, Ideology and American foreign policy The authors who claim that the United States has suffered a crisis since the beginning of the Roosevelt era often go on to argue that the post-war American anti-communist crusade helped Americans manage this crisis. We believe this is a partial truth and an important one, but it may not be as central to understanding the role that the ideas that are common sense to many Americans have played in governing American foreign policy as it might appear at first glance. The American anti-communist crusade can be explained as the result of the way ideas much older than Leninism have played themselvesout in the United States after the country became a world power. Ideology plays two roles in the foreign policy process. On the one hand, mass ideologies must exist to legitimize the roles played by foreign-policy-makers; ideologies help constitute decision-makers as separate actors. On the other hand the ideologies of foreign-policy-makers themselves let them apprehend the world and ideologies act as guides to policy. The Gramscian perspective suggests two important things in regard to ideology in these roles. First, the ideologies that legitimize decision-makers,-the ideas that the mass public of a nation refers to explain why a special elite does and should make policy for them-are unlikely to be coherent within any group in society and they are unlikely to be exactly the same for all groups in society. will be legitimized by common sense, by the contradictory consciousnessof the public. Second, we have no particular reason to believe that the operational ideologies followed by foreign-policy-makers will directly reflect the contra-dictory consciousness of the mass public more than minimally, that is, at the level needed to maintain the foreign-policy-makers’independent role. In this chapter we will begin with the ideas that have given popular tion to foreign-policy-makers in the United States, in particular the notion of America’s specialdestiny and mission. Then we willturnto the slowly changing mix of operational ideologies which have influenced the practice of American foreign policy from the foundation of the nation. Finally, we will look at foreign policy problems created by the conflicts within and between both sets of ideas, examining the form that any contemporary ‘crisis of legitimation’ in foreign policy is likely to take. American destiny and the legitimation of American foreign policy It is a commonplace of the history Americans teach themselves that American foreign-policy-makers have been a distinguished lot. The United States has IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN FOREIGN been blessed with diplomats like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Adams who could charm victory out of military defeat. They worked with authors of bold world visions, men like George Washington, James Monroe,and Woodrow Wilson. We suspect that part of what makes American foreign-policy-makerslook so good to the American public is that the public has put surprisinglyfew demands on them. In a country where foreign commerce only recently became important to most people, where international wars have not been fought on home terri-tory for generations, the public has little reason to be interested in foreign affairs. Foreign-policy-makers, as compared to officials in other branches of American government,have unusual leeway to define what they want to do and how to do it Perhaps the most widespread popular belief about foreign affairs is that the United States has a peculiar destiny. American foreign-policy-makersneed to, and have almost always wanted to, treat the US as a country with a special mission. Yet, Americans have come to no particular agreement as to how that mission should be pursued, although the basic repertoire of political means provided by American religion offers something of a guide. Where and when the United States is powerless to change foreign affairs, foreign-policy-makerscan isolate the United States from the rest of the world, or isolate parts of the world from the US. When American policy-makers confront people who it can be assumed because of their race, culture, or behavior could be convinced of the superiority of the American system, then policy-makers can work to convert them. When that is impossible and foreign powers threaten the United States value system or the nations that have been converted to its system, then repression must be tried. approving of anyThose who accept this Calvinist repertoire have attempts their government might make to make long-term deals with any foreign nations that do not accept the ‘American system.’ That is why it is diffi-popular support in thecult to United States for certain, non-idealistic -visions of international law or for the maintenance of foreign spheres of influ-ence, or, some would argue, for almost all of the traditional forms of diplomatic practice which are all about interacting in good faith with people with whom you disagree. In the real world, they say, American evangelism and attempts at domination have always been frustrated, thus forcing policy-makers into long periods of inactivity demanded by a brooding, isolationist No matter how real these cycles of ‘introversion’and ‘extroversion’are (and there is debate about that) they do not tell the whole story of the relationship between popular beliefs and foreign policy action. If Calvinist principles by themselves ruled American it would be for American diplomats and statesmen to have been as successful as they have been. But really only one of these ideas, the idea of American destiny, has60 IDEOLOGY almost universal support in the United States. Samuel P. Huntington argues quite correctly that the American assumption of specialdestiny functionsas the core of American nationalism? and what an unusual focus of nationalist sentiment it is because the idea of American destiny has no concrete content. Arguably, foreign-policy-makersare constrainedby this view to act to maintain and extend ‘Americanism,’but ‘Americanism’ can mean many things to many different people. Policy-makers have a wide range of choice among different concrete meanings of American destiny. Huntington, like many American scholars, believes that ‘Americanism’ means only one thing: the liberal principles of individual liberty, property, and preference for the market. But this has