American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Perry Anderson

mean, for ambitious contemporaries, the coming of a power commensurate with them. As the Civil War felled half a million of his countrymen, Whitman exulted that ‘we have undoubtedly in the United States the greatest military power in the world’.⁷ Yet after Reconstruction, the peacetime strength of the army remained modest by international standards. The navy—marines dispatched for regular interventions in the Caribbean and Central America—had more future. Symptomatically, the entrance of the United States into the intellectual arena of Weltpolitik came with the impact of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History, closely studied in Berlin, London, Paris and Tokyo, and a touchstone for both Roosevelts, which argued that ‘everything that moves on water’—as opposed to land—possessed ‘the prerogative of offensive defence’.⁸ A decade later, Brooks Adams laid out the global logic of US industrial preeminence in America’s Economic Supremacy. In 1900, he wrote, ‘For the first time in human experience a single nation this year leads in the production of the precious metals, copper, iron and coal; and this year also, for the first time, the world has done its banking to the west and not to the east of the Atlantic.’ In the struggle for life among nations, empire was ‘the most dazzling prize for which any people can contend’. Provided the American state acquired the necessary organizational form, the US could in future surpass the imperial wealth and power of England and Rome.⁹ But when war broke out in 1914, there was still a wide gap between such premonitions and any consensus that America should involve itself in the quarrels of Europe.

      II

With the arrival of Woodrow Wilson in the White House, however, a convulsive turn in the trajectory of American foreign policy was at hand. As no other president before or after him, Wilson gave voice to every chord of presumption in the imperial repertoire, at messianic pitch. Religion, capitalism, democracy, peace and the might of the United States were one. ‘Lift your eyes to the horizons of business’, he told American salesmen, ‘and with the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.’¹⁰ In a campaign address of 1912, he declared: ‘If I did not believe in Providence I would feel like a man going blindfolded through a haphazard world. I do believe in Providence. I believe that God presided over the inception of this nation. I believe he planted in us the visions of liberty.’ A ‘divine destiny’ was furthermore in store for America: ‘We are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty’.¹¹ The route might be arduous, but the bourne was clear. ‘Slowly ascending the tedious climb that leads to the final uplands, we shall get our ultimate view of the duties of mankind. We have breasted a considerable part of that climb and shall presently, it may be in a generation or two, come out upon those great heights where there shines unobstructed the light of the justice of God’.¹² After sending US troops into more Caribbean and Central American states than any of his predecessors—Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua—in 1917 Wilson plunged the country into the First World War, a conflict in which America had ‘the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world’.¹³

If US entry into the war made victory for the Entente a foregone conclusion, imposing an American peace proved more difficult. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a hurried attempt to counter Lenin’s denunciation of secret treaties and imperialist rule, were distinguished mainly by their call for a global Open Door—‘the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers’—and ‘impartial adjustment’, not abolition, of ‘all colonial claims’. Contrary to legend, self-determination appears nowhere in the enumeration. Wilson’s bulletins of democratic deliverance were treated with disdain by his partners at Versailles. At home, the League he proposed to avert future conflicts fared no better. ‘The stage is set, the destiny disclosed’, he announced, presenting his arrangements for perpetual peace in 1919, ‘the hand of God has led us into this way’.¹⁴ The Senate was unmoved. America could dispense with Wilson’s ambitions. The country was not ready for an indefinite extension of regenerative intervention into the affairs of the world at large. Under the next three presidents, the United States concentrated on recovering its loans to Europe, otherwise limiting its operations outside the hemisphere to ineffectual attempts to get Germany back onto its feet and restrain Japan from overdoing expansion into China. To many, capsizal to the pole of separation—in the vocabulary of its opponents, ‘isolationism’—seemed all but complete.

      The reality was that American entry into the First World War had answered to no determinable national interest. A gratuitous decision by its president, enforced with sweeping ethnic persecution and political repression at home, it was the product of a massive excess of US power over any material goals procurable by it. The rhetoric of American expansionism had typically projected markets overseas as if they were an external frontier, with the claim that US goods and investments now required outlets abroad that only an Open Door could assure. Yet the American economy, with its abundant natural resources and vast internal market, continued to be largely autarkic. Foreign trade accounted for no more than 10 per cent of GNP down to the First World War, when most American exports still consisted of raw materials and processed foodstuffs. Nor, of course, was there any Open Door to the US market itself, traditionally protected by high tariffs with scant regard for the principles of free trade. Still less was there the remotest threat of attack or invasion from Europe. It was this disjuncture between ideology and reality that brought Wilson’s millenarian globalism to an abrupt end. The United States could afford to dictate the military outcome of war in Europe. But if the cost of its intervention was small, the gain was nil. Neither at popular nor at elite level was any pressing need felt for institutional follow-through. America could look after itself, without worrying unduly about Europe. Under the banner of a return to normalcy, in 1920 Harding buried his Democratic opponent in the largest electoral landslide of modern times.

      But within a decade, the arrival of the Depression was a signal that the pre-history of the American empire was approaching its end. If the initial Wall Street crash of 1929 was the bursting of an endogenous credit bubble, the fuse of the bank failures that burnt the US economy into the real slump was lit by the collapse of the Creditanstalt in Austria in 1931, and its knock-on effects across Europe. The crisis brought home that, however relatively insulated American factories—farms less so—might still be from world trade, American deposits were not from international financial markets, in a signal that with the passing of London’s role as pivot of the system, and the default of New York as successor, the order of capital as a whole was at risk in the absence of a stabilizing centre. The immediate concerns of Roosevelt’s first term lay in domestic measures to overcome the crisis, prompting unceremonious abandonment of the gold standard and brusque rejection of any coordinated international attempt to manage exchange rates. But by previous standards the New Deal was not protectionist. The Smoot–Hawley Act was dismantled, tariffs selectively lowered, and an impassioned champion of free trade—to American specifications—put in charge of foreign policy: Cordell Hull, the ‘Tennessee Cobden’, becoming the longest-serving secretary of state in US history.

      Towards the end of Roosevelt’s second term, as war raged in East Asia and threatened in Europe, rearmament started to make good the weaknesses (highlighted by the recession in 1937) of domestic recovery, giving the New Deal a second wind. The internal fortunes of the American economy and external postures of the American state were henceforward joined as they had never been before. But though the White House was increasingly on the qui vive to developments abroad, and military readiness stepped up, public opinion remained averse to any prospect of a rerun of 1917–1920, and within