 Good afternoon. My name is Thomas Friedman. I'm the Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times And it's my pleasure and honor to be here with my teacher and friend Michael Mandelbaum Michael's emeritus professor from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is author of a fantastic new book The Four H's of American Foreign Policy Big Power, Great Power, Super Power, Hyper Power. Michael, greetings! Tom, it's good to be with you. Thanks to you for taking part in this and thanks to all of those who have tuned in live or will be watching this subsequently on the archive Zoom channel. Michael, you wouldn't have a copy of the book at hand. Would you just to hold up and just for those who want to order it right now on Amazon? This is what it looks like. It makes an ideal gift and you can get it. You can order it easily from Amazon or from the Oxford University Press website. Fantastic. Well, Michael, let's kick it off with a simple but obvious but important question, which is why did you write this book? Thank you. Well, I wrote Four H's of American Foreign Policy, which in fact covers 250 years from 1765 to 2015, that is from the Stamp Act to the Iran deal for three purposes. I have three purposes in mind. The first is simply to describe and analyze the major events and personalities of those 25 centuries. The second is to address the major controversies in American foreign policy during that period. So in the book, I address such questions as why did the 13 colonies rebel against the British Empire at the end of the 18th century? Why did the Cold War take place and why did it end as it did and which presidents were successful and which unsuccessful in conducting American foreign policy? Spoiler alert, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did not come off well. The third purpose of this book is to draw out the major themes that run through the history of American foreign policy in this period. What are those themes? Well, the history of American foreign policy, like the history of everything, exhibits both continuities and changes, and it is on the important continuities and major changes that the book is based. But let me just give you a preview of what those three are without going into any detail and then we can get back to them in the course of our discussion. There are, in my judgment, three major continuities. American foreign policy has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic. And as for the changes, the principal change has been the steady growth in America's power in relation to other countries in the international system. That growth has given the United States four distinct roles in the world, and those roles are reflected in the subtitle of the book. From 1765 to 1865, America was a weak power. From 1865 to 1945, a great power. From 1945 to 1990, a superpower, and then from 1990 to 2015, what I call a hyper power. You say, Michael, that American foreign policy is unusually ideological. What do you mean by that? And why is that the case? By that, I mean that the United States, more than other countries, has tried to use foreign policy to promote the adoption of its political ideas beyond its borders. And those ideas have been principally democracy within countries and peace among countries. Now, the United States is not the only country in the world ever to try to promote its domestic political values, or indeed, ever to try to promote these values. Great Britain in the 19th century did so in the second half of the 20th century, or I should say since the second half of the 20th century, the countries of Western Europe have attempted to do so. And the United States has not always emphasized value promotion in foreign policy. In fact, as I say in the four ages of American foreign policy, since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been two major approaches to foreign policy in the United States. Each of them identified with an important president of that period. The first of them is sometimes called realism or real policy. It emphasizes power. It's patron and exponent with Theodore Roosevelt. Its goal is a stable balance of power in the world. And indeed, Roosevelt spent much of his presidency trying to contrive a stable balance in East Asia. The other approach is value promotion, sometimes called idealism, or Wilsonian after the American president, Woodrow Wilson, who was most energetic in promoting. Wilson wanted to contrive not a balance of power, but what he called a community of power using the League of Nations that he helped to create after World War I, but that the United States did not join. Now, the two approaches have often conflicted. And when they have, America has usually opted to pursue a power-oriented, realist foreign policy. It's usually opted to defend its interests rather than promoting its values. And that, of course, is true for almost every country in every part of the world throughout history. But Wilsonian is the promotion of democracy and peace has since the beginning of the 20th century. And in a way, since the founding of the Republic always been important. It's always been on the agenda. Americans have never abandoned it. They've never ceased hoping to be able to make the world over, to make it more democratic and more peaceful. And that Wilsonian strain in American foreign policy is one of the things that makes that foreign policy distinctly America. You asked, incidentally, why the United States is prone to promote its ideals. And I think there