LRB Thomas Meaney, So It Must Be Forever

Thomas Meaney reviews American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers ...
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Thomas Meaney
American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson
Verso, 244 pp, 14.99, March 2014, ISBN 978 1 78168 667 6
A Sense of Power: The Roots of Americas Global Role by John A. Thompson
Cornell, 343 pp, 19.95, October 2015, ISBN 978 0 8014 4789 1
A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s by
Daniel J. Sargent
Oxford, 369 pp, 23.49, January 2015, ISBN 978 0 19 539547 1
It is a sign of true political power when a great people can determine, of its own will, the
vocabulary, the terminology and the words, the very way of speaking, even the way of
thinking, of other peoples, Carl Schmitt wrote in 1932, at the wicks end of the Weimar
Republic. Schmitt, the most formidable legal and strategic mind in Germany, who would join
the Nazi Party the following year, was thinking of America. The US was already the unrivalled
hegemon of its hemisphere. Schmitt admired its ample living space and its protected position
between two oceans. Americans had cleared out the native populations and intervened as
they pleased in the Latin south. It would be harder going for the Germans in Europe.
For Schmitt what was extraordinary about the American empire was the way it added to its
geographical advantage by continually refiguring the nature of its triumph. US imperialism
would go by other names: Manifest Destiny, Greater America, the American Century, the Free
World, Internationalism. Colonies and dependencies were rarely declared outright:
Americans knew how to conceal an empire, territorial or otherwise. (Who made a fuss in the
1950s when the US continued to add stars to its flag while Europe started disgorging its
colonies, or noticed that, until the decolonisation of the Philippines in 1946, the number of
US subjects overseas exceeded the number of black Americans on the mainland?) Schmitt
found the sharpest expression of Americas imperial precociousness in the Monroe Doctrine,
a quasi-legal fiat issued in 1823 from a position of relative weakness: the US decreed that
European powers were barred from meddling in its zone of influence; inside that zone, it
would decide what was peace, what was intervention, and what was security. For National
Socialists in the 1930s, the power to make all legal questions of sovereignty answer to political
exigency was a tantalising prospect. As a German making remarks about American
imperialism, Schmitt wrote, I can only feel like a beggar in rags speaking about the riches
and treasures of foreigners.
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The problem for the Germans was that just as they were trying to make their own Grossraum
a reality Hitler called it a Monroe Doctrine for Europe the Americans were dreaming of
becoming a global power. This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear.
Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the countrys exceptional primacy than
of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on
being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing armies; they preferred to speak of
international legal solutions and courts of arbitration. The possibility of a German-controlled
Europe made such detachment harder to sustain. As the liberal historian John Thompson
shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to
the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure
international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly based on
domestic growth and consumption. The chief motive behind Americas entry into the war,
Thompson argues persuasively, was that its leaders realised that it would cost them relatively
little to bend the world in the political direction they wanted. To justify intervention,
Roosevelt had to tack between security concerns and economic ones, which he exaggerated
for effect. Wages and hours would be fixed by Hitler, he told the public on the radio, while
the American farmer would get for his products exactly what Hitler wanted to give. And in
an age of air power, the US could no longer set faith in the oceans protection, not to mention
the threat that a German invasion of Brazil posed to Americas supply of the minerals and
metals it needed for its weaponry. Do we want to see Hitler in Independence Hall making fun
of the Liberty Bell? William Bullitt, Roosevelts ambassador to France, asked a year before
Pearl Harbor.
US war planners were already envisioning the utopia to come. Its premise was the defeat of
Germany and Japan, but also the break-up of European empires into a world of discrete
nation-states, each with its own liberal multi-party system and regular elections and each
umbilically connected to the dollar. The Trusteeship System of the United Nations would
serve as an incubator for premature nations, coaxing them from colonial rule into statehood,
or in the case of some American holdings, towards a convenient grey zone between colony
and military base. In this utopia the US was to be at once the summa of world history, never
to be equalled, and the model that would have to be followed. The planners drafted blueprints
for the United Nations as a way to package internationalism for an American public assumed
to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently
found, isolationism wasnt a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers
fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism including those at
home who were still committed to the equal legal status of all nations. There is literally no
question, military or political, in which the United States is not interested, Roosevelt told a
weary Stalin in 1944. The Kremlin would have been more comfortable keeping to some form
of a zones-of-influence system for a while longer, a wish shared by many wise men of the
West, from Alexandre Kojve to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires
to one of nation-states. But by wars end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape
of the Pax Americana.
