It is a rare thing indeed for a scholarly book to garner almost universal praise from its peers. The very nature of academia, after all, is for differing interpretations and, in many cases, divisive disagreements about particular topics. There is, of course, more chance of pulling this off with a wide-ranging work of synthesis that deals more with established narratives than there is with a fresh interpretation of primary materials, which is always liable to be subject to conjecture. Nevertheless, such acclaim remains the holy grail of academic publishing; a much-hoped-for, but rarely achieved, positive consensus of informed opinion.

In his contribution to Oxford University Press's History of the United States series, however, George C. Herring – one of America's foremost diplomatic historians and a leading expert on the Vietnam War – has seemingly pulled off the remarkable. From Colony to Superpower, the only topical work in a series that has dealt more with specific time frames in American history than with sweeping overviews, has received more or less unanimous praise since its publication in 2008. Robert Schulzinger, the editor-in-chief of the field's flagship journal Diplomatic History, described it in his own review as “the standard master narrative of the history of US diplomacy.”Footnote ¹ Other reviews have been equally praising. One of the few negative reviews, it bears noting, was by a fellow of Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institute, who wrote in the New York Times that Herring's work would not replace those of Samuel Flag Bemis, Norman Graebner, George Kennan or John Lewis Gaddis. “Sometimes,” he concludes, “less is more.”Footnote ²

What is, perhaps, most impressive about Herring's achievement is the fact that covering such an extensive time period could have easily led to a familiar litany of complaints about issues that were not included or explained in enough detail. In order to be so comprehensive, Herring had to adopt a particular approach; and in doing so, his book situates itself at the centre of a historiographical debate that is slowly beginning to take a new turn. New methodologies – such as transnational history and the cultural turn – could only be utilized in limited fashion if the book was to be comprehensive and flow neatly. Equally, it necessarily adopts a top-down approach to its subject – eschewing the current trend to view the making of US foreign policy either from below or from afar. In doing so, it serves as a powerful riposte to those arguing that greater “de-centering” of the field needs to take place.Footnote ³ In that vein, moreover, it strikes a chord with Fred Logevall and Campbell Craig's recent contention that adopting such an approach too heavily is potentially “ahistorical.”Footnote ⁴ Gauging Herring's intention on this front, though, is less clear-cut. To be sure, Herring frames his narrative neatly in the introduction – incorporating arguments relating to the link between domestic and foreign policy, attitudes of racial superiority and long-standing “unilateralist” sentiments – but he is less forthcoming on whether or not this top-down, US-centric model is a deliberate statement of intent or a model of convenience and clarity.

Each of the reviewers featured here highlights different elements of the book that they like as well as some that they would have liked more on. All, however, adhere to the scholarly consensus regarding the book's significant achievements. David Engerman hails the book's content, praising each constituent chapter as an “exemplar of concision.” He also celebrates the first half of the book – dealing with the pre-twentieth-century era – as “revelatory.” On the other hand, he has some concerns with the book's second half. The Cold War era, he writes, lacks the breadth of earlier passages with the focus primarily on “diplomatic and military topics.” Moreover, Engerman sees the post-Cold War chapter as being somewhat removed from the rest of the book; necessarily utilizing more journalistic sources means that the chapter is somewhat out of kilter with what has come before. Engerman does, though, find much to admire in Herring's footnotes – finding his ability to incorporate books and articles on a wide range of topics and methodologies to be a praiseworthy development, in spite of the fact that these play only a secondary role.

Campbell Craig begins by examining the book's impact on wider historiographical issues – citing the fact that, if nothing else, events since 2001 highlight the necessity of studying policymaking events in Washington because, while other factors may well be interesting and shed further light on a topic, it is ultimately in the United States that the major decisions are made. While clearly agreeing with the book's overarching context, Craig does find points of dissent with Herring. He is left unconvinced by the passages looking at McKinley's decision to enter into a war with Spain in 1898, while the sections on Wilson's entrance into World War I are viewed as lacking “decisiveness.” He also believes that Dwight Eisenhower should have been accorded more praise for avoiding greater conflict with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and that Jimmy Carter should have been given a higher grade for his achievements while in office. Finally, Craig suggests that it would have been beneficial for the study to have an “overarching conclusion” in order to draw together the full range of issues explored throughout its more than a thousand pages.

Mary Ann Heiss focusses predominantly on the two major themes that she found running through the text – themes that, she argues, take the study well beyond more typical complaints about things that should, or should not, have been included. The first theme that she focusses on is that of how America has consistently shaped the world; wars and interventions obviously feature heavily here, but so, too, do trade and diplomatic initiatives. Crucially, the widespread expansion of US trade links – coupled with the attendant spread of “lifestyle trappings” and goods – has served as a form of “cultural imperialism.” As a consequence of this theme, Heiss notes, the US was able to shape the world decisively long before it became a superpower.Footnote ⁵ The second theme that Heiss discerns flowing through the book is one that she describes as being the “flip side of the first” – namely the extent to which the outside world has influenced the US. From the advent of independence, Heiss suggests, the book does a superb job of demonstrating the way that other nations were able to impact upon America's development.

