The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War 9780742562981, 0742562980, 0742565866, 9780742565869

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The long-standing but unresolved debate of the

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virtues and values of multilateralism vs. unilatof world power, and debates are rife about the

GOVERNMENT • HISTORY

role of multilateral cooperation in the realization of U.S. foreign policy objectives.

STEWART PATRICK is a senior fellow and director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance at the

of Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement (2002) and Good Intentions: Pledges of Aid for Post-Conflict Recovery (2000).

“Stewart Patrick provides a compelling and nuanced account of the evolution of liberal internationalism in the United States. He uncovers how interests, ideas, and America’s liberal identity came together to fashion a multilateral brand of global engagement, shedding important light on where U.S. grand strategy has come from and where it may be headed.” —CHARLES A. KUPCHAN, professor, Georgetown University, Senior Fellow and Director of Europe Studies for Council on Foreign Relations, and author of The End of the American Era “A timely and important book, which shows convincingly how and why the twenty-first century quest for a viable global order is linked inextricably with the ongoing political struggle for the heart and soul of America itself.” —JOHN GERARD RUGGIE, Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs, Harvard University, and Special Representative of UN Secretary General for Business and Human Rights

eralism in American foreign policy is critically important in today’s complicated world. To understand the history of each approach is to

THE BEST

LAID PLANS THE BEST LAID PLANS

Council on Foreign Relations. He is the coeditor

“Stewart Patrick has added an important piece to the continuing puzzle of why the United States, which enjoyed a dominant strategic position in 1945, chose an overarching strategy of multilateralism. He shows how the values that undergird America’s national identity and changing strategic assumptions among the foreign policy elite helped move the country from isolationism to a genuine and pervasive commitment to institutionalized decision-making. At a time when our strategic assumptions are once again being challenged by the new threats of the twenty-first century, The Best Laid Plans charts our recent past in ways that offer a valuable guide to the future.” —ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University

PATRICK

United States once again finds itself at the apex

understand their opportunities and challenges for the future. The Best Laid Plans answers two central questions. First, why did the United States embrace the principles and practices of liberal multilateralism during World War II? Second, why did it cling to this vision of

THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN MULTILATERALISM AND THE DAWN OF THE COLD WAR

world order despite the outbreak of the Cold War in the late 1940s, as the “One World” that had been anticipated by U.S. postwar planners split into two rival global camps?

This book contends that neither the U.S. turn

Stewart Patrick

to liberal multilateralism nor the persistence of this orientation during the Cold War can be attributed solely or even primarily to the global power structure or crude considerations of material self-interest. Rather, Stewart Patrick argues that a combination of enduring identity commitments and new ideas, based on the lessons of recent cataclysmic events, shaped the policy preferences of American central decision-makers in the Roosevelt and Truman

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

For orders and information please contact the publisher ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420

ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6298-1 ISBN-10: 0-7425-6298-0 90000

administrations. Although the book is steeped in history, its conclusions have tremendous relevance for the contemporary era, when the

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10/29/08 3:50:23 PM

PATRICK

THE BEST LAID PLANS

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War Stewart Patrick

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patrick, Stewart, 1964– Best laid plans : The origins of American multilateralism and the dawn of the cold war / by Stewart Patrick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6298-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7425-6298-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6586-9 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7425-6586-6 (electronic) 1. United States—Foreign relations—Philosophy. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 3. International cooperation. I. Title. E183.7.P297 2009 327.73 22 2008034214 Printed in the United States of America

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Identity, Ideas, and the Quest for an Open World

ix

1

From Washington to Wilson

2

Planning the Postwar World: From the Atlantic Charter to Dumbarton Oaks

41

“A World of Power, Tempered by a Little Reason”: Creating the United Nations

73

“When Goods Move, Soldiers Don’t”: Opening the World Economy

105

Bretton Woods and the British Loan: The Postwar Monetary and Trading System

141

6

“An Imperative Principle of Action”: Self-Determination

173

7

A Dream Deferred: Adapting Multilateralism to Containment

213

8

A World Economy Postponed

231

9

From Collective Security to Collective Defense: The Origins of NATO

267

Between Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Communism: The Search for a Post-Imperial Order

297

3 4 5

10

1

v

vi

Contents

Conclusion: The Sources of American Conduct

325

Bibliography

335

Index

353

About the Author

377

Acknowledgments

T

he research, writing and publication of this book would not have been possible without the inspiration and encouragement of several colleagues, mentors, and loved ones, as well as the support of various foundations and institutions. All scholarship, of course, builds on the efforts of those who have gone before. The book in your hands owes a particular intellectual debt to the writings of John Ikenberry, Edward Luck, John Ruggie, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, who influenced my views about the sources of—and limitations to—U.S. global engagement. It has also benefited from the wise counsel of Andrew Walter, Andrew Hurrell, and Rosemary Foot, who each offered candid and constructive advice during the early phases of my research. I owe my most heartfelt thanks to Shepard Forman, founding director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, who took a chance on me right out of graduate school a decade ago and provided a congenial environment to launch my initial explorations on U.S. multilateralism. Following a stint at the Secretary of State’s policy planning staff, I was fortunate to resume this work at two outstanding think tanks, the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Council on Foreign Relations. I am deeply grateful to CGD President Nancy Birdsall and to Council President Richard Haass for their personal and institutional commitment to this effort. I also thank Milan Vaishnav for critical feedback on the manuscript and Alexander Pascal for his outstanding editorial assistance in preparing it for publication. Financial support for this book project was made possible by generous institutional grants from the Robina Foundation, the Rockfeller vii

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Brothers Fund, and the Ford Foundation. I must also thank Christopher Anzalone, Ashlee Mills, and Doug English of Rowman and Littlefield for their professional support and technical assistance in bringing this book to fruition. My greatest debt is to my wife Sophia and to our two young sons, who have shown extraordinary forbearance and good humor in sharing their husband/daddy with a computer screen. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my father, Robert J. Patrick, Jr., who opened my eyes to the world when I was a child and encouraged me to explore it as an adult. —Stewart Patrick

Introduction ✛

Identity, Ideas, and the Quest for an Open World

A nation hitherto devoted to domestic development now finds its first task roughly finished and turns about to look curiously into the tasks of the great world at large, seeking its special part and place of power. A new age has come which no man may forecast. But the past is the key to it; and the past of America lies at the center of modern history. —Woodrow Wilson, “The Significance of American History,” Preface to Harper’s Encyclopedia of the United States (1901)

F

ew developments shaped twentieth century world politics as fundamentally as the reorientation in U.S. foreign policy between 1940 and 1950. In ten tumultuous years between the Battle of Britain and the Korean War, the United States transformed its global engagement not once but twice. First, during World War II, the country abandoned isolationism and unilateral action to embrace internationalism and multilateral cooperation. Second, responding to the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, it adopted a policy of containment, deferring its “One World” ambitions to defend a more circumscribed “Free World” community. These strategic changes had profound consequences for world politics, shaping the international rules by which the United States and most other countries would operate for the rest of the twentieth century. This book analyzes the emergence of U.S. liberal multilateralism during World War II and its subsequent adaptation to the exigencies of containment. The American vision for postwar order had three core components: support for collective security, for an open and non-discriminatory system of international trade and payments, and for political self-determination. ix

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The book asks two central questions: Why did the United States arrive at this vision? How did it adapt this blueprint to the Cold War in the late 1940s? In providing answers, the book focuses on the motivations of senior decision makers within the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, who presided over the most tumultuous and creative period of international institution-building in the country’s history. Such historical questions have contemporary relevance. Early in the twenty-first century, the United States remains the preeminent global power. As in the 1940s, debates are raging about the uses to which that power should be put—and the value of participating in international institutions. The time is thus ripe to look back to an analogous era in American history to examine the foreign policy choices the United States made and the logic behind them. The motivations for the momentous shifts in U.S. foreign policy during the 1940s have never been satisfactorily explained. This largely reflects the long shadow the Cold War has cast over interpretations of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Certainly, focusing on the bipolar struggle makes sense in analyzing U.S. policy from 1947 onward, by which time the geopolitical competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing. But the magnitude of the Cold War has also obscured America’s liberal multilateral design for world order, developed during World War II. This multilateralism not only preceded containment as the organizing framework for U.S. foreign policy, it also outlasted it, into the 1990s.1 Neither the U.S. turn to multilateralism in wartime nor the surprising persistence of this general orientation during the Cold War can be attributed solely (or even primarily) to the distribution of global power (as Realists contend) or to the enlightened self-interest of a hegemonic state seeking to institutionalize its transitory dominance. Rather, I argue that a combination of enduring American political culture and new ideas— drawn from the lessons of recent cataclysmic events—shaped calculations of interest and policy preferences of American central decision makers. The United States emerged from World War II with unmatched material capabilities and international prestige, according it unrivaled capacity to shape the norms, rules, and institutions to govern postwar international political, economic, and security relations. But power alone did not dictate the purposes to which it would put these advantages or the instruments through which it would pursue its ends. Several feasible alternatives were available. America could have insulated itself, withdrawing into a continental fortress. It could have focused on building regional order in its own hemisphere. It might have tried to pursue its interests through unilateral action or unequal bilateral arrangements with weaker states. Instead, it chose to spread its hegemony in a largely

Identity, Ideas, and the Quest for an Open World

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consensual fashion, by organizing broad-based institutions to facilitate international cooperation. Standard accounts of postwar U.S. multilateralism depict it as the obvious choice of a globally dominant state seeking to advance its material interests and strategic position. But there was nothing inevitable about America’s multilateral impulse, which departed significantly from American diplomatic tradition. Other hegemonic powers, moreover, would have probably exercised their dominance quite differently. Postwar U.S. multilateralism owes less to U.S. power than to the country’s liberal ideals and newer beliefs, gleaned from recent experience, about the institutional requirements for a peaceful, prosperous, and just world. This combination of enduring identity and new ideas shaped the U.S. central decision makers’ perceptions of their new strategic environment, understanding of their country’s burgeoning power, and calculations of national interests, leading to a fundamentally different set of policy preferences. American multilateralism during and after World War II departed from past practice. Historically, the United States had avoided foreign entanglements, eschewing membership in international institutions and military alliances and insisting on freedom of action and flexibility in diplomatic and military affairs. With the brief exception of Woodrow Wilson’s illfated world order proposals following World War I, unilateralism was the rule in U.S. foreign policy. This resistance to global commitments was most pronounced in the interwar period, often described as an era of U.S. “isolationism.” Yet suddenly during World War II the United States heeded an internationalist vocation, assumed global leadership, and sponsored an array of multilateral institutions and partnerships to govern international security, political and economic relations, most notably the United Nations Organization and the Bretton Woods institutions. The goal of this effort was to create an open world—a rule-based global order in which peace-loving countries could cooperate to advance their common purposes within international institutions. American officials believed that such a world would rest on three pillars: collective security, economic multilateralism, and political self-determination. Balances of power, spheres of influence, and secret alliances would give way to a universal organization for peace and security, grounded in international law and supervised by a concert of the great powers. Disastrous policies of economic nationalism, bilateralism, and imperial preference would yield to a liberal, non-discriminatory system of trade and payments in which all countries would engage in commerce on equal terms. A world of empires would evolve into one of independent, self-governing nations, as the European powers would emancipate their colonies as soon as possible.

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In the early postwar years, Washington’s dreams of an open world collided with the realities of superpower confrontation and European weakness. As the hoped-for “One World” fractured into two, the Truman administration moved to safeguard the independence and prosperity of a narrower “Free World” community. The Cold War’s arrival, however, did not spur the United States to abandon multilateral principles as much as adapt these to new circumstances. The United States retained a consensual leadership style. Multilateralism remained its preferred means for organizing Free World relations, informing alliances like NATO as well as the American-underwritten global trading system. Containment was, in effect, “the American grand design for the postwar world scaled down to reality.”2 To realize their open world vision, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations needed to forge consensus both at home and abroad—a daunting task. Domestically, they had to overcome longstanding ambivalence toward international cooperation and insistence on untrammeled national sovereignty and freedom of action. This required senior U.S. officials to persuade political elites and the wider public that America’s interests were best served by going it with others, and that U.S. global leadership embodied (rather than contradicted) the widely accepted doctrine of American exceptionalism. The United States also had to win support or at least acquiescence from partners overseas, through persuasion, material inducements, and efforts to legitimate its global dominance. To forge broad domestic and international consensus on its objectives, Washington showed flexibility and willingness to compromise on the precise terms and contours of postwar order and to accept abridgments of its multilateral principles.3 America’s postwar blueprint would be altered by the desires of allies and partners, the parochial concerns of domestic actors, the strategic and political imperatives of war and peace, the demands of postwar reconstruction and, most significantly, the onset of the Cold War. Nevertheless, much of the multilateral vision survived in the form of institutions created to manage and mediate global security and political and economic relations. For the next half-century, multilateralism remained Washington’s preferred framework for international order. To a degree unique for a great power, the United States came to regard multilateralism not simply as a means to pursue narrow national objectives but as an end in itself. The United States did not invent institutionalized multilateralism.4 But the United States profoundly accelerated, broadened, and deepened it, by organizing its hegemony around multilateral international institutions, setting in motion a global trend of profound historical importance: The gradual proliferation after 1945 of international regimes and organiza-

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tions to facilitate cooperation in addressing transnational problems and regulating international activities. Over the ensuing decades, this U.S.inspired “move to institutions” restructured the strategic and normative context in which states formulated and pursued their national interests.5

THE ENIGMA OF POSTWAR U.S. MULTILATERALISM History suggests that any globally dominant power will attempt to organize international political life in accordance with its interests. It will pursue both “possession” and “milieu” goals, seeking not only to secure immediate material benefits but also to define the environment in which other countries operate.6 A central dilemma any would-be hegemon must tackle is what balance to strike among unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral means of advancing its interests. To what extent should it exploit its preponderant power through unilateral dominance and one-sided bilateral relationships with weaker states versus sponsoring institutions that extend considerable decision-making power to others?7 Strikingly, America opted for the latter. “Multilateralism,” most basically, refers to episodic cooperation among three or more countries. In a deeper sense, however, the term implies a general preference to act through collective frameworks rather than independently or through narrower bilateral arrangements.8 It implies a moderately egalitarian order based on rules as well as power, involving the governance of many rather than crude domination by the few. In a multilateral system, independent states agree that mutual relations in particular spheres (say trade or arms control) should be organized on a universal basis, according to accepted norms, rules, and principles of conduct. The most important norms of multilateralism are indivisibility and non-discrimination: Regardless of their parochial interests, relative capabilities, or current situations, participants treat their mutual obligations as indivisible, and they agree to apply these standards equally to all participants.9 How does this translate in practice? In commercial relations multilateralism implies a reciprocal, non-discriminatory system of international (or regional) trade and payments. Together, the norm of reciprocity and the most-favored nation (MFN) principle mean that any concessions granted to one actor must be extended to all parties; remaining barriers should be apparent to all, and collective rules should govern reciprocal tariff reductions. Likewise, in political-military affairs multilateralism takes the form of collective security (or, more narrowly, collective defense). International rules are enforced by a coalition of states legitimated by international agreement. Peace is based not on the balance of power but on the collective

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Introduction

weight of peace-loving states, the norm of non-aggression, and uniform rules with sanctions to deter or punish offenders. The members of this system, which is potentially universal, pledge to respond when any one is attacked, regardless of the aggressor or the aggrieved party.10 Multilateral obligations are reinforced by diffuse reciprocity—the expectation that relative benefits from cooperation will balance out over time—and by transparency—the ability of participants to verify compliance with commitments.11 The institution of multilateralism has much in common with the liberal conception of the rule of law, which holds that rules should be applied without discrimination or regard to particularistic interests. Thanks to the norm of equal treatment, and the principle of sovereign equality on which it rests, multilateral frameworks tend to level the playing field and dampen the impact of power differences in world politics.12 Why did the United States promote a multilateral order during and after World War II? The standard but incomplete explanation is that this was the “rational choice” of a globally dominant power seeking to maximize its material interests and strategic position.13 At first glance this argument seems curious. Multilateral cooperation is costly. It requires participants to relinquish some flexibility in foreign policy and sacrifice immediate gratification for the promise of future gain, hardly things that sovereign states enjoy. Such rule-based cooperation—predicated on the principles of equal treatment and self-restraint—naturally appeals to small countries, since it promises to constrain, even domesticate great powers and provide the weak with diplomatic leverage lacking in conventional bilateral negotiations.14 But it holds few obvious attractions for powerful states that have the option to bypass consultations, impose their will, or absorb the costs of acting alone. Indeed, great powers rarely make great multilateralists.15 By embracing multilateral cooperation, the postwar United States risked reducing its diplomatic leverage and maneuvering room, entangling itself in international institutions, and even subordinating its sovereignty to emerging structures of global governance. New global institutions promised cumbersome decision-making and risked creating policies of the lowest common denominator, given the need to satisfy multiple parties. Finally, multilateral regimes could encourage others to “free ride” on goods the United States supplied. With these drawbacks, a reasonable observer might have expected the mid-twentieth-century United States to avoid multilateral arrangements altogether in favor of a mixed strategy of unilateralism and unequal bilateral arrangements. This would have widened U.S. freedom of action, allowed Washington to coerce and extract concessions from weaker countries, and protected the United States from the incursions of inter-

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governmental arrangements. Instead, we find that at the pinnacle of its dominance, the world’s most powerful country embraced an egalitarian form of leadership that required self-restraint and promised smaller states a greater voice than necessary.16 Why the anomaly? One possibility is that U.S. officials were confident that America’s power would allow it to dominate any postwar regimes or organizations. Yet Washington was surely aware that a system based on “general principles coupled with common decision-making procedures could produce a situation in which other members of these multilateral organizations would seek to make the rules for the United States.”17 Rational choice theorists answer that multilateralism’s virtues compensated for these vices, making it the logical policy for a far-sighted, globally dominant power.18 First, multilateral cooperation enabled the United States to achieve goals that were otherwise unreachable or achievable only at great cost. It expanded U.S. options by allowing the country to share burdens, responsibilities, and risks. Second, multilateral institutions offered solutions to collective action problems.19 As the number of actors increases in a given policy realm (like trade), incentives increase for coalitions to arrive at common principles, norms, and procedures to mediate their interaction. Postwar international institutions reduced the transaction costs of multiple bilateral arrangements, allowing many states simultaneously to consult, share information, resolve differences, coordinate action, and monitor and enforce compliance with agreements. Third, beyond these generic functional benefits, the outbreak of the Cold War gave the United States a strong strategic interest in pursuing multilateralism, because the imperative of containing the Soviet Union gave Washington little choice but to deal with its allies in an egalitarian manner and provide them with collective goods of open commerce and military security. Had the United States exploited its power position visà-vis its allies, it would have jeopardized the integrity of its Free World coalition, endangering its own national security.20 Finally, institutionalized multilateralism promised to pay long-term strategic dividends, helping “lock in” the dominance the United States enjoyed in 1945 for decades. Acting alone or bilaterally might have made sense if Americans were concerned only with immediate gains and discounted any negative “downstream” consequences of exploiting its dominance. But U.S. officials saw their superiority as ephemeral, and they feared falling victim to overextension, setting dangerous precedents for other powers, and stimulating resistance to unbridled U.S. power.21 As John Ikenberry writes, the United States thus adopted a posture of “strategic restraint”: It acted as if it had less power than it actually did, sacrificing short-term flexibility and advantages by embedding itself in multilateral institutions to secure a long-term preeminence.22

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This was a prudent strategic choice, rational choice theorists contend, for it helped transform U.S. power from raw dominance into something resembling legitimate leadership. As Max Weber has written, “So far as it is not derived merely from fear or from motives of expediency, a willingness to submit to an order . . . always in some sense implies a belief in the legitimate authority of the source imposing it.”23 Multilateral institutions gave weaker actors a stake in the postwar order, treated them as partners rather than subordinates, provided them with valued public goods, afforded them forums to express their views, reassured them against the threat of abandonment, and acted as a constraint on exploitation by the hegemon. Legitimacy lowered the costs of maintaining international regimes, reduced the likelihood that disgruntled rising powers would challenge American leadership, and helped consolidate a world order that would continue to serve U.S. interests long into the future, even after U.S. power began to fade.24

THE SHORTCOMINGS OF CONVENTIONAL ACCOUNTS These standard accounts of U.S. postwar multilateralism are compelling but incomplete. The claim that multilateral cooperation promised to expand U.S. options is only partly persuasive. The value of multilateralism depends on the particular challenge, the number of relevant actors, and the availability of other policy instruments. These considerations would lead one to predict a more selective U.S. attitude toward multilateral cooperation, including heavy reliance on unilateralism, bilateralism, and ad hoc “coalitions of the willing.” The related argument that multilateralism overcomes collective action problems suffers from similar shortcomings. Although multilateralism is an obvious choice in some strategic situations, many cooperation problems have multiple feasible institutional solutions (or as game theorists would say, “alternative equilibrium points”). Nor does invoking the Cold War provide a persuasive rationale for U.S. multilateralism. The difficulty here is that the U.S. impulse toward multilateralism actually preceded Washington’s recognition of emerging bipolarity and its declaration of a policy of containment. Advocates of multilateral cooperation within the Roosevelt Administration assumed the postwar world would be dominated by a multi-polar balance among (at a minimum) the “Big Three” of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.25 At war’s end, most U.S. officials still believed Washington could co-opt Moscow into a multilateral order by providing it with a stake in an open world. Thus, even as bilateral relations deteriorated during 1945–1946, the Truman administration continued to seek Moscow’s

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support for a global trading system. Containment reinforced the U.S. decision to go it with others rather than driving it. Finally, postwar multilateralism did not simply reflect the far-sighted strategic calculations of the world’s most powerful country. Clearly, officials in Washington believed that an open postwar world served longterm U.S. interests. But again there remains the problem of timing. The relative global power of the United States arguably changed as much between 1900 and 1919 as it did between 1919 and 1945.26 Yet the United States in 1919 turned its back on multilateral cooperation and world leadership, retreating into relative isolation for two decades. The more fundamental problem of these conventional accounts is their assumption that U.S. multilateralism can be deduced simply from the country’s dominant power position and strategic environment. The corollary presumption is that any country in similar circumstances would have behaved the same way. On the contrary, it was not irrelevant which country assumed hegemony in 1945. Alternative hegemons—shaped by unique historical legacies, political ideologies, and domestic institutions—would in all likelihood have arrived at different conceptions of national interests, visions for world order, and leadership styles than those adopted by the United States, with profound implications for world order. The centrality of such national-level variables for foreign policy choices and international outcomes becomes clear if, like John Ruggie, we indulge in a counterfactual thought experiment, contrasting U.S. blueprints for the post-1945 order with those advocated by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Great Britain.27 Consider how different the past half-century might have been if any of these powers had emerged from World War II as the world’s dominant state. Based on the interwar and wartime record, we can assume that fascist Germany and Japan would have imposed bilateral and discriminatory commercial and currency arrangements and enforced tribute state political-security relationships on conquered and dependent countries. Similarly, Moscow’s Cold War relationship with its East Bloc sphere suggests that a globally dominant Soviet Union would have tried to institutionalize its political control over other nations in the “socialist commonwealth” through the Communist party instrument of Comintern, while organizing economic exchange among command economies on the basis of socialized production, state planning, and discriminatory bilateral arrangements. Even if relatively liberal Great Britain had emerged in America’s place in 1945, colonialism would have persisted longer as an accepted institution, imperial preferences would have remained central to global trade, and the dominant power would have pursued a more traditional balancing role than the active leadership the United States came to exercise. Compared

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to Britain’s own nineteenth-century global dominance, America’s postwar hegemony was far more multilateral and institutionalized. In short, other hegemons would have done things quite differently. The variety of these choices is not linked self-evidently to “objective” considerations of instrumental rationality. Mere consideration of these imaginary pasts—and conceivable presents—suggests that support for multilateral frameworks cannot be derived simply from the global distribution of power or the utilitarian argument that form follows function.28 Contrary to the homogenizing assumptions of rational choice theory, countries occupying similar strategic positions may define their national interests and policy preferences very differently.29 Rational choice theory predicts that a dominant state will use its capabilities to structure an international system conducive to its objectives, but it cannot describe those objectives or predict what form hegemony will take. There are different styles of hegemony, just as there are different styles of individual leadership.30 A dominant power may be benevolent or exploitative, benign or coercive; it may act on its own particularistic behalf or in the service of the broader good; it may alienate weaker states, or it may win followers. Or it may do a bit of both. The logical conclusion, as Ruggie has noted, is that the shape of the post-1945 order was as contingent on the (identity) fact of American hegemony as on the (material) fact of American hegemony.31 To understand the substantive content, institutional form, and stability of the post-1945 order, we need to look more closely at the distinctive political culture and domestic institutions of the United States.

IDENTITY, IDEAS, AND U.S. NATIONAL INTERESTS Until recently, the academic approaches to world politics gave short shrift to the role of identity and ideas in shaping state conceptions of national interest and policy preferences. Conventional rational choice theory assumed that interests were invariably defined in terms of power and wealth and could be deduced from a country’s position in the global environment. The problem with this perspective is that national interests are neither objective nor self-evident. They are “concepts and therefore ideas.”32 As political philosopher Hans Morgenthau noted, beyond baseline “minimum requirements” like survival, the national interest “can run the whole gamut of meanings that are logically compatible with it. That content is determined by the political traditions and the total cultural context within which a nation formulates its own foreign policy.”33 Perceptions about the appropriate ends and means of policy are inevitably conditioned by the normative and ideational context in which

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statesmen operate. Cultural beliefs, causal theories, current knowledge, principled convictions, and identity commitments all help officials render the complex world intelligible, act purposefully within it, and imbue their choices with cultural and ethical significance. Given this web of identity, ideas, and interests, rigid distinctions between “realist” and “idealist” foreign policies miss the point.34 Not only do ideas and identity influence a state’s understanding of its “real” material interests, but states also pursue “ideal” interests. At certain times national interests may be tightly linked to concerns of power, wealth, and survival. At others—as in Britain’s nineteenth-century campaign to end slavery—they embody ethical considerations or sentiments of national purpose. Viewed in this light, world politics is an arena of competing and interdependent national purposes, in which each nation attempts “to realize its distinctive preferences under varying constraints imposed by the preferences of others states.”35 The stakes in this game are not only strategic and economic. Powerful states also compete to build the framework of international society to reflect their distinctive visions of world order. Their response to strategic circumstance will be deeply colored by their national preferences. As the Cold War demonstrates, divergences in fundamental beliefs and world views can be an important source of interstate conflict.36

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: AMERICA’S LIBERAL IDENTITY The fact of America’s overwhelming power does not suffice to explain its turn to multilateralism during and after World War II. The U.S. quest for an open world also reflected the nation’s identity as a liberal republic and new beliefs about the preconditions for international stability, peace, and prosperity. Mainstream rational choice theory treats identity as unimportant, arguing that foreign policy preferences can be extrapolated from a state’s strategic position in the international system. A rival perspective known as constructivism takes identity more seriously. Each country possesses a socially constructed sense of collective purpose, the product of its cultural inheritance, historical experiences, and interaction with broader international society. This national identity helps to define, in the minds of its leaders, the country’s foreign policy preferences and international role. When national identities change, conceptions of national interest are likely to do so as well.37 For rational choice theorists, states are simply egoistic actors that respond to the logic of consequences, seeking to maximize their expected

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utility in the pursuit of given and consistently ordered preferences. Constructivists assume a different logic of state action. They believe that states also respond to the logic of appropriateness, by acting in accordance with their understanding of the proper behavior for an actor with their particular identity.38 Besides pursuing material interests, states also play roles and follow rules.39 In most social situations, of course, both logics of action tend to apply: that is, human beings both calculate consequences of alternative options in a given environment and follow rules that flow from their social identities and norms.40 At the very least, we should broaden rationalist approaches to state preferences to consider how world views, values and identities might shape the formation and subsequent pursuit of national interests.41 What light can constructivist considerations shed on U.S. foreign policy choices during the pivotal decade of the 1940s? Quite a lot. Political scientists have often overlooked the fundamentally liberal nature of American hegemony. One reason that multilateralism was so compelling to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations was that it resonated with the liberal political culture at the core of American national identity. Had the United States not been a liberal country—or had an illiberal hegemon assumed its pride of place in the postwar pecking order—the postwar world might well have been organized around spheres of influence, autarkic economies, imperial systems, tribute-state relations, bilateral arrangements or great power unilateralism. Instead, the United States naturally sought to legitimate its dominance through consensual leadership within egalitarian, multilateral institutions that embodied principles of openness, non-discrimination, and reciprocity. While political culture rarely determines policy outright, it can guide and constrain state choices by helping “to define in the minds of decisionmakers the range of permissible foreign policy goals, alternatives, and actions.”42 The impact of political culture on foreign policy is particularly strong in complex, ambiguous, and fast-changing situations.43 Historically, the United States has differed from other countries in a number of important respects, including its relative geographic isolation and its pluralist demographic make-up. What most sets America apart may be its “absolute and irrational attachment” to Lockean ideas.44 All nations, it has been said, are “imagined communities”—dependent on the collective belief of countless individuals that they somehow constitute a distinct group.45 In much of the world, this sense of national identity is explicitly linked to purportedly organic ties of blood and soil, and the territorial boundaries of the nation conform to patterns of ethnicity, religion, or language. The United States, however, is the “imagined community par excellence,”46 less a “people nation” than an “idea nation.” American citizenship is not a birthright but a political commitment. Membership

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remains open, at least in principle, to all who adopt the liberal principles upon which the country was founded.47 To become “American” is to embrace the basic Enlightenment proposition—inherited from the democratic political philosophy of John Locke and the laissez-faire economic theory of Adam Smith—that the pursuit of individual interest maximizes the collective good. The elements of this founding creed, enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, include attachments to constitutional liberty, representative government, the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, private property, commercial liberty, and equality of opportunity. This liberal dogma is so taken for granted that it has become synonymous with the “American way of life.”48 The tight grasp of Lockean liberalism on the national psyche underpins the venerable tradition of American exceptionalism—a pervasive faith in the uniqueness and superiority of the country’s liberal values and institutions, accompanied by a conviction that the United States has a special destiny to serve as a city on a hill or beacon to guide other nations.49 Indeed, the perceived validity of the country’s liberal principles derives from their presumed universality. This sense of predestination, and the fervor with which that sentiment is expressed, has been reinforced by America’s history of Protestant sectarianism. By focusing on the perfectibility of human nature and the requirements for the “good society,” religion has encouraged Americans to frame political and social debates in terms of morality rather than power or interests.50 These liberal identity commitments have long infused the content and style of U.S. foreign policy. They have shaped how U.S. decision makers perceive their material circumstances and national interests, define the nation’s goals and role in the world, come to terms with their country’s burgeoning power, design and pursue specific policies, and justify U.S. policies domestically and internationally.51 The pull of Lockean liberalism has not been without costs. It can render U.S. foreign policy ahistorical, apolitical, ethnocentric, inflexible, and erratic. Overlooking the historical rarity of their free, wealthy, and modern society, Americans sometimes underestimate the collective basis of social life, the reality of class conflict, and the economic preconditions for democratization.52 Committed to the rational solution of political problems and rejecting power politics as a cynical betrayal of national ideals, they may place unwarranted faith in persuasion, moral appeals, democratic elections, and the rule of law.53 Convinced of the universality of their founding principles, they are sometimes baffled by the complexity of human motivations—including ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, and historic enmities—and fail to anticipate illiberal resistance to their model of political and economic development.54 Inhabiting a secular church that dichotomizes complex issues into good

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and evil—and protagonists into heroes and villains—they may overlook that political conflict abroad can pit competing moral claims against each other.55 Finally, oscillating between the evangelical crusading of a redeemer nation and the hermitic retreat from an alien world, Americans risk careening between interventionism and isolationism.56 Lockean liberalism, however, helped underpin the consensual American hegemony of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1945, the United States possessed significant might and a geographic cushion of security to pursue a wide range of alternative foreign policy strategies. What narrowed the range of permissible options was the grip of liberal ideals over the American mind. Thanks to its political culture, the United States was more inclined than other great powers to conceive of the international system in domestic terms as a potentially universal community under the rule of law and to try to recast the world in its own image.57 Presented with extraordinary opportunities to shape world order, U.S. officials essentially projected outward their political and economic values, hoping to transfer to the international realm the same legal, political, and economic principles that sustained security, order, and prosperity at home. The goal of this effort, as Anton DePorte suggests, was to “Lockeanize a hitherto Hobbesian world,” by transforming an anarchic, conflict-ridden arena into an open, universal community under law, mirroring the free domestic political economy of the United States.58 Just as the U.S. national credo held that the ”many” would become “one” in America’s own plural society, so new multilateral institutions might reconcile international diversity through shared principles. Multilateralism embodied the conviction that international politics, no less than domestic politics, must be governed by the rule of law.59 It was this commitment to an institutionalized world order that set the United States apart from Great Britain, the liberal hegemon of the previous century. International institutions attracted the American mind because—like the constitution at home—they promised to enmesh all states in a framework of rules, discourage unnatural concentrations of power, and facilitate peaceful dispute resolution. In the long run, such institutions could socialize participants, altering their conception of interests and preferences and giving them a stake in the system. Because it presumed congruence between national and global interests, multilateralism helped to alleviate the discomfort many Americans felt about exercising their country’s newfound power abroad and assuming new international commitments. The United States could play up open trade, collective security, and self-determination as universal goods— while downplaying its narrower pecuniary, political, and strategic selfinterest in an open world. In a multilateral framework America would exert power beneficently for all humanity.60 By contrast, U.S. officials un-

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derstood that an alternative, illiberal foreign policy based on traditional power politics would fail to resonate with U.S. citizens and undermine popular support for sustained postwar engagement. In effect, the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman eschewed unilateralism and bilateralism as “un-American” foundations for global order.61

THE WISDOM OF EXPERIENCE: NEW BELIEFS ABOUT PEACE, PROSPERITY, AND POLITICAL ORDER National identity helps explain why multilateralism appealed to the American mind, but it does not explain the timing of the shift in the country’s global orientation. After all, Lockean liberal values had permeated the United States since the country’s founding. Yet it was only during World War II that the nation moved forthrightly to bring about an open world. Moreover, rival schools of thought in U.S. foreign policy—including advocates of isolationism and unilateralism—also tried to ground their claims in the language and symbols of American exceptionalism. Multilateralists, unilateralists, and isolationists alike agreed that the United States had a special destiny among nations, that its unique domestic values and institutions offered the most desirable model for economic and political life, and that the world would be a better place if it were organized according to the principles of democracy, free economic exchange, and the rule of law.62 Where they differed was over the implications of these propositions for America’s international engagement and about the best route to achieve a world congenial to U.S. interests and values. Whereas liberal internationalists hoped to recast international society (or even individual societies) in the U.S. image, unilateralists and isolationists sought to minimize entanglements, by acting alone or opting out of institutions and regimes that could threaten the country’s internal liberties or external freedoms. During the interwar years, American political culture proved compatible with unilateralism—even isolationism—in security relations and considerable protectionism and bilateralism in trade. Unless we postulate a rapid metamorphosis in the country’s identity or political culture, which seems implausible, we must supplement the American identity explanation with some other causal factor. Certainly, surging U.S. power provides part of the answer, since it afforded the United States new opportunities to shape the world. But the country had not converted to multilateralism a generation earlier, despite a similar rise in U.S. power. The reorientation of U.S. foreign policy in the 1940s reflected changes in the dominant belief system of top American officials about the institutional requirements for international stability, prosperity, and justice.

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From the country’s founding until World War II, the prevailing view had been that the nation could best preserve its national security through self-reliance and scrupulous avoidance of international entanglements. Woodrow Wilson had challenged this orthodoxy in 1917–1919, taking the United States into World War I and proposing U.S. membership in the League of Nations as a foundation for postwar order. But after Congress rejected Wilson’s League, the country quickly reverted to an isolationist and unilateral posture. By 1945, however, the core assumptions of U.S. foreign policy had shifted dramatically. Conventional wisdom now held that U.S. and international security were indivisible. America could no longer hide from the world. What brought this about? In brief, the previous orthodoxy eroded in the late 1930s and early 1940s as the expectations it generated—American invulnerability to Old World conflicts—collided with economic and political crisis and fascist aggression.63 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor dealt the final blow. These disasters naturally prompted a reassessment of longstanding policy beliefs and a search for socially plausible alternatives. The turn to multilateralism reflected lessons gleaned from recent historical experience about the positive, mutually reinforcing benefits of economic openness, collective security, and self-determination. This intellectual transformation unfolded in the arena of domestic policies, with new conceptions competing with—and, buttressed by the catastrophes of the 1940s, ultimately defeating— alternative ideas about America’s global role. This pattern is not unique to the mid-twentieth-century United States.64 History provides other cases, from post-Nazi Germany to Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, in which great powers have embraced new grand strategies in reaction to calamity. But if failure encourages foreign policy rethinking, it does not guarantee a change in course. New beliefs play a critical role in altering policy preferences and the strategies governments employ to pursue them. Such policy-relevant ideas can range from causal beliefs that offer explanations about how things work (Keynesianism, for example), to principled beliefs about how things should be (like anti-colonialism), to entire world views that structure the broad outlooks of states and societies (such as Bolshevism). They can influence foreign policy in various ways: by offering road maps for policy innovation, by providing focal points for cooperation, or (once embedded in institutions) by persisting even after the interests of their creators have changed.65 New ideas do not exert influence on their own, however. To compete successfully against rival beliefs and acquire political power within a particular government, new policy ideas must first win over experts on the basis of their theoretical appeal and practical relevance, by offering a persuasive explanation for past shortcomings and solutions to current

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challenges. They must then accommodate or overwhelm the intellectual biases within state bureaucracies, and the “captured” agencies must be able to implement policy innovations. Finally, to be put into practice, the new ideas must mobilize political coalitions or serve the agendas of ruling parties.66 New ideas are most likely to gain political traction amidst high uncertainty or after dramatic policy failure, when existing belief structures no longer provide credible guidance. Prevailing foreign policy beliefs are no different, susceptible to change in the wake of internal disasters and external shocks. The Great Depression and World War II were two such events. These twin catastrophes crippled national and international institutions, discredited past economic, political, and security orthodoxies, and stimulated leaders to reconsider national goals and doctrines. The crises also mobilized professional talent in the industrialized world and proffered opportunities for ideational entrepreneurs to introduce new causal and normative beliefs about the organization of economic and political life into the policy arena.67 In the United States, depression and war undermined the intellectual and political underpinnings of economic nationalism and isolationism and empowered alternative ideas about the sources of international peace, economic prosperity, and political order. This competing vision stressed multilateral cooperation within new international institutions. It envisioned a broad, even universal, system of global peace and security to replace the balance of power, spheres of influences, and bilateral alliances; an open, reciprocal, and non-discriminatory system of trade and payments in place of imperial preferences, bilateral arrangements, and mercantilist state barriers; and the triumph of the principle of selfdetermination, transforming a world of multiethnic colonial empires into one of independent, self-governing states. American officials saw the elements of this vision as mutually reinforcing: Collective security, predicated on great power comity, would facilitate peaceful dispute resolution, the pursuit of common interests, and shared prosperity. Commercial multilateralism would increase interdependence among nations, reduce global tensions, and advance liberty and democracy. Self-determination would mitigate great power rivalry, open new fields to trade, and foster peace among democratic states. A new world order would emerge, girded by sturdy American leadership and supervised by an interlocking system of legitimate international institutions. The architects of postwar U.S. foreign policy made little distinction between American ideals and material interests, which they generally assumed to be congruent. They were confident, too, that U.S. leadership in a multilateral order would advance narrow national as well as universal

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interests. The country’s unmatched military capabilities would make the United Nations an instrument of U.S. purposes. American economic ascendance would allow U.S. firms to reap the greatest rewards from unfettered commerce. Self-determination would open new markets and allow the spread of U.S. military bases. In sum, the triumph of U.S. liberal internationalism was a function of enduring elements of American political culture and new policyrelevant ideas. That these two ingredients were closely linked should not be surprising, since new beliefs win adherents only if they can be made to fit within the dominant political culture in a given historical setting.68 Recognizing this fact, the wartime Roosevelt Administration framed U.S. leadership in a multilateral world as an embodiment of enduring American values.

AN OUTLINE OF THE BOOK This book is divided into ten chapters. Chapter 1, From Washington to Wilson, reviews the competing visions that dominated U.S. foreign policy from the founding of the American republic until the interwar years, paying special attention to the debate over the League of Nations during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It documents an early, consensual U.S. preference for unilateralism that by the early twentieth century had evolved to split into three rival approaches to foreign policy: liberal internationalism, great power internationalism, and isolationism. All three perspectives accepted the tenets of American exceptionalism but disagreed about the desirable structure of international peace, the role of the United States in maintaining it, and the proper balance between U.S. unilateralism and multilateralism. The fight over the League of Nations unfolded as a monumental clash of these positions Chapter 2, Planning the Postwar World: From the Atlantic Charter to Dumbarton Oaks, charts the domestic revival of liberal multilateralism during World War II and analyzes the Roosevelt Administration’s planning for a postwar order in which the United States would possess unprecedented global responsibilities. Inspired by the perceived lessons of the recent, disastrous past, when U.S. abdication of global leadership had hastened the world’s descent into depression and war, the Atlantic Charter of 1940 foresaw a postwar order based on collective security, economic openness, and self-determination, guaranteed by new international institutions. This canny synthesis of Wilsonian internationalism and great power internationalism resonated with American domestic values about the principles that should govern political communities and provided safeguards to preserve U.S. sovereignty and freedom action.

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Chapter 3, “A World of Power, Tempered by a Little Reason”: Creating the United Nations, describes the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts in the last year of World War II to secure domestic and international agreement on its vision of postwar collective security through the United Nations. At home, the President and senior officials had to persuade skeptics that the world body would not infringe on national sovereignty and freedom of action. Abroad, they had to defend their multilateral scheme against a resurgence of power politics—notably wartime efforts by Moscow and London to negotiate postwar spheres of influence and territorial settlements—as well as repeated Soviet pressure to transform the UN Security Council into a crude great power directorate. American efforts bore fruit in June 1945, when fifty-odd nations in San Francisco endorsed the U.S.-inspired blueprint for a United Nations Organization that balanced universal membership within the General Assembly with special prerogatives for the Security Council. Chapter 4, “When Goods Move, Soldiers Don’t”: Opening the World Economy, traces the origins of U.S. support for a multilateral system of international trade and payments, examining the trade liberalization program of Secretary of State Cordell Hull and early transatlantic negotiations over the structure of the postwar global economy. As in security matters, overwhelming power gave the United States unparalleled leverage to recast the framework for international economic exchange. But it was not this power that predisposed Americans to embrace nondiscrimination and reciprocity as principles for global trade and money. In fact, the actual turn to international institutions reflected the experience of the Great Depression and the world’s spiral into violence, which altered public expectations about the role of the state in promoting social welfare and taught U.S. officials that the world economy could no longer be left in invisible hands. The ultimate contours of the world economy would depend on hard bargaining between the United States and its European allies, particularly Great Britain. An open, rule-bound international economy would rest on two main pillars: new financial institutions to coordinate monetary policies and to ensure the stability and convertibility of the world’s major currencies and a standing mechanism to promote commercial liberalization and oversee the elimination of discriminatory tariffs, quotas, preferences, and other restrictive habits. Chapter 5, Bretton Woods and the British Loan: The Postwar Monetary and Trading System, analyzes the protracted negotiations between Washington and London over the global financial and commercial system in which the liberal U.S. version of economic multilateralism collided with a more interventionist British variant. These deliberations culminated in the Bretton Woods agreements of July 1944, which largely enshrined American preferences. Anglo-American trade

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negotiations were even more arduous, given British attachment to imperial preference and a strong state role in the domestic and international economy. Washington used a combination of persuasion and economic inducements, including Lend-Lease and the British Loan, to win London’s commitment to multilateralism, albeit with caveats. Chapter 6, “An Imperative Principle of Action”: Self-Determination, recounts wartime America’s intense diplomatic efforts to hasten the dissolution of the overseas colonial empires, notwithstanding the negative reactions of critical European allies. This stance combined principle and pragmatism. Americans had long believed that legitimate government required the consent of the governed and, as the first colonial people to have achieved independence, felt a duty to inspire others struggling for liberty. Washington also anticipated that self-determination would enhance international peace and security—as well as America’s more mundane pursuit of strategic position, political influence, and commercial expansion. President Roosevelt thus insisted that the Atlantic Charter “applied to all humanity,” promoted a new concept of UN “trusteeship,” and pressed the British government (as well as the French and Dutch governments in exile) to set firm timetables for colonial emancipation, just as the United States had done in the Philippines. At the same time, U.S. anticolonialism remained evolutionary, not revolutionary, since a precipitous transfer of power to radical nationalists could pose dangers as great as unreconstructed imperialism. By the end of the war, moreover, Washington had back-tracked on its maximalist aims. Nevertheless, U.S. agitation helped set in motion a profound transformation of twentieth-century international politics, from a world of empires to one of sovereign states. President Roosevelt’s postwar planners presumed the United States and the Soviet Union could reach reasonable accommodation on major questions of world politics within a broad framework of multilateral cooperation. But chapter 7, A Dream Deferred: Adapting Multilateralism to Containment, details how the outbreak of the Cold War during the late 1940s revealed the incompatibility between the rival international purposes of the Soviet Union and the United States and compelled U.S. foreign policymakers to circumscribe their universalist visions. Soviet rejection of the U.S. concept of an open world and Moscow’s unwillingness to limit itself to a “soft” sphere of influence in Eastern and central Europe presented the United States with a serious ideological and strategic threat. The United States responded by shelving its “one world” hopes to embrace a new strategy of containment, enunciated publicly in the Truman Doctrine of March 1947. Rather than abandoning multilateral principles and institutions, however, the Truman Administration reconfigured them to serve as both the shield and spear of a narrower “free world” coalition, composed of like-minded states that collectively harnessed a preponderance of global power. This

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U.S. commitment to consensual leadership exercised through institutions offered a stark contrast to the Soviet Union’s own Cold War strategy. Containment transformed all three components of U.S. liberal internationalism: economic multilateralism, collective security, and selfdetermination. Chapter 8, A World Economy Postponed, recounts how Washington gave up its dreams that new monetary and trade institutions would facilitate rapid postwar recovery. Facing potential European economic collapse, the United States in June 1947 offered massive resources to restore Europe’s economic health. In return for the Marshall Plan, however, Washington insisted that recipients collaborate in their reconstruction efforts and deepen economic integration with their neighbors. To justify this departure from Bretton Woods universalism, U.S. officials persuaded themselves that regional integration would advance rather than retard global muiltilateralism. Indeed, the Marshall Plan provided a critical impetus to the establishment of the major postwar multilateral European and transatlantic institutions. Meanwhile at a global level, the United States continued to pursue an international trade regime. Washington found these postwar multilateral commercial negotiations far more complicated than the wartime bilateral negotiations with London had been. America’s very commitment to procedural multilateralism—involving multiple parties in negotiation— undercut progress toward substantive multilateralism—in the sense of an open, non-discriminatory, and reciprocal system of trade and payments.69 In late 1950, the Truman administration abandoned its goal of an International Trade Organization, adopting a more pragmatic and flexible approach to trade liberalization, in the form of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Chapter 9, From Collective Security to Collective Defense: The Origins of NATO, explores how allied vulnerability lured the United States into a far more dominant position in Western defense than it had initially desired, as European leaders clamored for U.S. protection. Remarkably, the Truman Administration responded to this “invitation” by insisting that any security arrangement take a multilateral form, even though a collective framework afforded U.S. allies far more influence over Western defense than alternative arrangements. Washington’s preference for multilateralism in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reflected a combination of normative considerations—notably an attachment to political liberalism and a belief in a distinctive transatlantic political community—and practical calculations—specifically about the long-term legitimacy and stability to be gained from an egalitarian, institutionalized form of alliance leadership. Washington’s commitment to Cold War security multilateralism was most evident in NATO. By contrast, in the Asia-Pacific region, the United

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States adopted a “hub and spoke” approach, based on bilateral relationships between the United States, at the center, and its less powerful allies. Different dynamics played out in the Western Hemisphere, where a formal U.S. commitment to multilateralism, embodied in the Rio Treaty and the Organization of American States, coexisted with a traditional pattern of asymmetric bilateral relationships. Of the three main components of America’s postwar vision, it was selfdetermination that faced the greatest hurdles in the late 1940s. The United States had begun to backpedal on the principle even before the war’s end, out of deference to its European allies. The onset of the Cold War sharpened Washington’s dilemma, raising fears that rapid decolonization would weaken America’s transatlantic allies and create vacuums of power in the global periphery vulnerable to communist infiltration. The American predicament is the subject of chapter 10, Between Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Communism: The Search for a Post-Imperial Order. Washington’s general orientation was to support “genuine” nationalist movements with proven anti-communist bona fides, but oppose nationalists who appeared to be dominated by communist forces, while pressing the imperial power to nurture and transfer power to moderate forces. This discriminating approach helps account for the different U.S. policies toward colonial liberation movements in Indonesia and Indochina. In the former case the United States compelled the Dutch to grant independence; in the later, it supported, subsidized, and ultimately supplanted a French war effort ultimately incompatible with the stated U.S. support for self-determination. The conclusion to this book, The Sources of American Conduct, argues that the fundamental questions that faced the 1940s generation confront us again today. As then, the United States remains by far the most powerful country in the world, but its contemporary security, political, and economic challenges are rarely amenable to unilateral action. As in the postwar period, the United States must consider how best to address the main threats to global security, manage the trade-offs of global economic interdependence, and foster the emergence of democratic, capable states in the developing world. Again, there are impassioned domestic debates over the ends and means to which the country should devote its awesome power, especially the international frameworks through which it should pursue its interests, and the balance it should strike between freedom of action and the utility of international legitimacy. In navigating the complex world of the twenty-first century, those charting U.S. foreign policy would be wise to reflect on the experiences, both positive and negative, of an earlier generation that faced similar challenges and opportunities.

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NOTES 1. G. John Ikenberry, “Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order,” International Security 23, no. 3 (Winter 1999): 43–78. 2. Anton DePorte, Europe between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 130–131. 3. G. John Ikenberry, “Rethinking the Origins of American Hegemony,” Political Science Quarterly 104 (1989): 375–400. See also G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power,” International Organization 44, no. 3 (1990): 284–315. 4. Christian Reus-Smit, “The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 555–589. 5. David Kennedy, “The Move to Institutions,” Cardozo Law Review 8, no. 5 (1987): 841–988. W. Michael Reisman, “Unilateral Action and the Transformation of the World Constitutive Process: The Special Problem of Humanitarian Intervention,” European Journal of International Law 11, no. 1 (2000): 3–18. 6. On “milieu” goals, see Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 67–80. 7. Lisa L. Martin, “The Rational State Choice of Multilateralism,” in John Gerard Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 113. 8. This usage follows that of John Gerard Ruggie, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution,” in Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters, 3–47. 9. James A. Caporaso, “International Relations Theory and Multilateralism: The Search for Foundations,” in Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters, 51–90, especially 53–56. Ruggie, “Multilateralism,” 8–14. 10. Ruggie, “Multilateralism,” 13. 11. Ruggie, “Multilateralism,” 22; Caporaso, “International Relations Theory,” 53–56. 12. Anne-Marie Burley, “Regulating the World: Multilateralism, International Law, and the Projection of the New Deal Regulatory State,” in Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters, 125–156. Miles Kahler, “Multilateralism with Large and Small Numbers,” in Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters, 295–326, 295. 13. Martin, “The Rational State Choice of Multilateralism.” 14. Phil Williams “Multilateralism: Critique and Appraisal,” in Multilateralism and Western Strategy, ed. Michael Brenner (London: St. Martins, 1995), 211–213. W. Michael Reisman, “The United States and Multilateral Institutions,” Survival 41, no. 4 (Winter 1999–2000), 62. 15. Steven Holloway, “U.S. Unilateralism at the UN: Why Great Powers Do Not Make Great Multilateralists,” Global Governance 6, no. 3 (July–September 2000): 361–381. 16. Friedrich Kratochwil, “Norms versus Numbers: Multilateralism and the Rationalist and Reflexivist Approaches to Institutions—a Unilateral Plea for Communicative Rationality,” in Ruggie, Multilateralism Matters, 443–474, 445.

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17. Burley, “Regulating the World,” 143. 18. Martin, “The Rational State Choice”; Ikenberry, “Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order.” 19. Martin, “The Rational State Choice,” 94–113. 20. Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons, “Theories of International Regimes,” International Organization 41, no. 3 (1987), 491–517, 508. 21. Martin, “The Rational State Choice,” 109–111. 22. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 162–214. 23. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978), 37. Ikenberry and Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power.” 24. Ikenberry. “Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order.” Michael Mastanduno, “Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War,” in Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies after the Cold War, ed. Michael Mastanduno and Ethan B. Kapstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 147. 25. Ruggie, “Multilateralism,” 29. 26. Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism?” International Organization 54, no. 2 (2003): 253–289. 27. John Gerard Ruggie, Winning the Peace: America and World Order in the New Era (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1996), chapter 2. John Gerard Ruggie, “The Past as Prologue: Interests, Identity, and American Foreign Policy,” International Security 21, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 89–125. Frank Ninkovich, “The End of Diplomatic History?” Diplomatic History 15 (Summer 1991): 439–448, 442–445. 28. Kratochwil, “Norms versus Numbers,” 450. 29. Andrew Moravscik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, 4 (Autumn 1997): 513–553. 30. David P. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance (New York: Century Foundation, 1987), 14. 31. John Gerard Ruggie, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution.” 32. Robert H. Jackson, “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, ed. by Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 112. Albert S. Yee, “The Causal Effects of Ideas on Policies,” International Organization 50, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 69–108, 71. 33. Hans J. Morgenthau, “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (December 1952). 34. John A. Hall, “Ideas and the Social Sciences,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy, ed. by Goldstein and Keohane, 39. Haggard and Simmons, “Theories of International Regimes,” 511. Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 442–449. 35. Henry R. Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 29. 36. By the same token, a sense of community can contribute to pacific international relations. See Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

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Press, 2006); Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, eds., Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 37. Ted Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory,” International Security 23, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 171–200, 175–176. Peter J. Katzenstein, “Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 6. 38. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders, International Organization 52, 4 (Autumn 1998): 943–969. Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, “International Organization and the Study of World Politics,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 645–685, 675. 39. Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Katzenstein, 60–61. John S. Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior: Why Germany Confounds Neorealism,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 765–803, 774. 40. Miles Kahler, “Rationality in International Relations,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 919–941, 933–36. 41. John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? NeoUtilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 855–885, 867. 42. Charles Kegley and Eugene R. Wittkopf, American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987). (Italics in original.) 43. Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior,” 777. 44. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), 6. Edward Weisband, The Ideology of American Foreign Policy: A Paradigm of Lockian Liberalism (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1973). 45. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edition (London: Verso, 1993). 46. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 105–111. 47. Christopher Thorne, “American Political Culture and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of American Studies 26, no. 3 (1993): 303–330, 320. Ruggie, Winning the Peace, 25. 48. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, 11. 49. Daniel Bell, “The ‘Hegelian Secret’: Civil Society and American Exceptionalism,” in Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism, ed. by Byron Shafer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 49–51, 63. 50. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 25–26 51. Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), xiv. Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Thorne, “American Political Culture and the End of the Cold War,” 314–315.

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52. David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 112. 53. John Lewis Gaddis, in Michael P. Hamilton, ed., American Character and Foreign Policy (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), 23–40. 54. Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 55. Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Africa and Asia 1870–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 169–74. 56. Samuel Huntington, “America’s Ideals versus America’s Institutions,” Political Science Quarterly 97 (Spring 1982). Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, 304. 57. Burley, “Regulating the World,” 142. See more generally Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 58. DePorte, Europe between the Superpowers, 80. Ruggie, Winning the Peace, 25. 59. Ruggie, “The Past as Prologue,” 110–114. 60. Thorne, “American Political Culture,” 314–315. Gaddis, American Character, 31. DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers, 80. 61. Ruggie, Winning the Peace, 25–26, 49. 62. Edward C. Luck, Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization 1919–1999 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999), 18–19. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 18. 63. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism?” 254, 262–263. 64. Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 65. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework,” in Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy, 3–30. Yee, “The Causal Effect of Ideas on Policies,” 69–70. 66. Peter A. Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 1–37. 67. Hall, The Political Power of Economic Ideas, 389. 68. Yee, “The Causal Effect of Ideas on Policies,” 87–92. 69. I am indebted to Jamie Miller for this formulation.

1 ✛

From Washington to Wilson

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. —Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

T

he sustained American embrace of liberal multilateralism after 1945 signified a departure from traditional patterns of U.S. international engagement. From the republic’s founding through the early twentieth century, unilateralism dominated U.S. foreign and security policy. In practice, this meant avoiding foreign entanglements abroad and preserving untrammeled sovereignty at home. This posture reflected a combination of strategic calculation and political culture. The first several generations of U.S. leaders were conscious of America’s relative weakness vis-à-vis the European powers, and they feared that involvement in foreign intrigue might corrupt their young nation’s political principles. As U.S. confidence grew, this commitment to unilateralism came to include insistence on freedom of action in the Western Hemisphere. Thanks to tremendous economic growth, the United States became a potential great power by the dawn of the twentieth century. This new might stimulated an unprecedented U.S. debate over the country’s proper international role. Three broad schools of thought stood out. Great power internationalism, championed by Theodore Roosevelt, called on the United States to uphold the global balance of power while maintaining its historic freedom of action. Liberal internationalism, expounded by Woodrow Wilson, advocated U.S. membership in a new multilateral structure for international peace and security, grounded in international law. Isolationism rejected the great power vocation entirely, recommending 1

2

Chapter 1

continued detachment from an alien and corrupting world. Nevertheless, adherents to each of these philosophies couched their arguments in the language of American exceptionalism. The historic struggle over the League of Nations in 1919 was primarily a collision between the two variants of internationalism. Both advocated global engagement but disagreed over whether the putative benefits of an international organization for peace and security outweighed the potential loss of U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action. Wilson’s unwillingness to compromise on his liberal multilateral vision, by accommodating the concerns of the great power internationalists, led to the Senate’s rejection of the League Covenant. Isolationists, though relatively few in number, ironically emerged as the main victors from this struggle. Under their influence, the interwar United States pursued a unilateral and detached foreign policy, particularly in political and military affairs, reaching its apogee during the 1930s.

THE LIBERAL INHERITANCE America’s Founding Fathers, having secured their independence in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, were acutely aware of the geopolitical vulnerability of their new republic—a weak nation of four million in a world of expansionist empires. Only by shying away from Europe’s political and military struggles, they believed, could the United States avoid vassalage to more powerful allies. Foreign entanglements might also endanger America’s hard-won but fragile internal liberties by encouraging Europeans to intervene in U.S. domestic affairs. As early as 1775, John Adams warned his colleagues that foreign governments “would find means to corrupt our people, to influence our councils, and . . . we should be little better than puppets, danced on the wires of the cabinets of Europe. We should be the sport of European intrigues and politics.”1 Adams and his fellow revolutionaries feared that outsiders would exploit America’s sectional differences and centrifugal forces, causing the loose confederation of former colonies to disintegrate. A miniature version of the anarchical European system might arise in the New World, with rival states balancing one another, by shifting alliances and engaging in recurrent warfare.2 These twin strategic concerns—ensuring independence abroad and preserving unity at home—provided a powerful impetus for replacing the weak Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781 to govern relations among the first thirteen states, with a federal Constitution six years later. The Articles had established a weak central government, consisting solely of a legislature that not only lacked the power to tax (or even

From Washington to Wilson

3

to regulate interstate commerce) but also left the United States in a feeble position to defend itself from external aggression. The advocates of the Constitution understood this well. One of the main justifications in the Federalist Papers for a stronger federal government was to permit a more robust foreign policy. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created “a more perfect union” by replacing the Articles with a framework according new powers to the federal government, notably in the areas of diplomacy, national defense, and commerce. At the same time, the founders placed limits on the authority of the center, to avoid a domestic tyranny that would threaten the liberty of both the states and the citizenry. Political authority remained decentralized, with federal and state governments continuing to vie for primacy, at least until the Civil War.3 This early experience with constructing a federal state to balance order and liberty would offer the United States an inspiration and model for its twentieth-century effort to recast the world along multilateral lines.4 Nevertheless, American political culture reinforced the early U.S. preference for non-entanglement in foreign affairs. The founding generation, and U.S. citizens at large, conceived of the United States as a new type of political community, organized around liberal and republican principles quite different from those governing European polities.5 It seemed only natural that a nation founded on Enlightenment values, vesting ultimate authority in the people, should adopt a distinctive role in world affairs and a foreign policy differing in content and style from those of corrupt Old World monarchies. Indeed, U.S. statesmen regarded Europe’s propensity for violence as the inevitable product of domestic tyranny. “Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government,” wrote Thomas Paine. “As war is the system of government in the old construction, the animosity which nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their governments excites, to keep up the spirit of the system.”6 Such warlike impulses would disappear in a world of democratic republics. On both idealist and strategic grounds, therefore, the early United States set a unilateral, even isolationist course. George Washington laid the intellectual foundations for this stance in his oft-cited Farewell Address of 1797: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Non-entanglement did not mean total isolation. The trade-dependent United States sought harmonious commercial relations with Europe, on the basis of non-discrimination rather than (as in the past) mercantilist rules that denied equal treatment to U.S. exports. But while foreign trade and cultural interchange were desirable, the nation should “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of

4

Chapter 1

the foreign world.” America’s fortuitous geographic position, across the wide Atlantic, made national insulation a viable strategy. “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course,” Washington observed. “Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”7 Non-entanglement was something on which both Federalists, with their expansive conception of the role of the federal government, and Democratic-Republicans, who sought to tame it, could agree. Alexander Hamilton saw America’s natural vocation as “the arbiter of Europe in America, and to be able to incline the balance of European competitors in this part of the world as our interests may indicate.”8 Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton’s rival, reaffirmed Washington’s doctrine in his first inaugural address, when he declared the republic’s policy to be: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”9 This policy of detachment did not imply a rejection of international law. Early U.S. statesmen regarded the “law of nations” as the foundation of world order, akin to the rule of law at home. Article VI of the Constitution thus recognized international treaties as the “supreme Law of the Land.” At an instrumental level, Americans understood that the international rule of law—empire based on “right” rather than might—had particular value to a weak nation. In 1793, Chief Justice John Jay declared that the “peace, prosperity, and reputation of the United States, will always greatly depend on their fidelity to their [international legal] engagements.”10 “Non-entanglement,” moreover, did not prohibit acquiring territory through negotiation, purchase, or conquest. In the early nineteenth century, the United States used diplomacy to settle border disputes with British Canada and with Spanish Florida, to gain access to the Mississippi River, and to obtain French Louisiana. These steps doubled the nation’s size. But the rule remained to avoid alliances and institutional commitments, so that the country might protect its national experiment from foreign invasion or contagion. The Napoleonic Wars provided an early test for U.S. isolationism and unilateralism. Until 1812, the United States clung precariously to armed neutrality, declining to choose between Great Britain and France (the tyrant of the ocean and the tyrant on land, as Jefferson characterized them).11 This posture made little sense on geopolitical grounds, requiring the nation to run risks and accept costs out of proportion to any realistic benefits. American neutrality owed less to strategic reasoning than principled conviction. It resonated with Americans’ self-perception as a nation of free men. These identity commitments generated a distinct vision of the nation’s appropriate role in the world, and U.S. diplomats communicated these convictions to the major powers.12 Even when the United States fi-

From Washington to Wilson

5

nally abandoned neutrality in 1812, it went to war to vindicate a principle: the enforcement of neutral rights. For most of the nineteenth century, the dominant strain in U.S. national security policy remained isolationism with a unilateralist thrust. The motives behind this defensive posture were partly “Jeffersonian”—that is, a desire to preserve U.S. liberties while serving as “a standing monument and example” to others. But they were also “Jacksonian”—an insistence on preserving national sovereignty, combined with a “don’t tread on me” willingness to use or threaten force, unilaterally, if provoked.13 As a rule, the United States kept political engagement with other nations to a minimum, maintaining open trade but avoiding overt participation in the global balance of power. Closer to home, the United States moved first toward continental domination—creating Jefferson’s “empire of liberty”— and then regional hegemony.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE AND THE EXPANDING SCOPE OF UNILATERALISM In 1823, President James Monroe extended the range of U.S. unilateralism. In response to a wave of rebellions in Spain’s Latin American colonies, he invoked the existence of an “American System” in which European powers should not meddle. Like his predecessors, Monroe reaffirmed the principle of non-entanglement in Old World affairs. But he also added a novel element, by declaring the Western Hemisphere to be off limits to new European colonies, prohibiting the transfer of existing colonies, and insisting that imperial rule not be re-imposed where it had been thrown off, reflecting U.S. sympathy with political self-determination. He put the colonial powers on notice that “we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”14 Simultaneously, U.S. officials pledged restraint in their dealings with hemispheric neighbors. They disavowed intervention to support Latin American democracy on the grounds that liberty could not be imposed but must be earned and that foreign crusades would endanger the very ideals Americans cherished. “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” Secretary of State John Quincy Adams explained in 1821. “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all . . . the champion only of her own.” The United States would thus restrict its support for democracy to “the benignant sympathy of her example.”15 Europe’s conservative monarchs regarded Monroe’s démarche as the impertinent demand of an impotent upstart. But the more liberal British

6

Chapter 1

government, fearing a European scramble for Spain’s former possessions, was favorably disposed. London used the Royal Navy to give teeth to Monroe’s doctrine and, more broadly, to insulate the United States from the overt operation of the European balance of power. As free riders on Britain’s naval mastery, Americans were at liberty to pursue economic development and continental expansion and even to fight a bloody Civil War without the significant threat of foreign invasion. Taking their enviable strategic context for granted, they could excoriate Europe’s power intrigues while fulfilling their “manifest destiny.” There was no little hypocrisy in this stance, since reflective Americans understood that territorial conquest would widen the scope for U.S. unilateralism. As Monroe observed in his special message to Congress of May 4, 1822, “It must be obvious to all that the further the expansion is carried, provided it not be beyond the just limit, the greater will be to freedom of action.”16 As U.S. power swelled, American officials increasingly invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a sword as well as a shield, using it not only to rebuff European meddling but also to consolidate U.S. supremacy on the continent and, eventually, the entire hemisphere. In 1845, President James K. Polk used it to defend the U.S. annexation of Texas, invoking both the principle of self-determination and the U.S. need to dominate North America. “We must ever maintain that people of this continent alone have a right to decide their own destiny. . . .” If the United States failed to incorporate the Republic of Texas, Polk warned, the latter might become “an ally or dependency of some foreign nation more powerful than herself.”17 The next year, Polk summoned the doctrine to justify war with Mexico, which brought the annexation of California and what would become (with the Gadsen Purchase of 1853) the entire American southwest—a fifty percent increase in the land mass of the United States. A generation later, in 1868, President Andrew Johnson cited the doctrine to justify the purchase of Alaska from Russia. By the 1890s, the Monroe Doctrine had evolved into an assertion that the Western Hemisphere was a U.S. preserve, where America could exercise a free hand. The administration of Grover Cleveland made this explicit in 1895. Intervening in a dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela over the boundaries of British Guiana, Secretary of State Richard Olney issued his famous corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: “Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” He warned Great Britain that America’s “infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”18 The reality was more complex. By the late nineteenth century, America’s tremendous economic growth had made it a potential—but not yet an

From Washington to Wilson

7

actual—great power. Between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, U.S. wheat production leapt by 256 percent; railway mileage by 567 percent; coal production by 800 percent; and oil production by 2,000 percent. The country had become the world’s leading manufacturer, a huge exporter of food and raw materials, and a prime destination for foreign investment. Yet this economic giant remained a diplomatic and military dwarf. It possessed only 39,000 military personnel, less than one-tenth of the armed forces of the British Empire (420,000)—to say nothing of the larger militaries of Russia (677,000), France (542,000), and Germany (504,000). Its navy ranked seventeenth in the world. As late as 1892, the New York Herald recommended closing the State Department, so modest were the demands on U.S. diplomats.19 In 1898 the United States became a global power in fact, by defeating Spain in a war spanning both the Atlantic and Pacific. In its first and only foray into formal imperialism, the nation acquired the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, as well as a Cuban protectorate. The next year, Secretary of State John Hay issued his Open Door note on China, insisting that the imperial powers preserve that country’s territorial integrity and open their concessions there to trade and investment on equal terms. An interesting hybrid, the policy signified at once a unilateral extension of the Monroe Doctrine to Asia and a multilateral vision of an open economic order in which all, in principle, could benefit.

COMPETING VISIONS FOR U.S. FOREIGN POLICY The rise of the United States to global power presaged a momentous domestic debate over the country’s appropriate global role that would continue through the first four decades of the twentieth century. Although frequently described as a clash between isolationism and internationalism, it was primarily a contest between two different visions of internationalism: the great power strain versus the liberal internationalist variety. A defining moment came during 1919–1920 in the titanic struggle over the League of Nations. At the root of this controversy was profound disagreement about the proper balance between unilateral and multilateral approaches to U.S. national security, including over which of these strategies best reflected America’s identity and served its interests. The dispute focused on the wisdom of U.S. membership in a global collective security system, with respect to the constraints such a commitment might imply for U.S. freedom of action and national sovereignty. The League fight had an ironic outcome. The rival internationalisms wound up canceling each other, permitting the temporary ascendancy of isolationism in interwar U.S. foreign policy.

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Although boundaries among liberal internationalists, great power internationalists, and isolationists blurred at times, these three broad categories represented distinctive tendencies within the U.S. foreign policy community between 1900 and 1940 and fundamentally disagreed about global security and America’s role in the world. (See table 1.1 ). Whereas liberal internationalists emphasized the indivisibility of world peace, great power internationalists took a narrower view of U.S. interests, focusing particularly on peace among the great powers and America’s regional (as opposed to global) responsibilities. These divergent diagnoses of the causes of disorder in the international system led them to advocate different structures of peace: in the former case, universal institutions of collective security; in the latter, some form of concert among the great powers. Wilsonians strongly preferred multilateralism, even at the expense of some U.S. freedom of action and domestic sovereignty, which great power internationalists were much less inclined to countenance. Similarly, Wilsonians supported disarmament and democracy as catalysts for peace. Great power internationalists—believers in strong national power and skeptics of the pacific influence of trade and democracy— considered this position naïve and unwise. Isolationists, a distinct minority, would play “spoiler” in the debate over the League of Nations. Their priority was to avoid foreign involvement, lest it draw the United States into war. They favored a structure of peace that kept the United States in splendid isolation, and they preferred unilateralism to protect U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action (although this could include harmless departures, such as the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928, disavowing war as an instrument of national policy). They had little patience for globalism, depicting events outside the Western Hemisphere as none of America’s business, and held a classically Jeffersonian attitude toward democracy and self-determination. The United States should be a city on a hill rather than actively remake the world in its image. Finally, American isolationism opposed militarism and imperialism, a stance that would be reinforced by the nation’s experience in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference. The clash of these countervailing impulses explains the longstanding U.S. ambivalence toward global engagement over the past century. No nation has devoted as much imagination, leadership, and energy to designing, creating, and defending international institutions as the United States. And yet none has been so sensitive to the perceived constraints of multilateral cooperation or so determined to preserve national sovereignty and the capacity for independent action. Debates among advocates of liberal internationalism, great power internationalism, and isolationism cannot be reduced to “realism” versus “idealism.” Each approach combines qualities of both schools of international relations. Indeed, a

Perceived World Order Problem

Indivisibility of peace

Balance among great powers

Foreign entanglement

Group

Liberal Internationalists

Great Power Internationalists

Isolationists

U.S. in “splendid isolation”

Great power concert

Universal collective security

Desirable Structure of Peace

Unilateral instinct, preserve sovereignty

Skeptical, seek freedom of action

Strong preference

Attitude toward Multilateralism

Strictly hemispheric

Regional, with selective global involvement

Globalism

Regionalism vs. Globalism

Issue

Table 1.1. Contending Approaches to U.S. Global Engagement in the Early Twentieth Century

Lead by example only

Skeptical about remaking the world

Extend democracy, self-determination

Democracy Promotion?

