How does Ideology Drive U.S. Foreign Relations?

Nicholas Breyfogle 
Hello, and welcome to "How does ideology drive US foreign relations?" brought to you by the History Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, by the magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm an associate professor of history and director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today. Welcome to everyone and thank you so much for joining us. The United States was the nation forged in the ideological fires of a democratic revolution to overturn monarchy and imperial control. Yet many American leaders and citizens ever since have denied or rejected a foreign policy guided by ideology. "Why is that?," we should ask. If ideas and ideologies help us to order and explain the world, often serving as rationales for action or inaction, as well as explanations for success or failure, how does the history of US foreign relations appear differently when viewed through the lens of ideology? In short, how has and does ideology drive US foreign relations? Today, we are privileged to welcome Christopher McKnight Nichols who will explore these and other questions. Christopher McKnight Nichols is a professor of history, and Wayne Woodrow Hays chair in national security studies at The Ohio State University. Nichols is an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship Award winner and Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer. He's also a frequent public commentator on US politics and foreign policy. Nichols is the author or editor of six books, including most recently, "Ideology in US Foreign Relations: New Histories". With that introduction, let me mention the plan. Professor Nichols will begin with a presentation on the ways in which ideology intersects with US foreign relations, and then we'll take your questions, and we'll open things up for discussion. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the q&a function at the bottom of your screen on Zoom and we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can. We received several questions in advance. We'll get to those first, and then work our way through the questions we get today. We'd like to acknowledge that the land The Ohio State University occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandot, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples. Specifically, the university resides on land ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the forced removal of tribes through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that have and continue to affect the indigenous peoples of this land. Now, let me pass you over to Professor Christopher Nichols, who will take us on an exploration of "How does ideology drive US foreign relations?." Over to you, Professor Nichols.

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
Thank you so much, Professor referable. Nick, it's a pleasure to be here with you and a pleasure to be here with this whole audience. Thank you for coming out. Thanks to the superb team involved with the Clio Society, the Goldberg Center, Arts and Sciences, and the OSU History Department and special thanks to you all, again, for being here and especially for devoting your time and mental energy to caring about history and about how history helps us to better understand the present and perhaps to build a better future. I've been keen to present on this topic for a while it's really close to my intellectual heart. So I thought I would start actually where Professor Breyfogle began as well - connecting place and people. In the land acknowledgement that you just heard about Ohio State University, occupying the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte and others. The land acknowledgement, I think, is useful as a segue for us to consider the intersection of peoples and places, and the role of ideas in the place of ideology as central to the imagined and very real possibilities, approaches and policies that have guided those interactions historically, and continue to play a pivotal role in the world we live in today. So if you think about this in the first chapter of my book "Ideology in US Foreign Relations" begins considering questions about indigenous peoples and the colonies and colonizers and imperialism before the revolution. Indigenous peoples were paradoxically included and excluded in the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall's famous, or rather, infamous 1831 ruling in the Cherokee Nation versus Georgia, they describe their legal status as, quote unquote, "domestic dependent nations". They were, in short, both the objects of diplomacy as through foreign relations and foreign politics and the subjects of governance through federal structures of the state, of the US as colonized people. Now, it was not always thus, in fact. Indigenous peoples political claims to membership in the British Empire were far from fixed. And often they placed colonials and colonized in the same footing as subject to the British monarchy. And this is really important to understand, that widening out our view, since before the founding of the US, ideologies related to Empire, subjecthood, who and what counts as a citizen or member of a community, hierarchies of races and civilizations have often been critical to guiding national, colonial, and then early US Republic policies, debates and shaping worldviews. Okay. So using this moment in our opening to branch off to some of these really important topics, today I'll do three things, hopefully. First, I'll begin with the recent history. This is something that most people coming to this kind of topic want to grapple with. We'll talk a little bit about Ukraine, we'll talk about China and Asia, I'll talk about Russia, provide a sense of how ideology has helped to shape US foreign relations in the post-911 era, using some great political cartoons to do so, to illustrate those main issues, ideas, and ideologies at stake. Then I'll present some guiding questions about the topic that hopefully will inform our conversation to follow, including on the peculiar presence and absence of ideology in American public life and politics. Second, I'll turn to the issue of definitions, and sometimes this can be boring so I'll try to do it in brief. Where does ideology come from? What do I mean by it? And what do most historians working in foreign relations circles mean by this? And how did the book itself, I'm branching off my analysis from grapple the subject. And then third, I'll dive into the history. We don't have a lot of time for it today, but I'll give you some broad brushstrokes and a few key findings that I hope will inform how you think about this subject moving forward, and also animate our discussion. So I'll quickly share my screen now so you can see some good images here. And starting with, this is the cover the book that I was talking about. And now I'll leap into our thinking about this moment in current foreign policy, and then move backwards, as I said. So, you know, in the heated 2008 Democratic primary, Barack Obama's national security advisory team chose this sort of pithy formulation to characterize his perspective on foreign politics and policy, and that was pragmatism over ideology. And one of the things you saw in this moment was Obama trying to separate himself from the legacy of the ideologies that had informed the Bush administration in the wake of 911. This was often called the ... Freedom Agenda, or a Freedom Foreign Policy, but also, as you are seeing here caricatured, the Bush Doctrine, right? In the national security strategy of 2002, the Bush