In our final review, Steven Casey concurs with some of the earlier points: like the others, he hails the book as a superb achievement, but like Craig he also highlights the book's wider historiographical significance. Given the broader context regarding diplomatic history as a subfield of American history, Casey writes, Herring's book is a timely reminder of the importance of foreign policy in the American tale. True, Casey continues, the book often focusses on “great American leaders” – a trait that, in periods like the 1920s where no overarching figure is present, can be a disadvantage – but in doing so it highlights the centrality of the presidency to the way that foreign policy is made and enacted. This is, of course, by no means exclusive; Casey also makes mention of the fact that the book gives Congress its head as policymaking force, as well as highlighting non-state actors who, at different times, are able to wield significant influence. The book is less successful, Casey suggests, when it looks to situate US foreign policy in its international context. Herring's study, he argues, would have benefited from more use of international history sources that were as current as those used on the US side. Nevertheless, he concludes by making a point also highly evident in each of the other reviews:

Herring's epic study, then, undoubtedly succeeds on its own terms (a fact strongly reaffirmed by our reviewers). It provides a comprehensive overview of US foreign policy from independence to the present day, while it successfully factors in a number of interrelated themes and arguments. And though it is a narrative ultimately couched in sombre shades, it is one that contains a salutary lesson for contemporary policymakers: “popular notions to the contrary,” Herring writes, “the United States has been spectacularly successful in its foreign policy” (9). This success notwithstanding, the US has to deal with the world it is in, not the one it would like. “Weaker nations can deal with a hegemonic nation by combining with each other or simply by obstructing its moves. Even America's unparalleled power could not fully assure the freedom from fear that George Washington longed for” (10). He closes the book with a call for greater diplomatic engagement – thus rejecting the unilateralism that has too often been present in the US approach. US leaders, he writes, “must lead by example and especially by listening to other peoples and nations” (964). When read in the current international climate, it is a view that seems especially pertinent and which only serves to reinforce the importance of a work of such impressive scope and synthesis.

George Herring's From Colony to Superpower is both typical of the series in which it belongs, the successful Oxford History of the United States, and different from the other volumes. It is typical in the way that it carries on the fine tradition of the Oxford History – broad synthetic interpretations of large swaths of American history by leading historians of their generation. And it is unusual in just how broad a swath of American history Herring covers – American foreign relations from 1776 until 2008 or so. This chronological breadth is, in fact, unique for the Oxford History series, the other volumes of which divide American history into more manageable chunks of a half-century or less. From Colony to Superpower contains twenty chapters, ranging from four years long (on World War II) to twenty-two years (on “the assertive republic,” 1815–37). Like America's foreign engagements, the book is weighted towards the late twentieth century, with six chapters set in the Cold War and one after.

It is the content of the book, not its architecture, that constitutes Herring's achievement. Each chapter is an exemplar of concision, explicating an impressive range of American foreign engagements pulled together – albeit sometimes quite loosely – by a set of themes carefully set out in the book's introduction. What possible themes could apply to American foreign policy as a colony, as a weak young nation, as an expanding global power, as a Cold War superpower, as a post-Cold War hyperpower? Herring's rich and thoughtful introduction identifies a handful of key themes that reappear continually through the book. For starters – indeed, on the very first page – Herring asserts that “foreign policy has been central to the national experience” (1); that this statement might undermine the decision to have a separate volume of the Oxford History on foreign relations is left unaddressed by Herring and by the series editor, David M. Kennedy. True to his word, Herring frequently delves into the ways in which foreign policy both influenced and was influenced by domestic politics and culture.

Many of Herring's themes serve to challenge common myths of America's global role: in spite of envisioning themselves as “peace-loving,” Herring insists, “few nations have had as much experience at war as the United States” (1). Similarly, despite frequent “disdain” for European forms of international relations, Americans “played the great game of world politics” skillfully (8–9). Similarly, while Americans have variously celebrated and bemoaned their “isolationism,” Herring corrects this misimpression by terming this same reluctance to work with other nations “unilateralism” (6). One reason for the confusion, he continues, is Americans' attitude towards the world economy: “allured by the riches of the world,” they emphasized economic freedom as the key to a new global order (2–3). Herring's remaining themes are expressed as tensions between competing ideals. Americans' faith in their nation's destiny was offset by a “pragmatism basic to American character” (2, 5). The democratic political system shaped (and, Herring suggests, sometimes misshaped) foreign policy at the same time that policy formation “normally remained the province of elites” (5). These generalities offer a thoughtful summation of American tendencies in relating to the world that is capacious enough to range from the Barbary Wars to Operation Barbarossa. They also reveal a tendency to generalization about “Americans” that is, fortunately, less evident in the text that follows.

