foreign policy that appears, as was observed of an earlier administration, to carry “a bible
in one hand and a revolver in the other.”
3
For Lieven, a resurgent US nationalism not only is a source of specific strategic
errors towards, for example, transatlantic relations, Israel, and Iraq,
4
but undermines the
US leadership of a enlightened, liberal international order that has sustained and
legitimized American power in the post-war era. Nationalism is a source of potential
disequilibrium from an otherwise centrist, liberal hegemony. Lieven argues that
“according to all precedents,” the United States should “behave as a conservative
hegemon, defending the existing international order and spreading its values by
example….American nationalism is beginning to come into serious conflict with any
enlightened or even rational version of American imperialism,” and is becoming “an
extremely unstable basis for hegemony.”
5
Henry Nau concurs that “at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, the nationalist approach to American foreign policy seeks to
undo the ambitious foreign policy legacies of the cold war and its aftermath.”
6
These arguments are consistent with a classic liberal critique of nationalism as a
source of reaction, chauvinism, and exclusionary conflict.
7
Nationalism has often been
problematic for liberalism, a difficulty that stems, according to Charles King, from an
“unease about how to reconcile special sentiments of connection and camaraderie that
3
European Economic Community official Jacques Delors, quoted in New York Times, “Its Far from Quiet
on the European Front,” December 12, 1984.
4
According to Lieven, for example, nationalism is “perhaps the single most important underlying factor
driving European hostility towards the Bush administration. Lieven, “The Perils of American
Nationalism,”p.99.
5
Anatol Lieven, “In the Mirror of Europe,” p.101.
6
Henry Nau, At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Ithica: Cornell University
Press, 2002), p.44
7
Nationalism can also be quite consistent with liberalism, whether as a source of self-determination or a
source of political cohesion in democratic polities. In the US case, as will be discussed, American national
identity is defined by the liberal values that constitute the “American creed.”
Convention