Whatever else he did, George W. Bush came to inspire a whole series of works in the genre that one might call “the United States and the world,” reflections on what, really, the proper place of the country ought to be in the order of things. The reason is obvious. In fighting his late and unlamented “war on terror,” Bush declared such a maximalist concept of that place as to force everyone, literally and metaphorically, up against the wall. Bush, in short, caused a great deal of worries, not to say alarm. So, while Ted Widmer is certainly right in insisting that his book is not about the Bush administration, the Republican years after 2001 are nevertheless its formative (and negative) point of reference. This was, as he says, an administration of “wolves in Wilsonian clothing” (321).

Against that backdrop, then, Widmer sets out to reassess how the United States has appeared in the world from beginning to end, what the project has been about and how it has played out. It is not a scholarly work, nor does it pretend to be, nor indeed could it be, given the immense scope. There are no footnotes and only sparing references to historians in the actual text. It is a work clearly intended for that well-known imaginary figure “the general reader.” I have no objections as such to this approach (though a bibliographical essay would certainly have been useful). At the same time, however, the value of the exercise then stands or falls with the power of the argument. Here, instead of an argument, one gets on the whole a numbingly familiar story, very much structured around a Whiggish convention of progressive history, liberal–internationalist norms, odes to judicious blends of “realism and idealism,” the customary set of heroes and a fairly predictable set of aberrations from the straight and narrow. It does not help either that Widmer sounds at times like a voice-over in a PBS documentary.

His narrative (and conceptual) device is to see the United States as the Ark of the Liberties, embarked on a “journey” through time and space which at some points gets dangerously off course and on occasion gets beached but eventually returns to the trek with more passengers on board, freely determining their destination and destiny. Things have gone awry, undermining the universal promise, in times of greed, rapacity, excess and sheer perversion. Witness, for example, James Polk and his engineered war against Mexico. Witness the foolish extension of the War of 1898 into a war of subjugation in the Philippines. Witness the intervention in Russia during World War I. Witness the undermining of democracy and converse support of dictators in the Cold War. Witness, above all, the war in Vietnam which threw the Ark so far off course as to turn it into something else (or very nearly so). Witness, finally, the tainted operation of implanting freedom in Iraq. Things have gone right, by contrast, in moments of realistic (not realist) assertion of power for properly idealistic (not idealist) purposes, the purposes inscribed in the national project itself. In describing that project, Widmer shows unusual and appropriate interest in the religious aspects. On the actual historical events, however, he has little analytical novelty to offer. Nor (which is more serious) does he have much by way of probing commentary once we reach the point around 1900 when the United States becomes a Great Power (or almost does) and the journey of the Ark can be personified in successive captaincies from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. What fits the liberal–internationalist frame in its judicious form is good; the opposite is not.

There are, nevertheless, some interesting curiosities here. Widmer's constellation of heroes (Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Kennedy; to a lesser degree Truman and Carter; decent marks for Eisenhower and Clinton) is predictable enough, as is his array of Great Deeds (e.g. Wilsonianism, World War II, the Marshall Plan, support of human rights under Carter, and so on). What stands out, however, is Widmer's extraordinary devotion to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the epitome of all the things that are good about “America” and American statecraft: “nothing less than the philosopher-king of the new world coming into existence” (213). One can sympathize with the motivating force behind this commitment to FDR, viz. the concept of an expanded range of rights and the realistic deployment of power for their implementation. The actual history, however, is manifestly weak, if not altogether wrong. Hovering near doctrinal edict, the account is notable precisely as symptom: FDR as a representation of what might be otherwise in the present age of (Bush) perversion. One of FDR's gifts in Widmer's view is his peerless capacity to combine ideals – good ideals – with rhetorical persuasion. Widmer, Bill Clinton's speechwriter, is a keen admirer of great speeches, and speeches consequently figure prominently throughout his book. It is therefore with some interest that one reads his unusually cool evaluation of the Great Communicator. He certainly acknowledges Ronald Reagan's rhetorical power but, much to his credit, does not fall into the current vogue of rosy memorialization. Indeed, by now the leisurely tone of neither-left-nor-right, the firm commitment to the vital center of the liberal imagination, has been replaced in the proceedings by a certain urgency and sense of outrage that culminates in a downright scathing depiction of the neocons. One wishes Widmer had shown more of that polemical verve in his earlier histories, but that would have required an altogether different kind of frame.