Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 19
ESSAY
PROMISED LAND
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
IN THE FOUNDING ER A
Walter A. McDougall
W
ho are we, we Americans? Are we
champions of liberty, both civil and
religious, both at home and abroad? Are we a
nation of many immigrant nations and thus
a template for a united humanity? Are we a
new Chosen People in a new Promised Land?
Are we exceptional because of a unique
immunity from the weight of history? Are
we universal insofar as all other nations are
destined to follow the trail we blaze until,
as the poet Tennyson prophesied in Locksley
Hall, "the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and
the battle-flags were furl'd / In the Parliament
of man, the Federation of the world"? Or do
Americans suffer from the most outlandish
delusions of grandeur in history? Do we just
fool ourselves by wrapping our private pur-
suits of happiness in sanctimonious pieties?
Or are Americans all the above: good, bad,
and ugly for the reason that we have been
freer than any people in history to indulge
the full range of human nature?
I believe sociologist Robert Bellah was
correct to impute to the United States a
civil religion. It can never become explicit,
of course, but the American civil religion
(or ACR as I call it) is like the atmosphere
in which we live and move and have our
being, because most Americans have always
believed, or wanted to believe, or pretended
to believe that their nation was planted by
Providence and endowed with a mission
to the whole human race. Today it goes by
the name "exceptionalism," a term invented
during the early Cold War. But the debate
over U.S. foreign relations has from the start
revolved around the moral as well as practi-
cal question of how to reconcile America's
interests with its values or, to put it in ACR
terms, the question of what America's God
requires of us.1
Are we called to be peaceful exemplars of
the American Creed or militant vindicators
of it? A city upon a hill trusting in Providence
Walter A. McDougall is professor of history and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the
University of Pennsylvania. This essay was first presented at the Hillsdale College Center for Constructive
Alternatives conference on September 8-11, 2013.
19
Modern Age - Fall 2014
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