What conclusions can be drawn from this (necessarily partial) account of proconsular leadership? In particular, are there any practical lessons that can be learned from it for the conduct of American security policy in today's world? If the United States has indeed become an empire of sorts, is it not of some importance to try to clarify or rationalize the role of its proconsuls abroad, especially in the light of what will generally be agreed to be the mismanagement of recent American experiments in regime change and nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan? I will try to address these questions briefly.

It is difficult to make large generalizations about the American proconsular experience. This is so in part because of the disparate circumstances in which proconsular leadership has arisen in the United States and in part because of changing organizational and cultural factors in American government and politics. The overarching thesis of this study is that delegated political-military leadership has been a significant independent variable in American national security decision-making from the end of the nineteenth century to the present – or, more simply stated, that it has made a strategic difference. This is not to say that it has made a difference always and everywhere or with the same degree of impact or long-term significance. Indeed, this has clearly not been the case. This study has necessarily concentrated on individuals and particular episodes in American history in which proconsular autonomy and hence leadership have been most marked; it has not attempted anything approaching an overall assessment of the relative contributions of leadership on the periphery and leadership at the center of the empire (to use again our vocabulary of convenience). Nevertheless, it seems safe enough to conclude that the cumulative weight of the cases studied here shows that the proconsular factor in the American story is one that has been widely neglected or underappreciated in standard historical accounts.