Frank Ninkovich’s The Global Republic minimizes the role of “Manifest Destiny” and the belief in American exceptionalism in the global rise of the United States. Instead, “the stimulus for the nation’s ascent to dizzying heights of power, far from emanating from within, was . . . of external origin, an inadvertent consequence of the need to keep up with a fast-changing globalizing world that was filled with promise and peril” (1-2). To understand America’s rise, we have to set aside “the idea that a deeply rooted universalizing impulse in the national character has been at work since 1776” (2).

Manifest Destiny in particular was ideological in the strict Marxist sense - a mask for interests and power: “Manifest Destiny could be taken to mean that Americans were God’s chosen people fulfilling a divine plan to take over and govern what came to be forty-eight contiguous states of the union. As a matter of faith, the term implied that expansion was so obviously written into the stars that it was not worth taking the trouble to justify. Thus viewed, Manifest Destiny was a slogan whose justification was to serve as a justification - in this case, to rationalize the dispossession of Native Americans, Mexicans, and anyone else who got in the way of this irrepressible movement of population. In its role as a justification, it is an excellent illustration of the concept of ideology as a belief system whose chief function was to rationalize the material interests of collective behavior. Apart from camouflaging the base desires of people who were interested in acquiring land or wealth in other forms, its causal value was negligible” (31). 

Besides, it was “too superficial to be a real ideology, for ideologies are complicated systems of thought with the power to generate enthusiasm in their own right.” Ninkovich finds it hard to believe anyone would be “moved to action at this time solely by a belief in Manifest Destiny” (31).

Ninkovich is no doubt right that the US was able to ride waves of globalization to what he describes as its “inadvertent rise to world power.” But there are several problems with his analysis.

First, he provides evidence that there was a universalizing impulse in American life, not just from 1776 but from the 1630s. Of course, that wasn’t manifest in an aggressive foreign policy; the Founders, like Winthrop himself, were more inclined to view America’s role as exemplary: Their success as a Republic would inspire Republican forces elsewhere. Whatever the method, though, early Americans hoped that the world would become somewhat more like America.

Which leads to a second problem: Ninkovich focuses too narrowly on “foreign policy” to measure America’s intentions on the world stage. The United States, he rightly says, “was lacking in the conceptual and practical tools for a revolutionary foreign policy” (26). And, again rightly, “America’s uniqueness as a geopolitically isolated republic was not matched by a corresponding exceptionalism in its approach to foreign relations. . . . foreign relations were reduced to the same kind of down-to-earth concerns that drive the policies of other states” (38). Given America’s geographic isolation, the US could be comparatively unconcerned about the kinds of balances of power and defensive concerns that preoccupied European states. True as this is, it doesn’t disprove a larger aim: A limited foreign policy, as an expression of a belief in limited government, can coexist with broader aspirations. We might ask, Would the Founders be heartened to find that the institutions they established in the US have spread throughout the world? Yes. And then, Would they see this as a fulfillment of their dreams? Again, yes.

Finally, with regard to Manifest Destiny in particular: Ninkovich minimizes the power of the concept because he minimizes how it linked with the energies of American Christianity. He might find concepts like Manifest Destiny un-motivating; John Quincy Adams did not, since Adams linked the spread of the US across North America with a civilizing mission infused with the leftovers of a Puritan-biblical vision of dominion over the wilderness.