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CHAPTER ONEThe American Century
The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power
By DONALD W. WHITE
Yale University Press
The Frontiers At mid-twentieth century, when the second great world war ended, the United States enjoyed wealth and prosperity unknown in foreign lands and rose to a summit of power. The interests and influence of Americans extended far from home. Their commerce was carried by merchant ships and aircraft to distant cities. The dollar was the standard of international finance and the credits of American banks flowed everywhere. Food, clothing, movies, machines, and science made the American name known throughout the world. The people shared their fortune by distributing charitable aid abroad in quantities without precedent. As after earlier wars in their history, their citizen-soldiers were disbanded and sent home. Yet the government pledged to defend friendly states and kept units of its undefeated army in strategic outposts, sea power that patrolled the oceans, and an air force that guarded the sky. It was a time of general peace and faraway local conflicts; no third world war erupted. The United States kept an order favorable to its allies and demonstrated its art of trade and ways of culture and modern living to aged societies.
The frontiers of American interest that came to gird the world began with the first colonial settlements huddled along the Atlantic coast. At independence in 1783, the United States took possession of forest and lake lands westward to the Mississippi River. In 1803 it expanded across the Great Plains of the Louisiana Territory as far as the Rocky Mountains. In 1819 it gained the Florida peninsula. The flatlands of Texas were incorporated into the Union in 1846, as were the forests of Oregon. At the conclusion of the war with Mexico in 1848, the United States won the southwestern desert regions, the Rocky Mountains, and the western coastal slopes all the way to the Pacific Ocean, leaving only minor adjustments, such as the wedge-shaped Gadsden Purchase in the Southwest, to fill out its linear boundaries.
Through treaties, commitments, and unilateral declarations, the United States made allies with far-flung countries in areas where the interests of American trade, philanthropy, culture, and security were often greater than those of any other power, and the boundaries of some distant lands became the frontiers of these interests. These foreign affiliations first covered the Western Hemisphere. As early as 1823 President James Monroe proclaimed influence over both North and South America by opposing European control or meddling. Here the frontiers stood, for the most part, until around the end of the nineteenth century, when in a burst of expansive energy the United States consolidated its hemispheric interests by taking colonies in the West Indies: Puerto Rico, occupied by troops in the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in World War I. The Panama Canal Zone came under the jurisdiction of the United States in 1903. To the west the United States extended its possessions deep into the Pacific Ocean, from Alaska, owned since 1867, to the Hawaiian islands and the Philippines in 1898. To connect the American mainland with the Far East, the United States quickly gained as outposts the islands of Guam and Samoa.
At the turn of the century, the area Americans had committed themselves to defend covered the Western Hemisphere and far beyond: on the Atlantic side, from Greenland to Brazil to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America; and on the Pacific side, across the world's largest ocean from Alaska to the Philippines. This area of security, Walter Lippmann calculated in 1943, comprised nearly 40 percent of the land surface of the earth. There it remained until World War II.
The outer reach of American interest grew into distant zones once dominated by the empires of the Old World. The frontiers were never precisely defined, though they could be seen in the country's overseas wars and the visible remnants of its military bases, airstrips, and patrol roads. Other evidence of the frontiers was invisible: trade, cultural diffusion, and diplomatic commitments. After World War I, American interest in Britain, France, and Germany dwelled more on the export of products and investment than on political order or military force. Early in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt denied reports that he had said the American frontier ran along the Rhine River. But he made no secret of his belief that American interests lay along the German border, for he feared that if the lands adjacent to the Rhine, which flowed through the industrial heart of Western Europe, came under the domination of a hostile totalitarian power, American trade and security would be weakened. The Western Hemisphere would be a besieged island.
After victory in the European war, the United States quickly established occupation bases in Germany, and its frontier of interest penetrated deep into Europe. In March 1946, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, accompanied by President Harry Truman, delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, that defined the new area within which the United States was obliged to assert its power. This area came up against regions held by Soviet Russia, which had brought down a communist "iron curtain" running from the Baltic Sea across the Eurasian plain to the Adriatic.