Perry Anderson, in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his first sustained critique of
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US power, concentrates on two unstable compounds in the empires image of itself, both of
which crystallised in the decisive postwar years, when it was still unclear how American
utopianism would adjust to postwar realities. The first such compound is made up of two
elements, exceptionalism and universalism, which Anderson treats as analytically distinct
impulses. Providential exceptionalism came first, originating in the Puritans attempt to build
a city upon a hill that would impress the England they had left behind. At least in theory,
Anderson suggests, American exceptionalism could be modest. Here he is on firm ground.
One of the most forceful denunciations of American expansionism was made eight years
before the expression manifest destiny first appeared in print, when the leading Unitarian
preacher, William Ellery Channing, warned that Americas sublime moral empire should
diffuse freedom by manifesting its fruits, since there is no Fate to justify rapacious nations,
any more than to justify gamblers and robbers, in plunder.
American universalism, in Andersons view, is more dangerous. It was effectively propagated
by Woodrow Wilson, who saw the entire world as a receptacle for Americas values. Lift your
eyes to the horizons of business, Anderson quotes him telling 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.
On the face of it, the message sounds like Channings call to spread American values through
non-forcible means, but the circumstances had changed. In 1910 the countrys economic
output was higher than that of Germany, France and Japan combined; by the middle of the
First World War, it had surpassed that of the British Empire. The countrys excess material
power opened fresh possibilities for what Anderson calls messianic activism.
The second of Andersons unstable compounds is the tension between the needs of American
supremacy and the needs of global capitalism. For much of the postwar era, US leaders rarely
bothered to distinguish between the two: the build-up of US power and capitalist husbandry
went hand in hand. When they were forced to prioritise, American leaders tended to privilege
political-military global leadership over the needs of capital, with the expectation that this
would be better for capitalism in the long run. At Bretton Woods, the US triumphantly
established the dollar as the worlds reserve currency and created supporting institutions,
including the World Bank and the IMF. Over the cries of Wall Street banks, which demanded
a much less constricting set of controls and were privately exploring the idea of lending
Europeans reconstruction funds, the Truman administration embarked on a programme
dedicated to economic stability. The reconstruction of Japan and Europe which American
historians persist in presenting as unique acts of beneficence was undertaken to ensure the
bedrock of the world capitalist system, even if that meant keeping the European empires on
their feet a bit longer. The US state, Anderson writes, would henceforward act, not primarily
as a projection of the concerns of US capital, but as a guardian of the general interest of all
capitals, sacrificing where necessary, and for as long as needed national gain for
international advantage, in the confidence of ultimate pay-off.
The drama of US foreign policy for Anderson comes in the way the country and its policy elite
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balance the requirements of global capitalism with what they perceive as the national
interest. From the 1940s to the 1970s, these interests were blurred, sometimes more than
Washington could tolerate. Truman complained that the first draft of his doctrine for
containing communism in Europe read too much like an investment prospectus. Andersons
survey doesnt parse the different types of US intervention in the global south, but these could
be roughly plotted along his axes of global capital and national interest. US-backed coups in
Guatemala and Grenada were salves for regional irritants, but the meddling in Iran and
Congo was undertaken in the general interest of global capital and the US-led world order at
large.
By the early 1970s, it was apparent that global capital wasnt serving the US as effectively as
the US was serving it. The remit of the imperial state beyond the requirements of national
capital, Anderson writes, was for the first time under pressure. Since the war, the US had
privileged the economic self-interest of its recovering allies, accepting their protectionism and
an overvalued dollar as the price to be paid for its political hegemony. But the Vietnam War
had depleted the Treasury, escalated inflation and upset the balance of payments, which only
worsened when Nixon removed controls on US corporate investment abroad. The total value
of dollars outside the country soon exceeded the governments gold reserves. France under
De Gaulle attacked the greenback with purchases of bullion, sending a cruiser to New York to
pick up its share. Describing Nixon as the only president with an original mind in foreign
policy, Anderson counts his decision to sever gold from the dollar and his declaration of the
end of the Bretton Woods system as a remarkable coup de main. The principles of free trade,
the free market and the solidarity of the free world, he writes, could not stand in the way of
the national interest. Or as John Connally, Nixons militantly economic nationalist Treasury
Secretary, put it, The foreigners are out to screw us. Its our job to screw them first.