Herring threads these themes through a basic plot line about America's ever-increasing engagement with the outside world. Indeed, there is a contradiction here. Like Richard Hofstadter's quip about the United States – “the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress” – Herring's book describes the United States as a nation whose birth and early survival were rooted in its foreign policy, and yet whose foreign engagements became increasingly important.Footnote ⁶ The War of 1812 was a “turning point” in which the United States (in one of the book's many memorable phrases) “surged to the level of a second-rate power” (132, 136), the “great transformation of U.S. foreign relations” began in the Gilded Age and “culminated” in the 1890s (299), Wilson's “New Age” marked another turning point in America's march to globalism (378), the late 1930s were a “great transformation” in America's global role (484), American globalism rose during World War II (538), and the formation of NATO amounted to “the American revolution of 1949” (626). Herring explains in some detail what changed in each of these moments, but seems reluctant to identify priorities among these many turning points.

Herring, furthermore, depicts many events in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with an eye towards the future: the negotiations with Spain in the 1780s presaged sectional divides that would appear a half-century later (48), sending Marines “to the shores of Tripoli” in 1800 marked the first American effort to topple a foreign government (100), a contretemps over protocol with Southeast Asian diplomats in 1832 revealed Vietnamese frustration with “foreign barbarians” (168–69), the spread of baseball and Christian gospel in the middle of the nineteenth century were aspects of American “soft power” (273), the Pork War with Europe in 1879 sounds much like twentieth- and twenty-first-century disputes over protectionism (p. 289).

That said, the first half of this book is, at least for this specialist in twentieth-century foreign policy, revelatory. It shows, in lively prose and telling quotations, the ways in which the rest of the world was always central to the concerns of the American state and its citizens. Partisan politics – indeed, political parties themselves – emerged out of foreign-policy debates in the late eighteenth century. The supposed ur-text of American isolationism, George Washington's 1798 Farewell Address, Herring shows convincingly but counterintuitively, was a call for vigorous commercial expansion as well as “temporary alliances” when necessary – the “blueprint,” in Herring's words, “for future empire” (83). Foreign policy, Herring boldly claims (and carefully documents) was “central to the national experience” in the antebellum years. The extent and variety of America's international engagements expanded dramatically in the decades after the Civil War, led largely by commercial considerations. American ships plied the seas bringing back everything from rare spices to plentiful guano, competing with European merchants all the while. Herring masterfully tracks formal diplomacy as well as the mechanisms of foreign policy. This latter topic seems hopelessly narrow and dry, yet Herring demonstrates again and again its importance as a measure of official American attitudes towards the world; what sums up nineteenth-century diplomacy for students better than the fact that the most important American foreign-policy official was Alvey Adee, who as second assistant secretary of state wrote most of the nation's diplomatic dispatches between 1877 and 1922 (279)? Herring carefully traces continental expansion, emphasizing the implications for American relations with (variously) Spain, France, England, and Mexico; to a lesser degree, he also builds upon Francis Jennings's insight that contacts with Native Americans were a form of foreign policy.Footnote ⁷ Each chapter starts with a brief summary and then mixes anecdote, quotation, and generalization to recount that history admirably.

The twentieth-century chapters contain all the virtues of the early parts of the book, even as the frequency and intensity of America's international engagement increased. They puncture sustained myths of Woodrow Wilson's presidency, showing how paeans to bipartisanship in foreign policy were a long-standing tradition – but that bipartisanship itself was rare (427). In spite of the partisan battle that led to his defeat in the League fight, Wilson nevertheless prevailed in making the United States into a world leader (434). The 1920s would reveal this well enough: a reorganized Foreign Service would serve to advance American global interests with great effectiveness, Americans traveled the world (especially Europe) in increasing numbers, American capital flowed into foreign direct investment in record amounts, and America dealt with a pariah state, Bolshevik Russia, with a combination of diplomatic isolation and commercial engagement (464–65).

The Cold War, the topic of Herring's own research, is covered clearly and effectively.Footnote ⁸ Herring occasionally refers to, but wisely never dwells upon, the historiographic controversies that wracked (some might say wrecked) the field of diplomatic history for decades – he consistently opts for a middle road; it is hard not to see his praise of 1920s Republicans as “non-ideological and commendably pragmatic” as Herring's own mantra (482). This moderation serves Herring well as he describes the escalation of American–Soviet tensions during World War II (surprisingly, though, omitting mention of the Potsdam Conference) and the first postwar years. As the familiar story of the early Cold War unfolds, Herring draws somewhat sparingly on the scholarship making use of Soviet bloc archival materials. The result is a familiar story that acknowledges innumerable American errors, from misreading local conditions in Greece in 1947 to misunderstanding Iran in the early 1950s, and so on, while not blaming the United States for starting the Cold War. Herring's description of Vietnam, which describes a succession of mistakes from Presidents Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson, is not surprisingly thoughtful and judicious. His discussion of the broader impacts of the Vietnam War on American policy and on the international order (in which Japan was the “only winner”) is especially impressive (745).