Fear of militarism & imperialism, support disarmament

Emphasize military, oppose disarmament

Strong preference for disarmament

Attitude toward Military Power

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shared claim to pragmatism and virtue helps explain why such debates have been so vociferous.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND GREAT POWER INTERNATIONALISM In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt led the charge of great power internationalism. Both as President and as a leading foreign policy voice thereafter, TR argued passionately that the country must embrace its responsibilities as a great power, a role with both regional and international implications. Regionally, acting like a great power meant keeping order in the natural U.S. sphere of influence in the Caribbean basin, in a manner that would serve Washington’s interests.20 In 1903, the United States interceded to guarantee Panama’s secession from Colombia, to secure sole rights to build an isthmian canal. The following year, Roosevelt formalized America’s right of unilateral intervention when he dispatched U.S. marines to the Dominican Republic to assume control over that country’s customs receipts. “In the Western Hemisphere,” he declared in his famous corollary, “the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of international police power.”21 Globally, it meant participating in the balance of power and great power councils on the main diplomatic issues of the day. TR exemplified this view by brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) ending the RussoJapanese War and joining the Algeciras Conference over the future of Morocco (1906). It also meant building sufficient military capacity to project power abroad. An early convert to naval power, Roosevelt in December 1907 dispatched America’s gleaming new navy, the “Great White Fleet,” on a yearlong tour to circle the world. Attending to power did not mean rejecting idealism. Historians and political scientists often treat Roosevelt and Wilson as opposing archetypes, depicting the former as a clear-eyed practitioner of power politics pursuing “realistic” objectives and the latter as visionary reformer pursuing “idealistic” objectives. This juxtaposition lends narrative tension to the historical drama, but the protagonists often deviated from this script. As the historian John Milton Cooper writes in his double biography of Roosevelt and Wilson, it is often hard to tell which of the two is more “warrior” or “priest.”22 Modern day “realists” who lionize Teddy Roosevelt as a sober strategist underestimate the moral core of his foreign policy and the influence of American exceptionalism on his thinking.23 In fact, permeating TR’s

From Washington to Wilson

11

speeches and writings was a moral conviction that the United States had a beneficent role to play in world affairs. The ultimate success of American foreign policy, he believed, depended on “whether the United States actually stood for something in world affairs.”24 Roosevelt consistently stressed the nation’s “responsibility” to cooperate with other “civilized nations” in humanity’s struggle against “barbarism.” He understood that deepening global integration required an activist internationalism that transcended pure reliance on the balance of power or regional intervention to embrace the collective management of world order. As he explained in his first State of the Union address, “More and more, the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.”25 Indeed, Roosevelt was the first major U.S. political figure to float the notion of a collective body to enforce world peace. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1910, after lauding various pacific means to preserve international comity (such as arbitration and mediation, international law, disarmament talks, and a standing international court), he emphasized the critical lack of any “police power” to enforce the world community’s will. He thus called upon “those great powers honestly bent on peace” to “form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others.”26 At the outbreak of World War I, TR again argued “for the nations to consider a great world agreement among all the civilized military powers to back righteousness by force,” with America as “one of the joint guarantors of world peace under such a plan.”27 He castigated President Wilson and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan for their studious neutrality between the Central Powers and the Entente, pouring scorn on their notion that international law and conventions alone could preserve world peace. To Roosevelt, “a milk-and-water righteousness unbacked by force is to the full as wicked as and even more mischievous than force divorced from righteousness.”28 TR was not alone. With Wilson committed to neutrality in the Great War, the Republican Party led the charge for an international instrument to deter and punish aggression. In June 1915, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts called for a “union of civilized nations,” which might “put a controlling force behind the maintenance of the peace and international order.”29 A week later, Republicans met in Philadelphia to establish the League to Enforce the Peace under the former President William Howard Taft. “We have got to depart from the traditional policy of this country,” Taft declared, and “step forward and assume certain obligations in the interests of the world.”30 On May 27, 1916, Lodge, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the League: “I

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do not believe that when Washington warned us against entangling alliances he meant for one moment that we should not join the other civilized nations of the world if a method could be found to diminish war and encourage peace.”31

WOODROW WILSON AND LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM Lodge’s speech was overshadowed by Wilson’s own rousing address to the League that very day, in which the President proposed to reform world politics along liberal lines. The President had come “to avow a creed” shared by all Americans: that all peoples have the right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live; that small states are entitled to the same respect for sovereignty and integrity as large ones; and that all peoples have a right to live in peace. To achieve these cherished objectives, the nations of the world must adopt “a new and more wholesome diplomacy,” renounce narrow alliances, and agree to concert their action within “a universal association of . . . nations” equipped to ensure the freedom of the seas, prevent aggressive war, and provide “a virtual guarantee of territorial and political independence.” Wilson assured his listeners that such commitments neither violated U.S. diplomatic traditions nor harmed American ideas and interests. “I shall never myself consent to an entangling alliance,” he avowed. “But I would gladly assent to a disentangling alliance—an alliance which would disentangle the peoples of the world from these combinations in which they seek their own separate and private interests and unite the people of the world to preserve the peace of the world upon a basis of common right and justice.” Such a universal arrangement would bring America “liberty. . . , not limitation . . . freedom, not entanglement.” It would also represent “the achievement of the highest things for which the United States has declared its principle.”32 Wilson’s proposal built on his earlier plans for a regional collective security system. Although the President was certainly willing to intervene to punish law-breaking by neighboring countries, he hoped to place inter-American relations on a more progressive footing, believing that the Western Hemisphere might “set an example to the world in freedom of institutions, freedom of trade, and intelligence of mutual service.”33 In December 1914, the President had instructed the Department of State to draft a pan-American treaty based on principles of sovereign equality, non-aggression, arms reduction, and the peaceful arbitration of disputes. The covenant’s first clause committed contracting parties to mutually guarantee each other’s “undisturbed and undisputed territorial integrity” and “complete political independence under republican forms of government.” Wilson’s hemispheric order would rely not on

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Roosevelt’s big stick but rather “upon the handsome principle of selfrestraint and respect for the rights of everybody . . . absolute political equality among the states.”34 During the 1916 presidential campaign, both major political parties signaled measured support for collective security. The Democratic platform endorsed U.S. participation with other nations “in any feasible association . . . to prevent any war begun either contrary to treaty covenants or without warning and frank submission of the provocation and causes to the opinion of mankind.” Wilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, recognizing that “there is no national isolation in the world of the Twentieth Century,” advocated “the development of international organization,” embodying “the preventive power of a common purpose” and offering “some practical guarantee of international order.”35 At the same time, public opinion supported continued neutrality in the Great War, and both parties remained divided about the appropriate scope, depth, and form of U.S. engagement in international affairs. Within the Republican Party, internationalist supporters of the League to Enforce the Peace collided with more nationalist and isolationist activists, who had no truck with “professional internationalists” and “mushy philanthropists and mollycoddles.”36 Wilson’s own challenge was to ease the Democratic Party away from its isolationist wing—while offering a reformist vision of world order that might appeal to liberal opinion. Emboldened by his re-election, Wilson came before Congress in January 1917 to propose U.S. participation in a postwar system of global collective security. He described a future international order based not on “a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized, common peace.” Henceforth, global security must depend on a league of peace-loving nations possessing sufficient military capacity so that “no nation, nor probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it.” Such a structure would uphold and enforce the international rule of law, including freedom of the sea; defend the rights of all nations, great and small; recognize the principle that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and reduce the crushing burden of armaments. Wilson stressed the continuity between this bold proposal and the principles that had long guided U.S. diplomacy. “I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: That no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development—unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.” Such a vision fused the national with the universal, simultaneously embodying “American” principles and “the principles of mankind.”37

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Great power internationalists in Congress greeted Wilson’s proposal skeptically. Senator Lodge dismissed it as utterly unworkable: “If we have the Monroe Doctrine everywhere, we may be perfectly certain that it will not exist anywhere.” Meanwhile, isolationists like Senator William Borah (R-ID) worried that an entangled America would lose the capacity to pursue a virtuous foreign policy. “What this passion-torn world needs and will need are not more leagues and alliances, but a great untrammeled, courageous neutral power, representing not bias, not prejudice, not hate, not conflict, but order and law and justice.”38 Until April 1917, the American debate over postwar collective security remained largely theoretical. A new phase began on April 2, 1917, when Wilson requested and Congress granted a declaration of war against Germany. The United States entered World War I to defend tangible interests, notably freedom of the seas and the European balance of power. But once the United States joined the conflict, Wilson insisted that it pursue not traditional war aims but a new world order informed by American principles.39 A constitutionalist for the international system, he believed that international peace, no less than domestic order, rested on the rule of law—and the power to enforce it. As he told a joint session of Congress, Americans would fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.40

The President offered his most sweeping blueprint for postwar order, the Fourteen Points, on January 8, 1918. Announced just two months after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia, this vision of global reform offered a distinct counterpoint both to the ideology of socialist revolution and the more traditional war aims of the European combatants. The first five of Wilson’s points envisaged a new era of transparent diplomacy, characterized by: “open covenants of peace openly arrived at,” without secret treaties or understandings; “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,” in keeping with the traditional U.S. defense of maritime rights; “the removal of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions,” conducive to the Open Door; a worldwide reduction in armaments, to reduce both the likelihood and carnage of future wars; and the “impartial adjustment of all colonial claims” in the interests of the inhabitants, consistent with the principle of selfdetermination. The next eight points addressed specific territorial and political matters, including the evacuation of Russia and Belgium; the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France; the rectification of the Italian

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frontier; the autonomous development of the peoples of the AustriaHungarian Empire, the Balkans, and Turkey in Europe; and the creation of a Polish state with access to the sea. Wilson’s final and most important point envisioned a postwar collective security system: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”41 Wilson did not invent the concept of collective security (an idea with deep roots in Western political thought42), but he was the first leader of a major power to try recasting international society according to its principles. Since the mid-sixteenth century, the balance of power had regulated world politics, and warfare had played an integral role in the shifting and precarious equilibrium. Wilson rejected it categorically. In his view, the allied troops had fought to do away with an old order and to establish a new one, and the center and characteristic of the old order was that venerable thing which we used to call the “balance of power”—a thing . . . determined by the sword which was thrown in the one side or the other, . . . [and] maintained by jealous watchfulness and an antagonism of interests.43

This unstable arrangement must be replaced by a collective security system based on the unity of peace-loving states. Unlike a traditional alliance, which unified a handful of countries against a specific threat, this universal compact would treat security as indivisible: An attack on one would be an attack on all, to be met with a swift, overwhelming response. With aggressive war outlawed, the collective response to aggression would become the only legitimate use of force. Wilson’s thinking about world order was grounded in assumptions, derived from U.S. history and experience, about the foundations of global security, the importance of international institutions and the necessity of American leadership.44 First, Wilson posited a connection between democratic governance and global tranquility. Authoritarian rule had insulated the rulers of the Central Powers from the pacific proclivities of public opinion, enabling World War I.45 Collective security would work only if a majority of states and all the great powers were self-determining democracies. A second force for peace was free trade. Liberal, non-discriminatory commerce permitted nations to exploit peacefully the markets and resources they might otherwise resort to force to obtain. Growing interdependence also raised the cost of war. Democracy and free trade would encourage peace but could not guarantee it. A stable and pacific world order would only emerge if nations adopted formal international institutions to govern their mutual political, security, economic, and social relations. In return for the benefits of

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multilateral cooperation, nations must be prepared to cede some freedom of action and even a portion of their national sovereignty. Wilson was optimistic that they would accept this tradeoff. As he noted, “National purposes have fallen more and more into the background, and the common purpose of enlightened mankind has taken their place.” Finally, collective security required American leadership. Wilson was confident that the United States would assume “its full share of responsibility for the maintenance of common covenants.”46

THE BATTLE OVER THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS The question of U.S. membership in the League of Nations sparked the most acrimonious foreign policy debate in American history. The League fight is often framed, misleadingly, as a straightforward clash pitting supporters of liberal international reform against defenders of narrow national interests. For modern liberals, Wilson remains the great unappreciated prophet of collective security, whose advice if accepted might have prevented a second global catastrophe.47 For Realists, his failure offers a cautionary parable of the perils of utopianism in a world of power politics.48 Like most myths, this conventional narrative rests on a kernel of truth. But it also obscures the moral unanimity of the main U.S. participants in the League fight. All agreed that the United States was a uniquely principled nation with a special destiny in international affairs. All believed that the country must aim not only to advance its own interests but also bring about a more just and peaceful world. All were determined to prevent a repetition of the Great War. Their disagreement centered on means: how the United States could best advance its real and ideal ends. The debate had two distinct poles. Wholehearted proponents of collective security, like Wilson, advocated entry into the League without preconditions or reservations. “Irreconcilables,” like Senator Borah, opposed it categorically. But most participants fell in a broad middle swath, prepared to countenance U.S. membership on certain terms. They recognized an American responsibility to help preserve world order but insisted on preserving U.S. freedom of action and national sovereignty. The major drama focused on whether League champions could reach an acceptable compromise with enough “reservationists” (themselves divided into “mild” and “hard” camps) to win a U.S. commitment to collective security. In the end, they could not. Among other things, the League fight embodied a constitutional and highly partisan struggle between executive and legislative branches to define and control the terms of U.S. global engagement. The U.S. Constitution established the executive and the legislature as co-equal branches

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of government, with joint control over foreign policy. This shared mandate has long complicated the U.S. assumption of multilateral obligations, particularly treaties, which require a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate for ratification. The executive seeking to win U.S. support for treaties must play a “two-level game,” negotiating domestically as well as internationally.49 This game is doubly challenging when different parties control the two branches and disagree about multilateral cooperation—as was the case in 1919–1920.50 The early twentieth century witnessed a significant expansion of executive power, and many legislators on Capitol Hill hoped to reverse this trend. Wilson’s several missteps in the League fight helped them do so. First, he treated the League—and foreign policy in general—as a sphere of exclusive executive competence, keeping even members of his own party at arm’s length. Second, rather than nurturing bipartisanship, he made a starkly partisan appeal for the League prior to the November 1918 midterm elections, which backfired when the GOP won narrow control of the Senate and increased its margin in the House. This forced Wilson to seek approbation for the League in the context of divided government. Third, he compounded this error by failing to include prominent Republicans on the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, neglecting to solicit Republican input in drafting the League Covenant, and insisting (over GOP objections) that the Covenant be part of the Versailles Treaty. Wilson’s mistakes offered an object lesson about the importance of building a bipartisan foundation for U.S. internationalism, one that Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman would learn to their advantage. Great power internationalists, most prominent in the Republican Party, were troubled by the sweeping commitments implied by Wilson’s League and by the constraints that it might place on U.S. action abroad. The President’s liberal internationalist view was that any collective security system must guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all countries, without discrimination, regardless of their location or relevance to U.S. security and prosperity. Leading Republicans, doubting such a universal scheme could possibly work, criticized the Covenant as a well-meaning but impotent response to the darker side of human nature. Teddy Roosevelt likened it to one of those “resolutions abolishing vice” introduced periodically in town hall meetings. He was dubious of any scheme that would place the United States in the position of an “international Meddlesome Matty,” obliged to respond to aggression wherever it occurred. If global stability was the goal, why not take a regional approach, by having each great power “introduce some kind of police system in the weak and disorderly countries at their thresholds”?51 And if a system of collective defense were genuinely needed, why not make it a flexible arrangement involving circumscribed commitments and narrow membership, limited

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“at the outset to the Allies . . . with whom we have been operating and with whom we are certain we can cooperate in the future”?52 In any event, such an arrangement must be “in no sense . . . a substitute for the preparedness of our own strength and for our own defense.”53 Senator (and former Secretary of State) Philander K. Knox agreed that collective security should begin with “the glorious present alliance.” Dismissing Wilson’s League as “a world State or . . . a great catalogue of unnatural self-restraints,” he called on the United States to stake out a prudent middle ground between utopian plans for perpetual peace and “that intense individualism which admits of no duty to the society of nations.” The answer was to be found in “a new American doctrine” that “entangles us in no way,” namely, If a situation should arise in which any power or combination of powers should, directly or indirectly, menace the freedom and peace of Europe, the United States would regard such a situation with grave concern as a menace to its own freedom and peace and would consult with other powers affected with a view to concerted action for the removal of such menace.54

THE LEAGUE COVENANT When Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919, John Maynard Keynes writes, he enjoyed “a prestige and moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history.”55 At each stop on his triumphal European tour, adoring throngs welcomed him as the herald of a new world order. This rapturous reception reaffirmed Wilson’s faith in the universal appeal of his postwar vision. He could only imagine “the generation of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Adamses . . . looking on with a sort of enraptured amazement that the American spirit should have made conquest of the world.”56 On February 14, the President presented the draft Covenant of the League of Nations to his fellow conferees. The first comprehensive effort to create an international organization for peace and security, the Covenant contained twenty-six articles on topics ranging from international mediation and arbitration to enforcement action, provisions on disarmament, cooperation on social issues, and the creation of a Permanent International Court of Justice. Any collective security system must strike a balance between the principle of equal treatment and the practical necessity of according special privileges to those states asked to shoulder disproportionate burdens for the common effort. The League was no exception. Wilson’s draft Covenant recognized the equal rights of all nations, great and small, accord-

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ing them representation in a League Assembly (Article 3). But it vested principal responsibility for matters of peace and security with a League Council (Article 4), composed of five permanent members (the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan), to be joined by four other states on a rotating basis. The Covenant envisioned a permanent apparatus for regular conferences and a system of arbitration and guarantees. Several mechanisms were designed to deter and respond to aggression or the threat of war. Article 11 permitted members to bring to the League’s attention any threat to the peace or instance of aggression. The Covenant provided for a three-month cooling off period, during which military action would be suspended, while disputes were referred to a third party for arbitration. If the conflict had not been resolved after ninety days, war would become legal. Any League member that resorted to war against a fellow member without first accepting negotiation and arbitration (Articles 12, 13, and 15) would be considered an aggressor against all members, whereupon the League would immediately impose sanctions, including the “severance of all trade or financial relations,” and the Council would recommend that members contribute armed forces to implement “enforcement by common actions of international obligations.” (Article 16). The most controversial clause in the draft covenant—Wilson’s distinctive contribution—was Article 10: “The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.” This sweeping, if ambiguous, statement became the focus of the League fight. Most Republicans saw it as an automatic commitment to respond militarily, an extreme interpretation. The ostensibly powerful commitment was weakened by the requirement (under Article 5) that the Council agree unanimously to any enforcement action, effectively giving the United States a veto. Moreover, Article 10 clearly considered military action as just one possible response, stating: “In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression, the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.” Wilson insisted that armed force would remain “in the background of this program,” employed only as “the last resort” when other instruments had failed. Most optimistically, he counted on the fear of moral opprobrium and world public opinion to deter aggression by League members.57 Wilson’s view of the League was functionalist as well as idealist. Once the League began to operate, it would generate a virtuous cycle, transforming state conduct and international politics. He reasoned that “in the very process of carrying these covenants into execution from time to time a machinery and practice of cooperation would naturally spring up which would in the end produce . . . a regularly constituted

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and employed concert of nations.”58 In effect, the League would socialize its members, producing new, more pacific patterns of state practice. To make the League work, however, the world’s “right-thinking nations” must “concert their purpose and their power.” Otherwise, “this treaty is not worth the paper it is written on.”59 Following publication of Wilson’s Covenant, U.S. debate over the League opened in earnest. “Internationalism has come,” Senator Gilbert Hitchcock (D-NE) observed, “and we must choose what form the internationalism is to take.”60 Republican critics denounced the document, contending it would repudiate America’s historic freedom of action, entangle the United States in military adventures where its interests were not involved, increase the risk of major war, and trample Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. Elihu Root, a former Secretary of State and one of the GOP’s most respected voices on foreign policy, complained that the Covenant “completely abrogated the Monroe Doctrine,” sanctioning external intervention in the Western Hemisphere and obliging U.S. intervention outside it. “Instead of abolishing war,” Knox charged, the League “actually sanctions, breeds, and commands it. Moreover, it absolutely requires that every future war will be a potential world war, and that we shall be an active participant in every such war.” Would it not make more sense, Lodge wondered, for the League to be “made up of the European nations whose interests are chiefly concerned,” with America cooperating on a flexible basis?61 Republican objections focused on Article 10. Lodge outlined these concerns in a celebrated debate in Boston with Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell on March 19, 1919. It was a “tremendous promise” to guarantee the independence and integrity of every nation, the Senator declared. Were Americans prepared “to send the hope of their families, the hope of the nation, the best of our youth, forth into the world on that errand?” By giving up its historic freedom of action, the United States would sacrifice its identity and its vocation. I want to keep America as she has been—not isolated, not prevent her from joining other nations for these great purposes—but I wish her to be master of her fate. . . . I want her left in a position to do that work and not submit her to a vote of other nations with no recourse except to break a treaty which she wishes to maintain. . . . Let her go on in her beneficent career, and I want to see her stand as she has always stood, strong and alive, triumphant, free.62

Senate “Irreconcilables” were adamant about avoiding international commitments, fearing that the nation would enmesh itself in Old World militarism and imperialism and endanger its domestic liberties. The United States ought instead to serve as an exemplar of democratic governance. Borah called for a recommitment to “America’s national spirit.”

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This was “not isolation but freedom to do as our own people think wise and just.”63 Senator Lodge quickly gathered support from thirty-seven Senators for a declaration that provisions of the draft treaty were unacceptable. Wilson responded by negotiating a revised version of the Covenant with the allies in Paris. This explicitly exempted the Monroe Doctrine and other “regional understandings,” but left Article 10 untouched. Equally worrisome for Wilson was growing criticism from the American left, which attacked Article 10 as preserving the European overseas empires, regardless of the aspirations of subject nationalities.64 Liberal and progressive support eroded further as the Versailles Treaty, of which the Covenant was part, assumed an increasingly punitive cast, threatening to embitter Germany and cripple European recovery. Such harshness hardly bothered Republicans, who had long advocated a “dictated” peace. But liberals—energized by Wilson’s promises of a “peace without victory” and of “impartial justice based on equal rights of victor and vanquished”65—were deeply disillusioned. Robert La Folette of Wisconsin, a Progressive and Irreconcilable, denounced the League as “an instrument for the preservation of the status quo. Like the Holy Alliance of 1815, it is couched in the language of idealism and peace. Like the Holy Alliance, it will be used for the suppression of nationalities and for the prosecution of aggressive warfare.”66 Wilson deserves some blame for the treaty’s severity. The international rule of law could be preserved and principles of justice upheld, he believed, only if wrongdoers were held accountable and disciplined. Wilson also contributed to the hardening peace terms indirectly, by insisting that the Covenant be incorporated into the Versailles Treaty, rather than considered on its own merits. This linkage weakened his negotiating position vis-à-vis the Western allies, since to secure agreement on the League (Wilson’s priority) he had to make repeated concessions to the allies (particularly France) on the treatment of Germany. This balance between the structure of the League and the terms of the treaty caused much of the diplomatic tension in Paris.67 In America the impression arose that wily European statesmen had outfoxed an earnest but naïve U.S. President. British economist John Maynard Keynes reinforced this view in his influential polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which included a devastating portrait of Wilson as a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” Despite growing disillusionment, the League was not yet a lost cause in the spring and summer of 1919. A majority of Americans, although wary of overseas entanglements, favored League membership. On Capitol Hill, the Chicago Tribune estimated, some forty senators supported Wilson’s League as envisioned, and another forty-three would consider it with reservations. Only eight rejected it in any form. Although nothing close to a Senate supermajority favored the current plan, more than

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eighty percent of legislators were willing to consider U.S. League membership on certain terms. For the League’s champions, the challenge was to craft a compromise, particularly on Article 10, that might attract enough “mild” and “hard” reservationists without alienating proponents of Wilson’s Covenant or eliciting a presidential veto. Wilson’s Republican rival in the previous election, Charles Evans Hughes, saw prospects for compromise, but Wilson was adamant that Article 10 not be emasculated, lest the League deteriorate into a “debating society.” On July 10, 1919, he presented the draft Versailles Treaty, including the League Covenant, to the Senate for its advice and consent. “Isolation was ended twenty years ago,” he told the legislators. It was America’s fate “to be a world power. . . . The only question is whether we shall accept or reject the confidence of the world.”68 Republicans remained defiant, depicting the League as a threat to U.S. sovereignty. Lodge insisted that “not even a corporal’s guard . . . can ever be ordered anywhere except by the constitutional authorities of the United States.” Although defenders of the Covenant claimed the moral high ground, they had no “monopoly on idealism.” Opponents, too, “have our ideals.” Our first ideal is our country. . . . We would not have our country’s vigor exhausted or her moral force abated, by everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel, great and small, which affects the world. Our ideal is to make her ever stronger and better and finer, because in that way alone, as we believe, can she be of the greatest service to the world’s peace and the welfare of mankind.69

Most Republicans regarded a U.S. capacity for unilateral action as a more promising route to global order than Wilson’s collective security scheme. America’s strategy, said Knox, should be “to reserve complete liberty of action either independently or in conjunction with other powers in taking such steps as we determine wise for preserving the peace.”70 In a belated attempt to reach bipartisan compromise, Wilson invited the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the White House on August 19, 1919. Despite the President’s reassurances that Article 10 was “a moral, not a legal obligation,” that Washington would enjoy a practical veto in any League decision on enforcement, and that the Covenant contained safeguards for congressional prerogatives, the Monroe Doctrine, and U.S. freedom of action, Republican legislators left unconvinced.71 Hoping to rally public support for the League, the President in early September embarked on an ambitious nation-wide speaking tour. In forty speeches delivered over twenty-one days, Wilson described the League as the only alternative to the crushing burden of armaments, the tyranny of a garrison state, and the certainty of another world war. He emphasized

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that growing global interdependence made it “impossible for the United States to be isolated, . . . to play a lone hand.”72 The President conceded that membership would entail costs as well as benefits: “Some of our sovereignty would be surrendered for the good of the world,” and the United States would not always get its way. “When we lose in court,” he observed, “we will take our medicine.”73 The trip took a grievous toll on the President, who collapsed and returned early to Washington. Several days later he suffered a massive stroke. He would serve out the remainder of his term as an invalid with his mental acuity impaired. On October 24, 1919, Lodge offered fourteen reservations to League membership, drafted to “release us from obligations which might not be kept, and to preserve rights which ought not to be infringed.”74 Among other things these provisions insisted that the United States: be the sole judge of whether it had fulfilled its obligations to the League; retain the right to withdraw at any time; assume no obligation to go to war under Article 10 or deploy military and naval forces abroad without prior congressional approval; determine for itself what matters were within its own internal affairs; brook no interference with the Monroe Doctrine; accept no commitment precluding national military preparedness; reject any League sanctions that overrode U.S. economic sovereignty; and reject any term of the Versailles Treaty that restricted the individual rights of U.S. citizens. The Senate approved twelve reservations on November 17. Wilson then instructed League supporters to vote against the treaty with the Lodge reservations, which they did on November 19, sending it to defeat by a vote of 39 for and 55 against. A second vote on the treaty without reservations lost, by a vote of 38 for and 53 against. The Senate returned the un-ratified Versailles Treaty to the White House. The treaty suffered the same fate in a second and final ratification vote four months later. Great power internationalists reiterated their conviction that U.S. freedom of action offered the most promising foundation for global tranquility. “The greatest single influence toward that justice among nations which is the essential requisite of peace,” Root declared in a February 1920 speech, is “[t]he sense of justice and independent and uncontrolled power of the United States to throw its weight whenever occasion arises in favor of what it deems to be right in the affairs of the world.” Irreconcilables continued to worry that the League would bring global entanglements, alienating the United States from its true identity and ideals, and endangering the country’s domestic freedoms. As Borah explained on March 3, “Europe is still Europe, with all her racial antipathies and imperialistic appetites, . . . and if we assume the task of effectuating a change, save as in the past by whatever power of precept and example we may exert, we will end up by becoming Europeanized in our standards and in our conceptions of civilization or we will fall into disintegration and as a Republic die.”75

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On March 8, eleven days before the final vote, Wilson called on America to enter the League “fearlessly, accepting the responsibility and not fearing the role of leadership which we now enjoy” and to “consider the matter in light of what is possible to accomplish for humanity rather [than] in the light of special national interests.”76 Despite Wilson’s threatened veto, this time a greater number of League proponents voted for the Treaty with the Lodge reservations, on the grounds that an imperfect League was better than none. But too few crossed party lines to make a difference. The treaty fell seven votes shy. Hoping yet to salvage victory, Wilson entreated the nation’s voters to view the 1920 election as a “solemn referendum” on the League. His appeal fell on deaf ears. Neither party emphasized it much during the campaign. The Democratic platform did describe the Covenant as “the surest, if not the only, practicable means of maintaining the permanent peace of the world,” but it also declared the party open to reservations “making clearer or more specific the obligations of the United States” within the League. The Republican platform, meanwhile, offered only vague support for some “international association,” backed by international law and courts, which might “secure instant and general international conference whenever peace shall be threatened.” In his keynote address to the GOP convention, however, Lodge insisted that freedom of action, not collective security, must remain the touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. “We must be now and forever for Americanism and nationalism, and against internationalism. There is no safety for us, no hope that we can be of service to the world, if we do otherwise.” This had been the lesson of 1917, when “we threw our great weight into the wavering scale and we were all the more effective because we went in without alliance and of our own free will.” Such a unilateral posture resonated with the Republican presidential candidate, Warren G. Harding, who explained in accepting the nomination, “America’s present need is not . . . submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”77

PLAYING A LONE HAND: AMERICAN “ISOLATIONISM” BETWEEN THE WARS The League fight ended ironically. The two versions of internationalism negated one another, allowing isolationism to triumph. Harding, who crushed his Democratic opponent James Cox, saw his victory as a mandate for isolationism, declaring in April 1921, “In the existing League of Nations, world-governing with its super-powers, this Republic will have no part.”78 America’s postwar retreat extended beyond the “return to normalcy” Harding had promised during the campaign. It was a self-con-

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scious policy of limiting foreign entanglements, combining political aloofness and economic nationalism. The United States did not ignore world affairs in the 1920s, but the thrust of its engagement was unilateral and isolationist, focused less on political-military affairs than economic matters and heavily reliant on private actors to complement official ones.79 This new orientation enjoyed strong support from the U.S. public. Appalled by the butchery of modern warfare, Americans were determined to avoid future global wars. They were also disappointed that U.S. human and material sacrifices had failed to reform world politics. The persistence of great power rivalries and European imperialism mocked Wilson’s promises, convincing many it had been a mistake to enter the war. And the perceived harshness of the Versailles Treaty undermined U.S. resolve to help enforce it and, indeed, nurtured U.S. sympathy for its revision. The Europeans had clearly played Americans for “suckers,” taking advantage of U.S. idealism to advance their own nefarious purposes.80 No doubt foreigners would avail themselves of any future opportunity to exploit American naïveté.81 Smarting from its defeats in the League fight and the 1920 election, the Democratic Party offered mere lip service to Wilsonian internationalism for most of the next two decades, including lukewarm, conditional support for League membership in its 1924 and 1928 platforms. Still, though isolationism was ascendant after World War I, its intensity in the 1920s should not be exaggerated. Among the public, isolationist sentiment would not reach its apogee until the second half of the 1930s. At an elite level, moreover, U.S. involvement in the war stimulated unprecedented interest in foreign affairs, evidenced by the establishment of private associations to deliberate on the place of the United States in the world—most prominently the Council on Foreign Relations, founded in New York in 1921.82 Other groups included the Foreign Policy Association (1921), the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (1922), and the League of Nations Association (1923). These institutions joined with the preexisting Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—formed in 1910—to nurture an informed constituency for global engagement. Such groups kept the internationalist flame flickering during the years between the repudiation of the League of Nations and the coming of the Second World War. Within the U.S. government isolationist sentiment was significantly stronger in Congress than in the executive branch. Today, the epithet “isolationist” is often used to criticize a hidebound, even reactionary, political outlook. This was not the case in the interwar years, when many prominent isolationists on Capitol Hill were either progressive idealists, like Borah and LaFollette, or younger Democrats like Burton K. Wheeler of Idaho and Huey Long of Louisiana. What united them was opposition

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to imperialism, militarism, interventionism, and alliances, combined with support for nationalist aspirations abroad. Furthermore, American “isolationism” was largely restricted to the political and military spheres. The Republican administrations of Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover supported international cooperation in matters of trade, finance, cultural exchange, and humanitarian assistance. What they resisted was foreign entanglement, including any responsibility for ensuring stability in Europe. Having rejected the Versailles Treaty, Washington rebuffed French requests for a security guarantee and concluded a separate peace treaty with Germany in 1921. More broadly, it took the position that events outside the Western Hemisphere, even the collapse of the European balance of power, would have minimal impact on U.S. national security. Coolidge captured this sentiment of splendid isolation in his fourth annual message to Congress, on December 7, 1926: We have no traditional enemies. We are not embarrassed over any disputed territory. We have no possessions that are coveted by others; they have none that are coveted by us. Our borders are unfortified. We fear no one; no one fears us.83

Fifteen years later to the day, Japan would launch a devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, eliciting a very different statement from one of Coolidge’s successors.

ECONOMIC DIPLOMACY AND POLITICAL ISOLATION During the 1920s, “economic diplomacy” was a defining feature of U.S. foreign policy, particularly toward Europe. As practiced by the Harding and Coolidge administrations, it combined the studious avoidance of political commitments and security guarantees with the pursuit of U.S. economic and financial interests through private instruments. This policy required U.S. banks to submit to the State Department proposed loans to foreign governments and companies. American diplomats frowned on loans used to purchase armaments, support foreign monopolies, finance budget deficits, or assist governments not recognized by—or in default to—the United States. Washington thus used private financial power rather than public funds to ensure the steady repayment of war debts, foster Franco-German reconciliation, stabilize the European economy, and open markets to U.S. commerce and capital.84 The linked controversies over inter-allied debts and German reparations were among the most poisonous issues in transatlantic relations during the 1920s. During the war, European allies had accrued massive

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financial obligations to the United States, and the Harding administration, aware that the U.S. public adamantly opposed cancellation, insisted on prompt repayment. This caused enormous resentment in Great Britain and France, both of which had suffered massive casualties. Interallied debt repayments became part of an elaborate, delicately balanced “reparations triangle”: U.S. financiers lent to Germany, which used these monies in part to send reparations to France and Britain, which then repaid war debts to the United States (and, in France’s case, also to Britain). At the London Conference of 1924, the United States won support for the Dawes Plan, setting a new reparations schedule, creating a new German currency, and providing new loans to Germany. In 1929, this yielded to the Young Plan, which fixed a new reparations schedule and restored German fiscal autonomy.85 The Republican administrations from 1921 to 1933 did not entirely ignore matters of international peace and security, but they were constrained in practicing great power diplomacy by the isolationist forces that the GOP had helped to empower in the League fight. Two secretaries of state, Charles Evans Hughes and Henry L. Stimson, made significant contributions to world order. During 1921–1922, Hughes hosted the Washington Naval Conference, a multilateral negotiation culminating in the most serious international arms control agreement to date. The United States, having emerged from World War I with a naval strength approximately equal to Britain’s, sought an agreement to stabilize current arms levels. The resulting Five-Power Agreement limited the fleets of United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy (respectively) to proportions of 5:5:3:1.75:1.75. The Washington Naval Treaties, which included a statement of open-door principles to govern relations with China, might have foreshadowed a multilateral security regime for the Asia-Pacific region. Unfortunately, Hughes’s resistance to any enforcement measures prevented the emergence of a true collective security arrangement. The U.S. Senate reinforced this point by attaching a reservation to the instrument of ratification, insisting that American armed forces not be used to repel aggression abroad. This U.S. pattern of espousing principles of collective security but avoiding any obligation to enforce them repeated itself in 1928, when the United States co-sponsored the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing aggressive war as an instrument of national policy. The treaty was the brainchild of Senator Borah, who hoped to outlaw war once and for all. It proved enormously popular at home and abroad, winning overwhelming Senate support and attracting the signatures of sixty-two countries. More sober critics derided it as an “international kiss”—a symbolic expression of fidelity lacking any real commitment. Indeed, Washington

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opposed creating any machinery to implement the treaty’s principles, and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg himself pledged that America would not use force to ensure compliance with it. Even so, the Senate added several “understandings” to its ratification, emphasizing that the treaty placed no limit on U.S. self-defense under the Monroe Doctrine and implied no obligation to assist the victims of aggression. Stimson used Wilsonian language to endorse the unenforceable treaty: The Kellogg-Briand Pact provides no sanctions of force. . . . Instead, it rests upon the sanction of public opinion which can be made one of the most potent sanctions in the world . . . . Those critics who scoff at it have not accurately appraised the evolution in world opinion since the Great War.86

As the 1930s progressed, it would become clear that world public opinion and half-hearted commitments to collective security were thin reeds upon which to base international peace.

THE CRUMBLING OF WORLD ORDER The League of Nations suffered from weaknesses inherent in the doctrine of collective security. Such a system requires its members to treat peace as indivisible and to oppose aggression wherever it occurs, regardless of the identities of aggressor and aggrieved. In practice, states tend to be more selective. The distant and self-contained nature of much armed violence often allows non-belligerents to enjoy a separate peace, at little cost to their own security. Accordingly, national responses to aggression typically vary with the perceived stakes, interests, and risks involved. Even when states reach consensus on the circumstances that ought to trigger collective action, the ambiguity of actual crises can complicate agreement on whether any given incident constitutes a case of “aggression,” a “threat of aggression,” a “breach of the peace,” or an “unlawful use of force.” Beyond facing these generic dilemmas of collective security, the League of Nations bore the brunt of more specific blows, particularly lack of universal membership. Had the United States given its steadfast support, the League might have stood a chance of deterring aggression and mediating the major political crises of the 1930s. Compounding America’s absence, other major powers also stood apart. The Soviet Union became a member only in 1934. Germany joined in 1926, only to depart in 1933. Japan also quit in 1933; Italy, in 1937. This lack of universality not only sapped the League’s legitimacy and undercut its practical effectiveness, but also

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reinforced the organization’s image as a tool of satisfied powers against revisionist states. Indeed, the League had difficulty accommodating peaceful change. Wilson had tried to address this problem by insisting on Article 19 of the Covenant, empowering the Council to consider revision of the Paris treaties if these were found prejudicial to peace. Unfortunately, the requirement that any such change garner unanimous approval in the Council allowed the satisfied powers—“poachers turned gamekeepers,” in E. H. Carr’s phrase87—to freeze the status quo. World politics descended into a contest between “righteous” states defending the current order and “lawless” ones bent on its overthrow. The most threatening of these revisionist states, of course, was Germany. Historians persuasively describe the Versailles Treaty as a failed Carthaginian peace, harsh enough to embitter Germany and prevent Franco-German reconciliation but not severe enough to eliminate the industrial and demographic bases of German resurgence.88 The settlement left an aggrieved Germany, bordered on the east by several weak states. Equally problematic, it did not resolve France’s strategic dilemma. Enjoying momentary supremacy in Western Europe but facing long-term decline, France fought a desperate rearguard action to ensure strict treaty enforcement. Unable to secure a firm U.S. (or British) security guarantee, allied agreement to dismember Germany, or U.S. aid for French recovery, Paris fell back on several contradictory strategies to advance its security and economic aims: occupying the Ruhr, demanding reparations, strengthening the League, exploring Franco-German integration, and building alliances with Germany’s eastern neighbors.89 Complicating France’s predicament, its own recovery depended on Germany’s industrial revival and access to German markets and raw materials. The League’s greatest and ultimately fatal shortcoming was its lack of effective peace enforcement measures. “If you say we shall not have any war,” Wilson had argued, “you have got to have the force to make that ‘shall’ bite.”90 In fact, the League was toothless. Under the Covenant only disputes submitted simultaneously by both sides could be subject to pacific legal arbitration and judicial settlement (Article 13). Other disputes, considered political rather than legal in nature, could be submitted to the Council for its recommendation, but such decisions were not binding on the states concerned. Article 4 permitted a state involved in a dispute to sit on the League Council and vote in the matter, allowing an aggressor to veto enforcement action against itself. In principle, Article 16 committed League members to respond forcefully to aggression, by imposing economic sanctions on aggressors and directing the Council to recommend the contribution of military forces. In practice, member states diluted

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these obligations, once they realized they might need to wage war to protect peace. League members reserved the right to decide whether the Covenant had been breached, and they frequently disagreed over what constituted aggression and who deserved blame. France tried to strengthen the Covenant with the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance (1923) and the Geneva Protocol (1924), which would have made Council decisions on political disputes binding, but Great Britain resisted such measures. Thus hamstrung, the League could not address the most serious threats to peace and security. Of the sixty-six disputes brought before it, the League successfully resolved thirty-five (only four of which involved hostilities), transferred twenty others to ordinary diplomatic channels, and failed to resolve the eleven gravest disputes.91 The League’s debility largely remained hidden during the 1920s, thanks to a temporary balance of power in Europe and the League’s handling of certain minor crises like the Greco-Bulgarian affair (1931). In 1925, Germany, France, Italy, and Great Britain signed the Locarno Treaty recognizing the borders of western (but not, significantly, eastern) Europe. These successes, as well as the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, provided an illusion of peace.92 The League’s weaknesses became glaring during the 1930s, as it confronted the revisionist demands of Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. In September 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, violating the Covenant, the Washington Treaties, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. London and Paris dithered, looking in vain for a forceful U.S. response Washington denounced Tokyo but refused to participate in any collective enforcement measures. When the League-appointed Commission of Inquiry (1932) eventually condemned Japan, the latter simply left the League. This pathetic scenario repeated itself after the League condemned Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. The League proved powerless to prevent the rearmament of Germany or its reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936. Nor did it deter Germany and Italy from aiding fascist rebels in Spain. By 1937, when Japan launched a full-scale assault on China, the League had become a marginal player in international security. Unable to rely on it for collective security, member states pursued more conventional defense strategies, including bilateral alliances and pacts of mutual assistance like the Little Entente among Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. These proved a poor substitute for the balance of power.

AMERICAN ISOLATIONISM As the geopolitical environment in Asia and Europe deteriorated during the 1930s, the United States did little to shore up the balance of power or

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reinvigorate collective security. Rather, isolationism rose dramatically. The prevailing sentiment held that distant developments little affected U.S. interests; that studious neutrality in foreign disputes could best protect U.S. national security; and that embarking on foreign adventures would only jeopardize America’s historic freedom of action and invite danger closer to its shores. Such detachment represented a continuation of American traditions, isolationists argued. As Senator Borah told the Council on Foreign Relations in 1934, “In all matters political, in all commitments of any nature or kind, which encroach in the slightest upon the free and unembarrassed action of our people, or which circumscribe their discretion and judgment, we have been free, we have been independent, we have been isolationist.”93 By the mid-1930s, conventional wisdom held that U.S. involvement in the Great War had been a grievous error. Casting about for culprits, some commentators blamed the nefarious machinations of unscrupulous bankers and arms manufacturers, the so-called “merchants of death.” Such claims gained credence during 1934–1935, when Senator Gerald P. Nye (R-ID) chaired a set of high-profile hearings to investigate U.S. entry into the war. The Nye Committee’s 1,400-page report, released on February 25, 1936, purported to show that U.S. financial interests and munitions makers had lured America into Europe’s conflicts. Although the report relied heavily on innuendo to substantiate weakly documented claims and ignored the broader geopolitical, economic, and ideological motivations for U.S. entry into the war, its mono-causal conspiracy theory struck a chord with the public. The key to avoiding future wars, it suggested, was to forbid U.S. loans or arms to foreign belligerents. By 1936, fully 95 percent of poll respondents believed the United States should stay out of any future war. The following year, 70 percent of Americans polled thought the United States had been mistaken to intervene in World War I.94 Domestic preoccupations reinforced isolationist sentiments. During the 1930s, Americans found themselves in the throes of a prolonged economic depression of unprecedented severity. Between 1929 and 1933, national output fell by one third; not until 1941 would U.S. GDP (gross domestic product) regain the heady levels of the late 1920s. By 1932, the ranks of the unemployed had risen to thirteen million Americans—one-quarter of eligible workers. The long slump sapped public confidence and diminished Americans’ appetite for international activism. As discussed in greater detail in chapter 4, early U.S. policy responses to the Great Depression were disastrous, exacerbating its length and severity.95 Rather than exerting leadership to stabilize the world trading and monetary system, the United States pursued short-term national interests at the expense of its trading partners. With the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, Congress raised the average duty on imports to almost 60 percent.

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Other nations responded in kind, imposing their own prohibitive tariffs and competitive devaluations, fragmenting the world economy into exclusive trading blocs. In June 1933, the United States abandoned the gold standard and, later that year, sabotaged a global conference in London called to stabilize exchange rates. Economic nationalism devilishly complemented political isolationism. The Democratic presidential candidate in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been a strong proponent of U.S. entry to the League twelve years earlier as James Cox’s running mate. His ardor had since cooled. In a 1928 Foreign Affairs article, he advocated practical cooperation “with the League as the first great agency for the maintenance of peace,” but did not advocate U.S. membership. Four years later Roosevelt explicitly repudiated that goal. Seeking the coveted endorsement of influential publisher William Randolph Hearst, FDR dismissed the League as “a mere meeting place for the political discussion of strictly European political national difficulties.” The Democratic platform of 1932 was silent on the League, advocating only a policy of international “consultations and conference.”96 After his election in November 1932, Roosevelt maintained a cautious attitude toward collective security. He pleased liberal internationalists by appointing Tennessee Senator and Wilson disciple Cordell Hull as his Secretary of State. Yet he signaled limits on internationalism, asserting in late 1933 that the United States did not “contemplate membership” in the League.97 The administration’s foreign policy during its first term remained primarily defensive, an effort to slow the isolationist locomotive and, where possible, divert it onto internationalist tracks. Hull describes even this limited agenda as an “extremely delicate task.” Had the White House gotten too far ahead of public opinion to push an activist global agenda, “the Roosevelt administration would have been thrown out of power bodily.”98 FDR felt these domestic constraints early on. In spring 1933 he instructed the U.S. representative in Geneva that if League members agreed to reduce armaments, the United States would cooperate with the League against threats to the peace. The Senate quickly passed an amendment overriding this commitment.99 Two years later it rejected the administration’s recommendation that the United States join the World Court. From 1933 to 1937 the administration battled the most extreme isolationist measures emanating from Capitol Hill—to little avail. Particularly objectionable to the White House was the Neutrality Act of 1935, prohibiting the sale or transfer of arms to all belligerents, regardless of the cause of the war or the identities of the combatants. In early 1936, Hull sought greater executive branch discretion from Congress, arguing that an effective foreign policy required the capacity to discriminate between aggressors and victims. Congressional isolationists, afraid the President might

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draw the country into war, rose en masse to defeat the proposal and passed a series of resolutions extending the Act through May 1, 1937. The Second Neutrality Act (1936) forbade loans and credits to belligerents. The Third (1937) extended this prohibition to countries involved in civil wars (notably Spain) and required an embargo on all belligerents. The isolationist ranks swelled during the second half of the 1930s, as the League’s shortcomings became more glaring. Americans were disgusted by the League’s failure to curb Japanese aggression in China, Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, and Nazi Germany’s rearmament. Sensitive to the public mood, Roosevelt barely mentioned foreign policy during the 1936 campaign, and his statements were ambiguous: “We are not isolationists,” he declared in August 1936, “except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”100 In November 1936 Roosevelt was reelected in a landslide, winning 60.6 percent of the popular vote, and 523 of 531 electoral votes (all but two states). This victory granted FDR a mandate, but not for internationalism. A poll the following year reported that only 26 percent of Americans said rejecting the League had been a mistake.101 Roosevelt could move only gingerly to guide a reluctant and divided nation—and a mistrustful and sometimes rebellious Congress—toward the understanding that aggression against fellow democracies threatened U.S. national security. Even limited forays in this direction generated controversy. On October 5, 1937, the President tested (and roiled) the political waters in a speech in Chicago. “The peace, the freedom, and the security of ninety percent of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining ten percent who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law.” The only defense against this “epidemic of world lawlessness” was for the peace-loving peoples of the world to “quarantine” the nations afflicted by warlike distemper.102 The “Quarantine Speech” created a national uproar. In a Gallup poll two weeks later, only 26 percent of Americans favored joining the League of Nations, with twice as many opposed (22 percent offered no opinion).103 Isolationists in the House introduced a bill proposing a constitutional amendment to require a national referendum prior to any U.S. declaration of war, except in response to an invasion of the United States. It took Roosevelt’s personal intervention to defeat the bill by a single vote. During 1933 to 1938 public discourse on foreign policy strongly favored isolationism. The ground began to shift in mid-1938, however, as Axis aggression began to undermine a central premise of the isolationist position: that overseas developments bore little on U.S. security and that the United States could best protect itself through continued detachment. Far from insulating the nation, isolationism had contributed to global economic fragmentation, exacerbated political instability, and left the United

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States alone as threats drew closer to its shores. Negative developments abroad caused the isolationist consensus to fray and proffered a political opening for frustrated Wilsonians, who not only critiqued current policies but also proposed an alternative course of action. Liberal internationalists depicted U.S. prosperity and security as intimately linked with that of other peace-loving states. Only through partnership with foreign countries could the United States build an open international economic system and prevent the domination of Eurasia by unfriendly powers. A growing number of Americans at elite and mass levels concluded that it had been a mistake not to join the League.104 The Roosevelt administration moved to reinforce the shifting public mood. Cordell Hull described internationalism as entirely consistent with American political traditions. The United States had not “the slightest intention to police the world.” But neither did it “have . . . the slightest intention of reversing a tradition of a century and a half by abandoning our deep concern for, and our advocacy of, the establishment everywhere of international order under law. . . .”105 FDR adopted a bolder stance after the September 1938 Munich agreement granting the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. He committed the United States to assist the rearmament of the world’s democracies. “[N]either we, nor any other nation, will accept disarmament while our neighbor nations arm to the teeth,” he declared on October 26, 1938. Roosevelt agitated for Congress to reform the Neutrality Laws and committed the country to begin strengthening its national defenses in his “methods short of war” speech on January 4, 1939. Isolationists continued to take refuge in the country’s geographic distance from potential enemies. “True, we do live in a foreshortened world in which, compared with Washington’s day, time, and space are relatively annihilated,” Senator Vandenberg conceded in February 1939. “But I still thank God for the two insulating oceans.” Roosevelt would have none of it. Modern technology left the country exposed like never before. “Beyond question, within a few scant years air fleets will cross the ocean as easily as today they cross the closed European seas.”106 In March 1939, German troops entered and annexed the rump Czechoslovakia. The next month FDR tried to shake up remaining public complacency about the link between U.S. and global security. “The continued political, economic, and social independence of every small nation in the world does have an effect on our national safety and prosperity . . . each one that disappears weakens our national safety and prosperity.”107 Public opinion remained strongly opposed to involvement in any prospective European war. In April 1939 a Gallup poll found that an overwhelming 83 percent of Americans thought that in the event of war, the United States should not “send our army and navy abroad to fight the enemies of England and France.” At the same time, there was a growing willing-

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ness to support Great Britain. By August, Americans were evenly divided between those who wanted to support Britain even at the risk of U.S. involvement in the war and those who sought strict neutrality. 108 CONCLUSION By summer 1939, the longstanding notion that the United States could best preserve its security by unilateral means was under severe strain. The outbreak of war in Europe in September and the fall of France the following June would fracture the isolationist edifice still further. But the final blow did not fall until December 1941, when America’s vast oceans proved no barrier to aggression. The U.S. entry into the Second World War would stimulate new thinking about the desirable shape of and appropriate role of the United States in the postwar world. The Roosevelt administration would adopt as its animating foreign policy vision a creative synthesis of Wilsonianism and great power internationalism. This posture recognized that American power and international peace and prosperity alike were best pursued through multilateral institutions that facilitated cooperation on political, economic, and security matters. Unlike after World War I, the United States would not withdraw into isolation but instead grasp the reins of world leadership in pursuit of precisely the sorts of arrangements it had avoided for most of its history. NOTES 1. Cited in Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy after the Cold War (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002), 165. 2. David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 2003). 3. Daniel H. Deudney, “The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control and the Balance of Power in the American States-Union, Circa 1787–1861,” International Organization 49, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 191–228. 4. David C. Hendrickson, “Three Governing Systems in American History: Philadelphia, Appomattox, Washington” (paper presented at annual meetings of the International Studies Association, Chicago, Ill., February 2001), 5–7. David Hendrickson, “In Our Own Image: The Sources of American Conduct in World Affairs,” National Interest 50, Winter 1997/8. 5. David M. Fitzsimmons, “Tom Paine’s New World Order: Idealistic Internationalism in the Ideology of Early American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 569–582. 6. Cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 32–33. 7. Washington’s Farewell Address, Avalon Project at Yale Law School http:// www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm (20 February 2008). Felix Gilbert,

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To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 8. Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers: No. 11, Avalon Project http:// www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed11.htm> (3 March 2008). 9. First Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson, March 14, 1801, Avalon Project, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/jefinau1.htm (3 March 2008). 10. Cited in Nico Krisch, “Weak As Constraint, Strong as Tool: The Place of International Law in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Unilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: International Perspectives, ed. David M. Malone and Yuen Foong Khong (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 44. 11. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 30. 12. Mlada Bukovansky, “American Identity and Neutral Rights from Independence to the War of 1812,” International Organization 51, no. 2 (1997): 209–243. 13. Walter Russell Mead identifies “Jeffersonian” and “Jacksonian” (as well as “Hamiltonian” and “Wilsonian”) traditions in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Century Foundation/Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). 14. The Monroe Doctrine, Avalon Project, (March 15, 2008). 15. John Quincy Adams, cited in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 36. 16. Cited in William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 17. Polk cited in Kupchan, The End of the American Era, 171; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 36. 18. Weisband, The Ideology of American Foreign Policy, 29–30. 19. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 242–248, 199–203. 20. David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898– 1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 21. Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, December 6, 1904. 22. John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11–13. 23. See for example Kissinger, Diplomacy, 43–4. 24. Cited in Robert Kagan, “History Repeating Itself: Liberalism and Foreign Policy,” The New Criterion (April 1999), 8. 25. Annual Message of the President transmitted to Congress December 2, 1902 (May 10, 2008). 26. Theodore Roosevelt, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1906 (April 20, 2008). http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1906/ roosevelt-lecture.html

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27. September 1914 , cited in Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 48; Ruggie, “The Past as Prologue,” 95; Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 12. 28. Cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 40. 29. Lodge, “The Maintenance of Peace,” speech of June 9, 1915 at Union College. 30. Cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 13. 31. Cited in Hendrickson, “Three Governing Systems,” 25. 32. Memorial Day speech, cited in H. W. V. Temperley, ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, I (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), 179. 33. Cited in Knock, To End All Wars, 44 34. Wilson cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 16. Wilson cited in “President Urges Unity for Peace,” [no author] New York Times, 6 January 1916, 1. 35. Democratic platform, Hughes cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 17–18. 36. Cited in Hendrickson, “Three Governing Systems,” 25. 37. Wilson’s “Peace without Victory” speech to Congress, January 22, 1917 Temperley, A History, 180–181. 38. Cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 22. 39. Temperley, A History, 173, 203. 40. President Wilson’s War Message to Congress, 2 April 1917, (22 March 2008). 41. Cited in Temperley, A History, 192–194. 42. F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 43. Wilson speech of December 28, 1918, at London’s Guild Hall, cited in Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Power and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 52–53. 44. Tony Smith, “Making the World Safe for Democracy in the American Century,” in The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Policy in the ‘American Century,’ ed. Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31–32. 45. Cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 49. 46. Quotations from Wilson’s “Five Particulars” speech, New York, September 27, 1918, cited in Knock, To End All Wars, p. 163; and Temperley, A History, 192–196. 47. Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight, Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2001). 48. See Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction into the Study of International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2001). Kissinger, Diplomacy. 49. Peter B. Evans, Harold K. Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam, Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 50. Robert B. Zoellick, “Congress and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Survival 41, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 20–41, 23. 51. Cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 42. 52. Cited in Hendrickson, “Three Governing Systems,” 27. 53. Cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 39.

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54. Knox, cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 40–41. The cause of the great power internationalists suffered a blow with Roosevelt’s sudden death on January 6, 1919. 55. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920), 38. 56. Recollections of September 6, 1919, cited in Temperley, A History, 197. 57. In Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 54. 58. Wilson cited in Knock, To End all Wars, 127. 59. Wilson address, Cheyenne, Wyoming, September 23, 1919. Cited in Smith, America’s Mission, 90. 60. Cited in Knock, To End all Wars, 229. 61. Root, Hardwick, Knox, and Lodge in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 60–65. 62. Cited in Luck, Mixed Messages, 63. 63. Borah cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 61. 64. “Defeat Article X,” declared the New Republic on March 29, 1919. 65. “THIS IS NOT PEACE,” the editors of the New Republic bellowed on May 24. Cited in Knock, To End all Wars, 234. William Langer, “The Well-Spring of Our Discontents,” Journal of Contemporary History 3, no. 4 (October 1968): 3–17, 7–8. 66. November 18, 1919. Cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 234. 67. Langer, “The Well-Spring,” 8. See also Marc Trachtenberg, “Versailles after Sixty Years,” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982) 487–506, 490–4. 68. Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 111–112, 118–119, 131. 69. In Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 135. 70. Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 137. 71. Knock, To End All Wars, 259. 72. Speech in Los Angeles, September 20, 1919, cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 182. 73. Cited in Knock, To End all Wars, 232–233, 266. 74. Cited in Knock, To End All Wars, 266. 75. Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 343–343, 380. 76. Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 346–347. 77. Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 383–389. 78. President Harding inaugural message to Congress. 79. Melvyn Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1979). Kathleen Burk, “Economic Diplomacy between the Wars,” Historical Journal 24, no. 4 (1981): 1003–1015. 80. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest, 331. 81. The editor of a Midwestern newspaper captured the prevailing mood: The United States was “the only really worthwhile nation of the world today. . . . The more we see of European affairs . . . a quagmire of crookedness . . . devious diplomacy and warfare . . . the more we like the idea of being in a position to keep away from Europe as much as possible.” The author, Henry A. Wallace, would later become an ardent proponent of liberal internationalism as FDR’s Vice-President. Quotation in J. Samuel Walker, Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy (Westport, CT and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1976), 13. 82. Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, second ed. (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006).

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83. President Calvin Coolidge, Fourth Annual Message to Congress, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=29567 (June 12, 2006). 84. Leffler, The Elusive Quest. Herbert Feis, The Diplomacy of the Dollar: First Era 1919–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 11, 18–20. Burk, “Economic Diplomacy between the Wars.” 85. Charles P. Kindleberger, Financial History of Western Europe (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 302–5. 86. In Kissinger, Diplomacy, 376. 87. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures,” Delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961 (London: MacMillan, 1961). 88. Langer, “The Well-Spring of our Discontents,” 16. 89. Walter A. McDougall, “Political Economy versus National Sovereignty: French Structures for German Economic Integration after Versailles,” Journal of Modern History 51 (March 1979): 40–23, 9. Jon Jacobson, “Is There a New International History of the 1920s?” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 617–645. 90. Cited in Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations. 91. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 315. 92. Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe: 1918– 1933, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2003). 93. Cited in McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 149. 94. Poll figures cited in Legro, Rethinking the World, 66. 95. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, rev. edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 96. Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: the Triumph of Liberal Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 25. Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations Boulder: Westview, 2003), 28. 97. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 28. 98. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, I (NewYork: MacMillan, 1948), 177. 99. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 28–29. 100. Cited in Cooper, Breaking the Heart, 405. 101. Poll results cited in Divine, Second Chance, 28. 102. “Quarantine” speech, October 5, 1937. AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History . (February 20, 2008). 103. M. Leigh, Mobilizing Consent: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 38–41. 104. Jeffrey Legro, “Whence American Internationalism?”, 261–262. 105. National Press Club speech, March 17, 1938. Excerpted in New York Times, 18 March, 1938. 106. Vandenberg and FDR cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 383, 385. 107. FDR Press Conference, Warm Springs, Georgia, April 8, 1939. The American Presidency Project . 108. March 1939 poll results. Braumoeller, 27.

2 ✛

Planning the Postwar World: From the Atlantic Charter to Dumbarton Oaks

They are children playing with bricks and “making the world over.” —Richard Law, British Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs1

S

hortly before dawn on September 1, 1939, the first wave of German bombers appeared in the sky over Warsaw as Wehrmacht divisions poured across the borders of Poland. For the United States, the outbreak of the second global war in a generation raised short- and long-term questions. The immediate one was whether it would remain neutral or join the side of the allies. The equally profound, if less pressing, question was what role the United States would assume in the postwar world and whether it was prepared to shoulder responsibility for building, sustaining, and defending future peace and security. It would take another two years, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to answer the first question. But well before the United States entered the war, the Roosevelt Administration began to answer the second. On the very day Germany invaded Poland, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the nation to “seeking for humanity a final peace which will eliminate, as far as it is possible to do so, the continued use of force between nations.”2 Operating discreetly, U.S. officials started laying the groundwork for a future structure of international security based on multilateral principles, anchored in the great powers, and sustained by vigorous U.S. leadership. This world order vision signified a creative synthesis of the two designs that had battled to a draw a generation earlier: the great power internationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson. This fusion bore the stamp of FDR himself, who saw 41

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it as the only approach that could both promote world peace and secure sustained U.S. engagement in world affairs. The principal vehicle for this vision—and FDR’s unique contribution to postwar order—would be the United Nations Organization. There was nothing inevitable about U.S. support for a multilateral structure of peace, particularly given the failures of the League of Nations. The United States, however, embraced multilateral cooperation, largely because the unilateralist orthodoxy that had long dominated U.S. foreign policy had been thoroughly discredited.3 During the interwar years, the country had adopted an independent and insular stance on the premise that isolationism provided the route to security and prosperity. But the successive disasters of the Great Depression, the world’s slide into war, and—most dramatically—the attack on Pearl Harbor, destroyed this comfortable illusion. This litany of misfortunes convinced the Roosevelt administration, most members of Congress and the general public that advancing the national interest demanded international institutions for political and economic cooperation backed by military power to ensure global stability. If the lessons of recent events help account for the timing of U.S. internationalism, American political values help explain the form that internationalism took. Multilateralism appealed to Franklin Roosevelt and senior officials in his administration in part because it was consistent with the principles believed to govern American domestic life—and promised to recreate at the international level the sort of open polity that Americans took for granted at home.4 Administration officials believed that only a universal system of collective security, backed by U.S. power, would both resonate with domestic political values and preserve postwar peace. This historic choice owed less to the power position of the United States than to the influence of American political culture and the perceived lessons of experience. To achieve support for this vision, FDR had to persuade both Congress and the American people that a multilateral approach to international peace was desirable on both practical and moral grounds. Senior U.S. officials, starting with the President himself, depicted collective security not only as the only hope for avoiding another round of great power rivalry and war, but also as an expression of longstanding American aspirations, ideals, and values. Thanks to their efforts, the postwar structure of international peace bore the stamp “Made in America.”

“THE GREAT ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY” Prospects for postwar American global leadership were hardly obvious in September 1939. As mandated by law, Roosevelt responded to

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the outbreak of the war in Europe by invoking the Neutrality Acts. At the same time, he warned his countrymen that they could not insulate themselves from the gathering storm, declaring, “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”5 FDR determined that the United States should do what it could to ensure an allied victory, including by entering the war if necessary, but he worried about outpacing a deeply isolationist American public. For two years he maneuvered within the limits of law and evolving public sentiment to assist the allies as best he could. The immediate and overwhelming U.S. public response to the war was to take refuge in isolation. Two weeks after hostilities commenced, only six percent of Americans wanted the United States “to declare war and send our army and navy abroad to fight Germany.” Ninety-four percent wanted to stay out. This sentiment proved resilient. In the twenty-seven months before Pearl Harbor, no more than 30 percent of Americans ever favored entering the war. Yet a majority of Americans supported efforts short of war to ensure an Axis defeat. In late 1939, 59 percent expressed a desire to help Great Britain materially in its struggle, even if this meant giving up some neutrality.6 Roosevelt exploited pro-allied feelings to secure passage of a fourth Neutrality Act on November 4, 1939. Unlike its antecedents, this legislation included a “cash and carry” provision, permitting Great Britain and France to purchase arms from the United States, so long as they paid in cash and transported the materiel on their own ships. Throughout 1940 and 1941, domestic debate raged over whether the United States should side with the allies or remain neutral. This dilemma became acute after June 1940, when the sudden and shocking fall of France left Great Britain alone to face the Axis onslaught. The most influential U.S. group advocating support for Britain was the Committee to Defend America by Defending the Allies, formed in May 1940 under the leadership of William Allen White, an influential Republican publisher. The committee, organized around a core of 650 prominent internationalists and some 600 chapters nationwide, operated with the quiet encouragement and advice of senior administration officials, including the President. During 1940–1941, the group built support for administration initiatives to support Britain, including the “destroyers for bases” deal and the Lend-Lease agreement. It quickly became the vanguard of the internationalist movement, drawing on the resources of the League of Nations Association to launch a massive nationwide propaganda campaign in favor of assisting Great Britain. Significantly, the committee buttressed the impression that Roosevelt was responding to, rather than leading, public opinion.7 The Committee’s main rival was the America First Committee, which attracted the support of millions of Americans—isolationists, pacifists,

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and nationalists—united in the belief that the United States must remain out of the war at all costs. Founded in August 1940 by Sears, Roebuck and Company president Robert E. Wood and led by a committee of fifty prominent citizens, including Alice Roosevelt Longworth (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter) and John T. Flynn, America First enjoyed the backing of powerful progressive and Republican legislators. Its most famous spokesman was the aviator and national hero Charles A. Lindbergh, whose antiSemitism and nativism would eventually alienate many Americans and cripple America First’s reputation.8 The committee’s founding principles were straightforward: No foreign power, nor group of powers, could successfully attack a prepared America. The United States should, therefore, remain scrupulously neutral and concentrate on building an impregnable defense against foreign aggression. Since Germany was destined to defeat the allies no matter what the United States did, any effort to provide the allies with “aid short of war” (as the Committee to Defend the Allies proposed) was a fool’s errand that would only distract the nation from domestic preparedness, entangle it in war, and endanger its democracy. Far better to seek an accommodation with Hitler. Most Americans, however, drew the opposite conclusion from the fall of France. With German troops on the English Channel, the United States had to bolster Great Britain’s capacity and resolve to continue the fight. If Britain succumbed or sued for peace, the United States would likely face Nazi aggression on its own. Seventy percent of Americans thus approved the administration’s agreement in September 1940 to provide Great Britain with fifty aging destroyers in exchange for rights to lease air and naval bases on eight British possessions in the Western Hemisphere.9 Simultaneously, the Administration strengthened America’s defensive capabilities. In July, FDR won congressional approval for an additional $5 billion in spending for national defense, bringing total spending for 1940 to $10.5 billion—nearly a tenfold increase over 1939. The Presidential campaign of 1940 hinted that the tide was turning away from isolationism. On June 24, eight days after France’s surrender, the Republican Party opened its nominating convention in Philadelphia. The specter of a Nazi-dominated Europe hung over the deliberations. In a raucous and divided gathering, the party’s rank and file bypassed wellknown isolationist front-runners like Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg to select as its standard bearer the political neophyte but solid internationalist, Wendell Willkie. This “Miracle in Philadelphia,” as journalists dubbed it, reflected growing doubts that isolationism could protect U.S. national security. Still, Americans remained conflicted about how far to go to stop Hitler. By September 1940, 72 percent supported entering the war as a last resort to defeat Nazi Germany. But the vast majority fervently hoped this would

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be unnecessary.10 Isolationism remained strongest in the Midwest. In October Willkie, trailing badly in the polls, appealed to isolationists there, alleging that Roosevelt had secretly agreed with the British to commit U.S. troops to the war in Europe. The gambit temporarily boosted his standing in several states. It was not enough. Although Willkie got more total votes than any previous Republican in history, FDR won handily, earning an unprecedented third term by an electoral college margin of 449–82, on the strength of 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million. In Congress the GOP picked up only five Senate seats (to trail 66–28) and lost seven in the House (to trail 267–162). FDR’s healthy margin of victory expanded his maneuvering room to enhance U.S. assistance to the United Kingdom. With the British government fast running out of funds to purchase war materiel and other supplies, Roosevelt proposed on December 17 that the United States loan military equipment to Britain free of charge. Characteristically, he explained this near belligerency with a homespun analogy, likening it to the loan of a garden hose to a neighbor whose own house was on fire. Twelve days later, in one of his most celebrated “fireside chats,” Roosevelt justified a dramatic increase in aid to Britain by invoking a new global vocation for the United States: “We must become the great arsenal of democracy. If Great Britain goes down,” the strategic consequences would be immense. The Axis would effectively control not only Europe but also Asia, Africa, and Australasia. America’s insulating oceans, which had bought such comfort “in the days of the clipper ships,” meant little in the age of the long-range bomber. The only way for the United States to avoid war was to deploy its economic and industrial might to sustain the forces of freedom against the legions of tyranny, by providing the British with “the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters, which will enable them to fight for their liberty and our security.”11 On January 10, 1941, the White House formally submitted to Congress legislation that would authorize the President to sell, transfer, exchange, or lend equipment to any country to defend itself against the Axis. Isolationists rebelled. Ratification would mean “war, open and complete warfare,” Senator Wheeler objected.12 Nevertheless, the Lend-Lease Act easily passed both chambers in mid-March, by a vote of 60–31 in the Senate and 317–71 in the House. Senator Vandenberg lamented: “We have tossed Washington’s Farewell Address into the discard. We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power politics and the power wars of Europe, Asia, and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat.”13 Roosevelt’s riposte was that isolation was an unrealistic and dangerous option in an ever-shrinking world. The country could not afford indifference to the fates of others struggling for liberty and security. As he told

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the American people over the radio on July 4, 1941, “The United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”14 Still, isolationist instincts persisted within Congress and among the American people. On August 12 the House of Representatives passed the Selective Service Act by only one vote. Similarly, the bulk of the Neutrality Acts were repealed only in November 1941—just one month before Pearl Harbor. The public itself remained split on the benefits of institutionalized internationalism: in a Gallup poll of May 1941, 38 percent wished the United States to join a postwar League of Nations, whereas 39 percent did not.15

POSTWAR PLANNING BEGINS Beyond assisting an allied victory, Roosevelt was determined that the United States should shape the future international order. His administration began planning for the postwar world just two weeks after the war began. On September 16, 1939, FDR appointed State Department expert Leo Pasvolsky as Special Assistant for Problems of Peace. Four months later Secretary of State Cordell Hull created an Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, chaired by Undersecretary Sumner Welles, with a mandate “to survey the basic principles that should underlie a desirable world order to be evolved after the termination of present hostilities, with primary reference to the best interests of the United States.”16 The committee set several baseline goals for the postwar world: restoring the international rule of law, ending the crushing burden of armaments, and reestablishing the smooth trade and financial relations essential to shared prosperity and peace.17 In its work, the committee drew on numerous proposals emanating from U.S. agencies as well as private groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace, led by Professor James Shotwell of Yale University.18 During 1940, U.S. planning efforts remained limited and discreet, to avoid antagonizing neutralist sentiment. Still, the committee began to map out a postwar structure of peace, including a world organization that would avoid the pitfalls of the ill-fated League of Nations. An early model called for an executive council of powerful states and an assembly with universal membership. In contrast to the unanimity provisions that had emasculated the League, the new body would be empowered to use force on the basis of majority rule. Welles also favored giving the assembly a regional dimension, in the form of nine different blocs of nations, and creating a global police force.19 These intriguing proposals never got off the ground, as attention shifted in mid-1940 to the grave crisis created by the Nazi blitzkrieg and the fall of France.

