According to Joseph Fouché, Howard Zinn saw the United States as an evil Sith lord, like Darth Vader, while Paul Johnson saw the United States as a virtuous Jedi, like Ben Kenobi, but Walter McDougall saw the United States as flawed but ultimately heroic, like Han Solo — the one who shot Greedo first.
Walter McDougall’s latest work looks at maritime strategy:
Americans’ bias toward maritime strategy is in fact over-determined. The geographical location, expanse, topography, and resources of North America make it the real World Island and thus by far the best suited to nurture a maritime supremacy. Indeed, the United States ranks first or close to it in all six of Mahan’s fundamentals for sea power. But the fact that the United States is history’s largest and most successful thallasocracy (Greek for “rule by the sea”) is attributable to cultural traits inherited from Great Britain as well as innate material and spatial endowments. Thus did the classic naval historian Clark Reynolds define the purpose of thallasocracy as “control of the sea lanes and islands by one state to insure its economic prosperity and thus its political integrity.”
But the manner of control, commerce, and polity most conducive to maritime supremacy just happens to foster more independent (he calls it “national privacy”), liberal, entrepreneurial, individualistic, representative, curious, diverse, cosmopolitan, and creative people and institutions than do rigidly hierarchical extractive land empires. (“Isn’t it funny,” he cites John Marin, “that Dictators never never never live by the sea?”) Moreover, navies cannot occupy or plunder provinces in the manner of armies and so pose little threat to civil liberties. Navies are expensive and take a long time to build, but can quickly decay or be lost, hence they tend to be conservative. Yet they venture forth on a chessboard claiming 71 percent of the earth’s surface and serving as highways to all civilizations of mankind, hence navies tend to be cosmopolitan. Thus, whereas armies and their historians tend toward a narrow, national perspective, naval historians tend to be universal in their perspective, stressing and generally (if guardedly) optimistic about the progress that seafaring peoples have bestowed upon civilization.
I have shared but a tiny excerpt of the original.