Ideology in U.S. Foreign Policy, With Christopher Nichols, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Jay Sexton

LIINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the role of ideology in U.S. foreign policy.

 

With me to discuss ideology in American foreign policy making are Christopher Nichols, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Jay Sexton. Chris is the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies and a professor of History at the Ohio State University. Chris has been the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and he has written or edited six books including Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.

 

Emily is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on nineteenth century America with a specialization in religion and foreign relations. She is the author of Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic.

 

Jay is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, professor of history, and director of the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri. He has written, edited her co-edited seven books, the most recent of which is A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History.

 

Chris is the co-editor of the new book, Ideology in Foreign Policy, New Histories to which he, Emily, and Jay have all contributed chapters. Chris, Emily, and Jay, thanks for chatting with me.

 

SEXTON:
Thanks for having us on.

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Thanks so much for having us.

 

LIINDSAY:
We are all academics by trade, though my status as an academic may have lapsed, but one of the standard practices of academia is to begin by defining your terms. So let's begin there in with you, Chris, What does a term ideology mean to you?

 

NICHOLS:
Ideology is a contested term for sure. One of the things that ideologies suggest is that they're based on assumptions and core principles that guide the construction of a worldview. We need ideologies in short to help make a complex world more finite and to help figure out perhaps how to forge paths forward in the policy making realm. Ideologies are the kinds of structures that set the terms for engagement. They shape politics. They're historically not static. So ideology is about that set of assumptions or core values and principles and organizing them to make sense of the world such that you can then make arguments for kinds of paths forward that you might want.

 

LIINDSAY:
So how does ideology differ from ideas? Or are they the same thing?

 

NICHOLS:
So I would say ideologies are constituted by ideas. You have to have those ideas, those conceptions, those notions. But ideologies are more than that. So they're not just an accretion of them like bricks in a wall, but rather the structure itself, what the wall is intended to become, perhaps. And also they're sort of influenced in the ways that walls or structures can be. So by gravitational forces, by changes in the environment, by things outside the control of those, putting them together. So ideas are the core building blocks for an ideology, but ideology structure them. They're the architecture of it.

 

LIINDSAY:
Let me turn to you, Emily. Maybe you want to add something to what Chris just said, but I'm curious, when you think about ideology and you look at the course of American history, what are the sort of things that would come to mind to you as being examples of ideology in foreign policy?

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Ooh, there is a lot. What I work on in my own research is what I've called here, missionary ideology and the framing worldview that Protestant Christians had, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, allowed them to think about what role the United States should have in the world and articulate an activist position that because of ideas about race, ideas about the superiority of Christian civilization, ideas about the need of the non-Christian world for intervention, that the United States had a duty and a role and a purpose to kind of step in and intervene in humanitarian and other ways at various points in American history. And so that's sort of where I focus on it a lot more. But I know Chris's work on isolationism is a major one as well, that we see at various points that emerges and kind of waxes and wanes at different points in American history. And as Chris said before, right, these ideas and ideologies change. They're flexible, they shift over generations and they're not static.

 

LIINDSAY:
I'm curious, Emily, just looking at the Christian imperialism that you write about, do these ideas necessarily have to be consistent or can they be contradictory in conflict with one another even within this ideology?

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Do you mean can they, within the single ideology, can they conflict or are there multiple competing?

 

LIINDSAY:
Yes. Where you have sort of an ideology, which in some sense parts of it at war with other parts of it.

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Oh, absolutely. And so one of the things that I find sort of most compelling about this missionary ideology is the way that it is structured on competing understandings about race and change. And so at the very center of it is the idea that non-Christians need to change, they need to convert to Christianity, but also that they can convert to Christianity. And so there's this expectation there that change is possible, that human improvement is possible, that cultures can change and civilizations can change such that those who need to convert can. 

 

That is absolutely in conflict with a sort of equally powerful set of ideas about race as sort of inherently creating inequalities among different peoples. And so if you want to sort think about this more as a religious study scholar at Stanford Kathryn Gin Lum has a wonderful book, Heathen, that talks about that side. So the sort of overwhelming consistent and persistent idea of difference, which she talks about of as using the terminology of heathenism as shaping the same ideology that I talk about. And it's always in conflict with this understanding of conversion as a possibility.