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Postwar planning quickened in early 1941, prodded by the President’s “Four Freedoms” address to Congress on January 6, in which he described a world of unprecedented peril, while holding out the hope for a better future for humankind. “At no previous time has American security been as severely threatened from without as it is today. . . . The democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world.” But the United States would never accept a “dictator’s peace.” It would insist instead on “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” The first of these was “freedom of speech and expression”; the second was the freedom “to worship God in [their] own way”; the third was “freedom from want,” meaning “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants”; and the fourth was “freedom from fear,” based on “a worldwide reduction in armaments to such a point and in so thorough a fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.”20 Giving practical expression to the Four Freedoms would require new forms of international cooperation. The President’s vision reinvigorated U.S. postwar planning, becoming, in Hull’s words, “a further basis on which to build our structure for a postwar world.”21 Four weeks after the speech, Hull created a new Division of Special Research at the State Department, also under Pasvolsky, to begin putting these principles into practice.

THE VISION OF THE ATLANTIC CHARTER The Roosevelt Administration issued several wartime declarations promoting an open postwar world based on the principles of liberal internationalism, including sovereign equality, self-determination and self-government, collective security and international law, and equal commercial access and treatment. These statements projected outward the liberal values that governed American political life, including equal treatment under the law, self-restraint, and peaceful cooperation.22 They also reflected lessons drawn from the successive disasters of the previous quarter century: the slaughter of the Great War, the inconclusive peace, the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, and the politicalmilitary rivalries and ideological polarization that had dragged countries into a second, even more destructive global conflagration. The most important of these statements of American purpose was the Atlantic Charter. Released on August 14, 1941, it was the product of a secret maritime rendezvous between Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The Charter was not

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a formal treaty—indeed, it was not even signed—but rather a statement of principles outlining political and moral foundations for a just, peaceful, and prosperous world. Though drafted jointly, the document was American in inspiration. The idea came from Roosevelt himself, who wanted the two nations to “jointly bind themselves” to the goal of “a new world order based on those principles . . . that would hold out hope to enslaved peoples of the world.”23 The Charter had eight points: First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them; Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity; Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security; Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want; Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance; Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.24 The Atlantic Charter embodied the U.S. preference for an open postwar world based on multilateral principles. It included a commitment to collective security, albeit in the imprecise vision of a “wider and more permanent system of general security,” supported by a multilateral sys-

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tem of disarmament. It called on all nations to remove existing barriers to equal access to trade and raw materials and, simultaneously, to commit to collaboration to improve labor standards and social welfare. The charter repeated the historic U.S. support for absolute freedom of the seas. Several of its clauses touched on self-determination, including insistence that territorial changes be contingent on the “freely-expressed wishes of the peoples concerned,” that sovereign rights be restored to victims of aggression, and that all peoples have the liberty to choose their own form of government. (These particular clauses would soon cause heartburn in Britain, which faced growing opposition to its colonial rule in India, Burma, and elsewhere). The document also echoed the “Four Freedoms” speech, explicitly advocating secure borders within which peoples might enjoy “freedom from fear and freedom from want.”25 Two clauses generated substantial controversy during the drafting. The British objected to a proposed nondiscrimination clause in point 4, citing their commitment to imperial preference under the Ottawa agreements. Churchill’s obstinacy on this point meant that the eventual Charter clause included the qualifying phrase, with due respect for existing obligations. This caveat left Hull “keenly disappointed,” feeling it “deprived the article of virtually all significance.”26 On the eighth point, London was more forward leaning than Washington. The British wanted to include as an explicit postwar objective the creation of an “effective international organization.” FDR shied away from such Wilsonian language, leery of outpacing congressional and popular sentiment and (as he told Churchill) of creating domestic “suspicions and opposition.” He was also skeptical that any reconstituted League would be sufficient to keep the postwar peace. It would be better, at least in the war’s immediate aftermath, to rely on “an international police force composed of the United States and Britain.” Churchill worried about dashing the hopes of internationalists, but the President thought “the time had come to be realistic.” Welles and Hopkins interceded, persuading the President to temper his emphasis on the great powers. In the end FDR accepted language stating the need to disarm aggressors, pending “the establishment of a wider and more permanent system of general security”—an oblique reference to some future world body.27 Some historians have dismissed the Atlantic Charter as a rhetorical flourish devoid of practical import. Such a judgment misses the point of the Charter entirely. First, Roosevelt’s own thinking tended to blend idealism and realism. The challenge for U.S. foreign policy was to harness America’s power to American purposes, in the hopes of getting an intractable world to conform as much as possible to U.S. principles. FDR conceded that the Charter did “not provide rules of easy application.” Nevertheless, it was “a good thing to have principles” toward which the

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world could aim. He expressed confidence the Charter would take its place beside the Magna Carta and Wilson’s Fourteen Points as “a step toward a better life for the people of the world.”28 Following U.S. entry into the war, the Charter became a statement of allied war aims. On January 3, 1942, twenty-six allied countries signed a “Joint Declaration of the United Nations,” endorsing the Charter’s “common program of purposes and principles.” To Hull’s mind the Charter was “a statement of basic principles and fundamental ideas and policies that are universal in their practical application” and enjoy “the support of all civilized nations.”29 More practically, the Charter offered U.S. planners “a broader and more definite basis for comprehensive preparation of postwar policy within the United States Government.” Without such planning, FDR believed, the war effort itself would be in vain. As he told the International Labor Conference on November 6, 1941: “This war, like the last war, will produce nothing but destruction unless we prepare for the future now.” The world must “plan now for the better world we aim to build,” seeking not palliatives but “permanent cures.”30

PEARL HARBOR AND THE SEARCH FOR A REALISTIC MULTILATERALISM The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor ended debate about whether the United States should enter the war. Its long-term impact on U.S. strategic thinking was equally profound. As Senator Vandenberg later conceded, December 7, 1941, “ended isolationism for any realist.”31 The United States entered World War II not to transform the nature of international relations but because it was attacked. Yet once engaged, its ambition expanded well beyond the defeat of the Axis powers. Washington sought to recast the very nature of world politics, to alter the arena in which the United States would operate. It pursued not only conventional “possession” goals like power and wealth, but also what Arnold Wolfers terms “milieu” goals.32 The desirable shape of international order and the appropriate U.S. role in sustaining it became matters of vigorous debate. Isolationism might be discredited, but internationalism could come in various guises: the messianic imperialism of Life publisher Henry Luce, who championed an “American Century” based on the forthright projection of U.S. ideology and industry; the economic Wilsonianism of Vice President Henry Wallace, who advocated a global New Deal to spread justice and social reform internationally and build a “Century of the Common Man;” the sober geopolitics of Yale historian Nicholas Spykman, who viewed power politics as an enduring fact of international life; the world federalism of

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Clarence K. Streit, who envisioned the pooling of sovereignty among formerly independent democracies; the pragmatic realism of influential journalist Walter Lippmann, who argued for a postwar alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia; and the “One-Worldism” of Wendell Willkie, who conceived of a single human community united by the advent of global interdependence.33 For internationalists in the Roosevelt administration, U.S. entry into the war offered a second chance to create an open world based on the principle of liberal multilateralism and the precepts of collective security, dismantling of trade barriers, and self-determination of peoples.34 Their thinking about postwar order was animated by shared ideas gleaned from the lessons of recent experience, from American political culture, and from a general faith in the beneficent global role of the United States. Above all, administration officials were haunted by the disasters of the interwar years, when the United States had failed to join the League or help stabilize the global economy. This abdication of leadership had enabled the collapse of collective security, exacerbated the global depression, and hastened the world’s division into protectionist and ultimately military blocs. They determined, therefore, to avoid the mistakes of 1918–1919, when the United States had won the war but (as Welles said) “made no effort to win the peace.”35 Their broad objective was to create and embed the United States within permanent multilateral institutions to facilitate cooperation in political, economic, and social affairs. As Hull explained in radio address on May 18, 1941, the nation would help establish “the foundations of an international order in which independent nations cooperate freely with each other for their mutual gain.”36 International institutions would offer countries the opportunity to harmonize and coordinate their foreign policies, reducing zero-sum economic competition, discouraging power politics, and transforming a system racked by rivalry and violence into a stable community amenable and conducive to collective undertakings. The result would pay dividends at both the global and national level, in the form of a stable, open world governed by the rule of law, providing security from aggression and sustaining free enterprise, individual liberty, and democratic institutions. America would serve as midwife to bring this world into being, and by binding the United States to multilateral institutions, the administration would discourage the country from going its own way or oscillating unpredictably in its global engagement. This was not simply Wilsonianism redux. To be stable, U.S. policymakers understood, any postwar peace must rely on power as well as principle. Wilson, intoxicated with the idea of collective security, had overreached with the League. Most senior U.S. officials had since sobered up. They recognized that a postwar structure of peace must include

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credible mechanisms of enforcement by the great powers and sufficient safeguards for U.S. freedom of action. As Dean Acheson describes it, the task before the Roosevelt Administration was to find a middle ground between “two contrary and equally unrealistic ideas . . . [that had] competed for the national mind, both springing from our earlier history”: isolationism, which assumed that the United States could insulate itself from serious global problems, and what Acheson termed “universal law,” which regarded the mere invocation of norms and obligations as an adequate foundation for national security.37 Neither offered a promising basis for U.S. foreign policy. The 1930s had revealed the impracticality of both U.S. detachment from the world’s troubles and international law (absent realistic enforcement). Chastened by a decade of fascist aggression, U.S. internationalists realized that world order was neither a natural condition nor a function of disembodied law. It was the product of power, imaginatively organized and robustly deployed. In addition to spurning isolationism and naïve liberal internationalism, FDR also rejected the country’s traditional unilateralism. World War II and the preceding depression proved that U.S. security and prosperity were too intertwined with the fortunes of others to make going it alone a promising option. The new order must be based on collective frameworks, backed by sufficient power, to manage international political and economic relations.

GENERATING IDEAS FOR WORLD ORDER Pearl Harbor thrust U.S. postwar planning into higher gear. “We are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows,” Roosevelt assured the country on December 9, 1941.38 The President named Hull the chair of a secret Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy. The committee, which met for the first time on February 12, 1942, quickly swelled to forty-five prominent internationalists, drawn from the White House, Congress, the State, War, and Navy Departments, other agencies, and private life.39 Substantive work soon devolved to five subcommittees devoted to postwar political problems, territorial questions, economic reconstruction, legal matters, and international organization. These official planning efforts were influenced by the private activities of innumerable journalists, academics, and other commentators who were calling upon the United States to embrace new global responsibilities. The postwar planners had a daunting task: to determine, in the throes of a global war, “sound bases for future United States foreign policy.” This mandate included defining U.S. interests and objectives in all major

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regions (and issue areas) and delineating the conditions, actors, and institutions required to realize them. They were asked to accomplish this, moreover, at a time of unprecedented international flux. It was hard to predict even the number, identity, and ranking of future great powers, let alone the prospects for restoring global economic stability; the fate of the longstanding colonial empires; and the impact of social forces unleashed by total war. The planners were confident of only two things: the Allies would defeat the Axis and the United States would emerge as the world’s most powerful country, possessing “profound new responsibilities in connection with practically all vital problems of world affairs.”40 This new American obligation to underwrite world order implied a redefinition of U.S. national interests and a reassessment of U.S. national security requirements. In the past, the United States had focused on its own safety (and that of its hemisphere) through isolationist and unilateral means. Its destiny had changed. In the words of planner Harley Notter, “The postwar responsibilities of the United States as a major power would be so different in degree, and presumably in kind, as to make imperative a thorough reappraisal of the world’s, and our own, security needs.” Increasingly, the concepts of national security and world order would conflate into one and the same. Accordingly, U.S. planners chose “to consider our own future security policy not only in terms of the American position alone but in terms with the world’s requirements for peace. With these our own requirements were merging.” Embracing this new role as global guarantor required a psychological adjustment, since it implied “fundamental departures from the traditional American position.”41 A “fundamental choice” for the Administration, Notter recalls, was “between seeking security by our own efforts alone or through cooperative action with other powers on an agreed basis.” The Advisory Committee came down strongly in favor of multilateralism. True national security implied “more than our being well-equipped to fight for the maintenance of our national possessions and interests.” It would “exist genuinely only when we were as free as contrivable from the menace of having to protect ourselves,” thanks to robust collective security.42 In security and other matters, the planners adopted an institutional approach to world order. America’s goal was to establish collective frameworks within which sovereign nation-states could conduct their relations. They assumed that international order no less than domestic order rested upon the rule of law. As Hull explained in September 1943, the aim was to replace “the anarchy of unbridled and discordant nationalisms, economic and political,” with international “rules of morality, law, and justice.”43 This institutional approach drew on America’s historical traditions. Like the framers of the U.S. Constitution who had sought a more perfect union among the thirteen original states, the

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postwar planners hoped that new multilateral institutions might encourage sustained cooperation among independent countries that might otherwise resort to unilateral action and violent competition. The goal was to create institutions at the global level that embodied principles and norms similar to those governing relations among U.S. states and the three branches of the federal government.44 These included sovereign equality and equal treatment, the rule of law, reciprocal obligations and concessions, checks and balances on centralized power, compromise in decision-making, credible and transparent commitments, institutional openness, “voice opportunities” for weaker actors, and indivisible security commitments among members of the community. This project of global institutional reform also derived from America’s more recent New Deal experience. Just as the New Deal innovations had helped to stabilize the U.S. domestic political economy by bolstering democracy and market capitalism, so new international agencies could assist nations in managing practical social, economic, and political problems and avoiding the descent into political extremism, geopolitical rivalry, and zero-sum economic competition. Indeed, many of the new multilateral organizations proposed by the planners mirrored the administrative and legal forms of domestic regulatory agencies created during the Great Depression.45 As a strategy to deal with global problems, this pragmatic focus on functional agencies promised to help de-politicize controversial issues by treating these as neutral, technical challenges, and, more generally, to institutionalize habits of pacific cooperation. With this aim in mind, the United States sponsored several wartime multilateral conferences to address global challenges. First came the Food and Agriculture Conference in Hot Springs, Virginia (May–June 1943), which addressed a topic that FDR believed offered “the best chances for immediate success in the first attempt to test the willingness of the United Nations to cooperate on postwar problems.”46 Subsequent gatherings would include the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey (November–December 1943); the UN Conference on International Financial and Monetary Problems at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (July 1944); the Dumbarton Oaks Conference on International Organization (August–October 1944); the International Labor Conference in Philadelphia (November 1944); the International Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago (November–December 1944); and the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (meeting periodically through 1945). Those engaged in long-range strategy and policy planning inevitably confront the challenge of remaining focused on long-term objectives without becoming irrelevant to pressing concerns. Dean Acheson later complained that U.S. postwar planning tended to be an “unreal and theoretical” exercise, “detached from the practicalities of current prob-

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lems and power relationships.” In his words, “The [State] Department under Mr. Hull became absorbed in platonic planning of a utopia, a sort of mechanistic idealism.”47 Roosevelt’s personal style—his predilection for making important foreign policy decisions and conducting high-level diplomacy on his own—exacerbated this disconnect. This commonly resulted in blueprints of uncertain practicality and policymaking without the benefit of strategic vision. Yet the postwar planning effort was not irrelevant. While many schemes were later discarded or transformed, major institutional innovations in postwar international relations, including the designs for the United Nations and global financial institutions, ultimately bore the stamp of U.S. long-range planning.

THE FOUR POLICEMEN: RECONCILING COLLECTIVE SECURITY AND THE BALANCE OF POWER The most momentous wartime deliberations about the postwar world concerned international peace and security. As noted above, Roosevelt wanted the United States to remain deeply engaged internationally, rather than revert to interwar isolationism or traditional unilateralism. He believed that an international organization was “the only device that could keep the United States from slipping back into isolationism.”48 But how to design a framework for sustained engagement that could advance the cause of peace and resonate with American ideals? For FDR, achieving both aims necessitated a universal security organization grounded in international law and open to participation by all countries but dominated by the great powers. The President rejected alternative approaches to world order on both practical and normative grounds. 49 He thought Americans had an instinctive aversion to the balance of power, regarding it as inherently amoral and a recipe for recurrent conflict. Similarly, FDR regarded explicit spheres of influence as alien to the American ethos, being contrary to selfdetermination and redolent of imperial despotism, economic exclusivity, and unending rivalry. Nor could standing military alliances ensure international stability. As the Great War had shown, such coalitions divided the world into armed camps and widened the scope and intensity of any conflicts that erupted. In any event, the American people would not accept binding commitments to safeguard postwar allies. Pure collective security, however, was out of the question. The League’s sad fate suggested that any consensus-based multilateral body would be vulnerable to delay, inaction, and impotence in the face of aggression. A postwar collective security organization needed teeth. As Welles asserted on Memorial Day 1942, the U.S. soldiers fighting today would demand

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a postwar world security organization based on the United Nations, including “the maintenance of an international police power.” Hull also threw his own weight behind an “international agency” capable of maintaining international peace—by force, if necessary. The League had been “based on magnificent idealism,” FDR told Congress in his 1943 State of the Union address, but it would take more than “good intentions” to defeat “the predatory animals of this world.”50 This presented a challenge for U.S. planners. The permanent organization would have to balance Big Four cooperation with the collective use of force. It had to possess real enforcement power rather than rely on moral injunctions, while being made palatable to smaller nations, which implied situating the new structure of peace in a broader normative and legal framework. Whereas Wilson had sought to replace the balance of power with collective security, FDR wished to reconcile the two. The President recognized the diplomatic value vis-à-vis lesser powers of some universal forum based on sovereign equality. But global order must rest on a political equilibrium among the great powers, akin to the Concert of Europe that had kept the peace in the first half of the nineteenth century. This directorate would uphold basic principles of international behavior, manage points of friction, and deploy overwhelming force to deter and, if need be, crush aggression. In Roosevelt’s words: “There should be a meeting place of all nations for the purpose of full discussion, but for management there seems no reason why the principle of trusteeship in private affairs should not be extended to the international field.”51 This was a sober synthesis of Wilsonian liberal internationalism and TR’s great power internationalism.52 FDR’s “Grand Design” for world order emerged during 1942. As Roosevelt told Soviet Minister Molotov in May, he could not “visualize another League of Nations with 100 different signatories; there were simply too many nations to satisfy.”53 Rather than turning world security over to such a universal democratic body, the main wartime allies must constitute a postwar international constabulary. “The United States, England, and Russia and perhaps China should police the world and enforce disarmament by inspection.”54 The Big Four, beyond representing a billion people, had the power to keep the peace for at least “25 years; at any rate until all of us living were now dead.” FDR repeated this theme to the U.S. Joint Chiefs, proposing “Four Policemen to stand guard against aggression on behalf of the future international organization.”55 FDR’s vision was predicated on enduring great power agreement on the desirable shape of world order and a willingness of each “policeman” to perform the duties assigned to it. To this end, U.S. officials hoped to obtain “a firm pact among the chief victor powers agreed upon prior to the conclusion of the war,” including agreement on “the basic principles

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of sound and stable international relationships.”56 State Department planning records betray optimism, even naïveté, about the ease of achieving and preserving such great power comity. U.S. diplomats conceded that the victors might differ on “their respective aims and purposes and . . . the means of attaining them,” but anticipated that “immense areas of common interest” would give the great powers opportunities and incentives to coalesce around such an understanding. Washington blithely assumed “that the great powers of the future must recognize and honor their collective security obligations and that the smaller states would tend not only to accept but even to welcome this new assumption of responsibilities by the great powers.”57 FDR’s Four Policemen concept did not address the problematic question of who would police the policemen if one or more declined to discharge its responsibilities or abused its position.58 More fundamentally, it presumed a basic normative consensus among the great powers that might not obtain after the war, when their common enemy had been vanquished and underlying ideological and political cleavages began to reemerge. FDR apparently calculated that the United States could socialize and co-opt the other policemen, notably the Soviet Union, through reassurances that new postwar institutions would satisfy their interests and afford them an influential voice in international affairs.

WHAT SORT OF POSTWAR ORGANIZATION? One critical decision was whether a postwar world body should be organized on a universal or regional basis. The British tended toward the latter view. Churchill proposed the creation of separate councils for Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Roosevelt and Welles were initially sympathetic. In April 1942, Welles outlined an “interim United Nations Organization” composed of an executive committee, including four great powers and five regional representatives, and a UN “Authority” composed of all states. Pasvolsky objected to the regional thrust of the executive council, however, and persuaded Hull to oppose it.59 Substantive U.S. planning soon shifted to a subcommittee on international organization, created on July 17, 1942, with Welles as chair (and Pasvolsky as a member). In late March 1943, Welles presented FDR with a draft constitution for a hybrid postwar international organization synthesizing the Four Policemen idea with Churchill’s regional approach. It envisioned a universal general assembly and an eleven-member executive committee of the Big Four plus seven regional representatives, each selected by a separate regional council. Any authorization of force by the executive council would require support from three of the four great

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powers and seven of all eleven members. The plan embodied Welles’s desire to balance “the sovereign equality of all states with the inevitable demand by the major military powers for such freedom of action as might be required.” FDR gave the scheme his preliminary assent.60 Hull continued to advocate for an international organization that was “wholly or as nearly as possible universal in structure and character.”61 He worried regionalism might engender trade wars, strain Big Four cooperation, promote military conflict, and endanger a truly global U.S. engagement after the war. Hull thus wrested control of the subcommittee on international organization. Welles’s abrupt resignation on August 16, 1943 (over a personal scandal), left the Secretary firmly in control of U.S. policy. The next day Hull presented his “Tentative Draft of a Joint Four Power Declaration” to the Anglo-American conference in Quebec. The document, drafted by Pasvolsky, called for a postwar world organization consisting of a general assembly, an executive council, and a secretariat. The regional dimension had disappeared, along with any idea of creating an “interim organization” as a prelude to a more permanent body.62 In Moscow on November 1, 1943, the foreign ministers of the Big Three declared their intention to “establish at the earliest possible date a general international organization, based on the principle of sovereign equality of all peace-loving states . . . for the maintenance of peace and security.”63 With the Moscow Declaration, the United States endorsed a postwar world order based on institutionalized cooperation, as opposed to U.S. isolationism or complete U.S. freedom of action. As a jubilant Hull exclaimed to a joint session of Congress, there would no longer be any need “for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interests.” Countries would now work together to advance common interests.64 By the Teheran Conference of November/December 1943, FDR himself had definitively rejected the notion of separate regional councils within a postwar world organization.65 At least three motives informed this decision. First, the President doubted that Americans would accept any arrangements that appeared to compromise the integrity of the postwar organization. As British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden reported to Churchill, Roosevelt believed “the only appeal which would be likely to carry weight with the United States public . . . would be one based upon a world-wide conception.”66 Second, the administration feared Congress would use separate regional councils for Europe, the Pacific, and the Americas as an excuse to restrict U.S. postwar engagement to the Western Hemisphere. The regional scheme would prove “a haven for isolationists” on Capitol Hill. Finally, regionalism would be susceptible to “abuses” by “set[ting] up a special relationship between one or

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two great powers and the small states in that region.” While the United States could be trusted not to exploit its privileged position—as the Good Neighbor policy showed—other powers were unlikely to exercise similar “self-restraint” within their own spheres. Hull predicted the creation of “closed trade areas or discriminatory systems” that “would defy the universal organization, induce the creation of similar systems in other regions, and produce serious inter-regional economic conflicts, with dangerous political repercussions.”67 Such circumstances could even catalyze a new balance of power, with regional blocs pitted against one another in economic and military competition. U.S. insistence on universalism over regionalism would have important implications for the shape of the post-WWII world. Had the Roosevelt administration chosen differently, a more heterogeneous international order might have emerged, based on multiple exclusive regional groupings. What remained after Teheran was a tripartite scheme for international organization. An enforcement entity consisting of the Big Four would have exclusive authority to deal with the use of force. There would be a weak assembly based on universal membership. An executive council of the Big Four plus six or seven regional representatives would deal with social and economic issues. The big powers would issue ultimatums in the event of a breach of the peace, resorting to force if necessary. As Roosevelt conceived it, America’s military role in the new organization would involve only air and naval power, with the other big powers supplying ground forces for any enforcement action. On Christmas Eve 1943, FDR delivered a radio address marrying the liberal and realist elements in the Administration’s postwar security strategy. “The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies—and we reject it,” he declared. It was not enough, however, to enunciate norms and principles without the power to back them up. “For too many years we lived on pious hopes that aggressor and warlike nations would learn and understand and carry out the doctrine of purely voluntary peace.” In the future, he stated, “We must be prepared to keep the peace by force.”68 To that end, the United States and its allies would retain “overwhelming military power” within the postwar organization. The Moscow Declaration and Teheran Conference provided the skeleton of a postwar international organization. In the following months the State Department moved to flesh it out. On December 29 Hull sent the White House an Outline Plan that would serve as the basis for fourpower negotiations on the future United Nations Organization. The plan foresaw a General Assembly empowered to discuss international disputes (though not to act on them); an executive council with power to enforce the peace, on which the Big Four would have permanent seats

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and some sort of veto; an international court of justice; economic and social agencies; and a secretariat. The President endorsed this scheme on February 3, 1944.69 This was no world government. As the State Department explained, “Nations should retain, and will insist on retaining, a large degree of freedom of action.” Accordingly, “no international super-government is feasible at this time, even if it were desirable.”70 The U.S. scheme balanced the ideal of sovereign equality (in the General Assembly) with the reality of power (by vesting real authority over war and peace in a privileged council). Unlike the League, which had extended to its assembly responsibility over security matters, the General Assembly would have its authority restricted largely to budgetary and administrative matters. The State Department blueprint would greatly inform the forthcoming Dumbarton Oaks Conference. The success of the proposed framework depended on the survival of patterns of consultation and agreement among the allies that had arisen during extraordinary wartime circumstances. Perhaps naively, Roosevelt and his advisors believed that Atlantic Charter principles could be reconciled with Moscow’s perceptions of postwar Soviet security needs.71 Hull knew in April 1944 that there was “no hope of turning victory into enduring peace” unless the “real-interests” of the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and China aligned. Without an enduring understanding between these four nations upon their fundamental purposes, interests, and obligations to one another, all organizations to preserve peace are creations on paper and the path is wide open again for the rise of a new aggressor.” Big Four unity could not substitute for broader UN unity, “but it is basic to all international action.”72

THE SHIFTING DOMESTIC CLIMATE The fortunes of the administration’s plans for postwar security rested on domestic as well as international dynamics. To win and sustain bipartisan support for U.S. membership in a new postwar international organization, the President and his senior advisers needed to establish both the desirability of this objective and its practical feasibility for Congress and the public.74 The revival of liberal internationalism in the United States helped their efforts. Wilson, so recently reviled as a disastrous idealist, enjoyed a dramatic rehabilitation of his public image. A new conventional wisdom held that Wilson had been right about U.S. participation in a multilateral world body and the dangers of abdicating leadership. A series of Gallup polls captured the shifting public mood during 1942, showing “a pro-

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found change in viewpoint on international affairs” since 1940, with 59 percent of respondents now favoring U.S. membership in a new League of Nations and only 22 percent opposed. Strikingly, Republican support for U.S. League membership jumped from only 23 percent in 1937 to 70 percent in summer 1942. By November 1942, 62 percent of Americans wanted to join “some sort of organization of nations after the war.” (Two months later, the figure was 72 percent.)74 Wendell Willkie, FDR’s Republican opponent in 1940, made it his personal mission to enlist the GOP in postwar internationalism. In April 1942, he sent the Republican National Committee a draft resolution that would commit the party “to undertake now and in the future whatever just and reasonable international responsibilities may be demanded in a modern world.” The committee conceded only that “the postwar responsibilities of the nation will not be circumscribed within the territorial limits of the United States.”75 But other Republicans were more forthcoming. On March 5, 1942, the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace (under GOP lawyer and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) called for a nascent world government—including a world parliament, international court, and international agencies—to regulate trade, settle disputes and control military power.76 In August, Willkie challenged all Republican candidates to accept the following pledge: “When the war is over, we must set up institutions of international political and economic cooperation and adjustment among the nations of the earth” and “devise some system of joint international force.”77 Later that month FDR dispatched Willkie on a goodwill tour around the world, intended to drive home a single message: technology had obliterated geographic distance, bringing far-flung peoples ever closer and leaving the United States little option but to embrace global interdependence and world leadership. Willkie traveled 31,000 miles in 51 days, giving scores of media interviews. On October 26, 36 million Americans tuned in to the radio to hear about his trip. The United States must fight not just for the destruction of its enemies but in the service of “a new world idea,” Wilkie argued. Isolationism was impossible: “There are no distant points in the world any longer.” His trip had revealed “a gigantic reservoir of good will towards us, the American people,” Willkie published his internationalist sermon, One World, on April 8, 1943. It quickly became the most popular work ever published in the United States.78 The administration was convinced that U.S. global engagement must be sustained and multilateral rather than—as in the past—episodic and unilateral. A growing number of Americans shared this sentiment. As Hull recalls, the country had “moved from a deep-seated tendency toward separate action to the knowledge and conviction that only through unity of action” could the free democracies achieve their shared aims.

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Accordingly, the United States must be a full participant in the creation and maintenance of global institutions.79 This rising internationalist tide reshaped the domestic debate, but had not yet vanquished isolationism. Republicans made considerable gains in the mid-term election of November 1942, picking up 44 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate. Only 5 of 115 congressmen with isolationist records were defeated. FDR himself worried that the postwar United States could easily revert to its interwar form. “Anybody who thinks that isolationism is dead in this country is crazy,” he wrote. “As soon as this war is over, it may well be stronger than ever.”80 When the Seventy-eighth Congress convened in early 1943, freshman Representative J. William Fulbright (D-AK) called on his Foreign Affairs Committee colleagues to draft “a specific plan or system” to maintain international peace. Two months later, a bipartisan group of Senators—Joseph Ball, Harold Burton, Carl Hatch, and Lister Hill—introduced a more ambitious initiative to transform the wartime alliance of the United Nations into a permanent “collective world security system” that could directly run the remainder of the war, occupy liberated territories, handle postwar recovery, and coordinate the peaceful settlement of disputes. The so-called “B2-H2” resolution presented a quandary for an administration still developing its own vision and negotiating with wartime allies on the desirable postwar order. Although FDR expressed support privately, he advised the legislators to delay until public opinion became more firmly internationalist to avoid provoking a destructive and costly Senate debate.81 The most controversial provision of the “B2-H2” resolution envisioned U.S. participation in a postwar international police force. On April 19 only 24 of the 96 Senators favored this idea, with 32 opposed and 40 noncommittal. Senator Taft attacked the proposal as a threat to U.S. national security, a surrender of U.S. sovereignty and a prelude to a fantastical “international superstate.” A May 2 Gallup poll suggested far greater support among the public, with nearly three-quarters of Americans endorsing the idea.82 Given congressional divisions, however, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Connally (D-TX) reassured an anxious Hull that he would keep the resolution bottled up to avoid a fractious floor debate. On September 17, 1943, the House handily passed the Fulbright Resolution, 360–29, “favoring the creation of appropriate international machinery, with power adequate to establish and maintain a joint and lasting peace, among nations of the world, and . . . participation by the United States therein, through its constitutional processes.” Strangely, a majority of prewar isolationists voted for it. “I shall never be for any commitment that gives away one iota of our national sovereignty,” Karl Mundt (R-SD) avowed, while declaring the resolution sufficiently flexible. “Within its

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boundaries is haven for the most ultra-isolationist in the country as well as the most ‘super-duper’ internationalist in the world.”83 One month later Connally opened what the New York Times called “the most important Senate debate on international affairs since the rejection of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations,”84 when he introduced a resolution advocating U.S. participation in an “international authority” to preserve international peace and security. Although the resolution was mum on U.S. participation in any global peacekeeping or peace enforcement measures, a number of diehard isolationists still objected. “It contemplates the submergence of our American sovereignty into some yet undiscovered form of super-government,” complained Robert Reynolds (D-NC). Taft and most other isolationists held their noses and supported the legislation, though not without reservations. The resolution passed overwhelmingly, 85–5, on November 5. The Fulbright and Connally resolutions profited from surging public support (85 percent by late 1943) for U.S. membership in a world organization.85 The intellectual evolution within the Republican Party was noteworthy. On September 8, 1943, the GOP’s Postwar Advisory Council unanimously adopted the Mackinac Declaration, advocating “responsible participation by the US in a postwar cooperative organization among sovereign nations and to attain a permanent peace with organized justice in a free world.” The brainchild of Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), the document struck a via media between the Senator’s own previous isolationism and what he regarded as utopian Wilsonianism, “those extremists at one end of the line who would give America away.”86 Vandenberg’s personal journey was critical in forging a bipartisan consensus on postwar internationalism. These various congressional initiatives unfolded in parallel with, but disconnected from, the Administration’s own postwar planning, which occurred outside the glare of Congress and the media spotlight. The first major public exposition of Roosevelt’s thinking appeared in spring 1944 in an article by journalist Forrest Davis in the Saturday Evening Post. Entitled “What Really Happened in Teheran,” the piece emphasized the Big Four alliance at the heart of FDR’s “Grand Design,” while downplaying the universalist component of the planned world body. It elicited criticism from both conservatives, who viewed it as facilitating imperialism and Soviet expansionism, and liberal internationalists, who perceived a return to great power politics.87 Cognizant of Wilson’s failure a generation before, Roosevelt and Hull took pains to nurture bipartisan backing for a postwar international organization. Beginning in April 1944, Hull held regular consultations with influential senators from both parties to share administration thinking on the proposed United Nations. The group included four Democrats—Connally,

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Walter F. George (GA), Alben Barkley (KY), and Guy Gillette (IA); three Republicans—Vandenberg, Warren Austin (VT), and Wallace White (ME); and one independent, the Progressive Robert La Follette (WI). Hull’s challenge was to satisfy internationalist legislators while reassuring skeptics, particularly Midwestern Republicans, that the United States would retain sufficient sovereignty and freedom of action. The early reactions were auspicious. Following Hull’s first briefing, Vandenberg confided: “The striking thing about it [the administration’s blueprint] is that it is so conservative from a nationalist standpoint. . . . This is anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world State.” Vandenberg endorsed the Administration’s notion of a four-power global alliance and praised Hull’s eagerness to avoid Wilson’s prior mistakes with Congress.88 From the administration’s perspective, the enemy was no longer isolationism but “unilateralism, the American urge to go it alone in the event that others do not accept American demands.”89 At the price of occasionally discomfiting ardent Wilsonians, the President and his senior officials went out of their way to reassure conservatives and nationalists that the postwar organization would not infringe in any meaningful way on the nation’s sovereignty and freedom of action (in the manner of Article 10 of the League of Nations Charter). The proposed veto for the permanent Security Council members provides a case in point. For Hull, this provision was non-negotiable. In a May 1944 meeting with the bipartisan committee, Senator Gillette complained that the veto constituted “a discrimination against small nations,” permitting any one of the Big Four to “kill a righteous proposal.” Hull’s reply was blunt: “Our government would not remain there for a day without retaining its veto power.” The great powers could not accept responsibility for keeping the peace if smaller nations—who made no such contribution—were given equal control over the use of force. As he told the Senators, The veto power is in the document primarily on account of the United States. It is a necessary safeguard in dealing with a new and untried world arrangement. Without it the United States would not have anywhere near the popular support for the postwar organization as with it in, any more so perhaps than in 1920.90

In this instance, as in others, the Wilsonian Hull proved to be something of a realist. On Memorial Day 1944, FDR delivered a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, designed to assuage conservatives. The administration aimed at “setting up some machinery of talking things over with other Nations, without taking away the independence of the United States in any shape, manner or form, or destroying—what’s the other word?—the integrity of

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the United States in any shape, manner, or form.” The institution would ensure that if an aggressor “started to run amuck, and seeks to grab territory or invade its neighbors, there would be a unanimity of opinion that the time to stop them was before they got started.” The message was clear, Time reported: “Franklin Roosevelt was not going to yield any U.S. sovereignty to any international organization.”91 Although unreconstructed Wilsonians bemoaned the lack of binding obligations on the United States, mainstream internationalists considered it prudent. Roosevelt thus staked out a practical middle ground between utopian internationalism and retrograde unilateralism, embracing a formula that promised constructive engagement toward peace without sacrificing U.S. sovereignty. Such an approach found a receptive audience not only in the Democratic Party but increasingly among Republicans. The GOP was split between its enduring Midwest isolationist wing and its emerging internationalist ranks. The Mackinac Declaration had sought to define a new Republican internationalism, advocating U.S. membership in a postwar organization while simultaneously insisting on the need “to protect the nation’s sovereignty and freedom of action.” Still, the forces of unilateralism and economic nationalism remained powerful. Taft, who would carry the isolationist banner into the postwar years, opposed membership in any new world body and rejected the depiction of World War II as a struggle for Wilsonian aims. “We are not fighting for democracy except for our own,” he declared.92 Given these divisions, the front-runners for the GOP Presidential nomination, Thomas Dewey and John Bricker, tread carefully in early 1944. But on April 27, Dewey announced his support for a postwar international organization, in a speech written by Dulles, arguing the United States must not “repeat the tragic error of twenty-five years ago.” Time magazine hailed the candidate’s “realistic internationalism.”93 On June 27, at its convention in Chicago, the GOP incorporated the Mackinac Declaration into its electoral platform. The Democratic Convention, meanwhile, endorsed the Moscow Declaration’s call for an international organization “based on the principle of sovereign equality of all peace-loving states,” though glossing vaguely over the question of peace enforcement. Outside government, summer 1944 witnessed a Wilsonian revival in full swing, with the release of a full length Hollywood hagiography, Wilson, and the publication of two influential books on postwar world order. Welles’s contribution, The Time for Decision, advocated a moderate liberal internationalism based on continued great power cooperation within the United Nations. “The people of the United States are once more afforded the chance to offer their cooperation and their leadership to other nations,” Welles argued. Walter Lippmann, a journalist and onetime Wilsonian,

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offered a more skeptical take on collective security in U.S. War Aims. It was an uncertain strategy, he observed, to “forbid national states to do the things which they have always done to defend their interests and to preserve their integrity.”94 Lippmann advocated an alternative policy of realism, based on Atlantic solidarity with Britain, Canada, and France. Given the acrimony over the League just a generation before, it is remarkable that U.S. membership in the future United Nations did not become a major flashpoint during the 1944 presidential campaign. This was not a foregone conclusion. On August 16, Dewey decried the administration’s approach to the upcoming Dumbarton Oaks conference. “I have been deeply disturbed by some of the recent reports . . . indicat[ing] that it is planned to subject the nations of the world, great and small, permanently to the coercive power of the four nations holding this conference.” This smacked, in his mind, of the “the rankest form of imperialism.” (At the same time, the nature of the criticism—focused on the rights of small states—testifies to the evolution of GOP internationalism away from pure great-power thinking.)95 Hull defused this crisis with skillful domestic diplomacy. Calling the charges “utterly and completely unfounded,” the Secretary invited Dewey to confer in a “nonpartisan spirit.”96 Dewey agreed, and Hull eventually persuaded the GOP candidate that the administration had no desire to create an international “superstate with its own police force and other paraphernalia of coercive power.” Dulles, Dewey’s emissary, and Hull negotiated an accord stating the United States should “not only be a part of the [postwar organization] but also take her share of the responsibilities such leadership implied.”97 More dramatically, the two sides released a joint statement on August 23 declaring that “the American people consider the subject of future peace as a nonpartisan subject which must be kept entirely outside of politics,” while “not preclud[ing] full public non-partisan discussion of the means of attaining a lasting peace.” Such a statement was unprecedented in American history as it effectively removed a central foreign policy issue from a presidential campaign. This bipartisan agreement built on an underlying reality. In mid-1944, 70 percent of Americans supported membership in an international organization—as opposed to 8 percent favoring membership in alliances instead.98

CONCLUSION By 1944 the Roosevelt Administration had engineered a new domestic consensus for institutionalized postwar cooperation within new international institutions. That summer the United States would host two major

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conferences of allied nations, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, to create the security and economic pillars for a new global order. As the next chapter shows, the Dumbarton Oaks conversations produced broad agreement among the Big Three—as well as China—on the outlines of a United Nations Organization balancing the concept of great power “policemen” with universal membership. An international conference in San Francisco in June 1945 would approve this basic scheme with some modifications. This signified a stunning reorientation in U.S. global engagement. A new commitment to multilateral cooperation had replaced unilateralism. Rather than attending solely to its own affairs, the United States would embrace profound new responsibilities as a guarantor of global order, an unprecedented step in American history. Precipitating this shift was the collapse of a prior prevailing dominant belief that the United States thrived most by maximizing its freedom of action and avoiding global entanglements. This ethos went to extremes during the interwar years, when the nation turned isolationist, hunkering down in the face of economic calamity and fascist aggression. The debacles that resulted from this policy, culminating in Pearl Harbor, destroyed the analytical foundations for both unilateralism and isolationism. World War II raised the question of what form of internationalism should the United States pursue after defeating the Axis. The previous generation had debated two alternatives: great power internationalism and liberal internationalism. Both had a certain attraction. The former promised to protect U.S. power and safeguard U.S. sovereignty; the latter resonated with America’s liberal principles and might soften international anarchy. Roosevelt insightfully pursued a policy combining virtues of both internationalist visions. The United Nations Organization would provide a universal forum for countries to pursue their collective security, while according special prerogatives to a privileged group of great powers expected to shoulder the main burdens for maintaining world order. The nature and limits of these prerogatives and commitments became the subject of extensive domestic and international debate during the last year of the war.

NOTES 1. Cited in Randall Bennett Woods, A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 251. 2. President’s radio address, September 3, 1939, http://www.mhric.org/fdr/ chat14.html. 3. For a related analysis, see Legro, “Whence American Internationalism?”

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4. Stewart Patrick, “Multilateralism and the U.S. National Interest,” in Cathal J. Nolan, ed., Power and Responsibility in World Affairs: Reformation vs. Transformation (Greenwood, CT: Praeger: 2004), 165–213. 5. President’s radio address, September 3, 1939, http://www.mhric.org/fdr/ chat14.html. 6. Poll results of December 1939, cited in Bear Braumoeller, “The Myth of American Isolationism” (unpublished paper, Harvard University Department of Government, 2002), 27. 7. Robert A. Divine, Second Chance, 30 8. Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940–1941 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953). 9. Braumoeller, “The Myth of American Isolationism,” 28. 10. Braumoeller, “The Myth of American Isolationism,” 27–28. Legro, Rethinking the World, 66. 11. Radio address delivered by President Roosevelt from Washington, December 29, 1940. (November 12, 2007). 12. Wheeler quotation from January 12, 1940. Douglas Brinkley and David Rubel, World War II: The Axis Assault, 1939–1942 (London: MacMillan, 2003), 193. 13. Vandenberg cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 388. 14. http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/sound-recordings.html#41 15. Gallup poll, Gallup, May 9, 1941. 16. Harley Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1950), 20. 17. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 47. 18. Divine, Second Chance, 29–34. 19. Schlessinger, Act of Creation, 36. 20. (December 10, 2007) 21. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1631. 22. William Reitzel, Morton A. Kaplan, and Constance G. Coblenz, United States Foreign Policy 1945–1955 (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1956), 24–27. 23. Sumner Welles, Where Are We Heading? (New York: Harper, 1946), 6. 24. “Joint Declaration of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain,” Department of State Bulletin, August 16, 1941, 125–126. 25. Warren F. Kimball, “The Atlantic Charter: ‘With All Deliberate Speed’,” in The Atlantic Charter, ed. Douglas Brinkley and David R. Facey-Crowther (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 84–85. 26. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 975. 27. Divine, Second Chance, 43–44. 28. FDR statements of late 1944, early 1945, in Kimball, “The Atlantic Charter,” 84–86. 29. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 975 30. Cited in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 51–52. 31. Cited in Joseph Marion Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (February 21–June 5, 1947) (New York: Viking, 1955), 122. 32. Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration, 67–80.

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33. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life 10 (February 17, 1941); Henry Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” American Free World Association, May 8, 1942; Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942); Clarence K. Streit, Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938); Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943); Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943). Divine, Second Chance, 57–68; Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 55–59. 34. Divine, Second Chance. 35. Sumner Welles, “Post-War Commercial Policy of the United States,” Department of State Bulletin, April 3, 1943, 285. The most influential advocates of liberal multilateralism were members of the East Coast internationalist elite, drawn from the worlds of law, banking, diplomacy, and academia. See Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 28–33, 179–180, 406–7. 36. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, p. 1630. 37. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (London: W. W. Norton, 1987), 6. 38. Radio address delivered by President Roosevelt from Washington, December 9, 1941, (November 11, 2007). 39. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 72–74. 40. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1–2, 56, 69–70, 151. 41. Emphasis added. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 126, 103. 42. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, pp. 127–128; 113. 43. Hull, “Our Foreign Policy in the Framework of Our National Interests,” Department of State Bulletin, September 18, 1943, 178. 44. Hendrickson, “In Our Own Image.” Hendrickson, Peace Pact. 45. Burley, “Regulating the World.” 46. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 143, 272. 47. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 88. 48. FDR’s views, according to Charles Bohlen. Cited in Arthur M. Schlessinger, Jr., “FDR at Yalta,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 May 2005. 49. Craig and George, Force and Statecraft, 106–112. 50. Welles cited in Divine, Second Chance, 66. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1178. Roosevelt State of the Union Address, January 7, 1943. (May 22, 2008). 51. Roosevelt to U.S. Minister to the Vatican. Cited in Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 16. 52. Craig and George, Force and Statecraft, 106–112. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Insecurities of Victory: the United States and the Perception of the Soviet Threat after World War II,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. by Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 242. Kimball, The Juggler, 103.

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53. Divine, Second Chance, 61. 54. FDR, May 1942. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 85. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 396. 55. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 105. 56. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 25, 128–129 57. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 128–9, 189. 58. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 398. 59. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 38–39. 60. Divine, Second Chance, 114. Welles cited in Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 69. 61. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 112. 62. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 85. 63. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 150. 64. “Address by the Secretary of State before Congress Regarding the Moscow Conference,” Department of State Bulletin, November 20, 1943, 342–43. 65. Hildebrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 45. 66. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 96. 67. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1643–1646. 68. Roosevelt fireside chat, December 24, 1943, cited in Divine, Second Chance, 159–160. 69. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 47. 70. Cited in Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 113. 71. Craig and George, Force and Statecraft, 110–111. 72. Hull speech of April 9, 1944, cited in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 233–234. 73. Alexander L. George, “Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Need for Policy Legitimacy,” in Change in the International System, ed. O. R. Holsti, R. M. Siverson, and A. L. George (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980). 74. Divine, Second Chance 68–71, 84. 75. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 63. 76. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 56. 77. None signed the pledge. Divine, Second Chance, 70 78. Divine, Second Chance, 71–73. 79. Hull speech of April 9, 1944, cited in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 233–234. 80. Election results and FDR quotation in Schlessinger, “FDR at Yalta.” 81. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 65–67. 82. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 109–110. 83. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 143. 84. In Divine, Second Chance, 147–148. 85. Hoopes and Brinkely, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 86, 86. In Divine, Second Chance, 130. 87. Divine, Second Chance, 134. 88. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 197. 89. Kimball, The Juggler, 84.

Planning the Postwar World 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1662–1664. In Divine, Second Chance, 204–205. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 160. Divine, Second Chance, 187–190. Welles and Lippman in Divine, Second Chance, 178–181. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 216. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 162. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1688–1689. Divine, Second Chance, 182.

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“A World of Power, Tempered by a Little Reason”: Creating the United Nations

We Americans should return again and again to the fountainhead of our national greatness, the founding fathers. Their thinking, their struggles to obtain cooperation, among the thirteen states, are magnificent prototypes for the thinking and struggles we must undertake to bring cooperation among the nations. —Cordell Hull1

T

he emerging internationalist consensus in the United States substantially improved prospects for a postwar multilateral organization for global peace and security. Still, winning agreement on the proposed United Nations Organization required the Roosevelt administration to navigate between skeptics and liberals at home while defending against a resurgence of power politics abroad. The details of the future UNO were negotiated at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in late summer 1944. Having learned from Wilson’s mistakes, the administration worked to nurture bipartisan support within Congress for the Dumbarton Oaks blueprint, making concessions to ameliorate the concerns of conservative legislators. Following the conference, it launched an unprecedented public education campaign to persuade the public at large that the proposed UNO would both advance the nation’s interests and reflect its cherished ideals. Washington’s hopes for the United Nations—and for an open world more generally—were threatened by the growing Soviet determination to seek unilateral advantage by dominating the countries on its borders. The Roosevelt administration opposed wartime efforts by Moscow and London to negotiate postwar spheres of influence and territorial settlements, 73

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believing that such exclusive arrangements would violate the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and portend the world’s fragmentation into rival blocs. Alarmed by Soviet unilateralism in Eastern and Central Europe, Franklin Roosevelt used the limited leverage at his disposal to secure Moscow’s explicit commitment at Yalta to permit self-determination of the countries of the region—a commitment that would soon prove to be worthless. American diplomacy bore fruit in April–June 1945, when fifty-odd nations assembled in San Francisco to hammer out agreement on a new collective security organization. As Washington intended, the result was a pragmatic blueprint for multilateral cooperation on peace and security, with universal membership in the General Assembly and special responsibilities and prerogatives for the Security Council. The UN’s fortunes would depend on the fidelity of its most powerful members to the organization’s founding principles, their willingness to act in concert on security issues, and their exercise of self-restraint in the pursuit of national advantage. U.S. officials were confident that the convergence of great power purposes would outlast the resolution of the extraordinary conflict that brought them together.

DUMBARTON OAKS The Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization opened on August 21, 1944, at the Georgetown estate of Dumbarton Oaks. The American, Soviet, and British delegations were led by Deputy Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko, and Permanent Undersecretary Alexander Cadogan. The U.S. delegation consisted primarily of technical advisors from the Political Agenda group, as well as the War and Navy Departments. Hull included Henry P. Fletcher, general counsel for the Republican National Committee, to underline the non-partisan nature of the undertaking. Throughout the deliberations, Hull took pains to keep the bipartisan committee of eight Senators informed about progress. A key point of executive-legislative contention concerned war powers under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, must the President secure explicit congressional consent before the U.S. representative to the new international organization cast any vote to authorize military enforcement action? Vandenberg and LaFollette adamantly defended Congressional prerogatives. As the former recalls, “I said [to Hull] that . . . I would never consent that our delegate on the new ‘League’ Council should have the power to vote us into a major military operation (tantamount to declaring war) without a vote of Congress as required by the Constitution.”2 Hull, armed with an opinion from the State Department legal advisor, argued that U.S. mem-

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bership in the UNO would provide the U.S. president wide leeway. Hull and the Senators eventually compromised, by separating the question of U.S. authorization of UN enforcement action from the question of U.S. provision of troops to the Council, which would require separate legislative endorsement by the Senate. This avoided a prolonged domestic row that could have cast doubt on the U.S. commitment to the UNO.3 The Big Three faced three main challenges at Dumbarton Oaks: designing the machinery that would keep the peace, determining how the Council would take decisions, and endowing the Council with sufficient capabilities to enforce these decisions.4 Hull set the tone with his opening remarks. Success or failure would depend on whether the powers proved “willing to exercise self-restraint and assume the responsibilities of joint action in support of the basic purposes of the organization,” including the use of their own military capabilities.5 Prior to Dumbarton Oaks, Washington had circulated its draft plan for an international organization to London and Moscow. The document envisioned an eleven-member security council, a general assembly, a secretariat, various sub-agencies, a military staff committee, and an economic and social council. Having absorbed the lessons of the League, American officials wanted a council with real teeth to fight aggression. Whereas the Covenant had mandated that council decisions be based on consensus, the draft charter endowed only permanent members with a veto, made council decisions binding on all states, and included detailed enforcement provisions. At the same time, the draft sought to appease sovereignty-minded American nationalists by omitting any Article 10–like commitment to guarantee the political and territorial integrity of member states. An explicit veto also negated an “automatic” U.S. obligation to respond to aggression. The talks revealed significant common ground but also notable differences among the Big Three. All agreed the Council must have sole authority to determine when a “breach of the peace” or “act of aggression” had occurred and to impose a settlement on the warring parties. They likewise believed that permanent members should be able to veto proposed enforcement action. “We were no less resolute than the Russians in adhering to this principle,” Hull explains. “We felt that only if the United States retained its right to veto a proposal that force or other sanctions be applied, which would naturally include American action, could we hope to obtain Congressional approval of United States membership in the international organization.”6 At the same time, the Big Three differed over the nature and scope of the veto. The most vexing disagreement, which nearly broke up the conference, centered on whether the veto should be absolute. The British arrived at Dumbarton Oaks with the most egalitarian proposal: None of the permanent members should be permitted to employ the veto in

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disputes directly involving it. The U.S. attitude was more ambivalent. Washington believed that permanent members should be able to veto any enforcement action, but not resolutions to place an item on the Council agenda. The Soviets, in contrast, insisted the veto be absolute. American officials attributed this stance to Stalin’s desire to dominate Eastern Europe without fear of UN interference. As Roosevelt complained to Gromyko at the White House on September 8, 1944, the United States could not accept an absolute veto, which violated the “American concept of fair play [dating] back to the days of our Founding Fathers.” He warned Gromyko that infringing this principle “would cause great difficulty in presenting the [UN] plan to the American public,”7 jeopardizing the creation of the postwar organization. FDR underscored this position in a cable to Stalin, reiterating that “public opinion in the United States would never understand or support a plan of international organization which violated this principle.”8 But Stalin was unyielding. The Big Three had agreed at Teheran that great power unity would undergird the United Nations, and unanimity required an unconditional veto. Moscow demanded the right to veto any action that might threaten its sphere of influence. In view of the deadlock, FDR instructed Hull to conclude the conference without a decision, deferring the issue until the next Big Three summit. The negotiators also discussed what military tools to place at the Council’s disposal. U.S. diplomats and defense planners considered several options, including providing armed forces to the UNO on an ad hoc basis, creating a standing international military force, and earmarking pre-committed national contingents for use by the UNO. Since the first option had failed in the League and the second threatened national sovereignty and raised command and control issues, U.S. officials advocated the third position at Dumbarton Oaks. Meanwhile, Roosevelt intended to limit U.S. military commitments to the new organization to air and naval forces. The United States rejected Moscow’s proposal that small states unable to contribute armed forces to UN collective enforcement efforts instead contribute bases for use by the permanent members of the Security Council. To Washington, this appeared a blatant violation of the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention, as well as a signal of Soviet designs on neighboring countries.9 Britain offered few changes to the draft U.S. charter, beyond seeking greater latitude for regional bodies within the overall framework of the UNO. The Americans and Soviets consented to an additional chapter to the Charter, specifying that “nothing in this charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies” (Ch. 8, Art. 52). Though not appreciated at the time, this provision would legitimate postwar collective defense arrangements.

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Another controversy surrounded the scope of the organization’s activities. Moscow wished to circumscribe the UN’s ambit—and the discussions at Dumbarton Oaks—to matters of peace and security, excluding “secondary” economic and social issues.10 The United States had a more expansive view of the UN’s purposes, believing that its mandate should include trade, economic development, colonial questions, and human rights. Beyond seeking “to establish peace and security, by force if necessary,” Hull explained, the organization should “foster cooperative effort among the nations for the progressive improvement of the general welfare.”11 The British, although wary on the colonial and human rights fronts, agreed, and along with the Soviets, acquiesced to the creation of an Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The American delegation generated controversy with an eleventh-hour request on September 9, 1944, to include in the charter a declaration of human rights, akin to the U.S. Bill of Rights. Soviet objections and British concerns prompted the Big Three to compromise on a general human rights clause for the charter.12 Colonial issues were deferred to the San Francisco Conference. The issue of member state representation sparked dissension as well. On August 28, Gromyko shocked the Americans and British by suddenly insisting that all sixteen of the Soviet republics be granted seats in the General Assembly as UN member states. Moscow presumably sought to neutralize the advantages the United States reaped from its leadership of the (then) solid Western Hemisphere bloc and that Britain enjoyed from its overseas dominions. After FDR objected, Stalin agreed to defer discussion on the matter until a later date.13 The Dumbarton Oaks Conference adjourned on October 9 with the release of “Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization.” These called for an eleven-member Security Council, including five permanent members with vetoes; a General Assembly open to all peace-loving states; an Economic and Social Council; and an International Court of Justice. Under Article 43, members would be asked to provide stand-by forces for use by the Security Council, to be deployed under the strategic direction of a military staff committee composed of military officials from the permanent members. The Dumbarton Oaks blueprint testified to the practical limits of collective security and the determination of the world’s most powerful nations to institutionalize their current domination in the postwar structure of peace. The Big Three created a universal body based on the principle of sovereign equality, but vested real authority and discretion over war and peace in the Security Council.14 Endowing each permanent member with a veto acknowledged that their aims might be insufficiently congruent for the Security Council to function in concert. As Walter Lippmann soberly observed, “peace cannot be enforced against a great power.”15 The veto

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was the precondition for great power solidarity and continued cooperation among the wartime allies. Dumbarton Oaks left several key issues unresolved, including the future of the colonial system and a proposed international “trusteeship” scheme for former Axis colonies; the actual purposes of ECOSOC; and the precise role of the General Assembly. But the biggest unanswered questions concerned the limits of the veto and the willingness of the permanent members to accept their responsibilities as custodians of world order. The UN’s American framers assumed optimistically that the Big Four would feel “morally bound” not to engage in aggressive war; “maintain adequate forces” needed “to prevent or suppress all cases of aggression”; and not “exercise [the] right of a veto capriciously or arbitrarily.”16 The Soviets’ insistence on an absolute veto and evident desire to dominate Eastern Europe cast increasing doubt on this assumption. “How can the new world order stop an aggression by one of its own Big Five?” wondered the editors of Time in October 1944.17 Who would police the policemen?

SELLING DUMBARTON OAKS AT HOME UN Security Council membership implied significant constraints and responsibilities. Would Congress and the American people accept them? The cloud of 1919—particularly the debate over Article 10—hung over these deliberations. In October Willkie chastised both political parties for emphasizing U.S. maneuvering room over collective security. “We are presented with an extraordinary proposition,” he wrote. “We are jealously to guard our sovereignty; other nations are likewise to guard their sovereignty; but somehow all nations are to be welded together into an international organization with the power to prevent aggression and preserve peace.”18 With the approach of the Presidential elections of November 1944, Senator Ball of the Foreign Relations Committee asked the two candidates to clarify their positions on whether a U.S. vote on the Security Council to commit U.S. troops should require prior congressional approval. Dewey dodged the question, but FDR answered directly in a speech on October 21. Just as a policeman should be able to arrest an intruder without a town meeting being called, “if the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in Congress, with authority to act.” Commentators praised FDR for his candor, while Dewey’s obfuscation prompted many opinion leaders to question his fitness for the presidency. On November 7, Americans

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returned Roosevelt to an unprecedented fourth term in an electoral landslide (432–99)—albeit the closest Presidential race by popular vote since 1916. The election wiped out isolationist congressmen in both parties, leading the New York Times to describe it as “the great and solemn referendum that President Wilson asked for and failed to get.”19 Roosevelt’s reelection brought changes and new initiatives at the State Department. Hull resigned after twelve years as Secretary. His successor, Stettinius, oversaw a massive public relations campaign to build domestic support for the UNO. By April 1945, the department had distributed an eight-page pamphlet, Questions and Answers on the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, to more than two million Americans and provided press packages to 9,000 weekly and 1,000 daily newspapers. Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress and former poet laureate, led this effort as Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Affairs. He dispatched U.S. diplomats around the country to meet with influential groups, including labor, church, professional, service, and peace organizations.20 State Department officials delivered hundreds of speeches in support of Dumbarton Oaks. MacLeish himself took to the airwaves with a lecture series on NBC radio about the United Nations Organization. He also persuaded Hollywood to produce a documentary on the UNO, The Watchtower over Tomorrow.21 This outreach drove home the message that a shrinking world meant that the United States could no longer go it alone or crouch in a defensive posture. It had to lead the world toward cooperative solutions to common security, economic, and social problems. American diplomats emphasized that the United States would sacrifice no sovereignty in this effort. “The thought of any kind of superstate is to us wholly repugnant,” Stettinius declared in a New Year’s message. To reassure those who suspected a starry-eyed Wilsonianism, he framed the UNO as a matter of self-interest rather than altruism. The United States sought to combine its power with others “not only for the common good but for the future security of our own nation.” MacLeish likewise depicted the proposed UN as a realistic solution to the problems of world order: “The practical choice at this time is clearly between an organization of the type proposed at Dumbarton Oaks and international anarchy.”22 The United States had to avoid the errors of the cynics, who said there would always be war, and the perfectionists, who demanded an ideal order. The President struck similar notes in his State of the Union address of January 6, 1945. “Perfectionism, no less than isolationism or imperialism or power politics, may obstruct the paths to international peace,” he observed. “In our disillusionment after the last war, we preferred international anarchy to international cooperation with Nations which did not see and think exactly as we did. We gave up the hope of gradually achieving a better peace because we had not the courage to fulfill our responsibilities in an admittedly imperfect world.”23

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The country could not afford to do so again. The UN framework, Hull added, would balance mankind’s “unquenchable aspirations” against the “world’s stubborn realities.”24 To entrench public support for the UNO, administration officials repeatedly invoked the touchstones of American exceptionalism—with a new twist. The United States had come of age, the President proclaimed in February 1945. “This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”25 The war had vindicated American values and institutions, and the world clamored for the United States to accept the mantle of global leadership. Never before, declared MacLeish, had the “creative idea” unleashed by the American Revolution “dominated the world as it does today.” The very phrase “One World” signified that “the idea of the liberty and value of the people—was on the march throughout the world.” This was “precisely the American idea.”26 The United Nations was but a global expression of the principles governing America’s own domestic politics, Vice President Harry Truman claimed. “The only rational alternative to existing international anarchy lies in some reasonable form of international organization among so-called sovereign states. This is merely an extension of local and national practices to an international plane.”27 Indeed, the challenge of international organization was “not unlike the problem which confronted our forefathers in 1789,” said acting Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Grew: “the necessity of creating an effective organization for the maintenance of peace.” Just as Americans had pioneered the frontier, so today they were “pioneering the peace.” 28 This public relations campaign paid off. By early spring 1945, U.S. public support for an international organization had risen to 80–90 percent. The League of Nations Association changed its name to the American Association of the United Nations. In April 1945, 94 percent of Americans approved of the upcoming San Francisco Conference on the United Nations Organization, and 28 state governors proclaimed April 16–22 “Dumbarton Oaks Week.” Still, 38 percent expected another world war within 25 years.29 Sustained multilateral engagement of course required solid Congressional support. Senator Vandenberg’s gradual conversion to internationalism profoundly affected postwar U.S. foreign policy. The Senator’s intellectual journey from isolationism and unilateralism toward a conditional multilateralism is evident in his speech of January 10, 1945: I have always been frankly one of those who has believed in our own selfreliance . . . . But I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action. . . . I want maximum American cooperation, consistent with legitimate American interest, with Constitutional process and

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with collateral events that warrant it, to make the basic idea of Dumbarton Oaks succeed. . . . But Mr. President, this also requires whole-hearted reciprocity. In honest candor, I think we should tell other nations that this glorious thing we contemplate is not and cannot be one-sided. I think we must say again that unshared idealism is a menace which we could not undertake to underwrite in the postwar world.30

Vandenberg’s mention of “unshared idealism” alluded to Soviet determination to secure unilateral control over postwar Eastern and Central Europe. As the war reached its denouement, America’s open world vision increasingly collided with the policies of its erstwhile Soviet ally.

U.S. REJECTION OF SPHERES OF INFLUENCE AND TERRITORIAL SETTLEMENTS To appreciate the significance of U.S. support for postwar collective security—and gain insight into the origins of the Cold War—one should consider an alternative approach to world order that Washington rejected. Throughout World War II, U.S. officials refused to negotiate spheres of influence arrangements among the Big Three or discuss political and territorial settlements prior to a postwar peace conference. Both decisions had enormous strategic implications, and neither can be explained without reference to American values of political liberalism. “Realists” have often maligned the Roosevelt administration for alleged strategic myopia, arguing that Washington’s policy cost the United States its best chance to lock in a favorable postwar balance of power in Europe, leaving Britain and Western Europe alone and insecure to face swelling Soviet power.31 Had it reached wartime arrangements on spheres of influence, the United States might not have confronted a Soviet Union so vigilant to keep control of its prizes and so tough to dislodge without major confrontation. The U.S. attitude reflected an interrelated set of historical lessons, principled convictions, domestic constraints and international considerations. To begin with, the administration was determined to avoid “relapsing into the practice of the Allies during the First World War, when they concluded a set of treaties splitting among themselves territories belonging to the Central Powers.” The resulting tinderbox of nationalist claims and smoldering grievances had lingered only to spark another world war. If this time around the allies “committed in advance to certain principles,” Hull believed, “the details would find a readier solution” in due time.32 In addition, American political culture prejudiced the United States against spheres of influence, circumscribing the range of permissible

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foreign policies. The Roosevelt administration regarded great power arrangements reached in the shadows as fundamentally un-American, the antithesis of transparent diplomacy and a betrayal of the country’s liberal principles. Roosevelt and Hull both delivered this message to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. As John Ruggie writes, “What FDR said to Eden, in effect, was that the real United States . . . would not accept, or might drop out of, a postwar security order based on spheres of influence.”33 Domestic political considerations buttressed principled opposition to spheres. FDR feared that word of wartime great power arrangements would undermine popular support at home for postwar American engagement. After all, “secret treaties had become one of the principal weapons of the isolationists in the United States in the period between the two wars.”34 As Hull wrote to the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, on February 9, 1944, American citizens would surely object to any postwar scheme providing “cover for another great power to pursue a course of unilateral action based on superior force.”35 To achieve legitimacy in U.S. eyes, great power domination would have to be subject to legal and moral restraints. A final consideration was international. American officials worried that wartime commitments on zones of influence “might hamper the proceedings of a postwar peace conference” and “inevitably sow the seeds of future conflict.” Such special arrangements “could not but derogate from the over-all authority of the international security organization.”36 Contrast this stance with the readiness of both the Soviet Union and Great Britain to engage in territorial horse-trading. Beginning in late 1941, Stalin tried to enlist British support for a Soviet buffer zone in Eastern Europe, including retention of the Baltic states and a westward shift of Poland’s frontiers to the Curzon Line of 1919. Stalin contemptuously likened the abstract principles of the Atlantic Charter to “algebra,” telling Anthony Eden that he preferred to deal in “practical arithmetic.”37 The British, meanwhile, found themselves “trapped between Wilsonian idealism and Russian expansionism.”38 Aware that Germany’s destruction would leave a power vacuum in Central Europe and that Washington had no intention of ensuring Europe’s postwar stability, London sought an explicit, practical agreement to delimit and constrain Soviet power.39 Hull and the State Department believed that any retreat from America’s open world goals would be a slippery slope that could only embolden the Soviet Union. The United States must “take a firm attitude now” in the face of Moscow’s “tremendous ambitions,” rather than “later when our position had been weakened by the abandonment of the general principles.”

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If the British Government with the tacit or expressed approval of this Government, should abandon the principle of no territorial commitments prior to the peace conference, it would be placed in a difficult position to resist any additional Soviet demands relating to frontiers, territory, or to spheres of influence which would almost certainly follow whenever the Soviet Government would find itself in a favorable bargaining position.40

SOVIET EXPANSIONISM AND THE LIMITS OF MULTILATERALISM American unwillingness to countenance wartime territorial or spheres arrangements became increasingly problematic after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in late 1943. As the Red Army began its inexorable march toward the heart of Europe, Soviet determination to treat conquered territories as an exclusive preserve became ever more evident. At the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in November 1943, the United States sought Soviet agreement on a clause committing the Big Four to act jointly in “any occupation of . . . territory of other states held by the enemy” and “consultation and agreement” before using military forces in territories of other states. Hull explained to Molotov that “this was a self-denying pledge to reassure smaller states against the unilateral or arbitrary intervention by one or more of the major powers.” The Soviets rebuffed this overture, agreeing only to “consultation.”41 Roosevelt tried again the following month in Teheran, but with a growing appreciation of the limits of U.S. leverage. He told Stalin that he would not oppose Moscow’s effort to move Poland’s frontiers westward, nor attempt to “turn her out” of the Baltics. But for “political reasons”—not least, ethnic voters—he “could not publicly take part in any such arrangement at the present time.”42 Moreover, U.S. public opinion and the U.S. government would demand a “referendum and right to selfdetermination” in the Baltics. On the other hand, the President added, “he did not intend to go to war with the Soviet Union on this point.”43 Stalin replied that the Soviet constitution would allow the Baltic people ample opportunity to express their will. Even if he had wanted to offer Moscow an explicit sphere, Roosevelt would have been constrained domestically. In March 1944, twenty-four first-term GOP congressmen expressed their alarm at “the seeming emergence of embryonic spheres of influence on a regional basis—the domination of small nations by great,” contrary to the promises of the Moscow Conference. The American people were “now wondering whether they were being led up a blind alley.”44 London, meanwhile, maneuvered in vain to secure American flexibility on a possible Anglo-Soviet agreement delimiting influence in the Balkans.

