Worldmaking
Page 73
NOTES
Abbreviations
ATMLP
Alfred Thayer Mahan Letters and Papers
FRUS
Foreign Relations of the United States
GFKP
George F. Kennan Papers
JFKL
John F. Kennedy Library
KD
The Kennan Diaries, edited by Frank Costigliola
Kissinger Telcons
Henry Kissinger Telephone Conversations on World Affairs
LBJL
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
PP
Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum
PWW
The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, edited by Arthur S. Link
“T&T”
Walter Lippmann, “Today & Tomorrow,” New York Herald Tribune
WLP
Walter Lippmann Papers
WLR
Walter Lippmann Reminiscences
Introduction
1. Quoted in Morris, Why the West Rules, 534.
2. Miscamble, George F. Kennan, 303.
3. Memorandum from George F. Kennan, January 20, 1950, FRUS: 1950, 1:38. The memo appears in heavily edited form on pp. 22–44.
4. Ibid., 43–44. For an excellent discussion of the debate, see Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 98–108.
5. Quoted in Beisner, Dean Acheson, 119.
6. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, 89.
7. Nitze, “The Role of the Learned Man in Government,” 277.
8. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, 89.
9. On Teller’s life and career, see Goodchild, Edward Teller. On Oppenheimer, see Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus.
10. Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 106.
11. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 233.
12. Herken, “The Great Foreign Policy Fight,” 73.
13. Galison and Bernstein, “In Any Light,” 311.
14. “Realism” is of course a loaded term that contains multiple gradations and types. Kennan is often characterized as a “classical realist”—in his focus upon the self-interested verities of human nature—as opposed to, say, “neorealists” or “structural realists” like Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt, and John Mearsheimer, who focus on structural constraints and incentives that shape international relations. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics.
15. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 151.
16. Several fine histories of American foreign policy have adopted an ideational frame. See, for example, Immerman, Empire for Liberty; Kuklick, Blind Oracles; Brands, What America Owes the World; and Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. Preston’s Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith traces with great skill the influence of religion on U.S. foreign policy.
17. George F. Kennan, March 12, 1949, KD, 213.
18. I am grateful to Joel Isaac for his insights on this subject.
19. The analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman used the word “worldmaking” in his Ways of Worldmaking, an erudite and wide-ranging discussion of art, science, literary criticism, and psychology. I use it here in a very different, specifically foreign-policy context.
20. See Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 129–36.
21. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft, 87.
22. Nichols’s Promise and Peril is particularly successful in rescuing isolationism from the condescension of history.
23. George F. Kennan, July 30, 1982, KD, 542.
24. On Roosevelt’s personal diplomacy, see Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances.
25. Kimball, The Juggler, 7.
26. See Steel, Walter Lippmann, 385, and WLR, 178.
27. www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm.
28. Quoted in Stephen Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991–2003,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 3–4 (September–December 2010).
29. Partial audio of the speech (and a full transcript) is available at www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=99591469&m=99603945.
30. Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Obama Says Iran Shouldn’t Misinterpret U.S. Response to Syria,” The Washington Post, September 15, 2013.
31. President George W. Bush, second inaugural address, January 20, 2005, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172.
32. Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, 181.
33. David Remnick, “Going the Distance,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2014, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/01/27/140127fa_fact_remnick.
34. Quoted in Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 319.
35. See, for example, Paul Wolfowitz, “Obama Needs to Change Stance on Iran,” The Washington Post, June 19, 2009; Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Obama Should Remember Rwanda as He Weighs Action on Syria,” The Washington Post, April 26, 2013; and Nasr, Dispensable Nation.
36. Quoted in Hyde, Common as Air, 187.
37. Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 346.
38. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Legitimacy and Force: Political and Moral Dimensions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 1:461.
39. I am grateful to Andrew Preston for this comparison. See Preston, The War Council, 246.
40. Quoted in Mistry, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of the Cold War, 207.
1. The Philosopher of Sea Power: Alfred Thayer Mahan
1. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, xi.
2. Schlesinger quoted in J. Simon Rofe, “Europe as the Nexus of Theodore Roosevelt’s International Strategy,” in Krabbendam and Thompson, America’s Transatlantic Turn, 191.
3. Beard, A Foreign Policy for America, 41.
4. See James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan (New York: Routledge, 2008).
5. Zachary Keck, “Alfred Thayer Mahan with Chinese Characteristics,” The Diplomat, August 1, 2013, http://thediplomat.com/2013/08/alfred-thayer-mahan-with-chinese-characteristics.