 

LIINDSAY:
Emily, I want to come back to this issue of the missionary movement, but first I want to bring Jay into the conversation. Jay, I don't know if you want to add anything on the definitional question about ideology, but I'm also just curious from your point of view where ideologies come from. As you're aware, there's a whole school of thought, particularly a Marxist school of thought that ideas or ideology are just the byproduct of material interest. Every good Marxist who's read the German ideology knows that. I'm sure there'll be people tweeting at me when we post the show arguing that it's all about who owns what and less where the ideas come from. So when you think about ideology, is it something detached from material interest or is it something that is driven by them?

 

SEXTON:
Well, I think it's absolutely attached to material interests. And I think that saying that one doesn't have to buy into a really brittle, rigid Marxist frame. It's quite obvious to us all that the ideas that structure the way we understand the world as it exists and the way we hope that it might evolve is rooted in real material circumstances. The other thing I'd say about this is that, especially given nineteenth century America, this kind of experimental bustling market society, I mean that's got to be one of the distinctive features of it. And you can see it in things like evangelical Christianity that Emily was talking about. You can see it in terms of competing systems of economic production within different regions and so forth. And the fact that you have a diverse... What I'm trying to spit out here is you got diverse economic structure, set of structures is the beginning point for understanding why you have so many different competing ideologies.

 

And I'd say that that's surely the hallmark of nineteenth century America is that there's not a dominant ideology despite the attempts of all these Cold War historians to project that back into... They did a bloody good job of doing that because I think they kind of had us all suckered for a generation thinking that there was one kind of proto Cold War ideology that structured nineteenth century geopolitics. And I think that couldn't be further from the truth.

 

LIINDSAY:
Well, Jay, help me out. For people who aren't steeped in nineteenth century U.S. history, when you talk about competing ideologies, what is it that you have in mind?

 

SEXTON:
Well, most fundamentally in the American context, you'd be talking about pro-slavery and free labor, free soil, and that that's often understood as a domestic kind of a thing. But slavery and emancipation structures, international relations right across the Atlantic world, beyond the Atlantic world. So you could say things like that, but you know, could say all the other material interests that structure how America fits into the world are contested. Think about free trade ideology versus protectionism. Think about the gold standard. I mean, that's a British ideology, isn't it? Which has its acolytes in this country. Gold standard versus those who pay for money or, who buy metallic currencies, you name it. Isolationism versus, I mean there are internationalists in the nineteenth century.

 

So many of them are similar to the debates we have in more familiar times for your listeners. Some of them, like slavery and so forth, are distinctively nineteenth century. Oh, sorry, I forgot the biggest one. Monarchy versus republicanism. I mean, at least in the first half of the nineteenth century, that's the big question is political structures, political regimes, ascribed hereditary social status. Fixed social order with a monarch on top with an established most often Catholic church or Anglican church versus a much more deregulated liberal society that's a republican form of government evolving into democracy. So you got lots of things in the kettle there with nineteenth century ideology.

 

LIINDSAY:
I want to come back to you on just that point, Jay in a moment. But I want to go back to Chris and ask you if you can, Chris, to put this talk about ideology in perspective. Because my sense is that a lot of Americans, when they hear the term ideology, think it applies to somebody else, that they see themselves as being pragmatic. We often talk about our country as being pragmatic, and as you've noted, Barack Obama framed his approach to foreign policy as elevating pragmatism over ideology. So I have to ask you, when you're sort of looking at the grand sweep of American history, is it the case that ideology generally takes a backseat to pragmatism, however it's defined?

 

NICHOLS:
Right. One of the things that comes to mind when I hear that or when I've written about the Obama foreign policy and his team in the 2008 election talking about pragmatism over ideology was of course one that is ideological in and of itself, right? Going back to a philosophical tool by which to organize a means ends relationship and judge outcomes. I love the William Jamesian end formulation that you can evaluate an idea by the conduct that it dictates. I think that's really useful in thinking about what pragmatism means, and that's really what Obama meant. But of course that was ideological in and of itself. What he was rejecting was the ideology of the Bush administration and ideas about nation building, about interventions that didn't necessarily have a clear exit strategy. Or to put it more bluntly, it was the doctrine of "Don't do stupid shit," right, that we heard in that era as well.

 

LIINDSAY:
Which is not a CFR approved term. I just want to put on the record, alright?

 

NICHOLS:
Okay. And you did not have to say it. The scholars in the room were using these words, and this comes directly from the Obama administration of course. But zooming out, one of the things that I think is great about having Emily and Jay in this conversation is to point us back to the nineteenth century and look at these ways in which ideology and competing ideologies are all over the landscape of American domestic and foreign policy and operating right at the intersection of the two. And so when you see our policy makers in the historical record or in the present, as you note in your question, Jim, suggests that they're anti ideological as functionally Obama did. It taps into a long strain of people who made these claims of not having ideologies guiding their policies or they're thinking about the world, but in fact being deeply, deeply enmeshed in ideological orientations that then were why they pursued particular outcomes. 

 

Whether they were the leaders of the South and the U.S. and the pre-Civil War years, right? Dictating both domestic and foreign policy based on a slave economic system, or they were mission leaders thinking about the mission field in the world, which we were just talking about and Emily can talk more about. And thinking about the U.S.'s appropriate place in the world as an agent of conversion, but also as a kind of in a reciprocal relationship with other peoples and groups, often hierarchical. This is very much ideological. As social science ideas come online about the differences between races as different kinds of views change over time in the nineteenth century. So fast forwarding then back to the last few presidential administrations, it should be no shock then that they're also just as much ideological in their orientations as Americans were a hundred or 200 years ago.

 

LIINDSAY:
Do you think there's a political value, Chris, in positioning yourself in administration as being pragmatic versus saying, "Yes, we're ideological?"

 

NICHOLS:
Absolutely. I mean, I think what that's code for is, well two things. One, flexible in terms of foreign policy, which sounds much better to many Americans certainly today than an inflexible kind of orientation. You might say, and Jay was noting sort of the Cold War, the kind of inflexibility of ideas about containment. Actually when you look at that history containment of the Soviet Union took many different shapes and forms over the years of the Cold War. So you could argue staunch anti-communism in a particular era was a kind of ideological position that was popular. But now I think flexibility is much more the name of the game when you say that you're pursuing a non ideological or less ideological orientation. In other words, you're just not rigid.

 

But you could also say, if you look at all the debates we've been hearing in the last little while, a lot of folks who are tapping into the long term nineteenth century ideas about protectionism for instance, or unilateralism, are again returning to kinds of ideological orientations that while they wouldn't call them ideologies, perhaps, really functionally are. And America First would be one of the ones that I would say, when you unpack what people mean by that, if they have real ideas and values in there embedded in there, those are functionally ideological kinds of commitments.

 

LIINDSAY:
I have a sense we're getting a real plug in here in this conversation for nineteenth century American history. So let's fully embrace it and do a deep dive. And let me go to you, Emily, because again, you write about the Christian missionary movement, and I suspect a lot of people really have not paid much attention to it or have a really good understanding of how it is that it shaped American foreign policy and America's engagement in the world more broadly. So can you tell us a little bit about it and what was the impulse that drove it?

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Absolutely. Yeah. So we usually date the beginning of the American movement to the founding of the first organization in 1810. But it started earlier and it certainly lasted, I mean, it's still going on now. I think there's something like, I forget what the numbers are, and this is where I'm a nineteenth century historian and not a contemporary person, but it's thousands and thousands of Americans every year go out on short term mission trips right now and are sort of engaging with certain spaces in the world through religious bodies and religious experiences. So it continues to be really important for shaping American understandings of certain places in the world and creating American relationships with certain places and peoples around the world. And that's a big part of the nineteenth century story and why it matters for American foreign policy. 

 

Over the course of the nineteenth century, and I talk about in the book I'm finishing up right now, which I'm titling Missionary Diplomacy, I look at the ways that the mission movement and the State Department grow up side by side over the course of the nineteenth century. And if you look at where missionaries are going and where the State Department is sending American official representatives, they've got a slightly different geography. The State Department is really focusing on relations with Europe, relations with Latin America, and missionaries are going to sort of all over Asia, they're going into the Middle East, they're going to the Pacific Islands as a century goes on, they'll be going into Africa as well. And the effect of that is that for large places around the world, large spaces around the world, missionaries are the ones who are telling Americans about what these places are, why they matter, who lives there and why they should care about it, and that really matters.

