Richard M Gamble

[...]it was national leaders who most urgently needed the right kind of moral education to bring an ethical center back to a centrifugal world. The president and his circle came to embrace the war as the means to global transformation, the end of the old order and the beginning of the final, perfect, and universal reign of justice, peace, and harmony, the triumph of "service" over "selfishness"-the worst sin in the progressives' Decalogue. In seven thematic chapters, Smith covers Babbitt's conception of human nature, the naturalist presuppositions at the root of both modern science and sentimentalism, the dangers of democracy divorced from self-control, idealism as inherently revolutionary, imperialism as the inevitable consequence of false democracy, vague and lazy "brotherhood" as a sham form of cosmopolitanism, and Babbitt's continuing relevance to the foreign-policy alternatives offered by Francis Fukuyama, Henry Kissinger, and Samuel Huntington. Page by page, Smith led me to consider the sources of constraint (what Walter McDougall helpfully calls an ethic of "self-containment") that had defined U.S. foreign policy until removed in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and then most dramatically in World War I. How did America lose its fear of going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams called the temptation in a phrase once celebrated for its wisdom, especially by George Kennan during the Cold War. The conflicting visions of U.S. foreign policy-the answers to the question, "What does America owe the world?"-were on full display already in the 1820s as the House of Representatives debated even modest and largely symbolic aid to the Greek War for Independence against the Ottoman Empire.