6. Beard, A Foreign Policy for America, 39–44.
7. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 11–12. See also Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy.
8. Beard, A Foreign Policy for America, 45.
9. Dennis Hart Mahan’s most important works include A Complete Treatise on Field Fortifications (New York: Wiley and Long, 1836), Summary on the Cause of Permanent Fortifications and of the Attack and Defense of Permanent Works (Richmond, VA: West and Johnson, 1850), and An Elementary Course of Military Engineering, 2 vols. (New York: John Wiley, 1866–1867).
10. As his biographer Robert Seager notes, “There is no evidence that Alfred Mahan ever read any of D. H. Mahan’s books. Nor, in spite of his great respect for his father and his strong sense of pride in family, did he ever number his father among those men he later identified as having had a major influence on the evolution of his own ideas.” Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 4. This lack of recognition is perhaps unsurprising given the manner of his father’s death.
11. Ibid., 89.
12. Ibid., xii.
13. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, x.
14. Ibid., xiv.
15. Ibid.
16. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 104.
17. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, xvii.
18. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Elizabeth Lewis, October 16, 1857, ATMLP, 1:3–4.
19. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 14.
20. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 91, 92.
21. Ibid., 187, 192.
22. Quoted in Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 52.
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23. Alfred Thayer Mahan, “A Statement on Behalf of the Church Missionary Society to Seamen in the Port of New York,” April 10, 1897, ATMLP, 3:590.
24. Alfred Thayer Mahan, “Woman’s Suffrage: A Speech,” 1914, ibid., 713.
25. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Mary Helena Okill Mahan, May 10, 1867, ibid., 1:102.
26. Ibid., December 29, 1867, and January 2, 1868, 118, 120.
27. Alfred Thayer Mahan to The Times (London), June 13, 1913, ibid., 3:497–498.
28. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 54.
29. This story is recounted in May, Imperial Democracy, 3.
30. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, 2.
31. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 38.
32. Widmer, Ark of the Liberties, 145.
33. Robert Kagan’s provocative Dangerous Nation argues that aggressive continental and overseas expansion has been central to the American story since the inception of the republic. In this respect the conservative Kagan pursues an argument that is strikingly similar to that proposed by New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber throughout the 1960s and 1970s. But even Kagan concedes that following the Civil War, “The expansive-reactive quality of American foreign policy, and the vagueness of American foreign policy goals, did determine the comparatively limited size and pace of the naval buildup” (355).
34. Ibid., 359.
35. Alfred Mahan to Samuel Ashe, July 26, 1884, ATMLP, 1:574.
36. Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters.
37. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 135.
38. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Stephen B. Luce, September 4, 1884, ATMLP, 1:577.
39. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Stephen B. Luce, May 16, 1885, ibid., 606–607.
40. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Stephen B. Luce, September 2, 1885, ibid., 613.
41. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Samuel A. Ashe, February 2, 1886, ibid., 625.
42. For a detailed account of the Mahan-Roosevelt relationship, see Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship.
43. “New Publications: Our Navy in 1812,” The New York Times, June 5, 1882.
44. In “The Nature of Influence,” Peter Karsten argues that Mahan’s influence on Roosevelt has been greatly exaggerated, and that TR was an original naval thinker in his own right, requiring little tutoring from the overestimated Mahan. He contends that Roosevelt used Mahan—and his intellectual respectability—to serve his own expansionary ends. Karsten’s article makes some fine cautionary points, but he both overestimates the depth of Roosevelt’s historical insight and underplays Mahan’s originality.
In 1886, Roosevelt, while engaged in writing a shallow, cursory biography of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, wrote to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “I have pretty nearly finished Benton, mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and being by nature a timid and, on occasions, by choice a truthful man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history.” Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 172.
45. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 92.
46. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Charles Scribner’s Sons, September 4, 1888, ATMLP, 1:657–58.
47. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Stephen B. Luce, September 21, 1889, ibid., 707–708.
48. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, 26. Walter LaFeber is particularly astute in identifying the commercial imperative driving Mahan’s theories. See, “A Note on the ‘Marcantillistic Imperialism’ of Alfred Thayer Mahan.”
49. Figures cited in Michael Cox and Doug Stokes, eds., US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 301.
50. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, 33.
