Surprise, Security and the American Experience
Written by: John Lewis Gaddis,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004,
ISBN: 9780674011748, 150pp.
Reviewed by: Russell Parkin, Senior Research Fellow at the Land Warfare Studies Centre and coeditor of the AAJ.
At the end of the Cold War, the American scholar, Walter Russell Meade, wrote a book entitled Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. A key thesis of Meade’s book was based on the identification of four traditions in American foreign policy. The five short essays contained in historian John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security and the American Experience seek to provide a similar context for the Bush Administration’s post–11 September strategy of pre-emption by putting it into an historical perspective. Gaddis is one of the most important American scholars of the Cold War period. In these essays he turns his talents to demonstrating that the key ideas of the Bush security policy— pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony—echo significant themes in the history of American grand strategy.
After the British burnt Washington during the War of 1812, US Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, established these same three principles in order to ensure the security of the young American republic. Pre-emption called for rapid responses to attacks on the United States and its national interests; unilateralism ensured that the United States would not be encumbered by alliances that would restrict its ability to act in accordance with its interests; and hegemony guaranteed that, within its sphere of influence, the United States would be able to act freely to defend its interests. Previous presidents, such as James Polk during the Mexican War and William McKinley in the Spanish–American War, stretched the limits of pre-emption. Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism foundered on the unilateralism of congress, but the enormously popular Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to transform US security policy significantly by forging close alliances during World War II and fashioning multilateral postwar developments, such as the United Nations, to expand US hegemony to its current worldwide status.
Through this analysis, Gaddis provides his readers with a balanced assessment of the United States’ response to 11 September. As he points out, ‘September 11, 2001 was not the first time a surprise attack shattered assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy. We’ve been there before, and have responded each time by dramatically expanding our security responsibilities’. Gaddis avoids making any judgments about the likely outcomes of the Bush grand strategy; indeed, looking forward, he raises more questions than he answers. This is a thought-provoking study by a major scholar in the field. Perhaps its greatest value is that it shows how the experiences of the past reverberate in the present and maintain their ability to influence future events profoundly.
