American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Drawing one set of imperatives from economic fears, policymakers drew another from the war itself. Pearl Harbor ended illusions that the oceanic separation of the United States from Europe and Asia gave it sanctuary from attack. The wartime development of long-range bombers, rockets, and atomic weapons heightened the national sense of vulnerability. Immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima, leading radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn fretted, “We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.”

  During the war, U.S. military and diplomatic personnel came to believe that the best way to protect the country from future attack would be to meet potential enemies as far from domestic soil as possible. To allow the country to project its power abroad, they began planning an extensive postwar network of overseas bases. In a letter to top Army Air Force generals, Assistant Secretary of War Robert Lovett wrote, “I cannot over-emphasize the importance that I place on this entire base problem.” Convinced that letting any power dominate either Europe or Asia would threaten U.S. security, American officials foresaw a need to engage with the geopolitics of those continents for years to come.

  A few nationally prominent voices dissented from the emerging consensus in support of a global U.S. role, however defined. Republican senator Robert Taft, whose political base lay among midwestern businesses with little interest in boosting exports, opposed the country’s acting as a global policeman or promoting a worldwide New Deal along the lines Wallace envisioned (which Taft saw as another form of imperialism). Taft believed that American benevolence would not necessarily produce a better world nor raise the living standards of its poor. Equally important, he and other conservative Republicans worried about the cost of any grand program of internationalism, which they believed would undermine the domestic economy while making it impossible to eliminate budget deficits or reduce the size of the federal government and the taxes paid to sustain it. As fiscal conservatives and opponents of New Deal state expansion, they feared that the very act of projecting its power would erode the country’s values and social structure.

  Congressional critics of “globalism”—a word coined in 1943 by German exile Ernest Jackh to characterize Adolf Hitler’s ambitions—had some power over foreign policy, with their ability to hold hearings and vote on budgets and treaties. Both Roosevelt and Truman, remembering Woodrow Wilson’s failure to win Senate confirmation of the Versailles Treaty, carefully courted Senate Republicans. But by and large, the formulation and execution of foreign policy remained highly centralized in the executive branch, in a cadre of like-minded policymakers from remarkably similar backgrounds, largely insulated from outside pressure.

  What would become the postwar foreign policy establishment assembled during the war in the War Department, State Department, and other executive agencies. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recruited a remarkable group of assistants, including Lovett, Robert Patterson, James Forrestal, John McCloy, Harvey Bundy, and George Harrison, who would play central roles in directing Cold War foreign policy (as would Bundy’s sons, McGeorge and William). They came from an extraordinarily thin segment of American life, having gone from Ivy League colleges to Wall Street law firms, a group, Stimson’s biographer Godfrey Hodgson noted, “almost as narrowly based, in social and educational terms, as a traditional British Tory Cabinet.” Joining them in making foreign policy and national security decisions were elite Foreign Service veterans, like George Kennan; a few top military leaders, like General George Marshall and Admiral William Leahy; and other men like themselves, who moved back and forth between positions in the executive branch (including the intelligence agencies) and major law firms, financial institutions, internationally oriented corporations, and, later on, academic positions. Almost to a man (it was a group almost exclusively of white men), they shared an unquestioned belief in the moral and economic superiority of capitalism and a deep internationalism, formed in reaction to the isolationist sentiment common before the war. Many filtered their view of the world through a kind of country club racialism that took for granted that there was a hierarchy of races and civilizations, with the United States, particularly its Anglo-Saxon population, having a gift and responsibility for leadership. Rarely involved in electoral politics, many foreign policy makers, like Kennan, had little taste for democratic decision making and little belief in the need to engage the public in discussion of foreign affairs. This internationalist elite, serving in administration after administration, gave postwar foreign policy great continuity, even as control of the White House passed from one party to the other.

  Some mass organizations tried to influence U.S. foreign policy. Civil rights and African American groups pressed the government to make good on Roosevelt’s rhetorical anticolonialism and, in particular, not to prop up the British Empire with financial aid or diplomatic support. Jewish organizations pressed for increasing the number of Jewish refugees allowed into Palestine and, later, for favorable borders and early recognition of Israel. Catholic and Eastern European groups protested the lack of religious freedom in Soviet-occupied areas of Europe. The CIO pushed for maintaining the wartime alliance into the postwar years and for an independent role for labor in international organizations. The AFL wanted government support for international labor but only for noncommunist groups. Such lobbying had only limited success, as foreign affairs, more than other areas of government, remained largely immune to popular pressure.

  International Organization

  Harry Truman shared the conviction of his key foreign policy advisers that the United States needed to create what Luce called a new “world-environment” in which the country would be both safe and prosperous. In his very first speech as president, he told a joint session of Congress, “In this shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical barriers.” Truman defined the country’s challenge as not defending particular territory or interests but “our American way of life.”

