The new peace

The Paris peace conference was convened on January 18, 1919, and lasted until June 28, when a peace treaty with Germany was signed at the Versailles palace. During these five months, the leaders of the victorious nations sat together and discussed not only the peace terms to be imposed upon the former enemy but also the shape of the postwar world. President Woodrow Wilson personally participated, as did the leaders of the European cobelligerents: David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France), Vittorio Orlando (Italy). Two Asian countries that had been involved in the war, China and Japan, were also represented at the Paris Conference, although they did not send their respective heads of government. The participation of these countries as well as the United States in a conference to settle a war that had originated in Europe was a clear indication of the passing of the European-dominated world order.

Each participating nation had its own agenda. The United States had already articulated what it considered to be desirable terms of peace in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The president and his entourage in Paris were determined to define a peace that reflected those terms as much as possible. That was also the German delegation’s expectation; having agreed to a cease-fire on the basis of the Fourteen Points, Berlin’s representatives believed only a peace along those lines would be acceptable to the nation that was reeling from a post-cease-fire chaos; the military was refusing to admit defeat, while radicals, under Bolshevik influence, were threatening to seize control of government.

Stalin died. Slowly the terror eased within the Soviet Union, especially after those competing for primacy within the leadership rid themselves of Lavrenti Beria, dreaded head of the secret police. Georgii Malenkov, who, in 1953, seemed to be Stalin’s likely successor, sought to reduce international tensions as well. He called for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world, held out his hand to Tito in Yugoslavia, and offered assurances of Soviet goodwill to Turkey, Iran, and Greece. Israel, India, and Japan similarly received indications that Stalin’s death might mean improved relations with the Soviet Union. But Malenkov’s hold on power was tenuous and those who vied with him were critical of his efforts to redirect foreign policy. It was not until after he was shunted aside, and Nikita Khrushchev continued his initiatives while providing a few of his own, that the main outlines of post-Stalinist policy were manifest.

The new Soviet leadership inherited a world in which the dominant power, the United States, had just undertaken a rapid military buildup and had demonstrated its ability to project its power many thousands of miles from its shores. Only weeks before Stalin’s death, a new administration had arrived in Washington, led by men who called for a more aggressive anti-Soviet policy, for the liberation of Eastern Europe, and for the “unleashing” of Chiang Kai-shek. These were people who would deny the Soviet Union the fruits of victory in World War II, deny the Soviets the influence and respect to which the world’s second most powerful nation was entitled.

Peace as an ideology

Peace as a dominant idea was a distinctive feature of the postwar decade. This is not to say that there had been no forceful movements for peace or effective presentations of ideas of peace before then. Before the Great War, there had developed various strands of pacifism, ranging from traditional Christian conceptions to the more recent socialist formulations. In the United States, scores of peace societies had been established to organize the international community better to promote a stable, interdependent world order. And then, during the war, Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin had emerged as spokesmen for two contrasting ideas about international affairs and propounded their respective visions of a world without war.

It was after 1919, however, that the idea of peace, of whatever shade of meaning, came to hold center stage in discussions about international affairs. We have already seen how potent were the drives for disarmament, outlawry of war, economic stabilization, and American capital movements, which together created an environment more conducive to peaceful interconnections among nations than to war and military preparedness. But the phenomenon had deep cultural roots as well and was sustained by intellectual developments in the 1920s. One might think of the ideology of peace at that time as a “hegemonic ideology” – the term Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, began to use as he penned his thoughts in prison. According to him, a society was held together through a set of ideas produced, refined, and manipulated by its elites in order to maintain some sort of order and cohesiveness.

Almost from their beginnings as an independent people, Americans used the oceans not as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe but as a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. In the 1780s, as a century later, merchants were driven abroad by the exigencies of economic depression at home, as well as by the attraction of profits (and settlements) overseas. By the 1830s, colonizers of both the white and black races had, with the help of several presidential administrations, established an American settlement for freed African-American slaves in Liberia. A decade later, driven again in part by the economic bad times of 1837 to 1841, U.S. officials signed their first treaty with China. In the next decade of the 1850s they sent Matthew Perry to open Japan to U.S. interests, both secular and religious. After 1865, the United States rapidly became one of the six great powers fighting over the remains of China’s Manchu dynasty and, for a time, even was an unlikely participant in the great colonial struggle over Africa’s riches.

Africa, Kasson, and African Americans

Africa burst into American (and much of the world’s) attention in 1870 when the New York Herald sent Henry M. Stanley to find the supposedly lost missionary David Livingstone in the interior of Africa. Stanley’s alleged greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” became famous, but Stanley’s discovery of the Congo’s rich mineral wealth received more attention at the time. In 1878 one of the great U.S. explorers, Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt, sailed along the West African coast and into several of its rivers.

In 1866, an English magazine, the Spectator, grudgingly observed, “Nobody doubts any more that the United States is a power of the first class, a nation which it is very dangerous to offend and almost impossible to attack.” In the immediate sense, this observation reflected the confirmation of nationhood through Union success in the Civil War. In larger perspective, it reflected an amazing growth of power since the republic’s birth ninety years earlier, little more than the lifetime of John Quincy Adams’s generation.

At the end of the Civil War, the nation’s population exceeded 35 million; Britain and France had fewer people. Although still far behind Great Britain, Americas industrial output nearly equaled that of France and exceeded that of other countries. American agriculture was the world’s most productive. Territory had swelled from fewer than a million square miles in 1783 to exceed 3 million square miles. The arbitrament of war had confirmed the viability of republican government.

The success of the United States owed much to achievements – some earned, some not – in relations with foreign powers. Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” is supposed to have said that God seemed to have a special place in his heart for drunkards, idiots, and Americans. Good fortune did seem to fall on the young Republic, perhaps most notably in its escape from the consequences of mismanagement by Jefferson and Madison, but also in such things as the fortuitous dominance over British policy by Shelburne and Aberdeen at critical times.

America goes to war

Few countries had been as well prepared to go to war as the United States in 1917. Not that the nation had made specific preparations to enter the European conflict on the side of Britain and its allies against Germany and other “central” powers. Officials in Washington as well as the American people would have welcomed a peace if it had been arranged by the combatants without their military intervention. Yet if intervention were to come, the United States was in an excellent position to make a decisive difference. It had strengthened itself economically and militarily during the years of neutrality, the people had had ample time to educate themselves about world affairs and their country’s potential role in them, and American foreign policy had been so conducted as to ensure the nation’s leadership position once it entered the war.

In the military sphere, President Woodrow Wilson had, in 1916, begun calling for preparedness – at first in order to keep the nation so prepared militarily that no power would dare challenge its security and interests. After 1917, of course, the purpose changed to creating a strong armed force to fight a war. The Selective Service Act of May 1917 established a system for registering Americans for military service, and within a year the army was able to send over two million “doughboys” to Europe. The navy would in the meantime be augmented, and the naval building program of 1918 envisaged making the U.S. Navy the most powerful in the world.

The American population is a mosaic, a people whose makeup can resemble the world with which it deals in foreign policy. Between the Civil War and World War I the mosaic became so pronounced, and the number of immigrants so enormous, that a historic turn was reached in the 1880s when, for the first time in the nation’s life, legislation excluded certain immigrants (in this case, Chinese). The exclusionary act was shaped by the economic downturn, but also by a deep-seated racism that, while it excluded some Asians, led to the lynching of numbers of Asians and African Americans in the 1880s and 1890s. It also melded with chaotic and tragic economic conditions in the West to produce a series of wars waged by the U.S. Army against Indians. With the ending of those wars, force had succeeded in consolidating non-Indian control of the continent. Militant laborers and angry farmers only remained to pose a domestic threat to order after 1890. This consolidation of the continent, training of military force, contradictory feelings about immigrants, and, above all, racism not only characterized these late nineteenth-century decades but were central in shaping U.S. foreign policy then and in the new century.

Allied forces returned to France in June 1944 and were soon battling their way inland from the Normandy beaches. In Washington, President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the defeat of Germany was on the horizon, the fall of Japan not far beyond. His thoughts and those of other American leaders, in and out of government, turned increasingly to the postwar world: What legacy would he leave the American people? How could he and his associates ensure an enduring peace and a prosperous America? What lessons could be learned from past failures, especially those that had followed World War I, the inability to stop the economic misery and aggressive violence of the 1930s?

Roosevelt and his colleagues expected the United States to emerge from the war as the greatest power on earth. And after this war, unlike the aftermath of World War I, they were determined to assert American leadership. This time they would create a world order conducive to the interests of the United States, which would allow it to increase its wealth and power, and carry its values to every corner of the globe. There would be no shirking of the responsibilities of power. The United States would provide the leadership necessary to create a liberal international economic order, based on free trade and stable currency-exchange rates, providing a level of prosperity the peoples of the world had never known. The United States would provide the leadership necessary to prevent the resurgence of German or Japanese power or the rise of others who might emulate Hitler and the Japanese militarists.

In 1969, when Richard Nixon, Cold Warrior personified, entered the White House, it was clear that most Americans had had their fill of war and confrontation. The country was eager to end the wasting of American lives abroad, no longer persuaded that a hostile world would deny Americans their freedom if they stopped spending billions to support the appetite of the military-industrial complex. The endless war in Vietnam had changed American attitudes, led the people to question the wisdom of their leaders, eroded support for overseas military adventure. The United States had to disengage from the Vietnamese conflict. Perhaps the time to end the Cold War had arrived as well. No one was quicker to perceive the new public mood than Richard Nixon. No one was better able to free the country from the tyranny of hysterical anticommunism than the man who had contributed so much to fanning that hysteria. As one Washington wit remarked, he was the first president since the end of World War II who did not have to guard his flanks against attack by Richard Nixon.

Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, like all postwar American leaders, sought a stable world order in which American interests would be preserved. Like their predecessors, they considered the containment of Soviet influence central to that end. But they confronted a Soviet Union that had gained strategic parity with the United States and whose leaders believed their country to be on the verge of becoming the world’s preeminent power.

After 1825, the Americans resolutely turned their backs on Europe. The opportunities, and problems, lay in their own hemisphere. In 1835, confessing to an omission from his great work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that “the Union … has, properly speaking, no foreign interests to discuss.” Half a century later, another foreign analyst, James Bryce, wrote in the American Commonwealth, “The one principle to which the American people have learnt to cling in foreign affairs is that the less they have the better.”

At first sight, Bryce’s comment seems exaggerated. After all, the preceding decades had been studded by disputes with Europe, especially with his own country. Yet in a world-political sense he was right: With extremely rare exceptions, America only tangled with European powers over interests near at hand, over territory and influence in neighboring areas, or – during the Civil War – over issues emerging from that national trial.

The Pursuit of Commerce

The most persistent exception to this generalization lies in the field of foreign trade and commerce. After 1812 the American merchant marine lost the advantage – and it had been an advantage despite the depredations of preceding years – of neutral status while Europe was at war. Nevertheless, after a brief slump the marine grew rapidly, and Americans took pride in the fact. This growth reflected an explosion in international trade, vigorously shared in by the United States itself, rather than the superior competitiveness of American shipowners.

To the Declaration of Independence

Twenty-five years before the Revolution, no important person dreamed of independence. Few thought of an “American” identity in any political sense. The word itself was more often used in Britain. Even after the affrays at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, most Anglo-Americans refused to face the prospect of a breach with the mother country. As late as the spring of 1776 John Adams wrote to an impatient correspondent, “After all, my friend, I do not wonder that so much reluctance has been shown to the measure of independency. All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great and uncertain effects.” Although by this time Adams and others felt independence desirable, even inevitable, they knew that many, even among Adams’s colleagues in the Continental Congress, shrank from that step.

Of course, Americans were proudly aware of their burgeoning growth. From midcentury onward, Benjamin Franklin, the best-known colonial figure, spokesman in London for Pennsylvania and sometimes other colonies, frequently boasted of it. Franklin even talked of an American “empire.” For him, however, this was to be but an increasingly important component of the larger empire centered in London, at least until the American population outstripped that of the metropol as a result of what he called “the American multiplication table.” On the eve of the Revolution, others joined Franklin. For example, Samuel Adams, John’s cousin, wrote in 1774, “It requires but a small portion of the gift of discernment for anyone to foresee, that providence will erect a mighty empire in America.”

The American question in the war

The coming of the Great War had little or nothing directly to do with the United States. It was a culmination of complex intra-European conflicts which had at least four dimensions: the French-German contention over Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkan crisis brought about by efforts of various nationality groups to assert their independence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or of the Ottoman Empire, the German-British rivalry over naval expansion, and the general colonial disputes. In none of these conflicts had the United States been directly involved. Its military power had grown considerably, and it had come to possess an overseas empire. But its presence in global geopolitical affairs had been primarily confined to the Caribbean and the Pacific, even though it had developed extensive economic and ideological influences throughout the world. The very fact that war broke out in Europe without any sense of American involvement revealed that, much as the United States had begun to make itself conspicuous on the global stage, its mere existence and power alone were insufficient to prevent a major catastrophe in international affairs. As the great powers of Europe one after another mobilized for war in July 1914, and as they formally began fighting against one another in August, the United States recoiled in disbelief, incredulous that the civilized nations should thus stumble into fratricide but, all the same, relieved that at least the American people were spared the tragedy.

The diplomacy of war

World War II (1939–45) was far more global than World War I. Few areas of the world, if any, were untouched by the conflagration that had begun in Europe, spread to Russia and the Middle East, merged with the Asian war, and even involved Latin America. The entire world became divided into the allies (officially termed the United Nations) and the Axis, with a few nations (e.g., Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland) maintaining neutrality.

Only the United States, however, could be said to be involved in all theaters of the war, in the Atlantic as well as the Pacific, in North Africa as well as Southeast Asia, and in the Middle East as well as South America. In this sense the war was the culminating point in the story of the steady globalization of the United States; having established its leadership position during World War I, it now exercised its role militarily, economically, and ideologically so forcefully that the world after World War II could truly be said to have been a product of American power and influence.

This is not the place to recount in detail the course of the war. Suffice it to say that in terms of military developments there were three stages in the history of World War II as far as the United States was concerned: from December 1941 to January 1943; from January 1943 to August 1944; and from then on to the end of the Pacific war in August 1945. The first three sections in this chapter briefly describe the course of the war in these three stages and point to some key themes in U.S. strategy and foreign policy as the nation fought the war and at the same time prepared for the peace.

The rise of the West

The world on the eve of the Great War was European-dominated. As we trace the history of American foreign relations from 1913 to 1945, it is important to recall that the United States had come into existence and conducted its external affairs in a world system in which European military power, economic pursuits, and cultural activities predominated. This had not always been the case. Before the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Chinese Empire in East Asia had been equal contenders for power and influence. In fact, as the European nation-states had fought one another almost without interruption throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a dispassionate observer might have predicted that those states would soon exhaust themselves and that the more unified empires of the Middle East and East Asia – collectively known as “Asia,” the “Orient,” or the “East” – might in the long run prove much more important determinants of world affairs.

As Paul Kennedy and others have argued, however, it was the very divided nature of European affairs that proved decisive in the ascendance of the region in the international community. Because the nation-state was in a virtually constant state of war or of war preparedness, it had to develop a centralized administrative structure for mobilizing armed forces and collecting taxes to pay for them. These, which John Brewer has termed the “sinews of power,” were systematically developed by the European monarchies throughout the seventeenth century, and during the following century the struggle for power among the nation-states came to define the basic nature of European international relations.

Like most American wars, the War of 1812 was not followed by a period of reponse, but rather by one of nationalism, here marked by efforts to foster American trade, expand territorially, and develop influence in parts of the hemisphere previously of little concern. These endeavors culminated in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. In his annual message of that year, President James Monroe asserted principles that, though not shouted to the world, had often influenced and even guided his predecessors. By giving public expression to these themes, he proclaimed a policy of diplomatic independence stronger than any his predecessors had dared.

At the very beginning of the period, in 1815, there occurred an incident that, though substantively trivial, expressed the new spirit. Monroe, still secretary of state, directed negotiators of a commercial convention with England to insist upon the principle of the alternat. By this principle, when major states made treaties, the name of each alternately took precedence in the text and, on the signture page of the copy it was to keep, each delegation signed on the preferred left hand side. Although partially followed in Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain and completely in the Louisiana agreements, most American treaties, including those ending the Revolution and the Wars of 1812, did not follow the alternat – Europeans took precendence. Monroe considered this demeaning, as did John Quincy Adams, one of the negotiators at London. Adam’s colleagues, Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin, were prepared to ignore their instructions and Adams’s opinion, but he thought them around by a threat to with hold his signature from the convention.

The Civil War created the beginnings of a new world for United States foreign policy, but it was another generation before that future could be realized. Out of the deaths of 600,000 Americans emerged, slowly but with certainty, a different nation, which replaced Jacksonian decentralization with centralization, the presidencies of James Buchanan and Rutherford B. Hayes with those of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the Jeffersonian agrarian-ideal commercial farmer with the Andrew Carnegie–J. P. Morgan ideal of the billion-dollar U.S. Steel Corporation, and the 1840s laissez-faire capitalism of James K. Polk’s Democrats with the late 1890s corporate capitalism of Senator Mark Hanna’s Republicans. Of special importance, the nation built on these four domestic transformations to construct a foreign policy that replaced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 with the Open Door policy of 1899–1900; that is, Americans were finished with land expansion from sea to sea. They were confident now in their supremacy over much of the Western Hemisphere and embarked on an imperialist course in parts of Asia and Africa.

These historic changes, of course, did not start cleanly in the 1860s. Jefferson and Polk, for example, had demonstrated the incredible potential for presidential power long before Theodore Roosevelt’s birth. The faith that supplying China’s market could put depression-ridden Americans to work dated back to the mid-1780s, not the mid-1890s. Even the once firmly held belief that the Civil War gave birth to the industrialized United States has been disproved. The annual growth rate of U.S. manufactures was 7.8 percent between 1840 and 1860, but 6 percent between 1870 and 1900. Between 1860 and 1870, the value added by manufacturing increased by only 2.3 percent annually, the lowest rate of increase in the nineteenth century.