A year later Truman in effect extended this frontier of interest from the Adriatic across the Balkan peninsula, beyond the straits of the Dardanelles linking Europe with Asia, nearly to the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. American financial grants supported the borderlands of Greece and Turkey, and credits and aid flowed throughout Western Europe, even to the British Empire, so recently the major world power. In the Atlantic, where Europeans had once dominated exploration and trade, the American merchant marine and navy had become triumphant.
In the Pacific, a defensive perimeter drawn up in January 1950 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson established a line of security running from near the tip of Alaska, southwest along the Aleutian Islands, across the sea to the islands of Japan, along the chain of the Ryukyu Islands, the largest of which was Okinawa, to the Philippines. The commitments to the East were at first not so strong, nor so well defined, as those to Europe. As an ally in the war against Japan, China had received American backing until its 1949 revolution made it a communist cohort of the Soviet Union. China then fell from favor, while the former enemy, Japan, under occupation for years by the American army, became a friend. Taiwan was not included behind this original perimeter, and it was uncertain for a time whether the lower part of Korea, south of China, was behind the line or a no-man's-land. But within the year of Acheson's expansion of the frontiers of American protection, the line fell across Korea, and American forces rushed to defend a front in the south against communist Koreans invading from the north. Far to the south lay the island continent of Australia, which, despite its distance, maintained close ties with America.
These frontiers of influence were strengthened with the formation of a military alliance system in Western Europe in 1949 and in eastern Asia in the early 1950s. But the frontiers on opposite sides of the world did not yet connect. To complete the circle, the United States gained allies in the 1950s among the nations of southern Asia, where political frontiers or perimeters were intermittently broken or lacked firmness. The line of influence extended through Southeast Asia, including South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It continued along the northern boundaries of divided Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, though India and Burma declared neutrality after gaining independence from Great Britain. The frontier was buttressed by rugged natural barriers that ran the length of the Himalaya range from the Khyber Pass, past the gates of India, to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, around the great deserts above the Persian Gulf, to, once again, the Caucasus, the Dardanelles, and Europe.
Such was the state of the frontiers of American interest as they developed from World War II into the 1950s. They were not the borders of an empire that held territory under a single sovereign authority. The United States was a republic and its principal means of establishing influence were aid, commerce, and diplomacy, though it came to offer protection against belligerents. It assumed the role of a primary power for which no other could substitute. Along the frontiers of this defensive area, the Americans confronted a revolutionary and mighty adversary, the Russians, and their massive nation with adjacent satellites.
To the allied states along this frontier, the promise of American aid and defense reached, and from those lands this influence was never to retreat under coercion of aggressors. On the European frontier the American pledge had no foreseeable end: "continuous," declared the treaty that united under American protection the Western European empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark. In the Pacific, to the Philippines, and later to Australia and New Zealand, the American commitments would remain in force "indefinitely." As for Japan, no change in its deference to the United States for its defense or to America's exclusive right to bases could take place without American consultation. In Southeast Asia, too, the Americans promised not to yield, and again the term "indefinitely" applied. American treaties were open to review by sovereign nations, but those commitments implied, no less than respect for the sovereignty of the allies, that the Americans intended never to surrender a foot of territory to aggressor nations. The Americans had never lost a war; the United States would not retreat. Where the strategic frontier lay at its farthest extent, in Southeast Asia, President Dwight Eisenhower compared the borderland to "a leaky dike, and with leaky dikes it's sometimes better to put a finger in than to let the whole structure be washed away."
It is these dimensions of space and time that provide a context in which the trade, cultural exchange, and battles fought in defense of American influence took place. Let us now continue not by reciting these events but rather by seeking to explain how and why a seaboard nation swelled into a world state. What are the origins of America's world role?
The Problem of the Rise to World Power Americans at midcentury dealt with the glories and problems of power as the people of every preceding age had done, but their global power was distinguished by its magnitude. As World War II was drawing to a close, in late 1944 President Roosevelt reflected, "At the end of this war this country will have the greatest material power of any Nation in the world. It will be a clean, shining America." He attributed America's rise to an expanding economy of peaceful production, richer than any other in skilled workers, and advanced in engineering, farming, business, and technological knowhow.
Government officials envisioned the same exceptional rise to power. Explanations of it varied, however. Harry Hopkins, an intimate adviser to the president, agreed. "We will emerge from this war the richest and most powerful people in the world." The United States alone, of all the great powers, would possess lands unscarred, a people well nourished, and a breadbasket filled to overflowing. "We will have the largest navy and merchant fleet on the seven seas, more airplanes than any other nation. Already a technological people before the war, we will find ourselves, as the result of our work in munitions factories, with the largest army of skilled workers in history. Our industrial production capacity, vaster than the combined capacity of our Allies, will be sufficient, once converted to the uses of peace, to fill consumer needs at home and, at the same time, to supply ... heavy goods ... for rehabilitation abroad. Our raw materials and natural resources ... will be sufficient, with wise stewardship, to last for generations. But, above all, we will emerge with our democratic institutions intact, a people free to shape our destiny as we see fit."
Soon after succeeding to the presidency, Truman made an even more ambitious claim for America's rise. "We tell ourselves that we have emerged from this war," he remarked in a radio address in August 1945, "the most powerful nation in the world--the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history. That is true, but not in the sense some of us believe it to be true." The war had shown Truman that the United States had tremendous material resources, skilled workers, managers, able generals, and a brave people capable of bearing arms. "The new thing--the thing which we had not known--the thing we have learned now and should never forget, is this: that a society of self-governing men is more powerful, more enduring, more creative than any other kind of society, however disciplined, however centralized."
Campaigning for the presidency in his own right in 1948, Truman barnstormed the country to convey to citizens the world-changing importance of their power. He hammered away at this theme from the back platform of the presidential train and in big-city convention halls and stadiums:
Salem, Oregon, June 11: "This is the greatest Nation on earth, I think. The greatest Nation in history, let's put it that way. We have done things that no other nation in the history of the world has done."
Trenton, Missouri, September 18: "this country will continue for another thousand years as the greatest country in the world."
Dayton, Ohio, October 11: "Now, this great Republic--the greatest in history, the greatest that the sun has ever shone upon--is charged with leadership in the world for the welfare of the whole world as well as our own welfare."
Not only political leaders but also editors, columnists, and writers proclaimed America's extraordinary rise. In early 1941 Henry Luce had decided to throw the weight of his publishing empire behind an effort to explain the emergence of the United States as a dominant power. Neil MacNeil, an editor of the New York Times, stating in 1944 that for a time "the United States must remain the most powerful of world powers," listed American assets in a particular order: the "most powerful navy that has ever sailed the five oceans"; the "biggest and hardest hitting air force that the world has ever known"; the greatest national industrial output on earth; the largest merchant marine at sea; the largest number of transport and commercial airplanes in the sky; an agricultural plant capable of feeding Americans and contributing more than any other to feeding hungry peoples; the "greatest national production of steel, petroleum, cotton and other vital products"; a domain located in the Western Hemisphere; and vast holdings of monetary gold and silver. Writing in Reader's Digest, Harry Scherman, a popular journalist, called America simply "the most powerful nation in history."
Government policy analysts examined in secret the status of national power. Following a request in 1948 by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal for a study of "the proportion of our resources which should be devoted to military purposes," the National Security Council produced a series of reports. The most comprehensive consideration of America's possession of "superior overall power," the document numbered NSC 68, which Truman approved in 1950, cited as vital components "a unique degree of unity" in society, "the capability of the American economy," and "military strength," including atomic armaments. The NSC subsequently sent a report to President Eisenhower, advising again that the American position as the "leader of the free world" was sustained by a "strong military posture," a "sound, strong and growing economy," and a high "morale and free institutions," to which were added "sufficient atomic weapons and effective means of delivery." The implication of the national security papers, even those of different administrations, was that to maintain superiority over the Soviet Union, the United States had to develop its assets to their maximum potential.
These ideas were not entirely new. Leaders had been assessing America's rise in the world from the beginning of the Republic. In 1780 John Adams told the French foreign minister, comte de Vergennes, that the "United States of America are a great and powerful people, whatever European statesmen may think of them." The country, Adams asserted, had unbounded possibilities for the future because of its enormous territorial expanse, embracing rich soil, mild climate, and incalculably plentiful natural resources, and because of the American people, rapidly expanding in numbers, and their production of agricultural goods for trade abroad.
Yet only in the late nineteenth century did the nation become widely recognized as a world power. William McKinley was the first modern president to claim that American power was the greatest in the world. In 1892, before assuming office, he quoted from an article written fourteen years earlier by the British statesman William Gladstone in the North American Review. England and America, Gladstone said, were then "the two strongest nations in the world, but there can hardly be a doubt as between the America and the England of the future that the daughter, at some no very distant time, whether fairer or less fair, will be unquestionably yet stronger than the mother." To McKinley that "no very distant time" suddenly arrived in the early 1890s. "America," he said, "`whether fairer or less fair'--certainly freer--is now `stronger than the mother.'" America had become the strongest nation in the world because "her power lies in a free and intelligent and progressive people," as well as in a strong, expanding economy and in social well-being. The Spanish-American War, a quick triumph resulting in the acquisition of an overseas empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, dramatically confirmed for McKinley America's rise to world-power status.
Victory in World War I revealed the enormous strength and potential of the industrialized continental nation. At the close of the conflict, President Woodrow Wilson stated that the United States was "a nation as powerful as any in the world," yet it alone had achieved "the primacy of the world." If America joined the League of Nations, Wilson declared, the country would be "partners" with the other powers. But, he added, "let me predict we will be the senior partner. The financial leadership will be ours. The industrial primacy will be ours. The commercial advantage will be ours. The other countries of the world are looking to us for leadership and direction." Through the "growth of our power," Wilson said, "we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind." Industry and capital continued to grow through the 1920s, and so did the nation's economic prowess. Advances in education, science, invention, efficiency, and production were among the factors that led Herbert Hoover to claim that America had attained a "position of transcendent power."
The attributes contemporaries accorded to this progress in each period were largely unanalyzed. They made lists of divergent factors--material and psychological, human and technological, peaceful and military--but these lists did not adequately distinguish one item from another. Enumerations did not indicate what was a significant development and what was not. We seek some structure of thought and analysis in an effort to understand why the United States became capable of exercising world influence.
The Analysis of Power An extensive attempt to comprehend the rise and decline of nations came in a new school in international politics that emerged around the theory of power politics. Under the impetus of world war, political scientists and strategists developed this theory in the 1930s and made it popular in the 1940s, believing that it was the only realistic way to see the world; hence their common name, "realists." They were direct about pursuing the national interest: a nation that abandoned self-preservation as the chief motive of its policy risked its very survival.
One of the ablest of the early realists was Nicholas John Spykman, a political scientist at Yale, who stressed in 1942 that all civilized life rested "in the last instance on power." Without power, he believed, no social progress was possible. Mechanical power--the ability to move mass--was the product of technology, and political power--the ability to move people--put technology at the service of society.
Spykman was baffled as to why power had a "bad name." He argued that Americans were wrong to condemn power as connoting evil, because power was only a means to an end. Sometimes the end was worthy, and in any case people were pursuing power with whole-hearted devotion. In ladies' sewing circles, he gathered, no less than in struggles between nations, power was a fact of life. A sound and practical foreign policy, Spykman stressed, should be designed "in terms of the realities of international relations, in terms of power politics." Already supposed to be in possession of unquestioned hegemony over a large part of the New World, the United States, Spykman predicted, should be expected in the post-World War II era to exercise its power in all parts of the world in pursuit of its interests.