  Roosevelt had envisioned achieving security and prosperity through new international institutions in which the United States would play a leading role. The United Nations, founded in San Francisco in June 1945, was to be the main vehicle for settling international disputes. Roosevelt hoped that through it the big powers would jointly police world trouble spots and counter threats to their own security. As things turned out, though, the main threats that the big powers perceived came from each other. With each of the Big Five able to block UN action by using their veto power in the Security Council, in the immediate postwar years the most important international issues were largely dealt with outside of the United Nations structure.

  The UN did play a role that had not been high on the agenda of its planners: promoting human rights. Roosevelt had suggested the inclusion of a reference to human rights in the proposals for the UN, but at its founding conference it was delegates from smaller nations (the largest bloc of countries attending came from Latin America) who pressed the issue. To the discomfort of U.S. officials, they succeeded in putting in the UN Charter a call for “encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion,” a slap at, among other things, racial discrimination in the host country. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, after being lobbied by liberal groups, including the NAACP, the CIO, and the American Jewish Committee, backed the idea of a UN Commission on Human Rights. It was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, and its work led to the UN adoption in December 1948 of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a nonbinding, somewhat abstract but sweeping statement of the political, civil, economic, and social rights of individuals and their equality before the law.

  While the UN was meant to handle security issues, Allied planners—led by Harry Dexter White from the U.S. Treasury Department and British economist John Maynard Keynes—designed another set of institutions to regulate international economic relations. At a 1944 conferenc
e in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, forty-four nations founded the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank). The IMF aimed to promote trade by setting up a system to facilitate currency exchange. Member nations agreed to fix the value of their currency in relation to gold, with gold in turn set at a fixed dollar price. In effect, the dollar became the benchmark for currency exchange. The agreement allowed rate adjustments only within limited ranges to avoid destabilizing fluctuations. To help countries with balance of payments problems, the IMF could provide temporary assistance from its reserve fund. The World Bank aimed to aid the reconstruction of war-torn nations through loans. Since voting in both institutions was proportional to contributions, the United States, by far the largest giver, effectively controlled them.

  In practice, neither group proved terribly effective, at least in the short run. In spite of their nominal commitment at Bretton Woods to liberal, nondiscriminatory trade and currency policies, in practice the Western European powers sought to rebuild their devastated economies by retaining preferential trade arrangements with their colonies and erecting barriers to cheap American exports that otherwise would undermine home markets for their own manufacturers. The United States, by contrast, wanted to end protected trading areas, both to open markets for its own goods (hoping to forestall a postwar depression) and to prevent economic autarky from leading to new international conflicts.

  In part because of such differences, the United States did not send the bulk of its reconstruction aid to Europe through the World Bank, and until the late 1950s the IMF remained relatively inactive. Instead, American officials used their country’s overwhelming wealth to try to directly counter the postwar retreat from free-trade principles. In 1945, Britain, desperate for cash reserves to fund imports, borrowed $3.75 billion from the United States, agreeing in return to allow the free convertibility of its currency, sterling, into dollars, to facilitate trade between its huge colonial empire and the United States. (Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William Clayton, who had cofounded the world’s largest cotton trading firm, told financier Bernard Baruch, “We loaded the British loan negotiations with all the conditions that the traffic would bear.”) Similarly, the United States conditioned a large loan to France on that country’s agreement to reduce subsidies and currency arrangements that favored its exports in the world market.

  A third economic organization, the International Trade Organization (ITO), meant to encourage and regulate trade, never got off the ground. In the process of drafting its charter, European social democrats and developing nations successfully pressed for the inclusion of provisions linking tariff reductions to full employment policies and improved labor standards. American business objected. When Congress failed to even vote on the ITO, it died stillborn. The UN-sponsored General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which had been set up as an interim mechanism for tariff reductions, became the substitute for the far more broadly conceived ITO.

  The Wartime Alliance Breaks Down

  On paper, the World War II victors had created a remarkable set of institutions to order the postwar world, but they failed to help resolve the most important challenges the Allies faced when the war ended. Most immediately, the victorious military powers had to decide what systems of governance would be put in place in those areas where prewar regimes had been obliterated. A political vacuum existed not only in the defeated Axis countries but also in the areas that they had occupied, including virtually all of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, large parts of China, Indochina, Korea, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. In some places, rival resistance groups or self-appointed governments claimed authority. In areas that had been French, Dutch, or British possessions, independence forces resisted the idea of the reimposition of colonial rule. With old social hierarchies toppled and ruling ideologies discredited, the future of much of the world seemed up for grabs. The Allied powers also needed to decide what to do about reparations. The Soviet Union and France sought to make Germany pay for the devastation it had wreaked on them, while the many U.S. policymakers feared that overly punitive terms would create economic and political instability. After Hiroshima, the control of atomic weapons became another imperative. Over these issues, the alliance that defeated the Axis powers began to fracture.