are several reasons. One is that the revolution was made in the service of these ideals. Thomas Paine said, we have the power to make the world anew. And that idea has never left America. The second, we are a country different from other countries because we are not based on a group of people speaking the same language or professing the same religion who live on the same territory for generations. This country is made up of people who came from elsewhere. And when they came from elsewhere, they did so for the most part. African Americans always accepted because they wanted to live in a country based on the principles that are the foundation of the United States. In the four ages of American foreign policy, I call the United States an idea state. And those ideas are the ideas of democracy and peace. A third and final reason that I think and I say in the book, we have been so committed to these ideas is that we are a nation of immigrants. Immigrants come here because they like these ideas and ideas because they want to live in a country that professors and practices them. And they have kept these ideals alive. Now, they've mainly kept them alive in domestic affairs. But because they so thoroughly permeate domestic affairs, they leak into our foreign policy as well. Where would you put Ukraine then on that? Is it an example of this, of Bilsonian or Teddy Rooseveltian? The Ukrainian war thus far seems to be one of those cases like World War II or the Cold War, where American engagement is seen to further both American security interests and American ideals. And to the extent that that is true, it is possible to get broad support for a policy. Now, it's also the case, as I note, in the four ages of American foreign policy, that every American war without exception has provoked dissent and opposition. Of course, it's taken a different form in different wars. For example, in the Revolutionary War, the people who didn't want to leave the British Empire left the 13 colonies and went to Canada. And in World War II, the fiercest opposition to American direct involvement in the war came before the United States actually got directly involved. The so-called America First Movement, which wanted to keep America out of the fighting in Europe, was strongest before Pearl Harbor. And after the American Declaration of Pearl Harbor, the American First Movement became far less important. But in general, there has always been dissent against American military policies, against American engagement, either directly or, as in the case of Ukraine, indirectly in wars abroad. But thus far, this particular conflict seems for the reasons that I've stated to command pretty broad American support. Interesting. In your book, Michael, you make the point that American foreign policy is also unusually economic. What do you mean by that? By economic, I mean that more than other countries, the United States has tried to use economic levers, economic instruments to achieve political goals. And you see that, of course, in the war in Ukraine with the sanctions that the United States and other countries have placed on Russia. But this goes all the way back to the beginning. As we all know, the American Revolution was provoked by taxes that the British Parliament imposed on the 13 colonies that the colonialists thought were unjust. One early response to these taxes was to boycott British goods so as to put pressure on the British merchants who were selling them to get them to put pressure on the Parliament to rescind the taxes. And for a while, it actually worked, at least in a few cases. Until the 20th century, the preferred American economic instrument for achieving political goals was trade. But in the 20th century, the United States began to use the export of capital for political purposes. This first began with what was known as dollar diplomacy in the administration of William Howard Taft, and it probably had its finest hour in 1947 with the European Recovery Program, popularly known as the Marshall Plan. But America has had recourse to the use of capital for political purposes recurrently ever since, for example, in the 1990s through the use of the International Monetary Fund. So America has been an economic power in the world from the beginning in that sense. It's a good segue to what I want to talk about, which is the role of democracy. What do you mean by the fact that our democratic character affected our foreign policy? How did that meld in there? It happened in that American foreign policy, more than the foreign policies of other countries, has been subject to public opinion and popular sentiment. The public has always had a voice in foreign policy, and that distinguishes the United States from the great powers of Europe, who historically, all the way up until the 20th century and in some cases beyond, had foreign policies that were the preserve of the aristocracy and the monarchy. Of course, America had neither, and so it was the public that had a say and a voice. And public opinion and public sentiment has been extremely important both in starting wars and in stopping them. For starting them, there is a recurrent pattern in American foreign policy in which a dramatic event takes place, usually overseas, but sometimes in the United States. The world is more dangerous than they had previously believed. It galvanizes the public and creates the demand for a more robust American foreign policy, which sometimes involves war. For example, in 1898, the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor paved the way, created the conditions and public opinion for the Spanish-American war of that year. Then later, the German submarine sinking of the passenger line in Lucetania in 1915 completely transformed the American perception of Germany's role in World War II and led to the American entry into that, sorry, World War I, and led to the American entry into that war two years later against Germany. And of course, most recently, we all remember the attacks on Washington and New York on December 7, September 11, 2001, which led to two American wars, the one in Afghanistan and the one in Iraq. And public opinion has also caused the American government to withdraw forces from countries where it was fighting. The war in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq all became unpopular, and ultimately, the American government had to end American participation. I ought to say that in each of those wars, the American public did not reject the reasons for which the wars were being fought. Rather, it concluded that the wars had become too expensive, and that expenses were denominated in American casualties, and the public decided that it simply didn't want to pay those expenses anymore. So as I said, public opinion is always important, and one consequence of that is that to other countries, the United States often seems volatile and unpredictable, and other countries make mistakes about the United States. For example, the Imperial Japanese government surely did not believe that the United States would respond to the attacks on Pearl Harbor as fiercely and with the endurance that it did. And Saddam Hussein certainly did not imagine that by occupying neighboring Kuwait, he would galvanize the United States into action, causing America to organize an international coalition, send 500,000 troops to the Persian Gulf, and oust Saddam's army from Kuwait. You know, one of the things that you talk about in the book and that I've long puzzled over, as very relevant today, is how did America get so powerful? Well, America steadily amassed, beginning with independence, the underlying ingredients of power and international order. The United States accumulated steadily more territory, more population, and greater economic output. And there, what is particularly important is that the United States, more than any other country, mastered and continues to master the techniques of the Industrial Revolution, which are extremely important for power in the world. The Industrial Revolution, of course, began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, but by the end of the 19th, the United States was at its cutting edge and has been there, more or less, ever since. In today's world, the most advanced technological countries have the potential to be the most powerful. Who would you say is number two today? Is it China? Is it the EU in terms of power? Well, I think today it would have to be China, partly because China is very deliberately and very energetically trying to amass power. The European Union has great potential for being powerful, but it isn't the kind of political unit that is able to muster its resources to make for military power. So China is getting more powerful and aspires to be more powerful. And as we know, not least from your columns, Tom, China is bending every effort to be on the cutting edge of technology. It's pouring lots of money into high-tech enterprises and presumably also in the high-tech weaponry. So the military competition, what is now the fifth era of American foreign policy, is bound to be in part, although certainly not exclusively, a competition in perfecting ever more sophisticated military technology. You know, initiatives come up around Russia, Ukraine, America, the whole dynamic is, has America ever been an imperial power? The reason I asked that, Michael, is that you hear a lot of people say, well, you know, we should understand how Putin feels. We had our own Monroe Doctrine. How would we feel if Russia were, you know, somehow supporting Mexico against the United States right now? Talk about that whole issue. Where are we an imperial power? And how are we the same or how are we different from Russia in Ukraine? Sure. Let me begin by saying a little bit about the Monroe Doctrine promulgated in 1823. The truth of the matter is, first, that it wasn't regarded as particularly important when it was promulgated, got much more important for Americans during the course of the 19th century as the United States became more powerful. In the beginning, I think in 1880 or 1881, it has been read in its entirety in every session of the United States Senate. But what was important about the Monroe Doctrine was that the United States didn't enforce it and had no way of enforcing it. The United States said, European great powers stay out of the Western Hemisphere. But the United States didn't have the military power to keep them out. The country that did have the military power was Great Britain. Great Britain was the master of the world's oceans. The Royal Navy could forward any country from projecting power across the Atlantic Ocean. And that's what Great Britain did. Now, Great Britain was very active in the Western Hemisphere in the 19th century. It controlled Canada, of course. But in addition, in Latin America, it had very close economic ties. And it had what some historians have called informal empire. It didn't govern Latin America, but it did dominate their trade. And that was fine with the British. They