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Churchill denied that he was proposing actual spheres. But he added that, “although we all had to act together, someone ‘must play the hand.’” Roosevelt, however, held firm, “prefer[ring] to see consultative machinery set up for the Balkans to resolve misunderstandings and to prevent the development of exclusive zones of influence.”45 The administration rejected a similar overture by Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko in July 1944, arguing that “any arrangement suggestive of spheres of influence could not but militate against the establishment and effective functioning of a broader system of general security in which all countries would have their part.”46 By the middle of 1944, U.S. officials had a clearer appreciation of the yawning chasm between American and Soviet political values. Whereas Washington focused on majority rule, minority rights, and selfdetermination, Moscow regarded free choice as a danger to its national security, portending the rejection of communism and the installation of independent minded—and potentially hostile—governments in neighboring countries. American universalism threatened to undermine the great power unity the Soviets saw as the bedrock of international order. As Moscow noted at Dumbarton Oaks, “no one should object if the Soviet Union . . . wishes to establish friendly relations with its immediate neighbors.”47 As a practical matter, Roosevelt’s scheme for postwar order relied on self-restraint by each “policeman” in its respective area of dominance. He apparently assumed that the Soviet Union, given sufficient assurances of Western good intentions and co-opted into international institutions, would limit the exercise of its hegemony in Eastern Europe by holding plebiscites (if not actual elections) and permitting Western trade and travel—interactions that might permit the evolution of open societies. In the event that the Soviets refused to show restraint, the United States would be left with a choice between appeasement and confrontation. On September 28, 1944, Roosevelt cabled Churchill on his hopes for achieving a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union. “I think we are all in agreement . . . as to the necessity of having the USSR as a fully accepted and equal member of any association of the great powers formed for the purpose of preventing international war. It should be possible to accomplish this by adjusting our differences through compromise by all the parties concerned.”48 Roosevelt wanted to do more than allay Moscow’s fears of an Anglo-Saxon condominium. He hoped to bring the Soviets into a partnership, to have them become part of a working peace system. Facing American resistance to spheres of influence, London took matters into its own hands. On October 9, 1944, Churchill met Stalin in Moscow and negotiated the infamous “percentages” agreement, defining the share of influence each party would enjoy in the several countries of Southeastern Europe. The Prime Minister produced a document

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suggesting that the Soviets might enjoy 90 percent influence in postwar Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria, whereas Britain would enjoy 90 percent in Greece; influence in Hungary and Yugoslavia would be split evenly, and Britain would be the preeminent naval power in the Mediterranean. Churchill recommended discretion in sharing knowledge of this arrangement with their U.S. allies. As he explained, “It was better to express these things in diplomatic terms and not to use the phrase ‘dividing into spheres,’ because the Americans might be shocked.”49 U.S. officials were indeed aghast when they learned of the percentages agreement and denounced it. Churchill and Eden were exasperated by Washington’s simultaneous resistance to spheres in Europe and unwillingness to support postwar stability on the continent.50 The U.S. stance left Great Britain with no means either to balance or to accommodate Soviet power. London regarded the U.S. attitude as a peculiarly American mixture of hypocrisy and naïveté. How could Washington take such a position, a British diplomat inquired of U.S. officials, when it had long enjoyed a sphere of its own in the Western Hemisphere? “It has always been dangerous to believe that principles [like the Atlantic Charter] were enough,” he warned. One had to be prepared to back them up with political commitment, economic assistance, and military force.51 As the war progressed, U.S. hopes for Eastern Europe increasingly depended on Moscow’s good faith. In summer 1944 Stalin recognized the Lublin Poles, composed of communists loyal to Moscow, as the provisional government of Poland, sidelining the London Poles backed by the United States and Great Britain. The New Republic warned: “In the absence of the United Nations Council, the shape of the postwar world is being set along the lines of old-fashioned imperialism, power politics, and economic rivalry.”52 Given that “strong Soviet influence” was inevitable in postwar Poland, Stettinius wrote Roosevelt on October 31, 1944, “The United States can hope to make its influence felt only if some degree of equal opportunity in trade, investment, and access to sources of information is preserved.”53 American officials hoped that Moscow would permit some level of political pluralism in the states on its periphery. Soviet and British imperial machinations discomfited the U.S. Congress, particularly Republican legislators. In his State of the Union address, Roosevelt counseled, “We must not let those differences divide us and blind us to our more important common and continuing interests in winning the war and building the peace.”54 On January 10, 1945, Senator Vandenberg took to the floor of the Senate to deliver a major foreign policy address. He lamented the “self-serving unilateral arrangements now being made by great European powers” that were “repugnant to our ideas and our ideals” and that called into question the principles of

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the Atlantic Charter. “Russia’s unilateral plan appears to contemplate the engulfment, directly or indirectly, of a surrounding circle of buffer states, contrary to our conception of what we thought we were fighting for in respect to the rights of small nations and a just peace.” The administration’s failure to repudiate such arrangements more vocally, he added, “hangs like a cloud over Dumbarton Oaks.” But instead of rejecting the principle of collective security, Vandenberg—an erstwhile isolationist—described it as the only alternative to anarchy and war. The next thing we need to do . . . is to appeal to our allies, in the name of reason, to frankly face the postwar alternatives which are available to them and to us as a means to preserve tomorrow’s peace for them and for us. There are two ways to do it. One way is by exclusive individual action in which each of us tries to look out for himself. The other way is by joint action in which we undertake to look out for each other. The first way is the old way which has twice taken us to Europe’s interminable battlefields within a quarter century. The second way is the new way in which our present fraternity of war becomes a new fraternity of peace. I do not believe that either we or our allies can have it both ways. They serve to cancel out each other. We cannot tolerate unilateral privilege in a multilateral peace.

Vandenberg called for “maximum American cooperation, with legitimate American self-interest . . . to make the basic idea of Dumbarton Oaks succeed.”55

YALTA In the months after Dumbarton Oaks, U.S. officials had groped for some solution to the veto impasse with the Soviets. On November 15, 1944, Stettinius and Pasvolsky presented FDR with a possible “compromise” formula: The veto should be permitted on substantive political matters, such as enforcement action, including economic and military sanctions, as well as issues of membership and expulsion. But no veto should be allowed on “procedural” matters, including voting about whether to discuss a particular question; in this case a bare majority should be sufficient. Finally, the veto would also be limited in the Council’s conciliatory or quasi-judicial function: No permanent member could veto consideration of peaceful settlement of disputes if it were party to the conflict.56 On December 5, FDR instructed Harriman to present the compromise formula to Stalin. After procrastinating for three weeks, Stalin rejected it. The veto must be absolute. As Molotov explained: “The principle of unity of action must be preserved from the inception of any dispute, it must never be diminished, and there must be no exceptions to it; otherwise,

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the entire organization would be emasculated.” FDR resolved to take the matter up with Stalin at Yalta—while musing aloud to U.S. legislators that he was “unsure whether the Soviet position on unanimity was a bad position and that we might have to yield to them on this point.”57 Roosevelt had several priorities at Yalta, each of which would require some positive steps from the Soviet Union. The President sought to move forward on the United Nations; to win Moscow’s agreement to enter the war against Japan; to work out a compromise on Eastern Europe; and to gain some preliminary agreement on the future of Germany. As Arthur Schlesinger observes, FDR accomplished each of these aims at the summit in the Crimea.58 Roosevelt and the U.S. delegation arrived at Yalta to discover that Churchill had adopted the Soviet stance in favor of an absolute veto. Stettinius and Eden quickly persuaded the Prime Minister to change his mind again. FDR, with Churchill’s backing, then argued to the Soviets that the principle of free discussion in the council would “demonstrate the confidence which the Great Powers had in each other and in the justice of their policies.”59 The next day, the Soviets accepted the U.S. formula. Permanent members would not be allowed to vote in pacific settlement as parties to a dispute; the veto would be allowed in balloting on enforcement action. No sooner had this problem been resolved than Moscow surprised the U.S. delegation by insisting on three seats in the General Assembly. Churchill immediately consented, believing that it would strengthen his case for including Britain’s several dominions as full UN member states. FDR vacillated but ultimately agreed, upsetting many on the U.S. delegation. Several days later, on February 10, FDR awkwardly sought Stalin and Churchill’s support for a future U.S. request for three General Assembly seats of its own. Stalin and Churchill quickly agreed. The Yalta conference unfolded against the backdrop of heavy-handed Soviet conduct in Poland. Churchill and FDR conceded to Moscow’s demands that they recognize the Soviet Union’s 1941 borders, effectively shifting the boundaries of Poland westward. In return, Churchill and FDR sought to persuade Stalin to broaden the base of the Lublin government. Stalin resisted, agreeing only to “reorganize” the provisional government through “the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad” and agreeing to the Declaration on Liberated Europe, which called for holding elections as soon as possible. Roosevelt was philosophical, telling a staffer, “It’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”60 On February 12 the Big Three released a communiqué. It outlined their intention to occupy Germany following the war and stamp out Nazism, to broaden the composition of the Polish government, to allow the peoples of liberated Europe to choose their own governments, and

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to hold a conference of the United Nations at San Francisco in April. The communiqué made no mention of the extra Soviet and American seats in the General Assembly or of a secret Soviet agreement to enter the Pacific war against Japan. In signing the Declaration of Liberated Europe, the three powers agreed to “form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.” The document ran in part: “This is the principle of the Atlantic Charter—the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live—the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government from those who have been forcibly deprived of them by aggressor nations.”61 Contrary to accusations made during the early Cold War and more recent invocations of this hoary chestnut,62 FDR neither sold out Eastern Europe nor was duped at Yalta. There is no reason to doubt FDR’s sincerity in promoting the Declaration on Liberated Europe, nor any evidence that he viewed Yalta as a spheres-of-influence arrangement. The fact is that Roosevelt had a lousy hand to play—and he played it about as well as he could. By the time the Big Three met in the Crimea, the Red Army was within fifty miles of Berlin, and the collapse of the “Thousand Year Reich” but weeks away. It was inevitable that Moscow would seek to dominate Eastern Europe and to ensure that the governments of the region pursued friendly policies toward the Soviet Union. And it was clear that the United States would have minimal leverage to influence Soviet demands on Poland’s borders or the composition of its government. Still, Roosevelt believed that Moscow could be persuaded to exercise self-restraint and accept limits to its preponderance by giving countries of the region autonomy in their domestic political and economic development and permitting economic and cultural exchange with the West.63 He hoped, in sum, that the Soviets would treat Eastern Europe as an “open” rather than “closed” sphere. “The President’s goal,” as Warren Kimball has written, “was an Atlantic Charter World—free to choose, but on the assumption that free choice would mean movement toward the adoption of American values; an Atlantic Charter world economically and socially secure because nations had followed the example of the United States.”64 By requiring the Soviets to sign the Declaration on Liberated Europe, Roosevelt secured an explicit commitment from Moscow that would allow the world to gauge its intentions. Notwithstanding the complaints of conservative critics, it is hard to see what else FDR could have done. There was little appetite within U.S. domestic opinion—or the U.S. Congress, for that matter—for taking a hard line against Moscow before its promises had been tested and while the war was in full swing.

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On March 1, an exhausted but triumphant Roosevelt returned to address a joint session of Congress. “The conference in the Crimea was a turning point—I hope in our history and the history of the world,” he declared. “It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliance, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.”65 Evoking Wilson’s return a quarter-century earlier, Roosevelt said that the American people would soon be asked to make “a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States—and of the world—for generations to come. There can be no middle ground here. We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict.”66 The following day controversy erupted when word leaked of FDR’s secret agreement to support three seats in the United Nations Organization for the Soviet Union (as well as three for the United States). Senator Vandenberg denounced the proposal, saying it “would destroy the promised ‘sovereign equality of nations’.”67 Press and public alike regarded the arrangement as a cynical deception, evidence of power politics, and a betrayal of wartime rhetoric about a new international organization founded on democratic principles. What other secret agreements might Roosevelt have reached with the other great powers? Stettinius persuaded Roosevelt that the proposal for extra U.S. seats was domestically untenable. To dampen the furor, FDR authorized Stettinius to say that the United States would not seek three votes at San Francisco, while supporting Moscow’s request for three seats for itself, Ukraine, and White Russia. The United Nations Organization would be born in the absence of its main architect. On April 12, thirteen days before the San Francisco conference was to begin, Roosevelt died of a massive stroke. His death elevated an untested Harry Truman to the presidency. On April 16, Truman reassured Congress that the UN conference would proceed on schedule. The new president took office at a time of deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations. The flashpoint was Eastern Europe and particularly Poland, where Moscow soon showed its unwillingness to live up to its Yalta obligations. The Soviets insisted that the Warsaw regime be seated at San Francisco, which Stettinius rejected. In Washington, meanwhile, U.S. ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman held a seminar for top State Department officials on recent Soviet moves. His central message was the “basic and irreconcilable difference of objectives between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Moscow’s insistence on “friendly” governments on its borders, he said, was nothing less than a demand to dominate those countries politically.68 Three days later at the White House, Truman confronted Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov on Moscow’s failure to fulfill its commitments. He

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berated the Soviet, insisting that Yalta could not be simply a “one-way street.” When Molotov objected to this undiplomatic tone, the President responded acidly: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t be talked to like that.” The following month Truman refused to sign peace treaties with Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary because their governments did not conform to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Truman’s new hard line pleased Republicans like Vandenberg, who confided with satisfaction in his diary that “FDR’s appeasement of Russia is over.”69 This was an unfair characterization of Roosevelt’s policy, ignoring the practical limits to U.S. influence over Soviet behavior. As Stettinius recalls, “It was not a question of what Great Britain and the United States would permit Russia to do in Poland, but what the two countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept.” Yalta, far from ratifying the division of Europe, represented Roosevelt’s—and America’s—last opportunity to prevent it. It was not Yalta that divided Europe into spheres, but rather the disposition of the respective allied armies, which gave the Soviet Union a chokehold on political developments in the eastern half of the continent. The reality, in Chip Bohlen’s words, was that Stalin “held all the cards and played them well. Eventually we had to throw in the hand.”70

A START, NO MATTER HOW IMPERFECT The United Nations Conference on International Organization opened on April 25, 1945, at the San Francisco Opera House, with representatives from forty-six nations in attendance. Mindful of Wilson’s disastrous precedent, the White House ensured bipartisan participation in the U.S. delegation. Besides Secretary of State Stettinius, the delegation included Senators Connally and Vandenberg of the Foreign Relations Committee; Representative Sol Bloom (D-NY), Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and his colleague Charles Eaton (R-NJ); Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard College; and Lieutenant Commander Harold Stassen of Minnesota. (Vandenberg agreed to serve only after securing a grudging, written agreement from Roosevelt that the Senator could voice independent views during the proceedings.) Pasvolsky would be the U.S. team’s principal advisor and senior negotiator, and Alger Hiss, an accomplished diplomat (and Soviet spy), would serve as Secretary-General of the Conference. Other senior U.S. officials participating in the proceedings included John McCloy of the War Department, Harry Dexter White of Treasury, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Nelson Rockefeller, and diplomats Charles Bohlen and Ralph Bunche.

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John Foster Dulles, a veteran of the Paris Peace Conference, would advise the Republican members of the delegation. In addition to the official delegations, the State Department extended semi-official status to forty-two U.S. domestic groups, representing business, education, labor, women, veterans, religions, peace societies, and service organizations. They ranged from the Council on Foreign Relations to the American Bar Association, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Kiwanis Club, and various church associations. Hundreds of other groups attended as observers. In his instructions to the official U.S. delegation, President Truman recalls, “I emphasized that I wanted them to write a document that would pass the U.S. Senate and that would not arouse such opposition as confronted Woodrow Wilson.” At the same time, the final Charter must not be so protective of sovereignty as to doom the UNO to irrelevance. “We ought to strive for an organization to which all nations would delegate enough powers to prevent another world war,” he said. “It was important for us to make a start, no matter how imperfect.”71 Over two months, from April 25 to June 26, the national delegations hammered out the text of the UN Charter. The final document, like the deliberations themselves, reflected an inherent tension between the egalitarian ideal of collective security and the reality of massive power differences. The Charter created a universal membership organization “based on the principle of sovereign equality” (Article 2.1) and open to participation by all “peace-loving states” (Article 4.1). But it also vested special privileges, including ultimate authority over peace and war, in a directorate of powerful nations responsible for world order. Throughout the conference, the U.S. delegation took pains to co-opt smaller and medium-sized countries, aware that running roughshod over them would risk a domestic U.S. backlash and endanger broad international endorsement of the UN Charter. Stettinius appointed several small country representatives as committee chairs, and he ensured that their concerns received an airing. Lesser powers advanced dozens of amendments to the draft Charter. Several were quite radical, calling for elimination of “permanent” Security Council membership, prohibition of the Big Five veto on Charter amendments, modification of the provision vesting sole enforcement power in the Big Five, and broadening the role of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Although all these were rejected, the conference approved twenty-four amendments, including a statement on self-determination, creation of a human rights commission, provisions for Charter revision, and representation on the Security Council for middle powers.

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The demands of the smaller nations could be exasperating. Connally vented after one trying day: “These little countries are going to bellyache and raise hell no matter what you do about it. We’re doing all this for them. We could make an alliance with Great Britain and Russia and be done with it.”72 His complaint captured both the constraints of multilateral diplomacy—which forced the United States to behave as if it had less power than it actually did—and the country’s self-perception as a benevolent, honest broker. It was also a bit disingenuous: Most of the substantive decisions in San Francisco occurred not in the large plenary sessions involving all countries but in informal nightly gatherings of the Big Five—the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France—in Stettinius’s penthouse apartment in the Fairmont Hotel. The purposes of the United Nations were laid out in the Charter’s preamble and first chapter. The overriding rationale for the organization, as might be expected, was to “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” And yet the Charter described a multipurpose organization, with a rationale that went far beyond matters of armed force. Entire sections were devoted to new mechanisms to promote economic prosperity, the international rule of law, human rights, and the self-determination of peoples. The inclusion of such broader concerns reflected the belief—widely held in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations—that economic misery, social injustice, and political oppression were important taproots of violent conflict. The Charter created a United Nations Organization with six distinct organs: a Security Council, a General Assembly, an Economic and Social Council, a Trusteeship Council, an International Court of Justice, and a Secretariat. The most important was the eleven-member Security Council, which would have “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” (Article 24). Composed of the five permanent and six elected members, it was given far stronger tools than the League Council had possessed to respond to the threat or outbreak of war. Under the terms of the Covenant, any authorization of sanctions or the use of force had required unanimity on the League Council, and such decisions were voluntary—rather than binding—on member states. In contrast, the Security Council was empowered to impose its will on the general membership. Under Chapter 7 of the Charter (covering “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression”), it could authorize sanctions (Article 41) and military force (Article 42), provided that seven of its eleven members—including all permanent members—agreed. Such decisions, moreover, were binding on all member states (Article 25). The Charter also obliged UN member states to negotiate and ratify, in accordance with their “respective constitutional processes,” special arrange-

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ments to make available to the Council such armed forces, assistance, and facilities that might be needed for UN-led military operations. The Charter even envisioned a standing Military Staff Committee, composed of the Chiefs of Staff of the Permanent Five or their representatives, to supervise the strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council. From Washington’s perspective, the UN Charter promised both a more robust response to aggression and greater freedom of action than the League Covenant had provided. The new Charter contained no openended commitments to preserve the independence and territorial integrity of other member states, along the lines of Article 10. Such weighty decisions would be left entirely to the discretion of the permanent members of the Security Council. The Charter also included protections for domestic sovereignty destined to please congressional conservatives. Article 2(7) read: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.” Some of the most contentious debates in San Francisco concerned voting within the Council, particularly the limits on the veto. Three weeks before the conference, Stettinius had publicly revealed the Yalta formula: The veto would be permitted on substantive but not “procedural” matters, permitting permanent members to block enforcement action but not discussion of a dispute in which they were involved. Dulles considered this “a statesmanlike solution to a knotty problem.”73 Most other American commentators agreed. Open discussion within the Council was essential, but any effort to impose sanctions on a permanent member would mean the end of the world organization. Unsurprisingly, the small and medium-sized nations were less enthusiastic about this compromise. In late May, the Australian foreign minister Herbert Vere Evatt created an uproar by proposing that no permanent member should be permitted to cast a veto of any kind when involved in a dispute. The United States rejected any such notion. “Since we would have to furnish most of the resources and manpower, I believe the United States should retain the right to say ‘no’,” Senator Connally explained.74 American officials depicted the Yalta formula as reasonable, since the Big Five accounted for half of the world’s population and the vast majority of its military power. “It is not a question of privilege, but of using the present distribution of military and industrial power in the world for the maintenance of peace,” Stettinius told a radio audience. “Without their strength and their unanimous will to peace the Council would be helpless to enforce its decisions.”75 The U.S. delegation rejected a similar amendment requiring

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the Council not only to oppose aggression but also enforce agreements on warring parties. Such a provision would have transformed the body from a policeman to more of a justice of the peace. Already fighting on one front, the U.S. delegation suddenly became engaged on another. On June 1, Gromyko abruptly reneged on the Yalta formula, insisting that the veto apply to all Security Council decisions, procedural as well as substantive. Stettinius informed Gromyko on Truman’s behalf that this was “completely unacceptable” and would make it “utterly impossible for us” to join the UNO. Vandenberg and Connally added that the Senate would never ratify such a Charter. The British, French, and Chinese delegations also stood firm.76 Cabling Moscow, Truman instructed Harriman and Hopkins to remove any remaining ambiguity. “Please tell [Stalin], in no uncertain terms, that this country could not possibly join an organization based on so unreasonable an interpretation of the provision of the great powers in the Security Council.”77 These remonstrations had their intended effect. When Hopkins met with Stalin at the Kremlin on June 6, the Soviet leader immediately yielded, brushing aside the issue as unimportant. Six days later, the conference similarly rejected the Australian amendment (20–10, with 15 abstentions). The Yalta formula had survived. In contrast to the weighty functions assigned to the Security Council, the General Assembly was designed primarily to be a talking shop. Nevertheless, the precise scope of its mandate generated debate. As outlined in a pre-conference charter draft, the assembly was empowered to discuss any matter related to “international peace and security.” Many smaller countries arrived in San Francisco hoping to broaden this remit to allow the Assembly to discuss any matter related to “international relations.” Washington supported this position, but Moscow objected violently, fearing that the Assembly would pry into the domestic affairs of member states. Vandenberg criticized the Soviet stance as a crude “attack on free speech” designed to silence “town meetings of the world.”78 Eventually, Stettinius and Evatt brokered a compromise, allowing the General Assembly to discuss any questions or matters “within the scope of the Charter” and to make recommendations (Article 10–11) on matters of peace and security, provided that the Security Council was not already seized of the matter (Article 12). The Assembly could also initiate studies and make recommendations to improve international cooperation in the political, economic, social, cultural, education, and health fields (Article 13). Finally, the Assembly would approve the overall budget of the UNO. The third organ created at San Francisco was the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Intended to advance the broader social aspirations and purposes of the United Nations, ECOSOC was designed to supervise

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the many “specialized agencies” created to facilitate intergovernmental cooperation in the economic, social, cultural, educational, health, and other fields. It consisted of twenty-seven (and later fifty-four) member states, each elected by the General Assembly to a three-year term. The creation of ECOSOC reflected the belief that many wars—including the ongoing one—had stemmed from economic and social crises. Thanks to American pressure, the ultimate UN Charter also contained important provisions intended to accelerate the emancipation of the European colonial empires and to give the United Nations a supervisory role in the administration of former colonial territories. Chapter 11 of the Charter contained a “Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories,” committing the imperial powers to ensure the advancement and progressive self-government of the peoples under their charge—the first time that colonial masters had accepted such an international obligation. Chapters 12 and 13 created a new “International Trusteeship System” to administer former League Mandates, colonial territories captured from the Axis powers, and colonies voluntarily placed under the system by imperial powers. This included new mechanisms for international oversight and review of the performance of trustee nations. These provisions on dependent peoples and trusteeship would have a profound effect on postwar international politics. As the distinguished British diplomat and international civil servant Sir Brian Urquhart contends, they “gave a momentum and a legitimacy to decolonization which allowed the process to be completed within thirty years of the San Francisco conference, putting an end to the long era of colonial empires, and radically changing both the geopolitical map of the world and the membership of the United Nations.”79 Unlike the League, the United Nations would adopt an organizational identity distinct from its member states. The Charter established a Secretariat, under the authority of a Secretary-General elected by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. The Secretary-General’s role would not be purely administrative. Rather, he was empowered to initiate debate, set the agenda, and propose international responses to global problems. One of the welcome changes to the draft charter, from an American perspective, was an endorsement of the role of regional security arrangements in maintaining postwar international security. In negotiations prior to the conference, Washington had argued for the elimination of regional councils within the UNO itself, on the grounds that these would dilute its universal character. At the same time, administration officials as well as members of Congress were determined to preserve the Monroe Doctrine, which had historically given the United States a free hand in the Western

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Hemisphere. Washington was not inclined to surrender this traditional arrangement for total reliance on an untested global body. In the days prior to San Francisco, U.S. officials had taken steps to shore up hemispheric defenses. On March 3, 1945, in Mexico City, the United States and its Latin American neighbors signed the Act of Chapultepec, calling for the negotiation of a hemispheric collective defense treaty and affirming the principles of mutual consultation, reciprocal assistance, non-intervention, peaceful cooperation, arbitration and conciliation, sovereign independence, and juridical equality. The parties pledged to consult if any of their number were attacked.80 The universal and regional thrusts of U.S. policy collided at San Francisco, on the question of whether enforcement action by regional bodies would require Security Council authorization. The U.S. delegation itself was divided. Vandenberg, Rockefeller, and McCloy favored a Western Hemisphere exemption. As McCloy told Henry Stimson, “I’ve been taking the position that we ought to have our cake and eat it too; that we ought to be free to operate under this regional amendment in South America, at the same time intervene promptly in Europe; that we oughtn’t to give away either asset.” Pasvolsky was adamantly opposed, warning: “We then move into a system in which we rely for our security on regional groups, large states with their spheres of influence surrounded by groups of smaller states. We will convert the world into armed camps and end up with a world war unlike any we have yet seen.”81 Stassen came up with a solution satisfactory to all: The Charter would enshrine not regionalism but the principle of “self-defense,” both individual and collective. The product of this compromise was Article 51: “Nothing in this Charter shall invalidate the right of self-defense against armed attack, either individual or collective.” More generally, Chapter 8 of the Charter would include a blanket endorsement of regional frameworks: “Nothing in the present Charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action, provided that such arrangements or agencies and their activities are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.” These provisions would be critical in opening the way for multilateral (and bilateral) security pacts in the postwar world. The San Francisco conference ended on June 26. President Truman, who attended the closing ceremony, underlined the role that self-restraint would play in making the UNO succeed. We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength—that we must deny ourselves the license to do as we please. . . . This is the price each nation will have to pay for world peace. . . . Out of this conflict have come powerful

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military nations, now fully trained and equipped for war. But they have no right to dominate the world. It is rather the duty of these powerful nations to assume the responsibility for leadership toward a world of peace.82

American press commentary on the Charter was largely favorable, depicting the document as a judicious balance among national independence, great power privilege, and the requirements of collective security. In the view of the New York Times editorial staff, the Charter “created the framework within which nations of good will can work together.” While it “does not and could not produce anything resembling a world government,” the newspaper continued, “it does, on paper, involve some voluntary relinquishment of sovereignty by the leading powers.” Although the Security Council would ensure “a significant element of Big Power control,” the Times added two days later, “It is the restrictions upon such control that are new and that constitute the gains made under the Charter.” In the view of Time magazine, the statesmen in San Francisco had produced “a charter written for a world of power, tempered by a little reason.”83

RATIFICATION Truman sought speedy Senate endorsement of the United Nations Organization. “We are going to ratify this charter and I want to see the United States do it first,” he declared on June 28. “If there is to be peace, countries must live under law just as our States and individuals do. . . . [It] is absolutely necessary for the greatest republic that the sun ever shone upon to live with the world as a whole and not by itself. . . . . I am anxious to bring home to you that the world is one world, just as Wendell Willkie said.”84 On July 2, the President took the unusual step of presenting the draft UN Charter to the Senate in person, only the sixth time a President had done so for a treaty. He told the Senators that the choice was “between this Charter and no charter at all.”85 Senator Connally also stressed urgency of ratification. While not “wishing to railroad this thing or jam it down anybody’s throat,” the Senator said, I don’t want the Senate dilly-dallying and honey-swoggling all through July and August just for the sake of making speeches to the people back home. . . . Those Senators who believe we should tread our path alone will vote against the Charter. But those who realize that this can’t be done and that the United States cannot live in a cellophane wrapper will favor the Charter.86

On July 9, Connally opened hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, inviting the entire Senate membership to attend. Defenders of

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the United Nations had a distinct advantage over champions of the League a generation before. Unlike the Covenant, the Charter was not integrated into a controversial peace treaty but was considered on its own merits. Administration officials and other Charter supporters tried to mollify legislators’ concerns that the Charter might entrench great power domination, deprive the United States of its freedom of action, or subvert the foreign policy role of Congress. As Stettinnius testified, “The Charter does not confer any power on the great nations which they do not already possess in fact.”87 What it did was to embed that power in a system of international rules. Likewise, Dulles reassured fellow Republicans that the Charter was no supranational power grab but rather a careful balance between U.S. freedom of action and practical international means to halt aggression. When Senator Eugene Millikin (R-CO) complained that the Charter would infringe on the constitutional duties of Congress, administration witness Pasvolsky reminded him that sending U.S. troops and assets to the United Nations would require a separate agreement with the Security Council. On the other hand, the administration reiterated that the President must be able to authorize initial UN enforcement action without prior Congressional approval. Vandenberg and Connally bolstered the administration’s case by arguing that legislative intrusion on the use of force would violate the spirit of the Charter and historical precedent. “[V]ery clearly for 150 years the President has had the right to use our armed forces in a preliminary way for the national defense and in the interest of preventing war,” Vandenberg noted. “That is a complete analogy to the intended use of preliminary force by the Security Council.” Vandenberg’s support provided political cover for fellow Republicans and ensured a strong bipartisan basis for ratification.88 The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the United Nations Charter by a vote of 21–1. The committee’s formal report recommended its adoption by the entire Senate without amendment or reservations. The report noted that the Charter contained several “safeguards for American sovereignty,” including endowing the United States with a veto on the Security Council and blessing regional arrangements like the Monroe Doctrine. In a floor speech on July 23, Connally appealed to his Senate colleagues not to repeat the League fate. Vandenberg also spoke on behalf of the Charter, assuring his fellow Senators: “The United States retains every basic attribute of its sovereignty.”89 On July 28 the entire Senate ratified the Charter, 89–2.

AMERICA, THE BENEVOLENT HEGEMON The genius of the U.S. design for postwar order, political scientist Franz Schurman has written, was to base global security on American might, as

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exercised through international institutions.90 The UN Charter reflected the U.S. vision for an open, rule-bound international order in which sovereign nations could cooperate to advance shared peace and prosperity. At the same time, U.S. officials were convinced that the UN’s fate would depend on the willingness of the United States, as the world’s most powerful nation, to serve as the ultimate custodian of postwar order. Indeed, a central theme permeating public statements and private musings of Roosevelt and Truman administration officials was the conviction that America had an indispensable role to play in guaranteeing world order, that its intentions were by definition benevolent, and that the use of U.S. power was inevitably congruent with the broader interests of humanity and the requirements of peace. Although power was destined to remain an indelible feature of international life, American officials were confident that U.S. leadership of a multilateral world order could restrain its worst excesses. They assumed, too, that an activist U.S. foreign policy would be welcomed throughout the world. In effect, the new global role of the United States was couched in the language of American exceptionalism. “For the second time in a generation,” Assistant Secretary of State William Clayton declared, “our country is faced with the responsibility and opportunity to participate in world leadership.”91 America’s friends abroad did not fear its power, Acting Assistant Secretary Joseph Grew explained in June 1945, “but that we shall fail to recognize it.” In embracing this “call to service and world leadership,” the nation could draw upon an intangible resource of incalculable value: “The power that is uniquely American of welding people of many national origins together in the service of an idea.” To Grew’s mind, “What we do not fully understand, what . . . we have never fully appreciated and understood, is the extent of our moral and spiritual power among other peoples.”92 By the end of the war the United States possessed dazzling capabilities, from the world’s most productive economy to a twelve-hundred ship navy organized around dozens of aircraft carriers—not to mention the secrets of the atomic bomb. These advantages gave the United States a critical margin of power to shape the postwar world and exercise decisive leverage on behalf of world peace. “As long as we can out-produce the world, can control the sea, and can strike inland with the atomic bomb,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote to a friend, “we can assume certain risks otherwise unacceptable in an effort to restore world trade, to restore the balance of power—military power—and to eliminate some of the conditions that breed war.”93 Unlike previous aspirants to global hegemony, U.S. officials were convinced that the United States could be trusted with this awesome might. “Power,” Forrestal insisted at San Francisco, “must remain with the people who hate power.”94 As the war wound down, U.S. defense officials began laying the groundwork for an expansive postwar U.S. military presence that would

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permit national “defense in depth” and project offensive power against any conceivable adversary. They clamored to annex Japan’s former mandates in the Pacific and retain military bases in the Philippines and Okinawa, to create an impregnable island chain, and to secure permanent and wartime installations and air transit rights throughout the globe. American strategists justified these privileges by invoking the country’s special role as the ultimate guarantor of postwar peace.95 Shortly after the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff completed two documents (JCS 1496 and 1518) outlining a proposed postwar national security strategy that would go well beyond the traditional goals of protecting U.S. territorial integrity and advancing U.S. political, economic, and social objectives, to include “the maintenance of world peace, under conditions which insure the security, well-being, and advancement of our country.”96 What remained unclear was whether the U.S. public would accept such an enduring internationalist vocation or revert to traditional patterns of unilateralism—or even isolationism. The challenge before the nation, Forrestal believed, was “to achieve accommodation between the power we now possess, our reluctance to use it positively, the realistic necessity for such use, and our national ideals.”97 The creation of the United Nations helped alleviate the discomfort that many Americans felt about assuming international obligations and wielding U.S. power.

CONCLUSION The fortunes of the world organization would depend on whether the permanent members of the Security Council proved willing to abide by its founding principles and to shoulder the responsibilities that accompanied their privileges. Unless its most powerful constituents embraced baseline norms of behavior and accepted a degree of self-restraint, the UNO was unlikely to contribute to global peace and security. In summer 1945, most U.S. officials still believed the Soviet Union, given a stake in the system, could be induced to behave in accordance with Atlantic Charter principles. Washington would soon be disabused of this notion. The collision of Soviet and Western values, and Moscow’s efforts to impose its own system on other sovereign states, revealed the fundamental incompatibility between the U.S. and Soviet world order visions. This normative disagreement prevented the Security Council from operating as a concert, forcing balance of power to operate outside of UN confines.98 Within two years of the end of the war, the open world for which Washington had worked had fractured into two. The outbreak of the Cold War, and its impact on U.S. multilateralism, is the subject of chapters 7–10.

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As American strategists were designing and negotiating the contours of the United Nations Organization, many of their colleagues were immersed in a parallel set of conversations and negotiations on new multilateral regimes to govern the postwar international trade and monetary systems. These discussions would culminate in three new U.S.sponsored institutions to regulate global financial and commercial relations: the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (or World Bank), and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. The next two chapters explore the motivations for U.S. multilateral economic policy, its formulation by the Roosevelt administration, and the arduous transatlantic bargaining that ultimately produced these institutions.

NOTES 1. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1731. 2. Diary of Arthur Vandenberg, cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (New York: Mariner Books, 2004), 120. 3. Divine, Second Chance, 222. 4. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 113. 5. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1676. 6. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1683. 7. FRUS 1944, I, 784–6. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 201. 8. Cited in Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 150. 9. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 178. 10. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 85–87. 11. Cited in Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 111. 12. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 91–93. 13. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 97–101. 14. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 339–340. Randall Bennett Woods, “Internationalism Stillborn,” Diplomatic History 16, 4 (Fall 1992), 615. 15. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 228–229. 16. Quotations from Hull’s “Outline Plan,” intended to guide for 4-Power discussions, December 29, 1943. Cited in Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 111. 17. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 228. 18. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 236–7. Willkie would die a few days later. 19. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 238–241. 20. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 168–169. 21. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 55. 22. Stettinnius and MacLeish cited in Divine, Second Chance, 246–247. 23. Roosevelt State of the Union address, January 6, 1945, American Presidency Project (15 January 2008).

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24. Hull, “What the Dumbarton Oaks Peace Plan Means,” Bulletin, January 28, 1945, 119. 25. Message of President to Congress, reproduced in “The Bretton Woods Proposals,” Department of State Bulletin, February 18, 1945, 220. (The President had first uttered this phrase at the 1936 Democratic Party Convention.) 26. MacLeish, “The American Certainty,” Department of State Bulletin, February 18, 1945, 239. See also Francis B. Sayre, special assistant to Secretary of State Stettinius, “America the Hope of the World,” Department of State Bulletin, May 1, 1943, 370–374. 27. Truman cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 7 (emphasis added). 28. Grew, “Pioneering the Peace,” Department of State Bulletin, February 18, 1945, 223–4. 29. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 67. Divine, Second Chance, 252. 30. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 153. (Italics in original.) 31. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 404. 32. Hull, Memoirs, 1170, 1116. 33. Ruggie, “The Past as Prologue,” 119. 34. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1170. 35. Cited in John Lewis Gaddis, “The United States and the Question of a Sphere of Influence in Europe, 1945–1949,” in Atlantic Security: The Formative Years. European and Atlantic Defense, 1947–1953, ed. Olav Riste (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1985), 63. 36. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1452. 37. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 406–7. 38. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 400. 39. Cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 396. 40. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1169. 41. Cited in Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 89. 42. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 412. 43. Lloyd Gardner, “The Atlantic Charter: Idea and Reality, 1942–1945,” in Brinkley and Facey-Crowther, eds., The Atlantic Charter, 67. 44. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 254. 45. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1451–1454. 46. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1458. 47. Cited in Sergiu Verona, Military Occupation and Diplomacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 30. 48. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 159. 49. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 162. 50. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 259. 51. The UK official was Michael Wright. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 251. 52. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 258–259. 53. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 169. 54. State of the Union Address, archived at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16595. 55. Arthur Vandenberg, “American Foreign Policy,” January 10, 1945. (February 3, 2008).

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56. Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 55–56. 57. Molotov cited in Divine, Act of Creation, 253–254. 58. Arthur Schlessinger, “FDR at Yalta.” 59. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 260–268. 60. To Adolph Berle, cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 60. 61. Declaration of Liberated Europe, archived by the Avalon Project of Yale Law School (April 10, 2008) 62. Elisabeth Bumiller, “60 Years after the Fact, Debating Yalta all over Again,” New York Times. 16 May 2005. 63. Gaddis, “The Insecurities of Victory, 248. 64. Kimball, “The Atlantic Charter,” 103. 65. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress Regarding the Yalta Conference,” Department of State Bulletin, March 4, 1945, 321–326. 66. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 270. 67. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 273–274. 68. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 85. 69. Schlesinger, 90–91 70. Stettinius, Bohlen, both in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 218–219. 71. Truman, Memoirs. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 80. 72. Cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 171. 73. Divine, Second Chance, 272. 74. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 193–194. 75. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 200–201. 76. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 202–205. 77. Cited in Divine, Second Chance, 295–296. 78. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 228. 79. Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 122. 80. Act of Chapultepec, Department of State Bulletin, March 4, 1945, 339. 81. McCloy in Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 275. Schlesinger, 175–181. 82. Address at San Francisco at the Closing of the United Nations Conference, June 26, 1945, (February 23, 2008). 83. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, pp. 261–262. Divine, Second Chance, 297 84. Cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 263. 85. President Truman address before the Senate, July 2, 1945, The American Presidency Project . 86. In Schlesinger,Act of Creation, 265. 87. In Divine, Second Chance, 305. 88. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 271. 89. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 273. 90. Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 68. 91. Clayton, “The Importance of the Bretton Woods Proposals,” Department of State Bulletin, March 18, 1945, 439–440. 92. Acting Secretary of State Grew, “The Responsibility of Power,” Department of State Bulletin, June 24, 1945, 1146–1148. 93. Cited in Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy 1941–1949 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 173.

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94. Thorne, “American Political Culture,” 314–315. 95. Melvyn Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948,” American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1984): 349–356. Norman Graebner, ed., The National Security: Its Theory and Practice, 1945–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 9. 96. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 282. 97. Cited in Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 173. 98. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 340–342. Clark, the Hierarchy of States, 168–207.

4 ✛

“When Goods Move, Soldiers Don’t”: Opening the World Economy

If we could get a freer flow of trade—freer in the sense of fewer discriminations and obstructions—so that one country would not be deadly jealous of another and the living standards of all countries might rise, thereby eliminating the economic dissatisfaction that breeds war, we might have a reasonable chance for lasting peace. —Cordell Hull1

F

rom the moment the United States entered World War II, American leaders predicted the country would emerge from the fray as the world’s undisputed economic powerhouse, dwarfing even its closest competitors. They were correct. The United States grew to dominate the four main “structures” of the postwar global economy: production, finance, knowledge, and security.2 By 1945, it produced half the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), manufactured goods, and electricity. The United States provided the world’s largest market for exports, yet relied on foreign trade only modestly. America also lay at the core of the international monetary system, controlling the world’s most important currency, possessing two-thirds of global gold reserves, serving as the largest creditor nation, and running enormous current and capital account surpluses. The country was an engine of scientific advancement and technological innovation, generating four-fifths of all major discoveries and inventions in the late 1940s.3 Finally, the nation’s unparalleled military power enabled it to provide baseline security for global commerce. The war had devastated the world’s other centers of economic power. Germany and Japan smoldered in ruins. The Nazis had laid waste the 105

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Soviet Union and enfeebled France’s economic infrastructure. Great Britain, commercial giant of the nineteenth century, was highly indebted to both the United States and the Commonwealth. Given its massive economic advantages, the United States enjoyed more than traditional “relational” power,4 or the ability to exert its will in one-on-one bargaining situations. It also possessed “structural” power—the ability to shape the context in which other countries operate.5 Washington had unmatched capacity to write the very rules of the economic game itself. It could, conceivably, recast the terms of global interdependence and shape the content, frameworks, and agendas of postwar international institutions. What the United States chose to do with this power is intriguing and historically unique. During World War II, the Roosevelt administration developed plans for a postwar system of trade and payments based on the principles of liberal multilateralism. In short, it sought a global economic order that would be open—discouraging the formation of closed blocs; non-discriminatory—according participants equal access to markets, raw materials, and fields of investment; liberal—minimizing state barriers to trade and payments; private—dominated by private rather than state-owned enterprise; cooperative—emphasizing collaboration rather than economic nationalism; rule-bound—delineating normative prescriptions for conduct; and governed—by international institutions embodying and enforcing shared rules.6 The United States largely succeeded in this ambitious effort. The U.S. drive toward economic multilateralism has never been satisfactorily explained. America’s turn to institutionalized global economic management reflected the influence of recently ascendant ideas and principles about the preconditions for international prosperity, political stability, and peace, as well as changing expectations about the role of the state in promoting social welfare. Enduring elements of U.S. political culture reinforced these new beliefs, predisposing the United States to embrace non-discrimination and reciprocity in commercial relations. Structural dominance of the global economy permitted the United States to recast the framework of international economic exchange, but the lessons of recent history, underpinned by longstanding liberal identity commitments, impelled the United States to pursue multilateralism coupled with moderate domestic intervention. This American brand of economic multilateralism did not arise immediately. Unmatched power did not mean U.S. omnipotence. The ultimate contours of the postwar world economy reflected hard bargaining, particularly between the United States and its European partners. More than a decade passed before Western European countries had recovered sufficiently to accept the full obligations of currency convertibility. The Americans were also consistently frustrated by the stubborn persistence

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of some imperial barriers to trade. The commercial and monetary system that emerged was not a laissez-faire free-trade fantasy but struck a practical balance between external openness and domestic intervention. Application of multilateral principles remained uneven, covering trade in manufactures, for instance, but not in agriculture. Furthermore, the onset of the Cold War restricted the geographic scope of the multilateral system, since Moscow insisted that Soviet bloc countries stay outside the Western commercial and monetary orbit. Nevertheless, the United States’ achievement in creating a largely open system of international trade and payments laid the foundation for decades of growth and prosperity in the Free World.

GAPS IN THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM Current orthodoxy attributes U.S. multilateralism to the functional benefits of institutionalized commercial and financial cooperation and the unique structural incentives the United States confronted as the world’s dominant economic actor.7 Multilateral regimes can indeed help solve collective action problems among self-interested agents. By accepting the principle of non-discrimination, the norm of reciprocity, common rules for trade and monetary liberalization, and procedures to monitor and enforce compliance, the United States and its partners reduced uncertainty, fears of cheating, and the transaction costs of multiple bilateral arrangements. Multilateral economic regimes are costly to create and sustain, however. Accordingly, they tend not to materialize unless a single dominant power undertakes the burden of creating and maintaining them. The influential “theory of hegemonic stability” posits that an open system of trade and payments will arise and endure only if a single international leader (the hegemon) possesses both the capacity and will to construct, manage, and defend its rules and institutions.8 The hegemon, in this model, performs several functions. In the trade sphere it presses for liberalization and maintains an open market. In the monetary realm it supplies a freely convertible international currency, manages exchange rates, provides liquidity, and serves as lender of last resort. Financially, it provides capital for international investment and development. Finally, it also protects the international economic system from political-military threats. For the system to hold, the hegemon must have not only material preponderance but also (tellingly) a liberal ideology and potential foreign partners. Such conditions have coincided only twice in modern history, in the case of nineteenth century Great Britain and the United States after 1945.9 Rational choice theorists offer plausible explanations for why the world’s most powerful state would agree to provide these public goods.

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To begin with, the world’s largest and most productive power has an innate incentive to foster an open world economy. A multilateral regime of low tariffs and non-discrimination permits the hegemon to acquire a larger pool of benefits all at once, in the form of access to many markets, rather than engaging in costly bilateral negotiations on market access with multiple countries.10 Second, protectionism and discrimination are especially harmful for a large country, since they reduce the ability of others to purchase its exports. Rational choice theorists debate among themselves over whether multilateralism is always in the hegemon’s favor, however. Institutionalists believe that states pursue absolute gains from cooperation, and so predict that a globally dominant state will embrace multilateral institutions consistently, regardless of the distribution of benefits from economic exchange. Neorealists, in contrast, foresee only conditional support for multilateralism, contingent on whether such cooperation promises to advance the hegemon’s relative position. In this view, the United States sponsored multilateral institutions after 1945 to reap disproportionate benefits from cooperation.11 Unfortunately, neither theory suffices to explain postwar U.S. economic multilateralism—let alone the actual shape of the trade and monetary regimes that emerged under American leadership. The institutionalist account presumes a harmony of interests between the United States and its major trading partners, overlooking that their interests frequently diverged and ignoring how these conflicts were resolved. Broadly speaking, all countries hoped to prevent a resumption of the interwar economic rivalries and disruptions. But they often held different preferences regarding precise international rules and were sensitive to the relative gains to different countries anticipated to accrue from economic cooperation. Agreement on the contours of the postwar economic regimes and the distribution of benefits to each player occurred only through arduous, often contentious negotiations.12 The neorealist narrative similarly falls short. American power informed U.S. trade policies and facilitated their success but did not define them. To begin with, America’s incentives to pursue liberal multilateralism were hardly overwhelming. Because of its large domestic market and relatively low dependence on exports (compared to, say, Britain), it could easily have followed a protectionist route. More fundamentally, noted earlier, other erstwhile hegemons like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would have organized global trade and monetary relations along very different lines, given their national systems. Since unique social purposes help determine the uses of power, the presence of power alone does not explain the preference of the United States for a multilateral economic system. A fuller rationale must account for the identity of the preponderant state, the content of its international vision, and the reactions of other countries to its purposes.

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What is more, structural theories cannot explain the timing of America’s embrace of multilateralism. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the postwar period, U.S. trade preferences shifted dramatically “from non-negotiable tariffs, to support for bilateral tariff reductions, to advocacy for a multilateral trade regime.” Such radical swings vastly outstrip the rate of accumulation of American power.13 Indeed, a key move toward U.S. liberalization happened during the interwar years—well before the United States achieved hegemonic status—with the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA). Nor does the magnitude of U.S. power account for variation in U.S. trade preferences across economic sectors. The United States offered vigorous support for liberal multilateralism when it came to manufactures, insisting on non-discrimination, opposing quotas, and favoring negotiated tariff reductions based on unconditional most-favored nation (MFN) treatment. In contrast, protection and discrimination became the rule in agriculture, with U.S. legislation subsidizing U.S. exports and restricting and imposing duties on imports.14 Despite America’s overwhelming interest in liberalizing agriculture trade, given its comparative advantage in farm products, U.S. pressure helped institutionalize agricultural protection in the postwar General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime. If institutionalist and neorealist versions are inadequate, might a Marxist analysis shed light on U.S. support for multilateral economic regimes? After all, the officials who dominated decision-making in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations came overwhelmingly from privileged, elite backgrounds. They had strong connections to the worlds of business and finance, which aimed to restore a functioning capitalist system at the national and international levels. The best way to secure their class interests would be through the global open door, in order to expand new markets for U.S. capital and exports. As Thomas McCormick observes, the United States “had a built-in incentive to force other nations to abandon their national capitalisms and to accept a world of free trade, free capital flows, and free currency convertibility.”15 Undoubtedly, U.S. officials were staunchly committed to capitalism. But the Marxist approach also fails to explain the qualified nature of postwar economic openness, which pressed not free exchange but the emergence of a hybrid system that tempered commercial freedom with protections for national autonomy and social welfare. Multilateralism did not imply a return to the “free trade” of the gold standard era. Countries would be allowed to maintain trade barriers, provided these were non-discriminatory in their application, and exchange controls, so long as these did not interfere with currency convertibility. Moreover, multilateralism would accommodate new state responsibilities to stabilize the domestic and the global economy.

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IDEAS AND IDENTITY IN U.S. POLICY CHOICES To explain U.S. policy choices, we need to understand how U.S. central decision makers formulated their conception of the national interest, built domestic support for their liberal economic agenda, and forged coalitions behind their policies.16 Above all, postwar American commercial multilateralism derived from the disastrous experiences of the 1930s and new ideas about the institutional requirements for economic growth and political stability.17 As the introduction noted, abrupt institutional change most often occurs during periods of crisis when existing state structures are unable to cope with domestic and international pressures. By loosening attachment to existing structures, such shocks provide an opportunity to overcome institutional inertia and normal patterns of incremental adaptation. They also facilitate the formation of new political coalitions and encourage the search for new policy directions. For institutional change to occur, however, new ideas must provide a plausible diagnosis of the current distemper and a persuasive prescription for a successful course of treatment.18 The pivotal crisis that drove the United States to embrace economic multilateralism was the Great Depression and the deteriorating socioand geopolitical climates it engendered. In response to the prolonged slump, the world’s major trading nations adopted self-defeating protectionist and discriminatory policies, seeking to insulate themselves from competition and export their economic woes via prohibitive tariffs, preferential trade arrangements, and competitive devaluations. The United States, which had traditionally protected domestic producers behind high tariff walls, exacerbated the vicious global economic cycle by passing the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930. Such mercantilist trade and beggar-thyneighbor monetary policies fragmented the global economy, prolonged the Depression, accentuated social disruption, and poisoned the global political climate. Acutely aware of recent political economic history, senior officials in the Roosevelt administration committed early on to detailed planning for a multilateral world economy as the foundation for postwar international prosperity and peace. An effective system of postwar multilateral economic collaboration would require new institutions in both the trade and monetary sphere. The Department of State took the lead in commercial policy, formulating policies that culminated in the Charter for an International Trade Organization (ITO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Treasury Department took the initiative in international financial policy, sponsoring the establishment of the Bretton Woods Institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International

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Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, more commonly known as the World Bank). The postwar multilateral order could emerge only with domestic and international backing. At home, advocates vied with powerful protectionist forces and compromised with potential obstructionists to win agreement on a broadly liberal course. Abroad, U.S. economic leadership necessitated forging consensus among ambivalent followers through painstaking negotiations. To realize U.S. goals, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations accepted temporary abridgments of multilateral principles. Seemingly against its short-term interests, Washington reached “asymmetric bargains” with key junior partners in return for long-term commitments to an open world economy, making unilateral concessions, offering short-term inducements, and allowing continued discrimination against itself in the process.19 The ultimate shape of the world economy would reflect these domestic constraints and international dynamics.

THE VISION OF CORDELL HULL New ideas bring about policy change only when sponsored by politically influential actors. The U.S. turn to commercial multilateralism after World War II could not have come about without Cordell Hull, the longest-serving Secretary of State (1933–1944) in American history. Hull’s distinctive contribution was to articulate a coherent economic philosophy justifying U.S. commercial liberalization and to pursue this orientation doggedly during his twelve-year tenure as America’s chief diplomat. Under his leadership, liberal multilateralism became an article of faith within the State Department, if not the moral imperative permeating postwar planning.20 By 1933, Hull had already devoted a twenty-five year legislative career to advancing the cause of trade liberalization. One month before becoming Secretary of State, at the height of the Great Depression, Hull outlined for his Senate colleagues a “three-point program” to revive U.S. and international commerce. He called for a gradual downward revision in “excessive” U.S. tariffs; proposed that Congress grant the executive branch authority to negotiate mutual tariff reductions on the principle of unconditional most-favored nation treatment; and suggested that the President summon “a permanent world economic congress” to permit the multilateral reduction of remaining barriers to trade.21 These three objectives—lower tariffs, non-discrimination, and a world trade organization—would guide U.S. commercial policy throughout Hull’s State Department tenure. He complemented this economic philosophy

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with an abiding conviction that open trade was not merely an avenue to prosperity but a highway to peace. Lower Tariffs It was opposition to high tariffs that first converted Hull to the cause of trade liberalization. He initially adopted this position for partisan and sectional reasons. Since the Civil War, the United States, with strong Republican support, had pursued a policy of unilateralist protectionism, characterized by high tariffs, made possible by the absence of Southern free traders from Congress. The Democratic Party had long objected, arguing for lower import duties used solely for purposes of raising revenue, not insulating domestic producers. Like many southern Democrats, Hull, who hailed from rural Tennessee, regarded high tariffs as an unjust subsidy to Northern industry that came at the expense of Southern agriculture and the interests of consumers and laborers nationwide. Tariffs permitted the expansion of great Northern monopolies and trusts, while raising the cost of living for average citizens and reducing U.S. exports to foreigners (who struggled to purchase American goods and often retaliated with high duties of their own). From 1871 to 1913, average U.S. tariffs never dipped below 38 percent.22 This protectionist tradition resulted from congressional control over tariff levels. Congress, unlike the executive branch and particularly the State Department, conceived of the tariff almost entirely in domestic rather than foreign policy terms—that is, to be manipulated in response to protectionist pressures and revenue concerns. During the nineteenth century, legislators repeatedly resisted proposed tariff reductions. Beginning in the 1890s, however, the protectionist coalition faced a growing challenge from domestic economic interests seeking tariff revision. A highly competitive manufacturing sector was emerging, notably in the production of automobiles, metals, and machinery. This development laid foundations for a potential liberalizing alliance of export-oriented northern industrialists, Wall Street financiers, and Southern agricultural producers. In an indication of the changing tide, Congress in 1897 gave the President authority to conduct reciprocal negotiations to reduce tariffs on particular imported goods in return for equivalent concessions (a privilege revoked in 1909). The first significant U.S. effort to reduce tariff rates came in 1913, shortly after Wilson won the White House and Democrats both houses of Congress for the first time in twenty years. Wilson thought free trade a potent force for world peace and a boon to American business and agriculture. He soon signed the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act (1913), the

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first serious downward revision since the Civil War. This measure, which Hull helped to draft, reduced average U.S. rates to 9.1 percent.23 These tariff reductions proved short-lived. Wilson’s Republican successors cooperated with GOP majorities in Congress to grant U.S. industry historically unprecedented protection, beginning in 1921 with the Emergency/Farmer’s Tariff Act. The trend accelerated in November 1922 with the Fordney-McCumber Act, which raised duties on industrial and agricultural goods to historical highs and reached its apogee in June 1930, when Congress passed and President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. This disastrous move spurred other countries to retaliate by increasing their own tariffs and discriminating against U.S. commerce. A vicious cycle ensued as trade contracted, incomes fell, and pressures for further protection swelled. In 1932, the United Kingdom and the British Dominions signed the Ottawa Agreements, fencing off the entire Commonwealth. By 1933 the value of world trade had fallen from $50 billion to $15 billion; the U.S. share of world trade, from 13.8 percent (1929) to 9.9 percent. Hull looked back on the 1920s as a missed opportunity, when the United States, rather than leading global commercial liberalization, had retreated behind high tariffs, soon followed by other countries.24 Non-discrimination At Cordell Hull’s State Department, an American commitment to nondiscrimination was at least as important as low U.S. tariffs. Under this principle, any commercial concession granted one trading partner would be applied to all. At an intellectual or policy level, one should note, there was no necessary connection between lower tariffs and non-discrimination. Many European countries, for example, maintained multiple columns of tariff schedules, with different duties on identical goods depending on their country of origin. But the notion of equal treatment had deep roots in U.S. political culture. The American Revolution, after all, had been fueled by resentment at the discriminatory trade regime imposed on the colonies by Great Britain. After winning independence, the United States had adopted the principle of equal commercial opportunity. In his Farewell Address, George Washington articulated such a guide for future U.S. trade: “Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences, consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing.”25 For nearly one and a half centuries, from the Franco-American Treaty of 1778 until 1923, U.S. trade relations involved conditional application

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of most-favored nation (MFN) status. This principle called for extending bilateral tariff treaties to third parties that agreed to provide concessions equivalent to those offered by the first country. In 1823, John Quincy Adams described the preamble to the 1778 treaty as “the foundation of our commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind,” embodying “the most perfect equality and reciprocity.”26 Insistence on equal treatment made sense for the United States, a vulnerable, trade-dependent nation in a world of mercantilist empires. The non-discrimination principle also struck a chord with the central ideological tenets of American liberalism (distilled from the democratic theory of John Locke and the economic theory of Adam Smith), that the free pursuit of individual interest maximized the collective good. Non-discrimination was but an extension to the international realm of the philosophy of minimal state interference in the “free market.” In practice, reciprocity played little role in U.S. trade policy during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the executive branch occasionally sought to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions, Congress typically stymied these efforts, so that tariffs were raised or (rarely) lowered without consulting with U.S. trading partners.27 This pattern produced a paradox: Even as America’s weight in the world economy grew, legislative control over tariff policy meant that U.S. diplomats enjoyed little influence over the tariff decisions of foreign governments. The attraction of equal treatment increased as the United States industrialized. By the late nineteenth century the desire for foreign markets for manufacturing and agricultural exports gave Americans more reason to oppose discriminatory trade policies and preferential commercial arrangements. Such concerns informed the Open Door Notes that Secretary of State John Hay issued in 1899–1900. The Notes demanded that the imperial powers provide equal commercial opportunity for all nations in China as well as unequivocal support for Chinese territorial and administrative integrity, the political corollary of non-discrimination. In keeping with the equal treatment principle, the United States (unlike many of its trading partners) entered the twentieth century committed to a single-column tariff. Yet U.S. extension of MFN was not automatic: It required third parties to provide concessions equivalent to those offered by the treaty signatory. This was a cumbersome way to liberalize trade. It required, Hull recalls, “an interminable series of negotiations with many countries.”28 Because the levels of trade and types of goods exchanged between America and its partners varied enormously, U.S. officials had difficulty determining what constituted “equivalent” concessions. During World War I, Wilson campaigned to make equal commercial treatment a pervasive feature of international trade. “Every nation [should] be free to determine its own economic policy,” he declared,

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“except in one particular, that its policy must be the same for all other nations, and not be compounded of hostile discriminations between one nation and another.”29 Following U.S. entry into the war, Frank Taussig, chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission, supervised a study of desirable postwar U.S. trade policy. The resulting report, Reciprocity and Commercial Treaties, completed in December 1918, recommended that Congress transfer to the executive branch the authority to raise or lower duties on the basis of reciprocity. More generally, it proposed that America adopt the principle of unconditional rather than conditional MFN, since “the separate and individual treatment of each case tends to create misunderstanding and friction with [third] countries.”30 In 1923, the United States finally adopted the unconditional MFN principle. But political opposition to tariff reductions meant that this step had little impact on trade liberalization during the 1920s. An International Trade Congress Ending this pattern of destructive discrimination and unfair economic competition, Hull believed, required the same sort of multilateral, institutionalized response that Woodrow Wilson had recommended for international peace and security. The answer was a permanent international organization with universal membership to facilitate simultaneous trade liberalization among multiple countries on the basis of unconditional MFN treatment. As Hull envisioned it, a world trade congress would replace periodic bilateral negotiations to reduce tariffs in discrete sectors with a standing body assembling all the world’s trading nations to mutually and peaceably negotiate a horizontal reduction of tariff barriers and the elimination of discriminatory non-tariff barriers like quotas. Such a structure would help de-politicize trade policy by channeling the pursuit of national interests into a set of acceptable norms and laws. Hull first broached this idea in a speech in Congress in 1916, when he suggested a postwar “international trade-treaty conference” in Washington.31 His activism gave impetus to the third of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but his proposal for a standing world trade congress went beyond anything the President was prepared to contemplate. Unlike FDR a generation later, Wilson offered no framework for international economic cooperation to complement his scheme for postwar global security. During World War I, French economics minister Etienne Clémentel had proposed that the allies extend their wartime cooperation on economic matters into peacetime. This would happen through the creation of new structures for the collective management of the international economy, beginning with raw materials and moving into preferential tariffs as well as coordination of financial and currency matters. To Paris’s

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disappointment, Wilson rejected these ideas and refused—as Harding would too—any official U.S. aid to assist Europe’s postwar recovery.32 Wilson’s internationalism did not extend to the economic and social realms of policy. Only after the experiences of the Great Depression and World War II did U.S. policymakers understand that global and domestic stability and prosperity depended on international economic management. On February 21, 1919, with Wilson in Paris, Hull recommended an international trade organization—charged with establishing rules of global commerce and mediating disputes—as an essential economic component of any collective security system. For Hull, it seemed obvious that such a body “would supplement, strengthen, and make easier [the League’s] operations,” by reducing the number of international commercial disputes the League would face. Citing a litany of wars caused by economic rivalry and inveighing against a slew of “unfair” trade practices, he declared “economic peace” to be “the greatest possible assurance for world peace.”33 Although a disciple of nineteenth century liberal thought, Hull did not fully espouse laissez-faire philosophy. Influenced by the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan and the progressivism of Wilson, he believed that equal commercial opportunity was not a natural condition but something that government had to encourage and enforce. Just as public sector reforms were needed to protect the national economy from monopolies, so, too, the international arena required rules and institutions to ensure fair competition among countries. Hull did not expect countries to renounce national interests to pursue altruistic goals, but wished them to pursue their interests in a multilateral framework of agreed principles, norms, rules, and procedures, in which all participants enjoyed equal rights (if not power). Liberal Multilateralism and World Peace Political as well as economic considerations underpinned the State Department’s faith in liberal multilateralism. This thinking trickled down from the top. Though initially drawn to free trade for sectional reasons, Hull viewed high tariffs and discrimination as damaging to U.S. foreign relations and world peace. He attributed the outbreak of World War I largely to the imposition of “unfair, injurious, and trouble-making trade practices,” including the rivalry and jealousy generated by closed imperial systems. Henceforth, he recalls, “I embraced the philosophy I carried throughout my twelve years as Secretary of State,” namely, that “unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war.”34 The causal link Hull drew between international economics and global security involved several logical steps. The imposition of high tariffs and

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discriminatory treatment by one country prompted retaliation by others. These measures and countermeasures reduced the volume of world trade, lowered global standards of living, generated higher unemployment, and increased poverty levels. Within individual countries, economic misery generated sociopolitical instability and upheaval, leaving destitute populations susceptible to the demagogic appeals of authoritarian and militaristic leaders (“easy prey to dictators and desperadoes.”). Externally, restrictive commercial policies poisoned the international climate, breeding antagonism and raising the “constant temptation to use force, or threat of force, to obtain what could have been got through normal processes of trade.” Economic competition, per se, was not to blame. Rather, “wars were often largely caused by economic rivalry conducted unfairly.” The world’s descent from commercial rivalry to violence during the 1930s confirmed Hull’s view that discrimination was the economic equivalent of military aggression and the ultimate cause of war. By the time he entered office in 1933, Hull recalls, “Economic disarmament and military disarmament seemed to me the two most vital and outstanding factors for peace and business recovery.”35

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE BATTLE OVER U.S. TRADE POLICY The prolonged economic crisis of the 1930s opened the door for institutional change in U.S. economic policy—foreign as well as domestic. But the U.S. shift toward multilateral commerce was hardly preordained. During the 1932 campaign, Democratic presidential aspirant Franklin Roosevelt, seeking to appeal to voters from industrial states, wavered on his party’s traditional support for tariff revision. Subsequently, the new President made clear in his inaugural address that any steps to collaborate in the restoration of international trade would remain “secondary to the reestablishment of a sound national economy.”36 To underline his priorities, FDR rebuffed a State Department initiative to request from Congress authority to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions. This stance undercut Hull’s position at the 1933 London Economic Conference (which collapsed after FDR rejected any U.S. role in stabilizing the world’s major currencies). It was unclear whether the interventionist New Deal at home could coexist with multilateral trade liberalization abroad. Hull saw them as compatible.37 But other powerful voices within the administration, Congress, and American society regarded protectionism and discrimination as essential corollaries to government intervention and regulation. Two pieces of legislation in 1933 revealed the tensions between the New Deal and liberal multilateralism.

