| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy. By Henry R. Nau. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. xvi, 314 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-3931-0.)

Another in the recent blizzard of prescriptive books vying to provide a post-Cold War road map for U.S. foreign policy makers, Henry R. Nau's provocative study will likely prove of greater interest to political scientists, international relations specialists, and diplomatic practitioners than to historians. Yet the author, himself a political scientist, draws many of his conclusions and much of his accompanying analysis from an appreciation of the past. It is an appreciation, one must note, derived from a highly selective reading of the relevant historical literature—a problem that has often plagued grand foreign policy theorists from Nau's academic discipline.

The sweeping, schematic nature of some of his characterizations will unsettle many historians. Can one reasonably depict the United States, for example, as a nation that has evolved from an "electoral democracy" (1865–1930) to a "social democracy" (1930–1965) to a "multicultural democracy" (1965–present) (pp. 68, 73, 77)? Or posit a pattern of American involvement in the world that has lurched from engagement to exhaustion to exit?

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