Worldmaking (95 page)

In
The Idea of National Interest
and
The Open Door at Home
, Beard pitched self-reliance and Europe avoidance to President Roosevelt. In recommending a move toward autarky, Beard's training in political science instilled confidence in the efficacy of this method; he had run a statistical analysis that confirmed the dispensability of export markets and the feasibility of turning inward. “[A] thousand experiences of political life,” Beard observed in 1908, “bear witness that a treatise on causation in politics would be the most welcome contribution which a scholar of scientific training and temper could make.”
11
His theory was born of the best intentions regarding America's capacity for perfectibility. Beard made a strong argument that the short-term economic costs of isolation—he calculated that foreign trade accounted for just 10 percent of American economic output—would reap a much larger peace dividend.
12
Yet the rest of the world's ability to encroach upon American seclusion was a variable that his proposal failed to anticipate—Beard's imagination ultimately failed him. President Franklin Roosevelt was wise to reject American continentalism and chart a course of preparedness that drew on the appropriate Mahanian lessons from the past.

Elements of Beard's vision endure. The historian Walter McDougall is correct to observe that the “vaunted tradition of ‘isolationism' is no tradition at all, but a dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies.”
13
But as the impetus for Wilsonian democracy promotion has dissipated in recent years, so putting Americans first has come back into vogue—reconnecting with a long-standing foreign-policy tradition that McDougall traces to Washington and Jefferson. In July 2011, Barack Obama announced a withdrawal plan for Afghanistan, expressing his desire to “reclaim the American dream that is the center of our story … America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”
14
On April 7, 2015, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, announced that he would seek his party's presidential nomination. Critics from across the political spectrum rounded immediately on Paul's supposed “isolationism.” Two days later, Paul delivered a speech in South Carolina that decried “frivolous” wars: “I see an America strong, strong enough to deter foreign aggression, yet wise enough to avoid unnecessary intervention.” It is clear that Paul's Republican opponents won't find it difficult to connect his worldview with that of Barack Obama, and condemn each as declinist and isolationist.
15

Beard was an admirer of Walter Lippmann in the 1910s and 1920s when the journalist was “expounding a socialist philosophy of a mild brand.” But his opinion changed during the 1930s as Lippmann attacked the New Deal as perilously statist and Beard's views on foreign policy as hopelessly naïve. In 1937, Beard observed that “amid all his outpourings there are often flashes of insight and justice with which I sincerely agree. I do not think he is a bad man.” Yet in Lippmann's supposed cozying up to entrenched elites, and in his support for a policy of military preparedness, Beard detected “the odor of a sickly humanism as thick as the smell of magnolia blossoms which apologists of the good old days in the South spread over the sweat of slave gangs.”
16
Profoundly disillusioned by Wilson's performance at the Paris Peace Conference, during which the president vested too much hope in an untested abstraction, Lippmann embraced Mahan's realism from the mid-1930s, which was always likely to rouse Beard's hyperbolic ire. Lippmann viewed Nazi domination of the Atlantic Ocean as intolerable. The United States had a vital stake in ensuring the independence of Great Britain.

Rationalizing and encouraging American participation in the Second World War was essential, which Lippmann worked toward skillfully. But so too was ensuring that President Roosevelt did not botch the peace in the fashion of Woodrow Wilson. To avoid this happening, Lippmann advised that America should work with the world's other powerful nations to ensure postwar stability—not through vesting any serious hope in the League of Nations' successor. Roosevelt should certainly resist making grandiose claims connecting the spread of democracy to the maintenance of peace. And while the president should disagree with Moscow where necessary, he should always keep an eye on the ultimate goal of avoiding another global war, to which contentious issues of smaller stake—such as Soviet domination of Eastern Europe—could be sacrificed.

Like Mahan, Lippmann believed that peace was best achieved through strength, that idealism should be stripped from policymaking, that the arbitration of disputes was impossible to achieve, and that the nation-state remained the principal actor in world politics. It disappointed Lippmann that so many of his goals were dashed in the first few postwar years, as ideological hostility—not a dispassionate calculation of respective interests—began to sour U.S.-Soviet relations. Yet Lippmann overestimated the ability of the United States and the Soviet Union to maintain a credible and workable postwar alliance. It turned out that ideological differences between the two nations mattered profoundly.

Lippmann's 1943 thesis that “a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power,” was a classic expression of realism, but its assumptions were scientistic. Lippmann's theory held that Josef Stalin was a rational actor acutely conscious of his nation's strengths and weaknesses, which meant the Soviet leader was unlikely to overstep the mark in projecting power if dispassionate analysis flagged the dangers of such a course. Lippmann was only partly right. While Stalin's goals in the early Cold War were not as expansionary as some have portrayed, ideology did play a causal role in shaping Soviet foreign policy.
17
Lippmann's theory blinded him to the possibility that Marxism-Leninism was not merely a wall of sanctimony deployed to dupe the people and lend grandiosity to a brutal despot, but rather that it animated Soviet action. And this made a modus vivendi between the two nations difficult to achieve.

George Kennan, whom Lippmann attacked in a series of influential articles, was the consummate foreign-policy artist. Kennan never intended that containment be applied as a rigid formula, he subsequently professed hostility to strategies that could fit onto a “bumper sticker.” He was insightful in identifying the ideological and historical factors that drove Stalin's foreign policy and proposed largely measured policies to ensure that Western Europe avoid the fate that Marxism-Leninism intended for it. Yet Lippmann was correct to chide Kennan for failing to set clear limits on what containment entailed beyond the European theater—on where America's vital interests began and ended. Kennan lamented later that he yearned to “extricate himself from the tar baby of containment.”
18
In the late 1960s, Kennan freely admitted that Lippmann's critique of the X Article had been valid: “much of it reads exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.”
19

Kennan was an impressive and subtle diplomatist, however, and this acuity was evident throughout his entire career. His keen historical perspective, remarkable linguistic ability, skill at assuming different identities and drawing insight from multiple epochs make him stand out as a scholar and diplomat. As a shaper of U.S. foreign policy, Kennan was constantly frustrated, with the exception of the period from 1946 to 1948 when his views and those of his political masters converged briefly on their path to divergence. As an analyst of U.S. foreign policy and of the foibles of politicians, however, he was exceptionally gifted, and history will likely view Kennan's post-1950 record as a public intellectual as farsighted on a great many counts. Like Walter Lippmann, his opposition to the Vietnam War, for example, was ahead of the curve and consistently insightful.

In 1989, during testimony before the Senate on the end of the Cold War, George Kennan delivered a rousing and unexpected endorsement of Wilsonianism as the only means to solve the world's most dangerous problems:

I was long skeptical about Wilson's vision … But I begin today … to think that Wilson was very ahead of his time in his views about international organizations. You see, just as I feel that the Cold War is now ending, I feel that another great and tremendous problem is growing upon us—or a double problem. One is to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction which are too terrible to be permitted to rest in human hands … But the other is to face up to the planetary environmental crisis which is now, if we can believe the scientists, growing upon us … The general lesson of what [the scientists] are telling us is that we have a much shorter time than we think to put things to rights in this planet if our descendants are going to have any sort of a civilized life in it. Now this is to my mind going to require a realization of the dream of international collaboration which Wilson had. I don't see any other way out of it.
20

Kennan appears to believe that some challenges—climate change and nuclear proliferation—are of sufficient magnitude and complexity that Wilsonianism is the only available course. And this is perhaps the only circumstance when foreign policy can truly be approached scientistically—when every nation is vested in solving a crisis with the potential to affect all. It is the closest the world can get to stable laboratory conditions.