What the Cold War chapters have in intensity, however, they lack in breadth. After defining foreign relations with impressive breadth up through World War II, Herring's analysis of the Cold War narrows to include primarily diplomatic and military topics, with occasional references to the changing international political economy. The expansion of American markets and foreign direct investment becomes a secondary concern; the record numbers of people in transit as immigrants, tourists, or foreign students merits nary a mention – even though post-1965 immigration remade the composition of America, even though tourism vies with oil as the largest single item of international commerce, and even though higher education is a major American service export (and has a greater impact on perceptions of the United States than its dollar figure would suggest). The book's final chapter, on American foreign relations after the Cold War, continues this narrowing process, losing the chance to place the origins of 1990s “globalization” in the context of Cold War developments or longer-term trends. At the same time, Herring necessarily relies more on journalistic dispatches than on books and scholarly articles – revealing an impressive file of newspaper clippings. The different character of the footnotes imparts a different character on the text; it is more episodic, less tied to the broad themes so effectively carried through the prior chapters, and more focussed on specific events and individuals – especially those in the White House. Herring's characteristic moderation is well evident, but the chapter feels somewhat less interpretative than the preceding ones. Fortunately this characteristic, which plagued the final volume of the Oxford History of the United States, affects only a short portion of Herring's book.Footnote ⁹

Until that last chapter, though, Herring's footnotes alone make an important point for historians. As the field of American foreign relations has expanded its compass well beyond Record Group 59 (the US National Archives designation for State Department records), the task of integrating newer cultural and social approaches with more traditional diplomatic ones has challenged historians as both teachers and scholars. Herring shows just how insights of scholars in the field fit together; he cites an extraordinary range of articles from Diplomatic History, and not just those appearing during his own stint as editor in the early 1980s. The articles cover diplomatic topics, but also baseball, missionaries, foreign aid, and (as the line goes) much, much more. The idea that that field's increasingly centrifugal tendencies nevertheless yield – at least in the hands of a master like Herring – a broad synthesis should reassure, indeed excite, diplomatic historians.

George Herring's From Colony to Superpower is a remarkable achievement, a pinnacle, perhaps, to a long and distinguished career. He has written a book that should reach scholars and students as well as “civilians” outside university gates. With its careful balance of argument and evidence, with its keen eye for the telling quotation, and with its forceful moderation, From Colony to Superpower may be the last single-volume account of America's engagements with the world; even if other books appear in the next generation, it is hard to imagine them having the same qualities – and quality – as Herring's remarkable tome.

The modern historiography of US foreign relations has gone through three stages that should seem familiar to anyone conversant with contemporary trends in historical writing. The orthodox, or nationalist, school has portrayed the United States generally as a virtuous, or at least innocent, nation that reluctantly took up the cause of power politics only out of threats to itself and its vital allies. According to this line of argument, America has rarely, if ever, acted malevolently or aggressively on the world stage; if it has done bad things (like the Vietnam War), the culprit is not the United States itself but well-intentioned leaders making understandable (or even unavoidable) mistakes. Conversely, a revisionist school, arising during the 1960s, turned the traditionalists on their head: the United States, rather than being uniquely benign, was in fact a particularly aggressive nation, expanding American power violently and globally not out of some miscalculation but for reasons of profit and domination.

A third approach to this debate demurs. Many contemporary historians put aside the question of political culpability, and even the central role of the US government, in their study of US foreign relations. Negotiating the “cultural turn,” if a bit later than many scholars in other subfields, they prefer to focus on aspects of American behaviour abroad away from summits and National Security Council meetings. Marginalized groups – racial minorities, women, the poor – become a central part of the American foreign-relations experience. And, from another direction, a new vanguard of historians argues that a singular focus upon the foreign policies of one nation, even such a colossally powerful one as the United States, provides an incomplete and misleading (and, many of them would add, uninteresting) picture. Only by engaging in international history – in accounting for the policies of all nations involved in a particular era or crisis – can a rich and satisfactory account be told.

Debate among these various schools, and new ones sure to come, will continue, driven both by new methodological innovations and by responses to present-day conditions; historiography, as we all know, is shaped by contemporary concerns and moods. With respect to this latter factor, it seems undeniable that the events of the past several years are pushing many historians of US foreign relations back toward a more conventional methodological position. This may be due to the fact that the radical expansion of formal American military power since 2001 tells us, to put it bluntly, that while the role of culture is interesting, and that an absolutely comprehensive account of an era should of course be international, what happens in official circles in Washington, DC remains far more important. In explaining the recent course of US foreign policy it simply will not do to examine the role of women's groups or the spread of American pop culture; nor will it do to suggest that such an explanation must give equal weight to the policies of France, Britain, or Iraq. Political decisions in Washington were central.

Yet the tragedy of US foreign policy during the first decade of the twenty-first century also makes it difficult to maintain the nationalist picture of an ingenuous America, minding its own business, having grudgingly to react to urgent threats when it would rather be left alone. If conventional methodology is back in vogue, so also is the revisionist mindset, if not its Marxian version.

