Overview: America and the World

American Studies can be described as an area study that examines the developments in American life throughout historic time. Moreover, it is also has been argued that we now live in a global village, that everything is being globally interconnected. My goal is to understand what America's place is in this global community. More importantly, however, it is important to understand how we arrived where we are now. Critically setting our gaze at America (of internally, and externally - as in "… and the World") through the decades is the mode of choice of this "project." Therefore, I submit that it is essential to study these topics in a combination thematic/chronological order. In addition, we examine America in interdisciplinary ways. We will look at the key junctions in American history and analyze the complexity of each historical crossroad to be as inclusive of as many disciplines as possible. We will deal with key text with specific perspectives - within a discussion - by section and we will determine to what extent these ideas/perspectives relate to each other.

We begin with William Appleman Williams, who is arguably the first modern historian to combine economic considerations with American foreign policy. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy Williams looks at the clash between America's espoused ideals and the "tragic" uses it mobilizes its immense power. Williams argues that other states must kowtow to America's mental image of democracy or face the wrath of America's military capacity. Arguably, if some attention is put into policy such a scenario might be avoided and prevented. William's canvas begins with the Open Door Notes of 1898 then closes out with Vietnam. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams also shows how America, despite being well meaning, fails to live up to its high ideals and principles when it relates to foreign policy. Americans, Williams argues, espouse some notion of self-determination and the sovereignty to evolve its unique variety of democracy. Sadly, no other country is allowed to aspire and develop the same. This hegemonic practice is, according to Williams, at the heart of the "tragedy." Cuba is William's loci and a case that he likes to (re)visit. America's elite required Cuba to conform to its vision, which meant prosperity for the sugar planters and their American patrons. Unfortunately, when Cuba threw off its despotic regime, America reacted. The fissure between the two nations has been around ever since the overthrow and no American administration will ever recognize Cuba so long as Castro is in power - which means now with Obama things may change. Williams also methodically tracks the years from 1898 through 1961 and reasons that American policy follows along the same economic considerations no matter which country. Williams makes a compelling case for the centrality of economic considerations. We (re)visit this framework of domination during the second part of the course when we read Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations.

Shortly after the fall of Communism, jubilation gave way to doubt and uncertainty. The long held guiding principle of "containment," had been a mainstay of American foreign policy for nearly fifty years and the Soviet demise stimulated vigorous debate among foreign policy intellectuals vis-à-vis the nature of the "new world order." In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington expand Foreign Affairs article (same title with a "?" at the end) that unconditionally advocates the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy. Huntington describes the post-Cold War world as "multipolar and multicivilizational" (Huntington, The Clash of Civilization 210). According to Huntington, "Civilizations" matter because they appeal to basic questions of human identity. Huntington's geopolitical arrangement is a multipolar world consisting of Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese, and Buddhist civilizations. In Huntington's civilizational worldview, borders take a back seat to civilizational conflict, which had previously been subsumed to ideological conflict, which he argues were stuck in the framework of the nation-states. Huntington's ideas provide a different perspective to frame international (or inter-civilizational) relations. His wished-for solution for America's relative decline vis-à-vis the Islamic and Sinic worlds of "adopting an Atlanticist policy of close cooperation with...European partners (Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations 49)" makes the matter worse within his paradigm - making matters worse is a concept we first dealt with through William Appleman Williams.

Huntington's model assumes "the clash of civilizations", which leaves no room for meaningful engagement that rise above linguistic, religious, cultural, and civilizational differences. While Williams argues that foreign policy is the work of calculating capitalists and Hunting, conversely, argues that it is all about "the Clash," Michael H. Hunt contends in Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy that ideology is the core impetus that has shaped American foreign policy. Hunt argues, "… an ideological continuity in (US) foreign policy with few if any equals among great powers in modern time" (Hunt, Ideology and Foreign Policy 13). Hunt posits that this "core foreign-policy ideas" informed US policy from the very start (Hunt, Ideology and Foreign Policy 14). These polices were validated by "a remarkable string of success" in US foreign affairs (Hunt, Ideology and Foreign Policy 125). Hunt suggests that Vietnam was "the culmination… of an old impulse to impose on the world the patterns of an ideological policy" (Hunt, Ideology and Foreign Policy 170). Hunt's critique argues from the position that ideology is based on a national mission, on racial stratification (reminiscent of Matthew Frye Jacobson's Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad 1876-1917 below), and on distrust toward social revolutions and upheavals (Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy 92-124). In Barbarian Virtues, Jacobson argues that the US first debut its power on the world stage was at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and first confirmed that power during World War I (Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues 4, 15-16, 56, 59, and 119). The years in between (the subject of this book 1876 to 1917) was an epoch of dramatic change. Jacobson writes that the dynamics of industrialization accelerated the rate at which Americans encountering foreign peoples, both here and abroad (Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues 261-265). Jacobson looks at "American conceptions of peoplehood, citizenship, and national identity" (Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues 4). Jacobson illustrates how these years are the foundation for today's sense of immigrants and foreign policy. We, in the US, continue to mobilize this paternalistic policy particularly in places and regions - especially in East Asia.

