A Sense of Power: The Roots of America's Global Role

While this monograph initially looked interesting it delivered somewhat less than it seemed to promise. Thompson's take on U.S. foreign involvement and intervention is essentially that so many of these situations were really not justified by either matters of security or economic advancement, and that the justifications seem murky in retrospect. The essential conclusion is that the U.S. actually having the power by the end of the 1800s, allied with the cultural sense that the power should be used, and the experiences of the world wars, the way was clear for the use of power to maintain an international environment congenial for the United States. All this suggests that cultural considerations predominated; though the author suspects show more that the once the financial wherewithal is not there Washington will withdraw quite smartly. This being the case, unless your professor assigned this book to you, you'd be better off reading Walter McDougall's "Promised Land, Crusader State," even though it's a generation old at this point. show less