didn't want to govern Latin America, which meant that they were happy with the arrangement that the United States preferred, keeping other great European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. And that means that the United States was what economists sometimes call a free rider on British power. The United States was the beneficiary of British naval power without having to pay for it. And being a free rider is common in international affairs. And we see it today in Europe. The smaller European countries are the free riders on American military power. Now, the way you get to be a free rider is to join NATO. And that's why the smaller countries of Central and Eastern Europe were so anxious to do so. Getting back to the question of empire, the word imperial now has an all purpose meaning. It's thrown around to mean you're big and strong. And by the way, I don't like what you're doing. But the dictionary definition of empire, the proper definition, at least in my judgment, and the way I use it in the four ages of American foreign policy, is control against their will of foreign peoples outside what is considered your own territory. And in that sense, the United States was an imperial power briefly. It got control of the Philippines as a result of the Spanish American War. It had a kind of suzerainty over Cuba through the so-called Platte Amendment. And it also annexed, at the same time, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Well, the Philippines got its independence in 1946. Puerto Rico is the territory. Hawaii is a state. The Platte Amendment has been revoked. All of the United States maintains the naval base on the island of Cuba in Guantanamo. And so therefore, I would say that in the strict sense of the term, the United States has been an imperial power, but compared with the great empires of Europe, the American Empire was short-lived. It was kind of half-hearted. It was small. Americans couldn't, it didn't care very much about it, and in some ways couldn't wait to get rid of it. And so it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't loom large in international history. And it did not loom large unlike the European empires in the, in the day-to-day political life of the United States. What role has war played in, in driving, shaping American foreign policy? Well, war has served as a kind of midwife for the transition from one American international role to the next. So that, for example, the War of Independence, what we call the Revolutionary War made the United States independent and thus able to conduct its own foreign policy. The Civil War paved the way for the American emergence as a great power in the world. American participation in the winning coalition in World War II left it as one of the two superpowers in the world, along with the Soviet Union, and the American-led coalition's triumph in the Cold War left the United States as the sole hyper-power. Incidentally, the term hyper-power comes from the French Foreign Minister, Nouvelle-Védérine, who called America the Épée du Sainte. Yes, I remember that. Let me say two other things about America and war. The first is that although the United States has fought a number of serious wars, 12 by my count, I don't think it can rightly be called a war-like country because in each of those wars, America had, at least in its own mind, defensive motives. Now, it wasn't always seen that way by other countries, but I think there is a case to be made that in every American war, the United States was acting defensively with one important exception. That exception is the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, which was a war of territorial conquest and as a result of which what is now the southwestern part of the United States and most of the West, including the State of California, came into the Union. The other point that I would make about war is that the United States has been unusually fortunate in having, during its most important wars, three superior commanders in chief. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington was an adept battlefield commander and his skill consisted mainly in avoiding battle with the superior British forces, battles that the continental army would have lost. He really only fought two or the Americans, only fought a couple of major battles and happened to win them. And in addition, Washington himself served as a potent symbol around which the continental army and the inhabitants of the 13 colonies rallied in support of the new nation. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln understood what the military requirements of his political role was. He found a general who could implement the appropriate strategy, namely Ulysses S. Grant, and he persevered to a successful conclusion despite the terrible costs of the war. Finally, in World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt had a series of very difficult strategic judgments to make and he made those decisions in a way that aroused controversy both at the time and subsequently and yet, as I say in the Four Ages of American Foreign Policy, in my opinion the decisions that he made were the right ones. Up first, between the fall of France in May 1940 and American entry into World War II in December 1941, a full 18 months, he sent as much help, especially military equipment, as he could to the British as they fought Nazi Germany. And after June 22nd, 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and a war between the Soviet Union