America's Mission

by Tony Smith, Richard C. Leone

The strength and prestige of democracy worldwide at the end of the twentieth century are due in good measure to the impact of America on international affairs, argues Tony Smith. Here for the first time is a book that documents the extraordinary history of American foreign policy with respect to the promotion of democracy worldwide, an effort whose greatest triumph came in the occupations of Japan and Germany but whose setbacks include interventions in Latin America and Vietnam.

Genres: Politics, History

480 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1994

About the author

Tony Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University of Science and Technology

Reviews

[Manar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tony Smith does the difficult job of rationalizing conflicting facts. He argues, unpersuasively, in this book that democracy promotion has been the primary motive for U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century, using multiple cases as empirical guide:
1. The Philippines
2. The Wilson “Revolution”
3. World War II and the Democratizations of Japan and Germany
4. The Cold War
5. The Carter Years
6. The Reagan Doctrine
7. After the Cold War
8. The EU as an Agent of Democracy

[Max Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thorough look at American foreign policy, the motivations behind it, and the causes of its successes and failures. The use of Japan and Germany as successes of containment was a bit surprising to me at first, but actually fit quite well in the long-term view of the trend of American containment

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely critical for understanding the principles of American democracy, how it differs from European democracy. Breaks down how America has spread and strengthened democracy. Particularly important reading in this period of declining democracy.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful, fair-minded, and certainly against the grain of American diplomatic history, America's Mission lays out the case that the US has been, however inconsistently, a pivotal force in global democratization. I'll get my main critique out of the way first: I read the second edition, which has two additional chapters (at least), and this added considerably to what is already a pretty long and dense book. In short, this book is work to get through, not because it's unenjoyable, but because it has dense argumentative layers. There are four chapters and an appendix for post-Cold War democratization up to Obama, which really should have been edited down.

But as for the argument, I thought this book was brilliant and balanced. Smith argues that the US has tried to cultivate democracy in the 20th century in large part out of the belief that democracy is universally applicable, but also because of the belief that democratization benefits US national security and prosperity. He moves from the late 19th century into the early 21st, showing how different presidencies tried to promote democracy with varying strategies and levels of success.

The book is super useful for thinking about why some democracy promotion efforts fail and others succeed. The US record is admittedly very mixed; not only has it acted against democracy in many cases (Guatemala, Iran, Chile) in which it put geopolitical interests first, it has also achieved less than stunning successes in places like Latin America and the Philippines. But the successes are huge, especially in the democratization of Germany and Japan. Smith emphasizes that the US cannot always create critical preconditions for democracy, including some level of economic modernization, literacy, civic society, coherent national identity.

In the Phillipines, for example, the US viewed its occupation as a temporary act of reformation, and it created modern infrastructure as well as political structures like a national legislature that gave the Philippines the trappings of democracy. However, US reforms did not challenge the agrarian oligarchy that dominated the archipelago, so democracy in the Philippines remained highly corrupt and elitist, with power rotating among a view small families. The US faced similar issues in Latin America in the early 20th century and basically gave up on democratization there from FDR's good neighbor policy all the way to Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, which also didn't really work. Far from being some kind of neocon democratic imperialist, Smith is highly sensitive to the difficulties of democracy promotion, the need to socio-economic reform to undergird nascent democracies, and the primacy of local actors in bringing about successful democratization. Just because democracy may be a universal form of government (albeit one that takes many variations) doesn't mean the US can create democracy anywhere or even that a given society is capable of transitioning to democracy in the short-medium term.

I also liked Smith's historical framing of the problem of democracy promotion in history. Democracy, he argues, is a response to the rise of the nation-state and the mobilization of the people into politics. It is a way of enabling participation, deciding among competing interests, protecting rights and property, and ensuring both stability and change. Communism and fascism, Smith argues, are also response to the problem of mass politics, albeit illiberal and anti-democratic ones. The reason that democracy emerged dominant over these other two answers to the problem of modernity has a lot to do with US power and example not only promoting democracy but building norms and institutions that fostered it (not to mention protecting zones of democracy from outside threats like the USSR).

Smith makes a good case for the essentially WIlsonian precepts of so much of US foreign policy in teh 20th century. Few presidents dissented from Wilson's core arguments: that the world should be composed of self-determining nation-states that are democratic or democratizing, that those states had equal sovereign rights, that they should obey international law, that they should work together in int'l institutions for collective self-defense and economic integration, and that the US should play a leadership role in all of this. Nixon was probably the major dissenter from this tradition, and other president valued democracy promotion more or less, balancing it with other imperatives like the Cold War.

Overall, this book cautiously does what most historians and political scientists are loathe to do, lest they appear to be shills of American power: explain success. For all America's flaws, it's not a coincidence that the century of American hegemony and the liberal international order also witnessed global surges of democratization. This trend line had many causes, but America's role was still important. It's especially important to revisit this history at a time of democratic backsliding around the world, which followed overly zealous efforts by the Bush administration to spread democracy at the point of a gun.

Anyways, I recommend this book for IR scholars, foreign policy historians, and other profs and graduate students. It's not, however, for the lay reader. James Traub's book on democracy in USFP is more accessible and succint.

[Paul D. Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good historical overview of American efforts to promote democracy abroad; some flawed assumptions about how democracy grows undergirds much of the analysis; and the concluding chapters on the Bush and Obama administrations can be pretty much ignored.

[Blake Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very informational on the us spread of democracy abroad for the past century and how the strategy in spreading democracy has varied.