 

It matters, especially when you start to have the United States creating treaties with those places. And the people on the ground who speak the languages and have some sense of context are missionaries. And so missionaries are there translating the treaties and helping in the room constructing what those relationships are going to be. I think to that question that you were talking about with Chris earlier, right, about how ideology is shaping some of these even so-called pragmatic conversations, it really matters that the people in the room, they are certainly interested in furthering what they understand to be American interests are there. But they're coming at it with an understanding that is formed by and structured by a missionary ideology that understands what they call Christian civilization as necessary for the good of all people around the world that understands certain kinds of government, that understands certain kinds of trade relationships, that understand certain kinds of gender relationships to be really key. And this has really important effects on American foreign policy throughout the nineteenth century and into twentieth century as well.

 

LIINDSAY:
Emily, would you say that those missionary activities, wherever they took place, and many of them are involved countries that are very important today, China jumps to mind, left behind a legacy that we're still feeling today? Whether in terms of leaving behind institutions or leaving behind residue of animosity?

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Absolutely. Institutions for sure. If we look at one of the things that missionary organizations did was they formed hospitals, they formed institutions of higher education. And a lot of those colleges and universities are still around in different forms and they create long term effects with sort of a sense of a connection between the United States and those places also with shaping what the political culture on the ground is in those places. So that is absolutely the case. And then animosity, I think there is the ways that the mission movement got connected with other aspects of American and Western imperialism more generally, certainly continues to have an important legacy with American engagements around the world.

 

LIINDSAY:
Well, that also gets back to your point, that this ideology that drove the movement had competing principles one, overwhelmingly positive and another one overwhelmingly negative.

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Yes, exactly. And so there's scholars in the twentieth century looking at these same developments. I'm thinking here of work by Melanie McAllister, by David Hollander and Gail Kenny and others does a really nice job of looking at how these experiences overseas then come back to shape American conversations within domestic circles and domestic politics about racism, about relativism and tolerance and these sorts of things. And it absolutely kind of continues to have a legacy sort into our current moment today. I think.

 

LIINDSAY:
Jay, I want to come back to you and talk a bit more about the ideologies that competed during the second half of the nineteenth century. And the volume that you contributed to, you wrote that the Civil War position, the United States take advantage of the late nineteenth century burst of cross border exchange that we now call globalization. Can you sort of fill me in on that?

 

SEXTON:
Oh, that's my controversial take on the global significance of the American Civil War. So oh, get ready for it. I mean, if you would wheel out, most of my colleagues, what they would say when asked, "Why does the Civil War matter?" They'd map it on to an international political narrative. And they would say, "As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, that this was about salvaging the last best hope, democracy," and so forth. And that you can look at the outcome after 1865 and you can make a case. Not sure it's as strong of a case as something, you can make a case that parallel developments unfold in other societies. And so this is the beginnings of a sort of triumph of liberal democracy. 

 

I'm not here to tell you that's totally rubbish, but I'm here to tell you that what really, if you just sort of step back and you don't view it from a very American prism and you say, "Well, what's really different after 1865 versus before?" And surely it's the volume of the incoming traffic to the United States in particular, capital becomes the world's greatest debtor nation. More debt and more foreign investment. And I mean that mostly is a good thing. It helps to pay for the colonization of the West, the development of the American economy, and then of course the labor, the migration patterns, the immigrants that are coming in and United States by one estimate, and the second half of nineteenth century attracts 25 percent of all cross border migrants. So it's the single largest destination for laborers as well. This is the roots of American power in the twentieth century. 

 

I don't think it's an ideological story, although ideology fits into that. And what I was trying to get at in that chapter in the book was that if you take that as what's globally both significant and then put the ideology question downstream, you're looking at different ideologies.You're looking at the ideologies of the capitalists that are pumping the money into the United States. You're looking at the ideologies of the immigrants that are coming post 1865, and you're looking at what is it that's attracting them to go to the United States. Of course there's push factors, but there's also pull factors. Some of those are ideological. 

 

And then you're looking at a different set of American ideological documents. So for instance, the thing that I think is most important ideological document of the Civil War, it isn't Lincoln's Gettysburg address, but it's the Homestead Act. And the Homestead Act has obviously kind of a bargained deal for immigrants, internal migrants as well as international immigrants, but it's also an ideology.

 

LIINDSAY:
Jay, for people who aren't boned up on the Homestead Act, could you refresh for them what it is?

