I unknowingly began this book many years ago as an undergraduate at Ohio State University after reading The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962) by William Appleman Williams; I continued it as a graduate student when the United States was still deeply involved in Vietnam and I read Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists of 1898–1900 (1968) by Robert L. Beisner. Williams's book, whatever its shortcomings, and they are few, remains the seminal study of the foreign policy of the United States as a world power. Tragedy emphasizes the existence of a coherent worldview among policymakers and demonstrates that such a perspective fundamentally derives from an economic base. The conduct of American diplomacy has therefore served to protect and advance a market-based political economy. Beisner's book, by recreating the fears and anxieties of the anti-imperialists of the late nineteenth century, helped me understand that a republic, let alone a democracy, was only as strong as those who would defend its basic values against what Walter Millis, in his classic 1931 account of the war with Spain, called “the martial spirit.” Both the Williams and Beisner studies broached what then became for me the crucial, troubling question: Could the American republic truly exist as an imperial power?

In search of an answer, this book asks whether the demands of national security undermine the integrity of liberty and weaken, perhaps irreparably, the values associated with it.