The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The American intervention in the First World War was an event of lasting consequence because of the meaning assigned to it by Woodrow Wilson, son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, who during his years of eminence as a university president (Princeton), governor of New Jersey, and twenty-eighth president of the United States became convinced that the American nation, and he personally, were bearers of a divine commission to reform civilization by abolishing war and extending to the globe the benevolent principles of American democracy and religion.*

  He believed that the world “will turn to America for those moral aspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom … that … all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America, but of humanity.”1 He reinterpreted the world war as an ideological war, just as the wars of the French Revolution had been a century earlier wars meant to change the condition of humanity. The world war would be the war “that would end war,” producing permanent peace. “[America’s world role has come] by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way … It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America indeed shall in truth show the way.” These were Wilson’s words on July 10, 1919, in his address to the U.S. Senate presenting the peace treaty. Such claims surpassed historical possibility; but they subsequently became integral to the vocabulary and ambition of American national policy.

  With Woodrow Wilson the Manifest Destiny of the United States ceased to be continental expansion and national power and progress, and was reimagined as a divinely ordained mission to humanity, as American statesmen have interpreted all the nation’s subsequent wars. The idea became essential to the American national myth.

  While the United States was still neutral, Wilson had proposed a “peace without victory,” but despite tentative positive responses from the two sides, when Germany resumed a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the president asked Congress (in April) to declare war on Germany. The effect of this decision, certain to tip the military balance, and of the peace proposals Wilson had produced, was to bring the armistice agreement eighteen months later, in November 1918.

  Wilson offered a plan for postwar security which would rest upon new international institutions based on American conceptions and values, so as to end what eight decades later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, echoing his 1916 rhetoric, would call “the destructive pattern of great power rivalry.” Wilson proposed the creation of a League of Nations, that (as he privately acknowledged) would eventually become an American-dominated world government.

  A world parliament of sovereign power over existing nations was then, as now, an unrealizable ambition. Even if the American Senate had accepted a commitment to go to war on the vote of the League of Nations (which it refused, the reason it rejected the Versailles Treaty in 1920), neither of America’s two main allies, the British and French empires, still intact, would have accepted a League of Nations with the powers Wilson proposed.

  Wilson assumed that universal national self-determination would end the destructive role nationalism had played in Europe’s past . His views had been formed in ignorance of the actual ethnic, religious, historical, and territorial complexities of the nations and national communities that had been part of the defeated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. He possessed a very American determination not to be confused by reality or bound by the past (not to be “reality-bound,” as a spokesman of another White House, eight decades later, was to say).

  He refused to have the history of the Congress of Vienna studied for the lessons it might offer the peacemakers of 1919. He thought good will and a fresh look at the problems by “dispassionate scientists” (an anticipation of Samuel Huntington and the claims of political science), and by Americans distant from the emotions and obscurantisms of Europe, could resolve it all. As early as 1912 he had said to a journalist that he believed God had chosen the United States “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.” In practice, the effort to apply the principle of national self-determination left controversial national claims unsatisfied, with large numbers of ethnic nationals on the wrong side of new frontiers (inevitable, without large-scale population transfers), agitating to recover “lost territories.”

  The Hungarians who found themselves inside Romania, the Sudeten Germans, and the Croats in a newly created Yugoslavia spent the following years resenting the authority of “artificial” new states, contributing to the rise of ethnic hatreds and proto-fascist movements that invited Nazi and Italian Fascist exploitation and hastened the arrival of a second world war—itself touched off by Hitler’s claims on the ethnic German borderlands of Czechoslovak Bohemia, and on formerly Prussian territories in interwar Poland. The eventual breakdown of Wilson’s First World War settlement was taken in the United States as proof of the incorrigibility of Europeans and as confirmation of the prudence and benefits of national isolation, support for which remained majority opinion in America until 1941. In April 1937 a Gallup poll asked Americans if it had been a mistake for the United States to enter the First World War. Seventy-one percent said “yes.” By then there was general agreement that the war had been a tragedy with guilt both on German and Allied sides.2 This revisionist interpretation of the war said that the United States had been drawn in by its economic stake in an Allied victory and by British propaganda. However, the decision to enter the Second World War was taken out of American hands at Pearl Harbor.

