Be prepared to be shocked (and awed) because Robert Kagan posits some of the most controversial theories about the United States' foreign policy including:
Washington's Farewell Address: a speech not for the ages, but one only intended for the first few years of the young republic Monroe Doctrine: much debated, but not implemented, because of the issue that tore apart the nation in the second quarter of the 19th century Hawaiian Statehood: applied for annexation to the United States in the first half of the 19th century, but because it fell south of the Missouri compromise line, and thus would be classified as a slave state, refused, and had to wait more than 100 years to join the nation as a state The Spanish-American War: perhaps the most popular war in U.S. history?
Kagan takes us on an exhaustive, exhausting thrill-ride through the foreign policy decisions of the United States from its pre-Revolutionary War era to the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. (The reader will have to wait for the next volume to find out what happens in the twentieth century.) Forget your dull high school history books; what you'll find here confounds the complacent reader who can name the Battles of each of our wars, but not the battles that were fought before, during, and after the bloodshed.
The saddest, most shocking section of the book focuses on the issue that eclipsed America's external focus of terroritorial expansion in the 19th century as it imploded in the years from the 1820's to the 1860's: slavery. Kagan describes a time when the United States stood alone among the nations of the world as our shameful sin, slavery, was denounced by intellectuals and the common man throughout the rest of the world community. We were founded on a belief that all men were created equal, and indeed had certain inalienable rights, yet we were hypocritically ignoring the denial of rights to our fellow human beings toiling in our own backyards.
The war that erupted between two sections of the country, sections as diametrically opposed to each other as the primary colors of red and blue, was the most wretched, hard-fought, emotionally-charged conflict in our history. And the aftermath was just as devastating as the lead-up to the war, with the South feeling itself to be an occupied country, with its "colored" population hardly any better off than they were before the War.
Kagan introduces us to characters who were the rock stars of their time (think Bono, not Britney). John Quincy Adams emerges from the shadow of a much-respected Founding Father father to become the leading abolitionist in public office. And William Seward, who, alas, has gone down in history attached to the unfortunate moniker "Folly," is revealed as one of New York State's (and the nation's) most principled, distinguished statesmen. (And Seward's Folly? Hardly. The 20th century Cold War would have heated up to a boil if Russia had still maintained a presence in the North American continent.)
Perhaps the biggest revelation in the book concerns the Spanish-American War, over the issue of Cuban independence. Cuban rebels, in an attempt to repel the Spanish, ceased working in any industry in an effort to force the Spanish out; the Spanish, playing hardball, removed hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their homes and settled them in (re)concentration camps, where as many as 300,000 are believed to have died from starvation. The citizens of the United States, Kagan maintains, demanded military action, fueled not by revenge for the sinking of the Maine, not by the lurid stories of the so-called yellow journalists, but by humanitarian concerns.
Heroes and villains, brilliant minds and darkest hearts, Kagan introduces you to a country, a people, who struggled to create a society that reflected the very best in human achievement, sometimes attaining it, sometimes not.
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