We sought, in East Asia, according to James Thomson, Peter Stanley, and John Perry, in Sentimental Imperialists (in a move the reverse of Williams, and differing from Hunt and Jacobson) souls more than we sought customers. Sentimental Imperialists tells us our affair with the Orient - China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea and the Archipelago of Chinese upstarts - was unrequited. We gave them Christ, republicanism, and consumer goods for which there was no longer a domestic market; they agitated unto revolution, as if they had a right to their own cultural integrity. We were supposed to be the cutting edge of manifest destiny. Why, then, did it take 2/3 of the American Army to pacify the Philippines in the 1900s? Why were we involved in five wars in East Asia from 1898 on? Why are Japan, China, and the US, for the moment, in troubled coalition? It is high time we conclude that these nations, very old and complex, created themselves long before our missionaries, our diplomats, and our occupying forces made spur-of-the-moment judgments and eventually dropped atom bombs. We are advised by Thomson, Stanley, and Perry (to the chagrin of Williams, Jacobson, and Hunt) that our wrecking of the East had less to do with a theory about the rapid rate of capital formation than it had to do with a dream of Christian cities.

Conventional wisdom therefore seems to argue, after having read The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Clash of Civilization, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, Barbarian Virtues, and Sentimental Imperialists; that in the final decades of the nineteenth century, white-supremacist racial ideologies and sentiments such as benevolent assimilation, the "white man's burden" inspired and motivated American imperialist projects in the nonwhite world. In Race over Empire, Eric T. L. Love argues that despite our racism we engaged. Race, Love writes, was a diversion (arguably a distraction) vis-à-vis the imperialists. In fact, "in an era marked by as much racial fear, hatred, reaction, and violence as the last decades of the nineteenth century . . . no pragmatic politician or party would fix nonwhites at the center of its imperial policies" (Love, Race over Empire xii). With the Filipino rebellion that followed the Spanish-American War just over the imperialists realized that by taking only the land needed for economic and military use, "the benefits of empire could be had without the entanglements attached to race" (Love, Race over Empire 200). What comes to presence from Love's analysis is a more complex and critical reinterpretation of interrelations between politics, race, labor, immigration, and foreign relations at the start of the American century.

The White Man's Burden and Imperial aspirations, one had washes the other. The Roman (see Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire below) and British empires are usually brought to presence as setting the pattern for both Bush regimes' hostile and antagonistic foreign policy. However, America's imperial project and modus operandi was really formulated shaped, worked, and (re)worked, according to Greg Grandin in Empire's Workshop, much nearer to our shores. Empire's Workshop shows how Latin America has become the testing ground for American foreign policy, containment strategies and imperial projects abroad - culminating in what Grandin calls, the "global war on terror" (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 8-9). With Grandin, our examination takes us more militaristic turn. During the time of Grandin's research and writing, much of the Americas were engaged in open revolt against US hegemony (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 57, 64, 96, 123, 140, and 213). On this premise, Grandin inquires: If the "Washington Consensus" failed to bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to the America, its own "Empire Workshop," how can it be trusted to be the beacon for the world? On the one hand, taking over from Grandin, Chalmers Johnson's Blowback, primarily examined the covert intervention, American style (pre and) during the Cold War, and its varied "unintended" consequences (abroad as well as at home). On the other hand, Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire focused on the years after fall of the Berlin Wall and at a time that the Soviet Union began to fracture into current configuration with breakaway states (Johnson, Sorrows 7, 18-20, 34, and 69). It was a time when the US was the self-described "lone superpower" (Johnson, Sorrows 4, 44, 67, and 72). Reagan and subsequent administrations would hold the mantle and designation of "reluctant sheriff" (Johnson, Sorrows 274, 284, and 307). We slid into current scenario was an administration sees itself as an essential nation (Johnson, Sorrows 284). Johnson sees it differently, this massive buildup that continues to move with such momentum, he argues in light of the war on terror, has made the US the New Rome (Johnson, Sorrows 3, 5, 257, and 284). In The Sorrows of Empire, Johnson brings to presence a sense of neo-militarism that is changing America, in drastic ways, and forcing on its citizenry the yoke of empire (Johnson, Sorrows 285).

Closing out with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, Klein the global "free market" has hijacked by crises and shock for 30 years, ranging from places like Chile to now Iraq. Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Klein takes this worldview from her experience covering such places as Baghdad after the US occupation, Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the tsunami, or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Klein (re)visits old and new events in The Shock Doctrine writing about such events and places like the Pinochet coup in Chile, China, Poland, South Africa, Russia, Asia, Bolivia, New Orleans, Iraq, Israel, the UK, and the USA throughout the book. She illustrates how capitalism (or corporatism) does not simply develop in the way that it pleases, but how it has to overcome the resistance capitalism itself has created. Now, armed with information, how do we assess the prospects of the future and how do we act accordingly. Are we to see a repeat of the "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy"?

2010 SPRING
	Graduate Assistant American Studies 212 : Contemporary American Global Issues (2 Sections) The United States in the Pacific Basin, Department of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa 46th International Winter Program for College Nursing Students - Chungang 45th International Winter Program for College Nursing Students - Seoul 3rd APC International Program for College Students
2009 FALL
	Graduate Assistant American Studies 212 : Contemporary American Global Issues (2 Sections) Globalization, America, and the World, Department of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa
2009 SPRING
	Graduate Assistant American Studies 339: Religions in America (3 Sections) Department of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa