By Brian Stewart
Monday, November 23, 2020
‘What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great
Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of
tomorrow.”
This bit of inspired prognostication came from the pen
of Walter Lippmann in a June 1939 essay titled “The American Destiny.” It was
written at the end of the “low, dishonest decade” in which Western nations had
watched as fascism consolidated and expanded its control at the heart of
Europe, and while a vicious despotism achieved a dominant position in the Far
East. With the totalitarian powers on the march, American officials and
intellectuals were already beginning to envision a postwar order in which the
United States would stand alone—as Churchill would later put it before the
House of Commons—at the summit of the world.
The world of tomorrow has well and truly arrived, with
America ensconced as the “controlling power in Western civilization,” just as
Lippmann foresaw. The American order has been far from perfect or peaceful,
especially in its opening four decades, when the standoff between democratic
capitalism and authoritarian Communism led to gruesome battles across the
postcolonial world. But American stewardship of the international system has
provided a vital buffer between civilization and barbarism. The wisest
observers of U.S. global leadership have understood it to be a “flawed
masterpiece.” The United States brought into being an order characterized by
the absence of great-power conflict, the ascent of democracy, and the spread of
market economics. Few of the glories of modernity would have been conceivable
without American leadership and American strength—its liberal values defining
the norm of international conduct and its legions defending the overarching
order by patrolling distant frontiers.
But nowhere is it written that the American order will
long endure. There is abundant evidence that the U.S.’s global primacy is no
longer as firmly established as it was after World War II, when the country was
at both the start and the height of its supremacy. In 1945, while vast tracts
of the earth lay smoldering, the United States emerged from the worst war in
human history largely unscathed. Requiring no postwar reconstruction, its
factories served up as much manufacturing output as the rest of the world. The
United States also possessed a network of far-flung military bases by which it
could project its power unto the ends of the earth. It supplied the world’s
reserve currency and established a globe-spanning market that saw the free
exchange of goods, services, and people. Another core element of this liberal
order was that America’s political philosophy of individual rights and
representative governance enjoyed pride of place in the world’s consciousness.
The stupendous but largely unsung achievements of the
postwar era are the result of American leadership and will be put at risk as
America’s commitment to the international order becomes more tenuous. And in
certain quarters, the U.S.’s relative decline, combined with the designs of
revisionist foreign powers, has even called into doubt the capacity of the
American hegemon to defend and perpetuate this order.
Stephen Wertheim, a historian of American foreign
policy, takes a different tack. Wertheim’s concerns about American primacy,
rendered in a provocatively revisionist but ultimately dismal new book, Tomorrow, the World, go far deeper than
contemporary doubts and criticisms of a world order founded on American power. Tomorrow, the World—and the work of the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he is a senior
director—presents a root-and-branch opposition to the leadership role that the
United States has played for more than three-quarters of a century.
_____________
Wertheim’s historical scholarship is tendentious but
not fruitless. Sifting through the archives, he unearths a trove of material
that proves, against the prevailing wisdom, that the United States did not
acquire its predominant position by mere circumstance. It was a conscious
choice made by a high-minded elite bent on establishing a Pax Americana.
Digging up old blueprints for global supremacy issued by the Council on Foreign
Relations, which helped conduct postwar planning for the short-staffed State
Department, Wertheim shows that those urging American hegemony boasted an
impressive infrastructure, including ample funding from the Rockefeller
Foundation, for shaping public attitudes and government policy. In league with
its British counterpart, Chatham House, CFR argued passionately that American
interests encompassed so much of the world that American responsibilities had
to swell accordingly. These muscular internationalists advocated that defending
American interests in the modern world meant defending liberal civilization
itself. This camp implored Americans accustomed to the quiet life to forgo
“normalcy” in favor of “world responsibility.”
