Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Beyond the strategic choices made, Roosevelt was simply a master at shaping public opinion through his frequent “fireside chats” with America, as well as a slick political manipulator of his political opposition through his consistent willingness to “reach across the aisle” for bipartisan support. Once the war began, FDR also benefited greatly from the public’s strong historical awareness of the mistakes made by politicians following WWI. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, for example, an ardent isolationist prior to WWII, came to realize during the course of the war how history seemed to vindicate Woodrow Wilson and vilify his main Republican opponent in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge.

  As for the Bush administration since 9/11, it was not known for generating any long-term bipartisan support for its “global war on terror”—just the opposite. With the political parties so clearly divided over Iraq, it’s fair to say that congressional oversight of the Bush administration’s wartime policies was highly restricted by Republican fear that any damaging information provided would lead to Democrats seeking to derail the war effort. This partisan rationale led congressional Republicans to go easy on the Bush administration while encouraging the White House to become even more secretive as the extreme partisanship wore on. Unlike Harry Truman’s administration, which clearly benefited from the general bipartisanship generated by the previous war, as well as its tendency to discourage strong ideological stances on the part of politicians, Bush’s post-9/11 “honeymoon” was relatively short, both domestically and internationally, as so far the “global war on terror” has created no identifiable zeitgeist that politicians have been able to harness for bipartisanship. Indeed, to the extent one has been created, it has been limited overwhelmingly to military personnel who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over time, as many of these military leaders transition to postcareer prominence in the political realm, this situation is likely to improve.

  4. BE REALISTIC ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN ACHIEVE BY INTERVENING.

  Being a national security novice and not given to seeking out military advice, Wilson tended to misjudge what the application of military force overseas could generate in political leverage. In other military interventions, such as sending U.S. Marines to Siberia following the Russian Revolution, he clearly underestimated the local hostility engendered and overestimated what U.S. forces could achieve. Wilson’s first-term effort to conclude a Pan-American nonaggression treaty that would “serve as a model for the European Nations when peace is at last brought about” died in large part because America’s previous and ongoing military interventions in the Caribbean and Mexico engendered significant fear in Latin America that such a treaty would simply condone more such interventions in the future. For Wilson thereupon to demand Europe’s colonial powers display a more hands-off attitude toward the Middle East naturally came off as somewhat hypocritical. When a rising economic power like America looked upon a “level playing field,” it saw unlimited opportunity, while competing states naturally feared they’d be shut out and local ones feared they’d be competitively bulldozed. Transpose this perspective to China today in its relations with Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa and you’ll spot many of the same fears among both local governments and external great powers. It’s easy to push a “consultative” model of political interactions when you know your overwhelming economic competitiveness will grant you sufficient leverage over lesser powers. When military power is used in such situations, it naturally comes off as overkill, thus yielding more local resistance and less leverage than anticipated.

  In the Second World War, America’s rude awakening to the Soviet Union’s postwar intentions was coterminous with Harry Truman’s trial-by-fire adjustment to the office of the presidency following FDR’s death in the spring of 1945. In FDR’s final address to Congress in March of that year, he laid down a rather impossible challenge when he said, “Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the world of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.” FDR had made his pact with the devil (Stalin) much in the same way Churchill had with the Americans: buying victory in the war by accepting a less-than-desirable peace. For Churchill, it was the loss of his empire’s preferential trading system, which meant he traded Great Britain’s empire for his civilization’s ultimate survival. For FDR, leveraging the Soviet Union’s manpower to bleed Nazi Germany allowed him to navigate history’s bloodiest conflict at a stunningly low per capita casualty rate (actually, the lowest in the war among all participants). FDR’s grand strategic brilliance lay primarily in these two accomplishments: giving his successor the chance to dramatically spread our model of a liberal trade order and the legal arbitration of interstate disputes (perfected at home, now projecting abroad), while leaving him not only an America that was financially and economically strong but a public that remained overwhelmingly open to the notion of the responsibilities of global leadership.

  Truman’s brilliance revealed itself in the execution of that dream, curtailing its aspects as required by the immediate Soviet threat of continental aggression across Eurasia. Despite his lack of foreign policy experience (he later admitted he had been an “innocent idealist” when he first met Stalin at the Potsdam Conference), but clearly buttressed by his own combat military experience in WWI, Truman executed a series of very difficult calls across the first twenty-seven months of his presidency, including the first and only use of nuclear weapons (trading that horrific precedent against the likelihood of increasing America’s total wartime casualties by 50 percent in any attempt to subdue Japan’s homeland), the formulation of the Truman Doctrine (picking up bankrupted Britain’s security-assistance role in Greece and Turkey), proposing and getting congressional approval for the Marshall Plan, and launching the Berlin Airlift. All these decisions represented severe contingency responses that emphasized America’s continuing exceptional role as guarantor of freedom, peace, and fair trade while accepting the emerging reality that our definition of that “free world” was rapidly shrinking, meaning we’d be able to protect only ourselves and the rest of what came to be known during the Cold War as the “West.” In 1950, that West constituted roughly a quarter of the world’s population, whereas already one-third of humanity was trapped behind the Iron Curtain, leaving about 40 percent of the planet up for grabs, especially after Europe’s remaining colonial empires fell apart across the next quarter-century.