Doctrine was articulated as one of preemption - that the US could and should use intelligence information in order to justify interventions abroad. This was a new kind of doctrine. It was one that actually had been ruled out during the Cold War, as American policymakers struggled with questions of a first strike, for instance, in an atomic, so-called "atomic diplomacy". But what you saw in this moment, and in contrast to Hillary Clinton, and virtually every serious Republican presidential candidate, was Barack Obama rejecting George Bush's ideological rationale - the rationale for toppling Saddam Hussein, the rationale for moving from Afghanistan to Iraq in the war, and the rationale for what many on the left called and derided "democracy promotion". But George Bush often said that he was not pursuing democracy promotion. But you also see here in this political cartoon by Dave Granlund there down on the screen, the kinds of ways in which Barack Obama also struggled with how to describe his ideology. To put it crassly, as you've undoubtedly heard, it was often referred to within the White House, the national security strategy as quote "don't do stupid shit". And what was meant by this was that the ideological approach of the Obama administration was not one that would take ideology as central. That in fact that it would be ad hoc, that it would be flexible, that it wouldn't be rigid. And this is one of the things you see throughout US foreign policy history, an argument that ideologies are fundamentally rigid and therefore problematic, and thus to be discarded. And this gets at the question that Nick began our conversation with. But another way to consider this is also through the lens of how ideology has shaped US relations in this same period with Russia, with China and elsewhere. One of the things that's fascinating about how the Obama administration dealt with questions of foreign relations was both on the left and the right, we saw criticism of his so-called "Red Line" in Syria against the use of chemical weapons. You also saw (and this is a political cartoon on the upper left) of democracy promotion by George Bush, just as the US was arguing that the rollbacks against democracy in Russia were a problem. And there you see this moment and it was another one that was also often derided that George Bush had said that he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes, and he saw his soul - that he understood the man, right. And you see there this sort of quick embodiment of the fact that the Bush administration was pursuing democracy abroad, and at the same time, Russia was rolling up democracy at home, imprisoning journalists and beginning a campaign of poisonings, among other things. So then you see also derided there and analyzed, right, that the Obama administration began a pivot to Asia. And what's fundamentally important in thinking about this moment of the Obama administration is that as it attempted to elevate pragmatism over ideology, what did they prioritize? They prioritized economic drivers. And the argument was, and you see this in the introduction to the book that I co-wrote with my great collaborator, David Milne, we see there actually the Obama administration arguing that it was far more important to think about the future of economic competition in the world than to worry about things like the nuclear stockpile of Russia or the possible militarism of Russia. In fact, as ... the annexation of Crimea and Ukraine in 2014 suggests, one of the problems of this elevation of pragmatism over ideology was its fundamentally ideological core. That is, that the Obama administration privileged and prioritized economic drivers, to some extent, more significantly than military drivers, or the ideological concerns and orientations of other powers. And that's what we argue in the introduction is really illuminating. Even as the Obama administration eschewed ideology, they rejected ideology, that turn itself was fundamentally ideological. And so by pivoting to Asia, by not having a fuller sense of the Assad regime's aims and ideological orientations in Syria, and the same with Russia, it was unable to fully grapple with the security concerns of Russia's first assaults in Ukraine, you could argue, its meddling in the election of 2016 and elsewhere. And so in some ways, this moment of misperceptions and miscommunications that goes back through two administrations with very different ideological orientations, helps to inform our present moment where the US was caught somewhat flat-footed, not that it was an American-centric problem or concern when Russia invaded Ukraine earlier in this year, in 2022. So taking a step back, one of the things that I think this helps us to see is some of the fundamental ways in which ideology has shaped US assertions related to Europe, and more broadly, the world. Here we see Teddy Roosevelt aiming the cannon of the Monroe Doctrine not at people within the hemisphere, but actually, at those in Europe making claims to the hemisphere. And the caption reads, "Hands off. This, in reality, entails no new obligations upon us, for the Monroe Doctrine means precisely such a guarantee, on our part." this moment, this era, this is 1905, of US assertions of hemispheric dominance came very much through the lens of ideology. One component of that was an argument about civilization - that American Anglo Saxon civilization was superior, and that it had a right and obligation to protect the sort of sacrosanct sphere of the hemisphere. So we'd see that here. And you could argue you see that expanding globally across the 20th century, such that by the early 21st century, the US was making such assertions ... as both the Bush administration and the Obama administration did in very different ways about protecting freedoms around the world. Another way to think about this, and this is a throughline throughout the history of the role of ideology in US foreign relations in different ways in different eras, you get the sense of those economic drivers being fundamental. And this was what the Obama administration was talking about, and yet they weren't as fully aware of as they might well have been. So here's an example from circa-1900, the copyright is 1900, might have been published in 1901. And after all, the Philippines are only the stepping stone to Asia, this comes on the heels of the War of 1898. And the peace that followed in Paris, where the US acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, protectorate status in Cuba and elsewhere. And what you're seeing in this image is the ways in which one, sort of, land acquisition, one strategic acquisition carried with it, embodied here, everything from steel rails and bridges, to education, and religion, all of the component parts of a broader American ideology of American civilization moving abroad. Or in the language of the imperialists of that era, the battle over whether or not American civilization begins at home or should be exported abroad. So, here we go. Let's think about this problem for a moment. The US is really as Professor Breyfogle noted, and as we put this together, a nation forged in the ideological fires of revolutionary democratic ideology. Ideology has always been there, right? But one of the fascinating components of that when you look at US ideology and domestic and foreign policy is that there's been a remarkable amount of continuity. You know, this is arguably a product of the fact that unlike many other nations, US's borders have been mostly safe. ...There has been a relatively stable political culture, we could talk about the Civil War