Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World By Walter Russell Mead. Alfred A. Knopf, 374 pages, $30.00 T his book begins with a bang and ends with a kvetch. "The United States has had a remarkably successful history in international relations," Walter Russell Mead proclaims in his opening pages. That such a common-sense statement might be regarded as provocative, Mead claims, testifies both to the myopia of much learned commentary on foreign policy and to most Americans' ignorance of their own diplomatic traditions. Those failings he energetically sets out to remedy. Mead presses his case with panache. Along the way he dispenses some trenchant aperçus: "A global hegemon leads a hard and busy life"; "the United States of America is the most dangerous military power in the history of the world"; "the advantages of democratic government apply in international affairs as well as in domestic ones"; and "France, Germany, Italy, and Britain may have sneered at [...