 

SEXTON:
Oh my goodness, the Homestead Act, everybody's got to know this. This is the Republican plan to carve up public lands in the West to offer it at cut rate prices to settlers. And of course, if you settle the land and you improve it, it becomes yours for essentially free. This is also offered to immigrants, not just internal migrants. And so in the nascent U.S. Foreign Service, this is one of the great achievements of the early American Foreign Service, which as we know is a very ramshackle, poorly run entity. It's not nowhere near as good as the British service. I mean, Emily can tell you all about when her missionaries get in trouble, they don't go to the U.S. consulate, they go straight to the British consulate knowing that that's where they're going to get protected.

 

In fact, here's a little nugget for you. Fully 25 percent of the members of the U.S. Foreign Service, consulates, and so forth, 25 percent of them aren't even U.S. citizens. They're citizens of whatever host nation they are most often. So it tells you something about these ideologies. They're not distinctly American nationalistic. They're ideologies that have appeal to wider people. And I think the Homestead Act would be a perfect example of that.

 

LIINDSAY:
Now, one of the things that struck me, Jay, in reading what you wrote is you talked about how some ideologies essentially triumph. They became or shaped the dominant narrative. But you also wrote, and this really struck me, "Those on the losing side lived to fight another day." Can you just briefly tell me what you mean by that?

 

SEXTON:
Well, I mean, after every election, the free traders in 1884, the free traders think that they had become ascendant or 1892 and the protectionist rise again from the ashes and it plays out in America's messy electoral politics. Of course, the biggest one concerns slavery. It's obvious it's the triumph of the Union. It crushes slavery, but forms of labor exploitation and coercive labor regimes pop up post 1865. I'm not saying that they're exactly like slavery. They oftentimes don't have quite as clear of an ideological justification. But if you're to obviously look at sharecropping in the deep South, you look at the segregated hierarchies of Jim Crow. Heck, If you're to look at coolie labor and the importation of Chinese laborers against their free will, both to build the railroads in the American West also throughout the Western hemisphere in Latin America, you could say free soil, anti-slavery, it won, but it didn't eradicate all of its opponents by any stretch.

 

LIINDSAY:
Right. We got the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

 

SEXTON:
Yeah. Can I say my favorite statistic about the Chinese Exclusion Act since you brought it up?

 

LIINDSAY:
You were allowed to, since I opened the door, as they say in legal.

 

SEXTON:
Here we go. You shouldn't have said it. If you asked me for my favorite statistic about union soldiers in the Civil War, I'll give that to you too.

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
I love that you have favorite statistics, that's great.

 

SEXTON:
Chinese exclusion. More Chinese entered Pacific ports, U.S. ports, in the decade after 1882 than in the decade before 1882. So you have this big early immigration restriction, but you do not have the state capacity to actually implement it. Really important point, you don't have Angel Island, I think it's like 1906, something like that, the Pacific version of Ellis Island. The actual implementation, the Chinese Exclusion Act is outsourced to private steamship companies and so forth. So state development, we can never lose sight of that when we're talking nineteenth century state capacity to actually do the things that these politicians in Washington are saying that they're going to do. If you look at the detail, it's often not the case.

 

LIINDSAY:
And I don't think we have to draw out the obvious parallels to 2022. Chris, I want to turn to you because you wrote about unilateralism, which I think most people like me who are trained as political scientists would think of as a practice rather than as an ideology. So change my mind that it's an ideology.

 

NICHOLS:
All right, let's do it. Well, so I try to line it up, and I especially am attentive not to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but to the sort of origins and traditions in the first roughly seventy-five years of U.S. history to show how there's a unilateralist foundation for U.S. foreign policy. And that it functions in different sorts of ways in trade in thinking about immigration and thinking about of great power politics as we would understand it today. And so that within kind of unilateralist orientations you have, as I've shown us some of my other work, or tried to show kinds of core components that we began with when we're talking about ideology and definitions. So self sufficiency is a key core component of unilateralism. Almost every argument about a unilateral policy is about being more self-sufficient, not being reliant on other countries. Unilateralism is very often a traveling companion to isolationist kinds of arguments. They're not the same, but they're very similar. 

 

And so when you see arguments that are classically termed isolationist, like weariness of joining NATO, collective security agreements being a permanent member of all kinds of trade organizations, those two have core constituent parts that add up to something more like an ideology. But what I say in the chapter is that unilateralism doesn't have to be an ideology to function ideologically. And what I mean by that, when you look at the ways that policy makers think in the historical record and also citizens think about the U.S.'s proper role in the world, you very often find something that looks sort of visceral. And you can think to our last president, Trump, tapping into this kind of deep vein unilateralist orientation, this enduring set of ideas about minding your own business as Pew and Gallup polls would suggest. But actually within that there are real policy ideas.

