Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korean Shaped the American Evangelical Empire

Abstract

had of the United States which rightly or not, attributed the crisis to this country and that in turn helped allow for the expansion of China’s power. In many ways, we are still living with the impact of decisions made at that time. Another theme in this volume that is worth highlighting is the important role that war has played on the development of the United States. This country started because of war with its colonial master, Britain, and war remained an important variable influencing the growth and also power and prestige of the United States. Also, the role of immigration and immigrants on the development of the United States cannot be overlooked. Mandelbaum’s discussion of immigration in this country from the 1860s to the early twentieth century sounds oddly familiar for the role that this issue played on domestic politics then and now. Writing about the early twentieth century he notes that “The inflow of immigrants created a backlash among native-born Americans, whose wages sometimes fell as the labor pool expanded and who often found the cultural habits the newcomers brought to be disturbing and even threating. In this way immigration affected domestic American politics” (123). This point is often echoed today. For all the praise that this volume deserves, it has some shortcomings not least of which is the author’s decision to stop in 2015. This overlooks the presidency of Donald Trump, which in many ways upended the patterns of U.S. foreign policy at this latest age. Mandelbaum gives us some tantalizing clues about the Trump administration and the current stage of U.S development as a “hyperpower,” claiming that “the United States found itself, in 2015, in a new era of foreign policy, the fifth in 250 years” (457), but he does not hint at what these might be or mean not only for this country, but also for the international system. Another critique, and admittedly it is a minor one, regards some of the decisions that the author made as to what to include or exclude. For example, while his documentation of treaties in the early years as well as much later in the country’s development gives us a complete assessment of U.S. relations with other countries and groups, including the native peoples, he omits a discussion of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and the U.S. support for the creation of that state which significantly altered the dynamics of the Middle East, an omission that I find curious. While he references this later on in the book as he discusses issues about the region, framing the creation of that state, and Truman’s support for it at the expense of a Palestinian state explains a great deal about the turmoil in the region since then, as well as the changing U.S. policy positions about a two-state solution and how much political capital any president would want to invest in the region for domestic as well as global reasons. This comprehensive narrative is easily accessible to anyone interested in the development of U.S. foreign policy, whether a student per se, or an interested layman. It offers important insights that help frame and make comprehensible the evolution of this country from a weak to a great power, and what that means both for the U.S. and especially for the international system as a whole. Most important, it makes a significant contribution to the documentation and understanding of American foreign policy.