The Myth of the Reluctant Superpower,

Globalization and Its Conceits,

Strategy of Openness

excerpted from the book

American Empire

The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy

by Andrew Bacevich

Harvard University Press, 2002, paper

p1
Madeleine Albright, Feb 1998
We have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.

The Myth of the Reluctant Superpower

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Theodore Roosevelt, December 1899
Of course, our whole national history has been one of expansion.

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[Historian Charles] Beard approached his task by examining the past through the lens of political economy. His first major book, Economic Origins of the Constitution, scandalized patriotic-minded defenders of historical orthodoxy by arguing that the Framers had pursued their task less under the spell of the high ideals of 1776 than with their eyes trained on the main chance." Encouraging commerce and manufactures, protecting private property, establishing financial instruments essential for economic development-these were the issues that preoccupied those participating in the secret deliberations in Philadelphia-issues in which they themselves had a large personal stake. The product of their labors preserved that stake. "The Constitution," Beard concluded, "was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities."

... For Beard, the Civil War became the pivotal event in the history of the republic, resolving that competition and thus opening the way for the next stage in the nation's development. At root, this "second American Revolution" was not a dispute over slavery, Union, or states' rights, but a contest between two irreconcilable economic systems, each pushing to expand and facing inevitable decline if denied the opportunity to do so. On the one side was the burgeoning "industrial vortex" of the North, on the other a plantation economy confined to "a limited territory with incompetent labor on soil of diminishing fertility. "5 Appomattox settled the issue once and for all. Although in destroying slavery the North's victory brought some modest benefit to those freed from bondage, the real winners were rapacious captains of industry in the North and, to a lesser extent, the South. The result was the Gilded Age, a paroxysm of creativity, plunder, and excess that gave rise to the nation into which Beard was born.

Preoccupied until the 1930s with recasting U.S. history in terms of class conflict, Beard relegated foreign policy to the status of afterthought. Foreign policy derived from domestic policy. Its primary purpose was to advance commercial interests. Writing before U.S. entry into World War I, Beard acknowledged the American tradition of "splendid isolation," only to dismiss it as fiction. Whatever its pretensions to distancing itself from the rest of the world, he noted, "at no time has the United States refused to defend American commercial enterprise in any part of the globe." From the very outset, the United States had "been a world power, as far as has been necessary. "

American participation in World War I alerted Beard to the hazards implicit in commercial diplomacy. Although Beard supported U.S. entry into the war as necessary to check German militarism, his enlistment in Wilson's internationalist crusade proved short-lived.' No sooner had the guns fallen silent than the debacle of the Paris peace conference and the release of documents from German and Russian archives began raising doubts that the war had been, as advertised, a war of German aggression that threatened the survival of democracy. In short order, skeptical journalists and historians were advancing arguments that undercut the official interpretation of America's own role in the war. Specifically, these revisionists challenged the notion that the United States had remained genuinely neutral during 19141917 and that in entering the war it fought to advance democratic ideals. Discounting Wilson's high-sounding rhetoric, revisionists characterized U.S. wartime policies as self-serving, reflecting an eagerness to cash in on Europe's misfortune. A phony neutrality permitted a massive trade in arms with the Allies, propped up by American loans. The result at home was large profits for bankers and arms merchants and a general economic boom, sustainable only so long as the slaughter on the western front continued. By 1917 those policies culminated in intervention at the behest of Wall Street tycoons who would face ruin if Great Britain and France lost the war. Once in the war, Wilson's idealistic posturing notwithstanding, the U.S. government turned a blind eye to secret deals and became complicit in Allied schemes of imperial aggrandizement.

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In the decades following the Civil War, [Beard] wrote, "as the domestic market was saturated and capital heaped up for investment, the pressure for the expansion of the American commercial empire rose with corresponding speed." Henceforth, sustaining American prosperity under existing political arrangements would require the unimpeded growth of trade and investment abroad. Here for Beard was the master key that unlocked the inner secrets of American statecraft. It not only explained why the United States had gone to war in 1898 and in 1917, but also revealed more fully the nexus between politics and diplomacy: American leaders chose intervention abroad in order to dodge politically difficult decisions at home-decisions that might call into question the constitutional framework that guaranteed the privileges of the propertied classes.

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Industrialists, bankers, and farmers-and their advocates in Washington-had long since concluded that the domestic market alone would not satisfy their own or the nation's requirements. They believed, wrote Beard, that 'American industry, under the regime of technology, is producing more commodities than the American people can use or consume, and the 'surplus' must be exported." The same applied to capital and the products of American agriculture. Influential members of these constituencies believed that failure to secure outlets for these surpluses would have (and in the 1930s was having) ruinous consequences, not only obliterating individual fortunes and causing widespread economic hardship but also threatening the social order.

For these adepts at the center of things," therefore, the essence of statecraft was not the once-in-a-generation crisis that obliged a McKinley or a Wilson to choose between war and peace. What really mattered were the long stretches between wars, when the attention of the press and public lay elsewhere. That was when the adepts, left alone, addressed the issues that really counted. Reduced to its essentials, U.S. foreign policy was an either/or proposition: a question of commercial expansion or stagnation and decay; world power or economic decline."

Viewed in this light, exporting economic surpluses-the "industrialist way of escape"-constituted the overriding national interest. It was not simply a matter of making money-although it included that, of course-but of preserving long-standing arrangements for allocating power and privilege within American society. According to Beard efforts to protect that interest ran like "a powerful motif through state papers from the inauguration of President McKinley to the retirement of President Hoover." For all the peculiarities in style and temper distinguishing McKinley from Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft from Wilson, or Warren G. Harding from Calvin Coolidge, each of those presidents had adhered to a common strategy. Though cloaked in professions of America's aversion to old-fashioned imperialism and its hopes for world peace, the centerpiece of that strategy was economic expansionism. Implementing that strategy involved "pushing and holding open doors in all parts of the world with all the engines of government ranging from polite coercion to the use of arms. 1127 Only by opening the world to American trade and investment could the United States flourish and ensure the permanence of its existing domestic order.

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[Charles Beard]
[any nation] "compelled to devote immense energies and a large part of its annual wealth production to wars, to preparation for wars, and to paying for past wars" risked becoming Sparta, its civil and cultural institutions transformed into "the servants of military purposes and the military mind."

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[Charles] Beard insisted that the preoccupation with opening doors misconstrued the nation's true interests. To be sure, "the supreme interest of the United States" properly included a commitment to providing all Americans with a decent standard of living. But the desideratum of economic growth did not trump all other considerations. The nation's true interests required statesmen to pursue economic objectives in a way "conducive to the promotion of individual and social virtues within the frame of national security." In Beard's view, the importance of this final point was paramount. To pursue the nation's material well-being by venturing beyond the frame of national security-by engaging in frequent interventions abroad or in wars not involving national survival-was to court overextension, exhaustion, and collapse.

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Beard generally viewed moral and humanitarian arguments on half of internationalism as mere camouflage. But to those given to the "theological assertion" that God had anointed "American law, order, civilization, and flag" to serve as his agents, he replied by calling attention to the country's callous neglect of its own poor. America's own boundaries contained more than enough human tragedy and misfortune to absorb the energies of citizens eager to uplift the downtrodden. Citing the plight of several million African Americans, Beard suggested that Those who are deeply moved in the virtuous sense implied by 'the White Man's burden' can... find extensive outlets for their moral urges at home," thus postponing any requirement "for acquiring by force additional congeries of 'brown brothers." To the extent that the United States did have obligations to the rest of humankind, it would be more likely to fulfill those obligations by setting an example than by imposing its values on others.

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To secure [access to international markets], American leaders devised a supple and highly innovative strategy that [historian William Appleman] Williams dubbed 'Open Door imperialism.' The famous Open Door Notes issued by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 and 1900 both inaugurated this shift in strategy and provided its definitive expression. The Open Door Notes declared America's interest in preserving China's territorial integrity and in claiming for the United States the same privileges enjoyed in China by the European powers and Japan.

... In Williams ' view, the architects of the open-door policy did not foist it on the masses. They had no need to: Americans embraced the policy as their own, because it encompassed aspirations that extended well beyond the economic realm. Bundled into the concept of openness were several other values. A world open to American enterprise and influence was a world conducive not only to economic opportunity but also to political liberty. In the eyes of most Americans, according to Williams, the two were linked inextricably. "Expanding the marketplace enlarged the area of freedom. Expanding the area of freedom enlarged the marketplace. Openness became a precondition of freedom and democracy. It implied stability and security. (Resistance to openness evidenced untrustworthiness if not outright antagonism.)

America's own commitment to openness testified to its own benign intentions-and therefore justified American exertions on behalf of an open world. Openness was not simply a cover for exploitation. "Most imperialists believed that an American empire would be humanitarian, and most humanitarians believed that doing good would be good for business."

The dogma of openness became a component of American ideology, the principle upon which the world should be organized, the basis for a broad national consensus on foreign policy, and a rationale for mustering and employing American power. In essence, wrote Williams, the open-door policy legitimated "the endless expansion of the American frontier in the name of self-determination, progress, and peace."

Williams laid the template of the open door upon the major events of the twentieth century and pronounced the fit to be precise. In doing so he turned the myth of the reluctant superpower on its head. In taking the United States into World War I, Woodrow Wilson had revealed "the Imperialism of Idealism," a crusade to graft American values onto the entire world and to thwart all others-such as Lenin-who fancied themselves engaged in an analogous undertaking. The isolationism reputed to characterize American diplomacy during the interwar period was, according to Williams, little more than "legend." World War II-commonly viewed as a conflict thrust upon the United States and fought against aggression-became, in Williams' view, "the War for the American Frontier." But it was in interpreting the war's aftermath in light of the open door that Williams showed himself at his most audacious.

The war's end, wrote Williams, left Americans "casually confident that their earlier visions of Manifest Destiny were materializing as the reality of the present." Viewing the atomic bomb as a "self-starting magic lamp," they looked forward to the arrival of "their long-sought City on the Hill in the form of a defacto American Century embracing the globe." The officials who directed U.S. foreign policy took it for granted that "such benevolent Americanization of the world would bring peace and plenty without the moral embarrassment and administrative distractions of old-fashioned empires. "

p30
[Arthur] Schlesinger
" who can doubt that there is an American empire?-an 'informal' empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet."

p31
William Appleman Williams
"Assume empire is necessary, what is the optimum size of the empire; and what are the proper-meaning moral as well as pragmatic-means of structuring, controlling, and defending the empire so that it will in practice produce welfare and democracy for the largest number of the imperial population?"

Globalization and Its Conceits

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Democrats and Republicans may cross swords about the feasibility Of ballistic missile defense. They may differ on the wisdom of intervening in ethnic conflicts and may disagree about the danger posed by global warming. But these amount to little more than quibbles over operational details. When it comes to fundamentals undergirding U.S. foreign policy, consensus reigns on all but the extreme left and right.

p43
Herman Melville in 1850
"We Americans are the peculiar chosen people-the Israel of our time."

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During the administration of George H. W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, a highly regarded national security specialist, served as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-ranking civilian official in the Department of Defense. Among his other duties, Wolfowitz was responsible for coordinating the annual review of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), one of the documents forming the basis of the Pentagon's system of planning, programming, and budgeting. In "normal" times, interest in the DPG did not extend much beyond the Pentagon. Changes from one year to the next tended to be incremental. Although it might redistribute service budget shares ever so slightly or determine the fate of some controversial new weapon system, the latest DPG could be counted on to leave overall strategy largely intact.

Wolfowitz understood that the early 1990s were not normal times. The Cold War had ended, and the apparent success of Operation Desert Storm had elevated American power and prestige to unparalleled heights. Believing the moment ripe for a full-fledged overhaul of national security strategy, Wolfowitz seized the opportunity. As he saw it, the annual review of the DPG, usually a matter of intramural concern, offered an ideal means of prodding not just the military but the entire national security establishment into reassessing American strategy.

For Wolfowitz, rethinking strategy required a frank acknowledgment of actually existing power relationships combined with an unsentimental appraisal of long-term U.S. interests. The draft DPG prepared under his supervision offered both. The central reality of the new era was American preeminence. At the moment, plausible challenges to that preeminence did not exist. The paramount interest of the United States was to perpetuate that situation.

Accordingly, the document that Wolfowitz drafted in the wake of the Persian Gulf War called for U.S. strategy to focus henceforth on "convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests." Properly conceived, American policies would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." Beyond such efforts to co-opt the willing, however, it was also incumbent upon the United States to "maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Though couched in measured language-"mechanisms" was a euphemism for superior military power, for example-the draft DPG was in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.

Which was precisely the problem. Wolfowitz's DPG abandoned any pretence of reluctance about being a superpower. Worse, it implied a radical departure from the conception of international politics embedded in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, or John F. Kennedy's unconditional promise "to assure the survival and success of liberty." That was the language of American statecraft. The draft DPG's candor-with the interaction of power and interests eclipsing universal ideals as the grammar of statecraft-had a decidedly alien ring. That such an approach might have found favor in nineteenth-century Paris or Berlin was perhaps to be expected, but it would not in twentieth-century Washington, D.C..

Strategy of Openness

p79
Albert Beveridge, April 1898
"Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours ... And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright."

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America's strategy of openness, in place for more than a century, derives from twin convictions widely held by members of the political elite and the foreign policy establishment. The first conviction is that robust and continuing economic growth is an imperative, absolute and unconditional. The aggregate wealth and sheer affluence of American society maybe the greatest that the world has ever seen, but they do not suffice. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the famed slogan devised by James Carville during the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign has enshrined itself as an inviolable rule of national politics: "It's the economy, stupid." According to Carville's Law, officeholders who allow the economy to stagnate get sent packing. Those who can plausibly claim credit for fostering prosperity, whatever their other misdeeds or indiscretions, win forgiveness-and re-election.

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The nation's political leaders and their economic advisers concluded that by itself the internal American market was insufficient to sustain the necessary level of economic growth.

Reiterating views that [Charles] Beard and [William Appleman] Williams attributed to prior generations, U.S. officials in the 1990s-especially members of the Clinton administration-concluded that American prosperity was unsustainable absent access to an ever-expanding array of lucrative new outlets for trade and investment. According to Warren Christopher, "We've passed the point where we can sustain prosperity on sales just within the United States." Given the limitations of the internal market, expansion abroad became essential. Speaking with characteristic directness, Samuel R. Berger said that "we have to continue to open markets" for one very obvious reason: "because that's where the customers are ... We have a mature market-we have to expand, we have to grow." Madeleine Aibright agreed: "our own prosperity depends on having partners that are open to our exports, investments, and ideas." Or, most succinctly, "Growth at home depends upon growth abroad." Those particular words are Bill Clinton's, but the sentiment is one that both Democrats and Republicans have endorsed: if the United States is to expand economically, it has Lo choice but to look abroad.

p114
Thomas Friedman
"We want 'enlargement' of both our values and our Pizza Huts. We want the world to follow our lead and become democratic and capitalistic, with a Web site in every pot, a Pepsi on every lip, Microsoft Windows on every computer and with everyone, everywhere, pumping their own gas."

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Theodore Roosevelt, April 1903
"There is a homely adage which runs, "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." If the American nation will speak softly and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far."

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Theodore Roosevelt, May 1904
"All that we desire is to see all neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendliness ... if it keeps order and pays its obligations, then it need fear no interference from the United States. Brutal wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may finally require intervention by some civilized nation, and ... the United States cannot ignore this duty."

American Empire - Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy

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