and others, but fundamentally, from the time of the founding movement forward, it's compared to nations that have, say, had major revolutions, invasions, occupations, or society-shaking crises of various kinds, the US has been able to escape most of those or many of those. And so, for me, what's really fascinating, and this is something I want to plant a seed with you all right away right here at the outset, is that there's been a real absence of self-consciousness of foreign policy ideology. So when you look through the historical record, whether you're looking at grassroots regular Americans, their letters to each other, their memoirs, their diaries, or you're looking at the most elite policymakers and presidents, you find a remarkable absence of self-consciousness about foreign policy ideologies. That's meant that ideology has, as I say there at the bottom, often been cast as a problem. In other words, it's been seen as narrow, or inflexible, or the product of bias or prejudice, and it can be all those things, but it need not necessarily be that. And so one of the critiques that comes out of the origins, actually of ideology in the French Revolution, is that by the early 19th century, some critics of ideology were suggesting that it was really much more of a problem than a solution. That ideologies that structure thought, that helped people make sense of the world around them, and then help to provide an orientation towards future options and policies, that those actually were to be rejected. So the takeaway there is that ideological formulation has often been less reflective in the US, and it's been more prone to outright rejection. So I want to then talk a little bit about ideology more generally: what it is, this is the second part of the talk, what it is, what it isn't, and where we might go from there. What are key words, key concepts, ways of thinking about this subject, and move ourselves forward. So if you're looking at the longer history here, and this would be a long talk for a different day in some ways, but I want to give you a brief outline of it so that we have a sense as we embark here. The term "ideology" has a long and contested history. It was really introduced by the ideologues of the French Revolution. The first use of the term was about 1797. And what they did was they constructed it as a "science of thought". It was aimed at constructing a system of ideas that reflected material reality. So ideology for the French ideologues was about a "science of thought", a system of ideas that reflected material reality. Now, about 50 years later, Karl Marx articulated one of the most influential orientations of ideology, and instead articulated that the relationship between culture and political economy ... providing an essential mechanism by which societies managed and reproduce themselves. So, if you move this kind of concept forward for Marx, a society's, quote, "legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic forms ensure that members of the different classes viewed their positions in society and the system itself as natural. Now, in some ways, this is about a kind of false consciousness, that ideology mapped over social differences in order to keep capitalists in the ruling class doing their thing. But it also was a way of saying that material drivers were essential, but over the top came a kind of ideology. Now, in the 20th century, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser shifted this perspective slightly, and this is something that a lot of the historians involved in my work in this book, have been a little bit more oriented to. This was to make the case that ideology is better understood as world-making, through reason and language, more of an imagined set of relationships that do, in fact, correspond in many ways to real conditions of existence. As he put it, "human societies secrete ideology at the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life". And you see this in a lot of the ways in which theorists talk about ideology, that it comes out of this sort of corpus of humanity that is fundamentally human in this sort of way, and for Althusser, in this sense, ideology define the real for the subjects of any particular society. That is, their lived reality and lived existence was understood through ideology. He emphasized this role and the role of the state in this process - that the state and social institutions are the quote "apparatus" that helps to reproduce ideology. So, you see that there, that the apparatus of the state and state institutions helps to reproduce and reinforce ideology. Okay, so what's that all about? If you're thinking about US foreign relations, the State Department, presidents are part of this process, so is the news media, so are foreign policy lobbies, so are political parties, so are church groups, or non-governmental organizations like the Red Cross, they're all kinds of ideologies at stake in their orientations to the world, how they understand it, what policies they advocate for, and then that shapes how individuals think about ideology. Alright, so how do I define it? How do we define it in the book? Moving forward here. So, clearly, here's just some core ways of thinking this through. Ideologies set the terms of engagement for nation states, and for all actors thinking about foreign relations. They're not static. This is one of the sort of misconceptions about ideology that you can pin it to the wall. But as intellectual historians often say, it's like nailing jello to the wall, right? When you get it nailed in, it comes sliding down, right? So you need to be very cognizant of change over time and context. Ideologies order and explain the world, as I say here, project illusions of controllable outcomes. That's a really important element of this. We all know in our lived experiences that just because you believe something, or hope to achieve something, it doesn't necessarily mean that that will happen. The same is true for nation states, no matter how powerful they are. The same is true for non-governmental organizations, no matter how powerful they are, and other kinds of actors in the foreign policy realm. Now, a key component of all definitions of ideology is that they make a complex world more manageable. In a world of infinite options and policies and principles and assumptions, you need something to help filter that, to make sense of that, and that's really what ideologies do. In so doing, as I say here, right, they define it and explain success and failure, they justify and set boundaries, and perhaps most important when you're thinking about ideology and foreign relations, especially in peace and in war - they compel sacrifice, aggression and inaction. So if you're thinking about right now, the war in Ukraine and Russian troops, right, one of the things that not having a robust Russian ideology related to the war in Ukraine has meant is that morale is terrible for Russian troops. When you think about morale for US soldiers in other conflicts, for instance, as a comparison, right, in World War Two, the US had been attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, it made for a robust ideology that seemed to transcend ... differences in the ranks of the troops, right? It was a war of, as FDR would put it, "for the four freedoms", which we'll talk a little bit about later, a war to make the world safe in Wilsonian terms for democracy, a war against evil, right? And that helped bring people together to sacrifice. And sometimes the function of ideology hides the fact that it is an ideology. We can talk more about that. But the point