Colossus (15 page)

“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people,” Herman Melville wrote in
White Jacket
, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world.”
¹³⁹
In the course of the twentieth century American leaders were to resort ever more frequently to such biblical language in their efforts to dignify, if not to sanctify, U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, they were following the example of earlier empire builders, not least McKinley. The extension of American values, both economic and political, beyond the frontiers of the United States seemed as much a matter of “manifest destiny” as the expansion of the frontier itself. Yet there was a chronic problem of execution. The farther into the tropics the United States sought to reach, the weaker its grip proved to be. The “empire of liberty” plainly had much to offer places like Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico, to say nothing of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But the will to make them permanent components of a greater American Republic turned out to be lacking; Hawaii and Puerto Rico alone were retained, not least because they were the most docile of the candidates for colonial status. The rest were offered a combination of sermons about political and fiscal rectitude and occasional military raids. The discrepancy between high-minded ends and means—“shoot[ing] men… till they learn to vote and to rule themselves”—was perfectly encapsulated in Mexico. The antics of General Pershing, as he galloped around Mexico in an obsessive pursuit of Pancho Villa, resembled nothing more than a burlesque of Melville’s
Moby Dick
—without the final, climactic confrontation.

Perhaps Pershing was right. Given another expedition, he might, like Ahab, have finally caught up with his “loose fish.” But it was not to be. On May 28, 1917, the general sailed for Europe as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, with instructions to harpoon a bigger fish. The United States had struggled to make good its claim to hemispheric hegemony. The paradox is that its imperial grip proved more firm when it was confronted with the bigger challenge of global power.

Chapter 2

The Imperialism of Anti-Imperialism

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses[,] took off backwards from an airfield in England….

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. …

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.

KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse 5
¹

America’s primary weapons … are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise. They want to subjugate the world, yet they cannot subdue little Korea.

JOSEF STALIN
²

WORLD WAR

It might be said that two calamitous events helped turn the United States from hesitant dominance of the Americas to what has sometimes been called globalism.
³
The first was the sinking of the Cunard liner
Lusitania
by the German submarine
U-20
on May 7, 1915, off the Old Head of Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 people lost their lives; among the drowned were 128 American passengers.
⁴
The second was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which sank or wrecked three cruisers, three destroyers and eight battleships and killed
2,403 Americans, most of them sailors. It was these two acts of maritime aggression that forced Americans to answer what has been called the oldest question in American foreign policy: whether to safeguard American security “by defense on this side of the water or by active participation in the lands across the oceans.”
⁵
The analogy with a later calamity, that of September 11, 2001, scarcely needs to be pointed out.

In reality, of course, “active participation in the lands across the oceans” had been going on almost from the moment of the Republic’s inception and was already far advanced long before 1915, to say nothing of 1941. Why did any Americans want to sail to Europe in the middle of a war and with a well-known risk of submarine attack? They certainly were not all tourists. As for Pearl Harbor, what more tangible evidence could be found for their country’s earlier transoceanic activism than a fifty-year-old naval base two thousand miles from the American mainland? In any case, it was not the sinking of the
Lusitania
that brought the United States into the First World War—or even the Germans’ final, desperate resort to unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917—but the exposure of a spectacularly clumsy attempt by the German Foreign Ministry to enlist both Japan and Mexico on the side of the Central Powers in the event of an American decision for war. The inducement the Germans offered President Carranza was “an understanding… that Mexico is to re-conquer the lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”
⁶

The issue for the United States was no longer a choice between globalism and isolation, whatever that might mean in practice; the decision for world power had already been taken long before the world wars. The real issue, as Walter Lippmann astutely observed in an article for the
New York World
in 1926, was simply one of self-knowledge: “We continue to think of ourselves as a kind of great, peaceful Switzerland, whereas we are in fact a great, expanding world power…. Our imperialism is more or less unconscious”
⁷
There is nothing new, as Lippmann’s observation indicates, about the idea that the United States is an “empire in denial.” The extraordinary thing is that it was able to remain in denial even after some twenty years of global conflict. As the German economist Moritz Julius Bonn put it perceptively, “The United States have been the cradle of modern Anti-Imperialism, and at the same time the founding of a mighty Empire.”
⁸
He wrote those words two years after the end of the
Second
World War.

The defining characteristic of American foreign policy in the three decades prior to 1947 was the insistence of successive presidents that the United States could somehow be a great power without behaving like any previous great power. German miscalculation presented Woodrow Wilson with an opportunity to do so, an opportunity not unlike that which presented itself to the Younger Pitt’s successors in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars. With the European powers exhausted by years of slaughter, it was possible for an American expeditionary force to decide the outcome of a global struggle, much as Wellington’s army had struck the mortal blow against Bonaparte in 1814–15.
⁹
Yet Wilson could not be content with the traditional fruits of victory: imposing reparations, new borders and even a new regime on the losing side. Stung, perhaps, by the charges that the United States had intervened only “at the command of gold”
¹⁰
—to underwrite Wall Street’s loans to Britain and France—his overwrought mind craved nothing less than a reconstruction of the entire international system. As early as December 1914 he had proposed that any peace settlement “should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien people.”
¹¹
The following May he informed the members of the League to Enforce Peace that “every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.”
¹²
“Every people,” he declared categorically in January 1917, “should be left free to determine its own polity,”
¹³
spelling out a year later what that would mean in practice in points five to thirteen of his famous Fourteen Points.
¹⁴
As envisaged by Wilson, the new “League of Nations” would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but might consider making future territorial adjustments “pursuant to the principle of self-determination.”
¹⁵
To Europeans this might seem revolutionary; to Americans, Wilson insisted, it was as self-evident as the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no other. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”
¹⁶

