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Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage)
 
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Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage) (Paperback)

by Robert Kagan (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 544 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage Books USA; Reprint edition (6 Nov 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0375724915
  • ISBN-13: 978-0375724916
  • Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 13.2 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 659,015 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beware, 5 Jun 2008
By Steve Keen "therealus" (Herts, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Dangerous Nation: America in the World 1600-1900 (Hardcover)
The United States' ability to cause trouble, sometimes unwittingly, has been demonstrated repeatedly during the nation's history, and Robert Kagan here gives the background to some of those episodes, motivated sometimes by expansionism (Mexican and Indian Wars), sometimes by the desire of slavers to expand their influence (the struggle for Texas, which I admit I'd never perceived or seen portrayed in that light before), and sometimes through good intentions (the Spanish-American War).

The US was for many years, Kagan points out, a beacon of liberality in an ocean of reaction, especially during periods of royal restoration in Europe, yet frequently it hesitated on the brink of intervention and left progressive forces disappointed and in the lurch, as in the struggles in South America involving Chile, Peru and Bolivia.

It has also been riddled with the contradictions of its attitudes: treating modernising nations in the 19th Century, such as Germany and Japan, as fellow travellers and seeming almost oblivious to those nations' atrocities in, respectively, France and China, for example; openly criticising other nations' excesses whilst simultaneously enslaving, lynching and disenfranchising considerable sections of its own citizenry. Even Great Britain, in persuading the Spanish authorities in the Caribbean to relax their slaving regime in Cuba to discourage annexation by US slavers, comes out looking clean in comparison!

Yet for all that, the nation has the potential for doing good, and has intervened on occasion with that effect. It has, and has had for many years now, a position in the world that almost compels it to at least consider intervention in any unsavoury goings on.

Kagan relates this story in a readable style, providing interesting background and any number of intriguing vignettes, as in his portrayal of Sandino (how did he ever become a hero?), the possible origin of the Anglo-American special relationship (Britain's climb-down over a border dispute between Costa Rica and Venezuela) and the provenance of the expression "sold down the river". At the same time the author makes any number of assumptions regarding his readers' knowledge of American history, so if you're going to read this but don't have a detailed background knowledge then a book such as Tindall and Shi's America: A Narrative History may come in useful.

Incidentally, sometime during my reading of the book I mentally scribbled "neocon" into the margin, as the messianic destiny of the US to deliver freedom and democracy to the benighted masses comes over loud and clear. And indeed Kagan's CV includes a spell as speechwriter for Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz, a founder of the Project for the New American Century and latterly as Foreign Policy advisor to Presidential hopeful John McCain.

Nevertheless, this is not a big exercise in proselytising on behalf of the US, nor is it an uncritical look at the nation's actions, or inactions for that matter. True it does emphasise the potential role of the US in safeguarding civilisation, but it also points out the dangers of the nation plunging itself into any given mess without evaluating the long-term consequences (or, as fellow neocon Donald Rumsfeld would say, "Stuff happens") as, for example, in the case of the final chapter which features a relatively lengthy account of the events leading up to the Spanish-American War, culminating in the "liberation" of Cuba and, as one of those unforeseen Consequences for which nobody had to invent a Law, the war/quagmire in the Philippines.

Kagan leaves it up to us, the readers, to draw the parallels with the modern world, and I could go on for ages about the hubris involved in War Lite and hanging up the Mission Accomplished banner too early in Iraq, but I'll just limit myself to that.

So read, but read with Shakespeare's Banquo's warning in mind:

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.
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