Book Talk | The Great League of Peace and Power
If you were an alien from outer space who landed in the United States for the first time, you’d have to get up to speed on a lot of things, especially how America fits into the rest of the world. The challenge would be in part to sort through myth and easy black and white interpretations of history. One could come to a lot of conclusions about why the U.S. goes to war, how it became a “super power,” and how it managed – or mismanaged — myriad relationships with other countries over the centuries.
In The Great League of Peace and Power: 250 Years of American Foreign Policy, David Hendrickson, professor emeritus at Colorado College, offers us a book that tells the tale of US foreign policy from the founding right up to the present moment. He grapples with the evolution of internationalism in the early 20th Century and its easy creep into global intervention, an ethos Washington has never quite recovered from.
Join the author in conversation with Daniel Larison, editor of the Eunomia newsletter, and Kelley Vlahos, editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft, for a wide-ranging talk about how America’s turn toward empire wasn’t sudden or unchallenged. Knowing this history and accepting it is one step toward changing our current imperial standing. The conversation will take place on Thursday, November 12th from 1:00 – 2:00 PM ET.
Panelists
David Hendrickson
David C. Hendrickson is emeritus professor of Political Science at Colorado College, where he taught from 1983 to 2020. Hendrickson was chair of the Political Science Department in 2000–2003 and 2017–2018. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1982 from Johns Hopkins University. In 2018, he received the Gresham Riley Award from the Colorado College Alumni Association for outstanding service, commitment, and accomplishment. Hendrickson is the author of eleven books. His essays have appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, Orbis, and Survival.
Daniel Larison
Daniel Larison is a regular columnist at Responsible Statecraft, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and a former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He writes regularly for his newsletter, Eunomia, on Substack.
Kelley Vlahos
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is editor-in-chief at Responsible Statecraft and a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute. Previously she was executive editor of The American Conservative magazine. Before joining TAC in 2017, Vlahos served as a contributing editor to the magazine, reporting and publishing regular articles on U.S. war policy, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. She spent 15 years as an online political reporter for FOX News at the channel’s Washington D.C. bureau, as well as Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. She is on the board of PublicSquare.net, a non-profit media project promoting informed Left-Right debate.
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