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In May 1933, Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. This law created an Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and gave it the authority not only to boost prices and reduce production of basic crops, but also to use import quotas and export subsidies to shield farmers from foreign competition. The AAA mandated direct government intervention in the farm sector and clearly violated multilateral principles. Likewise on June 16, FDR signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, establishing the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Among other provisions, the act granted the President flexibility to control imports, to protect domestic producers. Had the NRA survived rather than being abandoned in late 1934, protectionism and discrimination would likely have governed trade in manufactures as well as in agricultural products. Instead, the NRA’s failure paved the way for trade liberalization.38 The influence of protectionists in the Democratic Party, particularly members of FDR’s “brains trust,” alarmed Hull. The New Dealers opposed tariff reductions as an impediment to the pursuit of domestic demand and high prices. A Wilsonian, Hull held more conservative views about the government’s appropriate economic role than Roosevelt’s coterie of influential “experimenters” (as he termed them), who advocated a sweeping expansion of state powers.39 Particularly problematic was FDR’s appointment in March 1933 of George N. Peek, former AAA administrator, to head the new Office of the Special Trade Adviser, just as the RTAA was being sent to Congress. Peek, who jockeyed to control the new interdepartmental Committee on Trade Agreements, subscribed to a mercantilist conception of reciprocity. Believing that unconditional application of the MFN principle would swamp the country with inexpensive foreign imports without securing U.S. export markets, he advocated high U.S. tariffs and subsidies, bilateral barter arrangements to dispose of U.S. surpluses abroad, and retaliation to obtain guaranteed shares of foreign markets. Peek’s relying on specific reciprocity to gain privileged market access constituted an inherently discriminatory approach to foreign trade, one diametrically opposed to the State Department’s multilateral vision of equal treatment.40 Hull eventually won his clash with Peek, whose office was abolished, but the trajectory of U.S. policy could easily have gone the other way—toward a model of “bullying bilateralism”41

BILATERALISM IN THE SERVICE OF MULTILATERALISM The antecedents of postwar U.S. trade multilateralism lie in the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934. Approved in the depth of the

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Great Depression, the RTAA empowered the President to enter into reciprocal negotiations aimed at “expanding markets for the products of the United States.” A watershed in U.S. foreign economic policy, the law was revolutionary in two respects: It transferred control over trade policy to the executive branch, and it committed the United States to the principle of unconditional most-favored nation treatment. Since the founding of the republic, one of the biggest obstacles to U.S. trade liberalization had been Congress’s constitutional authority “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” (U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3). By 1930, Congress was setting individual tariffs on some 20,000 different articles.42 Whereas other countries might lower tariff rates by executive fiat, in the United States such action required support from at least two-thirds of the Senate. This hurdle undercut U.S. credibility with negotiating partners. Whenever an administration considered revising tariff rates, domestic beneficiaries of protection descended on Capitol Hill, lobbying legislators to raise duties or (at a minimum) hold them steady. Invariably, the Senate would dismantle tariff agreements painstakingly negotiated by the executive branch, amending entire tariff schedules to suit protectionist desires. The historical evidence was overwhelming, Hull recalls: “No American Senate had ever approved a trade treaty negotiated by the Executive which materially reduced tariffs.”43 Accordingly, among Hull’s first goals as Secretary was securing authority to enter into reciprocal tariff reduction agreements, with minimal congressional interference. Without this mandate, Hull told the House Ways and Means Committee on March 8, 1934, “It will not be practicable or possible for the United States to pursue with any degree of success the proposed policy of restoring our lost international trade.”44 The worrying global trend toward bilateralism and preference made such flexibility imperative. Any hope of slowing the world’s fragmentation into economic blocs rested on making credible offers of enhanced access to the U.S. market. The RTAA allowed the President to negotiate trade agreements that reduced tariffs by as much as 50 percent below Smoot-Hawley levels, with Congress required to accept or reject the final agreement in a single up-or-down vote. No longer could legislators pore over schedules, reversing and amending rates proposed for each imported product. The RTAA augmented U.S. negotiating leverage with foreign governments, enabling U.S. officials to dangle credibly the large U.S. market to incentivize reciprocal benefits. The RTAA also changed the domestic dynamics of trade policy-making. By taking tariff policy away from legislators and placing it in the technocratic hands of the State Department, the Act loosened the grip of protectionist constituencies and limited opportunities for congressional logrolling. Industries seeking protection now had to persuade

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non-partisan policy experts of the merits of their complaints, which would be evaluated against objective economic criteria rather than domestic political calculations. By revealing the connection between market access at home and abroad and by providing new institutional channels to influence policy, the act also spurred U.S. export interests to mobilize in support of freer trade.45 The RTAA allowed the United States to take the lead on global trade liberalization.46 To administer the act, Roosevelt created a Committee on Trade Agreements, chaired by the State Department and including representatives from the departments of Agriculture and Commerce, as well as the Tariff Commission. Within the State Department, Hull, on June 12, 1934, established a new division to handle trade agreements. Under Harry Hawkins, it became the premier locus of U.S. trade policy expertise, surveying potential country treaties, investigating possible import concessions, supervising country subcommittees, and reviewing industry concerns raised in the Committee for Reciprocity Information. The RTAA placed the State Department firmly in control of U.S. commercial policy. A second landmark component of the RTAA was its affirmation of the unconditional MFN principle. In this respect, the law built on new understandings of the meaning of “reciprocity.” For most of American history, U.S. commercial treaties had been exclusive bilateral arrangements that barred third parties from receiving the same treatment as the signatory, unless the United States received a specific concession in compensation. The RTAA transformed this situation. Henceforth, the United States would extend any concession offered to the principal supplier of a good to all other nations, so long as those third parties did not discriminate against U.S. exports by according preferential treatment to similar goods imported from other countries. In adopting the unconditional MFN principle, the Roosevelt administration shifted U.S. trade policy from “substantive bilateralism” (the exchange of equal concessions within exclusive arrangements) to “formal bilateralism” (nominally bilateral agreements with multilateral implications).47 This generated a powerful inducement for individual countries to accord the United States their most favorable rates, rather than continuing to discriminate against it. Extended to multiple partners, this logic would generate momentum for downward revision of tariffs. In short, unconditional MFN promised to replace the vicious cycle of discrimination and retaliation with a virtuous spiral of liberalization. As a piecemeal approach to multilateral trade liberalization, the RTAA departed from Hull’s preferred, universal model. As early as 1916, Hull had envisioned sweeping “multilateral action, whereby all nations would agree to reduce their tariffs at the same time and to the same extent.” The circumstances of the Great Depression, however, made this strategy

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unrealistic. Convinced that public opinion at home and abroad could not handle a more comprehensive approach, the Secretary of State seized on the RTAA as “the next best method of reducing trade barriers,” through “bilateral agreements which embraced the most-favored nation policy in its unconditional form—meaning a policy of non-discrimination and equality of treatment.”48 The RTAA passed the House on March 20, 1934, and the Senate on June 4, and FDR signed it on June 12. Support from export-oriented producers and internationalist interests proved instrumental in its passage. The Wall Street financial community, advanced manufacturing sectors (such as automobiles), and some segments of agriculture backed the legislation because each saw significant market opportunities abroad and realized that foreigners could buy U.S. goods only if they could earn dollars from the sale of goods in the United States. Within Congress, the opposition harped on predicted damage to U.S. industry and agriculture while seeking to preserve congressional control over treaties (in the Senate) and taxation (in the House). The administration mollified some concerns over legislative prerogatives by portraying the RTAA as only a temporary shift in control over trade policy, “an emergency measure to deal with a dangerous and threatening emergency situation.”49 The RTAA was limited to three years, after which the executive branch would need to seek its renewal. To smooth passage of these new trade authorities, the laws included concessions and safeguards for domestic interests to compensate them for their loss of protection. FDR permitted Hull to proceed with the trade liberalization program only after U.S. labor and agricultural interests, which feared losing out to international competition, had received significant protections by New Deal legislation. Industrial interests would also enjoy access to the policymaking process and escape clauses in case of grievous injury. These qualifications rendered America’s conversion to trade liberalism incomplete. To begin with, the act promised to reduce trade barriers and apply unconditional MFN treatment only to trade in manufactured goods. The principle of “parity” would govern trade in agricultural commodities instead of “reciprocity.” This meant the government could impose quantitative restrictions and subsidize U.S. agricultural exports to protect the domestic farm sector from foreign competition and to maintain high prices for farm products.50 During the late 1940s, at U.S. insistence, these divergent principles governing agricultural and manufacturing trade would be codified in the GATT regime. Even in manufacturing trade, the RTAA constituted only selective liberalization. The United States reduced duties on certain items in particular sectors, but continued to protect vulnerable industries. As

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Francis Sayre, an architect of the RTAA, conceded, the “whole program was based on finding places in the tariff wall where reductions could be made without substantial injury to American producers.”51 A “principal supplier” provision restricted goods that could be included in any agreement, and concessions were not extended to countries that continued to discriminate against the United States. The strategy of bilateral negotiations implied that tariff reductions remained narrow, rather than across the board. Moreover, the RTAA required the executive branch to give U.S. manufacturers reasonable notice (at least thirty days) of its intention to pursue a trade agreement and to create a mechanism—the interdepartmental Committee for Reciprocity Information—to solicit their input on proposed agreements. The Trade Agreements Program and Postwar Planning Despite the qualifications and incompleteness of the U.S commitment to trade liberalization, the RTAA signified an important breakthrough, permitting the United States to foster multilateral trade in manufactured goods through bilateral treaties containing an MFN clause. Hull and his colleagues quickly exploited this opening. On the eve of World War II, the United States had negotiated trade agreements with twenty nations, the most important being the Anglo-American Trade Agreement of November 17, 1938. (It would conclude eleven more during the war.) The State Department saw the reciprocal trade agreements program, with its multilateral implications, as a means to halt the trend toward discriminatory international commerce and reverse the deteriorating climate of world politics. During the 1930s, most major trading nations sought to advance their well-being at the expense of trading partners. As they imposed currency controls, formed producer cartels, created systems of preference, imposed quotas, raised tariffs, and subsidized exports, international commerce devolved into an increasingly aggressive competition for dwindling markets. European powers used political and economic leverage to negotiate or impose discriminatory bilateral agreements with small neighbors and developing nations, granting preferences to exports of weaker countries in return for privileged access to markets and strategic materials. The resulting fragmentation of the world economy deepened economic dislocation and exacerbated geopolitical rivalries. Mercantilist trends accelerated as countries began mobilizing for war. The State Department hoped to arrest the proliferation of such unfair, destructive, and ultimately self-defeating economic statecraft, and employed the RTAA program to this effect. It aimed for a world in which trade and payments flowed according to the laws of supply and demand rather than privileged systems of imperial preference or discriminatory

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blocs. Predicated on the belief that countries should simultaneously and mutually reduce trade barriers to expand the volume of international commerce, the text of each trade agreement reached under the RTAA began with a guarantee by both parties to extend equal commercial treatment.52 When the RTAA came up for renewal in 1937, the administration highlighted its economic and political benefits. As President Roosevelt told the House, “Our vigorous initiative in the field of liberalization of commercial policies has been an important factor in arresting the world trend toward national economic isolation, which seemed almost irreversible three years ago.”53 In testimony before the Senate on February 10, Hull stressed the critical national security benefits of trade liberalization, warning of an international march to war if the United States abandoned the trade agreements program.54 After a bitter fight, Congress renewed the RTAA by a vote of 285–101 in the House, 58–24 in the Senate. Three years later, on January 11, 1940, Hull testified to the House Ways and Means Committee on America’s success in halting global economic fragmentation. Besides undoing the legacy of Smoot-Hawley, the RTAA had given the world a symbol of constructive American economic leadership. “No new order can be successfully built without the assistance of the U.S. . . . ,” he declared. “If you destroy the reciprocal trade agreements you cast this nation out of the role that history seems to have ordained for us in fashioning a world.”55 Still, economic nationalists and isolationists like Vandenberg and Taft attacked the RTAA program for exposing U.S. domestic producers to unfair foreign competition and unjustifiably extending executive power. Protectionist industries like textiles were especially vocal. The 1940 RTAA battle was close. In the end, the measure passed the House 218–168 and the Senate 41–35, due to strong support for the first time from FDR. The U.S. campaign for unfettered access and equal treatment targeted all forms of protection and discrimination, from Hitler’s New Order and Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to Britain’s system of imperial preference. The latter impeded legitimate U.S. trade and investment through import quotas, discriminatory tariffs, and currency restrictions.56 The British Empire covered a quarter of the earth, possessed the world’s second largest economy, and controlled an important reserve currency. Its attitude would determine the success of Washington’s multilateral project. The State Department was intent on dismantling the Ottawa Agreements of 1932, which Hull called “the greatest injury, in a commercial way, that has ever been inflicted on this country since I have been in public life.”57 This exclusive arrangement raised duties against non-members and lowered or eliminated them for members. Britain granted Commonwealth members low tariffs and long-term contracts for bulk purchases of raw materials in return for

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their agreement to import British manufactures on preferential terms. In effect, Britain leveraged access to its domestic market to get its partners to restrict trade with third parties. Since 40 percent of prewar world trade had passed through British and Dominion ports, this not only placed U.S. traders at a disadvantage but was also a gigantic obstacle to postwar multilateralism. The Anglo-American Trade Agreement of 1938 helped reverse, if only temporarily, the severe protectionist trend in the British Empire, which had seen the percentage of imports subject to duty rise from 15 percent in 1930 to 58 percent in 1938.58 To win British assent, however, Washington had to concede that Britain could retain its discriminatory system of imperial preference. By 1938, administration officials touted trade agreements more for their political benefits than economic advantages. In Hull’s estimation, “Only five percent [of the RTAA program] is economic, while the other 95 percent is more or less political or psychological.”59 Again and again, he linked international economic openness to improved global security; and its absence, to military conflict. In what one historian has called “multilateral appeasement,” Hull hoped to use trade agreements to slow momentum toward war, by persuading recalcitrant states like Germany, Italy, and Japan of the benefits of open and peaceful trade, in keeping with his vision that “the economic approach should be the spear point of the approach to peace.”60 The outbreak of a Second World War did not shake Hull’s faith in the link between open commerce and political tranquility. Had the RTAA been launched in the 1920s, he believed, it might have discouraged destructive trade policies and stopped the slide toward war. Even with a late start, its political impact had been impressive: The United States did not wage war against any country with which it had signed an agreement, and the vast majority of its RTAA partners joined it in resisting the Axis. “The political line-up followed the economic line-up.”61 The wartime State Department widely accepted Hull’s politicaleconomic analysis of trade and security. Harry Hawkins, director of the Division of Commercial Policy, attributed the outbreak of World War II to “a cutthroat struggle for desperately needed but rapidly shrinking world markets . . . rapidly rising tariff walls, embargoes, quotas-restrictions, exchange controls, devalued currencies, and every other kind of trade warfare.” Assistant Secretary of State William Clayton echoed Hawkins in 1945, arguing, “Nations which act as enemies in the marketplace cannot long be friends at the council table.” State Department officials undoubtedly exaggerated the economic roots of military conflict and the promise of commercial liberty to cut them. For Hull, the lesson of the interwar period was simple: “When goods move, soldiers don’t.”62

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POSTWAR PLANNING FOR THE WORLD ECONOMY A distinctive aspect of U.S. postwar planning was the emphasis it placed on the economic—as opposed to simply political and military— foundations for international peace and security. The perception that suicidal economic nationalism had prolonged the Great Depression and contributed to global war convinced American diplomats that foreign economic policy should be a central—perhaps the central—component of postwar U.S. foreign policy.63 The constraints of wartime diplomacy reinforced America’s pursuit of “economic security.”64 As postwar planner Harley Notter recalls, “It was thought that the common interests of nations were more generally recognized in the economic than in the political field.” U.S. officials thus chose “to approach the problem of the restoration of peace first from an economic standpoint,” expecting that this would lay groundwork for a world security organization.65 The first U.S. postwar economic planning group, the Subcommittee on Economic Problems, formed on January 3, 1940. That same month, Hull told Congress that the “triumph or defeat of liberal trade policies after the war will, in large measure, be determined by the commitments the nations will assume between now and the [anticipated postwar] Peace Conference.”66 To advance the cause of economic liberal multilateralism, Hull relied on talented subordinates: Herbert Feis, his leading economic adviser; Francis B. Sayre, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and his successor, Henry Grady; Hawkins; and Clair Wilcox, the Director of the Office of International Trade Policy. All were determined to exploit America’s overwhelming but (presumably) transient dominance to lay the foundations for an open, interdependent world economy, organized along multilateral lines. As Hawkins counseled, The economic strength of the United States is greater than that of any other country. Its production and consumption is a large part of the production and consumption of the entire world. It is the greatest creditor nation. Policies that it pursues and advocates will be decisive in determining whether mutual impoverishment or mutual prosperity will characterize economic policies in the post-war world. . . . But it is an opportunity which we will have only for a relatively brief time.67

In a radio address of May 18, 1941, Hull outlined the primary goals of postwar economic cooperation, as gleaned from experience: moderation in trade restrictions; non-discrimination in commercial relations and access to raw materials; regulation of commodities to protect the interests of consuming countries; creation of international financial institutions to

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ensure monetary stabilization, currency convertibility, and the continuous development of all countries; and measures to implement these principles “freely open to every nation.”68 While each was laudable, State Department officials accorded priority to non-discrimination, or the removal of all inherently unfair barriers, such as quotas, preference, and exchange controls. Where protection persisted, it should take the form of tariffs, which might then be reduced equally for all parties. The British Empire remained the primary obstacle to the multilateral future. Despite the Anglo-American Trade Agreement of 1938, the rigors of the war effort had led London to fortify its trading and currency bloc by various measures, including imposing strict quotas on imports from outside the sterling area, blocking payments in sterling to other members of the sterling bloc, prohibiting free conversion into dollars of sterling balances held in this bloc, and signing long-term purchasing agreements with producers of primary products. These restrictions made the empire a self-contained commercial area, in which trade could be financed only by sterling, which, in turn, could not be converted to purchase goods from outside the empire. Similarly, the Commonwealth remained attached to preference, continuing to discriminate against outsiders. The State Department feared that the sterling bloc and imperial preference might survive into the postwar period, dashing their universalist hopes for a multilateral world economy without discrimination. Hull objected bitterly to Britain’s violations of the principle of equal treatment and told the British as much.69 American animus toward imperial preference deepened as the Axis countries created their own discriminatory and extractive commercial arrangements, using the British example as a precedent.70 Ideologically, economic multilateralism appealed to both American liberals and conservatives, since it relied primarily on the free market— rather than statism or collectivism—to address pressing social challenges like full domestic employment, economic growth, and global development. American diplomats made a direct connection between multilateralism abroad and domestic economic freedom. As Hawkins wrote in a report to the Executive Committee on Commercial Policy, “Because we desire to preserve our democratic system of individual enterprise, a policy of bilateralism under strict government control would be contrary to our national interest.” 71 Given America’s democratic heritage, U.S. policymakers believed, the United States should promote its trade with minimal government interference. Multilateralism promised to preserve the free enterprise system, and in doing so, to raise employment levels in the United States by opening foreign outlets to American capital and products. Officials were confident that surging U.S. productivity during the war would enable companies

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to withstand foreign competition. But they also feared a postwar recession (or even depression) as millions of veterans were demobilized and the U.S. economy returned to a peacetime footing. To avert, or at least mitigate, a slump, and to absorb the products of American factories and farms, it was imperative to secure foreign markets for U.S. exports during the war. Economic multilateralism offered this prospect.

SMITH ABROAD AND KEYNES AT HOME Other key areas of economic policymaking did not share the State Department’s unreserved enthusiasm for liberal multilateralism. Within the Treasury Department a consensus prevailed that any moves toward trade liberalization would inevitably be balanced by state intervention to boost employment and pursue other social welfare objectives. This conviction of the need to temper commercial openness with an activist state reflected lessons of recent experience. On both sides of the Atlantic, the crises of economic depression and war mobilization had altered public expectations about the appropriate role of the state in the domestic and international markets. The prolonged slump and disintegration of a global economy had discredited laissez-faire economics, shattered the free trade consensus of the gold standard era, and led both Americans and Europeans to reconsider the responsibility of the state to regulate the domestic and international economy. Influenced by new Keynesian ideas, government officials and private citizens in Europe and (to a lesser degree) the United States anticipated the state undertaking additional welfare responsibilities, intervening in the domestic economy to foster full employment, growth, price stability, and social security. Although American political culture had long favored free enterprise and commerce over state trading and dirigisme, and faith in markets remained strong in the United States, the New Deal left many Americans more skeptical of the unregulated private sector and more comfortable with a modified form of capitalism. For Europeans, state intervention was non-negotiable. Both the British government and the European governments-in-exile anticipated immediate postwar reconstruction tasks and, over the longer term, were dedicated to creating welfare states that fulfilled social democratic aspirations. Open markets remained important to generate growth, but required regulation, intervention, and a safety net to moderate their excesses.72 Wartime negotiations between the United States and its most important trading partner, Great Britain, produced the postwar international economic order—dubbed a “compromise of embedded liberalism.”73 That is, postwar regimes for trade and money balanced a general commitment

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to multilateralism with moderate state intervention. Participants would accept the general norms of liberalism, non-discrimination, and reciprocity, while retaining safeguards allowing them to pursue important social welfare objectives, including full employment and nationalization. Multilateralism, in other words, would be predicated on domestic interventionism, as countries followed the dictates of “Smith abroad” and “Keynes at home.”74 In contrast to the global economy of the nineteenth century, no one expected the era of embedded liberalism to self-regulate. Governing the new global economy would require international institutions both to insulate national economies from external shocks and to dampen disequilibria caused by competing national policies. The United States and its foreign partners, particularly in Europe, often disagreed about precisely where to strike the balance between openness and intervention. Nor did they always concur about the domestic and international institutions needed to achieve broadly shared goals. The internal and external contours of embedded liberalism would emerge through exceedingly difficult negotiations, particularly those between Washington and London.75 Although the United States could exploit its structural position and manipulate economic incentives, ultimately transatlantic accord reflected the normative and technical beliefs of a cadre of likeminded British and American expert economists and policy specialists. The wartime negotiations helped create novel shared understandings about the meaning of recent events and the regimes necessary to prevent history from repeating itself. These shared understandings in turn became the basis for norms and rules. These experts intervened at a fluid moment to help governments identify their interests and define a focal point for cooperation in the form of a managed liberal order that made monetary and trade relations both subject to international agreement and consistent with social welfare goals. Because it occupied a broad middle ground between economic nationalism and laissez-faire detachment, embedded liberalism allowed politicians of various stripes to embrace non-discrimination and reciprocity while claiming to protect national interests. 76

TRANSATLANTIC DIFFERENCES OVER MULTILATERALISM Of all of America’s trading partners, Great Britain was the most critical to forging a transatlantic agreement. During the early 1940s, the British War Cabinet and foreign policy establishment were both deeply divided about the wisdom of committing the country to a policy of postwar commercial multilateralism. There were those who felt that the United Kingdom should embrace open trade on strategic and economic grounds,

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even if this meant forfeiting imperial preference. Others, however, saw multilateralism as a threat to the imperial foundations of British prosperity and power or to postwar social democracy—or both. Some moderates in Parliament, attached to economic liberalism and cognizant of British financial dependence on the United States, were prepared to renounce discrimination, preference, and bilateral trading in return for U.S. aid. But multilateralism encountered strong resistance from both the left and the right, dividing the Labour and Conservative parties alike. Among the Tories, the most vocal opposition to U.S. plans came from “empire isolationists” who regarded the sterling area as the foundation of Britain’s prosperity and (increasingly tenuous) great power status. They advocated preserving or even extending imperial preference and maintaining exchange controls in the postwar period to protect vulnerable British industry and agriculture from foreign competition and to sustain sheltered overseas markets for British manufactures and investment capital in an uncertain future. They were opposed by a moderate group of “reform Tories,” who saw Britain’s future in multilateralism and believed that external liberalization was compatible with the creation of a mixed economy at home. They stressed, however, that tariff reduction, quota elimination, and dismantling of preference must proceed gradually to permit sustainable recovery and domestic planning. Reform Tories found common cause with other Conservatives like Anthony Eden and Richard Law, who viewed multilateralism as the only alternative to the division of the capitalist world into sterling and dollar blocs, followed by a U.S. return to isolationism.77 Within the Labour Party, meanwhile, many continued to identify open trade (and the free market in general) with mass unemployment and social injustice. They worried that non-discrimination would endanger postwar policies of reconstruction, nationalization, full employment, and social welfare. Labour’s left wing condemned multilateralism as a capitalist threat to the country’s socialist transformation and the introduction of a system of global economic planning. The party’s mainstream leaders took a more balanced view. They recognized the strategic and economic rationale for relaxing preference and currency controls, but fretted that precipitous moves to liberalize trade and restore sterling convertibility would place Britain in an untenable balance of payments position and increase its vulnerability to a possible U.S. economic downturn, thereby jeopardizing British recovery and social democracy. The challenge for moderate Labourites was reconciling their internationalist instincts with their domestic commitment to social justice and the welfare state.78 Despite an ideological antipathy toward empire, for example, many Labourites favored the continuation of preference to safeguard domestic planning and social welfare initiatives.

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Thus, while few Britons advocated pure free trade multilateralism, powerful factions in both parties were willing to accept a modified multilateralism—provided that Washington met certain conditions. The United States must give adequate assurances that it would pursue full employment policies, commit to a dramatic reduction in U.S. tariffs, provide Britain with sufficient aid to overcome its balance-of-payments difficulties, and not weaken the ties between London and the British Commonwealth. Anglo-American negotiations over the postwar economy centered on debate over these conditions. British postwar planners, well aware that Britain would face acute postwar balance-of-payments difficulties and pursue the creation of a modern welfare state, refused to expose the country to free economic competition in the immediate postwar world. They feared this would undermine the establishment of a regulated capitalist system, including sustained domestic consumption and employment. Any movement toward multilateralism needed to be tempered by elements of protectionism and discrimination, including the maintenance of currency controls, quantitative restrictions, and imperial preference. Keynes (himself a member of Labour’s moderate wing) was the most influential British participant in the Anglo-American financial negotiations. The economist recognized that bilateralism offered no alternative to the security and prosperity of a multilateral international economic system: “If we adopt bilateral arrangements, they will be adopted to our detriment by other countries such as Germany and the United States.” He likened bilateralism to “a crowd of people in the water all trying to secure themselves from drowning by standing on the others; the stronger or the luckier ones will survive, but a good many may drown.”79 Yet Keynes alarmed U.S. officials early in the wartime negotiations by suggesting that postwar Britain would continue to discriminate against U.S. commerce with import restrictions, currency controls, and imperial preference in order to conduct economic planning, state-led reconstruction, and social welfare provision after the war. Because these ambitious goals required massive imports and huge financial resources to pay for them, full multilateralism would be unrealistic in the short or medium term. To preserve financial equilibrium, moreover, Britain would need to protect its domestic producers, maintain preferential access to Commonwealth markets, and restrict the exchange of sterling into dollars.

A MOST UNSORDID ACT? During World War II, the United States exploited Britain’s financial vulnerability to wrangle concessions from its ally on commercial and

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monetary policy, namely abolition of discriminatory trade barriers and exchange controls. The primary instrument available to Washington was Lend-Lease assistance. The Lend-Lease Act, approved in March 1941, permitted the Roosevelt administration to “loan” items of military value to countries whose survival it regarded as essential to U.S. national interests. In authorizing this program, Congress instructed the President to seek repayment in any “direct or indirect benefit which [he] deems satisfactory.” The administration used this broad discretion to extract commitments from recipients on postwar commercial policy, “insist[ing] on multilateral as opposed to bilateral trade practices” and on “non-discriminatory treatment.”80 Article VII of the Master Lend-Lease Agreement signed with each aid recipient spelled out these multilateral engagements. The precise wording of this article became the subject of intense bilateral negotiations between Washington and London. On July 28, 1941, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson presented Keynes with a draft text. Aimed directly at imperial preference, it read: “The terms and conditions upon which the United Kingdom receives defense aid . . . and the benefits to be received by the United States of America in return therefore . . . shall provide against discrimination . . . against the importation of any product originating in the other country.” Keynes objected to any prohibition on discrimination, but Acheson held firm. “[A]s coldly as I could, I added that the British should realize that an effort of the magnitude of the LendLease program on our part imposed upon them at least an obligation to work in good faith for the establishment of a multilateral trading system sometime in the future.”81 The Atlantic Charter afforded a second opportunity to apply pressure toward this goal. At the rendezvous in Placentia Bay in August 1941, Sumner Welles proposed to his British counterpart, Alexander Cadogan, that the joint Anglo-American statement should include a clause supporting commercial openness. Churchill responded with a British draft suggesting the replacement of free market forces with an interventionist, supranational regime of managed trade, production agreements, and commodity arrangements.82 As such, Welles rejected it outright and produced an alternative draft emphasizing not equality of outcome but equality of commercial access, which should be extended “without discrimination,” to include imperial preference. Roosevelt interceded with the Prime Minister, stressing the symbolic importance of a liberal colonial policy to distinguish the Allied cause from Axis imperialism and offer hope to colonial peoples. Churchill was unmoved. While he personally disliked the Ottawa agreements, Britain could not accept the proposed article before consulting the Dominions, a time-consuming process. In the end Churchill accepted only a qualified commitment obliging signatories

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to “endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world.”83 Thus the Charter’s equal access clause contained sufficient ambiguity for both sides to declare victory. On the one hand, it implied that both countries would avoid “exclusive blocs and the use of totalitarian trade practices for political ends.”84 On the other hand, London’s caveat raised questions about Britain’s commitment to multilateral principles. Simultaneously, the British War Cabinet requested the insertion of a point in the Charter that highlighted concerns of social justice and economic advancement. It read: “Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic development and social security.”85 FDR readily accepted this addition, which linked the principle of non-discrimination with that of international economic collaboration to support domestic economic growth and social security. British financial dependence on the United States would offer Washington future openings to obtain more clear-cut commitments to multilateralism from its ally. The State Department sought Britain’s strict implementation of Article VII because it implied “the virtual abolition of Empire preferences and renunciation of bilateralism.”86 The British, however, refused to dismantle preference without firm assurances that the United States would slash its own high tariffs. London’s skepticism that the Roosevelt Administration could credibly commit to do this derived from America’s separation of powers, as well as the fragmentation of authority within the U.S. executive branch. Keynes outlined the difficulty in 1941: One can take nothing whatever for settled in the U.S.A., for the sufficient reason that the Administration, not being in control of Congress, is not in a position to enter into commitments on anything. We shall have to bear this in mind in all the negotiations for Anglo-American economic cooperation. What our representatives say bind the British Government. What the State Department or the Treasury or the departments of Commerce or Agriculture may intimate in the course of our conversations with them can and does bind no one. Thus, every bargain can, and very likely will, be overthrown by Congress . . . we shall, therefore, have to be very careful in tying up our side of the bargain with theirs.87

On January 12, 1942, Churchill told Hull categorically that he would reject any clause requiring Britain to give up imperial preference as a condition for Lend-Lease. Washington then sweetened the deal. It reassured London that Article VII did not imply any binding commitments on imperial preference, whose liberalization, in any event, would necessarily

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go hand in hand with U.S. tariff reductions. The War Cabinet assented on these terms. The final engagements appeared in the Master Lend-Lease (Mutual Aid) Agreement, signed on February 23, 1942. Article VII stipulated that the ultimate settlement of Lend-Lease accounts must include concrete steps, “open to participation by all other countries of like mind,” directed at “the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce, and to the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers.” The two governments pledged to begin conversations as soon as possible to ascertain how best to achieve these goals.88 Article VII seemed to imply tangible British concessions to dismantle protectionist and discriminatory arrangements. But a phrase requiring “mutually advantageous economic relations” as a prerequisite for reducing tariffs and preferences diluted the engagement. Britain would thus move toward multilateralism contingent upon its own (subjective) interpretation of when such conditions materialized.89 Although Churchill graciously described Lend-Lease as history’s “most unsordid act,” Washington showed little compunction about manipulating the flow of U.S. aid to prevent British dollar balances from getting too high—thus keeping Britain in a dependent state. This was partly a response to pressure from fiscal conservatives in Congress like Nye, Vandenberg, and Taft. Having previously opposed Lend-Lease on the grounds that it might drag the United States into the war, they now worried the British would use Lend-Lease as a subsidy to gain unfair advantage over the United States (and its private economic interests) and to preserve its Empire. They insisted on keeping aid levels low and restricting it to wartime. Although the State Department favored greater generosity, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau shared Congress’s desire for a tough line. Under his influence, Washington funneled enough assistance to stave off Britain’s collapse, while maintaining pressure on London to dismantle imperial preference, the sterling bloc, and currency controls. Congressional agitation also forced Roosevelt to back away from his early depiction of Lend-Lease as “pooled” effort, with each party contributing according to its ability and using resources according to its need. The administration’s new line described the aid as a loan to augment Allied war production, to be repaid in full. Not surprisingly, this shift increased British misgivings about America’s commitment to their postwar prosperity.90 In the case of Lend-Lease, as in other matters, the countries were “allies of a kind.”91

FRANCO-AMERICAN WARTIME NEGOTIATIONS U.S. officials hoped to win support for multilateralism from other key trading partners besides Britain. One of the most significant was France,

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currently under occupation but expected to play an important if diminished role in the postwar world economy.92 During the interwar years, France and its empire had constituted a large, protected bloc. France’s resumption of such policies would damage prospects for open postwar trade. Securing French adherence to multilateral principles would not be easy, given France’s venerable traditions of protectionism and dirigisme (state direction of the domestic economy). France’s recent history compounded the challenge. The experiences of depression and defeat had discredited the liberal political economy of the interwar Third Republic. All elements of the résistance wished to reverse France’s economic and political decline, but opinion was deeply divided about the appropriate economic role of the state and the wisdom of commercial openness. Two alternative visions vied for supremacy among French political leaders, expert economists, and hauts fonctionaires. A faction of “structural reformers” sought to transform the national economy and French society along socialist lines. They advocated vigorous state intervention and high protectionist walls. A contending group of “neoliberal” economists and policy experts, influenced by Keynesian ideas and the lessons of the Great Depression, rejected such introspective policies as futile. They argued that France must embrace foreign competition and non-discrimination, provided their compatibility with moderate domestic intervention.93 During 1942, U.S. diplomats pressed the London-based French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) to endorse the principles of the Atlantic Charter. In response, the CFLN’s Commission on Postwar Economic, Financial and Social Problems began debating the merits of multilateralism versus economic nationalism. “To what degree and at what rhythm,” it asked, “should France come round to free trade so as to comply with its allies to obtain their aid?”94 For the structural reformers, U.S. pressure posed grave dangers. In late 1943, socialist politician Georges Boris warned CFLN leader Charles de Gaulle of Washington’s determination to apply its liberal “therapy” to the postwar world. Penniless, France might have “no choice” but to yield to multilateralism in return for financial credits, but doing so would endanger prospects for radical economic transformation and social democracy. Boris worried that France, like the rest of Europe, “will not be able to elude an American hegemony which intends to orient it toward an economic organization of a capitalist and liberal type.”95 To resist this trend, the postwar French state must modernize French industry behind a protectionist shield, supervise economic production, and divide the economy into nationalized, directed, and supervised sectors.96 French “neoliberals” espoused an alternative vision. They recommended that France integrate itself into the global economy. Pure liberalism, however, was unwise. “Government intervention had to be limited, but it was essential,” recalls Robert Marjolin, CFLN Director of Economic

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Affairs. The Great Depression had “shattered the optimism of classical economics” and faith in free trade. At the same time, the New Deal had shown neoliberals that “compensatory action by the state” could temper market failures.97 The neoliberal Report on Postwar Economic Policy (or Courtin Report) of November 1943 called on the postwar French state to nationalize certain monopolies, expand social security, and institute progressive taxation. But it highlighted growth, not radical redistribution, as the vital engine of social reform. Externally, France must pursue multilateralism. “In neither economics nor war is it possible to shut oneself up into a purely defensive posture,” author René Courtin believed. “All Maginot lines end up being overrun or bypassed.” To avoid being left behind, France had to renounce its isolation and embrace competition. France had little to fear, and much to gain, from the proposed international regimes for trade and money, Courtin insisted. “Far from constituting instruments of hegemony” and endangering French sovereignty, new international institutions would “eliminate arbitrary decisions” and permit France “to participate in the management of world life.” Collective decision-making in such forums would offer France substantially more maneuvering room than bargaining “with the Great Powers in the silence of chancelleries.”98 Following France’s liberation in 1944, the neoliberals gained the upper hand in charting French economic policy. Rejecting both socialism and liberalism, they advocated a technocratic role for the state falling between the dirigiste faire (to do) and the liberal laissez-faire (to leave alone)—and which one might label faire faire (to cause to be done). Part of the twentieth century capitalist trend towards economic management, this vision saw the state pursuing full employment, moderating the business cycle, ameliorating economic dislocation, and coordinating public policy. To consolidate their victory, the neoliberals linked France’s multilateral commitments to an ambitious program for recovery and modernization. Ultimately, France chose interdependence over economic nationalism, counting on productivity gains to diffuse tensions among social partners, whose distributional disputes might otherwise jeopardize growth. France’s dire material situation reinforced French multilateralism. As Jean Monnet reminded his colleagues, “The material support of the Anglo-Saxons—and foremost America—will be a fundamental precondition for our recovery.”99 As head of the French Supply Mission in Washington during 1944–1945, Monnet cultivated a slew of prominent Americans to lay the groundwork for transatlantic economic agreement. As with Britain, Washington exploited its ally’s financial dependency to obtain French commitments to open trade. On February 28, 1945, France signed a Lend-Lease accord, assuming Article VII commitments.100 Still, like the British, the French insisted that liberalization occur gradually to

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permit postwar recovery and that the state “control and direct the terms of interdependence,” balancing open trade with social protections.101 CONCLUSION By mid-1944 the Roosevelt Administration, through adroit politicking at home and abroad, had forged domestic and tentative international agreement for a postwar multilateral economic system. The U.S. turn to commercial multilateralism was well under way by the beginning of World War II. Although its political values predisposed the United States to support a liberal, reciprocal, and nondiscriminatory system of trade and payments, the timing and content of this policy shift reflected the lessons of recent experiences. The global Great Depression and the world’s slide into war convinced senior Roosevelt administration policymakers of the need for new arrangements to govern the global economy. This would not be a wholesale return to free trade of the gold standard era, but a new period of managed interdependence, with standing international institutions to facilitate the orderly dismantling of trade barriers, ensure adequate liquidity to cushion against financial shocks, and permit the intervention of the state into the domestic economy for the pursuit of social welfare aims and national objectives. During World War II, the United States exploited financial and market leverage to win transatlantic commitments to its postwar multilateral vision. An international conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in July 1944 and subsequent international trade negotiations in the early postwar years would lay the cornerstones of this new order. NOTES 1. Cited in Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 81. 2. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter, 1987), 24–32. 3. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 358; Lundestad, The American “Empire,” 39–41. 4. On this classic definition of power, see Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 5. Strange, States and Markets. Stefano Guzzini, “Structural Power: The Limits of Neorealist Power Analysis,” International Organization 47, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 443–78. 6. William Diebold, “Economics and Politics: The Western Alliance in the 1970s,” in The United States and Western Europe: Political, Economic, and Strategic Perspectives, ed. W. Hanreider, (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1974), 137. 7. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

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8. The antecedents of hegemonic stability theory are to be found in Charles Kindleberger’s The World in Depression, 1929–1939, which argued that the openness and stability of the international economy depends on the presence of “a stabilizer, one stabilizer.” 9. Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner, “International Organization and the Study of World Politics,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 645–685. 10. Judith Goldstein, “International Institutions and Domestic Policies: GATT, WTO, and the Liberalizatin of International Trade,” in Anne O. Kreuger, ed., The WTO as an International Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 139. 11. Arthur A. Stein, “The Hegemon’s Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the International Economic Order,” International Organization 38 (1984): 355–386. Joseph M. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the New Liberal Institutionalism,” International Organization 42 (1988): 498–499. 12. Judith Goldstein, “Creating the GATT Rules: Politics, Institutions, and American Policy,” in Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters, 202. 13. Goldstein, 302–303. 14. Judith Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas on Trade Policy: The Origins of U.S. Agricultural and Manufacturing Policies,” International Organization 43, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 31–71, 31. 15. Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century, 5. 16. G. John Ikenberry, “A World Economy Restored: Expert Consensus and the Anglo-American Postwar Settlement.” International Organization 46, no. 1 (1991): 289–321.” Ikenberry, “Creating Yesterday’s New World Order: Keynesian ‘New Thinking’ and the Anglo-American Postwar Settlement,” in Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy, 58. 17. Richard Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multilateral Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 12–23. Stephen D. Krasner, “U.S. Commercial and Monetary Policy: Unraveling the Paradox of External Strength and Internal Weakness,” International Organization 31 (1977) 635–671, 638–39. 18. Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas on Trade Policy,” 32. 19. Stein, “The Hegemon’s Dilemma,” 358–59. 20. Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas on Trade Policy,” 58–59, 71. 21. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 146. 22. Jamie Miller, “Wartime Origins of Multilateralism, 1939–1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University (draft), 2001, 2–9. 23. Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 34–35. Lake, Power, Protection and Free Trade, 6–7. 24. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 354. 25. Text of Washington’s Farewell Address, The Avalon Project at Yale University Law School, (May 10, 2008). 26. Cited in Alfred Eckes, Opening America’s Markets: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 6.

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27. Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 35. 28. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 360. 29. Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 17. 30. Ruggie, Winning the Peace, 12–13. Miller, Wartime Origins,“ 35. 31. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 81–84. Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 9–15. 32. Marc Trachtenberg, “Reparations at the Paris Peace Conference,” Journal of Modern History 51 (March 1979): 24–55. 33. Speech of February 21, 1919, cited in Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 101. 34. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 81–82. 35. Hull quotations from The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 364, 84, 155. See also Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 115. 36. Cited in Stephan Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations of Hegemony: Explaining the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934,” International Organization 42, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 91–119, 97. 37. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hulls, 254. 38. Goldstein, “Creating the GATT Rules,” 202–205. Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas,” 57. 39. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 352–353. Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 41–43. Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 97. 40. In Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 115. 41. Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 50–51. 42. Zoellick, “Congress,” 26–27. 43. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 251–52. 44. Cited in Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 101. 45. Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 91–93. Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 48–49. 46. Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas on Trade Policy,” 58–59. 47. Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 92–93. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 359–61. 48. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 356. 49. Cited in Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 111. 50. Goldstein, “The Impact of Ideas on Trade Policy.” 51. Cited in Haggard, “The Institutional Foundations,” 92. 52. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 369. 53. Cited in Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 46. 54. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 518–519. 55. Hull at House hearings on 1940 RTAA, cited in Miller, “Wartime Origins,” 47. 56. Charles S. Maier, “The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” American Historical Review 86 (April 1981), 350. 57. Hull, in Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 12. 58. Stein, “The Hegemon’s Dilemma,” 374. 59. Cited in Miller, “Wartime Origins of Multilateralism,” 46.

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60. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 525. Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Partition of Europe, from Munich to Yalta (London, 1993), 18–26. 61. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 365. 62. Hawkins, “Economic Peace Aims,” cited in Department of State Bulletin, 27 February 1943, 185. Clayton in Pollard, Economic Security, 2. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 81. 63. Hawkins, “Economic Foreign Policy”, Department of State Bulletin, 29 April 1944, 392. 64. Pollard, Economic Security, 13. 65. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 23–24. 66. Hull, testimony 11 January 1940, Department of State Bulletin, 227. 67. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 19. 68. Hull, cited in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 46. 69. Kimball, The Juggler, 46. 70. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 19–20. 71. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 15. 72. Ikenberry, “A World Economy Restored.” 73. John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982). 74. Ikenberry, “Creating Yesterday’s New World Order.” 75. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy. See also Stewart Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France? American Hegemony, the Monnet Plan, and Postwar Multilateralism,” in Martin A. Schain, ed., The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 76. Ikenberry, “A World Economy Restored.” Ruggie, “International Regimes.” 77. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 34–43. 78. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 44–48. 79. Keynes quoted in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 48–49. 80. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 51. 81. Acheson cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 30–31. 82. “They will strive to bring about a fair and equitable distribution of essential produce, not only within their territorial boundaries but between the nations of the world.” Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 43. 83. “Joint Declaration of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain,” Department of State Bulletin, 16 August 1941, 125–26. (Emphasis added). Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 118–119. 84. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 53. 85. “Joint Declaration.” 86. Hawkins to Acheson, July 10, 1942. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 54. 87. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 55–56. 88. Article VII of the Mutual Aid Agreement, Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 463–64. 89. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 58.

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90. On U.S. manipulation of Lend-Lease, see Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 87–100. 91. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan 1941–45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 92. Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France?” 93. Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 151–177, 185, 275. 94. Cited in François Bloch-Lainé and Jean Bouvier, La France Restaurée 1944– 1954: Dialogue sur les Choix d’Une Modernisation (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 90. 95. (Italics added.) Having taken “certain steps . . . toward a planned economy in the interests of the collectivity,” France risked being “thrown into reverse in order to align with the United States.” Bloch-Lainé and Bouvier, La France Restaurée, 91–93. 96. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 177–79. 97. Robert Marjolin, Architect of European Unity: Memoirs 1911–1986 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 143, 120–2, 61–62, 72. 98. Comité National d’Études, Rapport sur la Politique Économique d’AprèsGuerre (Alger: Éditions ‘Combat’, 1944), 44–45, Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 175–77. Bloch-Lainé and Bouvier, La France Restaurée, 89. 99. Andre Kaspi, La Mission de Jean Monnet `a Algers: Mars-Octobre 1943 (Paris: Editions Richelieu, 1971), 216–17. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 191–201, 248–49. Bloch-Lainé and Bouvier, La France Restaurée, 94, 123–25. 100. “Lend-Lease Agreement,” Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America 1776–1949 (Vol. 7), 1078. January 9, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, 757–59. 101. John Zysman, “The French State in the International Economy,” International Organization 31, no. 4 (1977), 839.

5 ✛

Bretton Woods and the British Loan: The Postwar Monetary and Trading System Lincoln said, “This nation cannot exist half slave and half free.” This applies to commerce as well as to human beings. If we have regimentation in our foreign trade, how long do you think free enterprise can continue in our domestic commerce? —Will Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State

H

aving secured tentative domestic and transatlantic assent for an open postwar international economy, the Roosevelt Administration moved to institutionalize these commitments in new international organizations. Economic multilateralism would rest on two main pillars. First were international financial institutions to coordinate the monetary policies of the world’s major trading nations and ensure the stability and convertibility of their currencies. Second was a standing international regime—ideally a permanent organization—to promote commercial liberalization and oversee the elimination of discriminatory barriers to trade. In both the monetary and trade spheres, the most significant wartime and postwar negotiations transpired between the world’s largest economies, the United States and Great Britain. Strong differences of opinion between Washington and London over the future global financial system resulted in protracted negotiations. The Allies differed about the burden of adjustment to be placed on deficit versus surplus countries, the magnitude of liquidity any new international monetary regime should provide, the role of the dollar as the world’s key currency, and the pace at which countries should move toward full currency convertibility. In the end, U.S. rather than British preferences 141

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generally won out. Anglo-American agreement formed the basis of the Bretton Woods accords of July 1944, which created the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). Washington wanted similar architecture to govern global commerce, in the form of a multilateral trade convention and a standing international trade organization. Once again, the United States and Great Britain disagreed over critical issues, including the future of imperial preference, the pace of liberalization, and the exemption of certain sectors from international competition. As Anglo-American negotiations dragged into the postwar period, British resolve to pursue nationally-based strategies of reconstruction and social welfare, at the expense of non-discrimination principles, stiffened. Hoping to nail down an unambiguous commitment to open trade, Washington offered Britain a large loan, conditional on currency convertibility and gradual liberalization. It tried the same tactic with France, on a more modest scale. At home, President Truman won congressional support for both the Bretton Woods institutions and the British loan by presenting them as essential investments in an open world economy, which had become an article of faith among most legislators and U.S. opinion-makers. Unfortunately, European economic dislocation and the onset of the Cold War postponed a smooth transition to a managed system of international trade and payments.

RIVAL PLANS FOR THE GLOBAL MONETARY SYSTEM To create an open world economy, U.S. officials needed to overcome the anticipated economic disequilibrium of the immediate postwar years. Fortuitously, America’s dominance of global production and status as the world’s leading creditor nation as well as the overwhelming source for the capital needs of its trading partners afforded it leverage to tackle this challenge. The sustainability of the envisioned trade and payments system required that it provide sufficient liquidity, so that debtor countries could maintain their current account balance, purchase U.S. exports, and recover from the war enough to survive and compete in a global marketplace. The Treasury Department, which dominated U.S. financial planning, led negotiations with Great Britain on the postwar monetary system. Unlike some of their State Department colleagues, who swore by neoclassical economics, Treasury officials had no intention of placing America’s prosperity in invisible hands. Blind reliance on the supposedly self-regulating nature of global commerce was not enough; the world needed a managed

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multilateral order, with real institutions to oversee economic well-being at the national and international levels, including by ameliorating postwar dislocation, stabilizing currencies, easing financial crises, promoting full employment, and encouraging investment and development.1 In December 1941, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, an ardent New Dealer, put Harry Dexter White in charge of postwar planning for the global financial system. In White’s view, the stock market crash of 1929 proved that international capital markets alone could not guarantee global monetary stability, financial liquidity, or orderly transactions— much less ensure balanced growth, full employment, shared prosperity, and social justice. He dismissed the free trade assumptions popular in the State Department as “hangovers from a Nineteenth Century economic creed.” He doubted whether this doctrine had ever been sound. Rather than a return to free trade and the gold standard, White sought new “instruments of control” that would permit national governments to cooperate toward “world-wide sustained prosperity” by preventing a recurrence of the speculative capital movements, currency fluctuations, competitive devaluations, and exchange controls that had marred the interwar period. 2 On May 15, 1942, Morgenthau sent the White House a first draft of the Treasury blueprint for the postwar monetary system.3 Successive versions of the so-called “White Plan” envisioned the creation of two autonomous international agencies under the auspices of a postwar United Nations organization and open to universal membership. The first, a stabilization fund, would be a multilateral clearing system for international payments that provided credits to countries facing temporary balance of payments difficulties. Under the prior gold standard, deficit countries attempting to expand had faced an outflow of gold, forcing them to deflate. The new fund would permit them to pursue full employment policies, while avoiding exchange controls and competitive devaluations that might stimulate a deflationary spiral.4 In return for fund resources, borrowers would be required to yield some monetary sovereignty, particularly the ability to vary exchange rates and maintain exchange controls. The fund’s companion institution was the international bank for reconstruction. As designed, it would provide credits to assist postwar relief and recovery, contra-cyclical lending to prevent and mitigate global depressions, and low-interest loans to advance long-term development of productive assets. The bank would underwrite and guarantee loans, supplementing (not supplanting) private international investment. It would also furnish capital to induce American bankers to invest in reconstruction projects in war-wracked areas and evaluate proposed foreign loans. Through these institutions, Morgenthau hoped “to move the financial center of the world from London and Wall Street to the United States

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Treasury, and to create a new concept between nations in international finance.”5 Initially, the Treasury Department emphasized monetary stabilization and reconstruction equally. Gradually, the former gained priority, although the United States retained the idea of a bank to win support from London, European governments, and developing countries. The British government, like the Treasury Department, wanted a world monetary system based on stable currencies, with relatively fixed exchange rates, no restrictions on convertibility, and international credit for deficit countries. But London demanded that new global institutions not interfere with domestic policies of economic expansion and full employment. It insisted as well that the envisioned stabilization fund provide sufficient credits to cover Britain’s yawning balance of payments deficits until national production and exports revived. Finally, Great Britain sought safeguards in the event that the United States, expected to drive the postwar world economy, fell into recession and adopted protectionism. Beginning in autumn 1943, Morgenthau and White pushed for British agreement on a Joint Statement of Principles on the world monetary system. British negotiators, alarmed at U.S. pressure for early currency convertibility, insisted on full freedom to keep exchange controls during a postwar transition period, and the Treasury Department did not challenge this claim. By April 1944 the British Treasury, Foreign Office, and War Cabinet Secretariat all supported publication of the Joint Statement—essentially a modified version of the White Plan—on several conditions. These included concessions from Washington that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be paired with an international agency to finance reconstruction, that financial controls would be permitted for debtor countries during the transition phase, and that the Fund would offer Britain sizable financial resources during this phase. The Joint Statement was published simultaneously in Washington, London, and Moscow on April 21.6 This document led to the United Nations Financial and Monetary Conference that convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July 1 to July 22, 1944. These meetings, attended by forty-five members of the United and Associated Nations, culminated in the creation of the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The former offered a “double screen” to cushion countries experiencing temporary balance of payments problems.7 The latter furnished longterm loans, on commercial terms, for reconstruction and development. The managed multilateral system born at Bretton Woods was founded on the principles of price and exchange rate stability, early currency convertibility, trade liberalization, and moderate domestic intervention. In order to create the postwar international monetary system, U.S. and British negotiators had to reach agreement on several controversial issues,

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among them: the standard upon which the monetary system would be based; the rules governing exchange rates among currencies; the distribution of responsibilities between surplus and deficit countries; the level of liquidity to be provided; the convertibility of currencies, particularly during the postwar “transition” phase; and the governance structures of new international financial institutions. The Bretton Woods institutions represented a compromise between American and British perspectives. To begin with, the new international monetary system was founded on dollar-gold convertibility. The “gold-exchange standard” established at Bretton Woods linked the dollar directly to gold (at $35 per ounce) and fixed the exchange rates of all other currencies relative to the dollar. Given America’s position as the world’s leading economy, with huge gold reserves and a well-developed financial system, the dollar inevitably became the basic means of international payment and the main currency for international transactions. All countries agreed to buy and sell their currencies to maintain their par values (i.e., dollar exchange rates) and not to unilaterally devalue their currencies more than ten percent. An escape clause, however bowed to British concerns: Countries facing a “fundamental disequilibrium” were allowed larger devaluations, subject to IMF permission.8 The introduction of fixed exchange rates raised the question of the relative burden of adjustment for countries with a distorted balance of payments. In an unregulated international monetary system, this burden would fall on the deficit country, since a surplus country might accumulate foreign reserves indefinitely, whereas a deficit country would eventually exhaust its reserves and have to devalue or change its fiscal and monetary policy. The Bretton Woods agreements laid the heaviest burden on deficit countries, which would finance their deficits partly through depleting their reserves and partly by purchasing needed currencies from the Fund. Liquidity, or the magnitude of IMF credits to be made available to deficit countries, also caused contention. Great Britain anticipated extreme balance of payments difficulties, given its position as a deficit and debtor country, its urgent reconstruction needs, and its meager short-term export potential. Without easy access to international credits, the British simply could not pursue the expansionary domestic policies implied by their ambitious social welfare agenda. Accordingly, in spring 1942, Keynes proposed an International Clearing Union (ICU) to provide deficit countries with generous overdraft facilities, on the order of $25 billion. Under this scheme, surplus and deficit countries would settle their bilateral imbalances by increasing or reducing their share of ICU credits (with country quotas reflecting percentages of interwar trade). Central banks would have their accounts in the ICU debited or credited as their

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currencies were bought or sold. Debtor countries could then borrow from the surplus capital accumulated by creditors, using these resources to pursue expansionary policies of full employment at home. The British preferred a “passive fund” run by international technocrats and insulated from political, especially U.S., influence. In the end, Washington won agreement on an “active” fund that had to grant permission for countries to draw resources larger than their gold contribution. Keynes’s ICU had a clear expansionist bias. It placed few adjustment responsibilities on deficit countries, whereas surplus countries would be under pressure to inflate to return to equilibrium. The United States, having no desire to serve as the “milk cow” of the international monetary system, championed a fund with less liquidity that placed strong conditions on its loans to force the burden of adjustment onto deficit countries. Washington ultimately agreed to increase the fund’s assets from $5 billion to $8.8 billion—a significant boost but only one-third the size of Keynes’s proposed ICU. Rather than a global central bank, the IMF would remain a stabilization fund employed to address temporary balance of payments problems. As a concession to the British, Washington accepted a “scarce currency clause” in the Fund’s Articles. This permitted member states to discriminate against the exports of a country whose currency the Fund had declared scarce, providing an incentive for surplus countries to correct the imbalance.9 Any functioning international monetary system had to ensure the convertibility of the world’s major currencies. The importance of the British pound to world commerce made U.S. officials press for sterling’s prompt return to convertibility. But this created a quandary for London: If the pound became freely convertible, what would prevent foreign countries from running down the massive balances of sterling they had accumulated during the war, resulting in a loss of Britain’s meager holdings of dollars and gold?10 Article 8 of the IMF Articles of Agreement, which the British signed at Bretton Woods, pledged fund members to eliminate restrictions on current account payments and transfers, discriminatory or multiple currency arrangements, and any remaining exchange restrictions. But London got a lifeboat in Article 14, which permitted the temporary retention of monetary controls during a three- to five-year postwar “transitional period.” After 1952, countries were supposed to consult with the IMF about their retention of exchange controls. In a defeat for the United States, IMF member countries also retained the right to restrict capital flows.11 Finally, Washington and London had to reach agreement on the governing structures of the new international institutions. As the two largest contributors to the Bank and the Fund, they naturally agreed that the executive boards of both bodies should not make decisions on a onecountry-one-vote basis but rather according to a weighted voting for-

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mula, proportional to member contributions. With an IMF quota of 35 percent in 1945, the United States would be guaranteed an indirect veto on all major loan decisions and rule changes taken within the Fund. U.S. officials demanded both organizations locate their headquarters in Washington, D.C.—rather than New York, as London had hoped—to maximize U.S. political influence. Among the most curious features of U.S. policy at Bretton Woods was Washington’s effort to include the Soviet Union, despite its communist economy and commitment to state trading, as an integral participant in the postwar international monetary system. At least two considerations informed the American approach. First, U.S. Treasury officials recognized that, regardless of U.S. preferences, economic pluralism would inevitably feature in the postwar world, with national economic systems running the gamut from free market capitalism to social democracy to collectivism. Notably, they did not see the existence of command economies as incompatible with the adoption of a common framework of principles, norms, and rules to govern economic exchange among members of this heterogeneous world. Washington was also motivated by diplomatic and strategic calculations, wishing to reinforce solidarity among the Big Three as the war entered its final phase. Over the longer term, U.S. policymakers hoped that giving the USSR a prominent role in these institutions would reassure Moscow that the West did not seek its isolation and help integrate it into the open world order favored by Washington.

CONVINCING CONGRESS TO RATIFY BRETTON WOODS In January 1945 Roosevelt forwarded the Articles of Agreement of the Bank and the Fund to Congress, requesting swift legislative action. Acknowledging that neither institution was perfect, he pledged to seek their subsequent improvement, but stressed the importance of getting both bodies up and running to preserve prospects for an open world economy. “The world will either move toward unity and widely shared prosperity or it will move into necessarily competing economic blocs.”12 To improve chances for congressional approval, he submitted the accords not as treaties but as executive agreements which required only majority support. Domestic opposition emerged primarily from the eastern banking establishment as well as fiscal conservatives and economic nationalists in Congress. Wall Street, besides wanting to keep international finance in private hands, objected to the institutions’ lax lending criteria, which placed few obligations on debtor nations. Conservative legislators, meanwhile, chafed at subsidizing the reconstruction of countries which would not only compete economically (and perhaps geopolitically) with the

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United States but might also pursue imperialist, nationalist, or socialist policies inconsistent with U.S. preferences. Senate Minority Leader Robert Taft objected to the idea “that American money and American charity shall solve every problem,” particularly when foreign governments had not yet put their own economic houses in order.13 The Ohio Republican questioned devoting national resources and devolving U.S. sovereignty to new global agencies in which the United States would hold only a minority position and from which deficit countries could borrow freely, irrespective of their creditworthiness or economic policies. In his estimation, this amounted to “pouring money down a rat hole.”14 A more pointed criticism of Bretton Woods focused on the institutions’ woeful inadequacy to cope with global financial disequilibrium and the reconstruction needs of war-ravaged countries. Most IMF members would need to maintain exchange controls during the postwar transition period, and the Fund lacked sufficient assets to persuade them to abandon these. Until they did so, the dollar would remain the Fund’s only functional currency. As an alternative to the IMF, Harvard University professor John H. Williams proposed an initially bilateral approach to postwar monetary order. In this “key currency” approach, the United States would provide Great Britain with a large loan to stabilize and underwrite the international role of sterling, enabling the latter to meet its transitional needs, liquidate its sterling balances, and commence multilateral trade, while restoring London as a global capital market.15 Treasury Department officials rejected the key currency option, even as a supplement (rather than replacement) for the Bretton Woods institutions, partly out of principle. The United States had committed itself to an inclusive, multilateral international monetary system, and a more modest, informal relationship with London would have violated this universalist spirit. “The problems considered at Bretton Woods are international problems common to all countries, that can be dealt with only through broad international cooperation,” Secretary Morgenthau declared. Implementing the key currency proposal would produce “a dictatorship of the world’s finance by the two countries.” This position ignored that a narrower approach might be more suited to the problems of postwar transition and that close Anglo-American collaboration was, in any case, the essential precondition for the revival of multilateralism.16 The Roosevelt and (subsequently) Truman administrations lobbied Congress vigorously to win passage of the Bretton Woods accords. They pointed to the new institutions’ role in smoothing the transition from war to peace, dismantling exchange restrictions and currency controls, and boosting global economic growth and standards of living. In a speech in mid-March 1945, Assistant Secretary Clayton described the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations as the economic and political

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pillars of the postwar edifice of peace. “If either column fails,” he warned, “the whole structure collapses.”17 Exploiting end-of-war optimism about the prospects of international cooperation, the Administration tarred opponents of Bretton Woods as “isolationists.” If Congress failed to ratify, Morgenthau warned, foreigners would be “convinced that the American people either do not desire to cooperate or that they do not know how to achieve cooperation.”18 Privately, he depicted the IMF and IBRD as tools to force Great Britain and the Soviet Union to accept a world based on multilateral principles. As he told White: “England and Russia have to make up their minds on two vital things for them: is Russia going to play ball with the rest of the world on external matters which she has never done before and . . . is England going to play with the U.N. or is she going to play with the Dominions? . . . I am not going to take anything less than a yes or no from them.”19 The likelihood of passage improved in early June when Dewey, the GOP standard-bearer in the previous election, endorsed the Bretton Woods legislation. On June 7, the agreements sailed through the House, 345–18, with bipartisan support. Senate approval proved slightly more difficult, given Taft’s opposition, but Acheson reassured fiscal conservatives that the United States had “no thought of unconditional drawing rights” for Fund borrowers, on whom the burden of adjustment would fall.20 On July 18, the Senate approved the accords, 61–16. To guarantee that national interest considerations would guide U.S. voting within the international financial institutions, Congress added a provision to the Bretton Woods legislation subordinating U.S. executive directors on the boards of the Bank and Fund to a new National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Problems, charged with coordinating U.S. international monetary policy and making final decisions on proposed bilateral U.S. loans. Chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury, it included the Secretaries of State and Commerce and the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board and the Export-Import Bank. The Bretton Woods institutions ensured U.S. domination of the postwar international financial system. Unfortunately, their modest liquidity would not allow Britain to embark on a sustained path toward multilateralism. While London retained flexibility to impose trade and financial controls during the “transition” period, it lacked the resources to reinsert itself smoothly into an open world economy. As a mechanism to clear exchanges, the Fund did not address the current account imbalances and long-term investment needs of Britain and other European countries. The Bank also proved ill-suited to Europe’s reconstruction needs, since it mostly guaranteed private loans and, in the event, was slow to get up and running. America’s trading partners would thus need massive assistance and improved access to the U.S. domestic market.

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AMERICAN PLANNING FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE State Department economic planners aimed to create a similar framework for commercial relations that would complement the Bretton Woods institutions. They built on the pioneering work of Percy Wells Bidwell, a Yale economist and (since 1938) the director of research at the Council on Foreign Relations. Bidwell proposed that the postwar international economy be founded on a combination of multilateral agreements to eliminate various discriminatory trade barriers and a formal international agency to implement, monitor, and enforce agreements within the UN system. The commercial regime would incorporate a diverse array of national economic systems, ranging from liberal to socialist. Harry Hawkins, who led the State Department’s early planning for a postwar global trading system, advocated the Bidwell plan for postwar trade policy. This order would be based on rules diametrically opposed to the autarkic Axis blocs.21 Hawkins pressed the White House to enunciate principles to inform the re-conversion of national economies to peacetime conditions and prevent the fragmentation of the world economy. The U.S. entry into the war, and the rising tide of internationalism it produced in the United States, buoyed the cause of U.S. proponents of trade liberalization. Although the 1942 mid-term elections produced a strong Republican showing, including a forty-four seat advance in the House that left the GOP just seven seats short of a majority, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) won bipartisan support in 1943 (though, in a legislative compromise, it was extended only two years). Senator Eugene Millikin of Colorado remained skeptical, blasting the RTAA as a plan “to surrender our home market for the illusory promise of peace.”22 But other legislators like Arthur Vandenberg regarded it as an important demonstration of allied unity. Postwar planning within the Division of Commercial Policy rested on the premise that a dramatic expansion in world trade was necessary to achieve full employment at home and abroad, protect private enterprise from “rigid control by the state,” and bolster a future system of international security. State Department planners saw the United States—given its overwhelming size, favorable balance of payments, and ability to absorb foreign exports—as “the only nation capable of taking the initiative in promoting a worldwide movement toward the relaxation of trade barriers.”23 Beyond shaping prospects for global prosperity, Hawkins framed U.S. trade policy in national security terms as “an important factor in determining whether we will this time win and retain peace or blunder headlong into another bitter, costly world war.”24 By 1944, the trade liberalization agenda had taken on a bipartisan hue. In that year, Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey and the GOP party platform endorsed trade liberalization.

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ANGLO-AMERICAN NEGOTIATIONS As with the Bretton Woods institutions, the key wartime negotiations over an international trade convention and an accompanying trade organization involved the United States and Great Britain. If anything, trade negotiations were destined to be more fractious than those over monetary issues, given British wariness about non-discrimination and the impact of less protection for UK domestic industry. Moreover, trade liberalization would produce obvious winners and losers. In spring 1943, after much debate, the War Cabinet conditionally accepted the desirability of an international trade convention or “charter.” British support depended on the United States extending loans to deficit countries, slashing U.S. tariffs to permit a dramatic increase in imports from Britain, and allowing it to retain import controls.25 In sum, the British would adopt non-discrimination if the United States made sacrifices to ease their transition to multilateralism. This set the stage for bilateral trade negotiations scheduled for autumn 1943. The State Department invited British officials to Washington to begin discussions on the postwar trading system. There were significant areas of agreement. Both parties recognized the necessity of a multilateral convention and an international organization to govern postwar trade and a postwar commercial regime to moderate the impact of economic fluctuations and sustain high levels of employment. Likewise, both acknowledged that quantitative restrictions were injurious and should be abolished except in balance of payments crises (although London favored a more permissive attitude). At Bretton Woods, moreover, Great Britain and other Lend-Lease recipients repeated their Article VII commitments to eliminate import quotas, make currencies convertible after a transition period, and harmonize their policies to promote “high levels of employment and progressively rising standards of living.” Substantive differences, however, soon emerged in American and British negotiating positions. One fundamental point of contention surrounded the presumed causal relationship between commercial multilateralism and full employment, and which goal should take precedence. British officials had committed to an ambitious postwar social welfare agenda of national economic planning, lifetime employment, comprehensive health insurance, and large-scale public works. They contended that an agreement by the major trading nations to adopt policies of full employment (including countercyclical deficit spending to maintain domestic demand) must precede a reduction of trade barriers and an end to discrimination. Without a shared commitment to expansion, little would protect Britain from a postwar U.S. slump. Most of Britain’s Commonwealth partners, except Canada, likewise prioritized social welfare over

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open trade. American officials, by contrast, saw multilateralism as the key priority. Both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations believed the elimination of trade barriers and discriminatory practices and the stabilization of currencies would stimulate global economic expansion and facilitate high employment and rising standards of living at home and abroad. Opening global markets to U.S. commerce and investment would accomplish the British social welfare goals without resorting to state planning and intervention being contemplated in London. The divergence between U.S. and British approaches widened as the backlash against the New Deal intensified in the United States and as Britain continued to move to the left politically. In his January 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt had enumerated a broad set of economic rights for U.S. citizens, noting, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”26 A year later the tide in the United States had turned. Traditional conservatism reasserted itself in the Congress and the American body politic. A full employment bill, introduced to the Senate and House in January 1945, was diluted over the ensuing year. Deficit spending and public works programs lost their appeal as tools to promote employment and social security. Recognizing the shrinking U.S. appetite for government intervention in the economy, officials in the Roosevelt administration increasingly looked to opportunities abroad to raise standards of living. Multilateralism’s reliance on private enterprise and the free market to advance human welfare, and promise of recovery through trade rather than aid, attracted both conservatives and liberals.27 The last years of the war, however, found many British officials fearing that open commercial competition would jeopardize the construction of the modern welfare state and regulated capitalist system they had promised. The Beveridge Report of 1944, Full Employment in a Free Society, outlined the Keynesian argument for state-led management through fiscal and monetary policy, later enshrined in a White Paper on Employment in 1945.28 Washington and London also disputed the relative evils of imperial preference versus tariffs. Americans considered the inherently discriminatory imperial preference system particularly objectionable, whereas tariffs, while harmful, could at least be adjusted to grant all parties equal treatment. U.S. officials also believed preferences engendered international conflict. The British dismissed the Americans’ distinction as specious. The special treatment that Britain accorded to members of its empire was no different than what individual U.S. states afforded one another over foreign countries. Moreover, how could Great Britain countenance the total and permanent abolition of preference for a possible U.S. tariff revision—which might prove only temporary, depending on the attitude of the next Congress? As a precondition for reducing prefer-

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ence margins, London thus insisted that Washington first commit to a major, across-the board reduction in U.S. tariffs. This would stimulate a dramatic rise in U.S. imports from Britain, assisting the latter’s return to current account equilibrium and helping correct a structural imbalance in the global economy in which the United States possessed nearly all the world’s gold reserves and the lion’s share of productive capacity. While the State Department periodically pledged to seek such a horizontal tariff reduction, the U.S. executive branch was unable to deliver on this pledge. Indeed, FDR alarmed London by sending the RTAA (set to expire on June 30) to the House with a request for a three-year extension. The White House and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, anticipating protectionist resistance, denied the State Department’s request to negotiate tariffs according to sector rather than product-by-product. Even so, the RTAA faced opposition from economic nationalists, agitated by the persistence of imperial preference and the vulnerability of U.S. producers. The legislation eventually passed in June 1945 (by a vote of 239–153 in the House and 54–20 in the Senate). Rather than cutting tariffs broadly across sectors, the United States would continue to cut them only selectively, on a product by product basis, while protecting U.S. domestic producers from foreign competition.29 In October 1944 the State Department’s Committee on Trade Barriers submitted a draft international commercial code to a new oversight body, the Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy, chaired by Hawkins. This document presented alternative means to halve global tariff rates. The first, horizontal approach would require trade partners to cut tariffs by a certain percentage in particular sectors. The second, consistent with the RTAA approach, envisioned bilateral accords among a nucleus of major trading states, multilateralized by the extension of most-favored nation (MFN) treatment among participants. For U.S. postwar planners, the advantages of the former option lay in its sweeping approach to the removal of trade barriers, which avoided the time-consuming bilateral horse trading and fight against protectionist interests of the latter option.30 FDR’s reelection to a fourth term in November 1944 and the surging internationalist sentiment gave the State Department more leverage to pursue a multilateral trade convention. Business sentiment, including corporations, bankers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Foreign Trade Council, now solidly favored a code of trade rules to ensure non-discrimination and to open closed markets, especially in the British Empire. In March 1945 Secretary of State Stettinius approved a statement of principles for the expansion of international trade. It envisioned a multilateral pact that committed signatories to horizontal tariff reduction, the elimination of quotas and preferences, and the creation of a new international organization to oversee these steps. Two months later

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the interdepartmental Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy adopted a strategy of assembling the major trading nations—and as many other nations as possible—to approve the convention and institution. As a fallback position, the committee proposed that if multilateral consensus proved elusive, Washington should pursue “individual, bilateral trade agreements on a most-favored nation basis.”31 Roosevelt’s December 1944 appointment of William Clayton to be Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs gave a boost to U.S. commercial multilateralism, but London remained skeptical of U.S. support for a code of principles to govern world trade. British economic planner James Meade objected that Washington’s draft charter for an international trade organization embodied “a very dangerous trend of thought in the U.S.A., of which Will Clayton in the State Department may be taken as the symbol, that the way to cure unemployment is to have stable exchange rates and free trade” as opposed to domestic expansion.32 Yet, the need for U.S. financial aid and market access brought the British back to the table. Ernest Bevin, foreign minister in Atlee’s new Labor Government of July 1945, indicated Britain’s willingness to reconsider the Ottawa system if the United States reduced its trade barriers.

THE END OF LEND-LEASE The United States was not above leveraging its massive market to convince its main commercial partners, particularly Great Britain, to embrace its multilateral vision for trade and payments. In 1945, British officials finally had to reckon with their unsustainable financial situation and deepening dependence on the United States. The Second World War had propelled the two countries along radically different economic trajectories. Whereas American output doubled during the conflict, Great Britain lost a quarter of its national wealth. The end of the conflict would likely bring an abrupt deterioration in Britain’s balance of payments, given the anticipated termination of Lend-Lease, the end of austerity measures, and the refusal of Commonwealth partners to continue accepting payments in blocked sterling. Neither the IMF nor the World Bank had adequate resources to meet Britain’s immediate and medium-term needs. The United Kingdom would be in particularly dire straits if the United States continued to demand a prompt return to convertibility and insist on abolition of imperial preference, import quotas, and state monopolies, while blocking British access to the U.S. market. Keynes underscored that if Great Britain wished to remain a great power abroad and pursue policies of social welfare at home, it had no choice but to seek U.S. aid after the war.

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We cannot police half the world at our own expense when we have already gone into pawn to the other half. We cannot run for long a great program of social amelioration on money lent from overseas. Unless we are willing to put ourselves financially at the mercy of America and then borrow from her on her own terms and conditions sums which we cannot confidently hope to repay, what are we expecting?33

Nevertheless, voices across the British political spectrum worried the country would not survive a postwar scramble for markets, especially if its crumbling empire opened to competition.34 Some in the White House and the State and Commerce departments advocated direct U.S. aid to permit Great Britain to carry out its Article VII obligations. They reasoned that such assistance would give London the necessary confidence to dismantle the sterling area and discriminatory quotas. One possibility involved Britain devoting part of Lend-Lease to reconstruction and conversion to a peacetime economy. Shortly before the second Quebec conference, in September 1944, Hull urged the President to allow Britain to use U.S. aid during the closing phases of the war to meet early recovery needs, “accompanied by vigorous British efforts to join us in pressing a world-wide program of multilateral reduction of barriers to international trade.”35 Roosevelt agreed, brushing aside suggestions from the War and Navy departments that Washington should demand as compensation extended leases on Atlantic military bases and new bases in the Pacific. Still, the administration kept the flow of LendLease aid modest, thinking that fostering British financial dependency, rather than solving underlying British dilemmas, might force London to abandon quotas, preferences, and exchange controls. The prospective use of Lend-Lease for postwar rehabilitation faced intense resistance from the U.S. business community and conservative legislators on Capitol Hill. Commercial interests expressed bitterness that Britain continued to receive U.S. aid while blocking American producers and financial interests from markets and investment opportunities in its empire. In Congress, Republicans and Southern Democrats opposed squandering taxpayer dollars to subsidize imperial Britain (and perhaps communist Russia). Keen to reverse a dramatic twelve-year expansion of executive power, Taft charged Roosevelt and his advisers with planning an “international New Deal” via “a series of executive agreements . . . without any consultation of Congress.”36 He even objected to U.S. support for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). In March 1945, the Senate narrowly defeated Taft’s amendment to prohibit the use of Lend-Lease for postwar relief, rehabilitation, or recovery. Sensitive to these political winds, President Truman, who took office on April 12, soon directed executive branch agencies not to sign any new Lend-Lease contracts after the war, unless related to U.S. defense needs.

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On August 20, 1945, less than a week after Japan’s surrender, he abruptly terminated the Lend-Lease aid program and reminded its recipients of their commitments to multilateralism. At the same time, the President signaled American willingness to write off much of its Lend-Lease assistance to avoid repeating the war debts controversy of the 1920s. He also hinted at U.S. intent to consider postwar foreign aid, alerting Congress of the “need to transform [allied] cooperation for war” into “economic cooperation for peace.” Unless America ameliorated postwar dislocation, Truman feared, debtor countries might retain protectionist and discriminatory barriers to trade. 37

THE BRITISH LOAN The sudden end of Lend-Lease left Britain in a precarious financial position, with fast dwindling gold and dollar reserves. Britain’s Labour government had come to power in July 1945 with a mandate to construct a comprehensive welfare state, including a national health system, full employment, affordable housing, and social security. Financial insolvency imperiled this promise. Keynes advised Atlee that U.S. credits were essential: “There is no way out remotely compatible with the present domestic policy of the Government except on the basis of substantial American aid.”38 In return, Washington would surely press Britain to ratify Bretton Woods, dismantle the sterling area, and help develop an International Trade Organization. In early September Keynes arrived in Washington seeking settlement of the wartime accounts and new American assistance. The arduous bilateral negotiations lasted nearly three months. In financial policy, the United States sought the end of the dollar pool, the drawing down of the sterling balances, and Britain’s return to early currency convertibility. In commercial matters, it desired the elimination of quotas and wartime controls and the dismantling (or at least scaling back) of imperial preference. Britain’s negotiating strategy was to espouse support for multilateralism but insist that its postwar commercial policy would depend on the country’s financial situation. The British sought an enormous grant of $5–$6 billion to restore their current account equilibrium. With this credit in hand, Keynes promised, Britain could move promptly to liberalize its trade and embrace non-discrimination. Without it, the country would retain currency controls and bilateral trading arrangements.39 Clayton, who supervised the negotiations on the American side, favored a sizable aid grant to obtain British acquiescence to open commerce. He was prepared to cut U.S. tariffs significantly in return for a reduction in British preferences.