A year before the close of the war, William T. R. Fox, a research associate at the Yale Institute of International Studies, gave currency to the idea of a new status to which squirrels and elephants. He was quick to explain that the Soviet Union and the Dominican Republic were not both elephants, nor were they both squirrels; and he wanted to make clear that "we are not fighting to make them both squirrels." For Fox, the elephants mattered most in keeping the postwar peace. Differences in power would continue to exist among nations, he said, and the problems of the world would not be solved by endeavors to create a world of "no-power politics." Fox, like Spykman, insisted that power itself was ethically neutral. He urged Americans to recognize that power was a basic feature of political life and that it made "the most enormous difference in whose hands predominant power rests." After the war, he predicted, the United States would be rated as greater than a regional power restricted to a single area. As a superpower, it would have interests and influence from the East to the West. "'Great power plus great mobility of power' describes the super-power," he claimed.
The political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau did more than any other figure to establish the realist interpretation of international affairs. In 1948 he published his classic treatise Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, which argued that struggle for power was the essence of international affairs. Born in Germany in 1904, Morgenthau fled to Switzerland to escape Hitler and in 1937 emigrated to the United States, where he found the study of international affairs disorganized. While teaching at Brooklyn College, later at the University of Kansas and, beginning in 1943--the year he became a citizen--at the University of Chicago, he criticized the writing in his field by historians and international lawyers as overly legalistic and idealistic. Morgenthau brought from the Old World a pessimism about man's nature and the state of the world, while his scholarly work led him to believe that objective truths about politics could be discovered by human reason. His wealth of knowledge enabled him to lecture to his classes on world politics without a text; one of his students took a stenographic transcript of what he said, which became the draft of his book.
Morgenthau directly related his power theories to the observation that "the United States is at the moment of this writing the most powerful nation on earth." He was intrigued with the problems and rivalries this power created. "International politics," he wrote, "like all politics, is a struggle for power." Power was more than brutal force, it was the central aim of national interest. He proposed that the pursuit of power was the source of state behavior. No matter what the ultimate aims of nations, whether freedom, security, or prosperity, their immediate goal was power. Power was the means to national ends. Political power meant "man's control over the minds and actions of other men." It followed that power was also "a psychological relationship between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised," enabling some people to control the actions of others through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of these. Since he had traced the struggle for power back through history, he believed the contest for power must be ever-present.
Morgenthau, impatient with moral sentiment or wishful idealism, believed that the pursuit of power was not necessarily immoral. "To act successfully," he wrote in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics in 1946," ... is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny."
The chief opponents of the realists were the humanitarian moralists who saw the world from a different, ethical perspective. Of a longstanding tradition in the nineteenth century, the moralists included philosophers and writers who attributed America's rising world influence not to external force but to the internal example of a society. They opposed the power politics and imperialism of Europe. One of the early, clearsighted moralists was Albert Gallatin, who wrote "The Mission of the United States" at the time of the Mexican War. "Your mission was, to be a model for all other governments" and "to apply all your faculties to the gradual improvement of your own institutions" and, "by your example, to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large. Instead of this, an appeal has been made to your worst passions; to cupidity, to the thirst of unjust aggrandizement by brutal force; to the love of military fame and of false glory." Aware that the world powers of the past had been empires and monarchies, the moralists argued that the United States should not act imperially in emulation of them but rather show the way to reform by exhibiting the success of its democratic society. Morgenthau pointed to John C. Calhoun and William Graham Sumner as worthy representatives of this world perspective, the latter writing during the Spanish-American War that "expansionism and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people."
The realists responded that in the past the moralists could afford to advocate that their nation be small and inconsequential but virtuous. After all, they had lived on a continent insulated from the outside. But their legacy threatened to damage the national interest, which required growing world involvement. Even when leaders made decisions for "realistic" actions, the realists contended, they had been perverted by irrelevant moralistic justifications. A case in point was President McKinley's defense of colonizing the Philippines: after prayer in the wee hours of the morning, he revealed, he had heard the voice of God tell him to annex the islands.
