History & current events

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in America War and Diplomacy, by Andrew Preston. As this year’s presidential debate on foreign policy indicated, partisan differences often fade decidedly at the water’s edge. American political elites are consensually wedded to a firm conviction that the United States—“exceptional” and “chosen” as it is—remains the “indispensable nation” for international well-being. A conviction as old or older than the republic itself, it has long been infused by religious belief. Preston gives a splendid history of the role of this potent mix of faith and power in shaping America’s role in the world. Treating religious sentiment as more than rhetorical window dressing, Pres­ton makes the case for its causal force, not only in the extension of American global hegemony but in domestic opposition to it.

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrick Logevall. Hopes for shattering the exceptionalist imperial ambitions of the United States once rested on the “Vietnam syndrome,” which has now lost whatever potency it might have had. While we await what will, in all likelihood, be an equally short-lived “Iraq/Afghanistan syndrome,” we may be grateful to historians such as Logevall for reminding us of the origins and consequences of the earlier disaster. His huge and hugely rewarding book scrutinizes the last years of French rule in Indochina and the fateful American decision to assume the burden of curbing Ho Chi Minh’s struggle for independence. Not least of Loge­vall’s achievements is a tarnishing of Dwight Eisenhower’s halo as a reluctant warrior in Southeast Asia.

Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations, by Max Paul Friedman. The flip side of the conviction, often religiously inflected, that an exceptional America has a mission to the rest of the world is a puzzlement, often religiously inflected, over the failure of the rest of the world to appreciate the effort. Friedman, working in five languages across nine countries, explores the indispensable but utterly misleading concept of anti-Americanism. He, like Loge­vall and perhaps even Preston, will, of course, be charged with anti-Americanism.