Or so it seems at least in George Herring's formidable and majestic history of American foreign relations since the war for independence. In From Colony to Superpower, Herring has produced a comprehensive narrative history of US foreign policymaking, running to almost a thousand pages of text, whose methodology and form would have been familiar to the stodgiest of old-school historians. While Herring makes occasional gestures in the direction of culture and social movements, the vast majority of the book zeroes in on American political leaders, almost all of them white men, operating in the highest corridors of Washington power.

Yet the story he tells is not an apologia, much less a celebration. Early American foreign policy, he argues, was for the most part driven by crass political and commercial interests. The 1840s conflict with Mexico amounted largely to a land grab, a “war of lust and aggrandizement,” Herring writes. US behaviour in Latin America, especially after 1898, was paternalistic and racist. US East Asian policy in the 1930s drove Japan to desperation. The hyperexpansion of the Cold War after 1950 militarized the nation and led to disasters like the Vietnam War, which Herring, an expert on the topic, portrays unflinchingly. American policy in the Middle East since the 1960s has consisted largely of the blatant propping up of autocratic oil states and craven submission to the right-wing Israel lobby. And don't get Herring started on the foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration.

Distinguishing himself from some of the cruder revisionists, Herring does not regard the US as some kind of uniquely malign nation. The United States did on occasion have to contend with serious threats, and for the most part rose to the challenge. The founders deftly played Britain and France off against one another in their bid to achieve independence, a trick that had to work if the United States was to become a sovereign state in the first place. Lincoln waged effective diplomacy to discourage Britain from siding with the South during the darkest days of the Civil War. Herring devotes some serious attention to Franklin Roosevelt; in what I think may be his best chapter, he shows how FDR gradually and skilfully (and deceptively) guided the nation toward a war with Nazi Germany that he believed could not be avoided if America was to retain real independence. Though his treatment of the origins of the Cold War lacks the bite of the chapters on the 1930s and World War II, he does give Truman, Acheson, Kennan and others in Washington credit for devising a successful policy to contain a brutal Soviet regime. John F. Kennedy emerges as a strong President, especially in his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his bid for Cold War rapprochement just before his assassination.

Any historian of US foreign relations, including the present reviewer (more of a specialist on the twentieth century), will find aspects of the book to argue with. I found Herring's treatment of McKinley and the origins of the Spanish–American war a bit elusive; it was unclear at least to me what in the end led the President to parlay intervention in the Cuban revolution into a flurry of imperial conquests in the Pacific. Similarly, his analysis of Wilson's decision to intervene in World War I lacks decisiveness. He gives Eisenhower less credit than I would (and have done) for resisting an onslaught of alarmist militarism and nuclear sabre-rattling in the late 1950s – a campaign, it should be recalled, enthusiastically joined by Democrats such as Kennedy. He also seems too harsh on Jimmy Carter, whose admittedly poor management of his foreign-policy team should be contrasted with his foresight with respect to energy dependence, the Israel–Palestine conflict, and the importance of promoting human rights both abroad and at home.

More generally, I was disappointed that Herring did not provide an overarching conclusion to the book. Underlying so much of his writing is a theme of “American-ness,” of a “way” of waging foreign policy that seems particular to the United States. If this impression is correct, then it follows to ask Herring whether he thinks there is something exceptional about American foreign relations. Perhaps he would prefer to lay out an authoritative and exhaustive history and let the reader make her own conclusions (or perhaps he disagrees with the above assumption), but the book nevertheless seemed to conclude anticlimactically.

These obligatory reservations aside, From Colony to Superpower stands as the finest single study of US foreign relations from 1776 to the present yet published. Herring is to be congratulated not only for completing such a mammoth, uniformly well-written and copiously documented book, but also for focussing on policymaking in Washington, where so many of the decisions that have shaped our world have been made – for good and for ill.

Appropriate descriptors for George C. Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 are more difficult to find than one would think. Comprehensive, sweeping, and encyclopedic, though accurate, fail to convey the intellectual depth and interpretive breadth of a book that, despite its imposing length, is much more than a simple compendium of events and diplomatic pronouncements. Impressive, monumental, and even magisterial could justifiably be used, but none does more than suggest the scope of Herring's accomplishment – telling the tale of more than 230 years of US interaction with the world – while failing to take account of the unquestionable historiographical value of a volume that masterfully combines narrative and argument. Even Herculean and seminal somehow fall short, though they come close to the mark by suggesting the enormity of the book's reach and the likelihood of its staying power as an important element of the field's historiography. The fact that pithy descriptions of this book do not come easily should be seen as a testament to its unique position as an accessible one-volume treatment of an enormous and complex subject. To even attempt such an undertaking requires skill, confidence, and mastery of the field's vast literature, all of which Herring has in abundance. To succeed, as he has, in constructing a coherent and analytical account that is also a very fine read is certainly no mean feat.