  Wilsonianism enjoyed a short reprise immediately after the Second World War, which had reopened to Franklin Roosevelt the seeming possibility that had seduced Wilson: that a great armed struggle leading to the “unconditional surrender” of “evil” could secure America’s and the world’s permanent peace. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, American diplomats were set to work by the Roosevelt administration to draft a new version of the League of Nations. (George F. Kennan would later describe this as a characteristic instance of the American “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.”3)

  When the Second World War ended in 1945, the spirit of isolationism was still influential in American conservative circles, while at the same time there was a rush of popular sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people and a longing for a renewal of the sense of Allied solidarity that had prevailed during the war. Thus foreign policy was an issue in the 1946 and 1948 American elections. As late as 1949, the leading figure in the Republican Party, Senator Robert A. Taft, objected to American ratification of the NATO treaty, saying that it involved unforeseeable commitments (what would he have made of the idea of NATO in Georgia or Ukraine, or at war in Afghanistan or Pakistan today?). He was, nonetheless, despite himself, a Wilsonian, declaring his support for “international law defining the duties and obligations of nations … international courts … and joint armed force to enforce the law and the decisions of that court .” He felt the new United Nations organization did not yet fulfill these ideals but that it went “a long way in that direction.”4

  He was, despite all, still looking for a way to realize the globally utopian vision of a world parliament that had been Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s, which by then had become even for Republicans of isolationist instinct an established belief about how the world of the future should be organized, so that, as Tennyson had prophesied, “ … the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled / In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.”

  The 1948 Communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, and the outbreak of the Korean War terminated American isolationism, launched the Cold War, and caused the United States to adopt a policy proposed by a then-anonymous State Department officer, George F. Kennan.

  This policy’s intention was “to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the brea
k-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” He saw in this effort a “test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations … in which the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”5

  Containment’s increasing militarization during the 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration, reflected the influence of a more belligerent group of policymakers associated with the international lawyer and militant Protestant layman John Foster Dulles, descendant of missionaries and ministers as well as of diplomats, who became Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Historian John Lukacs wrote that Dulles, a Presbyterian elder and an international lawyer, “brought with him … the distressingly puritanical and at times even pharisaic inclination to see in the world struggle a national personification of good versus evil, mistakenly elevating the political ideology of anti-Communism into a superior moral principle.” (In 1942, Alexander Cadogan of the British Foreign Office had described Dulles as “the woolliest type of useless pontificating American.”)

  In the presidential campaign of 1952, Dulles called for a “rollback” of Communist power in Central Europe, which unhappily proved hypocritical and mendacious electoral rhetoric and national propaganda, responsible for the deaths of many in the Baltic states who took such American propositions seriously and went into the forests of the region to fight Soviet occupation troops in the mistaken belief that the West would support them. Later, in 1956, Hungarians in rebellion against their Communist government made the same mistake. Despite the revolts in East Germany in 1952, the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the Polish leadership mutiny that preceded it, nothing was done by Washington to exploit these opportunities to improve the condition of the Central European peoples. At the time of the Hungarian revolt, when Western military intervention was precluded by the risk of general war, Washington refused to consider such political alternatives as an attempt to negotiate a neutralized and disarmed Hungary, or some wider Central European settlement involving mutual troop withdrawals, as the Polish foreign minister had proposed. The events of the Czechoslovakian “Prague Spring” in 1968 offered a new such diplomatic opportunity, which again was ignored.

  The notion of a Central European “disengagement” was supported by Winston Churchill before his retirement in 1955, by Field Marshal Montgomery and other British and West European figures, and by Kennan, then at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. It was rejected in Washington, which had already taken the view that the Cold War had to be fought globally, and that compromise on any front undermined the prospect of “victory” in what James Burnham (a former Trotskyist, and one of the progenitors of the neoconservatives) described in a 1947 book as “the struggle for the world.” This American commitment to essentially military conceptions precluded serious Western discussion of the possibilities of political action to resolve the Cold War.

  As the end of the 1950s approached, a colleague, Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an argument that eventually became a book, suggesting that the American obsession with Soviet Communist power was turning it toward an Americanized version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism. We said Washington had fallen under the influence of “the ideological politics of the thirties and moral fervor of the Second World War” in assuming that we and Soviet Russia were now struggling, so to speak, for the world’s soul.6

  We argued that quite the opposite was true. The bipolar Cold War system would pass because Russia was actually backward while Western Europe and Japan were increasingly dynamic. We said that “Europe [is] not dead and [cannot] be expected, either in its western or in its eastern halves, to remain forever in tutelage of America and Russia.” We rather floridly declared that “the great introspective and timeless civilizations of Asia” were awakening and would seek power and influence in their turn, contributing to the pluralism of power in international relations. This went against much thinking of the period, which held that the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact countries it controlled, were becoming steadily more powerful, placing the democracies in deadly peril.

  We said of Communist internationalism:

  In the early years of the [Soviet] revolution the national element hardly figured; it was the universal messianic dream that counted for most . Lenin had looked West; he believed that “if proletarian revolution were not to break out in Germany, France, England … the October Revolution … must fail.” This did not happen. The result was the Russianization of the ideology … coinciding more or less with Stalin’s lifetime, the Communist movement became a Russian movement. [By 1960, one was seeing] the beginning of a third phase—the fragmentation of that pan-Russian and imperial dream.

