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THIS BOOK has a twofold purpose. The first is to recount the history of the various American efforts to foster democracy abroad and to evaluate the results of these attempts in terms of their own ambitions. The second is to ask how American foreign policy has contributed to the surge in the number, strength, and prestige of liberal democratic governments worldwide at the end of the twentieth century.

The first issue takes us through a hundred years of what this book will call American liberal democratic internationalism. Since 1898, when Americans had to decide what to do with their victory ill the Spanish-American War-largely inspired by a determination to SlOp Spain's repeated abuse of human rights in Cuba-no theme has figured more prominently in the annals of American foreign policy than the repealed presidential calls to promote the creation of democratic government abroad. William McKinley's taking of the …