Diplomatic Traditions that Echo across a Century

Jack L. Hammersmith
West Virginia University

Hannigan, Robert E., The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898-1917. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. xiii+ 271 pp.  Notes and index, $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-3666-1.

Ambrosius, Lloyd E., Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations. New York: Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2002. 181 pp. Notes and index, $75.00 (cloth) ISBN: 1-4039-6008-9; $24.95 (paper) ISBN: 1-4039-6009-7.

Fueled by the deadly drama of 9/11 and shaped by the policies of a president little schooled in the nuances of diplomacy, foreign policy has come to play an increasingly dominant role in twenty-first century American life. Yet, as two historians show in their quite different approaches to the U.S. diplomatic tradition, contemporary officials owe a considerable debt to the distant past. Focusing on the years 1898-1917, Robert Hannigan of Suffolk University and Bentley College examines in detail the emergence of the U.S. as the new world power. Lloyd Ambrosius of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln concentrates on the latter years of that era when Woodrow Wilson defined American diplomatic practice in a manner that would continue to influence policies for decades to come. Both works are insightful and of value to serious students of American foreign policy (including specialists) as well as concerned citizens.	1
Hannigan's is the more traditional work of American diplomatic history, a sound, detailed examination of those years between the onset of America's war with Spain and Wilson's reluctant decision in the spring of 1917 to enter World War I. Seeking to "explain the trajectory" of American foreign policy in these years, Hannigan organizes most of the book around regions of the world, partly in an effort to avoid a traditional focus on presidential administrations. Throughout his study, he seeks to link domestic progressive reform with the actions of American leaders attempting "to ensure a framework within which . . . the U.S. might successfully realize 'wealth and greatness' in the coming twentieth-century world" (xi).	2
Central to the emergence of the American nation upon the global scene was, in Hannigan's analysis, the "social evolutionary ideas" which he argues were "virtually all-pervasive among comfortable propertied, old-stock Americans" who dominated policy-making at this time (2). They viewed the world as being populated by peoples of great diversity, yet viewed authentic leaders as only those men who were imbued with a particular set of values and virtues. Strength of character, self-control, and a commitment to order were among the characteristics which defined such leaders and, by extension, great nations. The men who, given their background, breeding, and behavior, counted most at home should also control the world and its agenda. As Hannigan writes, "At bottom, the same vision, the same values, and the same assumptions that informed the general domestic approaches these men endorsed also guided their foreign policy" (12).	3
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