A single-volume account of American foreign relations from the Revolution onward, tracing how a scattering of coastal colonies hemmed in by hostile neighbors and rival empires became the dominant power in world politics, and how that ascent was understood by the people who managed it.

The organizing claim is that foreign policy has never been peripheral to American life. Outside help secured independence; anxieties about commerce and foreign threats shaped the Constitutional Convention of 1787; diplomacy mattered to the survival of the young republic and to how the Civil War ended. The picture of an isolationist America is treated as a myth that flatters the national self-image, since the country has been an active participant in world affairs since 1776.

War carries much of the narrative. Each generation has had one, and those conflicts both fed the myths of national virtue and marked the stages by which the United States acquired a continent and then a world role.