  In retrospect, this was a stunning comedown from our immediate postwar expectations: Instead of saving the entire world, we secured a mere quarter while “losing” substantially more to our rising rival in the East. But the next steps were relatively simple enough: contain our rivals while replicating our model to the greatest extent possible in the areas we had secured, and give as much attention as we could to replicating ourselves in the remaining ideological “waste spaces” that came to be known, alternatively, as the Third World or the Non-Aligned Movement. In many ways, this is the same sort of realism we need to apply today: locking in political and security alliances with those new adherents to our globalization order (especially rising Asia) while doing our best to replicate our models inside the Gap.

  5. NO POLITICAL SOLUTIONS FOR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.

  Reflecting our “special relationship” with Great Britain across this time period, much of the grand strategic logic animating our effort to project the American System upon the global stage following World War II emanated from a British economist. John Maynard Keynes, whose “spend to save” logic launched a global economic revolution in government interventionary policies in the decades following the 1936 publication of his seminal textbook, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, had his first and primary influence as a grand strategist (or what he called a “master economist”) in his short 1919 treatise (The Economic Consequences of the Peace) condemning the Treaty of Versailles, in whose negotiations he participated as a representative of the Bri
tish Treasury. In this amazingly prescient book, Keynes not only correctly foresaw how Versailles’s harsh peace would fail and ultimately unleash a German “vengeance” that he dared to predict “will not limp,” he likewise underscored how a Europe already deeply dependent on a global economy (and America in particular) could no longer operate in a mode of interstate war while holding on to a standard of living it could only maintain through continuing to interweave its national economies with one another and the larger world outside. In short, “Europe before the war” had so cast its economic lot with the dynamics of regional interdependence and global economic trade that destruction of one of its main components (here Germany) preordained both destruction of the regional whole and great havoc inflicted upon global order.

  To prevent such an outcome, or basically the descent toward global chaos embodied in the economic nationalism of the Great Depression, the commensurate triumph of fascism in Europe, and the unleashing of the most destructive war in human history, Keynes made a series of extraordinarily bold proposals. These proposals, none of which found sufficient execution after WWI, all found their way into being in the American-imposed international order following WWII—including the United Nations; the Bretton Woods Agreements creating an International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (forerunner of the World Trade Organization); the Marshall Plan from America; the long-term logic for a “free-trade union” to unite Europe (foreshadowing the EU); and even the requirement to contain the Communist political threat from the East while promoting a détente-like policy of increasing economic trade. In less than thirty pages of text (Chapter VII: “Remedies”), Keynes projects a long-term solution set that accurately predicts the next seven decades of European history, his key insight being that economic security is the sine qua non of a stable peace. In my opinion, this short book is the most compelling example of sound grand strategy ever put into print. It is also arguably the best single expression of the economic logic behind America’s unstated grand strategy throughout its history. By sticking with his “It’s the economy, stupid!” bias, Keynes articulates, really for the first time in history, not merely a theory of peace through trade, but a grand strategic vision for engineering trade for stability.

  If you want to win a global war on terror through nonkinetics, there is no better blueprint, because engineering trade for stability is the essential guiding principle of our country’s entire development as a nation-state and its rise to global power. The idealism of the Wilsonian impulse notwithstanding, it’s the economic pragmatism of the Keynesian revolution, later embodied in FDR’s New Deal package and subsequently projected upon—admittedly just—the West that makes modern (as in, American-style) globalization possible. That’s not to say American-style globalization is the only answer worth pursuing as we move forward, because it can’t be. It’s just reminding us of our seminal role in shaping the world we live in today. Again, globalization is not some unfamiliar monster, even if it often appears that we are Frankenstein to its unintentional creation.

  Wendell Willkie, Republican nominee for the presidency in the 1940 election, wrote a runaway bestseller in 1943 titled One World, in which he argued that the Versailles Treaty hadn’t worked to keep the European peace because it did not “sufficiently seek solution to the economic problems of the world. Its attempts to solve the world’s problems were primarily political. But political internationalism without economic internationalism is a house built upon sand.” By the early 1940s, this essentially Keynesian view was becoming accepted wisdom, primarily because the Great Depression of the 1930s plus the resumption of world war drove home to most Americans the new reality that their personal freedom stemmed primarily from their economic security—long taken for granted—and that their economic security could be greatly threatened even if their physical security could be maintained.

  As Keynes had previously recognized in WWI-era Europe, the Americans of this era were getting the first great glimpse of the complex interdependency of a then globalizing American economy that today sits so enmeshed in a global economy of our making that we do not recognize its profound revolutionary impact around the planet. Back then, the revolutionary impact of our growing economic and security connectivity with the outside world was felt more at home than abroad: By finally embracing global leadership we were forced to—really for the first time in our history—define Americanism completely, including, over the next quarter-century, finally resolving most of the residual institutional racism in our society as a result of greater international scrutiny. As we now watch globalization make similar demands on traditional societies regarding religious freedom and the rights of minorities and women, the continuing revolutionary impact of our system-creating efforts—first at home and then globally—must be kept in mind. Why? Because we still have that tendency, so much displayed by the Bush administration, to demand immediate political solutions to long-term economic problems.

  6. STATE YOUR POSITIVE GOALS AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.

  Here, Wilson was hamstrung by his election promises to keep America out of Europe’s war, especially after he won reelection in 1916 by a narrow margin. Once into the fight, however, Wilson expressed his idealism in the most ambitious form in his declaration of war on Germany:

  The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.

  What’s interesting about these goals, per Keynes’s harsh criticism of Wilson’s conduct at the Versailles Treaty negotiations, is their intense political focus. Wilson yielded on war reparations and colonial-style mandates for the Middle East and Africa because he felt that creating the political construct of the League of Nations was more important—more crucial to building a stable peace.

  The contrast with Franklin Roosevelt is not as stunning as you might expect, for FDR considered himself a true Wilsonian, having served in his cabinet as an assistant secretary of the Navy. On timing, however, FDR was far more aggressive, preemptively declaring America’s war aims in his joint statement, with Great Britain’s Winston Churchill, of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, more than three months prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Reflecting the New Deal experience, FDR’s Atlantic Charter basically expanded his Four Freedoms construct (speech, religion, from want, and from fear) to encompass the larger world. As Elizabeth Borgwardt argues, “Just because the New Deal had expanded the idea of ‘security’ to encompass economic and social security did not mean that the concept was now confined to these domestic dimensions,” especially as many Americans “anticipated widespread unemployment and even chaos in the conflict’s wake.” Thus, “it seemed only natural that the New Deal’s sweeping institutional approaches to intractable problems would be translated to the international level by Roosevelt administration planners.” This “integrated vision of social and economic rights,” as Borgwardt describes it, actually made the Atlantic Charter’s promise of future stability more individually oriented than state-focused, in effect making the declaration the first great expression of human rights in the modern world—a modern declaration of individual independence.

  In the end, FDR sought basically the same package of political rights (e.g., national self-determination) and legal arbitration (a global governance body and international court) that Wilson did. But what he added to the mix, and what really sold an American public that had just experienced the Great Depression, was the promise of an international liberal trade order that was effectively institutionalized. Wilson made similar noises about free trade (point 3), but then let that element of his agenda be largely defined in terms of war reparations. George Bush, one could say, played more
of a Wilsonian hand in his “war on terror,” stressing a world made safe for democracy but largely missing the chance to define—as FDR did in a nod to Theodore—a more middle-class ideology of economic security. As such, Bush was rightfully accused of sharing Wilson’s ambition and myopia when it comes to grand strategy.

  7. PLAN FOR THE POSTWAR RIGHT FROM THE START.

  This may seem obvious from today’s perspective, but it certainly wasn’t to Wilson’s administration during World War I. Almost purposefully playing behind the curve, Wilson spent his first three years in office assuring the American public he’d keep them out of Europe’s war (“too proud to fight” was how he initially responded to Germany’s sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania), only to whip that same public into anti-German and antisocialist frenzy once America entered the conflict in 1917, employing a massive propaganda effort through the government-sponsored Committee on Public Information and encouraging private vigilante groups of the American Protective League. Having made virtually no prewar attempt at economic mobilization, in part out of the fear of triggering wartime loyalties among an American population in which one out of six were foreign-born and overwhelmingly of European stock, Wilson thereupon aggressively stoked government-sponsored zealotry against any group or individual failing to meet the new standard of “100% Americanism.” Not surprisingly, this flood of chauvinism wasn’t easy to stem once the Armistice of 1918 arrived, complicating Wilson’s subsequent attempts to sell the American public on membership in the League of Nations and the global responsibilities it implied. That’s not to say Wilson’s government did not engage in postwar planning prior to the war’s end, because it did in the form of “The Inquiry,” a group of about 150 academics and experts who met for months in New York’s American Geographical Society building. This group’s research definitely shaped many of Wilson’s 14 Points, the vast majority of which, unfortunately, came to naught.