Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

Right.

And that, as someone, you know, I had just published a book or just finished a book on the history of American foreign policy, Special Providence.

Which I recommend people read.

In the book, the two phenomena that I talked about were, number one, this Pearl Harbor moment.

But the costs are

high.

Well, Walter, that takes me back to your book, Special Providence, which you alluded to earlier.

Because in Special Providence, you really talk about sort of four sentiments or themes or perspectives that run through the history of American foreign policy.

And when I...

Actually, I wrote Special Providence, came out right around the time of 9/11, and people at that time weren't really aware-

And one, two

... that there was anything but Hamilton and Wilson, and then suddenly discovered, oh, wait a minute, there are these Jacksonians there-

That's been kind of the predominant establishment idea really since World War II.

Special Providence came out right around the time of nine one one, and people at that time weren't really aware that there was anything but Hamilton and Wilson, and then suddenly discovered, oh, wait a minute, there are these Jacksonians there.

Who want to nuke Afghanistan or whatever came up after that.

I would say that Trump's coalition is a mix of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, isolationists and hawks.

If that ends up not happening and if the noose ends up kind of tightening around Chinese Christian communities, it makes it just very difficult to live Christian lives the way it happened in maybe the Soviet Union.

Could you see the cause of kind of Chinese Christians becoming a big deal in America? You wrote in Special Providence about how the fate of ordinary people in China was a big concern of American Christian missionaries for a long time.

There was the cause of the refuseniks in the late Cold War that, you know, we wanted to try to bring as many of these people over to America as possible.

Could you see that happening? Or is this kind of, we're just in a completely different world, different century now.