Seeking Monsters to Destroy: How Americans Go to War from Washington to Biden and Beyond
Dr. Jeffrey Engel
Center for Presidential History, Southern Methodist University
There is a recurrent yet previously unnoticed theme in American diplomacy that has
shaped American politics over time and fundamentally catalyzes Washington’s current
relationship with the wider world. It can be described in a single phrase: Americans
fight tyrants—not foreign nations, and certainly not foreign peoples. At least that is how
presidents typically describe their wars, because by and large this is how the American
people prefer to fight them: as crusaders against evil and tyranny, rather than as agents
for economic or imperial concerns. Unless, that is, the enemy seems different than
what Americans consider themselves—religiously, ethnically, and especially, racially. In
what is ultimately a story of power and politics, this lecture traces the way American
leaders have framed their foes from the American Revolution to today.
Jeffrey A. Engel is founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern
Methodist University, Professor in the William P. Clements Department of History, and a
Senior Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies. Trained at
Cornell University, Oxford University, and Yale University, he received his PhD in
American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. Having previously
taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M University
where he was the Kruse ’52 Professor and received recognition for his teaching at the
college, university, and system levels. Engel is author or editor of thirteen books on
American foreign policy and the American presidency, including his latest, When the
World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War and the co-
authored Impeachment: An American History. In 2019 SMU’s Resident Life Students
named him their campus-wide Hope Professor of the Year.