There were three difficulties with all this. The first was that it was richly hypocritical. In 1916 Wilson had drafted a speech that included the
characteristically sententious line “It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be….” His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wrote succinctly in the margin: “Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.”
¹⁷
The second problem, which a better knowledge of Central Europe’s ethnic geography might have helped him avoid, was that the application of self-determination would produce a significantly enlarged German Reich, an outcome unlikely to be congenial to those powers that had fought Germany for three years without American military assistance. But the fatal flaw of the Wilsonian design was that it simply could not be sold to a skeptical Senate. There was a vast gulf between the bold assertion of the Roosevelt Corollary, which simply authorized the United States to do what it liked in Latin America, and the airy commitments of the League Covenant, which would have obliged the United States to “respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing independence of all Members of the League.” When Henry Cabot Lodge proposed to make ratification of the peace treaty conditional on certain “reservations”—reservations that the British and French were prepared to live with—Wilson refused to compromise. He instructed Democratic senators to vote against any such qualified version of the treaty, pinning his hopes on the presidential election that a stroke then prevented him from fighting.

The Europeans wanted the Americans to bind themselves to the new postwar order. The Americans preferred to retain their freedom of action. So insuperable did this division of opinion appear in the 1920s that a further question needs to be addressed. Why was it possible after 1945 to overcome it? What changed between Wilson and Truman? Two answers suggest themselves. One is obvious. In the aftermath of the First World War the United States was comparatively sanguine about the threat posed by the Bolshevik regime that had established itself in Russia after the October 1917 Revolution. Although the United States, along with Britain, committed troops to support the White side in the civil war that ensued, it was a halfhearted effort—surprisingly so in the American case, since the greater part of the immense army assembled to fight the Germans had arrived in Europe too late to see action. The United States was not war-weary, as the Europeans were. It merely underestimated the monster that had been born in Moscow. In February 1919 Wilson’s adviser Colonel Ed-
ward M. House sent William C. Bullitt to Russia, ostensibly to report on “conditions political and economic therein,” in fact to sound out peace terms with Lenin’s government. Bullitt (a youthful champagne socialist) saw what he wanted to see; after their three-week junket he and the journalist who accompanied him concluded that they had seen the future and “it works!” True, the economy was in dire straits, but this was a temporary inconvenience, like the “red terror,” which (so Bullitt confidently reported) was in any case already “over” Wilson did not need much persuading. Even before Bullitt left for Moscow, he had concluded that American troops were doing “no sort of good in Russia.”
¹⁸
American attitudes were very different in the 1940s.

The second change related to the American economy. The stimulus of the First World War to U.S. growth was substantially less than the stimulus of the Second. As figure 1 shows, the Second World War had in every respect a bigger impact. The years before the war were dominated by the most severe and persistent depression in American history, the war more than doubled gross national product in real terms and the end of the war led to a severe slump. By contrast, economic performance before, during and after the First World War was subject to markedly less severe fluctuations. The recession of 1907–09 was minor compared with what happened in the 1930s, American entry into the First World War had a relatively muted impact on output and although there was a sharp downturn in 1921–22, the recession of 1946–48 was in fact more severe. Nor is it without significance that the recovery in the latter case was in large measure due to rearmament, which did not play a major role in the 1920s boom.

THE IMPERIALISM OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM

Imperial denial manifested itself time and again in the 1940s. Even before the United States entered the war, Henry Luce, the proprietor of
Time
and
Life
magazines, had urged Americans “to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power, which is authentically American…. America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skilled servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than
to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice—out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the Twentieth Century… the first great American Century.”
¹⁹
The contrast between these grandiloquent injunctions and the panic-stricken reactions when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor could not have been more complete.
²⁰
In the words of one reporter, “No American who lived through that Sunday will ever forget it. It seared deeply into the national consciousness, shearing away illusions that had been fostered for generations. And with the first shock came a sort of panic. This struck at our deepest pride. It tore at the myth of our invulnerability. Striking at the precious legend of our might, it seemed to leave us naked and defenseless.”
²¹
Writing in the
Washington Post
, Lippmann spoke of Americans as an “awakened people.” Yet even as the roused giant struck back, growing ever more assured of its share in an Allied victory after the battle of Midway, there remained a reluctance to acknowledge the irrevocable nature of the global commitment.