FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 15, 2005
CONTACT: Jennifer Linker, 202/939-2372, jlinker@CarnegieEndowment.org

President Bush’s use of religious themes and moral qualifications is not a unique feature in U.S. foreign policy but part of a historical framework that has long conceptualized the role of the United States as God’s chosen nation with a “mission” or “calling,” writes John B. Judis, a Carnegie visiting scholar, in a new policy brief. The Bush administration’s religious paradigm and apocalyptic mentality detracts from foreign policy success, especially in the Middle East. The religious expression “has made for eloquent and stirring oratory, but it may have also detracted from a clear understanding of the challenges facing the United States,” argues Judis. The full text is available at www.CarnegieEndowment.org/policybriefs.

This religious framework shapes a perception of the U.S. role in the world as the “chosen nation” designated to transform the world in its image. The concept was born of a form of Protestant millennialism brought to the United States in the 17th century that later became linked to American nationalism and exceptionalism. The “apocalyptic mentality” to which Judis refers comes from a belief that conflicts put good against evil and must be resolved through a cataclysmic change. 

Although some attribute actions in Iraq and the Middle East to the Christian right’s influence on the Bush administration, Judis explains that they result from the broader millennial framework that lies at the heart of current U.S. foreign policies.

Judis writes that “America’s more difficult moments have come when it has allowed religious conceptions not only to dictate ultimate goals but to color its understanding of the real world in which these goals have to be met.” In current U.S. foreign policy the apocalyptic mentality “discourages a complex appreciation of differences and similarities in favor of a rush toward generalities and simple polarities,” and results in acts like invading Iraq with a singular vision and distrust of outside interference.

John B. Judis is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment and a senior editor of The New Republic. He is the author of The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (Scribners, 2004), from which this essay is adapted.

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