Sense of Power

Why has the United States assumed so extensive and costly a role in world affairs over the last hundred years? The two most common answers to this question are "because it could" and "because it had to." Neither answer will do, according to this challenging re-assessment of the way that America came to assume its global role. The country's vast economic resources gave it the capacity to exercise great influence abroad, but Americans were long reluctant to meet the costs of wielding that power. Neither the country's safety from foreign attack nor its economic well-being required the achievement of ambitious foreign policy objectives.In A Sense of Power, John A. Thompson takes a long view of America's dramatic rise as a world power, from the late nineteenth century into the post–World War II era. How, and more importantly why, has America come to play such a dominant role in world affairs? There is, he argues, no simple answer. Thompson challenges conventional explanations of America's involvement in World War I and World War II, seeing neither the requirements of national security nor economic interests as determining. He shows how American leaders from Wilson to Truman developed an ever more capacious understanding of the national interest, and why by the 1940s most Americans came to support the price tag, in blood and treasure, attached to strenuous efforts to shape the world. The beliefs and emotions that led them to do so reflected distinctive aspects of U.S. culture, not least the strength of ties to Europe. Consciousness of the nation’s unique power fostered feelings of responsibility, entitlement, and aspiration among the people and leaders of the United States.This original analysis challenges some widely held beliefs about the determinants of United States foreign policy and will bring new insight to contemporary debates about whether the nation should—or must—play so active a part in world politics.

A Sense of Power is a deft, literary, and persuasive analysis of America's twentieth-century evolution from the world’s largest neutral nation to its most interventionist. Coming from a British observer and a historian of the Progressive Era who brings a fresh eye to foreign policy, it is more piquant and original than the title suggests., As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly based on domestic growth and consumption. The chief motive behind America's entry into the war, Thompson argues persuasively, was that its leaders realised that it would cost them relatively little to bend the world in the political direction they wanted., For readers unacquainted with the history of American foreign policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Thompson's work will serve as a deeply informative introduction, one that successfully walks the fine line between dry academic reportage and trivia-based 'popular' history.... As a historian rather than a political scientist, Thompson is perhaps ideologically predisposed towards demonstrating the complexity of the world through the lens of individual events rather than concerned with objective, generalizable relationships between larger, transhistorical variables. Were this to be Thompson's true, unstated goal, then the value of his historical explanation would only increase, even as the value of his theoretical edifice would recede even further., Thompson has written a provocative, thoughtful overview of U.S. foreign policy from the 1890s to the 1950s. In a non-polemical manner, Thompson vividly outlines many shortcomings in the realist and revisionist critiques of American foreign policy. He cogently and skillfully reviews the literature, raises the level of debate, and offers a wise and thoughtful analysis of his own., This argument—based as it is on shared understandings and social relations among the American and trans-Atlantic elite—is far more specific and persuasive than the vague "consciousness" or "a sense of power" animating American actions to which Thompson alludes repeatedly throughout the work. Yet even this claim, central to his thesis, is weakly identfied.

John A. Thompson is Emeritus Reader in American History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War and Woodrow Wilson: A Profile in Power.