Chapter Twelve explores three endeavors embraced by Rogers in the last decade of his life. His wanderlust and populist desire to gain practical knowledge and meet ordinary people prompted extensive world travel that took him to Central and South America, Europe, China, Japan, and the Soviet Union. These encounters bolstered his staunch anti-imperialism. Rogers also emerged as one of America’s greatest boosters of aviation. Seeing the wide-open skies as a new frontier and airplane pilots as updated version of the self-reliant cowboy, he promoted the development of commercial and military aviation at every opportunity and idolized flyers such as Lindbergh. Finally, Rogers embraced the newfangled media technology of radio. He became the host of a nationally broadcast radio program, first for CBand then for NBC, that allowed him to reach an enormous audience with his humorous reflections on the issues and personalities of the day. Rogers also became entangled in controversy when he used the n-word in one of his broadcasts, undercutting his record of supporting African Americans while forcing him to confront his own casual assumption of white racial superiority.

As the three primary cases do not show every configuration of independent variables that should lead to failed concealing, this chapter begins with two more circumscribed explorations of failed concealing in Tanzania and Honduras. It then explores the other strategies and examines their long-term effects. Although concealing is intrinsically risky since a ruler cannot know their own state’s legibility and presence of a strong enough asymmetrically interdependent relationship until these are tested in action, these other strategies may carry even bigger risks. As such, we should expect to see rulers, especially those with reasonable patronage-based capacity but little autonomy from outsiders’ interests and interference in their domestic affairs to try to conceal unsavoury domestic practices. It is therefore important to remain mindful of the effects successful concealing can have on global norms of human rights and good governance.

This chapter analyzes the effects of two important foreign policy traditions, isolationism and moral principle, as policy guides since the beginning of the Republic, and their continuing influence today.

During Trump’s presidency, “America First,” a slogan once associated with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee (AFC) (1940–1941) to prevent US participation in World War II, returned to the center of American political discourse. This chapter argues that the AFC’s anti-interventionist foreign policy and proximity to mimetic fascist groups such as the German Bund is distorted by the labels “isolationist” and “populist.” Instead, by tracing the history of the slogan to the 1880s, this chapter restores the short-lived AFC and more recent iterations since 2016 to the longue durée history of American nativism and nationalism. The slogan “America First” has endured because it offers answers to perennial American questions about national identity and action: both ‘who are we?’ and ‘how should we act in international affairs?’ The chapter defines the America First tradition as an expression of a fascist politics of national identity rooted in American history and not merely a copy of twentieth-century interwar European models. Challenging diffusionist theories of fascism, it contributes to theoretical discussions of fascism as a global, diasporic, and living political tradition.

Chapter 3 re-examines the “ascent” of the United States within the 19th century’s Eurocentric international order, retracing its special path from a fledgling and vulnerable republic to the status of an exceptional and exceptionalist world power. It focuses on the evolution of American ideas and ideologies in the sphere of international affairs, the rise of distinctive forms of US imperialism and unilateralism, and the emergence of core maxims of US international conduct such as those embodied in the ever more expansively defined Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Doctrine. It then casts new light on ephemeral aspirations to establish a modern Atlantic order of empires – led by the United States and the British Empire – that were pursued after the Spanish-American war of 1898 and in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

This chapter will situate Roth’s work within the post-9/11 climate defined by a shift in national attitudes as a result of an increased fear of terrorism, and among other literary figures struggling to represent American and, in some cases, the subject of terror, in their fiction.

The perspective is not isolationist: the United States should be a constructive world citizen. Nor does it arise from pacifism, although sometimes it may be wise not to seek to win wars, but to end them. Given war aversion and the essential absence of threat, military spending is hugely excessive. However, even if the US should substantially disarm, it is probably wise to keep some military forces to carry out limited missions, to hedge a bit against the highly unlikely rise of an effective adversary, and to develop a capacity to rebuild. There would be risk if military forces were very substantially reduced, but experiences in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that there is risk as well in maintaining large forces-in-being that can be deployed in an under-reflective manner. It also facilitates misguided militarized assertiveness, fatuous political rhetoric, and arrogance. The American public has not become newly isolationist or militaristic. It has long been willing to engage internationally, but not to expend American lives in costly and questionable foreign adventures: the 9/11 wars are not indicators of change in this. Indeed, an Iraq Syndrome has taken hold, and military intervention, particularly with ground troops does not seem to have much of a future.

Chapter 5 investigates my counter-example, the rogue diplomat whose indiscipline harmed U.S. interests. Joseph P. Kennedy, a contributor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 and 1936 election campaigns, demanded Embassy London as a reward, and FDR obliged. Upon arriving in Britain, Kennedy concluded that Adolf Hitler's Wermacht was invincible, that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's strategy of appeasement was correct, and that America had to remain neutral. Kennedy repeatedly misrepresented the Roosevelt administration's anti-fascist policy. Whereas FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were endeavoring to bring American--and world - opinion around to a posture of resistance to Hitler, Kennedy proclaimed that America had no stake in the conflict and that, moreover, he expected Germany to win any war that might break out. No matter how often FDR ordered Kennedy to hold his tongue, he would not comply. Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland horrified the ambassador, who forecast an end to democracy in Europe and America. At the close of Kennedy's thousand days in London, Anglo-American relations were in tatters and Britain stood alone against the Nazi juggernaut. Few did more than Kennedy to bring about this hideous state of affairs.