and the Nazis began, Roosevelt extended its assistance to the Soviet Union as well, despite the fact that it wasn't altogether popular in the United States. Then, once the United States entered the war, Roosevelt decided to concentrate American military efforts in the European theater. He pursued a so-called Europe First policy despite the fact that the war had begun with an attack from Asia. Roosevelt decided, and this was very controversial, that the first American military operation of World War II should take place in North Africa, and it did. It was called Operation Torch. His military advisor's objective on the grounds that attacking a German force in North Africa was a distraction from the main business of defeating the Germans by getting to the German homeland. But Roosevelt believed, and I think in retrospect he was probably right, that in order to sustain public support for the war, the American public had to see its army in action in the calendar year 1942. And finally, Roosevelt decided on June 1944 as the date of the great cross-channel crossing, the American, British, and Canadian invasion of France from Great Britain known as Operation Overlord, and indeed D-Day, as it came to be called, took place on June 6th. He made this decision despite the fact that one of his two great wartime allies, Joseph Stalin of Russia, had insisted on launching that operation before them, and despite the fact that his other great wartime ally, Winston Churchill of Great Britain, was eager to postpone the crossing, perhaps indefinitely. Let me have one other thing about their wartime leadership, and that is that all three were very good at what is the most important job of a wartime commander-in-chief and often the most difficult one, and that is keeping the American public committed to the fight. Michael, you alluded to Jefferson and Madison not being two of your favorite foreign policy presidents when we started. Who, give me your two favorites, and who you think were the two most overrated or least successful? Well, I do think that the big three, Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, were the greatest because they had the main opportunities for greatness. I might also say that one of my favorite foreign policy presidents, although he doesn't get a lot of credit, is the first George Bush, George H. W. Bush when you covered. I thought he handled the challenges that he faced very, very well. In response to the collapse of communism in Europe, he did very little, which was exactly the right thing to do. There's an old saying in war when your enemy is destroying himself, don't interrupt it. And Bush was very good at not interfering, but in reassuring the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the United States would not seek to take advantage of what was happening in the communist world at Russia's expense. And he also very judiciously handled the first Gulf War. He evicted Saddam from Kuwait, but he did not send American troops to Iraq itself in part because he feared what would happen when the United States did, and precisely what he feared happened when the United States did send troops to Iraq in the Second Gulf War. So George H. W. Bush is a foreign policy president who I think is underrated. Now let me say something about Madison and Jefferson. I do say in the book that although there is competition for the distinction, I think they may have been the two least competent leaders of American foreign policy. Why do I say that? Well, both had to cope with a particular problem that's been forgotten now but was important at the time. In the early years of the 19th century, written was Waging War with Napoleon's France, and its major strategy was to use its maritime supremacy to blockade France. It didn't want any ships reaching France, including American ships, and so it intercepted them. The Americans objected. They objected that their rights as a neutral party were being violated. George Washington objected, sent representatives to London. They worked out a compromise, and it was enacted by the Senate, so-called Jays Treaty, then Chief Justice John Jay of being the Chief American Negotiator. It happened again when Thomas Jefferson was president. Jefferson also sent a negotiator to London. Jefferson's negotiator also worked out a compromise, but Jefferson rejected it. He said that it didn't meet all of American's requirements, it didn't fully uphold America's neutral rights, and he wasn't going to have anything to do with it. For what then was he going to do? He decided in order to punish the British to implement an embargo, but the embargo was on American exports. Other countries, other leaders, embargo countries with which they are at war in order to punish them, Jefferson embargoed his own country. He thought that American goods were so valuable to the British that not having them, the British would give up and exceed to the American position on shipping. Well, of course, it didn't work that way. The British ignored him, American merchants, except especially in New England with furious. There was a lot of bootlegging and violating the embargo, and Jefferson finally had to withdraw it just as he was leaving office. But his successor and protege James Madison had to do something, and so he felt about the British interfering with American neutral rights. And so not being able to think of anything else, and with encouragement from some hawks in Congress, he declared war on Great Britain in 1812. It was probably the most