  We said that common sense about the nature of Russia’s and China’s real interests suggested that their theory was false and time was not on their side, so that Kennan’s policy of Containment (primarily through political means) of the major Communist powers, allowing the time for what Marx would have called their internal contradictions to undermine them, was the correct one. The interest of China was heterodoxy, to weaken Soviet supremacy among the Communists. Russia itself was in material decline. The United States was mistaken in interpreting Asian nationalism within the rigid limits of its Cold War outlook, as it was doing in Indochina, where it had convinced itself that the Vietnamese national Communist movement was controlled by China and Russia and posed a serious threat to American global interests, including its military interests. The world in the early 1960s, we said, was already one of developing multipolarity of power and ambitions, in which the United States could flourish but the Soviet Union, in the long term, could not. We ended by recommending patience. Time was working for the United States. The book amounted to an anti-interventionist manifesto, published on the eve of the American commitment to a clandestine war in Laos, and subsequently to military action in Vietnam and Cambodia.

  Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia were the first modern instances of what by now has become an inveterate American policy of direct military intervention in the internal affairs of small non-Western countries when these countries are believed—usually mistakenly—to be victims of some global menace eventually aimed at the United States, so powerful as to render these countries incapable of looking after their own affairs or of forging their own destinies. In such cases the “global” enemy identified in Washington has nearly always proven actually to be nationalism, in the expedient guise of Marxism (in Southeast Asia or Latin America) or instances of radical and xenophobic (that is, nationalistic) Islamic religious radicalism (the case today). The American intervention as a result fails to suppress the supposed enemy, and the United States itself assumes the role of aggressive foreign threat to the national independence of the nation which is the subject of American attention. Defeat is built into such a policy. For incomprehensible reasons this fact seems never to have been understood in official Washington, from the time of the Lyndon Johnson administration to that of the Obama administration.*

  The Dulles era of rigid and moralistic foreign policy ideology was followed by the Vietnam crisis, and the Russian-American struggle metastasized, so to speak—at least in American intelligence and policy perception—reappearing on a dozen fronts. What had been a conflict of two nuclear-armed states and rival political systems became seen as a global ideological and moral struggle of epic dimensions, in which the United States had to do political, and if necessary military, battle wherever the symptoms of Marxist thinking could be discerned, from the paddies of Laos to the jungles of Central America.

  Dulles had connected the national myth of savior nation with his own fixed notion of bipolar world struggle, a reflection of his religious convictions. This outlook became transformed into a view of Communism—especially of “Asian Communism,” mobilizing peasants rather than industrial workers—as a ubiquitous, insatiable, indefatigably resourceful international threat, acting under centralized Communist command. Visiting Saigon in the summer of 1962, I made a note t
o myself of the U.S. Embassy’s political people as “rigid, unimaginative, obsessed with ‘Communist timetables for the takeover of Asia.’” China at the time was still generally considered subordinate to Russia, supporting the Vietnamese Communists’ insurrection against French colonial power after the Second World War, and then, after 1954, against the American-supported South Vietnamese Republic of Vietnam.

  America’s Vietnam policy took Marxist (or Maoist) propositions about the development of Communist revolution in Asian societies with extreme seriousness, and held that the Vietnam War had to be won in order to block all of Asia from becoming Communist . (If this were not true, why should the United States bother about what began as a nationalist revolt against France in a distant Asian colony? Americans paid virtually no attention to the anti-French revolt already under way in Algeria in the 1950s, since the Algerian National Liberation Front was not Communist .)7

  The Dulles vision of bipolar struggle, promoted to global dimensions in the late 1950s, continued to rule American policy thinking until after Communism’s collapse. Its influence was still so great in 2001 that George W. Bush automatically constructed his global war on terror as what even at the time could be seen as a parody of the Cold War, even though the enemy in this new version of global struggle was an organization of a few thousand Muslim mujahideen and sympathizers, replacing as enemy in the administration’s imagination and propaganda a Soviet Union of 150 million people, possessing the second largest strategic nuclear force on the planet, an imposing economy, and global allies and clients. Astonishingly, this notion was generally accepted in the professional policy community and among the international media. The consequence of this has been the substitution of fictions for fact in important deliberations of government, as repeatedly attested by recent experience. A virtual reality is willed into existence that blocks out reality itself. Sometimes this delusion is driven by domestic political advantage. More often it is a case of personal or collective illusion, motivated by ideology, or private commitments or advantage, that in turn demands confirmation by subordinate officials.