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It is of utmost importance to accelerate Britain’s re-conversion to multilateralism in this way, both because of the danger that bilateralism and restrictionism might otherwise become embedded in British policy during the transition, and because the American business public will demand early evidence that Britain is going to go along with us in our post-war trade policy if they are to continue to support it.40

The Treasury Department, however, opposed a large credit to Britain and demanded that U.S. assistance come as a loan (rather than a grant). Moreover, American negotiators found the British unwilling to relinquish preference in return for U.S. credit and U.S. tariff reductions under the RTAA, or to countenance an international trade organization without adequate safeguards. Percivale Liesching, the chief British negotiator, distrusted the RTAA approach to U.S. tariff liberalization, which “could hardly be considered as ‘mutually advantageous’ in the language of Article VII.”41 The British wanted to reduce preference gradually instead of eliminating it immediately and entirely in return for U.S. tariff cuts, as Clayton desired. The final Anglo-American agreement committed the British to reduce or eliminate margins of preference only to the degree that the tariffs received made the deal “mutually advantageous” and, significantly, only with the consent of the Dominions. For its part, the United States would cut tariffs selectively and could take advantage of escape clauses permitting continued protection. Despite Clayton’s claims to Congress that Britain had pledged to end preference, London had only agreed to begin eliminating discrimination on a conditional basis. The U.S. trade negotiators retreated in other matters. London resisted American pressure to agree that quotas be limited to serious balance-of-payments difficulties, that the Fund (rather than the International Trade Organization (ITO), as Britain preferred) determine the length of the postwar transition period, and that non-discriminatory state trading be abandoned. In addition, the United States backed off somewhat on cartels. Although Washington considered these discriminatory and potential tools of aggression, U.S. negotiators agreed that the ITO would investigate them case by case. Despite these concessions, Clair Wilcox, head of the Division of Commercial Policy, exulted in the results: “We are busy writing new lyrics to the song of nineteenth century liberalism and we shall no doubt get them sung back to us—while we pay out in dollars.”42 The Anglo-American Financial Agreement, reached on December 6, 1945, forgave Britain’s Lend-Lease debts and extended a U.S. credit of $3.75 billion. Explicitly intended “to assist the Government of the United Kingdom to assume the obligations of multilateral trade,” the bulk of this credit came in the form of a “tied” loan from the Export-Import Bank. In return, London accepted certain multilateral obligations, most

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importantly, ensuring sterling’s return to full convertibility for current transactions within one year. This concession implied the liquidation of the sterling balances accumulated in the discriminatory “dollar pool.” London also agreed to dismantle remaining exchange restrictions and to replace quotas on U.S. goods with nondiscriminatory tariffs by the end of 1946.43 Finally, the British committed to negotiate reductions in margins of imperial preference and not to increase or establish new preferences. “This made the system of imperial preference a kind of vestige of the past and eliminated the possibility of making that system a major instrument of economic policy in the future.”44 Keynes and the British delegation were disappointed with the relative modesty and terms of the American loan. Rather than cure Britain’s financial maladies, it was a temporary palliative that carried new obligations and increased the country’s long-term vulnerability. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Clement Atlee joined President Truman in declaring that the loan would enable Britain to “move forward . . . toward the common objective of multilateral trade,” and away from global economic fragmentation.45 In announcing the loan, Truman and Atlee released joint proposals for a future international trade organization, as well as principles to govern a multilateral convention on commercial policy. They invited fifteen governments to attend an international conference on trade and employment sometime in summer 1946. The invitation list was diverse and global, drawn from the Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and India), and Europe (France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Czechoslovakia), as well as Cuba, Brazil, and China. Interestingly, the list also included the Soviet Union. Although U.S. ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman recommended against it, Acheson and other U.S. diplomats saw merit in including the world’s main state trader. In the end, Moscow declined the invitation, viewing multilateral trade principles as a threat to its state-run monopolies and an obstacle to the politicization of its foreign trade. In February 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes announced that the conference—now expanded to eighteen participants, with the addition of Norway, Chile, and Lebanon-Syria—would proceed without the Soviets.46 On the surface, outcome suggested that the American vision for the postwar world economy had won solid British endorsement. Reality was more complicated. Although Clayton boasted that Washington had loaded the British negotiations with all the conditions “the traffic could bear,” he noted the self-imposed limits of U.S. hegemony. “To attempt to force such countries to adopt policies with respect to their domestic economies contrary to their wishes, would, in my opinion, be an unwarranted interference in their domestic affairs.”47 U.S. officials had insisted on Britain’s external openness but had remained agnostic about their ally’s

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internal economic structures. Moreover, British multilateralism, including the elimination of preference, was conditional. As Atlee explained the deal to the House of Commons on December 6, “reduction or elimination of preferences can only be considered in relation to and in return for reductions of tariffs and other barriers to world trade in general.”48 The loan faced intense debate in Parliament, marked by irritation at the United States for linking multilateralism and financial aid. But Britain’s grave need for assistance—and good relations with Washington—made passage inevitable. Parliament approved the agreement by 343–100, with 169 abstentions (including Churchill and a majority of Conservatives). Truman sent the loan agreement to Congress on January 20, 1946, with an appeal for a quick approval. Ratification was no sure thing. Legislators understood the potential leverage of U.S. foreign aid. As a special House committee on postwar reconstruction noted, “The advantages afforded by United States loans and other settlements are our best bargaining asset in securing political and economic concessions in the interest of world stability.”49 The socialist composition of the British government, however, alarmed conservative legislators who wondered whether Britain’s state intervention in the economy and nationalization practices were compatible with a liberal international system of trade and payments. Many on Capitol Hill also asked why the Bretton Woods Institutions—sold by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as the answer to postwar dislocation and the alternative to large-scale bilateral loans—were suddenly inadequate to the task of stabilizing and healing Britain’s economy. Was the British loan merely the first in a series of massive credits for U.S. trading partners? Senior Truman administration officials lobbied Congress furiously, depicting the British Loan as the key to multilateral trade, an investment in a peaceful world, and a bulwark for America’s own free institutions. Secretary of State James Byrnes warned, “If we fail to make this loan, Britain will be forced to do business by barter with a bloc of nations . . . dividing the world into economic blocs, thereby endangering the peace of the world.” To assuage Congress, however, he promised that the loan was “not a precedent,” but rather reflected Britain’s unique position in the international trading system. Since half of all world commerce was channeled through bilateral agreements with Britain, dismantling imperial preference was the absolute precondition for an open world economy. Treasury Secretary Vinson echoed Byrnes, prophesizing British embrace of open multilateral trade if the loan passed and global economic warfare, unemployment, and poverty if it did not. 50 William Clayton went further, likening open commerce to a “highway to peace,” capable of transcending the urge for sovereign expansion. He predicted that failure to approve the British loan would “force Britain into a bilateral system” and precipitate

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the fragmentation of the world into “three great economic blocs,” portending the “complete regimentation of our external trade” and indeed endangering the freedom of America’s own domestic economy. Lincoln said, “this nation cannot exist half slave and half free.” This applies to commerce as well as to human beings. If we have regimentation in our foreign trade, how long do you think free enterprise can continue in our domestic commerce?51

Dean Acheson, playing Chicken Little, argued the loan would nurture “an economic system which is the very basis of our life”—the system of free individual enterprise, but without the loan, the United States might need to embrace autarky, which “would completely change our constitution, our relations to property, human liberty, our very conceptions of law.”52 Never mind that Truman’s emissaries to Congress exaggerated British commitments to multilateralism, since London had not agreed to dismantle preference, only to discuss reductions in preference margins. The administration’s pie-in-the-sky assessment of the loan and apocalyptic warnings did not persuade a number of skeptics on the Hill. Testifying before the Senate, Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner Eccles called the loan an investment in “a peaceful and productive system of world trade and finance,” for which the United States had already “laid down the ‘rules of the game.’” Senator Taft retorted, “It’s your world of multi-lateralism that doesn’t exist.” Where was it written, the Senator asked, that the United States should “finance the peace just because we financed the war?”53 Far from benefiting the United States economically, open multilateralism would flood the United States with cheap imports and decimate American businesses. Opponents of the loan also noted that its recipient was not a bastion of free enterprise but a socialist state in the process of nationalizing its domestic industries. Nor did the financial agreement do anything to eliminate state trading and place commerce in private hands. Taft ridiculed the notion that multilateralism would discourage the formation of economic blocs, ameliorate political rivalry and promote peace.54 The British Loan ultimately passed because of deepening American worries about the deteriorating relationship between the West and the Soviet Union. By early 1946, the crumbling of the Big Three’s wartime alliance had begun to change the context for international trade negotiations. Increasingly, they would take place with the emerging Cold War in the background. Stalin’s famous “two camps” speech of February 1946 made it perfectly clear that he did not share the universal vision of America’s postwar planners but saw the world in terms of spheres of influence and rival political-economic systems. This ideological division, embodied on the ground in Churchill’s “iron curtain” extending from the Baltic to the

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Adriatic, forced the abandonment of U.S. hopes for a thoroughly international trading order. It also reinforced the tendency of U.S. officials to treat aid and trade not only as instruments for economic stability and prosperity but as foundations for U.S. national security and Western unity. The same month as Stalin’s speech, Byrnes announced that postwar multilateral trade negotiations would proceed without the participation of Russia, which had adopted an obstructionist attitude toward the U.S. commercial agenda, including restricting trade between its satellites and the West.55 A significant turning point in legislative deliberations on the loan came when John Foster Dulles persuaded Senator Vandenberg that the credit could help ensure an independent Britain. “If we do not lead,” the senator warned, “some great and powerful nation will capitalize on our failure and we shall pay the price of our default.”56 These geostrategic concerns secured the support of wavering isolationists who would otherwise have opposed the loan as a wasteful subsidy to British imperialism and state socialism. The Senate approved the loan, 46–34; the House, 219–155. Truman signed the legislation into law on July 15, 1946. To accompany the British Loan, the State Department in July 1946 released its Proposals for Expansion of World Trade and Employment. These advocated a negotiated reduction, “on a balanced and equitable basis,” of current state restrictions on trade, as well as the establishment of common “rules and principles” to govern the use of any remaining trade barriers. The Proposals called on all countries to liberalize trade; extend equal access to markets and raw materials; stimulate global production, consumption, and exchange (in order to “enhance world solidarity and the prospects for peace”); and advance the “economic and social purposes of the United Nations.” The document reaffirmed that any multilateral system must include safeguards to protect social policies, balance of payments positions, and full employment.57 Washington invited its trading partners to a preliminary meeting to determine the agenda for a Conference on World Trade and Employment. Each participant would submit a proposed schedule of tariff reductions and other measures to remove trade barriers, applicable to all, and would agree to uniform rules to eliminate exchange controls, quotas, and subsidies. Washington reiterated its commitment to embedded liberalism on September 20, 1946, releasing a Suggested Charter for an International Trade Organization of the United Nations. The proposed ITO contained rules and mechanisms for liberalizing trade on an RTAA model, but with multilateral negotiations replacing bilateral ones. Countries would enjoy non-discriminatory access to one another’s markets, giving outsiders a strong incentive to join by improving access to their own, fueling a virtuous cycle of liberalization. A summary of official U.S. thinking on global

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commerce, the document asserted that “stabilization and trade policies should be consistent” but “must be compromised” when they clashed. More generally, it legitimated internal pluralism within a multilateral system, permitting countries to organize their domestic economies according to any mixture of entrepreneurship, technocratic planning, or public ownership, as long as this diversity did not split the world into “exclusive trading blocs.”58 The suggested charter tolerated some escape clauses from multilateralism, allowing for the stockpiling of strategic materials for national security reasons, quotas for reconstruction, responses to balance of payments deficits, and the pursuit of development priorities. The IMF, however, would have the final word on any exchange controls.

FRANCO-AMERICAN NEGOTIATIONS AND THE MONNET PLAN Great Britain was not alone in seeking U.S. assistance immediately after World War II. France, too, hoped for a generous credit to reconstruct and modernize its economy.59 French leader Charles de Gaulle proclaimed France’s continued grandeur, but reality said otherwise. “You speak of greatness,” Jean Monnet advised the general, but without U.S. aid, France could not regain “the first rank of industrial powers in Western Europe.” Given their precarious payments position and dwindling reserves, the French would need abundant U.S. financing to pay for massive postwar imports of food, coal, raw materials, and capital goods.60 Washington would assist, but only if Paris formulated a comprehensive recovery program and committed to open, non-discriminatory trade. The United States was relatively indifferent to France’s domestic path. “Be liberals or dirigistes,” Clayton told the French government on August 31, 1945. “Return to capitalism or head toward socialism. That’s your business.”61 But he conditioned U.S. aid on France’s adoption of multilateralism externally. To receive significant funds, Paris would need to allay U.S. fears that it might pursue a “path of autarky . . . excessive customs protectionism . . . and discrimination.”62 France fed U.S. anxieties by insisting that private trade resume “both gradual[ly] and within strict limits” and demanding that postwar multilateralism tolerate imperial preference and regional agreements.63 Foreign Minister Georges Bidault assured Secretary Byrnes in August 1945 that France would “adopt a regime of freedom” after “respite [from multilateralism] and must in any case continue to protect a few of her traditional industries.”64 Indeed, France retained cumbersome trade restrictions that annoyed U.S. officials, who registered formal protest with Paris.65

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During 1945–1946, Franco-American negotiations over U.S. financial assistance and French commercial multilateralism became deeply intertwined. Both Washington and Paris tried to exploit this connection. Byrnes, who anticipated “several opportunities in the future to link policy questions with credits,” instructed American diplomats to “support those in the French government . . . inclined toward a liberal commercial policy.” Washington promised France a $550 million loan, but only if the French first lowered tariffs, reduced exchange controls, and eliminated quotas. Paris inverted these conditions, warning the United States that without “generous credits covering the entirety of [French] needs,” any “negotiation on the reestablishment of commercial liberties will be in vain.”66 The French interpreted ongoing Anglo-American talks over the British Loan as the opening salvo in a multi-faceted U.S. “offensive in favor of free trade [and] the elimination of all discriminatory systems and all regimes of quotas.”67 Like Keynes, Monnet, France’s primary economic interlocutor with Washington, understood that the need for U.S. credits would force France to “lay her course consciously towards a policy of free and expanding commerce,” by ratifying Bretton Woods. Fortunately, Washington would aid the recovery of any ally “committed unreservedly . . . to international trade on a multilateral basis,” a welcome change from the inter-war years when isolationist America (abdicating its “obligations as a creditor nation”) had left postwar reconstruction to private capital. U.S. officials had evidently learned that “autarky tends to produce a low standard of living and conditions that conduce toward war.”68 Meanwhile, France, determined to extract the best possible terms from a compromise with America on embedded economic liberalism, declined to “discuss a future regime of international commerce without as a precondition having dealt with the . . . means necessary to reconstruct and modernize its economy.”69 France and the United States formalized the aid–trade linkage in a pair of diplomatic notes on November 8, 1945. The first announced their “full accord” on the need for liberal commerce, the abolition of quotas and prohibitive tariffs, and a world conference to advance these goals. The second endorsed a prior bilateral meeting to discuss French financial needs for national reconstruction. U.S. diplomats were encouraged by France’s commitments, which appeared to signal a “long-range orientation away from self-containment and toward multilateral trade with all its domestic components.” Yet, Paris clung to protectionism as its trump card: If the United States did not provide sufficient aid, France would stay outside the multilateral system. Indeed, the French played hardball, laying the onus of open trade squarely in America’s lap.70 France’s first postwar elections for a constituent assembly in October 1945, which gave the Communists a plurality of the popular vote, diminished the prospects

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of French cooperation in a new multilateral trade system. Washington worried about France’s ability to honor its commercial commitments in exchange for a dollar loan.71 After equivocating for a year, the French National Assembly finally ratified the Bretton Woods accords on December 31, as a prelude to negotiating with Washington over the pace and limits of multilateralism.72 In January 1946, General de Gaulle appointed Monnet to head a new Commissariat General au Plan (CGP). The general charged him with drafting a comprehensive, five-year state-led investment program, the Plan de Modernisation et d’Equipement. From its inception, the “Monnet Plan” was predicated on “continual collaboration” with the United States as the indispensable source of financial credits and imports of food, equipment, and energy. Monnet’s remarkable connections with prominent Americans enabled him to serve as a transatlantic intermediary and shape U.S. lending to France during 1946. Playing to both audiences, he warned American officials that without financial aid France would modernize “slowly and necessarily within the framework of a closed economy,” while warning his countrymen that deviations from multilateralism would jeopardize U.S. funding.73 Despite Monnet’s efforts, U.S. aid looked likely to be modest. Indeed, Truman had termed the British Loan “exceptional.” America’s ambassador in Paris, Jefferson Caffery, pleaded for generosity, arguing that a meager loan would endanger France’s status “as an independent and democratic country.”74 Cognizant of a backlash against wartime controls and the New Deal in the United States, French officials were skeptical about receiving a large loan. They doubted Washington would “finance a socialist state . . . that will not hesitate to use the credits to carry out a policy entirely contrary to that desired by the American people.”75 Re-christened the French Union, France’s empire presented a particular problem, since it preserved the “franc zone” and retained imperial preference. America’s demand for “equal treatment,” Monnet observed, “. . . collides head on with the venerable imperialist colonial conception which reserves to the metropole certain economic advantages.”76 In mid-March 1946, the socialist leader Léon Blum led a large French delegation to Washington to negotiate on trade and aid. They informed their hosts that France would only dismantle trade and exchange controls if it received support for the $11 billion Monnet Plan, intended to elevate France to “a position of equivalency” with leading industrial nations. France requested a whopping $4.186 billion—a sum greater than the British Loan! Blum warned that a meager loan would have “political consequences,” forcing Paris to turn to Moscow for help.77 At the same time, Blum sought to allay U.S. fears about French discrimination and dirigisme. In a statement to the National Advisory Council, he asserted the essential compatibility of international commercial openness with an active domestic role for the

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state: “It is perfectly conceivable to apply principles of economic planning or collectivism at home . . . while in external transactions . . . to practice a policy of international organization based on complete freedom and equality.”78 This principle of de-linking international and domestic economic policy became the premise for Franco-American negotiations. The Blum-Byrnes negotiations lasted throughout the spring of 1946. The National Advisory Council, charged with determining the scope of the credit for France, took account of political and strategic considerations. Frustrated by French foot-dragging over Germany, certain American policymakers wanted to make any financial assistance conditional on French concessions on the creation of central German agencies.79 Others pushed for a large loan to weaken communism in France. As the U.S. ambassador in Paris noted, “It is in our interest to strengthen the elements with which we can work, which share our basic conceptions and which therefore make for stability.” But some U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Vinson, balked at subsidizing a governing coalition that included Communists.80 The loan decision came in a pivotal May 6 meeting of the Council. Clayton advocated an Export-Import Bank loan of $750 million. In his mind, a smaller amount would be a “catastrophe” for French democracy. On the other hand, Federal Reserve Chairman Eccles disapproved of politically-motivated loans, and feared the United States being “accused of undertaking to buy a foreign election.” He thought Washington’s objective was “getting countries back on their feet,” irrespective of “whether the government is socialistic, communistic, or [a] capitalist democracy.” Clayton demurred, confessing “great difficulty in separating political from economic considerations in thinking about Europe.” France and Great Britain were the “bulwarks” of European democracy, whose recovery was necessary to “saving Western Europe from a collapse and social chaos.”81 By a 3–2 vote, the Council approved a $650 million loan—a small fraction of France’s request. Blum and Byrnes signed the Washington Commercial and Financial Accords on May 28, 1946. The United States agreed to write off most of France’s Lend-Lease debt and provide the $650 million credit from the Export-Import Bank to purchase essential capital goods, food, and raw materials. In return, France declared its “complete agreement on the principles” in the American Proposals, pledging to abandon protectionist import quotas, adopt reasonable tariffs, restore private channels of trade, limit nationalization, and confine all discrimination to a limited period of “convalescence.”82 In fact, France’s commitment to economic multilateralism came with several caveats. Liberalization must occur gradually to permit reconstruction, tolerate social democratic initiatives, not threaten the commercial

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and monetary unity of the French Union, and strengthen French claims on German resources. In addition, the United States had to partially finance France’s state-led modernization program (the Monnet Plan), during which France could control its imports. Nevertheless, like the British Loan, the Blum-Byrnes Accords signified an important “first step in the difficult elaboration of a liberal Atlantic consensus” on international trade.83 Some historians have depicted the Franco-American accords—and U.S. financial aid to Europe in general—as a battering ram for Washington’s “Open Door” policy in Europe.84 But this understanding ignores that the French made few concessions they had not already offered in principle. France was not required to eliminate its own system of imperial preference. Moreover, many French neoliberals welcomed the linkage between aid and multilateralism, confident that foreign competition would catalyze productivity and grateful that America’s “external constraint” would discourage radical structural reform at home.85 French officials obviously denied allegations that France had capitulated to U.S. imperialism asserting (in Blum’s words) that the Washington negotiations merely “provide the means for a freely decided policy for the expansion of such trade,” as delimited by “previous agreements between the two governments.”86 The accords, declared President Gouin, would discourage the world’s division “into autarkic blocs.”87 With the exception of the Communists (who abstained), the French Assembly ratified Blum-Byrnes unanimously on August 1, 1946. Monnet believed deeply that American financing would permit France to launch its recovery and modernization plan with zeal. True, the modest loan implied annual pilgrimages to Washington by French officials to secure additional funding. Nevertheless, the Plan’s momentum would generate a virtuous circle of U.S. aid and French economic development. Just as “the Plan permitted the conclusion of the accords, [so] the accords will permit the execution of the Plan.”88 Monnet anticipated a French financial crisis in 1947, but assumed Washington would devote massive resources to European reconstruction out of enlightened self-interest, because denying financial assistance would destroy the U.S. dream of multilateralism. The Marshall Plan of June 1947 vindicated this wager. In retrospect, the Blum-Byrnes Accords bought France time “to wait for an American initiative on the grand scale”89 and laid the intellectual foundations for the subsequent European Recovery Program.

CONCLUSION Both the British Loan and the Blum-Byrnes Accords evinced America’s consensual and pluralistic style of hegemonic leadership, which tolerated

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domestic economic systems considerably different from the U.S. model. Immediately following World War II, most West European countries would experiment with a number of market control devices, including restrictions on currency exchange and capital flows, as well as bilateral and state trading arrangements. Some critics of U.S. policy have contended that the United States, alarmed by the socialist flavor of European economic reforms, actively prevented these unique experiments from blossoming into a heterogeneous system of “national capitalisms,” by forcing European countries to accept a multilateral future against their will.90 To conclude that the United States exploited its economic preponderance to forestall the emergence of competing economic models in Europe, however, overstates the divergence of U.S. and European thinking on the desirability of commercial multilateralism. Most West European governments genuinely wanted to enter the multilateral system. British and French decision makers and policy experts came to share with U.S. officials certain causal and principled beliefs about the state’s legitimate role in domestic and foreign economic policy.91 Recasting their national interests, they renounced protectionism and committed their countries (eventually) to an open, reciprocal, and non-discriminatory order— provided they got resources in return. This transatlantic consensus on embedded liberalism reflected a convergence of the allies’ views about the preconditions for national growth and international political stability, along with a belief that external openness did not negate the pursuit of social welfare goals. If some West European elites were initially wary of multilateralism as a threat to social democracy, imperial preference, or regionalism, most realized in time that a hodge-podge of national strategies was no alternative to an open world economy. Accepting an economically interdependent future as inevitable, their debates with Washington focused primarily on the scope, pace, and timing of global integration. Britain and France’s embrace of economic multilateralism reflected a process of cognitive evolution rather than one of “hegemonic socialization.” The United States did not create an open postwar economy by “embedd[ing] norms among European elites,” 92 for America’s junior partners were strong-willed actors who refused to passively swallow Washington’s postwar vision. Indeed, Britain and France prodded the United States to modify its open world blueprint, resulting in transatlantic coalitions behind modified multilateralism. Within the boundaries of this normative agreement, Washington, London, and Paris debated the terms of (and limits to) multilateralism. Within these negotiations, strategic bargaining played a critical role. The United States leveraged its structural power as a creditor nation, manipulating financial incentives to gain acquiescence on prompt liberalization, while Britain and France threatened to defect from Washington’s scheme to

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procure more generous American aid. But their ultimate endorsement of multilateralism derived from a set of shared convictions in the merits of commercial openness and economic institutions in accelerating prosperity and underpinning peace, and in the compatibility of shared rules of international commerce with domestic pluralism permitting the pursuit of social welfare goals. Aware that consensual leadership required flexibility, U.S. officials accepted modifications to their multilateral vision. More preoccupied with encouraging multilateralism than defeating socialism, Washington condoned political and economic diversity among its partners and collaborated with the democratic Left.93 Although a desire to counter communism did inform American calculations, the credits to Britain or France were not purely “political” loans. At this point, the United States had not yet declared the Cold War, much less chosen the instruments to wage it; in fact, Washington was still contemplating a $1 billion credit to assist Soviet recovery. By summer 1946, the Truman administration had secured Congressional passage of the Bretton Woods agreements and the British Loan and published its blueprints for an International Trade Organization. But the United States would have to defer its dream of a quick transition to a multilateral system of trade and payments. The Bretton Woods institutions could not cope with the immediate challenges of postwar reconstruction and economic dislocation. Multilateral negotiations on the ITO faltered, with Washington unable to reproduce the triumphs of more arcane monetary negotiations occurring in a wartime vacuum. The British Loan proved inadequate to meet London’s postwar financial needs—let alone midwife a stable international system of payments. The precipitous move to sterling convertibility would cause a grave financial crisis in summer 1947, culminating in the devaluation of the pound. Faced with political and economic crisis in Europe, the United States put global multilateralism on hold to launch history’s most ambitious program of economic reconstruction: the Marshall Plan.

NOTES 1. Ikenberry, “Creating Yesterday’s New World Order,” 70–71. 2. White cited in Fred L. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 45–46. 3. “Suggested Plan for a United Nations Stabilization Fund and a Bank for Reconstruction of the United and Associated Nations.” Cited in Gardner, SterlingDollar Diplomacy, 74.

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4. Andrew Walter, World Power and World Money: The Role of Hegemony and International Monetary Order (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 152–53. 5. Morgenthau cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 76–77. 6. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 116–21. 7. Richard Cooper, “Prolegomena to the Choice of an International Monetary System,” International Organization 29, no. 1 (1975) 63–98, 85. 8. E. Brett, “The Post-War Political Settlement,” in Global Politics: Block IV: A Global Economy? (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1990), 4–12. 9. Walter, World Power, pp. 154–155. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 78–90. 10. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 57–58. 11. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 133–142 12. FDR cited in Smith, America’s Mission, 115. 13. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 123. 14. Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 129–32. 15. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 132–33. 16. Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 138. 17. Clayton, “The Importance of the Bretton Woods Proposals in the Post-War Economic Policy of the Department of State,” in Department of State Bulletin, 18 March 1945, 439–40. 18. Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 141. 19. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 129 20. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 134–36. 21. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 191–92. 22. Cited in Thomas W. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 17–18. 23. “Summary of the Interim Report of the Special Committee on Relaxation of Trade Barriers,” December 18, 1943. Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 101. 24. Hawkins radio broadcast in January 1944. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 41. 25. In April 1943, Churchill endorsed the Overton Report, which contained these positions. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 28–32. 26. State of the Union address, January 1944. 27. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 203–207. 28. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 38. 29. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 34–36, 42–47. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 219. 30. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 42–3. 31. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 218. 32. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 50 33. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 178. 34. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 216. 35. Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 170. 36. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 158. 37. James J. Dougherty, The Politics of Wartime Aid: American Economic Assistance to France and French Northwest Africa 1940–1946 (Westport, CT: 1978), 179–206. 38. Cited in Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 63.

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39. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 199–206. 40. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 330–35. 41. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 53–54. 42. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 55–57. 43. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 214–17. 44. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 68. 45. “Conclusion of Anglo-American Financial and Trade Negotiations,” Department of State Bulletin, December 9, 1945, 905–9. 46. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 61. 47. Clayton to Bernard Baruch, cited in Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 125. 48. James N. Miller, “Personality, Ideology, and Interest in the Origins of the Modern World Trading System: The Case of Stafford Cripps and Will Clayton” (paper presented to the Historical Society Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, May 2002). . 49. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 197–98. 50. Byrnes and Vinson, in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 242–46. 51. Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 132–34. 52. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: 1962), 235–36. 53. Taft cited in New York Times, 9 March and 17 April, 1946. 54. On congressional calculations see Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 386–91. 55. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 59–62. 56. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 248–52. 57. Department of State Bulletin, 9 December 1945, 918–19. 58. Department of State Bulletin, 6, 26, 27 October, 1946, 640–4, 757–60. (Italics added.) 59. This section draws on Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France?” 60. Jean Monnet, Memoirs, trans. by Richard Mayne (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 228. Michel Margairaz, “Autour des Accords Blum-Byrnes: Jean Monnet entre le Consensus National et le Consensus Atlantique,” Histoire, Économie, et Société 37 (1982): 439–70, 463–66. 61. Clayton, Archives of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (henceforth MAE), B Amérique, 245. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 221–22. 62. Advice of French envoy Hervé Alphand of August 26, 1945, in Margairaz, “Autour des Accords Blum-Byrnes,” 440. 63. July 30, 1945, and August 1, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, 762–67. 64. August 23, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, 717. 65. Clayton to Paris, September 25, 1945. Archives du Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe (henceforth AFM) 3/5/6. 66. September 1 and 25, 1945, MAE, B Amérique, 245. AFM 3/2/1, 3/5/2, 3/5/10. Philippe Mioche, Le Plan Monnet: Genèse et Élaboration 1941–1947 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1987), 125–26. Irwin Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 49. October 6, 1945, AFM 3/5/12. 67. French memo of November 1945. Cited in Mioche, 126–7. October 24, 1945, Archives Nationales (henceforth AN), F60. October 18, 1946, MAE, B Amérique, 245.

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68. October 10 and 17, 1945, AMF 3/5/15 and 3/5/24. 69. October 17 and 19, 1945, AFM 3/3/10. 3/3/11a. 3/3/11b. Mioche, Le Plan Monnet, 126–27. Bloch-Laine and Bouvier, “Autour des Accords Blum-Byrnes,” 130. 70. November 8, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, 770–1. November 14, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, pp. 771–773. AFM 3/5/35, 3/5/36, 3/5/40. November 12, 1945, MAE, B Amérique, 245. 71. November 25, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, 773–74. 72. Frances M. B. Lynch, “Resolving the Paradox of the Monnet Plan: National and International Planning in French Reconstruction,” Economic History Review 37, no. 2 (May 1984): 231–32. 73. Monnet to de Gaulle, January 1946, cited in Margairaz, “Autour des Accords Blum-Byrnes,” 444. Irwin Wall, “Jean Monnet, the United States and the French Economic Plan,” in Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity, ed. by Douglas Brinkley and Clifford Hackett (London: MacMillan, 1991), 89–90. January 15, 1946, FRUS 1946, V, 399–400. Marjolin, Architect of European Unity, 167. Mioche, Le Plan Monnet, 435. 74. February 9, 1946, FRUS 1946, V, 412–13. 75. Cited in Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France?” 229. 76. February 2 and 15, 1946, MAE, Classement Provisoire ‘A’, 194–95. 77. New York Times, March 22, 25, 28, April 3, 1946. Alfred Grosser, La Quatrième République et sa Politique Étrangère (Paris: Colin, 1967), 218. 78. Leon Blum, L’Oeuvre, Vol. 6 (Paris: A. Michelet, 1954–1972), 188–94. 79. April 2, 1946, State Department Central Files (henceforth SDCF), microfiche frame 463. Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France?” 229–32. FRUS 1946, V, 496–511. 80. April 4, 1946, FRUS 1946 V, 421–422. 81. May 6, 1946, FRUS 1946, V, 440–466. Pollard, Economic Security, 76. 82. May 28, 1946, FRUS 1946, V, 464–65. Department of State Bulletin, June 9, 1946, pp. 994–97. 83. Margairaz, “Autour des Accords Blum-Byrnes,” 467. Monnet, Memoirs, 268. 84. Annie Lacroix-Riz, Le Choix de Mariane: Les Relations Franco-Americaines de 1944 `a 1948 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1986). 85. Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France?” Frances M. B. Lynch, France and the International Economy: From Vichy to the Treaty of Rome (London: Routledge, 1997), 46. 86. “Report of M. Leon Blum and the French Delegation,” AN F60 923. June 12, 1946, AMF 4/6/1. MAE, Classement Provisoire ‘A’, 194–5 (italics in original). 87. Assembly speech, AN F60 923. 88. Monnet, The Memoirs of Jean Monnet, 253–54. 89. Mioche Le Plan Monnet, p. 93. Marjolin, Architect of European Unity, 167. 90. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 9–10. 91. Patrick, “Embedded Liberalism in France?” 92. Ikenberry and Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power,” 287. 93. Gaddis, “The United States and the Question of a Sphere of Influence,” 71.

6 ✛

“An Imperative Principle of Action”: Self-Determination

Our victory must bring in its train the liberation of all peoples. . . . The age of imperialism is ended. —Sumner Welles, May 30, 1942

T

he third pillar of wartime U.S. liberal multilateralism, along with collective security and open commerce, was self-determination. For America’s open world vision to take root, it was not enough that countries organize their coercive power in common and trade with one another on equal terms. A just and stable international order depended on the various peoples of the world governing their own affairs, ideally within independent, democratic states. This principle extended beyond Europe to the developing world, where the imperial powers would eventually have to transfer sovereignty to the colonial peoples under their control. During the Second World War, the United States undertook a campaign to lay the foundations of a post-imperial order. Despite its overriding strategic interest in maintaining the wartime alliance with Great Britain and other colonial powers, the United States adopted a staunchly anti-colonial stance. Washington not only pressured London, as well as the French and Dutch governments in exile, to commit to independence for their overseas territories but also drafted ambitious schemes for United Nations trusteeship to ensure international accountability and to assist the preparation of dependent peoples for gradual decolonization. From a purely cost-benefit perspective, American policy on self-determination does not make much

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sense. Why would the United States risk alienating its imperial allies and depriving them of raw materials to pursue the war effort? Why would it propound a principle of world order that threatened to generate so much international instability, at least in the short term? The concept of self-determination had deep historical roots in the American ethos and U.S. foreign relations. Since the Revolution, Americans had advanced the proposition that all peoples possessed an inalienable right to govern themselves. What is more, the United States had a special role to play in expanding the geographic scope of human liberty. By 1941, the lessons of two world wars had reinforced these longstanding sentiments. For Americans, imperial competition and spheres of influence inevitably engendered economic and military conflict. During and immediately after World War I, Wilson had proclaimed self-determination an inherent right and a precondition for lasting international peace and global prosperity. At the Paris Peace Conference, he sought to transform his belief into a core doctrine of world order. A generation later, the Roosevelt Administration recognized that World War II had unleashed a tide of revolutionary nationalism. FDR and his senior aides worried that persistent imperialism would undermine non-Western support for the war effort and postwar stability. In contrast, a world composed of independent, self-governing states would contribute to collective security and commercial liberty from which all nations could benefit. Narrower calculations of material gain reinforced these instincts. Senior U.S. policymakers believed that the United States was poised to reap disproportionate strategic, diplomatic, and commercial advantages in a post-colonial world. The retreat of the imperial powers would coincide with—indeed facilitate—the spread of U.S. influence to new corners of the globe. Newly independent countries would extend basing and transit rights for the United States to police the Asia-Pacific region. The decline of imperial preference would afford the country broader access to raw materials and open new overseas markets to U.S. commerce and investment. The disintegration of formal empires would give rise to an informal American “free trade empire”1 analogous to mid-Victorian Britain’s. Although the United States would retreat from its farthest-reaching wartime plans for a post-colonial world (primarily to avoid rupturing alliances with imperial Great Britain and France), U.S. support for selfdetermination catalyzed the process of decolonization that unfolded over the next two decades. Expounding a vigorous anti-colonial ideology and pursuing a practical decolonization policy, the United States hastened the collapse of overseas empire and the emergence of new, independent states, utterly transforming twentieth-century world politics.

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SELF-DETERMINATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY Historians of American foreign relations have long debated the “idealist” versus “realist” motivations behind U.S. support for self-determination and antipathy toward empire—as well the consistency with which this sentiment found expression in practical policy.2 The source of this instinct lies in the U.S. historical experience and the convictions that spurred American independence, such as: All government derives its legitimate authority from the consent of the governed, each people has an inalienable right to determine its own destiny, all groups naturally prefer to govern themselves rather than submit to others, and any people permitted to determine its own fate will naturally gravitate toward democracy.3 This creed dates back to 1776. The Declaration of Independence asserts that “the thirteen colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent states,” able to choose their own form of government rather than be ruled without representation by the British king and parliament. Heirs to the Declaration, succeeding generations of Americans have tended to regard imperialism as exploitative, undemocratic, antithetical to liberty, and prejudicial to progress. As the first modern nation to throw off the colonial yoke, Americans have consistently seen themselves as champions of people struggling for liberty against external (as well as internal) oppressors. They have, moreover, periodically (if selectively) projected this self-image by endeavoring to expand the scope of these universal principles. Yet Americans have often overestimated the ease with which the doctrine of self-determination could transfer to other lands, particularly multi-sectarian settings where the boundaries of the nation remain contested. In addition to this identity commitment to self-determination, Americans have historically espoused causal beliefs linking imperialism with domestic tyranny, international conflict, and economic closure. The U.S. colonial experience taught that political despotism inevitably bred resentment and ultimately revolution, compelling subjugated peoples to fight for liberty through independence. In the international arena, imperial competition fomented diplomatic tensions and warfare in an eternal race to secure exclusive control over disputed territories, markets, and raw materials. Even peace was illusory, since imperial powers eyed each other warily and prepared for war. Not until the aspirations of subject peoples were realized and the sources of great power rivalry neutralized would international harmony take hold. Americans have likewise perceived a strong connection between closed political systems and closed economic systems—another lesson learned

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from their own colonial experience. The United States gained independence in a mercantilist age when metropolitan powers accorded special treatment to trade with overseas possessions and obstructed American commerce and access. Such discrimination severely handicapped a small, trade-dependent nation, reinforcing America’s anti-imperial sentiments. In the U.S. worldview an open international economy would prove impossible as long as colonial systems persisted. Support for self-determination may have featured prominently and recurrently in U.S. foreign policy, but the country’s practice of this precept was selective at best. From independence onward, the United States repeatedly jettisoned the principle when it collided with American racial and cultural prejudices, strategic and economic preoccupations, and occasional imperialist appetites. During the nineteenth century, for example, U.S. officials were disinclined to grant self-determination to groups deemed inferior (or simply in the way), whether African slaves, America’s indigenous inhabitants, or the Mexican settlers occupying the future American Southwest. Nor did an ideological distaste for imperialism dissuade the United States from undertaking one of history’s most sustained efforts at territorial aggrandizement, accomplished through a mixture of displacement (of Native Americans), purchase (Louisiana in 1803, Western Florida in 1819, and southern Arizona and New Mexico in 1853), negotiation (Oregon Territory, 1846), annexation (Texas, 1845), and military conquest (California and the southwest, 1846–1848). Even as they criticized Europeans for ruthlessly exploiting alien populations, U.S. officials and the wider public euphemistically portrayed their own expansion not as an imperial venture but as “manifest destiny” of a growing nation blessed by Providence. Nor did anti-imperialism prevent the United States from acquiring its own overseas territories after the Spanish-American War, including the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and a protectorate in Cuba. Despite the selectivity and hypocrisy of its application, the concept of self-determination did shape the content and style of nineteenth century U.S. foreign policy in distinctive ways. American officials invoked the principle against the European powers on numerous occasions. These ranged from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823—which implied that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere should determine their own fates without threat of colonization or interference from Europe—to Hay’s Open Door Notes at the turn of the century, insisting that the European empires respect the territorial and administrative integrity of China and to permit equal commercial access to its market rather than dividing that country into explicit spheres of influence and zones of economic privilege. What of America’s late nineteenth century excursion into formal imperialism, which hardly seems to square with self-determination? Argu-

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ably an aberration, the adventure was justified as—and partly motivated by—a desire to liberate of Spain’s possessions from what Americans saw as abusive and decadent Spanish rule. Moreover, this imperial episode stirred significant controversy at home, prompting press and public debate about whether a nation dedicated to liberty could possess colonies of its own—notably and tellingly, the United States chose not to annex Cuba and committed itself to emancipate the Philippines. In the case of Cuba, in April 1898 Congress passed the Teller Amendment, declaring that the United States “hereby disclaims any disposition of intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people.” Without exaggerating the degree of American self-restraint,4 the amendment starkly distinguished the United States from the European great powers, scrambling for overseas empire.

WILSON AND “SELF-DETERMINATION” As an inspiration for U.S. foreign policy, the idea of self-determination arguably assumed preeminence during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Alongside international law, collective security, and international markets, Wilson saw self-determination as an indispensable pillar of a liberal world order. He intended for self-determining states to replace autocracy and empire, just as open commerce would supplant mercantilism and collective security transcend balances of power. Driven by moral and pragmatic concerns, Wilson believed not only that all peoples possessed an inherent right to self-rule but also that the denial of legitimate political aspirations directly caused domestic upheaval and international violence. The outbreak of the Great War, which he ascribed to the autocratic rule of the Central Powers and the competition of rival European empires, was a case in point. Wilson anticipated that the forces of revolutionary nationalism were ready to burst. Around the world, oppressed peoples from Europe’s multiethnic empires and overseas colonies clamored for liberty. To avoid drowning in this wave, the Western powers had to channel it along a moderate course. In skillful hands, Wilson thought the doctrine of self-determination could spawn a worldwide democratic revolution. Before the United States had even entered World War I, Wilson promoted self-determination as a cornerstone of any postwar settlement. As he told the Senate in January 22, 1917, “No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right

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anywhere exists to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.”5 In subsequently committing the United States to the conflict, Wilson defined the emancipation of oppressed peoples (“the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their own way of life and obedience”) as a primary U.S. war aim. He exuded optimism that Central Europe’s inhabitants, once rid of their rulers and given the opportunity to establish new political institutions, would gravitate toward democracy. The imperative of channeling nationalist forces in this direction became even more pressing after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. In the President’s mind, liberalism was the only alternative between the twin evils of reaction and revolution. In a speech to Congress on February 11, 1918, Wilson outlined his “principles for a permanent peace.” From now on territorial settlements must be “based on the essential justice of [each] particular case . . . in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned.” He pledged that Europe’s distinct national groups would find their aspirations dignified. “‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase,” Wilson pronounced, “It is an imperative principle of action which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” 6

CLEAR IMPACT, UNCERTAIN MEANING Wilson’s wartime utterances carried enormous weight with the world’s colonized and oppressed peoples. As Margaret MacMillan writes, the Fourteen Points inspired “the leaders of the Arab revolt in the desert, Polish nationalists in Warsaw, rebels in the Greek islands, students in Peking, [and] Koreans trying to shake off Japan’s control.”7 Despite his global impact, Wilson never sufficiently defined what the term “selfdetermination” actually meant. The enduring imprecision of the concept left colleagues and foreigners alike to speculate about whether “selfdetermination” implied an inherent right of people to choose their own government in a democratic fashion or (more sweepingly) entitled every self-declared national community to its own state. Did it necessitate independence, or merely autonomy within a larger political entity? The term befuddled even Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who wondered “When the President talks of ‘self-determination,’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, a community?”8 Given the enormous expectations Wilson had created, Lansing recognized, the phrase was “loaded with dynamite.”

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It will raise hopes that can never be realized . . . [and] cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited [as] . . . the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force. What a calamity the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!9

There were ample grounds for Lansing’s concerns. Wilson had accurately identified a revolutionary yearning for liberation among the subject peoples of the European multiethnic and overseas empires. But like many U.S. leaders after him, he failed to appreciate the limited relevance of the American historical experience, which represented a triumph of political self-determination, to the aspirations of indigenous decolonization movements, preoccupied with ethno-national self-determination. This confusion stemmed in part from the conservative character of America’s own revolutionary heritage and, more broadly, the non-ethnic basis (at least in principle) of American nationhood. Rooted in liberal Enlightenment values, the purpose of the American War of Independence was less to build a new national community than to create a new, legitimate social contract for the colonies by locating political authority in the hands of the “people.” The American conception of nationhood did not rely on ethnic ties but on the voluntary affiliation of “many” peoples into “one” polity, through adherence to a common political creed. The American patria was an idea, not a particular place or people. By contrast, the modern doctrine of national self-determination that so convulsed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed less to the American Revolution than to the French Revolution of 1789. The latter gave birth to modern nationalism by wedding the concept of popular sovereignty to that of the ethnic-national community, establishing a deep intellectual and emotional connection between “the state as a political unit and the nation as a cultural one.”10 As Isaiah Berlin has written, nationalism is a form of political romanticism that enshrines the nation as the ultimate source of human identity, purpose, and spiritual sustenance, and naturally elevates the claims, values, and standards of one’s own nation above those of other nations.11 Nationalism holds that organic ties bind the nation’s members together in a kind of extended, but exclusive, family. These precepts quickly give rise to the doctrine of national self-determination in which the needs of the ethnic nation can be fulfilled only by choosing its own form of government and by possessing a political state of its own. Since 1789, national liberation movements have endeavored to demarcate the boundaries of the political state (a legal-political entity possessing juridical sovereignty and a monopoly on the use of force) so that they correspond to those of the “nation” (an inter-subjectively defined community

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linked by a common language and/or shared history). The often tragic dilemma arises from the frequent disjunction between the two. Wilson’s effort to found postwar order on self-determination was, paradoxically, radical and conservative; radical, because it sought to replace multiethnic empires in Europe (and eventually the entire colonial world) with democratic states; conservative, because of its roots in an antiquated Enlightenment model ill-suited to an age of revolutionary nationalism. In promoting self-determination, Wilson risked throwing U.S. support behind a prospectively illiberal doctrine at odds with the country’s own history. The American model of popular democracy rested on the assumption of a readily identifiable sovereign “people.” In practice, recognizing such groups and what constituted their “consent” was usually hard and arbitrary. As U.S. officials discovered over the next century, the concept often collides with the ethnic, religious, and racial fragmentation of foreign polities, as well as alternative forms of sociopolitical organization based on kinship hierarchies, religious deference, and local identity.12

PROBLEMS WITH PRACTICAL APPLICATION IN EUROPE Beyond the ambiguity of the principle’s meaning was the question of where self-determination should actually happen. Despite noting the “utter longing of oppressed and helpless peoples all over the world,”13 Wilson intended that the doctrine should extend first to Europe, and only gradually to the colonized peoples of the wider world, whom he thought unprepared to assume the immediate responsibilities of self-government. They would have to submit to a prolonged period of external tutelage before receiving full sovereignty. Although the European powers thwarted Wilson’s efforts to insert an article on self-determination into the Covenant of the League of Nations, the President worked to ensure that the peace settlement in Paris, including the Versailles Treaty and secondary treaties, granted independence to a number of the subject nationalities of Eastern and Central Europe. The doctrine was not applied outside of Europe to the colonial empires in Asia and Africa or to the Ottoman Empire (except Turkey itself). Exempt from the principle, the empires of the Western allies actually grew in size. Even in Europe, Wilson hinted at the need to apply the doctrine selectively, depending on the merits of competing claims and the requirements of world order. He told Congress in February 1918, “All well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe, and consequently of the world.”14 But who were these “well-

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defined national aspirations”? Using such expedients as linguistic tests and (occasionally) plebiscites, the peacemakers in Paris struggled to weigh the relative legitimacy of competing national claims to self-determination. Nations, they soon realized, are inherently subjective entities, “imagined communities” based on the perceived bonds of their members.15 A chastened Wilson reported to Congress in late 1919, “When I gave utterance to those words [“self-determination”], I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.”16 Forced to make judgment calls on the fates of peoples of whom they knew little (on the basis of imperfect information), the Allies dignified the nationalist aspirations of the Bulgars, Czechs, Magyars, and Poles in the form of new states. Others, like Armenians, Macedonians, Ruthenians, and Ukrainians, they did not. The commingling in Eastern and Central Europe of multiple ethnolinguistic groups with competing and sometimes overlapping cultural, religious, ethnic, and political identities complicated the peacemakers’ attempt to reconcile competing historical claims by drawing boundaries incorporating all enclaves of settlement into homogeneous nation-states. Inevitably, successor states to the collapsed Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman empires contained significant minority populations.17 Yugoslavia, known until 1929 as the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes,” best reflected the heterogeneity of the new states. In all, the Peace of Paris left some thirty million people in Europe as ethnic minorities in other countries. The peacemakers required successor states to sign treaties promising to tolerate the minorities in their midst, including by extending religious and linguistic rights. But minorities had little recourse in the event of non-compliance, and they bore the brunt of ethnic chauvinism and discrimination. The post-WWI settlement manifested the difficulty of applying the principle of self-determination in practice. Indeed, it probably created as many injustices as it corrected and frequently countermanded the requirements of international order. Although the establishment of a durable framework for world peace was a central goal of the Paris Peace Conference, the triumph of the national principle fostered an interwar power vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe, with a handful of weak states unable to defend themselves against stronger revisionist neighbors. Indeed, Germany, which saw the loss of territory to the Poles and the Czechs as illegitimate, would exploit this perceived injustice to justify its onslaught in World War II. Wilson had also hoped that self-determination would be naturally conducive to representative democracy, but these hopes went largely unfulfilled. The successor states of Central and Eastern Europe possessed weak domestic institutions, democratic traditions, and political leaders.

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Although most began with democratic constitutions (in some cases based on the constitution of the French Third Republic), most quickly failed and yielded to dictatorships.18

THE MANDATES SYSTEM In addition to addressing the future of subject peoples in Europe, the victors of World War I had to deal with the disposition of Germany’s former colonies in Africa and the Pacific as well as the remnants of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. The authors of Versailles concurred that most of these non-European territories could not handle immediate independence, but disagreed about what to do about them in the meantime. Wilson argued that any power that assumed control of these territories must do so under the auspices of the League of Nations. The British were inclined to go along, but others strongly opposed this approach. The French, who coveted Cameroon and Togoland and a privileged position in the Levant, agitated for outright annexation. The Italians advanced similar arguments for Somaliland; the South Africans, for Southwest Africa; the Australians, for New Guinea; the New Zealanders, for Samoa; and the Japanese, for German concessions in China and islands in the Western Pacific. Absent concerted U.S. efforts, these interested parties would likely have annexed their desired territories in a scramble for empire. An obstinate Wilson, however, carried the day. The League Covenant invented a novel institution, the “Mandates System,” designed to supervise those territories “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” (Article 22). Under this regime, League members pledged to ensure the social welfare and development of indigenous peoples under their control. League mandates came in three categories, reflecting contemporary perceptions of each territory’s stage of development. Most advanced were “A” mandates, regarded as capable of self-government in the near future. These included the Middle Eastern successor states to the Ottoman Empire, including Iraq and Palestine (both administered by Great Britain) and Syria (administered by France). The former German colonies in tropical Africa were classified as “B” mandates, believed to require a longer period of tutelage. They included Togo (divided between Britain and France), Cameroon (of which 9/10 went to France and 1/10 to Britain), Tanganyika (Britain) and Rwanda-Urundi (Belgium). Finally, remote lands inhabited by “primitive” inhabitants became “C” mandates, where control by a “civilized” mandatory power might continue in perpetuity. These included Southwest Africa (South Africa), New Guinea (Australia), Samoa (New Zealand), and the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands (Japan).19

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Whether the mandates represented a qualitative break with past patterns of European colonialism or mere camouflage to disguise imperial scavenging over the corpses of Germany and Ottoman empires remained to be seen. The answer lay somewhere in between. In theory, the League would conduct international oversight of the mandates to ensure that the mandatory powers exercised their authority for the benefit and development of the inhabitants. Practically speaking, however, the Europeans and Japanese dominated these lands unimpeded during the interwar years. Iraq, which actually gained independence in 1932, provides a rare exception. Overwhelmingly, strategic and pecuniary motivations continued to drive the mandatory powers. The refusal to extend self-determination to the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and former German colonies bitterly disappointed local nationalist forces. The Arabs and Kurds, whose leaders had been energized by Wilson’s soaring rhetoric, found their hopes dashed, respectively, at the San Remo Conference of April 1920 (which awarded new mandates to the British in Palestine and Mesopotamia and the French in Syria) and by the Treaty of Sevres, whose vague promises of a Kurdish homeland went unfulfilled. In addition, Japan’s takeover of Germany’s former concessions on the Shantung Peninsula radicalized Chinese nationalists. Despite the practical continuity with earlier colonialism, the Mandates System nevertheless signified an important normative shift in the imperial framework. For the first time it established metropolitan accountability, by codifying the responsibilities of mandatory (colonial) powers to advance “the well being and development” of native inhabitants rather than simply exploiting them. Mandatory powers had to submit annual reports to the Permanent Mandates Commission, explaining how they were fulfilling this “sacred trust of civilization.” While the civilizing mission had long justified the imperial project, this new requirement acknowledged (at least implicitly) the human rights of subject peoples. In the case of Africa, the League obliged mandatory powers to permit “freedom of conscience and religion,” to prevent “abuses such as the slave trade, the arms traffic and the liquor traffic,” and to eschew the creation of armies for anything other than territorial defense. These progressive dimensions led one historian to hail the Mandates System as a “triumph of internationalism over nationalism, free trade over monopoly, humanitarianism over slavery, and self-determination over imperialism.”20 Briefly during the 1920s, American liberal internationalists hoped the Mandates System would spur a transition to a post-imperial world order. “The whole trend of the time is against wars of colonial expansion,” FDR wrote in 1923. “The thought of the world leans the other way. Populations themselves have a say.”21 However, the resurgence of mercantilism and conquest during the 1930s killed optimism that the League—and its

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Mandates System—could tame imperial rivalry, while reinforcing U.S. convictions that imperialism was antithetical to free trade and world peace. Great Britain’s steps to restrict trade between its overseas possessions and third countries in response to the Great Depression seemed to herald the world’s division into economic and political blocs. This trend took a more sinister turn as Japan, Italy, and then Germany deployed military forces to build empires of their own. The Axis’s imperial thrust further discredited the established empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Still, when considered over the long run, the Mandates System constituted an important step in the historical process of decolonization. Though limited in scope, it helped alter the normative context in which colonial powers operated by de-legitimizing further expansion of existing empires and establishing the principle of metropolitan accountability in the obligation that administering powers advance the welfare of dependent peoples. The Mandates System was a prelude to the more comprehensive concept of “trusteeship” that the United States would promote during the Second World War and incorporate into the United Nations Charter.

AMERICAN ANTI-COLONIALISM DURING WORLD WAR II As with Wilson, the Roosevelt administration opposed European imperialism on both moral and pragmatic grounds. Colonial systems denied people the right to determine their own destinies through democratic self-government. At a minimum, the imperial powers ought to prepare colonial populations for independence. On numerous occasions during World War II, FDR and other senior U.S. officials made clear American ideological distaste for colonialism. Early in the war, the President explained to Churchill the deep roots of U.S. antipathy toward the British Empire: “It’s in the American tradition, this distrust, this dislike and even hatred of Britain—the Revolution, you know, and 1812; and India and the Boer War and all that. . . . [A]s a people, as a country, we’re opposed to imperialism—we can’t stomach it.22 In November 1943, FDR stated flatly (and somewhat hypocritically, as Churchill no doubt knew) that Americans lacked imperialistic urges, whereas the British, with “400 years of acquisitive instinct in your blood . . . just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land if they can get it.” However, “A new period has opened up in the world’s history, and you will have to adjust to it.”23 The oppression of the colonial system, which “brutally exploited the native population and at the same time created the seeds for future wars,” appalled Roosevelt. Stopping in the tiny British colony of the Gambia

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en route to Casablanca in 1942, he found the inhabitants being “treated worse than livestock.”24 In February 1944, the President told a group of black American publishers, “[It’s] the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life. . . . The natives are five thousand years back of us. . . . The British have been there for two hundred years—for every dollar that the British have put into Gambia, they have taken out ten. It’s just plain exploitation.”25 FDR contrasted European imperialism with America’s own “Good Neighbor” policy. Though obviously dominant in its hemisphere, the United States conducted inter-American relations on the basis of equal treatment and mutual respect. At a more practical level, Roosevelt and his senior advisers supported colonial self-determination as a source of international stability and a vehicle to achieve mundane U.S. foreign policy objectives. Indeed, the President perceived colonialism as a greater danger to postwar peace than communism, since the former tended to fuel great power rivalry and stimulate nationalist revolution. Anticipating “tremendous changes” ahead as new nations in Asia and Africa struggled for independence, he reasoned that once imperialism began to unravel, the process would be unstoppable.26 America’s challenge was to use its power and prestige to ensure that decolonization advanced the cause of an open world. FDR recognized as well that the emancipation of the European overseas territories could further broader U.S. foreign policy objectives. Decolonization would eliminate imperial rivalry as a main cause of international conflict, facilitate a growth of world trade from which all could prosper, and permit a dramatic expansion of American commercial interests and strategic position overseas.

THE ATLANTIC CHARTER Though not appreciated at the time, the most incendiary war aim outlined in the Atlantic Charter was Article 3. It championed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and expressed the “wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been deprived of them.” From the outset, Washington interpreted this principle expansively, as implying the liberation of all dependent peoples. As Roosevelt told Churchill in August 1941, “I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”27 Besides embodying deeply held American ideals, FDR’s stance reflected the domestic political current in the United States, where public opinion would not support joining the war merely to protect the traditional empires against their newer Axis competitors.

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Even before U.S. entry into the war, Roosevelt pushed the British to commit to self-government for India, their most important colonial possession. FDR warned that the United States “could not and would not underwrite colonialism or undertake to defend imperialism as against movements in various places—like India—for independence.”28 The British resisted, insisting publicly that the vaguely worded Newfoundland communiqué applied only to the victims of Axis aggression. As of September 9, 1941, Churchill declared the Charter irrelevant to the Empire, and specifically India and Burma. The British War Cabinet reinforced this view, saying, “The Atlantic Charter . . . was directed to the nations of Europe whom we hoped to free from Nazi tyranny, and was not intended to deal with the internal affairs of the British Empire, or with relations between the United States, and, for example, the Philippines.”29 As London noted, the doctrine of self-determination could indeed apply to America’s own colonial possession. But this did not trouble Washington, which had long endorsed Philippine independence.30 This restrictive British interpretation became less tenable in December 1941, when Japan launched surprise attacks against Pearl Harbor and the European empires in Southeast Asia. In addition to drawing anti-colonial America into the war, Japanese aggression forced the delicate question of the postwar disposition of Britain’s overseas territories. Could London expect the dependent peoples in its empire to resist the Japanese yoke without promising them eventual emancipation? By January 1942, India had joined twenty-three other countries and territories in the Declaration of the United Nations, which committed signatories to the Atlantic Charter. Did those principles apply to India itself? As far as the Roosevelt administration was concerned, the parlous military situation in winter 1942 made it even more important for the allies to live up to these principles. One by one, the American, British, French, and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia fell before the Japanese onslaught, destroying the aura of white invincibility and sending shock waves through the colonial world. Britain quickly lost Hong Kong and Malaya, and on February 15, in a colossal blow to British prestige, the supposedly impregnable bastion of Singapore surrendered. Three weeks later, Burma fell, bringing Japanese troops to the frontiers of India. As these woes multiplied, U.S. observers became increasingly convinced that the old imperial order was doomed. What is more, unreconstructed imperialism would alienate Asian populations from the West, undermining the overall war effort. Responding to the fall of Singapore, Walter Lippmann called on the United States and its allies to chart a new course in Asia: The Western nations must now do what hitherto they lacked the will and the imagination to do: they must identify their cause with the freedom and

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security of the peoples of the East, putting away the “white man’s burden” and purging themselves of the taint of an obsolete and obviously unworkable white man’s imperialism. In this drastic reorientation of war policy, the leadership of the Western nations must be taken by the United States.31

Roosevelt and senior aides shared this assessment. The Atlantic Charter’s principles applied “to all humanity,” FDR told the American people on February 25, 1942.32 Undersecretary Welles underscored this point. “Our victory must bring in its train the liberation of all peoples. . . . The age of imperialism is ended.” Henceforth the international system would be predicated on the “sovereign equality of peoples,” without regard to their “race, creed, or color.”33 In late August 1942, Hull advised Lord Halifax, London’s British ambassador in Washington, of the U.S. desire to universalize the Atlantic Charter. He opined that Britain would face constant problems if it compartmentalized the Charter’s principles only outside the Empire.34 Writing to his superiors in the Foreign Office, Halifax remarked on the divergent U.S. and British policy approaches: Whereas “[W]e are accustomed to proceed from the particular to the general, but the Americans do just the opposite.”35 As FDR had hoped, colonial nationalists around the world came to see the Atlantic Charter as a promise of liberation—but this was only the beginning of the President’s anti-imperial activism. In press conferences, he repeatedly chastised the metropolitan powers for blocking progress toward national independence, reiterating that the Charter “applied to the whole world.” During 1942–1943, the President visited several colonial territories and encouraged nationalist leaders, both in person and through emissaries, to believe that a restoration of peace would herald their prompt emancipation.36 To prevent a postwar restoration of the imperial status quo, he reaffirmed his pledge to liberate the Philippines, pressed the British to liberalize their rule in India, and maneuvered to block Dutch and French efforts to return to Southeast Asia. At the level of public diplomacy, the Office of War Information publicized the U.S. commitment to decolonization. These gestures helped fuel nationalist movements worldwide.37 Wendell Willkie’s sensational global tour in autumn 1942 also gave anticolonialist sentiment a boost. Liberty was on the march throughout the developing world, he reported, warning that the current global goodwill toward America would evaporate if nationalist aspirations went unrequited. The war “must mean an end to the empire of nations over other nations.” The United States could accelerate this goal by sponsoring a Pacific or World Charter, and by challenging the imperial powers to offer “firm timetables” for independence and accept international supervision in the

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interim. Willkie’s proposals brought an angry response from Churchill, who exclaimed that he had not become the King’s First Minister “to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”38

INDIA AND ANGLO-AMERICAN TENSIONS During 1942, American anti-colonialism focused increasingly on India, already convulsed in turmoil. By far the most populous colony, India had a vigorous nationalist movement. In 1935, the British government had tried to mollify Indian nationalists by promising to grant the colony dominion status at an unspecified future date. But a new crisis erupted in 1941 when the British Viceroy declared India an active belligerent on the Allied side. In return for participating in the anti-fascist struggle, India’s Congress Party demanded immediate independence—something Churchill categorically rejected.39 The Indian situation presented a dilemma for the United States, torn between its cherished ideal of self-determination and its interest in allied unity. On the one hand, Britain’s failure to liberalize its rule in India or clearly signal the inevitability of self-government imposed risks on the United States and the war effort overall. Besides undermining public support in India for the war, London’s stubborn attachment to imperialism threatened to tar the United States, as London’s ally, with the colonial brush—not to mention playing into the hands of propagandists in Tokyo who claimed to be liberating “Asia for the Asians.” As Hull recounts, “we . . . felt that our own position among the Asiatic people would be adversely affected by a belief on their part that we were helping Great Britain maintain her imperial policy in the Orient.” And yet U.S. officials could not apply too much pressure on “the British to grant independence” or go too far in “encourage[ing] the Indians to demand it immediately.”40 Washington thus kept discussions with Britain on an informal basis and restricted itself to general public statements in support of self-government, without mentioning India specifically. As the European colonies toppled like dominoes to Japan in winter 1942, Washington feared India’s imminent collapse from unrest or invasion—a potential strategic disaster of the first order, given the colony’s critical role as a source of raw materials and a base for allied military operations from the Middle East to the Pacific. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a resolution advising Britain to increase autonomy. Hoping to salvage the tense situation, FDR wrote Churchill on March 10, 1942, gently recommending concessions to the Indian National Congress, including the immediate formation of a “temporary Dominion government” as a first step toward independence. As a historical precedent for such a possible interim arrangement, the President cited America’s own

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Articles of Confederation (“an obvious stop-gap government”).41 Still, FDR pledged not to interfere with British decisions in India. Churchill dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps to explore a negotiated settlement with Congress Party leaders, on the basis of postwar self-government. Roosevelt himself sent Louis Johnson, a former Assistant Secretary of War, to Delhi as his special representative to observe and assist this process. The Cripps Mission marked the closest that London and Indian leaders ever came to a wartime settlement. Interpreting his mandate liberally, Cripps made progress with Nehru and other Congress leaders. Johnson, too, became deeply involved, ultimately helping to broker a potential compromise that would have guaranteed postwar dominion status for India as well as expanded Indian participation in wartime decision making. This opening closed, however, when Churchill instructed the Viceroy to reject the emerging bargain. The failure of the Cripps Mission prompted Gandhi in August 1942 to launch the “Quit India” campaign, which led to the jailing of many of the Congress Party’s most important leaders. 42 The Cripps Mission might have succeeded had FDR intervened forcefully at this critical juncture. Still, Roosevelt did not hide his displeasure, telling Churchill bluntly: “The feeling here [in Washington] is almost universally held that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British to concede to the Indians on the right of self-government.” Anticipating India’s possible fall to the Japanese, the President warned the Prime Minister “that the prejudicial reaction on American public opinion can hardly be overestimated.”43 Enraged, Churchill responded that he would prefer to resign than to compromise on India. Privately, he thought “the President’s mind was back on the American War of Independence . . . [imagining] the India problem in terms of thirteen colonies fighting George III.”44 Facing British intransigence, FDR backed down from assertive pressure on India, refraining from anything more than vague statements about the merits of a liberal attitude. In winter 1943, William Phillips replaced Johnson as Roosevelt’s personal representative to India, and continued in vain through April to mediate a settlement. “The peoples of Asia cynically regard this war as one between fascists and imperial powers,” he informed Washington. “A generous British gesture to India would change this undesirable political atmosphere.”45 As the editors of Life magazine wrote in an Open Letter to the People of England, “One thing we [Americans] are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together.”46

THE FRENCH EMPIRE AT BAY The British Empire was not the only target of American anti-colonial sentiment. As the war proceeded, the French empire became more of a U.S.

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preoccupation, and a strident—even personal—concern of Roosevelt’s. FDR’s son, Elliot, quotes his father as saying, “When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions or that will aid and abet the empire in its imperial ambitions.”47 France was certainly in a vulnerable position, divided between rival governments and powerless to protect its empire. After France succumbed to the Nazis in June 1940, its overseas territories became a subject of competition between the Vichy regime and the London-based French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. Washington maintained an ambiguous relationship with Vichy even after U.S. entry into World War II, and refused to recognize the CFLN as the legitimate government of France until October 1944. Washington’s apparent determination to create a new world order troubled de Gaulle, who styled himself as France incarnate. In particular, he feared America’s evident desire to liquidate the French empire. To the general, A kind of messianic impulse now swelled the American spirit and oriented it toward vast undertakings. The United States, delighted in her resources, feeling that she no longer had within herself sufficient scope for her energies, wishing to help those who were in misery or bondage the world over, yielded in her turn to that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself.48

For his part, Roosevelt saw the United States (rather than de Gaulle’s CFLN) as the caretaker of France and its empire. In Casablanca in January 1943, the President likened France to “a little child” unable to provide for itself, explaining to de Gaulle that “in such a case a court would appoint a trustee.”49 FDR’s many public statements supporting self-determination raised hopes of emancipation in French North Africa.50 Privately, the President encouraged the Sultan of Morocco to expect U.S. support in expelling the French. He also chided his envoy, Robert Murphy, for giving the French assurances about the return of their colonial possessions.51 Still, at heart, American anti-colonialism remained evolutionary rather than revolutionary. U.S. officials believed imperialism to be doomed but considered most dependent peoples unprepared for immediate self-rule. As Hull explained in November 1942, the United States “earnestly favors freedom for all dependent peoples at the earliest date practicable.”52 The precipitous transfer of power to nationalists, especially “radicals,” could prove worse than unreconstructed imperialism by jeopardizing regional order and possibly endangering world peace. Some colonies, like India, could handle independence early. Others, including most in sub-Saharan

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Africa, might require several decades of preparation. Accordingly, the United States envisioned an apprenticeship “long or short depending on the state of development of respective colonial peoples.” Not surprisingly, Hull considered the U.S. record in the Philippines as “a perfect example of how a nation should treat a colony or a dependency . . . to make all necessary preparation for freedom.”53 FDR agreed, telling the U.S. public in a November 15, 1942, radio address, “The history of the Philippine islands in the last 44 years provides in a very real sense a pattern for the future of other small nations and peoples of the world . . . a pattern of global civilization which recognizes no limitations of religion, or of creed, or of race.”54

THE CONCEPT OF TRUSTEESHIP Given their abysmal track record under the League of Nations’ Mandate System, however, the Europeans could hardly be trusted to nurture their colonies toward self-rule. Without accountability to international standards and supervision, they would obstruct and delay independence indefinitely. Roosevelt proposed the concept of “trusteeship” to facilitate the transition to a post-colonial order. He envisioned an international regime of benign tutelage, in which an established power would assume protective custody for each dependent people, safeguarding their welfare, fostering their economic and political development, and preparing them to assume the obligations of full independence. But whereas the mandate system had vested complete authority in the hands of the administering powers, trusteeship would involve rigorous oversight. Each trustee would discharge its duties under the watchful eye of the United Nations. The President first raised these ideas in conversations with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in spring 1942. He proposed to replace the old mandate system with a temporary system of international trusteeships. The appropriate scope of this system became a topic of debate both in Washington and among the United States and its allies. Early on, Roosevelt determined that the scheme should extend beyond former Mandates and territories detached from the Axis to encompass (at least in some fashion) all colonies. Indeed, certain strategic British and French colonies such as Malaya and Indochina might come under international control. Such a universal system of supervision would hold metropolitan powers accountable for preparing their dependent peoples for eventual independence.55 In summer 1942 the State Department began to draft a Declaration on National Independence for submission to the United Nations. The document would commit the imperial powers to enhance colonial capacities for self-government, open their possessions to foreign

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commerce on a non-discriminatory basis, and establish precise timetables for the emancipation of dependent peoples. During autumn 1942, the Political Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on Foreign Policy continued to debate whether trusteeship should cover all dependent territories, including formal colonies, or simply former mandates and territories seized from enemy states. An early, sweeping draft advocated placing all dependencies under the trusteeship umbrella. Anticipating strenuous European resistance to this, Hull advised FDR in November to restrict the scope to mandates and ex-Axis colonies. Other colonial powers would simply be asked to commit to international supervision of their activities and eventual independence for their colonies. The final draft of the Declaration on National Independence that the State Department conveyed to Roosevelt in March 1943 included this distinction. This document envisioned a new International Trusteeship Administration (as an essential component of a postwar international security organization), with authority over former Axis colonies and League Mandates. The draft also included an explicit obligation from the metropolitan powers to prepare their remaining colonies for eventual independence.56 It enumerated five specific responsibilities: providing dependent peoples with protection as well as moral and material support for their political, economic, social, and educational advancement; giving qualified local persons positions within the colonial administration; granting progressive self-government to dependent territories; fixing specific dates for full independence; and permitting the development and exploitation of the colonies’ natural resources in the interest of the inhabitants themselves and the wider world.57 Despite Roosevelt’s later concessions on timetables for independence and the scope of trusteeship, he sought until his death a declaration on national independence as part of the UN Charter. He believed such a statement would compel the imperial powers to accept routine international inspections, accept the ultimate goal of independence, and take concrete steps to foster colonial security, welfare, and local self-government. The President hoped “the draft declaration . . . would be a powerful means of inducing colonial powers to develop their colonies for the good of the dependent peoples themselves and of the world.58 Roosevelt recognized the United States could not dismantle the entire colonial edifice overnight, but he expected the announcement of independence for India, the U.S. example in the Philippines, and trusteeship for Indochina to begin the slow yet inevitable process of decolonization. Like the rest of America’s multilateral vision, trusteeship signified a confluence of high-minded principles and narrower calculations. As Welles explained in March 1943, “These [colonial] peoples have not yet

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reached the stage of development at which they can make decisions for themselves. The whole purpose of the trusteeship program is to help these people to make their choice.” In the same breath he stressed that “This project is motivated not by altruism or idealism but solely by considerations of security,” noting, “the two objectives can be obtained at the same time.”59 Indeed, American officials believed that failure to address the legitimate aspirations of dependent peoples would severely undermine U.S. national security. Acknowledging the peoples around the world “clamoring for freedom from the colonial powers,” Welles compared the absence of a legitimate, timely decolonization process to “failing to install a safety valve and then waiting for the boiler to blow up.”60

THE FUTURE OF ASIA As the war in the Pacific progressed, the Roosevelt Administration increasingly worried about the future of Southeast Asia. Japan’s wartime conquests there had broken white colonial rule, from Britain in Burma, Malaya, North Borneo, and Singapore to France in Indochina, the Netherlands in Indonesia, and the United States in the Philippines. Most U.S. policymakers saw the writing on the wall: the old imperial order was over. “We could not help believing,” Hull recalls, “that the indefinite continuance of the British, Dutch, and French possessions in the Orient in a state of dependence provided a number of foci for future trouble and perhaps war.”61 Attempts to restore the prewar status quo rather than address nationalist aspirations risked embroiling the West in complex, costly, and intractable colonial conflicts, damaging America’s reputation in the eyes of Asian peoples. American diplomats in China warned that U.S. prestige would suffer if it were implicated in the reassertion of European empire. U.S. citizens, moreover, would wonder, “Why should American boys die to recreate the colonial empires of the British . . . Dutch and French?”62 In Chunking, the U.S. military representative, General Hurley, bluntly informed representatives of the “imperialist governments” of his personal opposition to imperialism. “I have remarked to them that the United States is committed to the proposition that governments should derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”63 The United States had pledged in 1934 to emancipate its own colony, the Philippines, by July 4, 1946. During the war, U.S. officials reaffirmed their intention to honor that commitment and continually invoked the Philippine model as one the European imperial powers should emulate. And yet U.S. officials feared granting immediate independence to unprepared colonial populations because of the potential social turmoil and regional upheaval. Trusteeship offered a promising middle course

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between unreconstructed imperialism and precipitous decolonization. The challenge, as Washington saw it, “was to induce the colonial powers—principally Britain, France, and the Netherlands—to adopt our ideas with regard to dependent peoples.”64 For Roosevelt, the French colony of Indochina epitomized all that was wrong with the colonial system. The venality of French imperialism disgusted FDR, who complained to Halifax that France had “milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”65 Welles agreed about the “great moral question involved here” that would “shape and color the world after this war is over.”66 To prevent a restoration of the status quo ante, U.S. officials pressed the Free French to permit independence for Indochina and rebuffed de Gaulle’s repeated requests for a Free French role in the Pacific theater. Washington’s sensitivity to rising Asian nationalism led FDR to designate China as one of his four postwar “policemen.” He had no illusions about China’s relative power or internal stability but sought its participation for political and strategic reasons. A prominent Chinese role would prevent the postwar structure of peace from appearing as a white man’s club, maintain momentum towards decolonization, and help provide regional stability after Japan’s defeat. Thus, in private conversations with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo during November 1943, Roosevelt suggested that China might serve as Indochina’s postwar trustee and that Hong Kong might become a free port. Churchill certainly anticipated the threat China would pose to the colonial system as a full member of great power councils, serving as “a faggot-vote on the side of the United States in any attempt to liquidate the British Overseas Empire.”67 Yet the Sino-American consensus should not be exaggerated. The Koumintang government was skeptical of trusteeship and advocated immediate independence for European colonies in Asia—something U.S. officials rejected as precipitous because it threatened to create a Chinese sphere of influence in the region. Asian specialists within the State Department asserted that with the legitimacy of imperial rule destroyed by the war, the United States enjoyed great prestige in the region by virtue of its anticolonial stance. China expert John Patton Davies warned against “align[ing] ourselves in an Anglo-American bloc which would place us in opposition to the rise of nationalism in Asia.”68 State’s Office of Far Eastern Affairs argued that the return of the European powers to Southeast Asia should occur only if they pledged themselves to eventual colonial independence and an economic open door. A memorandum for the President on September 8, 1944, from the Division of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs, called for “early, dramatic, and concerted announcements by the nations concerned making definite commitments as to the future of the regions of

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Southeast Asia.” Ideally, such announcements should include “specific dates” for the extension of “independence or complete (dominion) selfgovernment,” “specific steps . . . to develop native capacity for self-rule,” and “a pledge of economic autonomy and equality of economic treatment toward other nations.” It recommended that in the meantime the imperial powers establish a regional UN commission for the area and make “a formal declaration of trusteeship under an international organization for the period of tutelage.” In contrast, any effort by the Western powers to restore the status quo ante “will almost surely lead to serious social and political conflict, and may lead to ultimate unifying of oriental opposition to the west.”69 Roosevelt approved of the proposed strategy.

