National Security and Core Values in American History is a useful addition to a specialized literature on the impact of the US national security state on American life and government. It is a great counterpoise to the study it builds upon, Michael J. Hogan's masterful A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). As with the likes of diplomatic historians William Appleman Williams and Michael Hunt, who both isolated the ideational and materialist aspects driving the expansion of American power, Walker undertakes to reassess the US pursuit of global engagement through national security by going beyond the post-Second World War context that is usually associated with the idea of the national security state. Not that Walker believes that national security was a term in vogue before the 1930s, but he rather conceives the novel way of thinking about security—the security ethos as a new public diplomacy aimed at the nation—that the language of national security encapsulates could also be applied to the 1890s and the debate over empire that accompanied the War of 1898.

Walker states that the similarities between the 1890s and 1940s are sufficient to speak about the same imagined way of thinking about security, even though he recognized that “the language of security policy and … the extent of consensus supporting a national security state differed in the two periods” (52). What is crucial for him is not that it came about as a concept after 1945, but that the creation of the security state has a history that dwells further back than the 1930s, for instance, and that the security ethos bears some responsibility in putting the nation's basic values at risk. According to Walker, it is through Theodore Roosevelt's leadership (in the McKinley administration first and then as president), himself inspired by the geopolitician Alfred Mahan, that the US would see(k) an empire that “brought forth the security ethos that went with it” (292).

Divided in four distinctive parts, the monograph's first section retraces the origins of the American republican values in the colonization of the seventeenth century. Walker then expresses how the security ethos has distorted the nation's core values. The second chapter consequently addresses head on the “first national security state” whose creation is connected to the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The second part concerns the internationalism inherited from Wilson, from which Walker will dissect the core values that America wants to brandish in the world. This section is logically linked with the global containment doctrine and the expansionism of cold war liberalism and ends with the shortcomings of American global engagement, notably with the astounding political defeat and humiliating retreat from the Vietnam War. The third section ranges from Nixon's re-election, which sets the tone for a new strategic globalism (which would lead to the Americans leaving Saigon in 1975), to the “new world order” self-proclaimed by George H.W. Bush and the Clinton years and his leadership of US hegemony under globalization.

The last part is dedicated to the George W. Bush era and the war on terror, where Walker centres on the Bush Doctrine and its ill-devised strategy of pre-emption. Overall, Walker asserts that four grand strategies have accompanied the global presence and American empire and contributed to undermining the historical balance that defined the nation as a democratic liberal republic: Wilsonian internationalism, global containment, strategic globalism and the pre-emption strategy enacted by the Bush Doctrine. The book finally ends on a precautionary note, highlighting that under the security ethos, “America's march to hegemony compromised the nation's core values and thus the prospects for a healthy democracy” (292). He then adds that it is impossible to state whether it might be too late for a possible restoration of what he deems to be “the basic values, the rights, and the liberties sustaining American democracy” (292).

All in all, this study rightly fits into the scholarly heritage it aspires to, that of William Appleman Williams, and represents a real intellectual tour de force. Its ambition to provide a historical synthesis of US foreign policy from the birth of the republic to the most recent developments under George W. Bush is well served by Walker's lifetime of scholarship and teaching of the history of US foreign relations (more than 30 years). Its sharp critique of American exceptionalism is more than welcome in a period tarnished by neoconservative fantasies of America's benevolent empire. Inasmuch as this study does not stand out for its originality, its take on the history of the security ethos that led to the abuses of presidential power under George W. Bush is not only informative but lays out a very convincing case for the pitfalls befalling national security. This historical account in the identity politics of the United States through foreign and security policy could indeed be read as a useful rejoinder to David Campbell's classic, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 [1992]), who might share some of Walker's concerns without being as subservient to the constitution process of these long-standing “American core values.”

If Walker decided to write this book as a result of certain dissatisfaction with Cold War scholarship on US foreign policy, as many such studies are faulted for their ahistoricism, one would have expected to find an engagement with studies on US ideology done outside the disciplinary boundaries of history, notwithstanding that Hunt's Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) remains indispensable. Without its being a tall order, this would have certainly strengthened the claims and purview of this book. Other than the one aforementioned source that is missing (Campbell's), classical sociology works like Harold Lasswell's 1941 article “The Garrison State” in the American Journal of Sociology or C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite (1957) on the impact and fear of the national security state on American life, as well as a must-read on national interests and the national security worldview on the same historical period done by political scientist Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) would have satisfied this reviewer. But alas, this does not hinder the findings of this elegant study.