Book Review: Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance

In the years after the Cold War, foreign policy took a backseat in the minds of many Americans. Of course, the United States was involved in the world--NAFTA, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, etc. But with the exception of the Gulf War, the nation's people tended to be wary of foreign engagement outside of the realm of trade. It seemed that the United States had won the Cold War and, more broadly, won control over the world. Francis Fukuyama notoriously claimed that we had reached "the end of history." Now we could trade and travel around the world. Who could stop the obvious superiority of American free market capitalism? And when obstacles did stand in our way, we did our best to cover our eyes and ignore what was going around us. We were reticent to enter Bosnia and only did so after hundreds of thousands of people were dead. We never made a national commitment to Somalia and pulled out after the disastrous Battle of Mogadishu. We ignored the genocide in Rwanda entirely. We chalked the first attempt to blow the World Trade Center up to a few crazy extremists and went on our merry way.

Of course 9/11 changed all of that. Some change was inevitable after that date, but the incompetent ideologues running the country made the transformation all the more painful and unnecessary. The rise of China threatened American economic power, along with rising oil prices and the falling dollar. The pointless Iraq war brought America's international prestige to a point as low as in the doldrums of the late 1970s. Perhaps most importantly, Americans have had to engage the world in a way we thought we had left behind after 1991. Whereas 15 years ago, we thought the world was our oyster, now we feel besieged in a world of hostile religions, growing rivals, and saddled with a declining economy.

Not surprisingly, this new world is leading to interesting new books on U.S. foreign policy. One of the leading recent works is Michael H. Hunt's The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance. Providing a long overview from early American history to the present, Hunt does a fantastic job of showing how the U.S. became the global hegemon and how it has always existed in a world not of its own making.

A major point here is that the United States is not exceptional. American exceptionalism has long been a major national myth. Hunt demonstrates how American expansionism largely mirrored that of Europe except that our 19th century conquests came on our own soil. In the 20th century, our attempts to dominate the world were really little different than those of Britain, France, or the Soviet Union. In my view certainly, the sooner these ideas about American exceptionalism can be destroyed, the better off the nation will be and I appreciate Hunt's efforts toward this goal.

Hunt also does a fantastic job of emphasizing the importance of U.S. culture in pushing foreign policy. From Coca-Cola to automobiles to movies, U.S. cultural products have arguably done more to both push American interests and to alienate our enemies than anything accomplished in the State Department or the White House. This sort of cultural foreign policy history is traditionally understudied, though that has changed significantly in recent years. Pairing the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa with Robert McNamara and Walt Rostow to understand America's foreign policy in the 1960s not only expands our definitions of U.S. foreign policy, but also makes a lot of historical sense.

Hunt discusses many interesting points that I don't have to go into in detail. He shows the complicity of the Republican Party in the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s, detailing how happy U.S. companies were to invest in Mussolini's Italy and how J.P. Morgan became Mussolini's leading financial advisor on international issues. (100), how the United States help doom democracy in the developing world by practicing the slogan "Better for freedom to come slowly than risk disorder" (232), and showing compelling evidence that dismisses the Republican myth that Reagan won the Cold War (263).

Finally, Hunt places the U.S. war in Iraq in historical and global context. He minces no words. Among other attacks, when describing Bush's foreign policy, he writes, "A macho streak that was part of Bush's Texas ethos and compensated for a lifetime of underachievement may have at this point [after 9/11] come into play" (279). The Bush administration has created one of the great disasters of American history, one that threatens America's hegemonic position in the world. Hunt questions the durability of American hegemony, suggesting that it is difficult for nations to retain their position at the top. We may be seeing this now. The decline of the dollar, America's extreme susceptibility to oil prices, the rise of China and India, the failure of the United States to succeed in Iraq or Afghanistan, and global warming may all be threatening the United States' ability to navigate a tricky world successfully.

I definitely recommend this well-written overview of U.S. foreign policy for anyone interested in the issue. This challenging book forces the reader to question the role of the U.S. in the world and made this reader at least wonder about the future of this nation and of the world.