But, as the historian Daniel Sargent notes in his shrewd reconstruction of this episode, the
tactic was less purposeful than ironic. Nixon had intended to threaten Europeans with a
dollar devaluation that would improve the US trade balance, restore American employment
and better his chances of re-election. The plan was to embark on a temporary period of
floating currencies before a return to the status quo; no one in the Nixon administration
wanted to give up control of the monetary order to market forces. No one, that is, except for
Connallys successor, George Shultz, a University of Chicago economist who beat Kissinger in
the bureaucratic turf war and committed the country headlong to floating currencies and the
free flow of capital without national controls. (Kissinger worried that the policy Shultz called
for would encourage a hostile bloc of Western European economies to form, shattering the
Atlantic Alliance.) Nixons economic demarche had begun as an attempt to protect US
markets and insulate them from capital flows, but it turned out, in Andersons telling, to be a
boon for both capital markets and US power, which could now manipulate world currency
valuations by means of Federal Reserve interest rate adjustments. Wall Street, sceptical at
first of a departure from fixed-exchange markets, learned to love the new order.
*
It is a sign of the limited intellectual range of American diplomatic historians that when
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Andersons critique first appeared in the pages of New Left Review, they detected an update
of William Appleman Williamss New Left classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
(1959). But Andersons picture of American imperialism departs from several presuppositions
of New Left historiography. He salutes Williams and the Wisconsin School the prairie
populist tradition associated with him but he also makes a point of distancing himself from
it. In particular, Williamss contention that American imperialism was grounded in the
ideology of the open door which began with the USs determination to be granted equal
access and fair treatment in Chinas European-dominated port cities and the continuous
extension of American capitalism towards ever larger markets, first across the continent, then
across the Pacific and beyond, doesnt square with Andersons view of a predominantly
protectionist United States before the Second World War, the Republican Party having long
equated the conspiracy of free trade with British imperial interference with growing
American industry. What for Williams is a story of continuous American economic expansion
is for Anderson a story of the way Americans came to conflate the global capitalist system
with the projection of their own national power, continually looking past the fissures in their
own ideology and interests.
Andersons interpretation has more in common with the Swedish left historian Anders
Stephanson, along with several putatively conservative critics of American empire, among
them Chalmers Johnson, who argued in his Blowback trilogy that US imperialism breeds
some of the most important contradictions of capitalism not the other way round and
that much of post-1989 US policy, from the inflicting of the 1998 financial crisis on the Asian
Tigers to the current push for the TTP and TTIP, has been aimed at prying open markets that
the US was content during the Cold War to give leave to be protectionist and heterodox.
Unlike Johnson, however, Anderson doesnt chase down equivalences between the Soviet
Union and the US, with the Eastern European nations mirroring the USs satellites in East
Asia, Japan figuring as Americas East Germany, and the Kwanju massacre as Americas more
murderous version of Tiananmen Square. The competition was never close to equal in
Andersons telling, which finds support in rich new archival studies, such as Oscar SanchezSibonys Red Globalisation, which shows how desperate the Soviet Bloc was to participate in
Western markets as early as the 1950s, and Jeremy Friedmans Shadow Cold War, which lays
out the immense cost of the Soviet Unions revolutionary posture in the Third World, a
beleaguered and misguided attempt to maintain radical credibility against the allure of
Maoism.[*]
Andersons critique of American power is also distinctive in a more basic sense. Many of the
most prominent American critics of US imperialism came to their positions while serving as
spear-carriers of empire, in Johnsons phrase. Williamss thinking grew out of the racism he
witnessed as an ensign in the US Navy, and his narrow escape from taking part in the nuclear
tests on Bikini Island. Johnson, himself a US Navy veteran of the Korean War, was a
consultant to the Office of National Estimates in the CIA, and a longtime academic Cold
Warrior. Along with perhaps the most prominent contemporary conservative critic, the
former US Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, Johnson expected US globalism to readjust after
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the downfall of the Soviet Union. When no such adjustment came in fact, the number of
bases expanded these critics began to question whether American globalism really grew out
of the need for Soviet containment. Their scepticism was bolstered by first-hand disgust with
imperial practices: in Johnsons case, the rape culture and environmental devastation he
witnessed at US bases in Okinawa; in Bacevichs, the hubris and technological utopianism of
the no-fault operations of the Persian Gulf War. The anti-imperial passion shared by
Bacevich, Johnson and Williams issues from their belief that US foreign entanglements,
especially in service of the maintenance of global capitalism, threaten a truer version of
American republican principles. Each of them has a commitment to what Williams called an
open door to revolutions, his term for a world order where the US doesnt impose its own
economic hegemony and different peoples are able to pursue their own forms of social life.