RESISTANCE FROM BRITAIN AND FRANCE FDR and senior U.S. diplomats indisputably opposed colonialism on principled grounds, but American policy by the end of the war fell short of the ambitious schemes for a postcolonial world that Washington had drafted during 1942–1944. The United States gradually adopted a more conservative position on trusteeship, moderating its anti-colonialism for two strategic considerations. First, the administration wished to avoid alienating America’s European allies, whose support it needed to ensure a successful end to the war and a smooth transition to peace. Second, U.S. foreign policymakers faced growing pressure from the defense establishment to secure unilateral control over strategically significant islands in the Pacific. The European governments regarded American anti-colonialism as a dangerous mixture of naïve idealism and cynical self-interest. In their view, U.S. officials exuded an innocent confidence that the American model of political self-determination and liberal democracy would transfer easily to ethnically divided and politically immature societies in the developing world. Europeans could also not help but notice that Washington’s principled plans for a post-colonial order would serve more mundane American ends by opening new territories to U.S. political influence, strategic position, and commercial penetration. The British remained unalterably opposed to a joint statement endorsing the Declaration of National Independence. London flatly rejected the principles of binding international accountability and eventual independence for its colonies. British officials could countenance a gradual transition to “self-government,” but “the dissolution of the British Empire and the substitution for it of a multiplicity of national sovereignties” was another matter.70 Meeting with Roosevelt in March 1943, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden announced London’s opposition and sought to

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weaken U.S. attachment to the declaration by suggesting slyly that the United States itself might have interest in annexing some of the former Japanese mandates it was conquering in the Pacific. But FDR eluded the trap, insisting the islands come under international trusteeship.71 Given transatlantic differences over colonial independence, Welles concluded that at best perhaps “the administration of the colonies will be kept in harmony with the principles of trusteeship by the pressure of international public opinion.”72 The British again refused to budge at the Quebec Conference in August. As Eden explained, the word “independence” was fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of the British Empire, which recognized only dominion or colonial status. Seeking to bridge Anglo-American differences, Hull reassured Eden that Washington did not envision the emancipation of Britain’s colonies “as separate entities” “tomorrow or next week,” but the Secretary’s efforts were in vain.73 By summer 1943, London concluded that a joint Anglo-American position was impossible, given its uncompromising opposition to international supervision, to the goal of “independence,” and to timetables for its realization.74 Undeterred, FDR continued to construct more elaborate schemes for trusteeship. At the December summit of the Big Three in Teheran, he suggested that all colonial territories of strategic value be placed within the trusteeship system. Stalin readily agreed, but the proposal alarmed Churchill, who perceived it as a threat to British possessions like Malta and Gibraltar. “Nothing would be taken from England without a war,” he vowed.75 Early in 1944, Roosevelt conceived a system of international ports, strategic bases, and regular international inspections for colonies like Morocco or the Gambia. He told the Pacific War Council that Korea should fall under trusteeship for forty years and that the United States might act as a “police agent” in the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands. 76 As an allied victory crept toward inevitability, Britain’s determination to protect the integrity of its empire grew fiercer. London could concede the possibility of “self-government within the Empire,” but would absolutely not conceive of “eventual independence for her colonies.”77 Churchill’s unequivocal opinion was that trusteeship imperiled Britain’s national interests and must be staunchly resisted. “There must be no question of our being hustled or seduced into declarations affecting British sovereignty in any of the Dominions or Colonies. . . . ‘Hands off the British Empire’ is our maxim, and it must not be weakened or smirched to please sob-stuff merchants at home or foreigners of any hue.”78 British intransigence forced the United States to retreat at the Dumbarton Oaks conference. U.S. pre-conference documents make clear that Washington hoped to secure Big Four agreement on the creation of a Trusteeship Council within the United Nations to supervise not only the administra-

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tion of trust territories (including former League mandates and ex-Axis colonies), but also the preparation of colonial territories for independence. Fearful of international meddling in its imperial affairs, London demanded the removal of trusteeship from the conference agenda. The stillbirth of America’s “dependent peoples project, embraced within a plan for a trusteeship system to be set up under the United Nations organization,” deeply disappointed Hull.79 The U.S. clashed even more forcefully with France on the latter’s imperial territories. The British, at least, admitted the possibility of selfgovernment and dominion status for their possessions. The French, by contrast, regarded their empire as an indivisible entity based on the principles of “union” and “assimilation.” U.S. proposals for international trusteeship and accountability collided with France’s longstanding myth that the metropole and its colonies were indissolubly bound by principles transcending racial and ethnic heterogeneity.80 The disaster of 1940 had only increased the psychic importance of the empire as a symbol of France’s universal republican values, civilizing mission, and enduring great power status.81 Accordingly, despite their heavy dependence on the United States, the Free French used their meager resources to try to recover their imperial possessions and reassert metropolitan authority, offering only modest concessions to the aspirations of colonial nationalists. René Pleven, CFLN Colonial Commissioner, set the tone on January 3, 1944, when he declared that France’s overseas territories would enjoy “no other independence than that of France.”82 Strengthening the sinews connecting metropole to empire, however, required placing relations on a more progressive footing, granting internal liberties and responsibilities within a tight federal system. This attitude characterized the Brazzaville Conference of Colonial Governors (January 30–February 8, 1944), which proposed to reform economic and indigenous policies and the political and administrative organization of French Africa. Although historians now consider the gathering a milestone in the long process of decolonization, its organizers saw reform merely as a means to co-opt indigenous elites in a project advancing France’s imperial grandeur. Clinging to the principle of indivisibility, the conference explicitly rejected dominion status for France’s overseas territories, since “the aims of the work of civilization accomplished by France in her colonies rule out all idea of autonomy and all possibility of development outside of the French empire.” Accordingly, “the eventual constitution, even in the far-off future, of self-governments [sic] in the colonies is out of the question.”83 Ralph Bunche, the lone American diplomatic observer in Brazzaville, bemoaned the colonial governors’ tenacious attachment “to conventional French policy of integration and assimilation” and refusal to recognize

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“that France owed any accountability to the international community in the conduct of her colonial affairs.”84 A generation prior, the Brazzaville recommendations might have appeared forward-looking, but in the wake of war and privation and the rise of anti-colonial movements, they were anachronistic. De Gaulle cynically saw U.S. proposals for trusteeship as a subterfuge to advance U.S. political influence and commercial access in the developing world. Meeting with FDR in July 1944, the general discovered just “how close to his heart this monumental edifice was.” The President clearly anticipated “that the crowd of small nations would assault the position of the ‘colonialist’ powers and assure the United States of an enormous political and economic clientele.” De Gaulle cautioned Roosevelt that depriving France of its empire would impose a “psychology of the vanquished” upon the French, preventing them from playing a constructive role in the postwar order.85 In public, de Gaulle proclaimed that France “will recover intact all that belongs to her,” while promising that the old empire would yield to a more federal system.86 France’s liberation from German occupation soon permitted more vigorous French resistance to American anti-colonialism. During winter 1944–1945, French officials in Morocco complained to Paris of “the malevolence . . . and the bad faith with which [American propaganda] denigrates our colonial undertaking.”87 In January 1945, the Quai d’Orsay told Washington bluntly that French rule in Indochina, besides accommodating international law and benefitting the inhabitants, would be otherwise devoid of “international character.”88 Overseas territories would enjoy “satisfactory autonomy,” but—as Foreign Minister Georges Bidault declared angrily in March—“France would be her own trustee.”89 Perhaps inevitably, decolonization would cause more trauma for Paris than London. The British could look back with pride on their wartime triumph as a national vindication. Consequently, they had less psychological need to cling as tightly to empire after World War II. Things were more complicated for France. By contributing modestly to the allied victory, the empire helped sustain the Gaullist myth that France had merely lost a “battle” in 1940 and remained a great power in 1945. Moreover, as Jean Chauvel, Secretary General at the Quai, recalls, “We were still too weak in 1945, and too poor, to detach ourselves from signs of power and glory.”90 The atmosphere in post-liberation France precluded any magnanimity toward colonial aspirations. Finally, in contrast to the British imperial tradition, France’s colonial ideology depicted overseas territories as an organic part of the mother nation, so that “principled opposition to the universal values of French civilization was, by definition, impossible.”91 Accordingly, the French rejected commonwealth or dominion arrangements that threatened to loosen the bonds uniting the metropole

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and overseas territories. As a result, France engaged in ferocious wars to suppress nationalist rebellions in Algeria, Indochina, Madagascar, and elsewhere to keep its empire intact physically and psychologically.

GROWING U.S. SECURITY CONCERNS Even as U.S. officials pursued a post-colonial order, they remained mindful of America’s enhanced security needs in a world shrunk by modern technology. The advent of carrier-based air power and long-range bombers dramatically increased U.S. vulnerability to foreign threats. Moreover, the United States, as the world’s most powerful country, would assume great responsibility for preserving postwar peace. American defense officials reasoned that to defend its national security and underwrite global order, the United States would need an extensive network of naval bases, airfields, and other military installations from which it could conduct “defense in depth” and project offensive power against any aggressor.92 These strategic requirements generated stiff headwinds for Roosevelt’s trusteeship plans. During its long slog across the Pacific, the U.S. military occupied an increasing number of islands of potential strategic value as refueling stations, naval bases, airfields, and meteorological stations. These included Japanese colonies and mandates as well as former European possessions. But what to do with these territories, particularly those captured from Japan, after the war? As early as March 1942, Roosevelt publicly denied any desire by the United States to annex these Pacific islands and stated his preference that they fall under a system of international trusteeship. FDR’s trusteeship plans were unpopular within the U.S. military establishment. As Hull recalls, the administration “encountered resistance from our own War and Navy Departments, which felt that our ideas conflicted with their desire to acquire sovereignty of Japanese islands in the Pacific for use as United States bases.”93 For the remainder of the war, the President and the State Department confronted—and rebuffed—requests from American defense officials to annex pivotal islands in the central Pacific as part of an impregnable island chain. In March 1943, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox advised Congress that the country would require postwar air and naval bases on former Japanese mandates and current European possessions. He posited that leveraging U.S. aid, especially Lend-Lease, might help gain such concessions.94 Roosevelt intervened personally, instructing Knox not to approach the British on this matter. Rather than annex the former Japanese mandates, Roosevelt wanted to transform these territories into international bases under the authority of the United Nations. He believed such an arrangement would satisfy both

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U.S. anti-colonial objectives and national security needs. The UN solution would avoid diluting the trusteeship idea and maintain momentum for a post-colonial order. It was, frankly, the only approach to postwar security in the Pacific likely to garner support from a liberal-minded American public. The arrangement, moreover, would serve U.S. interests by allowing the United States to exercise effective control of the island territories under UN auspices. Having reached an agreement with Stalin and Chiang (though not with Churchill) that “the policing of the Western Pacific and, therefore, the necessary air and naval bases should be taken over by those powers capable of exercising effective military control,” the United States would inevitably assume control of the former Japanese mandates on behalf of the envisioned international security organization.95 As American military power swelled in the twilight of the war, the U.S. Joint Chiefs continued to press for the construction of a far-flung global network of bases and air transit and landing rights. They justified these acquisitions by invoking America’s inevitable role as the guarantor of postwar peace.96 In early 1944, Admiral Leahy told Hull that the Japanese islands should remain under sole U.S. control, since “their conquest is being effected by the forces of the United States.” Leahy saw “no valid reason why their future should be the subject of discussion with any other nation.”97 At the start of the Dumbarton Oaks conference, George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, wrote to Hull, recommending that the United States and the Soviet Union mutually recognize each other’s “dominan[ce] in their respective areas.” Hull rejected this proposition to avoid setting a precedent for Russian behavior in Eastern and Central Europe. He knew “Russia would not oppose our outright acquisition of these islands,” but also foresaw “that Russia would thereupon use this acquisition as an example and precedent for similar acquisitions by herself.” Hoping to shape Soviet behavior by example, Hull insisted on no exception to the principle that former Axis colonies be placed under trusteeship.98 Nevertheless, as the war wound down, European resistance and U.S. strategic calculations combined to wear down America’s demands on its imperial allies. Only former League Mandates, colonies detached from enemy states during the war, and any territories that the imperial powers voluntarily chose would fall under UN trusteeship authority. In the end, Roosevelt rejected the State Department’s recommendation that the United States formally request from the imperial powers precise timetables for emancipating their colonies. This retreat was manifest at the Yalta summit of February 1945. When Secretary of State Stettinius mentioned the word “trusteeship,” Churchill leapt to interject. “I will not have one scrap of British territory flung into that area. After we have done our best to fight in this war and have done

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no crime to anyone, I will have no suggestion that the British Empire is to be put in the dock and examined by everybody to see whether it is up to their standard.” Stettinius quickly backed down, assuring the Prime Minister: “The only thing contemplated as to territorial trusteeship is to provide in the charter of the world organization the right to create a trusteeship if it so desires to do so. . . . We have had nothing in mind with reference to the British Empire.”99 In fact, the United States had abandoned a longstanding element of Roosevelt’s postwar vision: the universal application of trusteeship to all colonial territories to ensure accountability for the treatment of their dependent peoples and the preparation for their eventual independence. The United States ultimately relented to French resistance as well. France’s determination to return to Indochina became urgent after March 9, 1945, when Japanese troops toppled the Vichy government in Saigon and installed the puppet Bao Dai, who immediately declared independence from French rule. Washington’s continued obstruction of French efforts to return to the colony infuriated de Gaulle. “What are you driving at?” he asked the U.S. ambassador to France. “Do you want us to become, for example, one of the federated states under the Russian aegis?” Linking the fate of the French empire to Communist forces in France, the general threatened, “We do not want to fall into the Russian orbit, but I hope you do not push us into it.”100 A month before his death, FDR reluctantly consented to France’s return to Indochina. Although the President worried that restoring European rule over Asia would create “1,100,000,000 potential enemies,” he understood that continuing to block France might cripple prospects for postwar Franco-American cooperation—a price he was not willing to pay. “If we can get the proper pledge from France to assume the obligations of a trustee,” he stated, “then I would agree to France retaining these colonies with the proviso that independence was the ultimate goal.” When pressed as to whether he would settle for a commitment to mere “self-government” or “dominion status” for Indochina, FDR replied no, “it must be independence.” Army Chief of Staff George Marshall instructed the U.S. Air Force to offer “token assistance” to French forces in Indochina retreating from the Japanese.101 Though determined to reassert their imperial rule, the French recognized the need to liberalize it. On March 24, 1945, de Gaulle announced the replacement of the French empire with a more federal “French Union,” whose inhabitants would receive rights equal to those of metropolitan citizens, as well as the creation of a new Indochinese Federation, which would enjoy “freedom in keeping with its stage of evolution and its capacities.”102 These significant concessions, however, failed to satisfy colonial nationalists, especially in Indochina, where the humiliation of Vichy forces had breached a psychological barrier among the local populace.

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Within the State Department, meanwhile, U.S. officials debated intensely in April–May 1945 about how to respond to the reassertion of European imperialism in Southeast Asia. European experts warned that coercing the imperial powers would jeopardize allied solidarity, imperil prospects for postwar European recovery, and permit the Soviet Union to exploit differences among the Western powers. Assistant Secretary of State James C. Dunn argued that the United States had “no right to dictate to France, nor to take away her territory.”103 On the other side the department’s Asian experts, led by Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew (a former U.S. ambassador to Japan) and Southeast Asian diplomatic officers, saw nationalism as an “inexorable” historical force.104 The United States must stand on its principles and demand firm timetables for independence from the imperial powers to avoid getting tarred by the colonial brush. The two camps eventually compromised: France could return to Indochina provided it gave adequate assurances about future self-rule and the economic Open Door. This solution neither conceded indefinite French rule nor required unconditional timetables for independence. By the end of spring 1945, Washington had reassured the British, French, and Dutch that the United States would not obstruct their reimposition of colonial rule in Asia.105 Ultimately, U.S. decision makers valued allied solidarity more than American principles. Washington needed British and French support to successfully conclude the war and establish a stable peace. “We could not alienate them in the Orient and expect to work with them in Europe,” Hull later explained.106 U.S. efforts to compel Britain and France to place their colonies in the new system of international trusteeship might catastrophically rupture transatlantic relations. Washington could not risk this in light of the multiplying indications of Soviet expansionism and subversion in Europe. An April 1945 report by the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA) argued that the United States should promote more liberal colonial rule in Asia to forestall revolution, but not “champion schemes of international trusteeship which may provoke unrest and result in colonial disintegration, and may at the same time alienate us from the European states whose help we need to balance Soviet power.”107 Achieving change while maintaining allied unity would require the United States circumspectly to persuade the imperial powers of the inevitability of independence. If the United States could not secure advance commitments on decolonization, it would try to delegitimize the norm of empire by getting the Europeans to accept a trusteeship formula. And yet the persistent demands of U.S. defense officials to enjoy special privileges on the Japanese islands complicated U.S. hopes of using trusteeship to advance decolonization. Stimson opposed any “quixotic gestures” on “the principle of trusteeship” that would jeopardize unilateral U.S.

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control over the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands, particularly since the British, Dutch, and French imperial powers would probably not reciprocate by ceding their own possessions.108 Breezily equating U.S. national security with global security, he insisted on America’s “absolute power to rule and fortify” the Pacific islands taken from Japan. “They are not colonies; they are outposts of great strategic significance, and their acquisition is appropriate under the general doctrine of self-defense by the power which guarantees the safety of that area of the world.”109 Nevertheless, FDR rejected the War Department’s pleas for outright annexation through the end of his life, including during his last press conference, on April 5, 1945. Truman diverged slightly from his predecessor in this policy debate. He sought a multilateral cloak that would permit complete postwar U.S. control over the islands without smacking of imperialism. Leo Pasvolsky solved this challenge by inventing within the UN Charter a new category of “strategic” trust territory that designated the United Nations as the guardian of the islands’ formal sovereignty, while giving the United States free rein politically and militarily. Moreover, the United States would answer not to the General Assembly but to the UN Security Council, where it could wield its veto to ward off any meddling. “If selfrighteousness is a hallmark of American policy,” one historian comments, “then in the trusteeship question it found its finest hour.”110

SHOWDOWN IN SAN FRANCISCO At San Francisco controversy erupted over the future of the colonial empires. Having long favored a declaration in the UN Charter that recognized the inherent right of all dependent peoples to eventual independence, the United States found itself trapped between the main anti-colonialist powers, the Soviet Union and China, on the one hand, and the chief imperial powers, Britain and France, on the other. The former insisted on “independence” as the explicit goal of the colonial enterprise, whereas the latter would concede no more than “self-government” as an ultimate objective.111 Emotions ran high. On May 3, French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault blew up over rumored U.S. plans to place Indochina under trusteeship. Startled by Bidault’s tirade, Dunn replied disingenuously, “No official policy of this Government . . . has ever questioned even by implication French sovereignty over Indo-China.”112 In extemporaneous comments, U.S. delegation member Harold Stassen allowed for the first time publicly that the term “self-government” would suffice for U.S. purposes, since it might lead to eventual independence. Although many U.S. officials considered this a betrayal of Roosevelt’s—and America’s—ideals, the Truman

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administration sided with the Europeans for fear that London and Paris might otherwise abandon the UN Charter.113 The final UN Charter reflected the U.S. retreat. Although Chapter 12 (Article 76) of the Charter set the goal of trusteeship as “the progressive development towards self-governance or independence” (emphasis added), this latter word was omitted from the Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories contained in Chapter 11 (Article 73). The Charter obliged colonial powers only “to ensure, with due respect for the culture of the peoples concerned, their political, social, and educational advancement, their just treatment, and their protection against abuses,” and “to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free institutions.” American officials hoped naively that, as territories became self-governing under Chapter 11, the colonial powers would transfer them to Chapter 12 and prepare them for independence. In the event, however, no administering power placed its dependent territories under trusteeship, meaning that the territorial scope of trusteeship did not exceed that of the Mandates System.114 Nevertheless, creation of the Trusteeship System, particularly against British and French opposition, represented a significant achievement, as it hastened the dissolution of the colonial empires. By establishing a progressive, intermediate status between perpetual dependency and immediate independence, the UN Charter effectively recognized the legitimacy of the colonial peoples’ aspirations for separate political independence. Colonization was no longer a purely domestic, internal issue, but an international matter in terms of imperial responsibility and indigenous development. The creation of the United Nations Organization enshrined national self-determination and sovereign equality as principles of international society, catalyzing the transformation of a world of empires into one of independent states. The trusteeship regime had more extensive provisions for international supervision and accountability than contained in its precursor, the Mandates System. The Charter’s drafters not only divided the new Trusteeship Council evenly between administering states (including the United States) and non-administering states, but made it accountable to the General Assembly, where anti-colonial countries—from Latin America, the Soviet Bloc, and newly independent former colonies— constituted a clear and growing majority. The United States ensured that Article 87 of the UN Charter directed the General Assembly (and under its authority, the Trusteeship Council) to accept and examine petitions submitted by the inhabitants of trust territories. This provision would later afford dependent peoples an extremely important international forum to advance their aspirations. The Charter included two signifi-

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cant mechanisms for international supervision. Article 87 provided for “periodic visits to the respective trust territories” for the international community to assess progress occurring under trusteeship. And Article 88 directed the administering authority to report annually to the General Assembly “on the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of each trust territory.” Yet administering states retained significant prerogatives to define and interpret the terms of trusteeship. For starters, the entire regime was voluntary. Article 75, which established the UN trusteeship system, placed “no obligation on states (including those administering mandates) to place their dependent territories under trusteeship.” Article 79 presented another huge loophole by granting the mandatory power a de facto veto over the terms of the trust. This seriously undermined the General Assembly’s ability to influence trusteeship, since the administering power could always threaten to withdraw its mandates from the new arrangement. The resulting trusteeship agreements tended to give administering powers the same sort of omnipotence that they had enjoyed over ordinary colonies, including “full powers of legislation and jurisdiction”—provided they accepted modest supervision and commercial openness. 115

STATE DEPARTMENT COMPROMISE ON COLONIAL POLICY Following months of intense internal debate, the State Department in late June 1945 developed a broad, somewhat equivocal colonial policy. It concluded that the United States could best pursue its interests in Europe and the Far East by working with the colonial powers. The document did acknowledge “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they shall live,” as well as the necessity of accommodating rising nationalism in Asia to ensure security and stability in that region. But it also recognized that premature U.S. demands for independence of subject peoples could destabilize the Asia-Pacific region, alienate allies, and undermine unity among the “major United Nations.” Accordingly, the policy of the United States should be to encourage colonial powers to help their dependencies “achieve a progressively larger measure of self-government.”116

CONCLUSION Predisposed by virtue of its political culture and national identity to advocate a world order based on the principle of self-determination, U.S. officials and citizens alike considered empire abhorrent to individual

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liberty. The anti-colonial worldview inspired by these values informed the Roosevelt Administration’s formulation and articulation of wartime policy toward the European imperial powers. Convinced of self-determination’s universal applicability, the American people and their elected representatives saw hypocrisy in fighting a war against fascist slavery while assisting the restoration of their allies’ colonial empires. Yet U.S. policymakers seldom paused to contemplate the difficulties of replicating their own historical experience in a world of demographically diverse empires and an age of ethno-nationalism. The United States had been anti-colonialist since its founding, so what explains the U.S. push to end the colonial era when it did? In short, the outbreak of World War II and the anti-Axis struggle. The Roosevelt administration embraced the following lesson from the 1930s slide into war: imperial competition for exclusive control over territory, people, and raw materials drove international conflict. Moreover, FDR foresaw that the rising tide of colonial nationalism would doom the imperial project. The war had destroyed the bases of imperial legitimacy, particularly in Asia, as subject peoples witnessed the prostration of their white masters to their Japanese neighbors. American officials could neither restrict the Atlantic Charter to the conquered peoples of Europe, nor hold back the nationalist tide sweeping the colonial world. Their only choice was to ride this wave and seek to channel it in moderate rather than radical directions. If this transition occurred in a controlled manner, the United States could look forward to commercial and strategic advantages from a new world of self-determining states, in the form of market access, political influence, and military bases. Accordingly, the Roosevelt Administration called on European imperial powers—who doubled as its wartime allies—to make explicit declarations of intent and specific timetables for the liberation of their subject peoples. Besides blunting Japanese propaganda, such steps would solicit contributions to the Allied war effort by the promise to colonial nationalists of their emancipation. American officials invented trusteeship as a vehicle for the multilateral supervision of the hoped-for global decolonization process. As originally conceived, trusteeship would apply not only to ex-Axis policies but to the entire colonial world and would expedite the rise of a new international order as dependent peoples gradually became capable of self-rule. And yet the reactions of other countries and competing objectives within the U.S. government forced modifications and abridgments of FDR’s vision. In the last year of the war, the Roosevelt Administration backed down from its ambitious aims on trusteeship to avoid breaking with Britain and France, which vehemently opposed any measures portending the loss of their colonial possessions. American defense officials

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also encouraged a dilution of trusteeship to secure Pacific islands for future U.S. military installations. By the end of the war, Washington had acquiesced to the return of the imperial powers to their former colonies and agreed to limit the scope of trusteeship to territories formerly under Axis control, League mandate, or those “voluntarily” placed under UN authority. Though a significant retreat from America’s maximalist vision of 1942–1943, these concessions were hardly an unconditional surrender of Atlantic Charter principles, because the U.S. efforts did succeed in changing global norms. By integrating into the UN Charter the new Trusteeship system and a Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories, the United States weakened the crumbling imperial edifice and hastened the advent of a new world order of independent, self-determining states. Thanks in large measure to U.S. wartime pronouncements and pressure on the metropolitan powers, the principle of self-determination became a cornerstone of international life by mid-century. Unfortunately, the United States would find its own historical experience of limited use in confronting the often-explosive force of revolutionary nationalism in the developing world. Soon after World War II, the Cold War would further test U.S. support for colonial self-determination, as the emerging imperatives of containment tore the United States between the desire to nurture an authentic anti-communist nationalism and the demands of its imperial allies whose support it needed to combat the growing Soviet menace in Europe and beyond.

NOTES 1. William Roger Louis, “American Anti-Colonialism and the Dissolution of the British Empire,” International Affairs 61, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 395–420, 397–9. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, 6 (1953): 1–15. 2. See Williams, Empire as a Way of Life; Lloyd Gardner, “Lost Empires.” 3. D. C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 226–28. 4. Particularly in view of the Platt Amendment (1903), qualifying Cuba’s sovereignty. 5. Wilson’s “Peace without Victory” speech, cited in Temperley, A History, 181. 6. Wilson, February 11, 1918, cited in Temperley, A History, 195. 7. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 15. 8. Cited in MacMillan, Paris 1919, 11. 9. Alfred A. Cobban, The Nation-State and National Self-Determination (London: Collins, 1969), 62. 10. Cobban, The Nation-State, 36.

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11. Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, 341–45. 12. Watt, Succeeding John Bull, 227–28. 13. Cited in Temperly, A History, 198–200. 14. Wilson, “Four Principles of a Permanent Peace,” February 11, 1918. 15. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 16. Cited in MacMillan, Paris, 1919, 12. 17. Some 35 percent of Czechoslovakia’s inhabitants were neither Czech nor Slovak; in Romania, 30 percent were not Romanian; in Poland, one-quarter were not Polish. The successor states were the focus of irredentist yearnings in mother countries like Hungary, which lost 67 percent of its area and nearly 60 percent of its population under the Treaty of Trianon. 18. Antony Polonsky, The Little Dictators: The History of Eastern Europe since 1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). 19. William Roger Louis, “The Era of the Mandates System and the Non-European World,” in The Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 201–213. Walter LaFeber, “The American View of Decolonization, 1776–1920: An Ironic Legacy,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pungong, 37. 20. Louis, “The Era of the Mandates System,” 204. Cited in Victor Pugong, “The United States and the Trusteeship System,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pugong, 87–88. Article 22(5) of the League Covenant explicitly called for mandatory powers to establish “equal opportunities for the trade and commerce of other Members of the League.” 21. In Paul Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period in World History’: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pugong, 66. 22. Cited in Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 324. 23. Cited in Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period,’” 63. 24. Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period,’” 72. 25. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 144. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 74. 26. FDR cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 61. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It. 27. Cited in Lloyd Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II to Dien Bien Phu, 1941–1954 (New York: W.W. Norton 1988), 27. 28. Attributed to FDR by Rexford Tugwell, in Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period,’” 69. 29. Cited in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 401. 30. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 pledged independence for the Philippines by 1946. 31. In Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 134. 32. FDR radio address, February 23, 1942, cited in Watt, Succeeding John Bull, 223. 33. Cited in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 154–55. Hull repeated these themes in a speech in two months later. “The War and Human Freedom,” Department of State Bulletin, 23 July 1942, 642. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1484–85 34. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1485.

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35. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 175–76. 36. Robert J. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–49 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 307. 37. Kimball, The Juggler, 127–33. 38. Willkie and Churchill cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 136. 39. Dennis Merrill, “The Ironies of History: The United States and the Decolonization of India,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pugong, 107–9. 40. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1482–83. 41. Cited in Kimball, Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence, I, 402–4. 42. Merrill, “The Ironies of History,” 112–13. 43. Kimball, Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence, 446–47. 44. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 327–28. 45. Phillips cited in Watt, Succeeding John Bull, 224. 46. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 112. 47. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (public), 114–16. 48. De Gaulle, The Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, Volume I: Unity 1942–1944, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 79–80. 49. Conversation on January 22, 1943; cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 67. 50. Juliette Bessis, L’Opposition France-États-Unis au Maghreb de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale jusqu’à l’Indépendence des Protectorats 1941–1956’, in Les Chemins de la Décolonisation de l’Empire Français (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1986), p. 344. 51. FRUS 1943, 694–96, 505–14. Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 168–69. 52. Italics added. Hull to London Embassy, November 20, 1942, FRUS 1943, I, 746. 53. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1599, 1601. 54. FDR radio address of February 15, 1942. 55. Christopher Thorne, “Indochina and Anglo-American Relations, 1942– 1945,” Pacific Historical Review 45 (1976), 92. 56. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, 62. 57. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1234–35. 58. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1305. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 429. 59. Welles, in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 237. 60. Welles, April 10, 1943, cited in Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 25. 61. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1601. 62. John Patton Davies, advisor to General Stillwell, to Secretary of State, in Thorne, 76. 63. Cited in D. C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull, 224. 64. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1599. 65. January 24, 1944, FRUS 1944 III, 773. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull,1595– 97. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 27, 38. 66. Welles, in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 164. 67. In LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina,“ 1281.

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68. In McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, 69. 69. “Memorandum for the President” from Abbot Low Moffatt, September 8, 1944, FRUS 1944, 2nd Quebec Conference, 261–63. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1600–1. 70. Cited in Victor Pungong, “The United States and the International Trusteeship System,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pungong, 243. 71. Kimball, The Juggler, p. 138. 72. Welles, March 1943, cited in Thorne, “Indochina and Anglo-American Relations,” 92. 73. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1237–38. 74. Kimball, The Juggler, 140. 75. Tehran Conference: Tripartite Dinner Meeting, November 29, 1943, Documents on the Grand Alliance, 1942–1943 . 76. Pungong, “The United States and the International Trusteeship System,” 90. 77. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1599. 78. Churchill to Eden, cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 148–49. 79. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1599. 80. D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 2, 70. Raymond F. Betts, France and Decolonisation 1900–1960 (London: MacMillan, 1991), 5–17. 81. John E. Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur: The Ambivalence of French Foreign Policy Toward the Far East, 1919–1945 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991), 218–251. 82. Bessis, L’Opposition France—États-Unis au Maghreb,“ 344. 83. Paul-Marie de la Gorce, L’Empire Écartelé 1936–1946 (Paris: Denoel, 1988), 476–9. 84. Cited in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 45–46. Betts, France and Decolonisation, 61. 85. De Gaulle, Memoirs. II: Unity, 199. 86. Washington press conference, July 10, 1944, cited in de la Gorce, L’Empire Écartelé, p. 424. Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 235. 87. “Les Activités Américaines au Maroc,” Quai note cited in Bessis, “L’Opposition France--États-Unis au Maghreb,” 345–46. 88. 20 January 1945, FRUS 1945, VI, 294–95. 89. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 46. 90. Jean Chauvel, Commentaire: “D’Alger `a Berne (1944–1952) (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 175. Dalloz, The War In Indochina 1945–1954, 74–75. 91. Christopher M. Andrew, “France: Adjustment to Change,” in The Expansion of International Society, ed. Bull and Watson, 339. Marshall, The French Colonial Myth, 100. 92. Melvyn Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948,” American Historical Review, 89, no. 2 (April 1984), 346–400. 93. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1599. 94. Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period,’” 73. 95. President’s comments to Pacific War Council on January 12, 1944, cited in Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period,’” 75–76.

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96. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 126. Melvyn Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security.” Norman Graebner, ed., The National Security, 9. 97. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 165. 98. Hull, Memoirs, 1466. FDR opposed annexation of former Japanese mandates “as contrary to the Atlantic Charter.” Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 448. 99. Cited in Kimball, The Juggler, 151. 100. U.S. Ambassador in France to Secretary, March 13, 1945, FRUS 1945, VI, 300. 101. Taussig memorandum of conversation, March 15, 1945, FRUS 1945, I, 124. March 24, 1945, FRUS 1945, VI, 302. 102. Declaration on Indochina, March 24, 1945. In Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 236–37. 103. Dunn to Joseph Grew, April 23, 1945. Cited in Thorne, “Indochina,” 94. 104. George Herring, “The Truman Administration and the Restoration of French Sovereignty in Indochina,” Diplomatic History 1 (Spring 1977), 102. 105. Robert J. McMahon, “Towards a Post-Colonial Order: Truman Administration Policies toward Southeast Asia,” in Michael J. Lacey, ed., The Truman Presidency, 342. 106. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1599. 107. Cited in Herring, “The Truman Administration,” 101. 108. Cited in The Forrestal Diaries, ed. by Walter Millis (New York: Viking, 1951), 37. 109. Cited in Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 483. Stimson also in FRUS 1945, I, 312–14. 110. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 115. “Recommended Policy on Trusteeships,” April 18, 1945, FRUS 1945, UN, 350–351. 111. Pungong, “The United States and the International Trusteeship System,” 94. 112. Steven P. Sapp, “The United States, France, and the Cold War: Jefferson Caffery and American-French Relations, 1944–1949” (doctoral dissertation), 160–62. May, 9, 1945, FRUS 1945, VI, 307. 113. The U.S. delegation rejected an impassioned plea from Australian Foreign Minister H. J. Byatt that trustreeship be applied to all colonial territories. 114. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 115–7. 115. Pungong, “The United States and the International Trusteeship System,” 96. 116. FRUS 1945, VI, 558, 565.

7 ✛

A Dream Deferred: Adapting Multilateralism to Containment

There are, in short, two worlds instead of one. —Charles Bohlen, August 30, 1947

B

y the summer of 1945 the United States had laid the normative and institutional foundations for a new world order based on the principles of liberal multilateralism, including collective security, open international trade and finance, and political self-determination. The architects of this vision took for granted that these separate pillars would be mutually reinforcing. They also assumed that the United States, by virtue of its unmatched power and inherent benevolence, had a unique role to play in promoting, sustaining, and protecting multilateral cooperation. An open, cooperative postwar world would best promote American ideals, ensure global peace and prosperity, and advance narrower U.S. interests. The Truman administration hoped for a rapid transition from the most destructive war the world had ever known to a smoothly functioning international order under multilateral institutions. In October 1945, shortly after Japan’s surrender, the President re-stated American support for a liberal multilateral world based on self-determination, democracy, freedom of the seas, equal access to trade and raw materials, freedom of expression and religion, and collective security.1 Later that month, Secretary of State James Byrnes delivered the same message: “We cannot have the kind of world cooperation necessary for peace in a world divided into spheres of excessive influence and privilege,” he declared. “Today the

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world must make its choice: There must be one world for all of us or there will be no world for any of us.”2 Over the next two years, however, America’s one-world hopes were dashed by the collapse of superpower relations, the deepening economic crisis in Europe, and the outbreak of radical nationalism in parts of the colonial world. The U.S. framers of the UN Charter had problematically— perhaps naively—presumed that the convergence of great power purposes would outlast World War II. Even more optimistically, they expected the Soviet Union, if given a stake in the postwar system, to behave consistently with Atlantic Charter principles. But the depth of the ideological clash and strategic competition between Washington and Moscow ruined the Security Council as a forum for great power concert. This disillusioning reality forced the United States to seek alternatives to universal collective security.3 Similarly, the threat of European economic collapse compelled an indefinite postponement of the open global commercial and monetary system that the United States (and, grudgingly, Britain) had designed at Bretton Woods and in wartime trade negotiations. Finally, an outburst of nationalist revolution in the developing world created excruciating dilemmas for the United States in the context of a deepening Cold War, as Washington struggled, often in vain, to balance solidarity with its allies against its support for self-determination. During the late 1940s, America’s best-laid wartime plans unraveled, leaving the United States with the unpalatable choice of either abandoning or modifying them to the challenging circumstances following World War II. The origins of Soviet-American antagonism and resulting bipolar strategic competition have been analyzed extensively. Scholars, however, have devoted minimal attention to tracing the impact of Washington’s “containment” policy on the vision of liberal multilateralism that it ostensibly replaced. The conventional wisdom, as expressed by Robert Pollard, remains that the Cold War derailed America’s pursuit of “a Wilsonian peace based on self-determination, collective security, and multilateralism.”4 Yet this widely held assessment ignores the resilience and deep roots of America’s liberal multilateralism. What is striking in the late 1940s is not how quickly policymakers discarded this vision but how much of it survived, albeit in circumscribed form. Even as its “One World” dreams vanished, Washington made multilateralism the central organizing principle for U.S. leadership of a narrower “Free World” coalition.5 The goal of containment was to consolidate a community of free states that could limit Soviet expansionism and ultimately force the USSR to wither, so that political-economic freedom could spread worldwide. In short, the United States adapted its multilateral ideals to the reality of a bifurcated world, shifting from universalist internationalism to consensual coalition-building.

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THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR Countless historians and political scientists have depicted the Cold War as a conventional and inevitable great power clash. The destruction of the Axis countries and the exhaustion of Britain and France inexorably drew the United States and the Soviet Union into power vacuums around the world, where their interests invariably collided, engendering insecurity and geopolitical rivalry—resulting unfortunately but unavoidably in superpower competition.6 The shortcoming of this interpretation lies in its simplistic, reductionist explanation of the U.S.-Soviet conflict as owing only to international power dynamics. This quintessentially realist analysis denies that domestic institutions, political ideologies, or national purposes played any significant role in shaping the nature and extent of the superpower confrontation. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., for example, writes that the Cold War “would have been quite as acute had the United States been, like the Soviet Union, a Marxist Communist state.”7 While this, superficially, may be correct, the impressive record of pacific relations among democracies raises doubt that such acute rivalry would have emerged had the Soviet Union, like the United States, been a capitalist democracy.8 Some have, in fact, made this argument, contending that “the logic behind containment . . . would have required American opposition to Soviet expansion even if the Soviet Union had abandoned communism for democracy.”9 Such reasoning rests on two flawed propositions: first, that a liberal Russia would have pursued unaccommodating expansionism; and, second, that the United States sought to contain only Soviet power rather than the Communist idea and the totalitarian political and economic institutions it implied. Neither of these assumptions stands up. In the words of French political philosopher Raymond Aron, “To conclude . . . that the rulers of a nonCommunist Russia would have [had] the same diplomatic policy . . . is simply absurd.”10 Nor can one ignore the anti-Communism at the heart of U.S. containment policy. At its core, the Cold War was a collision of two irreconcilable worldviews, one based on the principle of openness and the other on the principle of closure. The fact that the two states, which survived World War II with the most power, possessed fundamentally different and mutually exclusive ideologies transformed an otherwise manageable competition into a perilous global confrontation. Each side imputed unlimited objectives to its opponent, who, in turn, became an existential “threat.”11 The stakes in this quasi-religious war transcended territory, power, and wealth, touching on matters of national identity, the allegiance of human minds, and the survival of different ways of life. Prospects for durable Soviet-American cooperation foundered on divergent conceptions of legitimate international order.12 The main flashpoint

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was Moscow’s insistence on rigid control over the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. As noted in chapter 3, the Roosevelt administration opposed wartime agreements over spheres of influence that would run counter to the liberal principles of the Atlantic Charter and undermine domestic U.S. support for sustained global engagement. The Declaration on Liberated Europe bound the Allies to form interim governmental authorities in liberated and former Axis states “broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population” and to ensure “the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.”13 Moscow had no intention of permitting the peoples of East and Central Europe to exercise free will. Stalin made his position clear: “This war is not as in the past: Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his social system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”14 The slide towards a Cold War began with Moscow’s refusal to accept non-communist governments on its periphery and Truman’s opposition to closed, Axis-style blocs.15 Of course, U.S. opposition to spheres had its nuances. Washington intended to retain postwar privileges on certain Pacific islands as well as its historic, paramount position in the Caribbean and Central America— “our little region over here which has never bothered anybody,” in Henry Stimson’s words.16 But these were open areas rather than closed blocs. Latin American states had wide latitude to manage their own political affairs and engage in independent diplomatic, economic and cultural intercourse with other states. “Unlike the institution of marriage,” Byrnes observed, the Good Neighbor policy was “not an exclusive arrangement”—a crucial distinction in the eyes of U.S. officials, convinced that open spheres would have benign international effects.17 The Truman administration might have tolerated a Soviet veto over the foreign policies of buffer states (akin to the “silk glove hegemony” Moscow came to exercise over Finland18). But it would not accept “blatant monopolistic control” over the countries of East and Central Europe. Charles Bohlen predicted that U.S. concession on this principle could “only lead to increasing friction with the Western democracies and the eventual division . . . of the world into spheres of influence in the most undesirable and dangerous sense of that term.” Indeed, it “would in essence mean the abandonment of any world organization in the foreseeable future” and the transformation “of the world into an armed camp in preparation for the next world war.”19 Furthermore, deliberately carving up the world would run afoul of U.S. political culture. When fellow Sovietologist George Kennan ruminated about “divid[ing] Europe frankly into spheres of influence,” Bohlen objected: “Foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy.”20

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American postwar planners had thought the Soviet Union and the United States, despite their different political and economic systems, capable of cooperation within the new multilateral institutions developed at Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods. U.S. officials soon discovered that new structures and processes were not enough. Institutions could advance global peace and prosperity only if they reflected shared interests, principles, and values.21 The United States tried to co-opt Moscow, but the Kremlin had no interest in joining Washington’s open, rule-bound conception of international society, which it found deeply threatening. Moscow’s tightening grip on its neighbors revealed the fundamental divergence of American and Soviet international purposes and undermined prospects for postwar concert. Byrnes bemoaned the direction of Soviet policy in a secret memorandum on December 1, 1945. Moscow had deprived East Europeans of self-determination and imposed “an economic blackout” on the region through exclusive bilateral barter and trade agreements. He recommended the Truman Administration “stand firm” on “fundamental principles,” making it clear to Moscow “and, if necessary to the American public, that we cannot continue collaboration with the Soviet Union if it insists on making unilateral decisions and taking unilateral action in its dealings with other nations of the world.”22 Indeed, in the months after the war’s end, the administration came under increasing domestic pressure from Republican critics in Congress, who charged the President with insufficient vigilance in the face of Soviet expansionism. “Munich led to World War II,” declared Senator Taft. “Yalta, Potsdam, and [the Foreign Ministers’ summit in] Moscow may well lead to a war which may destroy civilization.”23 East-West relations continued deteriorating in early 1946. On February 9 Stalin delivered his “two camps” speech to the Soviet Party Congress, depicting U.S.-Soviet confrontation as inevitable, pending the ultimate triumph of Communism. Though dismayed by the message, American officials nevertheless welcomed the clarity on Moscow’s position. “Stalin’s speech constitutes the most important and authoritative guide to post-war Soviet policy,” H. Freeman Matthews cabled Byrnes and Assistant Secretary of State Acheson. “It should be required reading for everyone in the department.”24 Later that month U.S. diplomat George Kennan crystallized American anxieties and provided an intellectual rationale for a nascent strategy of “containment” in his “long telegram” from Moscow. Kennan located the sources of Soviet conduct in a combination of Marxist-Leninist dogmatism, instinctive Russian insecurity, and the internal dynamics of totalitarianism. Without any immediate prospect of changing Moscow’s worldview, the U.S. should respond to Soviet expansionism with a “firm and vigilant application of counterforce,” designed to strain the Soviet

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empire, alter Moscow’s understanding of international relations, and produce a gradual mellowing in the Kremlin.25 Kennan’s analysis had a sensational effect within the State Department and the wider Truman administration, then split between advocates of continued engagement with the Soviet Union—who regarded the USSR as a traditional great power—and hard-liners—convinced that Moscow’s inherent expansionism required vigorous resistance by the United States and its Western partners. The long telegram persuaded U.S. officials to adopt new policies designed to restrict Soviet territorial expansion and oppose internal political subversion in non-communist countries. Although this strategy would not be christened “containment” until the following year (when Kennan published his thesis under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs), the White House began implementing it immediately. In early March 1946, President Truman endorsed a speech by Churchill in Fulton Missouri, where the former Prime Minister proclaimed an “iron curtain” had descended on Europe from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. The doctrine of containment implied abandoning the pursuit of a postwar modus vivendi with the Soviets. At heart, it “acknowledged the limits of shared political community in the postwar world.”26 To preserve its political and economic values, the United States must defer its dreams of One World under international law and use its power and ideals to mobilize a narrower coalition committed to defending free institutions. The strategy had immediate implications for U.S. policy in postwar Europe, and particularly the disposition of Germany, the greatest strategic prize in the deepening Cold War. Germany, by virtue of its industrial potential, demography, and geographic location, held the key to mastery of the European continent. During the war, policymakers in Washington had debated whether the allies should transform the defeated nation into a pastoral country, as former Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau advocated, or seek to reconstruct it as an engine of European recovery, as many in the State Department recommended. When the Nazis surrendered in May 1945, the Truman administration favored Germany’s reconstruction. As decided in Yalta, the four victorious allied powers divided the country, and Berlin itself, into four separate occupation zones. At Potsdam in August, Truman, Stalin, and Churchill agreed to an administratively decentralized but economically unified Germany, along with a 150-mile westward shift in the German border and massive German reparations to the Soviet Union. This early impression of four-power concert over Germany’s future belied major disagreements on the matter at meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers (representing the US, UK, USSR, and France), in London in September–October 1945 and April–July 1946.

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The United States became increasingly frustrated by Moscow’s treatment of its own zone of occupation as an exclusive political and economic preserve, rather than moving toward integration with the Western zones. By March 1946, Kennan believed current Soviet behavior in East and Central Europe made Germany’s division inevitable. Accordingly, he cabled from Moscow that the Western allies should finish “the process of partition which was begun in the east” and “rescue [the] Western zones of Germany” by protecting them from Soviet interference and “integrating them into . . . Western Europe rather than into a united Germany.”27 On July 11, 1946, Byrnes asked the British and French to merge the occupation zones in Germany to form an economic union. On January 1, 1947, the United States and Britain fused their two occupation zones into one “Bizone,” while pressing France to eventually integrating its zone as well.

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE The Truman administration’s public declaration of the Cold War came in March 1947, precipitated by a rapid deterioration of Britain’s strategic position in the Eastern Mediterranean. Senior administration officials, fearful that Greece, Turkey, and indeed the entire Near East might fall into the Soviet orbit, quickly framed this regional crisis as part of a larger global struggle. “The reins of leadership are slipping from Britain’s hands,” Clayton warned Secretary Byrnes. “They will be picked up either by the United States or Russia. If by Russia, then the balance of world power will turn against America and war will be likely within a generation. If by the United States, there is a good chance that war can be averted.”28 On February 26 President Truman met with Congressional leaders at the White House. Dean Acheson sketched for the legislators a vivid and frightening tableau of the deepening bipolar conflict. The world faced a polarization of power unknown since the Punic Wars, a rivalry exacerbated by an “unbridgeable ideological chasm.” If Communism triumphed in Greece, it would spread quickly to other European states like so many apples in a barrel infected by a single rotten one. France offered a case in point. The French government had four Communists in its cabinet, including the minister of defense. Communists controlled the major unions and had infiltrated the ministries, factories, and army. Nearly a quarter of the French electorate had voted for the Communist Party. With France’s steadily deteriorating economic situation, “the Russians could pull the plug any time they chose.” After a stunned silence, Senator Vandenberg urged the President to share this message with Congress and the American people.29

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On March 12 the President addressed a joint session of Congress to request $400 million in economic assistance for the beleaguered Greek and Turkish governments. Truman framed his appeal as part of a sweeping new American mission “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities and outside pressures.” The world, he explained, was caught in a Manichean struggle between “two ways of life;” one was based on totalitarianism, the other on “free institutions, representative government . . . and individual liberty.”30 The United States would use its might to ensure that freedom prevailed over oppression. As Acheson told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “We are willing to help people who believe the way we do, to continue to live the way they want to live.”31 Some twelve decades earlier John Quincy Adams had articulated a foreign policy of detachment, declaring that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” While the American republic favored the freedom and independence of all foreign peoples, it would be “the champion and vindicator only of her own.”32 Truman brushed such isolationist caution aside, committing the United States to defend human liberty around the world. Indeed, the President’s speech was phrased in a manner that forced the nation to accept or reject new worldwide responsibilities. The New York Times proclaimed that “the epoch of isolationism and occasional intervention is ended . . . [to be] replaced by an epoch of American responsibility.”33 As with previous visions of American internationalism, including those of Wilson and FDR, the Truman Doctrine was couched in the language of exceptionalism. Observers at the time recognized the President’s emphasis on the ideological nature of the geopolitical contest. The American system must “prove its value—just as an article for export,” wrote the editors of the New York Herald Tribune. President Truman was asking for dollars; but he was also asking for the enthusiasm, the willingness to venture, the belief in our own values, which can prove to the shattered peoples of the world that the American system offers a working alternative to the totalitarian order which is otherwise their only refuge.34

In later years George Kennan bridled at the quasi-religious tone of the Truman Doctrine, bemoaning the transformation of his limited containment strategy into an all-encompassing global commitment. Yet Kennan’s ex post facto critique rings hollow, inasmuch as he infused his long telegram (and subsequent “X” article) with assumptions about the country’s predestined, benevolent global mission. The Cold War, he wrote, would “test . . . the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among na-

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tions.” He prophesized that Americans would thank “Providence” for allowing them to carry “the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”35 Implementing “containment” would require bipartisan support.36 The November 1946 elections handed the Republican Party both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932, with 51 Republicans to 45 Democrats in the Senate and 246 Republicans to 188 Democrats in the House. Some prominent members of the 80th Congress took umbrage at the universalism of Truman’s speech. Senator Lodge (R-MA) cautioned against launching a “holy war” with the Soviet Union. But other Republicans approved of its tone and implications. Vandenberg, for one, believed it necessary to “scare the hell out of the American people” to generate sufficient political will to confront the Soviet threat. 37 As a foundation for American foreign policy, “containment” afforded distinct political advantages over alternative visions of U.S. global engagement. Above all, it drew on a deep reservoir of anti-Communism in the United States. Nearly all Americans—conservatives or New Dealers, southern agriculturalists or Midwestern factory workers—could embrace opposition to Communist subversion and Soviet aggression. The defensive grand strategy of containment would help mobilize U.S. resources and justify a U.S. global activism that Wilsonian universalism or the postwar planners’ modified multilateralism might never have sustained.38 Yet the public’s fervent anti-Communism had its drawbacks. It would significantly constrain the ability of the Truman administration to implement this new doctrine with discretion. By exaggerating the monolithic nature of the worldwide Communist movement, it complicated U.S. policymakers’ efforts to distinguish vital from peripheral concerns. Most tragically, anti-Communism fueled the rise of McCarthyite hysteria, destroying thousands of Americans’ lives and trapping the Truman administration in a dogmatic straight-jacket partly of its own making. Assuming leadership of the Free World meant ramping up U.S. foreign assistance to members of the anti-Soviet coalition. On April 29, 1947, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff received a report from the Strategic Survey Committee titled “United States Assistance to Other Countries from the Standpoint of National Security.” The document developed a hierarchy of country candidates for aid “on the assumption that the next war will be ideological.” In light of the superpower conflict, the Joint Chiefs asserted that “the United Nations as presently constituted can in no way enhance our security.” Indeed, placing too much faith in the UN’s ability to protect “the vital security interests of the United States . . . could quite possibly lead to results fatal to that security.” Instead of universal collective security, the report stressed trans-Atlantic security, noting that the two world wars had revealed the interdependence of the Old and New Worlds. It

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fell to the United States to bolster and mobilize the resources of Europe, Franco-German rapprochement, and ensure the security and solidarity of Western Europe and North America.39

THE IMPACT OF THE COLD WAR ON U.S. MULTILATERALISM “Containment” altered but by no means broke the American preference for multilateralism. U.S. policy simply shifted to create a new narrower, multilateral free world community that would collectively enjoy a preponderance of global power.40 As Charles Bohlen explained in August 1947, Washington confronted an international context “at direct variance with the assumptions upon which, during and directly after the war, major United States policies were predicated.” Given “two worlds instead of one,” the overriding goal of U.S. foreign policy must be to unite the “nonSoviet World . . . politically, economically, and in the last analysis, militarily. . . . Only in this way can the free and non-Soviet world hope to survive in the face of the centralized and ruthless direction of the Soviet world.”41 Yet, whereas the Soviet Union adopted a heavy-handed, domineering stance towards its satellites, the Truman administration determined not to pursue containment unilaterally but through consensual leadership of a broad coalition. In the words of three early Cold War analysts, Washington “sought to keep alive the principle of collective international action in an open system of relations,” preserving of “a structure of multilaterally harmonized sovereign interests” within the Free World.42 The U.S. containment strategy that emerged in 1947–1948 was designed to revive the economies of Western Europe (including the western zones of Germany) and Japan and to integrate these reconstructed states into an American-led coalition. Furthermore, the perpetuation of “an American hegemony” was not the long term U.S. objective. Regarding bipolarity as a dangerous basis for containment, U.S. policymakers sought the consolidation of “independent centers of power capable of balancing each other as well as the Russians.”43 “It is clearly unwise for us to continue the attempt to carry alone, or largely single handed, the opposition to Soviet expansion,” Kennan wrote Marshall on November 6, 1947. Rather, the architect of containment favored restoring “the balance of power in Europe and Asia by strengthening local forces of independence and by getting them to assume part of our burden.”44 This desire to discourage European dependency would inform Washington’s two signature transatlantic initiatives of the early postwar years, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The United States designed the European Recovery Program so as to foster continental integration and independence. It similarly insisted that NATO take a multilateral form. The rationale for global pluralism was

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part principle and part practical. As Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, explained, U.S. officials rejected “unilateral American domination of the world” as being “contrary to the American ethos,” likely to “invite enmity and opposition” and beyond the country’s will and capacity to enforce.45 America’s coalition approach to containment grew to comprise several successive components during the early postwar years. First came a policy of economic assistance, starting with the Marshall Plan in June 1947. Next, a network of defensive alliances began to emerge with the Atlantic Pact discussions in May 1948. The administration then initiated a program of mutual aid, enshrined in the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of October 1949. Finally, the United States commenced a program of development assistance, proposed as “Point Four” of President Truman’s second inaugural address of January 1949 and realized in the Act for International Development of May 1950. By 1950, Washington had replaced its wartime dream of collective security through the United Nations with a policy of collective defense, as authorized by Article 51 of the UN Charter. Overcoming its historically detached position and skepticism to peacetime alliances, the United States organized a vast coalition committed to “collective effort and mutual obligations.”46 Washington’s coalition approach to security would take different forms in different regions. Transatlantic relations manifested the strongest commitment to multilateralism, particularly as embodied in NATO. In Latin America, U.S. multilateralism inspired the Rio Pact and the Organization of American States. In the Asia-Pacific realm, geographic distance, cultural differences, colonial struggles, and especially distrust of Japan complicated the creation of a single collective defense system. Washington thus negotiated a series of bilateral treaties that came to resemble spokes of a wheel centered on the American hub.47 The overall result was a loose coalition of regional groupings featuring the United States, backed by American resources and commitments. The early 1950s found the United States at the core of a worldwide alliance system involving more than 40 countries, with 450 significant bases in some 36 of them. This outcome would have surprised Truman Administration officials in early 1947. Washington initially assumed the Soviet threat was primarily political (as opposed to military)—since Communism was “nurtured in misery and want,” and reasoned, therefore, that containment would rely mostly on economic instruments.48 Thus the Truman Doctrine of March 1947 promised money, not troops, and the Marshall Plan sought to promote not dependency but the rapid economic resurgence of an independent Western Europe capable of defending itself. Events, however, took a far different course. During the late 1940s weakness and insecurity in Europe drew the United States into a more

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formally hierarchical role in Atlantic economic and military affairs than Washington had intended.49 Indeed, postwar Western Europe offers perhaps the clearest historical instance of one region “inviting” a powerful state to extend its influence.50 Why Western Europeans chose to align with America rather than balance against it remains an intriguing question. After all, the United States was the world’s most powerful country. Based on pure balance of power logic, it would be reasonable to expect other countries to have ganged up against it. The reason that Europe invited U.S. influence is that states seek to counterbalance not power, per se, but rather perceived threats. And “threats” represent a subjective interpretation of a potential adversary’s offensive capabilities, geographic proximity, and apparent intentions.51 In determining their strategic alignments, statesmen weigh not only the material capabilities of other powers but also their recent behavior, perceived goals, espoused ideology and domestic political processes. In the late 1940s, Western Europeans found the Soviet Union—by virtue of its evident expansionism, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, totalitarian leadership, massive military, and location next door—far more threatening than America. Similar dynamics played out elsewhere, from the Philippines to Australia to Latin America, as foreign elites sharing common assessments of the Soviet threat and internal communist subversion, similar material interests, and kindred political-economic systems chose to align with the United States in the emerging Cold War. Certainly, America’s global posture did not always expand “by invitation,” as the experiences of Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) testify. Nevertheless, it was often “pull” more than “push” forces that drove an expanding U.S. political-military presence. The broad appeal of U.S. political and economic values and the magnetic attraction of American cultural products reinforced this trend.52 In describing the Cold War role of the United States, some scholars have written of an American “empire.” The problem with this “imperial” label is that it exaggerates the magnitude of U.S. domination over the “free world” and ignores the broadly consensual nature of American hegemony.53 Consultation and compromise lay at the heart of the post-1945 order. The foundation of American primacy was broad normative agreement among the United States and its partners, particularly in Europe, on the desirability of liberal political and economic institutions as well as the basic rules and principles governing the international system. In return for providing armed protection and promoting economic growth for its allies, Washington enjoyed a legitimate form of leadership, including authority to shape Western agendas, set the parameters of policy debates, and take the initiative in decision making. The United States used this prerogative to sponsor multilateral organizations to coordinate Atlantic economic, political, and security relations. Such frameworks, like NATO

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and GATT, gave the weaker partners substantially more autonomy and influence than other plausible arrangements. The United States also deployed financial, military, and diplomatic inducements in Europe in an effort to groom like-minded elites, co-opt labor, and win public support for centrist political solutions.54 Multilateral institutions, generous U.S. aid, and shared liberal values underpinned the legitimacy of U.S. dominance, allowing Washington to incubate and nurture a community of nations based not just on interest (much less repression) but also on common sentiments. American preponderance, therefore, tended to elicit allegiance rather than grudging submission.55 In Europe the pro-American stance of most elites, relative quiescence of working classes, and consistent electoral triumph of Atlanticist political forces all testify to the consensual nature of U.S. hegemony.56 The outcome of postwar trans-Atlantic diplomacy was both impressive and historically unprecedented: By the late 1950s, the industrial democracies constituted a community within which war was virtually unimaginable, united by their faith in U.S. leadership, opposition to Soviet expansionism, and acceptance of economic multilateralism.57 The postwar Free World, moreover, resulted from extensive consultations and negotiations among the members of the coalition, particularly those in Europe. Indeed, the success of the U.S.-led system owed much to the scope for autonomy—even independence—that it permitted national governments.58 American flexibility was pragmatic because U.S. and allied purposes often overlapped, but were seldom identical. Having invited hegemony, or at least acquiesced in it, to secure U.S. resources and (they hoped) “domesticate” American power, foreign partners skillfully tailored their participation in multilateral structures and cooperative endeavors to suit their own agendas. Leveraging any assets at their disposal, including internal weakness, they proved adept at inducing changes in U.S. plans. Washington’s readiness to compromise on the substance of policy derived from its recognition that a U.S. willingness to reach mutual accommodation would sustain the legitimacy of U.S. global leadership.59 The United States could not ignore the concerns of Cold War allies expected to contribute financially and materially to the recovery and defense of the free world community. To engineer broad consensus among allied governments, Washington tolerated differences in their domestic economic policies, diversity in their political composition, and pit stops in their movement toward open trade.60 Notwithstanding their distaste for socialism, for example, U.S. officials collaborated closely with Europe’s democratic left.61 Washington also grasped that imposing a rigid postwar order on allies would contradict America’s own espoused principles of self-determination, non-intervention, and political pluralism, thereby un-

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dermining the legitimacy of U.S. leadership both at home and abroad.62 Structural dominance allowed America to define the agenda of Atlantic relations, but its egalitarian approach to leadership constrained its hegemony. Thus friends as well as enemies modified U.S. blueprints.63 Still, tensions existed between America’s egalitarian ethos of multilateralism and its desire to shape the policy of the Free World coalition. Washington preferred a consensual leadership style, but U.S. policymakers did seek to forge consensus around American preferences, rather than settling for coalition agreement on the lowest common denominator. Their dilemma emerges clearly from the ur-text of American Cold War strategy, National Security Council directive 68 (NSC 68). Commissioned in January 1950 after the “loss” of China and Moscow’s acquisition of the atomic bomb, the document was intended as a comprehensive review of U.S. national security policy. NSC 68 laid out a new, more aggressive vision of “containment” that placed heavier emphasis on the military dimensions of the struggle. Although often described as a Realist document, NSC 68 had an explicitly ideological point of departure; it attributed the Cold War to “The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design.” The Soviet Union, “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own,” was leading an “assault on free institutions . . . worldwide.” Equating “a defeat for free institutions anywhere” to “a defeat everywhere,” the authors argued for the United States to match Moscow on all capabilities and counter aggression wherever it emerged. 64 Mindful of U.S. “responsibilities for world leadership,” NSC 68’s authors endorsed Washington’s assembly of a vast coalition of allies and former dependent peoples to create a just world order “based on the principle of consent” rather than on “compulsion and coercion.” To this end, American values—“the essential tolerance of our world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations”—possessed tremendous importance. At the same time, U.S. officials understood that the “very virtues” of America’s consensual approach to exercising power could “handicap us in certain respects,” since “dissent can become a vulnerability.”65 To cement allied solidarity, the United States would need to display “power, confidence, and a sense of moral and political direction.” 66

CONCLUSION Despite the dramatic shift in U.S. grand strategy from one world universalism to anti-Soviet containment in the late 1940s, there was impressive continuity between the international visions that animated the wartime

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administration of Franklin Roosevelt and the Cold Warriors of the Truman Administration. The onset of the superpower struggle, European economic weakness, and the outburst of radical nationalism in the colonial world did require some adjustments to wartime U.S. plans for a global future based on commercial multilateralism, collective security, and self-determination. But even though the United States deferred its universalist aspirations with the advent of the Cold War, it adopted a consensual style of coalition leadership, based on the legitimacy afforded by multilateral institutions and egalitarian frameworks. Faced with the Soviet menace and the specter of European economic collapse, the United States intervened with massive financial resources to restore Western Europe’s health but insisted that recipients collaborate in their recovery efforts and deepen continental integration on the assumption that commercial multilateralism on a regional scale would lead eventually to an open and global system of trade and payments. In the security realm, the United States traded collective security through the United Nations for a strategy of collective defense, focused on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which America insisted take a multilateral form based on the principles of nondiscrimination and reciprocity. Nor did the United States entirely discard its ideal of self-determination but, in light of the Cold War and the demise of colonial empire, it sought to support only “genuine” nationalist movements committed to the anti-Communist struggle.

NOTES 1. Truman, “Restatement of the Foreign Policy of the United States,” Department of State Bulletin, 27 October 1945, 653–656. 2. Byrnes, “Neighboring Nations in One World,” Department of State Bulletin, 4 November 1945, 711. 3. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 340–42. Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 168–207. 4. Pollard, Economic Security, 60. 5. Franz Schurman, The Logic of World Power, 6. 6. See, for example, Avi Shlaim, “The Partition of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War,” Review of International Studies 11 (1985). 7. Arthur Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 202. 8. For an early, influential contribution to the now voluminous “democratic peace” literature, see Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, nos. 3 and 4 (1983), 205–233 (part 1) and 323–353 (part 2). 9. Barry Posen and Steven Van Evra, “Reagan Administration Defense Policy: Departure from Containment,” in Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American

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Foreign Policy, ed. Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild (Boston: Little Brown, 1987), 78. 10. Aron, “What Is a Theory of International Relations?” Journal of International Affairs 21 (1967), 192. 11. See Raymond L. Garthoff, “Why Did the Cold War Arise, and Why Did It End?” Diplomatic History 16, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 287–88. 12. On “legitimate” and “revolutionary” orders, see Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Congress of Vienna (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1964), 1–6. 13. “The Crimea Conference: Report of the Conference,” Department of State Bulletin, 18 February 1945, 213–16. 14. Stalin’s words of April 1945, as recorded by Yugoslav official Milovan Djilas, cited in Pollard, Economic Security, 39. 15. Gaddis, “The United States and the Question of a Sphere of Influence,” 63. 16. Stimson cited in DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers, 90. 17. Byrnes “Neighboring Nations in One World,” 710. 18. John P. Vloyantes, Silk Glove Hegemony: Finnish-Soviet Relations, 1944–1974. A Case Study of the Soft Sphere of Influence (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press). 19. Eduard Mark, “Charles E. Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945,” Diplomatic History 3, 2 (Spring 1979), 207–8. 20. “Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies,” Bohlen observed. Cited in Gaddis, ‘The United States and the Question of a Sphere of Influence,” 60. 21. Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline, 99–101. 22. “The Foreign Policy of the United States,” December 1, 1945, FRUS 1946, I, 1136–37. 23. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 290. 24. Cited in Woods, A Changing of the Guard, 294. 25. For Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of February 22, 1946, see FRUS 1946, VI, 696–709. See also “PPS 13,” November 6, 1947, FRUS 1947, I, 770. On Kennan’s thinking and its implementation see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 25–88. 26. Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline, 99–101. 27. Kennan cable of March 6, 1946, FRUS 1946, V, 519. 28. Cited in Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 143. 29. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 217–19. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, 140–41. 30. The Truman Dosctrine, Avalon Project at Yale Law School, http://www. yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/trudoc.htm. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 220–23. 31. Acheson cited in Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 205 (Emphasis in original). 32. Cited in Ronald Steel, Pax Americana (New York, 1977), 5 33. Cited in Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, 172. 34. Cited in Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, 171–2.