Foremost among these internationalists was Henry Luce,
whose bracing 1941 manifesto on behalf of “The American Century” was pivotal in
situating the debate about America’s role in the world between isolationism and
internationalism. Wertheim notes that Luce sought to turn U.S. global
leadership into an “unanswerable position” in American politics, insulated from
popular passions and fickle public opinion. In the pages of Life, Luce warned readers that an
internationalism without the power to enforce its principles was doomed to
failure. The totalitarian powers of the day would not understand any language
but force. “The United States could enjoy liberal trade and common norms of
conduct no further than its military force would permit,” as Wertheim
characterizes this view. “The world would remain prone to war, ordered only by
an armed superior,” imposing what Luce called its own “philosophy of life.”
The deep roots of America’s military dominance of the
global commons is Wertheim’s central theme. His book’s originality is in its
conceptual framework of two discrepant forms of internationalism that once
contended for American hearts and minds.
The first set of internationalists comprised legalists
and quasi-pacifists who advocated a world organization to promote the cause of
disarmament and to arbitrate disputes between states in the international
system. Instead of assuming political and military leadership of world affairs
(as the term “internationalism” has come to signify in mainstream political
discourse today), this camp sought to keep American arms at home, or at least
strictly limited to the Western hemisphere. This soft internationalism was
intent on regulating national sovereignty by codifying legal codes to which all
states would be harmoniously bound.
A harder form of internationalism eventually
materialized that discarded many of these blithe assumptions. It articulated a
vision of superior power that would be marshalled to underwrite a decent world
order. Contrary to the Enlightenment faith that the expansion of material
progress inexorably brings moral progress in its wake, it held a grim view of
human nature and was skeptical about claims that history was a progressive
upward march toward right and reason. It believed that in order to prevent the
international realm from descending into chaos and conflict, a benign hegemon
must act as the world’s staunch friend and defender. This tragic sensibility
was paired with a certain idealism about the possibilities of a freer world
that might blossom under American auspices. In time, this realist-idealist
hybrid bred what the Bush administration called a “distinctly American
internationalism.” This international activism was, as Robert Kagan has
written, an “act of defiance against both history and human nature.” And only
the United States was—and is—fit for the purpose of carrying forth this
world-historical task.
For many years, the first brand of internationalists
ruled the roost in the making of U.S. foreign policy. “One world war did not
convince the country to join its president’s league for peace, let alone to vie
for supreme power in Europe and Asia,” Wertheim writes, and “not even ardent
interventionists of the day sought the latter.” This was a time when America
remained aloof from traditional considerations of the balance of power, and its
activism on the world stage was marked by the “people diplomacy” of free trade
and open congresses devoted to resolving disputes through the instrument of
world organization.
However, as Wertheim notes, “the aspiration to tame
power politics through the pacific settlement of disputes and the disarmament
of nations” eventually gave way under the pressures of history. By the time
imperial Japan had conquered Manchuria and was on course to subordinating much
of Southeast Asia, and Hitler rearmed and sent Germany’s armed forces crashing
into Poland and Western Europe, it was clear that moral suasion and soft
internationalism were a dead letter. Internationalism, if it was going to
matter, had to shoulder an unusual burden to assure the survival and success of
freedom in the world.
Wertheim lays particular emphasis on denouncing the
term “isolationism” as a red herring. He is certainly right that “isolation” is
a poor description for America’s position in the world, before and during its
status as the world’s predominant power. Isolationism, after all, is an odd way
to characterize a set of colonies that grew to subdue a continent and expel
foreign meddling in an entire hemisphere. The United States never practiced a
pure form of isolationism, and given Americans’ defining characteristics, was
never going to do so. But for this reason, it’s overwrought to suggest, as
Wertheim does, that America’s elite in the 1930s and 1940s embarked on “a
veritable reconceputalization of their nation’s world role.” In truth, the
pursuit of global supremacy was merely a logical extension of its long rise to
prestige and power, a subtle but significant shift to preserve and defend its
exceptional national identity and interests in a hostile world.
