Synopsis

The United States has never felt at home abroad. The reason for this unease, even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is not frequent threats to American security. It is America's identity. The United States, its citizens believe, is a different country, a New World of divided institutions and individualistic markets surviving in an Old World of nationalistic governments and statist economies. In this Old World, the United States finds no comfort and alternately tries to withdraw from it and reform it. America cycles between ambitious internationalist efforts to impose democracy and world order, and more nationalist appeals to trim multilateral commitments and demand that the European and Japanese allies do more.

In At Home Abroad, Henry R. Nau explains that America is still unique but no longer so very different. All the industrial great powers in western Europe (and, arguably, also Japan) are now strong liberal democracies. A powerful and peaceful new world exists beyond America's borders and anchors America's identity, easing its discomfort and ending the cycle of withdrawal and reform.

Nau draws on constructivist and realist perspectives to show how relative national identities interact with relative national power to define U.S. national interests. He provides fresh insights for U.S. grand strategy toward various countries.

In Europe, the identity and power perspective advocates U.S. support for both NATO expansion to consolidate democratic identities in eastern Europe and concurrent, but separate, great-power cooperation with Russia in the United Nations. In Asia, this perspective recommends a shift of U.S. strategy from bilateralism to concentric multilateralism, starting with an emerging democratic security community among the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Taiwan, and progressively widening this community to include reforming ASEAN states and, if it democratizes, China. In the developing world, Nau's approach calls for balancing U.S. moral (identity) and material (power) commitments, avoiding military intervention for purely moral reasons, as in Somalia, but undertaking such intervention when material threats are immediate, as in Afghanistan, or material and moral stakes coincide, as in Kosovo.

Foreign Affairs

The United States' sense of its own exceptionalism — as a perfected New World polity — has long haunted its foreign relations, pushing it either to remake the world in its own image or to retreat into its own borders. This important reinterpretation of U.S. foreign policy illuminates the tensions, conflicts, and opportunities that flow from this unique national self-image. Nau's ambitious argument is that relations between states are shaped by both power and national identity. Where power is highly unequal and national identities diverge (such as in U.S. relations with countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America), relations tend to be hegemonic. Where power is more equally distributed but national identities diverge (such as in U.S.-Soviet Cold War relations and perhaps in emerging Sino-American relations), balance-of-power politics prevails. But where national identities converge and power disparities are less dramatic (such as in relations between the advanced industrialized democracies), more complex, interdependent, stable, and legitimate relations prevail. Nau offers rich discussions of U.S. foreign policy under these different configurations. His optimistic conclusion is that the spread of capitalist democracy creates a more hospitable world in which the United States can reconcile its self-image with the leadership of a decentralized and well-coordinated global system.