being, that in some ways, the Obama administration's pragmatism over ideology, of course, was itself an ideology. And the function of those kinds of ideas and concepts and policies can sometimes make it less obvious that they're at play. And that's one of the arguments that you see in the Marxist thinkers about ideology that really seems to hold true, that you can have very subtle, unreflexive, unacknowledged kinds of ideological commitments that are profoundly shaping for individuals and groups and nation states of outcomes. So here, one final definition. As Michael Hunt, historian who's worked a lot on foreign relations and foreign policy and ideas, has argued ideology is best understood as, quote, "an interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that reality". So what does that mean? In thinking about foreign relations, ideology is really about a core set of assumptions, a core set of principles, that helps distill the complex world around us into a more coherent worldview that then can help make arguments for how to move forward - what kinds of policies, what kinds of hopes, aspirations, dreams, and compromises are possible. So that's, in a nutshell, the ideological terms of the book. So how has it influenced US foreign relations history? How does this history look different? I organized an international conference, I brought together 20+ historians, there I am on C-Span talking about the subject to look at this. And one of the things that we noted, one of the reasons why the book has been getting some good attention this year, is that most foreign policy historians, most foreign relations scholars, if they've looked at all that ideology have tended to look at elite policymakers. And some of what follows in my quick history here will be from that perspective, but not exclusively. They haven't tended to look at indigenous peoples and groups, like I just noted at the outset. They haven't tended to look at marginalized groups in the US and abroad. They haven't tended to look at grassroots actors, or generational differences, which I'll talk a little bit about later. They haven't tended to look at cultural production. So there's a great chapter in the book on George Lucas and Star Wars and how his fear of modernization theory and actual critique of it and the US war in Vietnam deeply inflected his construction of the Star Wars universe, in fact, and that that was intended in some ways as a subtle way to generate similar kinds of thinking out of those watching it. That may be news to some people watching this right now. Read Daniel Immerwahr's chapter in the book to learn more. So one of the approaches to understanding this, and one takeaway that was surprising to us, is that it's crucial to think about key terms and concepts - ideas, ideologies, concepts like capitalism, concepts like white supremacy, thinking about nativism, thinking about refugees, thinking about democracy. One term and concept came up again and again in my research and the research of those involved in the book: civilization. You can see that in the political rhetoric of presidents and policymakers, and you can see it in the words, language, and thought of everyday actors from the foundational era of the US at the turn into the 19th century, all the way up to the present. Sort of civilizational thinking has informed US foreign relations in different ways at different moments, but as I noted, right, thinking about from George Bush to the Monroe Doctrine, and back and forth, civilization has been a justification for intervention, or non-intervention, anti-imperialism or imperialism. It's been a way of thinking about best practices at home, civilizing at home against indigenous peoples and groups, and on and on, we could talk about that. A major development in historical circles, really, over the last generation has been a, kind of, linguistic term. This is a big difference from about roughly three or four decades ago, when historians were looking for other kinds of orientations in thinking about ideology. So a lot of the people in the book, a lot of the scholars that I'm in conversation with about ideology, look at ideas and look at words, look at language, and are very attentive to the etymology and direction of those words and ideas. Alright, so now I'll give you this very quick overview of a few ways to understand what has happened in ideology and this history, and then we'll get into our conversation. So, you know, as I've argued foreign policies emerged from and produced ideologies out of necessity. The Monroe Doctrine in 1823, which I already brought up, is a good example. Issued by James Monroe, conceived in part by John Quincy Adams, and ostensibly designed to forestall European interventionism, right, in the hemisphere and safeguard US regional interests. The doctrine arose from and bequeathed powerful variants to things like imperialism, things like unilateralism, kind of hegemonic view of the US's role in the hemisphere as a kind of caretaker, ability to meddle at its own will, developed during a really critical period of anti-colonial revolutions across Central and South America. One element at work here that's important to note is the US has had a long-standing preoccupation with the problems of revolution, particularly at its doorstep, but also within the country. And so it's an anti-imperialist country, a revolutionary anti-revolutionary country. It's a fascinating set of ideological constructs that are often in conflict. But if you move forward, the dynamic of foreign policies emerging from, as well as generating ideologies, is further powerfully confirmed, ou know, more than 100 years later with the Bretton Woods system of 1944. It was designed to help the world recover from the Second World War, as all of you smart folks in the audience undoubtedly know, to avoid the mistakes made following the First World War, when the US wasn't doing post-war planning in the midst of the war, did not join the League of Nations, and the structures of the world order, what one scholar calls the "new deal for the world", the creation of institutions such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, are very clearly ideological projections of power. They're premised on a US leadership role for a post-war world, and that's really one of the key ways of thinking about this. So here over a century apart are two key ideological orientations of the US: one and the hemisphere, one worldwide, that helped us get a sense of many of the overlapping kind of ideologies at work. Alright, so I'll quickly give you a few more tidbits before concluding. John Quincy Adams, in the 1840s, actually interestingly argued for British imperialism. He made a case in the context of the Opium Wars, that in fact ..., the British role in the world was one that was crucial, and that China's leaders were committing a quote, "enormous outrage on the rights of human nature", chief among them: the right to free trade. So even though he's known as this great abolitionist, also articulated, as I said, in the Monroe Doctrine, a fascinating move in the 1840s was John Quincy Adams and a kind of ideology of empire that actually excused British imperialism to some extent, and articulated this kind of civilizational thinking where the British and Americans were allied against other nations and peoples who were perceived through racial hierarchy as less important, less significant, or more inferior. Here's another thing to plant a seed for you all. There's a great chapter in the book by Professor Emily Conroy-Krutz. I should say, the previous one is by Professor Nick Gaia. In her