Wertheim laments the fact that in taking up the mantle
of global leadership, the United States abandoned its old wariness of
“permanent alliances.” He bemoans America’s permanent war footing, especially
Truman’s 1945 declaration that “we must relentlessly preserve our superiority
on land and sea and in the air.” For Wertheim, this marked the transformation
of internationalism from what was recognizably a mere pose to a defining
posture of American statecraft: “Once opposed to nationalism and defined by the
transcendence of power politics,” he writes, “internationalism came to denote
U.S. world leadership above all.”
Tomorrow, the World bristles with annoyance that American
presidents are no longer averse to playing the old “European” game of power
politics. But its author never pauses to consider that it was precisely such an
aversion that generated twin catastrophes in the form of world wars. Despite
his argument that Axis dominance of Europe and Asia presented no great threat
to “the United States proper,” such a constrained vision of the national
interest would not have been feasible if Americans or American principles were
to survive, much less thrive. The record of the first half of the 20th century
gives scant basis for confidence in the view that Europeans can keep the peace
without the forward engagement of the United States.
_____________
This book makes a compelling case that U.S. global
supremacy was the desired objective of much of the American elite, within
government and without, well before the nation’s entry into World War II. But
it offers little reason to doubt the moral and strategic soundness of that
judgment. Wertheim makes much of the fact that Americans understand their
global ascendance as having been “thrust” upon them rather than being
ambitiously chosen. These conditions are hardly mutually exclusive. Before
American primacy became an established fact, it must have been easy to imagine
a postwar order that would be an “order” in name only, vulnerable to the kind
of breakdown that had already been endured twice before in the century. This
sad history could not be repeated, and America’s special position and national
character not only equipped it to prevent such a repetition, but were the only
factors that could.
Professor Quincy Wright, a tireless advocate of
international organization in the first half of the 20th century and a hero of Tomorrow, the World, argued near the end
of his life that “the trouble with the American people” was in failing to grasp
the difference between imperialism and internationalism. In reality, this was
always a distinction without much difference. In a time of civilizational
collapse, the architects of the American order drew a very Roman lesson about
the nature of world order: Without supreme power and a readiness to use it, the
underlying order would perish at the first weighty challenge. Is this internationalism?
Imperialism? One could simply call it responsible statecraft.
Wertheim’s lingering faith in a soft internationalism
is evidence of the ascendant unrealism in elite American circles. He contends
that the internationalism of American primacy seeks to “project armed power far
and wide” rather than cooperate with foreign states to “end the scourge of
war.” In this way, Wertheim argues, “martial greatness now seemed the ultimate
proof of American greatness.” The argument would have dismayed those present at
the creation of the American order, who had fresh memories of the
Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war only a few years before the Nazis unleashed
their blitzkrieg. The suggestion that war could be prevented only by preparing
for peace was a proposition that had been manifestly tested and found wanting.
This unfortunate approach to the exigencies of power
is also revealed by a particular tic that crops up regularly in the book.
Seldom does Wertheim speak of American primacy and preeminence without a
qualifier: the armed superpower, armed primacy, armed dominance—as if temporal power was ever anything other than
what Thucydides said it was four centuries ago: an imposition by the strong on
the weak. What kind of dominance would it be if it was not armed? A short-lived
dominance, one suspects.
And yet, is the distinguishing characteristic of
American hegemony really its penchant for meting out violence? In a world where
the demand for order greatly exceeds the supply, American hegemony has been
broadly accepted by democratic allies who, in spite of criticizing American
“hyperpower,” have never instigated the kind of counterbalancing that has
felled empires past. This is not an accident. As a leading member of the
governing German Social Democratic Party explained in 2003, after the Iraq war:
“There are a lot of people who don’t like the American policeman, but they are
happy there is one.”
What is the problem, then, with dominance in the
service of high ideals? Wertheim does not quite say, but his assumption seems
to be that all power is inherently illegitimate if it is not evenly
distributed. This must give the book a certain appeal to utopians everywhere,
but it leaves it diminished in the minds of those who realize that nations,
even hegemonic ones, are run by human beings rather than angels or devils.
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