If simply producing this volume was a singularly difficult undertaking, the same holds true for any attempt to review or critique it. Despite the book's considerable heft – both tangible and intangible – virtually all readers will find something that could or should have been addressed in more depth. To me, such complaints seem misplaced, given the impossibility that a work such as this could or should cover everything. Selection, as we are fond of telling our undergraduates and graduate students as they embark on their own research projects, theses, and dissertations, is part of the historian's craft, deciding what to put in and leave out a crucial skill of the profession. And in this area Herring has excelled, coherently combining in one place the salient story of the US role in the world from the Declaration of Independence through 2007. Some of the episodes and details here are well known; others are less so, even for specialists. Rare indeed must be the reader who comes away from this book without learning something new. The narrative scaffolding Herring has constructed for From Colony to Superpower is exceptionally sound, and it provides a solid base for his grand synthesis of the field. Rather than attempt to summarize the full scope of Herring's epic tale, I have myself employed here the historian's prerogative of selectivity and will address two related themes that struck me as I made my way through the volume.

The first broad theme that I found running throughout From Colony to Superpower is Herring's consistent reminder of the manifold ways the United States has shaped the wider world, through its trade, intervention in wars, and diplomatic encounters and initiatives, for example. Trade propelled the nation's earliest encounters with the rest of the world, pushed it toward war in 1812 when British and French actions interfered with what were already well-accepted conceptions of a neutral nation's right to trade during wartime (and arguably again in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson sought to defend those same rights), and inspired the extra-continental expansion of the 1890s and beyond. More than simply guiding official policies, however, the export of US goods and lifestyle trappings via trade also helped to spread American culture and influence around the globe. So extensive has this sort of cultural imperialism been that it has at times sparked opposition and outrage by those whose cultures the United States seemed determined to dominate or at least reshape. France may be the most prominent propagator of cultural blowback, but it is by no means the only one. The United States has also left its mark on the world through its military operations abroad, whether in the form of various “temporary” occupations throughout Latin America, the brief war with Spain in 1898, the two world wars of the twentieth century, or the (all-too) numerous interventions that dominated the Cold War period and after. The steady expansion of America's military involvement abroad has signaled Washington's growing role as a world player and its mounting strength as a military power – and, insofar as a nation's military might depends on its ability to support significant arms development and/or purchase, an economic power as well. (In one of the most interesting observations of the book, however, Herring invokes recent events to dismiss those who would argue for the invincibility of a “hyperpower” like the United States by averring that “power does not guarantee security” (10).) Finally, the two-plus centuries of US foreign relations chronicled in From Colony to Superpower make clear the transformative power of American words and diplomatic initiatives. From a myriad of presidential doctrines – Herring gives special prominence to James Monroe's, though its author, of course, was in fact John Quincy Adams – and other speeches, statements, or initiatives, such as Wilson's Fourteen Points or the Marshall Plan for the postwar reconstruction of Western Europe, the United States has left a considerable mark on the wider world and its people.

In tracing the extent of America's influence abroad, Herring astutely notes that the United States was shaping the world long before it emerged as a major international player at the end of the nineteenth century and solidified its world-power status early in the twentieth. On the contrary, as early as the late eighteenth century, when the thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies sought and secured the international assistance they needed to win their independence from Great Britain, America was influencing the European balance-of-power system and helping to intensify the Anglo-French rivalry that would emerge full-blown in the Napoleonic Wars. Skillful Federalist diplomacy during the early national period allowed the United States, in a theme propounded decades ago by Samuel Flagg Bemis, to profit from Europe's distress. In this way the early US role in the world was not unlike that of developing or peripheral nations during the twentieth century as they exerted influence over more powerful nations – including the United States – often far in excess of their individual means and status. Herring's careful attention to the long sweep of American influence on the world constitutes, to my way of thinking, one of the book's most coherent and consistent themes.