argument, she talks about late 19th century missions, and one of the things that's fascinating about this is she looked at the next generation. A section of ... "Missionary Herald", and of mission magazines and newspapers was this section called "For The Young People". And one of the things that it did was that ... she introduced the voices of youth not often heard in histories of the US and the world, as a way to understand how missionaries took ways to ensure that the next generation understood the world around them, the differences between other cultures in the US, sometimes in relativistic terms, sometimes in very much racialized and racist terms. You know, as she argues, appealing to its readers as children, the letters ... understood that children grow into adults, the ideas that were planted a seeds now would grow to shape the ideology of the adults the children would become. We very often don't think about this. It's the same with that Star Wars example. And one of the things I want to highlight for you is that the children of missionaries in the late 19th century very often became the diplomats of the 20th century. They became the people who are the articulators of what Henry Luce called, "The American Century" because of their language skills and cultural competency. So another element of the book, and another thing that I want to point out just very briefly, is that if you look at the grassroots level, you find some remarkably deep and broad arguments from regular Americans about foreign policy. That, in fact, ideology can operate very effectively at the level of regular citizens. And in fact, you know, if you look at foreign policy polling, it's often said that Americans are not great at understanding foreign relations, understanding the world around them, but when you look closely at the letters, for instance, of GI's returning from World War Two, you find that, in fact, they have very deep and rich concepts about the world around them and very deeply felt assumptions and principles that guided their worldviews. As she puts it, Professor Michaela Hoenicke Moore, you find in this bottom-up approach, a diversity of foreign policy perspectives that defies conventional binaries of isolationism and internationalism, elites and masses, hawks and doves, Republicans and Democrats or even conservatives and liberals. You find, in short, lots of GIs coming back from World War Two, among other things, very hesitant to be the world's policemen in the Cold War. So let me do a couple more and then we'll conclude. One chapter the book by Professor Andrew Preston that's fantastic is about national insecurity, and in particular about the role of fear and emotions in shaping ideology. As he argues, there's been an inordinate prevalence of fear that sits at the heart of the American worldview, and provides a basis for thinking about US foreign policy. If you think about how Americans have operationalized fear and how politicians have used fear to justify interventions, military conquest, and other kinds of foreign policies, just quickly, you get a sense, especially since World War Two, of the operational capacity of emotions in generating new ideological constructs. What do I mean by that? Thinking about mutually assured destruction, "MAD". Thinking about how and why you see there between 2016 and 2020 more fear of China and Russia, less fear of North Korea. Why would Americans, who have a lot less to fear from North Korea, be more fearful of North Korea than South Koreans? That's an interesting opening question that Andrew poses in his chapter, and it's a really fascinating way of thinking about how such a powerful nation as the US has often operated out of fear, not just since 1945, but especially when it had this immense military and commercial power, economic power in the world. Alright, one other way to think about this is freedom. This is a great chapter in the book, historian Jeremi Suri talks about it and I wanted to plant this as a seed for us in our conversation and for you to talk about with others as well. Suri argues that the notions of freedom as an ideology is really useful. As I note there can be understood as a base alcohol for Americans that changes over time mixing well with certain additives in some moments, but not with others. What he argues is that "freedom from", "freedom to", and "freedom over" are essential ways of determining and understanding different periods. The Monroe Doctrine is a classic example of "freedom from" in that case from European meddling in the Western Hemisphere, as I've noted. Suri dates that the period from a "freedom to" as being dominant in the late 19th century, when the US economy was developing at breakneck speed, Woodrow Wilson was the influential advocate of freedom to the rest of the world, according to Suri. In the Second World War, in the beginning of the Cold War, arguably the period of "freedom over" - over other nations. Just as John Jacques Rousseau might have phrased it, forcing them to be free to become an essential task of US foreign policy. As he writes, and as I've also written the National Security Act of 1947 is one of the crucial moments in this phase - when Americans self-consciously built a permanent military industrial complex to guard freedom on a global scale. And okay, finally, I'll give you one more. This is from my own chapter. If you're thinking about unilateralism, I argue that it may be the longest-standing construct in US Foreign Relations ideology. A kind of visceral orientation, yes, but also intellectual. This urge to go it alone, this urge for self-sufficiency, to not have multilateral constructs keeping the US from its perceived vital interests. And the point here is that unilateralism goes all the way back. Back to John Quincy Adams saying, quote, "happiness consists in independence, disconnected from all European interests, and European politics". Even Hamilton, who was instrumental in securing the first Anglo American treaty argued that a fatal heresy is that of a close alliance. You hear this in Washington and Jefferson, right, fear of entangling alliances. But what this has informed is something much broader and deeper. Skepticism about NATO, which we've heard so much about in recent years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the first collective security organization the US joined since the revolution, joining it in 1949. Skepticism about the UN, skepticism about binding trade alliances and deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership, skepticism about the US being part of international law, being subject to the international law of other countries. So what I want to argue is that this unilateralism, which we've sometimes heard in recent years is, for example, was something that was unique to the Trump administration is, in fact, not at all. And that unilateralism goes as far back as the US nation state, and that helps explain the kind of enduring ideas about why going it alone, why minding your own business in the world, poll so well with so many Americans. That these kinds of ideas about self-sufficiency, about neutrality, about not being bound to binding alliances and structuring with other countries, are really deep rooted in American thought, and especially in how Americans think about their role in the world, in particular, about border making and boundary making as an another critical component of that. So I'm really interested in talking with you all about how the US has rethought its role in the world over time, and how ideology has been central to that. And I will leave it at that for now. Thank you so much.