Of all the spokesmen of the moralistic point of view, Woodrow Wilson was the most eloquent and his thought the most far-reaching. His conviction, well founded in nineteenth-century liberal thought and the ethical standards of Christian and Calvinistic theology, was that democracy and constitutional government would temper the maneuvers of the big powers. "It is a very perilous thing," he said in an address in Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913, "to determine the foreign policy of a nation in the terms of material interest. It not only is unfair to those with whom you are dealing, but it is degrading as regards your own actions.... We dare not turn from the principle that morality and not expediency is the thing that must guide us."
The realists countered that however much Wilson had wanted to "make the world safe for democracy," he had relied on the American army to achieve his ends. Wilson had fully recognized the historical implications of America's economic rise. But he wanted to help shape the peace at Versailles on the moral principles of democracy. After his return in 1919, he declared in Los Angeles: "The day we have left behind us ... was a day of balances of power. It was a day of `every nation take care of itself or make a partnership with some other nation or group of nations to hold the peace of the world steady or to dominate the weaker portions of the world.' Those were the days of alliances. This project of the League of Nations is a great process of disentanglement." The league was supposed to be a democratic organization of the world's nations, America's contribution to a general world order.
Congress, however, rejected the Treaty of Versailles. When Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a series of reservations restricting the league's jurisdiction, Wilson, fearing the destruction of the democratic intent of the league, refused to accept them. In the end, the moral example of democratic aspiration in isolation at home failed to reconcile foreign nationalistic demands voiced around the world. The league, which had no other power than that of its member states, was helpless to prevent Japanese expansion in Manchuria and China, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, and Hitler's repudiation of the Versailles settlement.
These crises threw American thought about the world in turmoil, and World War II gave impetus to the intellectual tradition of the realists. After the war Morgenthau's Politics among Nations became probably the most influential textbook of its time, read by specialists and students for the framework it offered in the field of world affairs. By mid-century the preoccupation with power politics and the struggle for political and military power had largely replaced the economic doctrines that Lenin and Charles Beard had expounded as the basis of world affairs in earlier days.
Realism entered the plane of government and diplomacy. Influential among the realists who applied theory to policy was George Kennan, a student of history, diplomat, policy analyst, and expert on Soviet affairs. Kennan believed that the most serious fault of American policy was what he called the "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems." That approach he labeled idealistic, for it projected the common concepts of American law and politics into international relations--as in the Hague conferences on disarmament, the Kellogg Pact to make war illegal, and the League of Nations. Remarkably, Kennan asserted that realism would free foreign affairs from concepts of right and wrong, and correct the "assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment.... It is a curious thing, but it is true, that the legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted as it unquestionably is in a desire to do away with war and violence, makes violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest." Kennan pleaded in the early 1950s for the realism of power politics--or, as he wrote, for whatever "is realistic in concept, and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are." In his cabled dispatches from Moscow to the State Department, Kennan urged--as strongly as in his later writings, including Realities of American Foreign Policy--that relations with Russia be placed entirely on a "realistic and matter-of-fact basis," guided not by morality or altruism, but by the strengths and weaknesses of nations.
The nation's rise in the world, from the perspective of the realists, rested on power and its elements, which included geography, natural resources, population, industrial development, military ability, and national morale. The balance of power enabled the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pursue interests in remote regions of the earth through trade, cultural activity, and war. Opposed as it was to moralism, realism nevertheless reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as force and influence. Realism was a way of looking at the world, comprehended as power politics. For our purposes, power is defined as the qualities or properties that make possible the national exertion of influence or force in the world. Power, in this sense, means essentially capability rather than actual force or influence, though we may find that the ways influence was exerted might indeed eventually enhance or weaken the power that supported it.
Our attempt to understand the origins of America's world role turns now to the themes of the elements and balance of power. We will first examine the various reasons for the balance of power that contemporaries set forth according to their rational beliefs about the world. Our work, as the study progresses, is to analyze these explanations and to weigh them for significance against the world with which contemporaries dealt.
(C) 1996 Donald W. White All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-300-05721-0
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