From Colony to Superpower's second thematic contribution might be considered the flip side of the first, to wit, an emphasis on the ways the outside world has shaped the United States. And again, Herring effectively demonstrates that this trend began extremely early in the nation's history. British and Spanish lack of respect for the new United States – as evidenced in trade inequities, border assaults, and other depredations – posed serious threats to the Confederation government during the mid-1780s. As Herring makes clear, meeting those threats, and neutralizing the concurrent Native American resistance to US control over the trans-Appalachian territories ceded by Britain in the 1783 Peace of Paris, “provided some of the most compelling arguments for a stronger national government” (44). In this way, foreign threats to the new nation led directly to the Constitution of 1789, which Federalist defenders hailed as a vehicle for protecting the nation from outside enemies, particularly those provisions providing for centralized powers of defense and trade. To put it another way, pressures and threats from the outside world played an important role in shaping key elements of the nation's now centuries-old governmental structure. Absent those pressures and threats, might that structure have looked different? Herring does not answer that question, but his thorough and insightful discussion of the role that foreign affairs considerations played in shaping the new government proves conclusively that early on the world was leaving its mark on the United States. The same holds true of his thoughtful treatment of the role of immigration in profoundly remaking the nation during the Gilded Age. “The presence of immigrants from exotic places,” Herring notes, “provoked growing internal tensions and in different ways sparked conflict with other countries” (281). Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants posed special challenges, he suggests, for both domestic and foreign policies. Internally, immigrants challenged traditional American values like free speech (as occurred when Irish immigrants agitated against British control of their homeland), inflamed racist sentiments among Americans (as evidenced in attacks on Italian immigrants in New Orleans), and even spawned exclusionary legislation (as in various attempts to limit or ban Chinese immigrants that achieved success in the 1890s). Externally, the consequences of immigration led to diplomatic rows with other countries and even the prospect of war. Although, in each case, immediate tensions were smoothed over by skillful diplomacy, the Irish question vexed Anglo-American relations for some time to come, navalists in the United States actually used the tensions with Italy as fuel for their calls for a larger sea presence, and US relations with China were significantly compromised because of immigration restrictions. As Herring effectively demonstrates, the nation was not immune to outside pressures or influences as its global power and reach expanded at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. One of the most striking illustrations of this idea, for me, comes in his discussion of the way the early Cold War era “turned traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions upside down” (595). Facing an unprecedented external threat from what it came to dub international communism, the Truman administration embarked on a massive reconceptualization of the nation's place and purpose in the world and, in the process, made “foreign policy … a central part of everyday life” (650), where it has essentially remained ever since.

Although From Colony to Superpower is a work of history, and a very fine one at that, it concludes with a brief explication of the current state – and possible future course – of the nation's foreign policy. And here Herring makes some excellent points based on the long sweep of the nation's world involvement. Unilateralism is dead, which means that, like it or not, the United States must work with other nations cooperatively rather than trying to dictate to them. And although America's “military spending and vast nuclear arsenal” may support its claim as “the world's strongest nation” (961), its economic decline and growing anti-Americanism around the world illustrate the limits of military power. In the end, Herring advises those who would make the nation's foreign policy to study and learn from those who preceded them. “Pragmatism,” “practical idealism,” and “cultural sensitivity” are just three of the traits that might be divined from such an endeavor (963). Finally, all Americans, policymakers and private citizens alike, must abandon the age-old idea of American exceptionalism, with its built-in assumption of American superiority, and work toward a true partnership with other nations based on equality, cooperation, and mutuality. Herring's expertly executed account of the 230 years of US relations with the outside world provides a good roadmap for such an undertaking, and is highly readable and entertaining to boot. Ultimately, it not only lays bare the nation's past but also provides valuable insights for understanding the present and charting a better and more successful future. Scholars in the field, interested general readers, and even policymakers will – and should – read this volume both for what it says about the nation's historical encounter with the outside world and for what it can suggest about how that encounter might proceed more positively in the future.

Historians of American foreign relations consider themselves an endangered breed. Inside the United States few history departments now hire specialists in the field, while many are dropping US foreign-policy survey courses from their curricula. Basic statistics confirm the disheartening trend. Whereas in 1975 three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian, in 2005 fewer than half did. Reflecting the defensiveness of many of those foreign-policy specialists lucky enough to have a job, the executive director of Diplomatic History, the only major journal in the field, recently proposed a name-change, replacing what many now view as the staid and stale reference to diplomacy with something that has more cachet and credibility.Footnote ¹⁰

Seen against this gloomy backdrop, one of the central contributions of George Herring's magisterial new book is to demonstrate how vitally important foreign policy has been to the American experience. In the first third of the book, which takes the reader through the period from 1776 to the start of the twentieth century, he stresses that the members of the founding generation were “not naïve provincials” but self-consciously part of a Eurocentric community, with a worldview shaped by their interaction with Britain and led by men who had closely read the relevant European literatures on diplomacy and commerce (15). Their revolution against the British only succeeded because of their alliance with France – as well as French naval support, no less than 90 percent of their gunpowder in the early stages of the war came from Europe.

Having won independence, foreign policy cast a long shadow over the new state's early development. Indeed, the Federalists' fear that the Confederation's political weakness might encourage European intervention prodded them to call the Constitutional Convention, while also casting a long shadow over their deliberations that produced the new government. During the 1790s the public's differing responses to the French Revolution then helped to generate the first political parties, as Republicans broke away from Federalists, and both sides clashed over whether to support the British or the French: a vexed question that touched upon ideology, economics, and national security.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the interaction of the United States with other states remained crucial. This was an age of American imperialism – continental imperialism at first, and Herring accords due weight to the story of what happened to those, like the Native Americans and Mexicans, who were often brutally swept aside. It was also a period of halting efforts by successive administrations to intervene in the Western Hemisphere, while also projecting American influence further afield. As the book heads into the twentieth century and beyond – which takes up almost two-thirds of the 960 pages – Herring then delves into the familiar tale of war: of the tortuous passage of the United States into the two world wars, its extensive interventionism during the Cold War, and the recent travails of the war on terror.