Nicholas Breyfogle  
Chris, thank you so very much for giving us so much incredible kind of information and things to think about. It's such a very quick period of time, so much appreciated and this book looks incredibly rich, and incredibly interesting. Let's give you some questions to kind of think about. Folks who are with us today in the audience, please send in any questions you have by typing them into the q&a function just at the bottom of your screen, and I will happily pass them on and we can talk about them. We did have a few questions that came in in advance with registration and I thought I'd just start with a couple of those just to kind of get us going. One of the people online wants to know, so how does the United States justify working with states that are openly opposed to American ideals in order to combat kind of our enemies? And has this changed over time? And if so, how?

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
That's a good question. So the one way of thinking about that is that there's been a fundamental mismatch between rhetoric and reality in US foreign relations from the outset. That a kind of cautious realism, you might call it, a willingness to deal with those who perhaps have repugnant ideas or repugnant actions based on core precepts of American democracy has been there, in part, at the beginning out of weakness, not strength. That the US had to deal with other nations, or felt that it had to, American diplomats and policymakers. The level of criticism of high policy, however, you have seen also from very early on, media, regular members of society, critiquing that exact problem, the core of this question, that the US has, in fact, allied with or worked with other countries and groups, who were not following American sorts of principles. You know, in many eras, the point of thinking about ideology is to think about what it can justify. In many eras, the US certainly, in the Cold War, for instance, propped up so-called "Frankenstein dictatorships" - people in groups who nominally claimed to be democratic, and in fact, were totalitarian dictators, often oppressing their people. Or the US, of course, has notably been a participant in several major coups that have changed world history, you know, anti-democratic coups, I should say, such as in Guatemala, or in Iran. So that has not changed fundamentally, but I would argue that structures of American power have changed over time, such that the US did not have that capacity, say, through the CIA and intelligence that it does in the 20th century and 21st century, in the 19th and early 20th century. And so operating out of a more of a weakness model, you got more of these sorts of alliances of convenience and need. You get that, but more in terms of security structures and meddling in the later 20th and 21st century. So there's some change, and there's some continuity. There, of course, are ideologies in the US foreign policy matrix that would not permit that, right, and so that's been another part of the mix. So I would add one other element, which is interesting. In 1898, you had the Anti-Imperialist League, and in 1940, and 41, you had the America First Committee, ... they were the two biggest foreign policy lobbies in US political history, and both argued that the actions the US was taking were fundamentally anti-democratic, and not in the nation's best security interests. They're from very different places. One was against colonialism, and the other was against the US intervening in the war in what was World War Two. But in both of those instances, what those lobby groups were pointing out was a mismatch between rhetoric and reality, or as they saw it.

Nicholas Breyfogle  
Chris, you just mentioned, kind of, media and the role of media. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how you think the changing kind of realities of media, you know, obviously from the 19th century through until the internet age, how has that transformed the role of, kind of, ideology in foreign policy? I mean, going from yellow journalism to Twitter, what's the role there?

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
Yeah, that's a good question. It's practically a whole 'nother book in conversation, right? So, there's several ways you could tackle this. You know, one is to think about actual foreign policy formation tends to happen well outside the realm of popular discourse. So the National Security Council these days, you know, groups that are, the National Security Strategy, lots of area experts with all kinds of language skills and nuanced capacity. But in the public sphere, the shaping of what is projected happens through the media, you know, throughout time, even though ... there's a lot more of a governmental apparatus now. And so if you look to the early 19th century, you find these robust critiques of US relations with France and with with England in terms of the Napoleonic Wars, they're highly partisan and very vituperative. Ad hominem attacks, that Jefferson was exposed as someone who'd had, you know, relations with an enslaved person, which we would now called rape, alright, you know, high profile things like that as part of a critique of foreign policy and domestic politics. As you move forward through the 19th century and the 20th century, I think the the media's role in not so much ideological formation, but in articulating what those core ideas are, is really important. So you get, you know, presidents attempting to shape that conversation. So one of the things I was trying to highlight as I was planting those seeds was the role of political rhetoric, you know, historians really now are very attentive to language, a kind of deep attentiveness to changes over time, etymology and that sort of thing. One of the things you see in the 20th century is American politicians trying to explain to the wider public why, for instance, you know, containment of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, meant that the US should be spending lots of blood and treasure in places like Turkey, or regarding Greece and Italy. And you know, so that's the Truman administration and thinking about the Truman Doctrine that, in other words, in ideological terms, why the US should be a guarantor of freedom for free peoples around the world and supporting them in 1947. And moving forward. It takes the media to get that out to the wider public, and to help generate buy-in. And so you see much more, especially the mid 20th century, of a neat connection between the two. As you spin that forward, a diversity of media in the landscape, the velocity of change, and technology has fundamentally altered that. That's really an abnormal place in American political history. So where we are now is that you have a vast array of different articulators of US foreign policy and critiques thereof, including citizen journalists, you know, right, on Twitter and elsewhere, such that it's much harder for a president or foreign policy team to articulate something that could generate a lot of buy-in. So those early examples that I was giving, right, you could see the left and the right critiquing Bush and Obama were very similar things in different ways. You know, it's emblematic of this point, that it seems awfully hard to have a centralized, kind of, media positioning to help reinforce a foreign policy if you're a policymaker, and if you're a regular citizen you probably like the fact that you have more channels, in some ways, if you take advantage of them to get a better sense of what are the implications of US foreign relations. For instance, drone strategies, or what's happening in Yemen? Or where are US weapons going around the world? Why does the US have 800 bases around the world? These would have been questions that would have been much less asked by mainstream media in say, 1950.

