The ending of the Cold War, represented by the extraordinary changes that have been taking place within the international system since 1989, has finally, it seems, put an end to a situation wherein two armed and tightly organised blocs confronted one another and perceived each other as being, in essence, a threat that was immediate and potentially mortal. Given, too, that it was the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union itself that fell apart, it is understandable that this should be widely perceived as a victory for the West; and it is perhaps inevitable that attention should now fall on how the United States will relate to the international environment in which the country may well find itself in the early decades of the coming century.

As Christopher Thorne's readers will have discovered from this printed version of his Albert Shaw Lecture at Johns Hopkins University, his concern with the question of American political culture had become the central focus in much of his academic work, and, indeed, of his private correspondence as well. When last we spoke, two days before his death, he heaped praise on the National Health Service – which I took as a final comment on a crucial difference in British and American health care.

The subject of this article is the foreign policy views of singer and songwriter Bob Dylan: a personality whose footprints during the 1960s were so impressive that a whole generation followed his lead. Today, after thirty years of recording, the number of devoted Dylan disciples is reduced but he is still very much present on the rock scene. His political influence having been considerable, his policy views deserve scrutiny. My thesis is that Dylan's foreign policy views are best characterized as “isolationist.’ More specifically: Dylan's foreign policy message is what so-called progressive isolationists from the Midwest would have advocated, had they been transferred into the United States of the 1960s or later. I shall argue that Bob Dylan is just that kind of personified anachronism, seeing the contemporary world through a set of cognitive lenses made in the Midwest before the Second World War – to a large extent even before the First (or, indeed, before the American Civil War).

In October 1968 the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London was under siege from students protesing against the continued American presence in Vietnam. In France the universities were in turmoil. The Washington Post for 6 October covered the Apollo Flight – the first step to the moon–, uprisings in Columbia university, Twiggy in person and a debate about when the Bikinians might return to their island. Nixon was edging his way towards the presidency in a year that had seen the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, a year in which Johnson decided not to stand for another term in order (allegedly) to devote himself to ending the Vietnam war, in which the Democratic convention took place in Chicago in the midst of violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

The idea of a “new world order,” of an opportunity to remake a broken world into a more liberal and democratic place, was very much in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some historians were encouraged to look at earlier periods with this concept in mind, and this essay is the result of one such attempt. The whole idea of an attempt to build a new world order has a very positive ring about it. At the least it seems to assume a plan, and an active personality or two behind the plan; it also assumes a global reach. If these are in any sense requirements, the United States during the interwar period fulfilled them only partially and erratically. Certainly, if one looks for the strong, general pattern in American foreign policy during this period, the culmination of many smaller plans and patterns, one can be found: the drive to convince the world to adopt policies leading to an international economy characterised by free trade, convertible currencies and open markets, and along with that, the drive to convince countries to disarm. All American administrations from 1919 to 1939 would have agreed with these policy imperatives. But what is undeniable is that they varied in their emphases, in the efforts which US governments themselves made to get these policies accepted. Only Woodrow Wilson had a plan, and only he sought to involve the US Government permanently in this process, to the extent of tying it down to future responsibilities: all others preferred, when feasible, merely to give indicative guidance.

In the reams of commentary that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, no theme was more common than that it ended American isolationism. According to Time magazine, “this was the moment that changed Americans from a nation of provincial innocents, not only ignorant of the great world but proud of their ignorance, into a nation that would often have to bear the burdens of rescuing the world.” “The United States was shaken to the bottom of its soul, its geopolitical innocence in ruins,” Newsweek recalled. “No longer could it cultivate the old American illusion of withdrawing safely behind the Atlantic and Pacific while the rest of a corrupt world went about its dirty business.”