  By February 1945, when the Big Three leaders met at Yalta in Soviet Crimea to concretize earlier understandings about postwar arrangements, the Red Army stood but forty miles from Berlin, already having fought its way through Eastern and much of Central Europe, greatly reducing Anglo-American leverage. At that meeting, and for four decades thereafter, the United States tried to lessen the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, but short of all-out war, which it never was willing to engage in, there was little it could do to control events in areas the Soviet army occupied when Germany surrendered. Similarly, the Soviets, as they themselves recognized, had little ability to influence developments in areas occupied by the Americans, most importantly Italy and Japan.

  At Yalta, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt maintained the Big Three alliance by compromising or papering over differences. Germany, they decided, would be divided into U.S., British, French, and Soviet occupation zones, with a joint council, governed by unanimity, addressing the issue of any possible reunification. Britain and the United States, acknowledging the enormous sacrifices that the Soviet Union had made during the war, accepted borders that gave it considerable land from eastern Poland. While not directly challenging Soviet control over Eastern Europe, Churchill and Roosevelt got Stalin to agree to hold free elections in the region and add representatives from the noncommunist London-based government-in-exile to the pro-communist government that the Soviets had installed in Poland. In Asia, the Soviet Union pledged to enter the war against Japan once Germany surrendered and to sign a friendship treaty with the anticommunist Chinese Nationalist government. In return, the United States and Britain agreed to territorial concessions to the Soviets in Manchuria, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.

  Almost immediately after Yalta, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union began to grow, at first largely over Eastern Europe. Unlike Churchill, who had made it clear that he would be happy with a system of mutually recognized spheres of influence, Roosevelt had accepted the idea only reluctantly, at least as applied to Eastern Europe. He worried that in the United States, voters from Eastern European backgrounds, especially Poles, would turn on any politician who failed to resist Soviet efforts to control the region. Furthermore, he did not want to abandon the principle of national self-determination—the notion that nations have the right to self-government—which was a defining feature of the Anglo-American war aims set forth in the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Stalin, in agreeing to hold free elections in Eastern Europe and reorganizing the Polish government, provided Roosevelt with domestic political cover and some expectation that Eastern Europe might be at least partially included in an American-led liberal world system. But there was only so far the Soviet Union would go.

  Soviet leaders, above all else, cared about security, making sure that a ring of friendly states protected their country from yet another invasion from the west. At first, without any set design on how to control Eastern Europe or what economic norms should prevail there, they proved flexible about how to guarantee the allegiance of bordering states; in some countries they imposed governments that they tightly controlled, but in others they permitted relatively free elections. Over time, though, the Soviet government showed no hesitation to do whatever it took to prevent hostile regimes from emerging on its borders, including shattering old elites, purging allied communist parties to ensure their loyalty to the Soviet Union, and engaging in wholesale undemocratic acts.

  The United States found it hard to accept Soviet control over Eastern Europe. Economic concerns played some role. Before the war, the United States sent only 2 percent of its exports to the region and had only 4 percent of it
s overseas investments there. However, it saw the exchange of Eastern European foodstuffs for Western European manufactured goods as integral to European prosperity, which in turn figured large in the American vision for its own postwar development. Soviet control made the possibility of such an arrangement uncertain.

  Geopolitics and ideology figured more importantly. For one thing, an expanded Soviet-controlled landmass raised fears among American security experts of the possibility that Soviet military pressure might weaken Western European ties to the United States. For another thing, some policymakers, like Truman and Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, found the way the Soviets played loose with the idea of political self-determination offensive. Stalin and his subordinates liked to point out the Anglo-American tolerance for undemocratic practices in zones they influenced, such as their support of a repressive right-wing regime in Greece. But a faith in their own goodness, deep-seated in American culture, allowed leaders and the public in the United States to be largely undisturbed by such contradictions. As the African American press and civil rights groups noted, American officials, like former South Carolina senator James F. Byrnes, who succeeded Stettinius as secretary of state, pressed the Soviets to allow free elections in Eastern Europe while ignoring a blatant lack of democracy in the South.

  For American policymakers, Poland emerged as a key test of Soviet intentions. Shortly after Yalta, Roosevelt complained about the very minimal steps the Soviets took to restructure the Polish government. After Roosevelt’s death, Truman raised the issue again in a tense meeting at which he scolded Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. What the Americans saw as an emerging Soviet trend to ignore past agreements and act unilaterally undermined their trust in their wartime ally, just as American decisions to shut the Soviets out of such key matters as the control of atomic weapons and the occupation of Japan would confirm Soviet suspicions of Western hostility.