Nicholas Breyfogle  
Oh, that's great. One of the people in the audience is asking, well, this question. So, with the two party system that we have now, and with it now being so antagonistic and seemingly unwilling to work together, how do we craft a long term foreign policy that can best serve an overall ideology and political goals, and not have it be subject to change or debate over change every every four years?

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
That's a great question. I think that, you know, in my take as a historian is that one of the remarkable things about US foreign relations over time, and I hinted about this, is that there has been a real consistency across administrations. The, sort of, peaceful transfer of power across administrations in the US has often meant a kind of continuity, particularly when it comes to pledges to other countries, pledges for security. Not always, right, we could point to some terrible examples where that wasn't the case. But generally speaking, there's been a neat through line in US foreign relations, whereby administrations mostly adhere to the, kind of, core precepts and assumptions that came before. That was sort of blown out of the water by the Trump presidency in 2017. And if you're a nation state around the world, observing the US, if you buy my quick gloss of that - that there's been more continuity in general across administrations, then you have to look at the US now in 2022 and say it could change dramatically after 2024. And I think this question gets at the heart of that, that you can't assume that there will be a significant continuity. Perhaps you couldn't in the past, perhaps that was naive to think that that was the case. Nevertheless, it now seems that recent history has suggested that that is no longer accurate. So how do you do that? Well, one thing is to think very long term. This is where some of my work on grand strategy comes in. If you're thinking about the next 5 or 10 years, that may be insufficient, but if the US is committing to say, a 20, to 50, to 100-year set of strategies, and of course, they can't be too specific, they're more aspirational, they need to be big things like containment - containing the Soviet Union for as long as it takes so there aren't revolutions around the world and so that there isn't a World War, right, so basic precepts. And then you fill in those policies over time. An articulation of that, a kind of new grand strategy, say, for climate change, would be the kind of thing that you could imagine outlasting some administrations. Now it might be thrown into chaos somewhat by a different presidency, but as a long term strategy, you could imagine then every four years sort of resetting to some extent, and then trying to build in some continuity, say, through international organizations or other kinds of groups. You know, the fact of the matter is, most of these ideologies, as I said, aren't static, and so they operate not just at the level of policymakers and formal policy, but they're changing with different contexts and they come from the bottom up. And so one of the important points of the book is that these GIs is coming back from World War Two, for instance, grassroots actors in all different scenarios, they're really informing policy too. They have robust ideological commitments that can push change over time. And so, you know, our ideologies matter, those of us in this conversation, right, our kinds of commitments. My deep commitment to democracy around the world means I will advocate for the people of Ukraine, even if the President and politicians don't, right? So in some ways, foreign policy ideologies are ours ourselves, not just located in the nation state or in the bureaucracy or our representatives.

Nicholas Breyfogle  
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned climate change and one of the questions we have revolves around the ways in which ideology plays out, perhaps, differently when you're looking at, sort of, bilateral relations, you know, US/China, US/Russia, US/Mexico, whatever you want to pick, as opposed to the way ideology functions when dealing with international types of questions, global questions. Things like climate change, or a global refugee problem, or issues of that kind of nature where there are multiple actors sometimes everyone on the whole planet is involved in these kinds of discussions, you know, thinking about COP 27, we've just finished up. But ...do you see ideology working differently in those different types of, kind of, diplomatic relationships?

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
Absolutely. Yeah, and you see that over time. So I think, you know, where I ended, the chapter I wrote, one of the chapters I wrote, in the book, "Unilateralism" comes from my long standing studies of isolationism, unilateralism, globalization. And, you know, so, obviously it's incompatible to think about a strong unilateralist orientation and kind of multilateral commitments to binding agreements and, say, through climate change accords, through different kinds of economic partnerships, and on and on. So it depends on the particular ideologies, right, those commitments. And depending on your moment, you know, we could go farther back in trying to stop the US road into the First World War, for instance, the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, thought that the US should pursue lots of bilateral cooling off treaties for arbitration, for instance. So it wasn't that he didn't want to pursue, kind of, global peace, he thought the best path for that was through lots of bilateral accords to say: okay, we will go to international arbitration before we resort to war, we will not trade with belligerence, we will let international arbiters help us decide whether or not we're sending war materials or just raw materials that would be helpful to a people but perhaps not to their full capacity for war making. He of course, disagreed with Woodrow Wilson, and in 1915, was the first Secretary of State to resign because of those disagreements. Wilson was much more multilateral in the sense that he wanted to join the war, be on the side of the British and the French. Now, of course, the US entered that war as a quote, "associate power", had no formal alliance there, did not fight under the flags of other nations. So even there, you see a kind of commitment to the US being part of the war and its outcomes, make the world safe for democracy, while still not being fully multilateral in the ... contemporary 21st century sense, you might think, right, not having a full formal alliance. So, you know, I think that it's a really important point, and that there can be these kind of complex configurations of ideologies, just thinking that the World War One moment helps illuminate that, especially in war and peace. But another piece of this, and just one of the reasons why I did all the definitional work is, you know, ideologies are really about your core principles and assumptions. Some of the assumptions you won't know. We don't know our full assumptions, you know, we're enmeshed in a world where we have certain beliefs that are fundamentally unarticulated and uninterrogated. But some of those might be about then, say, why we need to deal with climate change for the next generation or several generations down the line even if we have a kind of mental construct that we prefer unilateralism, for instance, that we prefer, you know, the US acting on its own interests with national autonomy and sovereignty ... in most occasions. So the challenge there is, then how do you operationalize that ideological construct for the core commitments that are maybe a little less interrogated? This gets to psychology, this gets to philosophy, right? It isn't really so much an easy historical piece of analysis, except to say that one of the things we find in the historical record is so often these ideologies are contradictory - that there's something problematic embedded in them and it depends on the particular moment to see how the scales balance, right? And they may balance for multilateral commitments to a multigenerational project against climate change, and they might actually shift to bilateral trade protectionism in some other moment, for instance.