51. Ibid., 34.
52. Ibid., 42.
53. Ibid., 43.
54. Ibid., 45–46.
55. Ibid., 52–53.
56. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 466.
57. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 53–54.
58. Ibid., 56.
59. Ibid., 57.
60. Ibid., 57–58.
61. Ibid., 58–59.
62. Ibid., 82–83.
63. See, for example, Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire; Ferguson, Colossus; Bacevich, Limits of Power; Hobsbawm, On Empire; Gaddis, The Cold War; Hoffman, American Umpire.
64. Figure cited in Johnson, Nemesis, 5–6.
65. Jonathan Freedland, “A Black and Disgraceful Site,” The New York Review of Books, May 28–June 10, 2009, 27.
66. Wimmel, Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet, 48.
67. Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 434.
68. Both reviews are quoted in Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 210–11.
69. Ibid., 213.
70. Wimmel, Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet, 57.
71. Karsten, “The Nature of ‘Influence,’” 590.
72. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 295.
73. Ibid., 291.
74. Alfred Mahan to Ellen Evans Mahan, July 13, 1893, ATMLP, 2:122.
75. Alfred Mahan to Theodore Roosevelt, June 6, 1894, ibid., 281.
76. John Hay, “John Hay’s Years with Roosevelt,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 131, no. 784 (June 1915): 578.
77. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 208.
78. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 236.
79. Karsten, “The Nature of ‘Influence,’” 590.
80. For a deft portrait of Lodge, see Nichols, Promise and Peril, 22–25.
81. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, 13.
82. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 328.
83. Alfred Mahan to Samuel A. Ashe, November 7, 1896, ATMLP, 2:470.
84. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 338.
85. Roosevelt quoted in Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 385.
86. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Theodore Roosevelt, May 6, 1897, ATMLP, 2:507.
87. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Theodore Roosevelt, May 1, 1897, ibid., 506.
88. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Theodore Roosevelt, May 6, 1897, ibid., 507.
89. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 240.
90. Roosevelt quoted in Karsten, “The Nature of ‘Influence,’” 590.
91. May, Imperial Democracy, 94.
92. Ibid., 73.
93. Ernest May offers an elegant pen portrait of McKinley ibid., 112–13.
94. Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 387.
95. See Zimmerman, First Great Triumph, 236.
96. Quoted in Foner, The Spanish-Cuban War, 237.
97. Ibid., 238.
98. Halper and Clarke, The Silence of the Rational Center, 36–37. See also Thomas, The War Lovers.
99. Foner, The Spanish Cuban War, 239.
100. May, Imperial Democracy, 143.
101. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 361.
102. “The Sinking of the USS Maine,” remarks to the New Jersey chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, February 22, 1898, ATMLP, 3:592.
103. On McKinley’s reluctance to wage war against Spain, see Offner, An Unwanted War.
104. May, Imperial Democracy, 130, 268.
105. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 364.
106. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban War, 263.
107. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 262.
108. May, Imperial Democracy, 159.
109. Kristin Hoganson believes that a crisis of masculinity—provoked by mass unemployment, which deprived American men of the means to support their families—contributed to a popular mood of bellicosity. See Fighting fo
r American Manhood.
110. On the festive popular mood on the eve of war, see Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, 65.
111. Quoted in John Braeman, Albert J. Beveridge, 22–25.
112. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 363.
113. Ibid., 357; for a discussion of the lopsided military balance, see 354–58.
114. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 271.
115. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 375.
116. May, Imperial Democracy, 221.
117. Traub, The Freedom Agenda, 13.
118. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 393.
119. Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 323.
120. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 27, 1898, ATMLP, 2:569.
121. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Henry Cabot Lodge, February 7, 1899, ibid., 627.
122. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 409.
123. Alfred Mahan to Samuel Ashe, September 23, 1899, ATMLP, 2:658.
124. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 410.
125. Ibid., 413.
126. Ibid., 414.
127. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Theodore Roosevelt, March 12, 1901, ATMLP, 2:706–707.
128. Morris, Theodore Rex, 3.
129. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 69.
130. Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary, 154.
131. On the building of the canal, see McCullough, The Path Between the Seas.
132. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 436.
133. See Hannigan, The New World Power, 19–24.
134. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power, 41.
135. Wimmel, The Great White Fleet, xiv.
136. See Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 65.
137. Figures cited in Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason.