It is perhaps no coincidence that it is Eric Alterman, a trained historian turned journalist, who has made these matters the subject of a polemical, wide-ranging book. Alterman knows how out of step he is, observing in his introduction that “the democratization of American foreign policy is a problem that worries precious few people” (p. 4).

Alterman’s main thesis is that in the United States foreign policy has been “deliberately shielded from the effects of democratic debate.” The accent here is on “deliberately.” If ordinary Americans are on the sidelines, this is not because the field of foreign policy is too arcane or because the public is too ignorant, but because elites willfully exclude them.

In Alterman’s view, this usurpation of democratic authority reached its peak during the period of the Cold War, resulting in horrendous policies from which millions suffered. Now in the era of unipolarity and globalization, the marginalizing of the people has even graver consequences since what happens abroad impinges directly upon domestic life. The absence of popular control over foreign policy signals the collapse of democracy here at home.

The top-down procedures are alarming in their own right. But Alterman’s animating conviction is that ordinary people would make better decisions, assuming they possessed the relevant information. This is because the abiding values of the people are more humane than those of the elite. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, “most Americans,” claims Alterman, “do not live to conduct foreign policy; rather they conduct foreign policy in order to live” (p. 14). In the present period, this translates into a less imperial, militaristic stance than that of the rulers.

But is it correct to say that the majority of Americans possess a foreign policy stance? Casual observation would suggest that most people have tuned out and that, absent an extraordinary crisis, they are relatively indifferent to international events. While Alterman is keenly attuned to public ignorance and apathy, he sees both as the consequence rather than the cause of political impotence. “Anyone who studies the problem carefully” will clearly see that “the American people do not accept the foreign policy establishment’s definition of the nation’s priorities in the world, but do not know how to force a reassessment” (p. 14).

Some of the most original sections of Alterman’s book are contained in his historical overview of American diplomacy, which traces how during the course of two centuries the public forfeited control of foreign affairs. At the inception of the new nation, white men were “obsessed with politics” and took it personally as the Republic veered between friendship with France or Britain. In 1793 when Citizen Genet came courting support for the French Revolution “grocers, bakers, sail makers and lawyers organized themselves into volunteer brigades should war with England ensue.” And when John Jay accommodated the British with his famous treaty “opponents burned him in effigy and pelted his representatives with rotten vegetables at every opportunity.”

Yet the ink hadn’t dried on the Constitution before George Washington was violating its spirit (if not its letter) by presenting the Senate with a secret article for a treaty with the Creeks and refusing to supply the House of Representatives with the details of the Jay Treaty. And on it went, from Thomas Jefferson, who purchased Louisiana without explicit congressional sanction, to James Madison blundering into a needless war with Britain, through James Polk creating a phony incident to justify the conquest of Mexican territory.

Unifying all of these misbehaviors was the drive for unceasing expansion. In part the legacy of a Lockean “liberalism,” which featured unlimited economic opportunity, it was also rationalized by Jefferson and his successors as a means of promoting equality and republican virtue. Alterman contends that the effect was quite the opposite as with each accretion of territory the president’s authority grew, that of Congress weakened, and the public’s influence dwindled. By the end of the nineteenth century, “when the land ran out,” the quest for foreign markets and outlets for investment provided the new impetus for empire. Hence the “abuses of presidential power continued to escalate, leading to foreign wars of conquest, entangling alliances, the creation of a large standing army, and the trampling of the very republican values this expansion had been intended to protect” (p. 51).

A trampler-in-chief was Franklin Roosevelt who, for admittedly “brave and far-sighted reasons,” ran roughshod over the Constitution to get the country into the Second World War (p. 17). Craftily sending ships to places where they were likely to be attacked and then lying about it, allowing the FBI to wiretap phones and to open the mail of suspected Axis sympathizers, and permitting the agency to spy on congressional critics, he set dangerous precedents that Harry Truman used with even less scruple.

Not surprisingly, Alterman is most eloquent and impassioned when he arrives at the Cold War era. Many of his points are familiar fare. It is hardly news that the conflict with the Soviet Union engendered an “imperial presidency” and a “national security state” in which the parameters of debate were tightly drawn and the voice of the people rendered mute. Yet by highlighting the many forms of official secrecy and dissimulation and by bringing them together in a tight narrative, he casts fresh light on the plight of ordinary Americans, who try to make sense of American foreign policy. He also provides a stinging critique of the media, which is so corrupted by money and so identified with the governing elite, that it has abdicated its educational function.

Given these many ills, how could the situation be remedied? Dropping his historian’s hat, the author spins out his “immodest proposal” for reviving “the liberal republic.” He genuinely believes that “the people” should decide. But for this to happen, they have to be well informed and not only that, they need to “deliberate” about issues in the fashion once imagined by the Founding Fathers. Yet Americans are famously busy and it is difficult to see how this deliberating will fit in their schedules.

Alterman’s idea is to elect a “foreign policy jury” for six-year terms on the basis of biographies and short statements of purpose. Those chosen would be paid a middle-class salary for full-time work and would have access to all sorts of experts. This body would “operate on an experimental basis as a means of strengthening democratic discourse and focussing debate on the concerns of the American people” (p. 177). It would not immediately replace the authority of Congress or the president. But, “once the jury proved its ability to function coherently, the system could gradually transfer key components ...of U.S. foreign policy” to it (p. 178). Upon retirement, jurors would go back to their communities and hold seminars in local schools, libraries, and cable TV stations.

Coming at the end of a quite sober, down-to-earth narrative this “immodest proposal” seems surprisingly innocent. In light of two hundred years of bureaucracy building and secret keeping – not to mention globalization and the loss of government power to the private markets – how could such an ad hoc body successfully operate? And what would ever induce the executive or the Congress to cede power to a citizen entity?

Of course the author recognizes that his plan is fanciful, and he observes more than once that it is unlikely to be adopted any time soon. So why bring it up? Perhaps to show that if a democratic foreign policy was a priority, there are simple institutional ways to accomplish this. Moreover, in order to move in a democratic direction “we must first overcome the psychological hurdles that prevent us from thinking, institutionally, beyond ...meaningless tinkering with a system that has essentially broken down” (p. 180).

Yet in bending our imagination toward institutional reform, Alterman obscures the chief features of the public opinion conundrum. To begin with people seem uninterested in foreign affairs and are not clamoring for a larger role. Alterman interprets this as the outgrowth of disappointment and repeated frustration. But the evidence for that view is slim. It seems just as plausible to argue that foreign affairs is a complicated subject and that ordinary Americans would rather invest their time elsewhere. People may also be quiescent because they are unaware of what their government is doing and how it is affecting themselves and others.

Moreover, vested interests will vigorously resist an enlarged public role, especially if – as Alterman seems to assume – an empowered populace would radically change the direction of foreign policy. In contrast to some revisionists, the author emphasizes that there are multiple actors in the foreign policy process, including the investment banks and multinational corporations, the national security bureaucrats, powerful ethnic organizations, and some single-issue advocacy groups. Yet, he well recognizes the preeminence of corporate interests and shows that the obsession with free markets, the impulse toward political interventions, and the commitment to overwhelming military power reflect the self-interests of the dominant players.

Yet in advocating institutional reform, Alterman seems to be appealing to the foreign policy establishment itself. He is earnestly demonstrating that the citizen jury could be very wise and responsible. But why should that establishment change its method of conducting business? The incentive, the author suggests, is the growing body of resentful, alienated Americans who have fueled the movement for Ross Perot and more recently for Patrick Buchanan. But it is unclear how much of that movement pertains to foreign policy or whether the challenge runs deep. From an elite perspective, the diffuse disaffection of the public is a small price to pay for policies that have garnered immense wealth and power.

The achievement of a democratic foreign policy is not a matter of moving the institutional furniture around, but of masses of people in motion. At a point of great crisis the elite may fracture, as it did during the Vietnam War. To establish greater democracy, however, there is no substitute for popular agitation and organization. Until ordinary citizens perceive the connection between the actions of their government abroad and their situation at home and have rallied around strong policy positions, “who speaks for America” will be those at the top.

In brief, the problem with Alterman’s “immodest proposal” is not its utopianism but that as a strategy for change it reverses the order of things. One can imagine many arrangements that would facilitate citizen participation and, odd as it now seems, even elections could serve that purpose. But the missing ingredient is an aroused public, without which all the townhalls in the nation will remain empty.

The great strength of Eric Alterman’s book is that he writes with great erudition and thoughtfulness about a much neglected historical question, so fundamental that cutting-edge scholarship should not ignore it. He asks us to contemplate how it transpired that as the United States forayed out into the world, its internal democracy withered.