Recommended: Special Providence

I just read and highly recommend Walter Russell Mead's 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World

Mead’s central argument in this book, well supported by his historical review, is that despite the conventional wisdom that America didn’t even have a foreign policy until World War II, and has been largely inept ever since, actually America has had an active foreign policy since its inception, and in general our foreign policy has been far wiser and far more effective that most other nations, from following our “Manifest Destiny” to sweep across the continent and unite the whole land into one nation (think how much less powerful we would be if what is now America were still divided up into separate Spanish and French and English and American nations) to our maneuvering in World War II that left us a superpower. As Mead argues, America’s foreign policy has shaped today’s world, and in general it has shaped it better than competing nations would have shaped it.