Nicholas Breyfogle  
I'm gonna sneak in one more question, I'm gonna beg everybody's patience just to keep on ... because there's one more that came in. Did the Obama era. kind of, pragmatic ideology that you talked about blind us to Russia's nationalistic ideology and subsequent invasion of Ukraine? To what extent does a nation's particular ideology make it unable to understand other nations with different ideologies?

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
That's a great question. That's exactly what I was teeing up there in that opening, so thank you. Yes. So I think that, you know, the Obama administration's elevation of a, kind of, pragmatism was, first, over ideology was first, frankly, fundamentally ideological. Like pragmatism is about, as William James would have put it, the conduct that an idea dictates - that it's always provisional, and that it's a philosophical tool for figuring out, you know, the worth of ideas, the so-called "cash value of ideas", as he put it. So one of the things that's missed there is the fact that this, sort of, aggrandizement, and I think that we have a problem here of scale, right? So nations don't necessarily have ideologies, right? That's an abstract concept. Vladimir Putin has an ideology that we can diagnose, to some extent, through his public statements, eventually, as historians probably we'll get in his records, hopefully, and figure that out, we'll see, maybe some future historians will. So we can diagnose his ideology, and one of the things we see there is this, sort of, mythologized historical view of a kind of Imperial Russe that never actually existed, that doesn't recognize the fact that Ukraine and not Russia, was sort of the origins of Russia. Kyiv predates Moscow, and we could have a long story story about this, but he has this imagined history that matches on to his, kind of, nationalistic ambitions. And that's the kind of thing that someone like Barack Obama would be very capable of diagnosing. And the challenge, the problem was that their core assumptions of the national security strategies in that period were pushing back against strong ideological orientations for the US's role in the world, say, democracy promotion, a freedom agenda, right, these things that came out of the Bush administration. So what they prioritized was economics. What they saw on Russia, and this is the question is exactly right, was a country that was dependent on fossil fuels almost singularly and had no future as an economic competitor to the US or China that they could perceive. So they pivot to Asia, and they don't really think about, say, cyber warfare, all the meddling elections that's going on, the assault on Georgia that precedes the assault on Crimea, the fact that fundamentally, Vladimir Putin was obsessed with this kind of nationalistic, mythologized vision of achieving a past that had never been there for a future that seemed, you know, impossible. And so you're exactly right, except that, you know, the Bush administration had very different miscalculations about Russia, right? They were pushing back thinking that Putin was being anti-democratic within his country, but they weren't so sure about the possibilities for collaborating and connecting in the future, that Bush saw much more possible working with Vladimir Putin. Obama tried to reset that relationship, it didn't really work out, and his miscalculations were about prioritizing economics over other forms of ideological aggrandizement, territorial, sort of mythologized, etc. And I think one other element of this that's fascinating, Daniel immerwahr, who wrote the chapter in the book about Star Wars, recently wrote a piece on geopolitics. And one of the things we're seeing in the world now is this argument that it's a reterritorialization of the world. One of the things the Obama administration was operating under was this presupposition coming from people like Thomas Friedman, that the world had been flattened, that it was all about globalization and connection, and he did not see the border making the boundary making and the nationalistic, kind of, muscular nationalism and authoritarianism that was rising. And that's arguably because of the certain ideological blinders and presuppositions that were there, versus other ones. And I don't mean this as a critique, because I'm critiquing both administrations. Just trying to diagnose the foreign policy ideas that are there. And I think you're right, fundamentally one of the ways of understanding the role of ideology in US foreign relations, is that it shapes the future, right? It as I said, right, it is this mechanism through which you can make a complex world more finite, but in so doing, that does narrow the parameters of what's possible, and it potentially leads to significant miscalculations. And you can see that in other eras, too, which is one of the things that the the book illuminates.

Nicholas Breyfogle  
Chris, thank you so very much for, I mean, it was just such a pleasure learning from you today. And you've given us so much to think about as we walk away. I want to thank everyone for joining us today, for your excellent questions. I'm really grateful to Christopher McKnight Nichols for sharing his expertise and his passion for history. Please join me in giving him a virtual round of applause. Thank you, Chris very, very, very, very much. And I'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Alex Stacklane, the Department of History, the Goldberg Center, and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective for their support of this event. Again, thank you all for coming today, Chris, thank you so much, and please stay safe and healthy and we'll see you next time. Goodbye. 

Christopher McKnight Nichols  
Thank you all.