Stephen E. Ambrose

Stephen E. Ambrose, in Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, argues that the foreign policy of the United States since before World War II and into the 1990s has been based on largely irrational factors, rather than on any coherent vision of global reality or this nation's proper place in that reality. Changes in presidents from Truman through Bush had minimal effect on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, especially with respect to the number one goal of that policy---the containment of Soviet Communism. Containment as a policy became so increasingly entrenched through the Truman and succeeding administrations that it carried the strength of an addiction for the leadership of the country. The very basis of U.S. foreign policy in this period was the ideology of the Cold War which saw the world controlled by two forces---the U.S. and its evil enemy the Soviet Union. Ambrose is absolutely correct, and convincing in his well-reasoned and thoroughly documented thesis, when he argues that the United States has proved to be a bumbling giant groping its way half-blind into the future and into its role in a world shaped by global rather than national powers and events. If anything, Ambrose is too kind and generous to American Presidents and foreign policy makers, granting them a flexibility in places where it seems that they altered course simply because it was unavoidable, rather than as a result of any wisdom or rational analysis. And even in those instances where

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Cold War containment policy. Kennedy certainly entered office under the pall of the same Cold War ideology and its containment policy, as evidenced by his "missile gap" rhetoric, his increase in advisors in Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. We will never know whether he would have altered U.S. policy, though his test-ban treaty with the Soviets, his denunciation of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and his plan to withdraw from Vietnam indicate at least a willingness to consider more flexibility in that policy. With his assassination (a result, in part, of just that flexibility?) and the ascension of Lyndon Johnson, strict Cold War ideology was re-established, with the Vietnam War its major consequence. The point Ambrose makes, and with which this reader concurs wholeheartedly, is that all these American leaders and their foreign policy makers were controlled by an ideology which in the long run hurt the United States, even considering the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War and containment policy led to massive economic costs created by military build-ups, and finally to the division of the country over Vietnam, which in retrospect was an insane war for which the nation is still paying economically, p

Category: History - S