Plum Blossoms

Gaddis' main objective is to compare and contrast George W. Bush's fundamental changes to America's foreign policy to the two previous seismic shift in the aftermath of a surprise attack on America. First, after the attack on Washington in the War of 1812, John Quincy Adams develops America's traditional three prongs of security and foreign policy: preemption, unilateralism and hegemony (on the continent). Later, after Pearl Harbor, FDR would take a more multilateral approach towards maintaining American security. In both instances, the expansion of American power was the formula for securing the homeland.

The final one third of this book is where the good analysis kicks in. The previous two thirds are solid, but the history gets a bit stale: listing the subsequent presidents who follow (in their words, at least) the tenets of Quincy Adams is a necessary device to illustrate the importance of those tenets, but it gets repetitive. On the other hand, it is interesting to see how Gaddis interprets the foreign policy direction under GWB in historical context. Gaddis takes a balanced approach to his task, understanding that any analysis at this point is highly speculative. I do not want to spoil the good parts, but suffice it to say that I am happy to read Gaddis provide stinging commentary on some of the failures, while maintaining perspective on the positive aspects of Bush's return to Quincy Adams' principles on an expanded scale.

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience is a compact book that puts an excellent historical perspective on current US policy. Note that it's so short that it's a bit easy to breeze through it without absorbing, so it's worth reading over again. Which is what I plan to do, after finishing my current book, Niall Ferguson's Colossus.