misbegotten war the United States had ever fought. But the British, at first, paid very little attention because they were busy fighting Napoleon. But when in 1814, Napoleon's campaign in Russia turned into a fiasco, and he was defeated for the first time, they could concentrate on North America. They sent an expeditionary force, which, among other things, burned the city of Washington, D.C. It was a complete disaster for the United States. The Americans sued for peace. Peace was finally concluded in 1815, and the Americans gained nothing from the war. So it was a lot of effort, a lot of pain, for nothing whatsoever. Interestingly, Americans remember that war, if they remember it at all, and most of us, I suspect, don't, as the occasion in which our national anthem was written. A Baltimore lawyer named Francis Scott Keane saw the British bombard Fort McHenry in his native Baltimore, wrote a poem about it, which was set to music, and we played it ever since at public occasions. So every time you stand for the national anthem, you're remembering the war of 1812. It doesn't deserve to be remembered for any other reason. Michael, to wrap up just a simple question, has American foreign policy been successful these 250 years? Very important question, and my answer in the book is as follows. In its first three eras, American foreign policy was remarkably successful. As a weak power, the United States did manage to defend its independence and expand across the North American continent, while keeping out, or having the British Navy, keep out the European powers, preventing them from interfering. In its career as a great power, it was part of the two coalitions that won the two biggest wars in all of history, World War I and World War II. As a superpower, it led the coalition that overcame the Soviet Union and global communism. So for those three eras, it was remarkably successful. In the fourth and most recent era, the era of the American hyperpower, the United States was not successful. Why was it unsuccessful? Well, the United States certainly made errors of foreign policy. In my view, the decision to expand NATO in the 1990s against the wishes of Russia when the Russian president was a would-be Democrat, Boris Yeltsin, was a mistake. And certainly the war in Iraq did not go the way Americans hoped and believed it would. But there was, I think, a larger problem. During its era as a hyperpower, the United States had one major project. It tried to foster and install both directly and indirectly a particular kind of government in countries all around the world. That was our kind of government, the government that was democratic, that respected the rights of its people, that had the institutions necessary for economic prosperity, and above all, that was at peace with its neighbors. And that was an admirable goal and a sensible goal in the sense that a world in which every country had such a government would be a much better world, not only for us, but for everybody in the world we have now. But there was and is a problem that tripped us up. Having such a government is not straightforward. A country that has such a government needs to have certain preconditions. It needs to have a certain set of dominant values. It needs to have a particular series of institutions. It needs to have some history of experience in operating those institutions. Not every country has them. And the countries where we try to install these, this kind of political system, especially the ones that we occupy directly, and the ones the countries such as Russia and China, where we tried indirectly to encourage the formation of democratic rights-protecting rule, did not have the preconditions. And so we failed. United States in some, in my judgment, failed in its major project in its fourth era as the global hyperpower, because it undertook what turned out to be mission impossible. Yeah, it's really interesting, Michael, the way you've done it. We power great power, superpower, hyperpower. In each case, in the first three, we were a balancing force, basically. And balancing Russia, balancing Nazi Germany, balancing Britain and France and others. A kind of classical Kissingerian role. But in the hyperpower phase, we went from balancer to revolutionary in a way. And we weren't able to sustain that. In that period, there was a paradox. In the era in which the United States had the most power, it was the least successful. Yeah, yeah. I think the absence of the need to balance was part of the reason. In all the other three eras, we had countries about which we had to work, and countries that could at least potentially do us harm. And that imposed a kind of caution, a kind of prudence, a kind of restraint. Yes. In the era of hyperpower, we were in effect America unbound. That led to overconfidence and overreaching. Interesting. Michael, this was fantastic. Thank you very much for your time. Would you hold that book up one more time? Because I know everyone wants to go right to their computer now to amazon.com. Click on the four ages of American foreign policy, weak power, great power, superpower, hyperpower, and buy it now and read my column tonight in the New York Times, which is going to use the book as a starting up point to discuss the Ukraine war. Thank you, Michael. Thank you to the National Archives. Thank all of you for listening here and throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. Order it now. See you soon. Many thanks, Tom, and many thanks to all who are watching. Pleasure.