence had charged America with the task of
making a new world, not reforming the old; protected by an ocean and with the bounty
of a continent, America could best serve the cause of freedom by concentrating on its
own development, becoming a beacon of hope for other nations and people around the
globe.
But if suspicion of foreign entanglements is stamped into our DNA, then so is the
impulse to expand—geographically, commercially, and ideologically. Thomas Jefferson
expressed early on the inevitability of expansion beyond the boundaries of the original
thirteen states, and his timetable for such expansion was greatly accelerated with the
Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. The same John Quincy Adams
who warned against U.S. adventurism abroad became a tireless advocate of continental
expansion and served as the chief architect of the Monroe Doctrine—a warning to
European powers to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. As American soldiers and
settlers moved steadily west and southwest, successive administrations described the
annexation of territory in terms of “manifest destiny”—the conviction that such
expansion was preordained, part of God’s plan to extend what Andrew Jackson called
“the area of freedom” across the continent.
Of course, manifest destiny also meant bloody and violent conquest—of Native
American tribes forcibly removed from their lands and of the Mexican army defending
its territory. It was a conquest that, like slavery, contradicted America’s founding
principles and tended to be justified in explicitly racist terms, a conquest that American
mythology has always had difficulty fully absorbing but that other countries recognized
for what it was—an exercise in raw power.