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 policy was re-designed to reflect global reality, the leaders too often expressed regret that they had to abandon previous policy.
For example, Ambrose writes that Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most ideological of the Cold War Presidents, had to face the rising evidence of the limits of U.S. power in shaping the world in an era of globalism. Globalism includes the realization that no nation, no matter how powerful, can control the world as it was at least imagined...