 

He may not have articulated them in the way that I would spell them out, or political theorists would spell them out in clear categorization and hierarchy. But you go back and you think about trade protectionism, what was going on with China just a few years ago, what continues to go on, in fact, right? These are actually quite popular with American people and I would argue whether or not you want to buy that they're ideology, they function ideologically. That is that they help organize complex world into finite ideas that then people can act on and endorse and support. So that's really a key piece of this. 

 

And I think it goes back again to some of the things we were just hearing from Emily and Jay, that some of these nineteenth century foundational ideas and the competitions where as, I really like Jay's formulation, that the losers often live to fight on another day. And that different policy formulations actually can often give a lot of credit to those ideas. And also, I love that tidbit because the thing about the anti-immigrant ideology in the late nineteenth century, right? Immigration restriction being very popular, but not having the state capacity to do it. Sure, there's 2022 comparisons, but there's also 1920s comparisons. The southern border was wide open even as you have the most stringent immigration restriction in 1921, 1924. So you can have that ideology and then actually not have the policy to fulfill it, which is what historians, we are really all about that context, kind of tracking that all the way through the details there.

 

LIINDSAY:
Well, I have to tell you your point that the past still matters through today, reminds me of that quote in Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of a living, our second Karl Marx reference of our conversation.

 

I actually want to come and ask a question that I know you as historians always get, and it's probably unfair to ask the question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. And it has to do with of the utility of history. I mean obviously we spend time studying history because it's fun. We also do it because we're trying to understand where we came from and how. But partly it's because we hope it's going to shed some light on who we are and where we might be headed. 

 

So I want to ask you first, Jay, what is it that you sort of learned from your studies that you think is relevant for today and you wanted people to keep in mind? And then I'll carve out a little bit of space when you're finished and you can tell me what your favorite statistic is about the Civil War, because I know there are a lot of people listening to this conversation who want to know the answer to that question.

 

SEXTON:
I didn't think you was going to go for it. All right, good. That's a totally massive question to ask so many different ways of answering it. But how about this? What's most important for your listeners is the most basic point, and that is that the way America has fit into the world historically has not looked like it did in the post 1945 era. That's a blip that's very unusual. And it's obviously unusual just in the preponderance, the accumulation of power relative to other powers. But it's also very unusual in how it fits into those broader global flows that we were talking about. I mean, United States in that American century kind of exception, had its borders closed primarily. I mean not entirely, but had its borders closed, immigrants, it exported whether it imported capital, it was free trade. There wasn't really a politics of protectionism, it was very nationalistic.

 

It looked different than it did for its history up till then and then how it looks kind of now. And so that's not to say that history is repeating itself or the twenty-first century looks like the nineteenth, but it is just to say that the nineteenth is a whole lot more relevant than it used to be. And the way that we used to understand the nineteenth century looking through that Cold War prism, I mean, we really misunderstood it. So there's a lot of opportunities for us historians to try to get it right. And whether or not that helps us deal with the challenges of today, I don't know. That's not really my job. My job is to get the history right. And I think we're starting to do that because we see how exceptional and unusual what we thought was the norm of how unusual that really was.

 

LIINDSAY:
And now your favorite historical fact about the Civil War.

 

SEXTON:
All right. I don't know why this isn't taught in every school in America. The majority of the Union Army was minority. The mighty Union Army that crushes secession, 25 percent are foreign born. I mean, there's a significant chunk of the Union Army doesn't even speak English. 25 percent is foreign born. We know 11 percent is African American. And if you include second generation, if you include the sons of first generation migrants, which I think you should in nineteenth century America because of settlement patterns and how they kind of grow up in their own areas, you get well over 50 percent, 55 percent. The Union Army is like an example of how power can be assembled from different cultures, different races, all on behalf of an ideological cause of restoring the Union. And more than a few of them also were ideologically opposed to slavery.

 

LIINDSAY:
There is so much there to discuss and delve into. I'm going to pass on the opportunity to do so, but I do want to ask if there is a book out there you would recommend for people who are intrigued by this, what would you recommend they read?

