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.

The tension of the years 1958–62 was without parallel in the four decades following World War II. Concerns over Berlin and Cuba led American forces to confront Soviet forces in situations in which a misstep, a rash action by an aggressive or nervous officer, might have led to war, might have led to the incineration and irradiation of much of the world. Nikita Khrushchev provoked each of these crises. The Soviet triumph in the space race, the launching of Sputnik in 1957, confirmed his faith in the ultimate triumph of communism, and he hoped to accelerate the process in the era of his leadership. He found American arrogance intolerable and was intensely eager to terminate it by reversing the strategic balance. Berlin he delighted in calling the “testicles” of the West: “Every time I give them a yank they holler.” Cuba, ninety miles from the coast of Florida, provided a convenient platform for placing the nuclear missiles that would teach Americans what it felt like to live under the shadow of the bomb, would put an end to the American penchant for nuclear blackmail.

Although provoked or precipitated by Soviet behavior, the crises of this era cannot be understood without recognizing the interactive quality of Soviet actions and statements, the extent to which they were responses to the policies of the United States and its allies. The Soviets had reacted with notable calm to West German integration into NATO, presumably recognizing that NATO contained the Germans as well as the Soviet bloc.

What historians write and teach is a hopefully constructive synthesis of creative thought, labor in the primary sources, and absorption of and reaction to the work of others. The following comments direct interested readers to a selection of the historical literature that has shaped The Creation of a Republican Empire. For a comprehensive list of writings on American diplomacy, though limited to works published before 1981, see Richard Dean Burns, ed., Guide to American Foreign Policy Since 1700 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1983).

The Canvas and the Prism

John Quincy Adams’s career is traced in Samuel Flagg Bemis’s magisterial biography John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1949) and John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), based very largely on Adams’s papers, which Bemis was the first to use. Bemis, whose own physical and intellectual affinity with Adams was often noted, treats his subject sympathetically.

The European war and U.S. neutrality

The several months between September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and the spring of 1940, when the target of the attack shifted to Western Europe, have been referred to as the period of a “phony war.” War had been declared by Britain and France immediately after the German invasion of Poland, but there was actually little fighting between the two sides. After Warsaw fell on September 27, there was little further military action, and there were even some attempts at reestablishing a semblance of status quo in Europe without more bloodshed. Although German and French troops confronted one another along their frontier, they did not exchange fire. There was an atmosphere of unreality, and many doubted if this was actually the beginning of another world war.

And yet there was nothing “phony” about the developments in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union, taking advantage of the just-signed nonaggression pact with Germany, sent its troops to Poland from the east, in effect partitioning Poland into two. Soviet forces then turned north, invading Finland in mid-October. The severe fighting continued until March 1940, when the parties signed a peace accord, which included some territorial cessions to the Soviet Union. In Asia, the Sino-Japanese War went on. Although the intensity of ground fighting had abated, Japanese air attacks on Chinese railroads, military bases, and the wartime capital of Chung-king were stepped up. In the meantime, just before the German spring offensive began in the West, a group of Chinese politicians led by Wang Ching-wei set up a pro-Japanese government in Nan-king.

America’s war in Vietnam is the textbook example of great-power arrogance and self-deception, of the abuse and dissipation of wealth and power. American leaders knew and cared little about the people of Vietnam, their history, their culture, their aspirations. Vietnam was of no intrinsic importance to the United States. In the years when the French controlled Indochina, they pursued a mercantilist policy, allowing minimal foreign involvement in the region’s economy. American business developed no stake there, and although the area was potentially rich in natural resources, there was nothing there that could not be obtained elsewhere, or that the locals could afford to deny to the world market. Similarly, the region was of minimal strategic importance. A case could certainly be made for keeping Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam from being controlled by a presumed adversary, whether Japan in 1941 or China or the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War. But, of course, a case for containing the influence of an antagonist could be made for every corner of the earth – and outer space as well. Friendly control of what had once been French Indochina was unquestionably desirable. But if Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam were all hostile to the United States, the shift in the world balance of power would be imperceptible. No vital American interest would be threatened. Nonetheless, more than fifty thousand Americans gave their lives in a war in Indochina, as did hundreds of thousands of, Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese.

Disarmament

The postwar world began in 1919, with the signing of the Versailles peace treaty. Nobody could tell then how stable the new structure of peace would be, or even what the structure meant in different regions of the world. With the U.S. Senate refusing to ratify the treaty, some were already writing off the just begun postwar period as but a brief interlude in otherwise conflict-ridden international affairs, and many were pessimistic about the future of the League of Nations as well as other arrangements the powers had worked out in Paris.

The world during 1919–20 did, indeed, seem very precarious, little different from the situation on the eve of the Great War. Not only did the United States not participate in the League, thus apparently reverting to prewar isolationism, but the peace treaty was proving extremely unpopular in many countries: Germany, Italy, China, and others. In these countries movements were already developing to denounce the peace treaty and what it signified. The Germans condemned the punitive aspects of the peace, the Italians thought they should have gotten more out of it, and the Chinese were disatisfied because the treaty had not forced the Japanese to withdraw from Shantung.

The situation was still unstable in the Soviet Union, and Poland seized the opportunity to invade the revolutionary nation. In Hungary, in the meantime, a radical government established itself, giving rise to fears elsewhere that Bolshevism was spreading. The creation, in 1919, of the Communist International, to coordinate Communist activities throughout the world, conjured up the spectacle of a global movement to challenge the peace.

The diplomacy of the dollar

Any stable system of international relations must be built on economic foundations, and the situation in the 1920s was no exception. Indeed, given the devastation brought upon the European economies, no postwar order could be conceived that did not include an economic agenda. How to restore the European economies and, through them, reestablish stable international economic relations was a key issue of the postwar period, the more so since, as noted earlier, the Versailles peace treaty had failed to address the issue squarely.

The Great War had cost Europe dearly; 9 million of its youths had died in war, another 20 million had been wounded, and more than $400 billion had been expended on battle. Inevitably, the European countries, victors and vanquished alike, suffered from a decline in industrial and agricultural production, which, combined with a severe inflation, caused social and political instability. Moreover, foreign exchange mechanisms remained confused. The system of multilateral trade and investment that had functioned before the war had been based on the gold standard and the principle of currency convertibility, both of which had been given up during the war and could not be automatically restored when the peace came. (Only the United States lifted the ban on gold shipments right after the war.)

After the death of Bajirao in 1740, there was a short and inconsequential scramble for the powerful office of Peshwa. Shahu, however, overrode the opposition and chose Bajirao's son, Balaji Bajirao, for the office. At the time (and currently in Maharashtra), he was known as Nana Saheb, and will be thus referred to throughout this section. He was only nineteen years old when he assumed office (recall that his father, Bajirao had been only twenty); his experience had been somewhat more in administration than accompanying his father on the yearly campaigns.

We shall divide the period from Nana Saheb's taking office to the watershed Battle of Panipat (1761) into two sections. First, we shall look at the expanding areas controlled by the Marathas, and there were many. Maratha leaders pushed into Rajasthan, the area around Delhi, and on into the Punjab. They attacked Bundelkund and the borders of Uttar Pradesh. Further east, the Marathas attacked Orissa and the borders of Bengal and Bihar. In the south, Maratha armies repeatedly crossed the Karnatak, collecting tribute. Second, we shall look at what sort of polity developed behind these expanding “frontiers.” Some of the themes will be the development of largely autonomous Maratha polities, problems posed by the remaining armed, elite groups in the areas conquered, and styles of factional conflict, and we will return to the theme of social mobility.

How, then, might we describe the Maratha polity? At the outset, let us dispose of several notions prevalent in the historical literature. The Maratha polity was not an empire, if, by that, we have an image of imperial Rome or the Mughal Empire. There was no graded civilian/military ranking with attendant symbols of authority. Those in the military were not, until late in the eighteenth century, full-time professionals. The Maratha polity did not, and could not, impose a uniform legal or revenue system. It never minted a uniform, high-quality currency; neither did it build the straight roads which were the pride of the Roman Empire. Large parts of the Maratha polity, unlike Rome or the Mughal Empire, were permanently alienated to military commanders. There was no grand, imperial architecture.

Another term, in favor since the nineteenth century in writings on Marathas, is “confederacy.” This term, also, fails to describe many central aspects of the Maratha polity. Confederacy implies a long-term shared power among groups or individuals of more-or-less equal power for mutual benefit or gain. The models which come to mind are the co-operation between the Swiss cantonments or the pre-Revolution American colonies. Confederacy implies a long-term cast of characters (the confederates) to make and execute plans. In contrast, as we have analyzed, it was characteristic of the Maratha polity that the inner circle of power changed with each generation, sometimes as frequently as each decade. Men joined or left the inner circle, depending on the stability and strength of the ruling family.

Balaji Vishwanath died in 1720. Against the objections of other ministers, Shahu appointed Balaji's son, Bijirao. Here we meet, after Shivaji, the most charismatic and dynamic leader in Maratha history. He was only twenty years old and already had a reputation for rapid decisions and a passion for military adventure. Bajirao had been on the expedition to Delhi in 1719, and was convinced that the Mughal Empire was breaking up and could not resist a Maratha drive to the north into Malwa and beyond. This was the major theme of the next twenty years of his ceaseless military and administrative activity.

This judgement by Bajirao was quite correct. Let us consider the various regions of the Mughal Empire, starting in the north and working south. Ever since his appointment to the Punjab in 1713, Abdul Samad Khan had sent little information to Delhi beyond the yearly tribute. By the time his son succeeded him in 1726, the Punjab was, functionally, an independent, tribute-paying state (with its own problems with the Sikhs). Awadh followed the same course. Sagdat Khan had been appointed governor in 1722, and independently removed mansabdars and changed jagirs. Four years later, the attempt to remove him resulted in his taking possession of Awadh. Thereafter, the province paid some tribute, but there was no Mughal authority inside it. In 1727 in Bengal, the son of Murshid Quli Khan succeeded to his father's governorship, and the province became functionally independent. The Rajput states, always internally autonomous, expanded in the 1720s.

After the Peshwa took refuge with the British, the pattern followed the familiar course of a disputed Maratha succession. The British offered support to an otherwise weak candidate, in return for substantial grants of revenue-producing land. More important, the British asserted the legitimacy and authority of their candidate over the Maratha houses. (This sequence is structurally no different from the British attempt to set up Raghobadada a half-century earlier, or the Nizam's parallel attempts in the same period.) Just as predictably, Holkar and others at Pune set up a rival candidate and sought allies. What differed this time were the resources and organization of the British. Lord Wellesley and Lord Lake organized a vast, comprehensive set of coordinated campaigns, which put 60,000 trained men in the field on widely separated fronts. The aims were to divide the Maratha houses, break Shinde's modern army and regular income, and seize income-producing territory. During the monsoon of 1803, the British neutralized Holkar, the rival Peshwa, and several of the smaller houses (such as Patwardhan) with treaties.

In the months that followed, the war was fought on several fronts. One British army engaged Shinde and the Bhonsle forces in northern Maharashtra, the major battle costing thousands of casualties on both sides. With the defeat of the Maratha army, the British took Burhanpur and its nearby fortress, Asir. They also succeeded in stopping the traditional raiding tactics adopted by the Bhonsle forces. Simultaneously, another British army moved on Delhi, Agra, and Shinde's lands north of the Chambal river.