Special providence : American foreign policy and how it changed the world

From one of our leading experts on foreign policy, a full-scale reinterpretation of America's dealings--from its earliest days--with the rest of the world.
It is Walter Russell Mead's thesis that the United States, by any standard, has had a more successful foreign policy than any of the other great powers that we have faced--and faced down. Beginning as an isolated string of settlements at the edge of the known world, this country--in two centuries--drove the French and the Spanish out of North America; forced Britain, then the world's greatest empire, to respect American interests; dominated coalitions that defeated German and Japanese bids for world power; replaced the tottering British Empire with a more flexible and dynamic global system built on American power; triumphed in the Cold War; and exported its language, culture, currency, and political values throughout the world