Dangerous Nation - America's Foreign Policy from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Dangerous Nation - America's Foreign Policy from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

by Robert Kagan

Vintage, HK$161

America is a threat to global stability, but there's nothing new in that view. One of the great myths of American history is that the US has been relatively non-aggressive and anti-colonial. Revisionist historian and columnist Robert Kagan reveals it to have been quite the opposite, almost from the start. A leading player in the neoconservative camp, Kagan begins here what promises to be a compelling two-volume history of US foreign policy. In Europe, the unanimous view reported by John Quincy Adams in 1817 was that the US would become 'a very dangerous member of the society of nations', whence comes Kagan's title. In this first volume, he explores the westward land-grab, built on the government's indifferent destruction of the Indians, and early US dealings with the French, Spanish and British (Canada was viewed as a target for acquisition), ending with the Spanish-American war of 1898. Unfortunately, as the journal Foreign Affairs points out, Dangerous Nation 'is too much of a polemic against foreign policy realism to serve as a solid narrative history'.