 

SEXTON:
Nobody's written that book. It's so weird. The history of immigration and then the history of the Civil War just don't intersect in the historiography, but they totally should because the Civil War... Don't forget right before the civil wars, when you get the know nothings, this is when you get a very powerful anti-immigrant politics. And it's that foreign born military service that transforms, that flips that political script just as it does for slavery and Black citizenship. 14th Amendment is not only about African American rights, it's also about the rights of immigrants and birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. So there's a rich, constitutional, social, political, and military history to be done. Somebody ought to write this book.

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
That should be your book, Jay.

 

LIINDSAY:
Okay, well hopefully we have a few history PhD students listening to our conversation and they're going to pick up your challenge. Emily, I want to turn to you. Where do you come down on this argument that history may not repeat, but it can rhyme or echo?

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Yeah, it is the hard one. As Jay was giving his answer, I was thinking about this. And what it comes down to for me, I think, is that we can notice things in the past that we miss in the present. And so one of the things that studying the past, I think really does for me is, and particularly studying things like ideology, we can sort of recognize dynamics that are going on in the past. We can recognize strains of racism within early women's rights movements. We can recognize the ways that there are limitations and all kinds of power dynamics going on in humanitarian movements in the past that when we're living through it can be kind of easy to not pay as much attention to.

 

And I think attention to history for me is really about opening our eyes and knowing what questions to ask about the moment we're living through as well. Not because it's going to tell, sort of give us the path forward, not because things happen exactly the same way now that they did in the past, but because when we're looking with that bit of distance, we can analyze in a way that invites us to bring those same tools to the moment that we're living through right now.

 

LIINDSAY:
And Chris, what about you? I know a lot of presidents bring historians in on occasion because they want to learn from the past. What is it they should be trying to learn?

 

NICHOLS:
So I think both Emily and Jay got at core pieces of this. From my perspective, one of the things you learn by studying the past intensively is that the present is obviously not just deeply shaped by the past, but that so much that we take for granted in our everyday lives is an accretion of different, often ad hoc decisions, policies and other things. And so we get normalized in the present to certain situations. We all see this in our own lives. Think about the use of technology in your life today, or checking boxes and contracts and being surveilled in ways that none of us who didn't grow up as digital natives, for instance, can take for granted. 

 

In the same way, just thinking about The President's Inbox and ideology, right? The Biden administration, after a long time finally published and put forward its national security strategy. You can go back in U.S. history. Look at the rise of national security strategies, right? We were talking nineteenth century. There were no national security strategies in the nineteenth century. But you can find ideologies guiding the administrations. You can find competitions within them because they often had teams of rivals running around or a power imbalances where some people were outvoted or literally caned in Congress. You had these sorts of battles.

 

So anyway, so thinking about our current moment, a national security strategy, as Emily suggested, if you look to the past, you can much more easily discern and analyze, I think, though it's quite hard to do, the kinds of ideologies at work in national security strategies. And then it can help make visible the implicit assumptions and principles that perhaps are not as visible. So for instance, what Jay was saying, right, if 1945 to roughly 1989, '90, '91, '92 was an anomalous period, then it's fascinating to see that the current administration is trying to, I think the first chapter of the national security strategy is something like challenges to the world order, challenges to a world order that it is taking for granted, right? A rules-based world order that is itself functionally anomalous in world historical and U.S. historical terms. 

 

So, what are the underlying sort of core assumptions about why that benefits the U.S. in materials driver terms and ideological aspirational terms? What does it mean to think about the U.S. as a world leader and what are the core elements of that? Should it be public health to deal with the next surge or the next pandemic and all that sort of thing. So from my perspective, history then helps us to make visible the invisible in our ideological assumptions today and in the world we live in. The kinds of policies and questions and details that shape things that we often take for granted.

 

LIINDSAY:
On that note, I will close up the President's Inbox for this week, even though I would love to keep this conversation going. My guests have been Chris Nichols, the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, and a professor of history at the Ohio State University.

 

Emily Conroy-Crutz, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University and Jay Sexton, the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, professor of history, and director of the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri.

 

Chris is the co-editor of the new book, Ideology in Foreign Policy, New Histories, to which he, Emily and Jay have all contributed chapters. Chris, Emily, and Jay, thank you very much for this fascinating conversation.

 

NICHOLS:
Thanks, Jim.

 

CONROY-KRUTZ:
Thanks for having us.

 

SEXTON:
Thank you.

 

LIINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us your review. We love the feedback. You can find the books and articles mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org.

 

As always, opinions expressed on The President's inbox are solely those are the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Senior Podcast Producer Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.