Paul Nitze was a paradox. Like Kennan, he formulated a seminal foreign-policy strategy—NSC-68—before disavowing the conflicts that the document rationalized. Unlike Kennan, he never expressed regret for the document's alarmist style or the way NSC-68 recklessly expanded America's obligations to the world. Nitze's other significant contribution to the making of U.S. foreign policy—the notion of the “correlation of forces”—was a clear expression of faith in the model of foreign policy as science. More accurately, Nitze applied scientistic principles to build structures that performed particular functions. Through the entirety of his career, Nitze inflated Soviet military capabilities, pushed strongly for increased military spending, and lambasted administrations he disliked—those of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Carter—for allowing the Soviet Union to tilt the correlation of forces in Moscow's direction, encouraging future conflict. This assumption of worst-case scenarios led to many foreign-policy misadventures.

But Nitze was also prescient on many issues. He was often correct to assume the worst of the Soviet Union—that Stalin would behave rationally and seek to develop a fusion device—when recommending the development of an American hydrogen bomb. Throughout the Reagan administration, Nitze favored deep cuts in the superpowers' nuclear arsenals, earning the enmity of those who previously viewed him as an ideological ally. In fact Nitze was far from dogmatic; it was merely that NSC-68, the Gaither Report, and Team B made him appear that way. The disconnection between plan and action was often stark in the case of Nitze. He never successfully translated his often nuanced personal views into the blueprints he drafted, which built massive structures that were intimidating and awe-inspiring but difficult to move once locked in position.

Though his doctorate was in political science, Henry Kissinger was steeped in history. His dissertation focused on the Napoleonic era and identified lessons that the United States might draw from the adroit statesmanship displayed at the Congress of Vienna. Kissinger did not experiment in the Wilsonian fashion, viewing liberal idealism as his main ideological adversary. Instead he recommended policies that emulated his hero, an arch-exponent of balance-of-power diplomacy, Prince Metternich. Kissinger wanted to apply the lessons of history and had no interest in seeking new discoveries about the laws of international relations. Stability mattered more than justice.

But while Kissinger drew from historical precedent, he also followed some formulas. He
believed
in the balance of power and the domino theory. This explains his cautious support for the Americanization of the Vietnam War; his coming around to the logic of recognizing China; the value of pursuing a policy of détente with the Soviet Union; his tendency to vest American credibility in conflicts of tangential significance; the brutal manner in which he and Nixon escalated and deescalated the Vietnam War; his veneration of credibility as a priceless diplomatic commodity; his amorality. Kissinger was capable of profound diplomatic insight and the tawdriest recommendations. He was not an obvious practitioner of diplomacy as science. But he clung doggedly to his axioms and was rigid in his approach to many diplomatic crises. Metternich possessed a quality that Kissinger evidently lacked: a sense of proportion.

Paul Wolfowitz was second only to Woodrow Wilson in his scientism. His scholarly methods and foreign-policy career emphasized experimentation with a view to remaking the aspects of the world that he viewed as deficient. Following Wilson, Wolfowitz's worldview was undergirded by a single principle: substantive geopolitical stability is contingent upon the spread of democracy. Wolfowitz begins by imagining what a peaceable world looks like and works backward to realize that utopian aspiration. The abstraction is the starting point in matters of import; the primary goal is often vaulting and unprecedented.

Such ambition clearly has virtue. But it also resembles the self-righteousness shared by Wolfowitz's fiercest critics on the left. Who is more confident than the individual who understands the
true
nature of world affairs? Noam Chomsky and Paul Wolfowitz share many common traits; among other things, they both overstate America's actual or prospective ability to engage in worldmaking. Wolfowitz's stated belief that the invasion of Iraq might catalyze the democratization of the entire Middle East may be unfolding before our eyes. Or it may be that the causal connection is illusory or impossible to detect. Or more likely still: that the current unrest across the region is beyond both America's ken and its ability to “manage.” But let there be no doubt that the invasion of Iraq led to bleak consequences that overwhelm the stock defense: “Isn't it better that Saddam is gone?” The human cost is harrowing and the financial cost continues to spiral upward as compound interest wreaks havoc. The war emphasized the limits of American power rather than the potentialities. Like Vietnam, this lesson has salutary value, but only if it is heeded.