Sometimes other members of the historical profession adopt a somewhat sneering attitude towards diplomatic history, not because they deny the importance of foreign policy to the American experience, but rather because they denigrate its focus on very traditional, and very untrendy, actors. This, inevitably, is a field in which the state – and often just a few leaders at the top of the state – play an enormous role: indeed this is the history of “dead white men” with a vengeance.

Throughout this book, Herring duly focusses on the great American leaders. In his view, Thomas Jefferson was not only responsible for the massive expansion of territory through the Louisiana Purchase, he was also the personification “of a distinctively American approach to foreign policy,” that of the “practical idealist” (93). William Seward not only manoeuvred the country through the diplomatic perils of the Civil War era, he was also “the key figure in mid-nineteenth-century expansion, the link between the Manifest Destiny movement of the 1840s and the overseas expansionism of the 1890s” (255). Woodrow Wilson not only presided over the involvement of the United States in the Great War, he was also “the dominant personality, the seminal figure” in the development of American foreign policy during the twentieth century (379).

In the absence of a key statesman to structure his discussion around, Herring sometimes appears at a bit of a loss. Thus he finds the 1920s difficult to analyse because, though far from the outdated caricature of a mere “isolationist backwater,” it still lacked “a dominant Wilson-like figure” (436). Yet it would be grossly unfair to suggest that Herring is only concerned with great men of American history. He documents the growth of the national security state during the World War II–Cold War era, which brought numerous new executive departments, agencies, and bureaus into the policymaking process. He accords due weight to Congress, especially in periods like the 1870s–1880s, 1930s, and 1970s when legislators acted as a drag on executive power, blocking imperial expansion, anti-Axis initiatives, or Cold War interventionism. And he often looks beyond the state, assessing the role of partisanship and pressure groups, foreign travel and broader cultural exchanges, religious activism and peace movements, ethnic organizations and economic interests.

Because foreign policy has been so central to the American experience, many groups in American society have been drawn into foreign-policy debates, not to mention foreign-policy actions of their own. Herring documents most of their salient experiences, from the New England missionaries during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century who set out to evangelize the world to the citizen activists of the progressive era who promoted peace or agitated against repressive regimes, from the businessmen who played such a prominent role in diplomacy during the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s to the familiar ethnically oriented or ideologically driven pressure groups that play such a vocal role in the modern policy debate. In fact, his book is a model of how diplomatic historians can integrate these other narratives into a coherent whole: rather than just focus on the dead white leaders, he shows how other important actors in American society can be drawn into the scope of diplomatic history.

Throughout, Herring also tries to place American foreign policy in its international context. But here he is not always as sure-footed. While almost always on top of the relevant American historiographies, his analysis of this international context could have occasionally benefitted from an awareness of some of the more recent non-American literatures. Two passages are illustrative. In the first Herring claims that because American troops finally arrived on the Western Front in such large numbers by 1918, the United States “determined the outcome” of World War I (416). Yet this is a great oversimplification. As recent international histories have shown, the AEF's involvement was undoubtedly important. But the American contribution to victory in World War I must also be viewed alongside German exhaustion, especially after the failed Ludendorff Offensive, not to mention the revival of patriotic fervour inside Britain and France, and the improved tactical effectiveness of the British and French armies.Footnote ¹¹ The second passage, though smaller, is nevertheless important. In his discussion of the early Cold War, Herring refers to Harry Truman's famous comment to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in April 1945: “Carry out your agreements and you won't get talked to like that” (589). Yet, as a recent analysis of the Soviet records points out, Truman probably never made such a remark, which only appeared in the memoirs he wrote more than a decade after the event – memoirs that, on this issue at least, were undoubtedly “sexed up” for public consumption.Footnote ¹²

Still, these are relatively minor quibbles, especially given the book's massive scope and scale. For the most part, Herring impressively synthesizes an enormous amount of material, reaching judgments that are invariably judicious and wise. In fact, perhaps his greatest achievement is to tell such a complex story in such a coherent manner. As one would expect from the author of the best introductory text on the Vietnam War, Herring's book is a model of clarity. Despite its length, it should certainly become the key starting point for all those courses that still focus on the history of American foreign policy.

Herring ends with a chapter on the recent war on terror. It is a familiar story, but one that underlines this book's importance. For this was a moment when just a few individuals in key positions in the state apparatus made policy choices with profound consequences, not just on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also with respect to the image of the United States in the world. As Herring points out, Bush's misguided policies were not only underpinned by ideology and reinforced by post-9/11 fear; in the President's case, they also stemmed from his lack of knowledge about the world. Seen in this light, Herring's book ought to become much more than just a key text for those dwindling number of diplomatic history courses. It should be required reading for all those interested in the United States' development, not to mention any aspiring leaders who might one day have to make their own judgments about how to wield American power in the world.