Anderson entertains no such possibility of redemption. Theres no better republic to go back
to, no way to roll back the messianism. Though he doesnt endorse it, the version of US
globalism that seems to interest Anderson most is that of the mid-century migr
geostrategist Nicholas Spykman, who in Americas Strategy in World Politics (1942)
perhaps the most striking single exercise in geopolitical literature of any land, Anderson says
spared his readers the dogmas of liberal democracy and the free market. Instead, he
advised his adopted country to face up to the realities of class warfare, the increasing
concentration of wealth and the coming race for resources. The more clear-eyed the US was
about its interests, in other words, the less savagery it would perpetrate in the name of
idealism. Carl Schmitt counselled something similar in his retirement, when in 1958 he
published a platonic dialogue in which an American called MacFuture interrupts
Alcibiades-like a conversation between two German thinkers about geopolitics. MacFuture
believes the US has a duty to submit the entire galaxy to a Monroe Doctrine, and that the
conquest of space will be a repeat of the conquest of the New World. The Germans feebly try
to interest their guest in the notion of limits.
Anderson doesnt mention another tradition of domestic US anti-imperial critique, Black
Internationalism, which bridged the distance between black American intellectuals and their
African counterparts in the colonial world, seeking to solder their cause together with appeals
to colour-blind communism and pan-Africanism. As Robert Vitalis notes in his book White
World Order, Black Power, Black Internationalism was born alongside the white chauvinist
version of international relations at the end of the 19th century, when international relations
meant race relations.[] The academic field of IR was focused more on the study of global
racial hierarchies and the problems of colonial administration than on the abstract interplay
of nation-states. Vitalis shows just how preoccupied American IR thinkers were in
maintaining white dominance and purity in the colonial world, which of course included their
own colonies. Foreign Affairs still the house IR journal of the US foreign policy
establishment began its life in the 1920s as the Journal of Race Development. The tragedy
of Black Internationalism is that some of its most radical advocates Ralph Bunche at the
United Nations, for example became moderates in their attempt to reform American
globalism from within. Meanwhile, some of the most stubborn figures Rayford Logan, Alain
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Locke, Merze Tate were institutionally and financially isolated in the black academy,
outside of which their work was ignored. They were nearly forgotten by the following
generation of black radicals, who had to cut their anti-imperial critiques from whole cloth in
the 1960s and 1970s.
If Andersons analysis does have a precursor, it is in the work of Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, two
radical historians of the 1960s. Gabriel Kolkos The Politics of War (1968) now forgotten,
but recognised in its time by Hans Morgenthau and other conservatives as a scathing and
persuasive revision of orthodox Cold War history showed how US policy following the
Second World War was dedicated to eradicating the threat of the anti-fascist left, which was
poised to sweep elections across the world, especially in Europe and Korea. For the Kolkos, it
was this more or less internal threat to the global capitalist system, rather than any possible
communist takeover, that Washington couldnt tolerate. But where the Kolkos found a
concerted, coherent strategy among US postwar planners, Anderson sees American
strategists cobbling together an ideology thats less a cover than part of the substance of
American imperialism itself. Instead of peeling back American rhetoric to reveal imperial
intentions, Anderson examines the way the rhetoric contributes to and shapes those
intentions.
*
The second part of American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers plunges into the contemporary
American dreamworld of empire. Anderson has always been attracted to those who speak of
the world without euphemism, and he appraises the recent offerings of American Grand
Strategists with sardonic respect: however rabid or fantastic their conceptions, these are
writers who take in the whole globe and describe it in a lucid register aimed at a wide
audience. They dont much condescend to election cycles, party affiliation or the
preoccupations of American political science. The two boldest thinkers Anderson treats have
much in common ideologically but have very different strategies. In 2014, Robert Kagan
published an essay entitled Superpowers Dont Get to Retire: What Our Tired Country Still
Owes the World in the New Republic. Partly a policy memo directed at the president (Obama
promptly called Kagan in for lunch), it was also pitched at American millennials who grew up
in the shadow of Afghanistan and Iraq and have little trust in the efficacy of American power.
In Kagans world, authoritarianism is the default human condition, which only America
stands capable of pushing back. Iran, Russia, China: all of these form a new authoritarian
front every bit as dangerous as the USSR. What gives the United States the right to act on
behalf of a liberal world order? Kagan asks. In truth nothing does, nothing beyond the
conviction that the liberal order is the most just. The liberal order, Kagan goes on, was
never put to a popular vote. It was not bequeathed by God. It is not the endpoint of human
progress. So then what does justify it? Its enemies, Kagan declares, which are worse than
itself. Just as liberal capitalisms foes wish to impose their worldview, so America must
impose a liberal world order, and as much as we in the West might wish it to be imposed by
superior virtue, it is generally imposed by superior power. The planets silent majority is
grateful for this service. Imagine strolling through Central Park, Kagan writes, and, after
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noting how much safer it had become, deciding that humanity must simply have become less
violent without thinking that perhaps the New York Police Department had something to
do with it. What Kagan calls for is what Schmitt thought impossible: a Monroe Doctrine for
the world, which Kagan speaks of as a heavy moral burden. In the international sphere,
Americans have had to act as judge, jury, police, and in the case of military action,
executioner, he writes. So it has been since 1945, so it must be for ever.
At the opposite end of the strategy spectrum from Kagan, Anderson has found a curious
specimen. Thomas Barnett is a former Naval Academy instructor, and a self-declared
economic determinist who delivers TED talks to the military top brass about the limits of
American power. His work, Anderson writes, is not unlike a materialist variant, from the
other side of the barricades, of the vision of America in Hardt and Negris Empire. America
needs to ask itself, Barnett writes in Great Powers (2009), is it more important to make
globalisation truly global, while retaining great-power peace and defeating whatever
anti-globalisation insurgencies may appear in the decades ahead? Or do we tether our
support for globalisations advance to the upfront demand that the world first resembles us
politically? For Barnett, the answer is clear: America must trust in the market, which will
solve all strategic problems. Russia? It is experiencing its Gilded Age, and will come around
in fifty years. China? Already capitalist anyway, and Xi is just Chinas version of Teddy
Roosevelt trying to root out corruption and make markets more functional. Iran? Proceed
with every deal possible, let the market penetrate, and stop threatening it with military
strikes. Tell Israel to back off: Iran will take the position in the Middle East to which its
culture and educated population entitle it. North Korea? First let Beijing extract from it all
the minerals it needs. Then, when it reaches rock bottom, the Chinese will invite the South
Koreans in to clean up the mess. In a world so tilted in the USs favour, Barnett calls for
drastically reducing the military to a small force with only a handful of bases that will be used
to handle terrorist pin-pricks. In every other respect the time has come for stay-at-home
capitalist husbandry.
What strikes Anderson about the collection of American strategists hes assembled is how
despite their radically different worldviews they all agree that the US will and must remain
the supreme world power. In Walter Russell Meads eyes, Americas genius, with its special
British lineage, is simply too difficult to replicate. In John Ikenberrys, the world is already
signing up to mimic Americas image. To Kagan, American dominance is simply a matter of
political will. As Barnett sees it, the US is already so ahead in world history, its almost unfair.
As the strategist Christopher Layne, one of the rare dissenting voices in Andersons account,
points out, when American foreign policy pundits speak of the post-American world, what
they really mean is the Now and Forever American World. The presidential candidates who
tend to win are those who most seamlessly embody the contradictory calls for more vigorous
projection of American power on the one hand, and more aggressive globalisation on the
other. This is something the Clintons have always understood.
[*] Red Globalisation: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to
Khrushchev (Cambridge, 294 pp., 65, March 2014, 978 1 107 04025 0); Shadow Cold War:
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The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (North Carolina, 312 pp., 30.50,
September 2015, 978 1 4696 2376 4).
[] White World Order, Black Power will be discussed more fully by Susan Pedersen in a
future issue.
Vol. 38 No. 14 14 July 2016 Thomas Meaney So it must be for ever
pages 5-7 | 4453 words
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Limited 2016
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Thomas Meaney reviews American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers ...

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