The Irony of American History by Reinhold Neibuhr (1952)

Neibuhr defines a few terms for us early on in this book to help us understand the framing of his reading of American foreign policy (as an extension of American identity). Tragedy is where a force like America faces an impossible decision and must choose a morally indefensible path in order to preserve a greater good. Irony is when a force like American chooses a morally indefensible path under the disillusion of it being moral. This idea is most carefully created in the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American, where the American CIA (well…) agent Alden Pyle is an earnest, aww shucks American — smart, capable, and wholly and willfully ignorant — helps to institute state violence in Vietnam during French colonial occupation. It is only the presence and voice of the outsider, British journalist Thomas Fowler, who helps us to frame him this way. This would be in opposed to a novel like Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, which earnestly defends US foreign intervention as a necessary good (as opposed to a necessary evil) and suggests that only incompetence and malfeasance were to blame for its failures, not original sin. This would be the accidental irony that Neibuhr suggests.

In a lot of ways this book acts as a kind of grandfather text to so much of the New Americanist texts that would come out in the 50s-90s that put a name and face (and a culture) to anti-colonialist American studies.