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35. X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947), 566–82. Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 96. 36. Acheson, Present, 95–97. 37. Cited in Timothy P. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 28. 38. Ronald Steel, “The End and the Beginning,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 296–97. 39. (Emphasis added.) JCS 1769/1, FRUS 1947, I, 736–750. 40. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 13–19. Gaddis, “The Insecurities of Victory,” 242. “Preponderance” came to be defined as “superior power in ourselves and in dependable combination with other like-minded allies.” “NSC 79,” June 26, 1951, FRUS 1951, I, 99–101. 41. Bohlen, August 30, 1947, FRUS 1947, I, 763–64. 42. Reitzel, Kaplan, and Coblenz, United States Foreign Policy 1945–1955, 302. 43. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 17. 44. “PPS 13,” 770ff. 45. Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision (New York: Grove Wiedenfield, 1989), 119. 46. Reitzel, Kaplan, and Coblenz, United States Foreign Policy 1945–1955, 244–45. Paul Nitze, “Coalition Policy and the Conception of World Order;” 19–30; William Lee Miller, “The American Ethos and the Alliance System,” 33–35; and Arnold Wolfers, “Collective Defense Versus Collective Security,” 59; all in Alliance Politics in the Cold War, ed. Arnold Wolfers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959). 47. Kahler, “Multilateralism with Small and Large Numbers,”300–1. 48. Robert A. Pollard, “Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War: Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and American Rearmament,” Diplomatic History 9, no. 3 (Summer 1985), 271–72. 49. Bernd-Jurgen Wendt, “Europe Between Power and Powerlessness,” in Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in a Postwar World, 1945– 1950, ed. by Joseph Becker and Franz Knipping (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 539–553. 50. Geir Lundestad, “‘Empire’ by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (September 1986), 263–277. Gaddis, The Long Peace, 59. 51. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 52. Bruce Russett, “The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony: or, Is Mark Twain Really Dead?” International Organization 39 (Spring 1985): 207–232, 228–230. 53. For one such exaggeration, see Graebner, The National Security, 12. 54. Charles S. Maier, “Analog of Empire: Constitutive Elements of United States Ascendancy after World War II” (Woodrow Wilson Center paper, May 30, 1989), 1–6. 55. Ninkovich, “The End of Diplomatic History?” 444.

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56. Charles S. Maier describes this “consensual American hegemony” in “The Politics of Productivity, 148–150. 57. Karl W. Deutsch, et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969). Ernst van der Beugel, “Comment,” in From Marshall Plan to Global Interdependence: New Challenges for Industrialized Nations (Paris: OECD, 1978), 28. 58. Charles S. Maier, “Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and US Foreign Policy Objectives in the Truman Years,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey, 273–275. 59. William Lee Miller, “The American Ethos and the Alliance System.” 60. Gaddis, “The United States and the Question of a Sphere of Influence,” p. 71. Maier, “Alliance and Autonomy.” If the United States “set the limits on deviations to the right or left,” as one historian contends, in Europe at least these margins were wide. Lloyd Gardner, “Lost Empires,” Diplomatic History, 13, no. 1 (Winter 1989), 4. 61. Edward Rice-Maximin, “The United States and the French Left, 1945–1949: A View from the State Department,” Journal of Contemporary History 19 (1984): 729–747. 62. G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan “The Legitimation of Hegemonic Power,” in David P. Rapkin, ed., World Leadership and Hegemony (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990), 65. 63. Ikenberry, “Rethinking the Origins of American Hegemony,” 376. 64. “NSC 68,” April 14, 1950, FRUS 1950, I, 234–92. Acheson, Present, 373–76. 65. Bohlen to Nitze, April 5, 1950, FRUS 1950, I, 272. To put this dilemma in contemporary terms, America’s “soft power”—its institutions and values—could easily become a soft constraint on American hegemony. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 66. “NSC 68.”

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It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. . . . The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all, European nations. —George C. Marshall, Harvard Commencement, June 7, 1947

T

he architects of postwar U.S. international economic policy had assumed that the Bretton Woods institutions, the British Loan, and the proposed International Trade Organization (ITO) would facilitate rapid movement to a global multilateral system of trade and payments. But in the early postwar years, the perceived national security exigencies of the Cold War, notably European economic recovery, would have to come first. The United States put its universalist vision on hold. To restore economic health and, therefore, political stability to Western Europe as well as transatlantic equilibrium, Washington launched the Marshall Plan in June 1947, providing on a bilateral basis the liquidity it had denied Europe at Bretton Woods. Nevertheless, multilateralism persisted within the Marshall Plan framework. Washington insisted that the Europeans adopt a collective approach to reconstruction and use U.S. assistance to catalyze deeper continental economic integration. American prodding encouraged early steps toward a European economic and political community. U.S. officials rationalized their retreat from the goal of global multilateralism by persuading themselves that regional integration would be a stepping-stone to an open world economy. The European Recovery Program (ERP) laid 231

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the foundation for the great multilateral organizations that emerged in the late 1940s and the 1950s to govern intra-European economic relations: the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (forerunner of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and the European Coal and Steel Community (succeeded by the European Economic Community). While the Truman Administration implemented the Marshall Plan and promoted European integration in the late 1940s, it continued to press for a universal trade regime. In September 1946, Washington had released a Suggested Charter for an ITO. Over the ensuing year and a half, U.S. officials undertook painstaking, but ultimately frustrating and fruitless, multilateral negotiations with a diverse and expanding set of trading partners. America’s liberal vision quickly came under siege from both developed and developing countries that wanted more state intervention, protectionism, and discrimination to pursue national agendas. Ironically, Washington’s dedication to procedural multilateralism—involving multiple parties in negotiations over the rules of the game—gave others both a forum and the leverage to dilute movement toward substantive multilateralism, i.e., a regime based on non-discrimination and reciprocity.1 By yielding to foreign demands for a growing list of exceptions, the Truman administration alienated domestic support for the ITO. It abandoned the initiative in late 1950. The demise of the ITO did not kill economic multilateralism itself, however. Instead, the United States took a more pragmatic and flexible approach to trade liberalization through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In the interest of Free World solidarity, the Truman Administration used the authority of the RTAA to grant asymmetric concessions to its trading partners to reduce commercial barriers and restore the economic health of its allies. The open, reciprocal and non-discriminatory order envisioned at Bretton Woods would emerge gradually in fits and starts over the next decade.

THE EUROPEAN CRISIS OF 1946–1947 American negotiators at Bretton Woods had failed to appreciate how much aid would be necessary to rebuild postwar Europe and correct the disequilibrium of the global monetary system. The economic crisis that struck Western Europe in winter 1946–1947, therefore, came as a shock. Washington had assumed that short-term humanitarian assistance and the long-term stabilizing impact of the IMF and IBRD, supplemented by the bridging credit of the British loan, could meet the continent’s recovery needs. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

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(UNRRA) would deliver emergency relief to European refugees and internally displaced peoples, while the Fund and the Bank would provide the long-term liquidity and stability to ensure sustained growth. Yet, these mechanisms foundered in the face of massive economic dislocation, including a yawning current account imbalance, shortages of goods and manpower, the devastation of productive regions, the loss of foreign assets, the atrophy of trade, and the collapse of communications and transportation networks. The IMF and IBRD were wholly unprepared and ill-equipped to respond. The Bank had only $3.8 billion in assets, and none of it available for the crisis of 1946–1947. The Fund, meanwhile, had limited funds at its disposal, and had not even been designed to deal with transitional reconstruction needs.2 The greatest impediment to European recovery was a structural dollar deficit, caused by high European investment and consumption. The gigantic U.S. payments surpluses of $8.2 billion in 1946 and $11.3 billion in 1947 reflected these imbalances.3 European production had exceeded expectations, but the continent could not sustain its substantial imports from the United States (currently running seven times the value of Europe’s exports). This balance of payments crisis threatened not only Europe’s immediate recovery but also America’s long-term goal of an open international economic system. To preserve foreign exchange, European governments resorted to state trading, protectionism, and currency restrictions, resulting in the proliferation of some two hundred bilateral commercial arrangements. President Truman lamented this trend toward regimentation and discrimination as neither “the American way” nor “the way to peace.” But he cautioned that the United States “might have to follow suit.”4 Congress had already approved the massive $3.75 billion loan to Great Britain in July 1946, as well as emergency credits to continental countries totaling $554 million in 1945 and $2.75 billion in 1946, but these expedients failed. Britain drew on its loan faster than anticipated, so that by mid-1947 it was clear that London would exhaust its credit within weeks. The rigid timetable for sterling convertibility compounded British difficulties, as the return to convertibility on July 15 stimulated a run on the pound.5 Prime Minister Atlee suspended convertibility on August 20, re-imposing trade and exchange controls to preserve the UK’s remaining reserves. The next month Washington again allowed Britain to discriminate against U.S. goods. Multilateralism would have to wait until this transatlantic disequilibrium dissipated. The United States had “grossly underestimated” the extent of Europe’s postwar economic dislocation and recovery needs, Clayton reported to Washington on May 27, 1947. Without large-scale assistance to finance its imports from the United States, he warned, Europe risked “economic,

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social, and political disintegration.” Such a calamity would doom American efforts toward an “open world trading system,” threaten “world economic stability,” and could even “endanger the survival of the American system of free enterprise.”6 To prevent the Communist takeover of Western Europe, preserve future prospects for a multilateral world economy, and protect its very way of life, Washington must devote massive assistance to European recovery.7

THE MARSHALL PLAN: ITS MOTIVATIONS The Truman Administration jumped into action. In a commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall signaled that the United States would do all in its power to enable a comprehensive recovery program for Europe. The framing and phrasing of the U.S. offer were significant. There was no Marshall “plan” as such. Instead, Marshall invited the independent nations of Europe to collectively design their own reconstruction plan. “The initiative, I think, must come from Europe,” he declared. “The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so.”8 Prior to Marshall’s speech, top State Department officials had debated America’s involvement in any prospective European recovery program. Kennan, director of Marshall’s policy planning staff, believed Europe should provide the initiative, planning, and responsibility, whereas Clayton insisted, “The United States must run this show.”9 The ultimate structure was a compromise: a multilateral agreement among European states supplemented with bilateral accords between each participant and Washington.10 Although the United States was effectively seizing the mantle of leadership in the Atlantic world, it demanded that the Europeans embrace the principles of self-help, mutual aid, and collective coordination of assistance. The United States endeavored to revive Western Europe, but in a manner specifically designed to avoid indefinite European dependency and subordination, with the intent of restoring the continent and its constituent powers as independent actors in a multilateral system. The Marshall Plan was designed to serve several interrelated purposes. First, U.S. officials wanted it to preserve the eventual possibility of an open world economy, by consolidating a regional multilateral system of trade and payments as an initial step. Second, it would advance the strategy of “containment” by strengthening the attachment of European publics and elites to market capitalism and democracy. Third, American foreign policy makers envisioned the plan as a framework to promote Franco-German reconciliation, which they saw as key to endur-

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ing peace and stability in Western Europe. Finally, they hoped it would catalyze European unity and the continent’s emergence as another pillar of the Free World.11 The Marshall Plan was an acknowledgment that the economic and political preconditions for global multilateral economic cooperation did not yet exist. To justify this departure from Bretton Woods universalism, State Department officials consoled themselves that for the ideal of multilateralism to survive, the United States must consolidate and entrench it on a regional basis—an idea shared by some of Washington’s allies.12 Hervé Alphand, director-general at the Quai d’Orsay, also regarded a European market as “a precondition for generalized multilateralism.”13 The joint recovery effort might eliminate archaic European concerns with self-sufficiency, zero-sum economics, and the engrained habits of bilateralism and restrictionism that stymied European productivity and open trade.14 At a global level, Clayton explained in November 1947, the Marshall Plan was “highly complementary and interrelated” with the proposed International Trade Organization. One would address “short-term emergency needs in one part of the world,” the other “long-range policies and trade all over the world.”15 Still, the pragmatic push for regional economic integration and the simmering desire for global multilateralism engendered vociferous debates within the Truman Administration’s National Advisory Council on Economic and Social Problems. Representatives from the State Department and the Economic Cooperation Administration (created to run the Marshall Plan) argued that the United States should tolerate European discrimination against U.S. goods during a postwar transition phase. They also supported the creation of a European customs union. Another faction, comprising Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. delegation to the IMF, worried that European economic integration would retard the realization of Bretton Woods and result in a permanently discriminatory bloc. Besides preserving the prospect of global multilateralism, the Marshall Plan had a geopolitical purpose. Although claiming the initiative was “directed not against any ideology but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos,” Marshall himself avowed the Plan’s intent “to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”16 American officials believed that an open, democratic, society was predicated on a basic level of economic well-being.17 As Dean Acheson had explained a month earlier in a speech to the Delta Council of Cleveland, Mississippi, it was not only “human beings [who] exist in narrow economic margins, but also human dignity, human freedom, and democratic institutions.” The United States was willing to use its “economic and financial resources to widen these margins.”18

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The Truman Administration played this national security card in autumn 1947, in requesting short-term emergency aid for France, Italy, and Austria. The world faced a struggle pitting the “American way of life and thought,” based on individual rights and constitutional government, against a totalitarian Soviet system that ruthlessly subordinated human liberty to the “iron discipline by the state.” If Europe adopted Communism’s “philosophy of despair,” the President warned, Americans, too, might need to “forego, for the sake of our own security, the enjoyment of many of our freedoms and privileges.”19 Washington, therefore, must use its wealth to support the survival of democracy and capitalism in Europe. Washington’s containment concerns coalesced with the “politics of productivity.”20 The ERP aimed not just to rebuild the European economy but to modernize it and unleash an era of unprecedented growth. American officials posited a direct connection between economic prosperity and stable democracy. They presumed that Europe’s achievement of a certain threshold of per capita income would breed political, economic, and social values similar to those of the United States, i.e., that liberal values would follow U.S. assistance, “rather as in previous centuries trade had been thought to follow the flag.”21 The ERP would serve as a “transmission belt” for two fundamentally American economic beliefs. First, “that the test of an economic regime is growth and productivity.” Second, “that private markets and open economies are effective means to these ends, in contrast to the redistributionism, protectionism, and dirigisme characteristic of socialism.”22 By linking recovery to modernization and growth, U.S. officials hoped to transform divisive questions of economic policy into technical (and allegedly neutral) tasks upon which both capital and labor could agree, thus dissipating longstanding tensions over social equity and the distribution of wealth. Ideally, the shared pursuit of abundance would replace class conflict in Europe as growth attracted the moderate European left to the market, deprived local Communists of the weapon of human misery, inspired public confidence in democratic institutions, and buttressed tottering centrist coalitions.23 By reinforcing social democratic alternatives to communization, the Marshall Plan meant to “draw the teeth of European socialism.”24 The Marshall Plan also offered a possible solution to the longstanding dilemma posed by Germany’s economic and demographic potential. Specifically, how could that country serve as a regional economic engine without jeopardizing the security of its neighbors?25 This question was of paramount importance to France. Paris, understandably fearful of German power and another U.S. retreat into postwar isolation, resisted American and British efforts to unite the western occupation zones into a single West German state. Instead, the French sought internationalization of the Ruhr, occupation of the Rhineland, annexation of the Saar,

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and political decentralization.26 The Marshall Plan suggested a way out, namely through the “interweaving of the German economy with that of the remainder of Europe,” so Washington could reconstruct Germany while speaking of the continent as a whole.27 Engineering Franco-German economic integration required Washington to convince France that the rise of the Soviet Union bent on “world conquest” now posed the greatest threat to France’s security and “traditional way of life.” Moreover, Paris needed to believe that German power could benignly serve European ends. These realities made the fates of France and Germany interdependent.28 Some in Paris were receptive to such arguments. Just a week before the Harvard speech, Foreign Minister Georges Bidault called for a Germany “constructed not in isolation, but as a function of a wider European plane.”29 Indeed, the genius of the Marshall Plan was to embed Franco-German rapprochement within a framework of European unity. Although neither Marshall nor the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 (the ERP’s enabling legislation) mentioned “integration,” U.S. officials designed the plan to promote political and economic unification, leading “to some form of regional association of West European states,” without which “the project would “certainly fail in its major purpose.”30 Accordingly, the sole stipulation of the sketchy “plan” announced in June 1947 was that Europeans collectively determine their requirements and coordinate their recovery efforts.31 This arguably signified the first time in history that a major power had sponsored unity rather than division in an area where it possessed significant interests.32 The goal of European unity became a bipartisan cause celèbre in Washington during the late 1940s. In January 1947, Republican foreign policy spokesman John Foster Dulles made a speech, cleared with both Dewey and Vandenberg, advocating U.S. support for a federal Europe. On the Democratic side of the aisle, in late March, Congressman J. William Fulbright (D-AK) and Senator Thomas Hale Boggs (D-LA) introduced companion bills proposing “the creation of a United States of Europe within the framework of the United Nations.” Such legislative pressure caused heartburn for George Marshall. He counseled prudence to Vandenberg, telling the senator, “We should make clear that it is not our purpose to impose on the peoples of Europe any particular form of political or economic association.”33

THE EUROPEAN RESPONSE West European governments immediately responded to Marshall’s proposal. The day after the Harvard speech, Bidault proposed that European

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states jointly draw up an inventory of their total resources and current deficiencies. Paris hoped that its own Monnet Plan would provide a model for continent-wide reconstruction. On June 18, Bidault and his British counterpart, Ernest Bevin, endorsed Marshall’s initiative in a Franco-British aide-memoire.34 Marshall’s speech had not explicitly ruled out participation by the Soviet Union or its satellites. Although Washington considered it unlikely the Soviets would accept, Moscow might join the effort, if only to scupper it. On June 27, Molotov arrived in Paris for trilateral talks with the French and British. Bidault urged the Soviets to join the American initiative, while insisting that they participate within the context of a multilaterally negotiated, continent-wide reconstruction plan. Molotov, rebuffed in his efforts to secure an American blank check, refused these terms. The Marshall Plan would proceed without the USSR. On July 4, 1947, France and Britain invited twenty-two European states to attend a conference on Marshall’s initiative. Under pressure from Moscow, the Central and East European states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria declined (as did Finland, to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union).35 The remaining sixteen countries assembled in Paris on July 12 at the Conference of European Economic Cooperation, which later became the Committee of European Economic Cooperation (CEEC). Although the United States had no official delegation at the conference, it made its presence—and preferences—felt. In late July Clayton held informal bilateral talks with the European delegations and met with the CEEC executive committee. He stressed that any recovery scheme must include increased coal and food production, the elimination of bottlenecks, fiscal reform, coordinated recovery, trade liberalization, and early currency convertibility.36 In Washington, the Interdepartmental Committee on the Marshall Plan set the goal of U.S. policy as a permanent regional organization to supervise European commercial and monetary reforms, allocate scarce materials, and encourage joint planning and integration. Washington fretted that the Europeans would present the United States with sixteen separate “shopping lists.” As Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett told Clayton, the United States sought the gradual replacement of the current bilateral European trade and monetary arrangements with more efficient multilateral accords—and, ultimately, a customs union.37 The outcome of the CEEC plenary conference disappointed the United States.38 The meeting closed without “any spectacular declaration” of intent “to proceed to a unified economic organization of Western Europe,” or even any commitment to coordinate recovery efforts. American diplomats pressed the CEEC executive committee for a joint reconstruction

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plan, progressive trade liberalization, and the establishment of a permanent European organization, warning that anything less than these “essentials” would “prejudice the success of the entire Marshall program.”39 The sixteen countries promised to lower trade barriers but did not commit to a permanent organization with a powerful secretariat. Disagreement about the desirable scope of regional integration, particularly between France and Great Britain, frustrated U.S. efforts. Paris sought a strong supranational organization to allocate U.S. aid, supervise national recovery plans, and engineer incremental unity that would culminate in a European customs union. London preferred looser intergovernmental cooperation and progress toward a continent-wide free trade area. Their opposing positions reflected divergent historical traditions, wartime experiences, and perceived vocations. France’s history of political centralization and written constitutions made it inherently more amenable than Great Britain to the idea of European federalism. The war had reinforced these views by discrediting the nation-state in the eyes of many Frenchmen, while largely vindicating it for Britons.40 Finally, French elites, tending to see France as the continent’s natural leader, presumed a united Europe would amplify French influence. By contrast, British leaders worried that European integration would detract from London’s triple vocation as counselor to Washington, leader of the Commonwealth, and partner with Europe. The final CEEC report of September 22, 1947, settled on a practical approach among the European states to undertake joint recovery efforts, combined with a request of $19.1 billion for 1948–1951 from the United States. The Sixteen agreed to collaborate in setting production targets, improving productivity, modernizing equipment and transportation, and pursuing financial, monetary, and economic stability. They would also strive for high employment, remove “abnormal restrictions” on trade and payments, eliminate obstacles to the free movement of people, and coordinate their use of resources. Finally, the CEEC endorsed the long-term goal of a “sound and balanced multilateral trading system based on the principles which have guided the framers of the draft charter for an International Trade Organization.”41 Disappointing the Americans, the Europeans refused to consider more than a temporary organization, slated to disappear when reconstruction had ended, and agreed only to “study” the notion of a customs union. They made no provisions for political union. Washington perceived the Europeans as overly timid. On October 25, Lovett reiterated that U.S. credits were predicated on demonstrable progress toward economic integration. The United States was prepared to invest in the continent’s future, but Europe would need “to accept for itself risks also,” by modifying its ingrained habits.42

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American sentiment for European unity remained strongest in Congress, where influential members were convinced that political federalism and unencumbered commerce offered the only path to European peace and prosperity. On October 23, the Senate and House passed the Fulbright and Boggs Resolutions, both calling for a “United States of Europe.”43 The Truman Administration struggled to navigate between congressional accusations of not pushing hard enough on European integration and European accusations of American imperialism. The State Department labored to educate Congress of the difficulties and dangers of imposing continental integration from abroad. On December 19, 1947, Truman submitted the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) to Congress, requesting $17 billion over the next four years. Two months later the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported its findings on the draft FAA: “The present bill makes clear that the extension of aid by the United States results from the pledges accepted at Paris and is contingent upon the continual effort of the participating countries to accomplish a joint recovery program through multilateral undertakings and the establishment of a continuing organization.”44 On State Department advice, congressional leaders rebuffed efforts by Fulbright and Lodge to insert language into the act formally linking U.S. assistance to European progress on a political federation or economic integration.45 The preamble to Title I of the FAA expressed a more modest aspiration: “The policy of the people of the United States is to encourage those countries through a joint organization to exert sustained common efforts . . . which will speedily achieve that economic cooperation in Europe which is essential for lasting peace and prosperity.” Still, the legislation conditioned U.S. aid on “multilateral pledges” for joint recovery and the creation of a permanent European organization to promote trade liberalization, currency convertibility, monetary stability, and economic collaboration. Thanks to a major lobbying effort by the State Department (and an ominous coup in Czechoslovakia), the FAA passed the Senate and House handily (by votes of 69–17 and 329–74, respectively), and was signed into law by Truman on April 3, 1948. On March 15, as Congress debated the Foreign Assistance Act, the Sixteen reconvened in Paris to respond to U.S. demands for a “continuing organization.”46 After the FAA had passed on April 18, the Europeans agreed to transform the CEEC into a full-fledged Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), pledging “closer and everlasting cooperation” to promote joint recovery, early currency convertibility, and trade liberalization. The OEEC’s Plan of Action called for financial and monetary stabilization, increased exports, reduced non-essential dollar imports, elimination of internal disequilibria, investment for modernization, and exchange of information.47

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THE ECONOMIC COOPERATION ADMINISTRATION: TOOL OF U.S. IMPERIALISM? The Foreign Assistance Act created an Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) to implement the Marshall Plan. In addition to fostering a multilateral approach to European recovery, the ECA was charged with negotiating bilateral Economic Cooperation Agreements with each aid recipient. Washington made sure to extract political and economic concessions from its partners through these bilateral accords, which contained clauses intended to shape the internal economic policies, national recovery plans, and external commercial orientations of European countries.48 In return for U.S. aid, each recipient promised to coordinate its recovery with other European countries, restructure and stabilize its domestic economy, and liberalize its trade with other recipients. It also pledged to permit the entry of U.S. investment, provide the United States with raw materials, host an ECA mission and accept its review and advice on national reconstruction plans, and publicize any assistance received from the United States. “Counterpart” funding constituted one of the ECA’s principal tools. Under this scheme, participating governments would approach the ECA for dollars to pay for deliveries of U.S. goods. These dollars would be released subject to ECA evaluation and approval, and in exchange recipients would deposit an equivalent amount in their own currency in national matching funds. The ECA mission, in consultation with the host government, would then use these local currency funds to channel investment into particular sectors and break bottlenecks to reconstruction. Counterpart theoretically gave Washington enormous leverage over national reconstruction plans. In practice, the ECA’s influence varied by country, ranging from very heavy in Greece and Italy to moderate in France to light in Great Britain.49 The conditionality associated with the ERP has led some historians to see the Marshall Plan as economic imperialism, but a closer reading underlines the convergence of transatlantic purposes. Critics allege that the ECA sought to discourage competing economic visions to American market capitalism, pry open markets for U.S. goods, and transform recipients into political-economic satellites of the United States.50 It is true that U.S. resources did not come free of charge. But the United States did not impose the ERP on Europe. During the late 1940s, non-Communist leaders actively solicited U.S. help in rebuilding their shattered economies, stabilizing their democratic regimes, resisting Soviet aggression, and liberalizing trade and payments. Lodge predicted that the ERP would be “the biggest damn interference in internal affairs that there has ever been in history.” Yet he was correct in thinking that “almost everybody

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. . . will be damned glad to see us interfere.”51 The success of European recovery efforts required continual collaboration between U.S. officials and local forces, including the Labor Party in Britain and the Socialists and Christian Democrats in France, Germany, and Italy, who, despite their left-leaning socio-economic orientation, shared the same general goals of anti-Communism, democratic liberty, economic stabilization, and gradual multilateralism. During the Marshall Plan era, the United States behaved more in an egalitarian than domineering fashion. This was by no means predetermined. Given vast disparities in relative power, Washington could have unilaterally dictated the terms of its recovery assistance on each European state. Instead, the Truman administration combined bilateral agreements with a multilateral approach that required the sixteen aid recipients to hammer out, collectively and painstakingly, a joint approach to recovery and present it to the United States in a united front. With the Marshall Plan, the United States effectively assumed responsibility beyond Europe’s immediate recovery to ensure its long-term independence.52 If aid recipients did not absolve their patron of seeking any quid pro quo, on balance they found its assistance more benevolent than exploitative. Washington structured incentives in ways that influenced European perceptions of self-interest, but did not force systemic changes in political-economic regimes. Such flexibility enabled the success of U.S. efforts. American policymakers understood that the heterogeneity of European capitalisms, which ranged from social democratic to laissezfaire tendencies, required “a good deal of tolerance for philosophical differences.”53 European governments took advantage of this elasticity to advance their own national recovery plans.54 Although historians continue to debate the impact of the Marshall Plan, by most accounts, it worked. The ERP probably did not “cause” West European recovery, but it helped expedite and smooth a recovery already under way.55 It yielded productivity gains, trade liberalization, and social peace and buttressed precarious centrist governments lacking the fortitude to undertake or the capacity to survive austerity measures.56 The Plan’s mixture of material benefits and institutional cooperation induced Europeans to join an American-led community of free nations committed to capitalism, democratic institutions, and national independence.

U.S. SUPPORT FOR EUROPEAN INTEGRATION The OEEC convened for the first time on August 16, 1948. To maximize the organization’s role, American officials sought to extend its competence to the coordination of reconstruction programs and the liberalization of

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intra-European commerce. Averell Harriman, U.S. Special Representative to the OEEC, had insisted in June that the new body help supervise the allocation of U.S. aid. The next month Paul Hoffman, head of the ECA, exhorted Europe to adopt “new patterns of intra-European trade and exchange.”57 By pushing member states to formulate their interests within collective frameworks and submit their policies and performances to collective scrutiny, the OEEC encouraged a tendency among Europeans to “think multilaterally.”58 Despite ambitious schemes in Congress for European political and economic federation,59 the Truman Administration was more circumspect, seeking the gradual economic and political integration of “presently free Europe” to include “as much of Europe as becomes free.” Rather than foist a blueprint for a “United States of Europe,” Washington recognized that “integration,” in the words of Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett, would “proceed at a different pace in the various fields of interest and with somewhat different participants in each case,” to ensure that “the pace is not set by the slowest.” The Europeans must remain in the driver’s seat, but the United States had a vital role to play, since “continuing pressure, and assistance” might be necessary to get Europe to take “bold and difficult measures” in a timely manner.60 Administration officials used words like “unity,” “union,” “integration,” “unification,” and “federation” interchangeably. The ambiguous goal of “integration”—which could connote trade liberalization, collaborative recovery, single market, customs union, political confederation, or even political unification—had political advantages. Such vagueness allowed the State Department and the ECA to conceal modest progress by pointing to incremental steps in various directions, thus mollifying congressional advocates of a United States of Europe.61 In 1949, the ECA’s priority shifted from averting economic collapse to increasing productivity through the creation of a single European market. American diplomats and ECA officials, extrapolating from U.S. historical experience, tirelessly expounded the virtues of a unified continental market for increased trade, growth, and per capita income. By abandoning outmoded concerns of self-sufficiency and coordinating their efforts, the ECA argued, Europeans could open new fields of enterprise and raise productivity, “bringing nearer . . . the possibility of a world-wide equilibrium and genuinely multilateral system.”62 To this end, the ECA attacked exchange restrictions and import quotas as well as bilateral currency and trade agreements that hindered the efficient use of resources and the free flow of goods, services, and capital in Europe. Urging the removal of barriers was one thing. Sustaining and entrenching integration required American support for “European institutions with the power to transcend

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sovereignties and coordinate policies so that normal market forces could operate” freely across Western Europe.63 Cognizant of this imperative, U.S. officials pressed their European counterparts to institutionalize their deepening integration. On September 15, 1949, Paul Hoffman warned European governments that continued U.S. congressional and public support for Marshall Aid required “dramatic and substantial evidence” of progress toward unity.64 This would necessarily imply some loss of sovereignty, as autonomous central agencies came to supervise national monetary, fiscal, credit, and trade policies.65 In a subsequent sermon to OEEC foreign ministers, Hoffman, citing a “terrible sense of urgency” and warning of a “viscious cycle of economic nationalism” when the Marshall Plan expired in 1953, called for “nothing less than the integration of the Western European economy.” To alleviate intra-European payments problems, increase European productivity, and close the dollar gap, OEEC members must liberalize trade among one another, make their currencies convertible, coordinate fiscal and monetary policies, and create a “single, large market of 270 million consumers.”66 Hoffman’s appeal launched OEEC toward its most significant achievements in economic integration: the establishment of the European Payments Union (EPU) and the liberalization of intra-European trade. In December 1949, the ECA proposed an automatic multilateral payments clearing system that would allow European countries to offset their bilateral credits and debits by balancing deficits with one country against surpluses with another. Because countries could now focus on their overall payments position rather than on myriad bilateral balances, they no longer needed import quotas or other trade restrictions.67 The EPU, which emerged in July 1950, helped reduce the dollar gap, eliminate barriers to trade within Europe, and encourage monetary coordination. In the realm of international trade, ECA pressure bore fruit in August 1950, when the OEEC adopted a new liberalization code to end commercial discrimination in Europe. While these were major accomplishments, the United States made little headway with the Marshall Plan in advancing European currency convertibility or reducing discrimination against U.S. exports. Ironically, in fact, Washington actively promoted the emergence of a bloc that discriminated against the dollar and U.S. goods. Treasury Department officials feared such a bloc would morph into a permanent fixture of the international landscape, undermining the goal of an open, one-world economy.68 Still, State Department and ECA officials consistently defended their view that European regionalism would bring global multilateralism closer. Events would reward their faith, albeit slowly, as the EPU and intra-European trade liberalization paved the way for eventual European currency convertibility and commercial liberalization in the late 1950s.69

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Washington’s grand ambitions for ever closer European economic (and conceivably political) integration were complicated by divergences between the major European players. Given continued British skepticism about the European project, the Truman Administration increasingly sought leadership from France, which considered the OEEC “the first step in European Unity.” American officials hoped Paris would persuade its neighbors to move beyond “the cautious initial steps toward military, political, and economic cooperation” and accept “more radical departures from traditional concepts of national sovereignty.”70 France nevertheless differed with the United States on important points. The “neoliberals” steering French economic policy had long advocated some form of European integration, in part to minimize French dependence on the United States.71 They had also committed France to an eventual embrace of multilateral trade after a period of “convalescence” to avoid endangering the Monnet Plan. Unlike Washington, however, Paris saw regional unity as a means to delay rather than hasten global multilateralism. French officials meant to control the pace and extent of European economic integration so that the postwar French state could temper and direct the free market through planning and investments in social welfare.72 Rather than sign off on a wholesale liberalization that would expose vulnerable sectors of the domestic and imperial economy to foreign competition, France took a dirigiste stand on OEEC economic cooperation, envisioning agreement on shared markets, rationalized investments, sector liberalization, export contracts for producers, and collective access to raw materials. For strategic (and historical) reasons, Paris also insisted that any European economic integration advance France’s security vis-à-vis Germany. In practical terms this meant giving priority to French recovery needs, safeguarding the Monnet Plan, and making France the hub of continental heavy industry. These goals took on urgency after Paris yielded grudgingly to American and British pressure and signed the London Agreements of June 1948, which consolidated the western zones of occupation in Germany. European unity promised France one last chance to mitigate German power.73 In sum, French leaders viewed “Europe” as a way to postpone global multilateralism, avoid U.S. domination, and constrain Germany’s resurgence. As France’s integrationist ardor waxed, Britain’s flirtation with “Europe” waned. London insisted that any continuing organization remain a loose intergovernmental entity rather than a supranational body. In November 1948, it rejected Paris’s suggestion of a European coal and steel cartel as inconsistent with the British aim of an OEEC-wide free trade area. The same month, France called for a new representative assembly, alongside the British-sponsored Council of Europe, to embody a union of

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European peoples. The British government tepidly replied that any such body must be purely consultative, in keeping with London’s view of an inter-governmental association of sovereign states. (In January 1949, the two countries compromised on a European Council of Ministers accompanied by a consultative assembly with recommendatory powers. The statute of the Council of Europe was signed on May 9, 1949.) The Foreign Office, which advocated European “unity” but not “union,” also rebuffed Monnet’s proposal of February–March 1949 to merge the two nations’ economies as a prelude to full European economic union.74 Spurned by London, Paris courted other partners. On March 26, France and Italy agreed in principle to a bilateral customs union as a stepping-stone to a wider sub-regional economic grouping that might form the core of a larger continental entity under French leadership. British resistance to supranationalism and French determination to hold the reins on Germany complicated Washington’s efforts to foster OEEC-wide integration. Though significant, Marshall Aid did not permit the United States to recast Europe in its own federal image. In February 1949, Kennan conceded that the “form and pace” of integration would remain “predominantly matters for the Europeans themselves” to decide.75 Still, pressure mounted in Congress, which amended the Foreign Assistance Act in April 1949 to declare it “the policy of the people of the United States to encourage the unification of Europe.”76 On October 6, Bohlen told Kennan that the United States must continue to do all in its power to support European unity—politically within the Council of Europe, economically within the framework of the OEEC, and militarily within the Atlantic Pact and the Mutual Assistance Program.77 Given Britain’s growing detachment from the continent and Allied disagreements over Germany, the Americans turned to Paris to spearhead unity. Washington hoped that integration, besides offering France tangible economic gains, would provide an acceptable framework for German revival. Meeting with French Prime Minister Robert Schuman in late September 1949, Secretary of State Acheson noted that the United States was “too far away” to unite Europe. Only France, “as the strongest democratic power on the continent,” could supply the “initiative and leadership” to realize a “long-range solution to Franco-German enmity.” He exhorted Schuman to assimilate the Federal Republic “promptly and decisively into Western Europe.”78 Acheson’s exhortation struck a chord with Schuman, an Alsatian— and a veteran the Kaiser’s army—with a keen appreciation of the need for Franco-German rapprochement. France had to avoid “the old errors of the German problem,” and “there is only one solution,” he had told the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the French National Assembly, “the European solution.”79 Since individual European countries could

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no longer “satisfy interior problems by their own economic and military resources” or compete with the economic giants of the modern world, Europe’s continued fragmentation was “an anachronism, a nonsense, a heresy.” European unity was the way forward, and it must begin with a “tête-a-tête franco-allemand.”80

THE EUROPEAN COAL AND STEEL COMMUNITY Without constant U.S. prodding from 1947 to 1950, West European countries would probably not have taken the decisive steps toward continental unity that they accomplished by 1950. Nevertheless, the scope and institutions of integration reflected European priorities and conditions.81 Ultimately, France, in May 1950, proposed the Schuman Plan, a geographically circumscribed customs union based on regulated markets. The resulting European Coal and Steel Community became the forerunner of the European Economic Community created in 1957. By early 1950 Paris concluded that Washington’s European policy offered no solution to French insecurity and economic weakness. The ERP had saved the Monnet Plan, the basis of French recovery, but had simultaneously hastened German economic revival, diminishing France’s relative gains. France’s negative policy against Germany had failed to prevent the Federal Republic from progressively recovering the symbols of sovereignty and the substance of power. In 1949 an Allied High Commission and a German administration replaced the military government. Dismantling of German industry declined dramatically. German nationals could once again own Ruhr resources. Bonn even entered the OEEC.82 Despite the North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 and assurances by Acheson that the United States “would facilitate French leadership in the Continent,” officials in Paris wondered “what guarantee have we that [the] US will not in [the] future transfer its backing for Continental leadership to Germany?”83 Nor had Paris’s more positive efforts to neuter Germany succeeded. France had engineered neither a broad European union containing both Britain and Germany nor a narrower continental bloc excluding the latter. French officials feared that liberal multilateralism on a regional scale would threaten France’s managed capitalism and offer no control over German revival. Thus, Paris in spring 1950 began exploring a “more restricted customs union based on regulated and controlled markets.”84 Taking advantage of fervent American integrationism and its own fleeting superiority on the continent, France seized on sub-regional integration to obtain the security that had long eluded it. In a May 9 press conference in the Salon d’Horloge, Schuman proposed a dramatic solution: “to place the whole of

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Franco-German coal and steel production under an International Authority open to the participation of the other countries of Europe.” This pooling of heavy industry would “lay the first concrete foundations of the European federation which is indispensable to the maintenance of peace.”85 Although historians justly attribute paternity of the Schuman Plan to Jean Monnet, prominent Americans shared Monnet’s conviction that the construction of “Europe” should commence with coal and steel. George Ball, an advisor to Monnet, and Lewis Douglas, U.S. ambassador in London, had previously suggested bringing French and Benelux resources into the IAR. In mid-October 1949, John J. McCloy, American High Commissioner in Germany, advocated merging the heavy industry of Britain, France, Germany, the Ruhr, the Saar, and Luxembourg. Noting this transatlantic congruence of opinion, French ambassador to the United Kingdom René Massigli wholly admitted “the American origin of the ideas which were at the basis of the plan.”86 Yet Schuman’s proposal departed in important ways from Washington’s preferred vision for Europe. Confronting American pressure for both West German rehabilitation and the creation of a liberal, OEEC-wide customs union, Paris pursued a more geographically circumscribed “Little Europe” based on regulated cooperation in specific sectors and congenial to French domestic planning and continental leadership.87 Like the Marshall Plan, the Schuman Plan brilliantly addressed a confluence of problems, from the deepening Cold War to America’s unnatural domination and Germany’s revival to France’s faltering recovery. In a pivotal memorandum of May 3, 1950, Monnet outlined France’s predicament. The dangerous crystallization of the Cold War into two hostile blocs had engendered fatalism rather than the search for solutions. The time had come for France to transform Europe from a stake in the bipolar competition into an independent actor and find a permanent solution to the German problem. France could not permanently shackle Germany, which, unless led into healthy collaboration with other free peoples, might again become “a cancer dangerous to the peace.” Alternatively, Washington, doubting France’s “solidity and dynamism,” might turn to Bonn for continental leadership. The answer, Monnet asserted, was for France to abandon coercion of Germany in favor of a policy of reconciliation and resource sharing.88 The core of a united Europe, Monnet wrote, should lie in joint control over coal and steel, historically important as the materials of war and fundamental to the heavy industry goals of the Monnet Plan. Bonn’s recent request to increase steel production threatened not only French reconstruction and modernization but also a return to zero-sum economic competition and protectionism in Europe. To avoid “Malthusianism,” Paris must cement Franco-German interdependence with supranational institutions of a united Europe.

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Such an historic rapprochement would also “de-block” movement toward the European unity that U.S. public opinion demanded in return for Atlantic partnership. Monnet envisioned a united Western Europe, “at the heart of the new community of free and peaceful peoples” and allied with “a strong America” but avoiding its domination, that would restore global equilibrium. As Paris had used Marshall aid to fulfill Monnet Plan goals, so it could tap into U.S. pressure for integration to help define the terms of European interdependence.89 Monnet identified the “essential political objective” of the new community as “mak[ing] a breach in the walls of national sovereignty . . . narrow enough to secure consent, but deep enough to open the way towards the unity which is essential to peace.”90 The European Coal and Steel Community that emerged in April 1951 would certainly require some pooling of economic sovereignty. Although the Schuman Plan was more restricted in scope and dirigiste in flavor than Washington had wished, the Americans had to accede to it or renounce European integration altogether. Acheson gave an immediate and unequivocal blessing. Harriman, likewise, called it “the most important step toward economic progress and peace since the Marshall Plan speech.”91 Great Britain, however, did not join the nascent “Little Europe.” London rejected participation in light of its own Commonwealth obligations, recent nationalization of its own coal and steel industries, and reluctance to make open-ended commitments to supranationalism. Looking back in the early 1960s, Senator Fulbright regretted that America did not employ Marshall Aid “to push hesitant nations toward political federation as well as economic cooperation.”92 Yet it remains doubtful that Washington could have imposed such unity on Europe at any acceptable cost. Lasting integration, after all, necessitates either voluntary participation or perpetual enforcement. The totalitarian USSR could dictate to weak, non-democratic satellites, but America’s liberal ethos and the requirements of legitimacy in the western coalition made U.S. domination inconceivable. The leverage of Marshall aid put the United States in a position to frame the parameters of European recovery, but American principles precluded it from demanding political integration of Europe—or even a Europe-wide free trade area, which implied significant sacrifices of European sovereignty and autonomy. The Truman administration wisely recognized that on the OEEC, “the United States could try to influence developments but could never achieve anything lasting by force or coercion.” Washington thus limited itself to urging recalcitrant states to conform to the decisions of OEEC majorities. Still, “American initiative played a major and decisive role” in these early steps toward European integration93 as the broad and flexible U.S. approach to unity allowed the European principals—especially France—to take local ownership of the integration project.

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Both French and American politicians tried to minimize the inherent tensions between Atlanticism and European integration. Yet, France plainly intended the Schuman Plan to reduce the continent’s dependence on U.S. power and wealth and to promote a French-led Western Europe as an independent actor in the international arena. In their search for a multilateral world, American statesmen had effectively, if unconsciously, committed themselves to the same goal.

THE FAILURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE ORGANIZATION AND THE SUCCESS OF GATT While pursuing European recovery and promoting continental integration, the Truman Administration continued trying to lay the institutional foundations for global commercial multilateralism. The cornerstone of this edifice was to be the International Trade Organization. President Truman believed the ITO would “complete the postwar structure of peace” begun with the creation of the UNO and the Bretton Woods institutions.94 On October 15, 1946, a Preparatory Committee of representatives of eighteen countries gathered in London to consider Washington’s Suggested Charter. All major trading nations supported multilateralism in the abstract, but in practice they disagreed profoundly on the norms and rules that should govern global commerce, each according to its national agenda.95 Among the Commonwealth countries, for instance, only Canada supported America’s liberal vision; in contrast, Australia was committed to domestic regulation and imperial preference, and India sought leeway to discriminate for purposes of domestic development, particularly to protect infant industries. The continued divergence between the United States and Great Britain, by far the dominant trading nations, posed the most problems. Washington remained absolutely committed to non-discrimination. Clair Wilcox, the chief U.S. negotiator, enunciated U.S. principles for international commerce: “That international trade should be abundant, that it should be multilateral, that it should be non-discriminatory, that stabilization policies and trade policies should be consistent.” Britain’s Labor Government continued to prioritize full employment, insisting that trade liberalization could occur only to the extent that it furthered this objective. Intent on preventing the spread of deflation from abroad, London wanted “unambiguous recognition” in the Charter of full employment as “a duty which each government owes not merely to its own nationals, but to the world as a whole.”96 U.S. negotiators disputed this notion, reasoning that employment levels in other countries were largely outside of a given state’s control—unlike national policies of non-discrimination. Moreover,

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states could legitimately differ over where to strike the balance between employment objectives and economic growth.97 By November 26, 1946, the Preparatory Committee in London had agreed on 74 of 89 articles of the draft ITO Charter. A jubilant Wilcox explained: “All of the countries here now have our grand design clearly in mind.”98 The London draft did incorporate several welcome provisions, such as precluding the creation of any new preferences or increase of existing ones, ensuring that reductions in the MFN rate automatically reduced margins of preference, and prohibiting existing international commitments from obstructing the reduction of preferences. The participants also agreed to enter “reciprocal and mutually advantageous negotiations” to reduce tariffs and eliminate tariff preferences. On the other hand, the draft also included important exceptions to free trade principles, notably a general acceptance of quotas as well as their discriminatory application in a variety of circumstances (including postwar transition situations, balance of payments crises, domestic support programs, and for development purposes). These loopholes left a gaping hole in America’s multilateral vision. The agreement also sanctioned discrimination in the event of declining currency reserves, eased restrictions on cartels, and granted more leeway for commodity agreements. Finally, the document committed each nation to “take action designed to achieve and maintain full employment within its own jurisdiction through measures appropriate to its political and economic institutions,” while avoiding measures likely to create unemployment elsewhere.99 Two subsequent arduous negotiating sessions, in Geneva in spring 1947 and in Havana the following winter, would complete the ITO Charter, but to facilitate liberalization in the meantime, the London meeting drafted a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Attached as a protocol to the draft ITO charter, the GATT essentially gave multilateral effect to bilateral tariff reductions. Each state party would propose maximum tariff schedules across a range of trade items, which would form the basis for bilateral negotiations. Any concessions would extend automatically to all trading partners. The GATT resulted in a round-robin set of negotiations, with continual bargaining and liberalization. Conceived initially as a mere addendum to the ITO that would become obsolete with the latter’s entry into force, the GATT rapidly became the focus of postwar trade liberalization. The Truman Administration would use its authority under the RTAA to lead a historic reduction of barriers to global commerce. As a prelude to the Geneva conference on the ITO, U.S. negotiators obtained authority to reduce U.S. tariffs up to 50 percent of 1945 levels by portraying multilateralism as a way to boost exports, at a time when the United States had 41 percent of the world’s GDP and one-third of its exports. However, the Republican victory in the mid-term elections

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of November 1946 raised question about U.S. trade liberalization.100 Whereas the war had converted most Republicans to internationalism in the security sphere, many remained economic nationalists. The greatest antagonism toward the ITO came from diehard isolationists and antiNew Deal partisans like Taft, Millikin, and Speaker of the House Joseph Martin, who distrusted any effort to extend domestic regulation to the international arena. Hoping to stave off protectionist forces, Truman struck a deal in February 1947 with Vandenberg, Taft, and Millikin. The Republican leadership agreed to defer introduction of tariffs for a year provided that the Administration inserted an escape clause into every GATT agreement permitting the withdrawal of any trade concessions the Tariff Commission deemed harmful to domestic producers.101 Truman issued a directive that any tariff reductions must not bypass “peril points” to harm domestic industry. The administration also invoked the deepening Cold War as a rationale for U.S. trade liberalization. In spring 1947, Clayton warned Congress that without multilateral commerce “we are going to leave a vacuum into which, inevitably, will move an economic system based on principles alien to our ideas, injurious to our interests, and highly restrictive on the volume of world trade.” Wilcox struck the same note, describing the stakes in trade multilateralism as “our leadership in international affairs, our foreign trade, our system of private enterprise, our national security.”102 The continuing absence of a common code of international commerce, they suggested, might precipitate the socialization of the U.S. economy. Still, the Republican resurgence undermined the U.S. negotiating position in Geneva, casting doubt on U.S. readiness to assent to sweeping tariff reductions in return for Britain’s embrace of non-discrimination. The State Department assured the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that Britain’s elimination of imperial preference was a fundamental precondition of the ITO. In fact, the prospects of this happening were dim. By spring 1947, neither the Conservative nor the Labor Party was prepared to eliminate preference without massive U.S. concessions. The GOP’s control of the 80th Congress only reinforced British intransigence. The second preparatory committee meeting on the ITO opened in Geneva on May 16, 1947, with eighteen nations in attendance. It lasted three months. From the start, Washington’s free trade orthodoxy met heavy opposition. Almost all countries—the Europeans, Commonwealth members, and developing states—sought a code that would permit regulated trade and some discrimination. The British offered minimal concessions on preference. Under protectionist siege, the U.S. delegation retreated from its liberal principles. It ultimately accepted modifications condoning increased state control over foreign investment, greater room for state-led industrialization, quotas, and exchange controls for balance of payments

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reasons, and interventionist policies of full employment. The United States also acquiesced in the persistence of import and exchange controls after the postwar transition. The ITO was becoming a vehicle of government interventionism rather than worldwide free trade. Despite its growing reservations about the ITO Charter, the Truman administration persuaded itself that exceptions to multilateralism remained limited and temporary and that any agreement on uniform rules of global commerce, however imperfect, at least constituted a step forward. American business was less sanguine. The National Association of Manufacturers condemned the provisions of the Charter as “far out of conformity with American principles”; a bad ITO was “the one thing worse” than having none at all.103 As part of the Geneva preparatory committee meetings, parties to the GATT held their first session to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions. Facing resistance from Commonwealth countries, the United States had lowered its expectations to a significant liberalization of trade in commodities. The U.S. delegation offered concessions covering $1.4 billion of U.S. imports, but the British wanted more. In urging U.S. generosity, Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin invoked the historic precedent of nineteenthcentury Britain: The United States was roughly “in the position today where Britain was at the end of the Napoleonic wars.” After 1815 Britain “‘practically gave away her exports’ but this had resulted in stability and a hundred years of peace.”104 Clayton countered by proposing that Britain reduce its preferences by 20 percent per year in exchange for a significant U.S. tariff cut. Cripps responded that Britain’s deteriorating current account balance made “multilateral trade almost an impossibility.” Any relaxation of preferences must depend on a solid guarantee of greater access to the U.S. market—something ultimately in congressional rather than Administration hands. Clayton sought permission from the State Department to remind the British of their multilateral commitments—and even to suggest the United States could make Marshall Plan aid contingent on Britain following through. But Lovett rejected this hardball approach, believing a “thin agreement” in Geneva to be “better than none.” As the Cold War chilled Europe, allied solidarity outweighed free trade orthodoxy.105 In the end, the Geneva Round did bring about significant liberalization in international commerce as it culminated in the largest reduction of trade barriers in a generation. Truman labeled it “a landmark in the history of international economic relations.” A multilateral agreement comprised of 106 separate bilateral accords among 23 nations, including 10 developing countries, Geneva covered 70 percent of world trade and half of global imports. Washington’s willingness to strike asymmetric bargains made all this possible. For every concession it received, on average

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it extended two in return. The final accord covered three-quarters of U.S. imports and lowered average U.S. tariff rates to 25.4 percent—commensurate with the low levels of the mid-nineteenth century. American trade negotiator Winthrop Brown hailed the outcome as “the first major step to be taken by important nations to reverse the trend toward trade restriction and economic isolation which has persisted throughout the world since the First World War.”106 The next round of GATT negotiations, the Annecy Round of April– August 1949, proved less impressive. It effected only modest liberalization, as developing countries sought exemptions for infant industries and the Commonwealth insisted on maintaining import controls for balance of payments protection. Nevertheless, by 1949 average U.S. tariff rates had declined to 13.8 percent, compared to Smoot-Hawley levels of 52.8 percent in 1933. When the Annecy agreements took effect, U.S. rates would fall even farther, to 5 percent.107

THE IRONIES OF HEGEMONIC MULTILATERALISM American postwar planners had been confident that a standing international trade organization with universal membership would surely lead to global trade liberalization, enabling nations to rationally pursue joint benefits from lower barriers and non-discrimination. Washington, however, did not anticipate that postwar negotiations to create such a body would provide opportunities for adherents of illiberal economic visions to thwart America’s dream. In the wake of World War II, the United States discovered that its dedication to procedural multilateralism— whereby consultations with all members of the group shaped the content of international institutions—undercut its ability to achieve substantive multilateralism—the realization of an international economic regime based on non-discrimination, reciprocity, and indivisibility. Although Washington hoped to forge consensus around, and thus legitimate, U.S. preferences through multilateral negotiations, these in fact provided a forum for countries skeptical of economic multilateral principles to gang up on the United States and restrict the scope and terms of trade liberalization. For all of its power, the United States remained trapped in a “multilateral paradox.” As Jamie Miller writes, “Americans could not propose an inclusive, egalitarian forum to negotiate trade policy, and at the same time prescribe the policy to be adopted there,” if they wished to remain true to their egalitarian principles.108 Arguably, bilateral negotiations with an MFN principle might have served U.S. interests better. This would have permitted the United States to liberalize

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on a case-by-case basis through the RTAA and exploit its market leverage to secure relative gains. The Havana Conference on Trade and Employment opened on November 18, 1947, a day after Truman had asked Congress to fund the Marshall Plan. In addressing the gathering, Will Clayton described European recovery and multilateral trade as complementary undertakings. The Marshall Plan “would be a temporary and emergency program” for Europe, “whereas tariff and ITO negotiations at Geneva are intended to produce results of a permanent character in putting the world back on the road to economic peace.”109 American officials made sure that the ERP (and any European customs union that emerged from it) conformed to the draft ITO Charter, so that European countries could rapidly assume their ITO obligations as they recovered. Fifty-six nations attended the Havana conference, including thirty-nine developing countries. The latter possessed significant negotiating leverage on account of their numbers, Europe’s need for overseas markets to facilitate reconstruction, and their role as strategic assets in the burgeoning Cold War. The developing world pushed a panoply of provisions at odds with liberal multilateralism. They sought even more room for preferential trade arrangements, rectification of terms of trade imbalances between exported commodities and imported manufactures, new allowances for state trading and protection for infant industries, greater leeway for cartels, and increased state control over investments. The U.S. delegation successfully rebuffed most of these demands, but the Charter did come to encompass exceptions for economic development (advanced by the likes of India, Brazil, and Chile, who wanted to safeguard national development plans and place restrictions on foreign investment). Washington also assented to greater flexibility in the imposition of currency controls for balance of payments reasons. Fifty-three nations signed the Final Act of the Havana Charter of the ITO on March 28, 1948. The document fell well short of the liberal, marketbased trading system to which America aspired. Instead, the ITO Charter was premised on government regulation and protection, reflecting the rest of the world’s experiences of depression and war and postwar concerns about economic recovery and the advancement of social welfare. As Wilcox conceded to U.S. business leaders, American “views about a free economic world are not universally held.” Regulation and state-ism represented “the kind of a world we live in.” Despite these setbacks, the Truman Administration continued to argue that an international trade organization with common rules might eventually reduce distortions and blossom into the liberal multilateral ideal. The President signed the Charter on March 24 calling it “a code of fair dealing in international trade.” 110

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The ITO, in trying to accommodate disparate economic doctrines, disappointed most countries. The United States had pressed for formal obligations on the elimination of imperial preference, quotas, and discrimination generally, whereas the United Kingdom and others had pushed for safeguards for domestic full employment policies. “The result was an elaborate set of rules and counter-rules that offered imperfect standards for national policy” that “satisfied nobody and alienated nearly everybody.”111 The U.S. delegation’s concessions played poorly at home, undermining support for the ITO Charter. Export-oriented American businesses bemoaned its anti-free enterprise aspects, including its investment provisions. Protectionists blasted its giveaways to foreign nations. Conservatives excoriated it as a global socialist bureaucracy—a New Deal writ large—conducive to cartels and state trading. The National Association of Manufacturers released a tract titled Economic Munich, describing the ITO as a threat to capitalism. Wilcox endeavored in vain to defend the organization, imploring critics: “We can’t just go off to the North Pole and be fine and pure just by ourselves; we have to come to terms with the actual situation that we find in the world and put as much restraint on it as we can, and that is what the Charter does.”112 Faced with swelling opposition, Truman delayed seeking legislative approval for the Charter until after the November 1948 elections, which returned Democrats to power in both houses of Congress. On April 28, 1949, he submitted the Charter to Congress as a joint resolution, rather than a treaty, which would have required support from two-thirds of the Senate. Administration officials presented the ITO as a pillar of world order and U.S. national security—the “capstone of the economic structure” of the Free World, as Acheson told the Chamber of Commerce.113 The new body would establish the rule of law in international economic relations” and imply the “nearly universal acceptance of America’s economic philosophy.”114 Its rejection, however, would “jeopardize every effort that has been made to organize the world for peace.”115 Such arguments did not resonate on Capitol Hill in the context of a deepening Cold War. Since two adversarial blocs had already formed, portraying commercial multilateralism as a cornerstone of global harmony struck legislators as out of touch and anachronistic.116 By the late 1940s, the objective of a universal trade organization seemed less pressing—and more utopian—than concrete steps to support European recovery and block Soviet expansion. If the aim was to bolster allies through trade, the United States could always resort to the GATT, an existing, more flexible instrument than the ITO. During 1948 and 1949, Congress was preoccupied with containment imperatives, including legislation on the ERP and creating the North At-

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lantic alliance. By the time it held hearings on the ITO in April–May 1950, most legislators, as well as the champions of free trade outside of government, had abandoned it. In congressional testimony, Acheson tried once more to play the Cold War card. “Freedom is hanging in the balance in many parts of the world,” he implored, “and millions of people are looking in our direction for assurance that we really mean what we say.”117 But the House Foreign Affairs Committee decided not to consider the legislation during the 1950 session, given upcoming mid-term elections. The U.S. private sector dealt the most crippling blow to the ITO’s prospects. Although the American business community (including the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Foreign Trade Council [NFTC], the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. Council of the International Chamber of Commerce) had earlier supported Bretton Woods and the British loan, virtually all abandoned the ITO. Business leaders saw the Havana Charter as a betrayal of America’s multilateral objectives, sanctioning numerous avenues for discrimination against U.S. goods and investment. Clauses allowing the indefinite continuation of quotas against U.S. exports, placing the burden of adjustment on surplus countries and limiting foreign investment for balance of payments reasons particularly offended the private sector. The NFTC complained that such provisions would “transform the free enterprise system of this country into a system of planned economy, with consequent initiative-destroying regimentation, reduction in productive output and standards of living, and threat to the free institutions and liberties of the American people.” In the same vein the U.S. Chamber of Commerce blasted the Charter as “a dangerous document because it accepts practically all of the policies of economic nationalism [and] . . . jeopardizes the free enterprise system by giving priority to centralized national governmental planning of foreign trade.” The ITO would relegate the United States to a “permanent minority position owing to its one vote one country voting procedure,” while ”making it impossible for the United States to engage in an independent course of policy in favor of multilateral trade.”118 Faced with near-universal business and legislative opposition, Truman capitulated. On December 6, 1950, the White House issued a press release that “the proposed Charter for an International Trade Organization should not be resubmitted to Congress.”119

EMBRACING THE GATT The end of the ITO did not halt the march of commercial multilateralism. In lieu of the ITO, the Truman Administration (and its successors) pursued trade liberalization via the GATT regime, which provided a less

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detailed but nonetheless serviceable code of rules for international trade.120 Although the State Department would have preferred a straightforward multilateral approach to commercial policy, whereby all the world’s nations came together to reduce tariffs across the board and eliminate discrimination in one fell swoop, U.S. diplomats accepted that significant progress toward liberalization could also happen through a “bilateralmultilateral” approach, whereby the major trading nations concluded numerous bilateral arrangements with one another. The death of the Havana Charter arguably proved a blessing. The GATT turned out to be a more flexible framework for trade liberalization, one that retained the substance of multilateralism without the procedural frustrations and resentments that had accumulated during the ITO negotiations. Washington succeeded in getting the major goal of its commercial policy—the Chapter V provisions of the Havana Charter— incorporated into Part II of the GATT. This made non-discrimination the key norm of postwar trade. The most-favored nation (MFN) principle and the norm of reciprocity effectively offered any market concession to all parties. The GATT also enshrined transparency, in that it prescribed the transformation of quotas into tariffs, which could be subject to reciprocal negotiations. Though it did not herald an era of free trade universalism, the GATT inaugurated a regime of freer if not free trade through “a generalized commitment to the reduction of protectionism on a multilateral basis.”121 The GATT also, however, contained numerous exceptions, qualifications, and escape clauses to multilateral principles. The U.S.-inspired order was a hybrid that combined market liberalization and nondiscrimination for manufactured goods while tolerating protectionist and discriminatory measures. It permitted the formation of customs unions and free trade areas that discriminated against non-members and excluded entire sectors and spheres, notably trade in agriculture and fisheries, from the prohibition on quotas. Foreign investment remained under host country control. The GATT did not address trade in services and condoned certain restrictive business practices along with employment obligations. At the insistence of Britain and France, it granted continued exceptions to imperial preferences and contained safeguards in the event of balance of payments difficulties (Article 12). Yet, compared to the ITO, the GATT represented a more pragmatic approach to postwar trade liberalization, one sensitive to domestic and political realities in trading nations and to the national security imperatives of a deepening Cold War. The fact that it was an informal arrangement among contracting parties, rather than a supranational organization, made it palatable to sovereignty-minded members of Congress. The GATT also preserved legislative prerogatives, since it required the administration to

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return to Capitol Hill periodically to secure reauthorization of the RTAA. This dynamic empowered the executive branch to direct trade liberalization only after Congress had responded to protectionist constituencies. In effect, the GATT regime subjected the U.S. commitment to trade liberalization to the balance of forces in Congress. In spring 1948, the Republican-controlled Congress shortened Truman’s request for a threeyear extension of the RTAA to only a year. More problematic, the new RTAA legislation enhanced the Tariff Commission’s role in approving proposed tariff adjustments, including a prerogative to hold public hearings and establish ceilings or “peril points” below which producers might be harmed. Truman publicly pledged not to lower tariffs in 1948, but following the Democratic resurgence in the 1948 elections, he requested a longer extension of the RTAA, this time without “hampering restrictions.” The more amenable 81st Congress eliminated the “peril points” clause and made the tariff commission once again an advisory body. A new, three-year RTAA passed easily (319–69 in the House; 62-19 in the Senate) and was signed into law on September 26, 1949.122 Protectionist forces endured, however. In reauthorizing the RTAA in 1951, Congress reinserted “peril point” language, as well as multiple escape clauses and quotas. Truman nevertheless signed the bill into law. Beyond accommodating domestic political pressures for protectionism, the GATT served a useful strategic purpose in the international arena. It provided an economic web tying together the Free World coalition that the United States had assembled for its geopolitical contest with the USSR. GATT embodied a moderate form of multilateralism, sufficiently flexible to attract all the major trading nations. Though based on market capitalism, it permitted significant departures from “pure” economic efficiency, such as continued protectionism in agriculture and extensive domestic regulation of particular industries. Although Washington never relinquished the goal of a world trade organization, it conceded that multilateralism would initially be confined to its allies. Through successive GATT trade rounds, moreover, the United States accepted qualified reciprocity, striking asymmetric bargains with trade partners whose own tariff concessions were typically less than what it was offering. By opening its markets to foreign exports, particularly from Europe, and promoting gradual liberalization among allies, the United States created an economic corollary to NATO and its growing network of alliances in other areas of the world. Although Washington clung to the vision of global multilateralism, “Free trade universalism was a goal for the far-off future, when the superpower struggle had abated.”123 A commercial regime intended to bolster the prosperity of the Free World had supplanted the wartime dream of an open global economy. American support for the GATT had a strategic rationale in the Cold War.

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Whereas Roosevelt’s postwar planners had once associated open trade with global peace, Truman’s aides described the GATT’s utility for containment. James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, made this linkage clear in congressional testimony. The U.S. military, he stated in 1949, regarded the RTAA as “a step in the interest of national security both in the immediate and in the long-term sense.”124 Like the Marshall Plan, the GATT became an instrument of “economic security,” based on the assumption that open trade and economic prosperity among America’s free world partners offered the best way to achieve international stability and ward off Communist subversion.125

CONCLUSION The European economic crisis of 1946–1947 and the onset of the Cold War challenged wartime U.S. plans for a liberal system of trade and payments. Despite the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions, postwar trends portended to Washington the fragmentation of the global economy into exclusive economic blocs, with negative implications for America’s domestic political economy and potentially perilous consequences for international peace and security. The Truman administration responded by launching history’s most ambitious foreign assistance program—the Marshall Plan—designed to stabilize America’s critical European allies while saving the prospect of an open system of international commerce. A signature feature of the ERP was U.S. insistence that aid recipients collaborate to define their collective needs and the purposes for American assistance. Pressure from the United States played an indispensable role in driving early European steps toward economic and (to a lesser degree) political integration. The scope and nature of integration, however, largely reflected the predilections of the Europeans themselves. This dynamic arguably marked the first time in history that a preponderant power had pursued a policy promoting unity rather than division in an area under its influence. Meanwhile, at the global level, the United States supported commercial multilateralism through the development of an ITO Charter, signed in Havana in March 1948. Unfortunately, Washington found postwar negotiations with a diverse and growing set of actors a frustrating experience, as a formally egalitarian process enabled both developed and developing countries with more protectionist and statist attitudes to kill America’s desired multilateral trade regime via death by a thousand cuts. The Havana Charter that resulted from this laborious process of negotiation was a pale reflection of the bright vision of liberal commerce of which U.S. policymakers had dreamt during World War II. Faced with grow-

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ing opposition from Congress and the private sector, President Truman ultimately abandoned the ITO. Nevertheless, the United States continued pursuing commercial multilateralism through the GATT, whose flexible framework for trade negotiations, based on the MFN principle, enabled significant trade liberalization that bolstered U.S.-led Free World opposition to the Soviet Union. During the ensuing postwar decades, the United States played a dominant and largely constructive role in the world economy. It pressed for additional liberalization, maintained an open market, supplied a freely convertible currency, managed exchange rates, served as a lender of last resort, and provided funds for investment and development. Like Great Britain in the nineteenth century, the United States tolerated asymmetric bargains with its trading partners, remaining open to foreign goods in return for an easing of protectionism abroad. The United States did not insist on equivalent concessions from smaller trading partners, but allowed them to free ride on tariff reductions it had negotiated with individual partners and then multilateralized. In short, playing the part of benevolent hegemon, it bore the burden of providing public goods.

NOTES 1. I am indebted to Jamie Miller for this formulation. 2. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 291–93. Krasner, “US Commercial and Monetary Policy,” 660. 3. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 294. 4. President Truman, address at Baylor University on “Peace, Freedom, and World Trade.” Department of State Bulletin, 16 March1947, 481–85. 5. On July 29, British Foreign Minister Bevin requested that Washington release the UK from the non-discrimination conditions of the British Loan, to which Truman consented. 6. Clayton to Acheson, May 27, 1947, FRUS 1947, 230–32. Clayton, “GATT, the Marshall Plan, and the OECD,” Political Science Quarterly 78, no. 4 (December 1963), 496. 7. Kennan memo, May 16, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 220–23. 8. Department of State Bulletin, 15 June 1947, 1159–60. FRUS 1947, III, 237–39. On Marshall’s sketchy, early thoughts, June 13, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 249–51. 9. Kennan to Acheson, May 23, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 223–20. Clayton to Acheson, May 27, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 230–232 (emphasis in original). 10. Charles Kindleberger, “Memorandum for the Files: Origins of the Marshall Plan,” July 22, 1948, FRUS 1947, III, 244. 11. Michael Hogan, “The Search for a ‘Creative Peace’: The United States, European Unity, and the Origins of the Marshall Plan,” Diplomatic History 6, no. 3 (Summer 1982), 267–85. Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51 (London: Methuen, 1984), 53–54.

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12. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 304–5. Miriam Camps, “The Continuing Institutions: An Assessment,” in The Marshall Plan: A Retrospective, ed. by Stanley Hoffman and Charles Maier (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), 71. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 83. 13. Hervé Alphand, L’Étonnement de l’Etre: Journal 1939–1973 (Paris: Fayard, 1977), 163–69. 14. Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–1951 (London: Methuen, 1984), 58–60. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 54. 15. Radio address from Havana, November 1947, cited in Ellen Clayton Garwood, Will Clayton: A Short Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 8. 16. Marshall commencement address at Harvard. 17. Harriman had foreshadowed such a strategy as early as April 1945. “Unless we are willing to live in a world dominated largely by Soviet influence, we must use our economic power to assist these countries that are naturally friendly to our concepts,” he cabled from Moscow. “The only hope of stopping Soviet penetration is the development of sound economic conditions in these countries.” Harriman, in Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 248. 18. Text of Acheson speech in Jones, The Fifteen Weeks, 274–81. 19. European Recovery and Economic Aid: A Report by the President’s Committee on Foreign Aid (Harriman Report) (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 7 November 1947), 17–20. Truman remarks on submitting aid package for France, Italy, and Austria to Congress, December 19, 2007, cited in Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 200. 20. Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy After World War II,” in In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy, ed. Charles S. Maier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 121–52. 21. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 60, 123. 22. Marshall Planner Harold van Buren Cleveland, in The Marshall Plan Forty Years After, ed. by David W. Elwood, 12. 23. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity.” Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 60, 123. 24. Anthony Carew, Labor under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 225. 25. John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 151. 26. “France: Policy and Information Statement,” September 15, 1946, 22, State Department Central Files (microfiche frame 493). Also FRUS 1946, II, 109–12. Chauvel, Commentaire, 187. 27. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 452. 28. “United States Assistance to Other Countries from the Standpoint of National Security,” Report by the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, April 29, 1947, FRUS 1947, I, 740. July 21, 1947, FRUS 1947, II, 1000–3.

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29. Bidault address of May 28, 1947, cited in Annie Lacroix-Riz, “La Perception Francaise de la Politique Americaine en Europe de 1945 a 1948,” 129. 30. Both quotations from Kennan. Kennan to Marshall, May 16, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 221. Kennan, PPS 23, “Review of Current Trends in US Foreign Policy,” February 24, 1948. FRUS 1948, I, pp. 510, 515–6. Hogan, “The Search for a ‘Creative Peace’,” 274–5. 31. June 4, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 237–9. 32. Armin Rappaport, “The United States and European Integration: The First Phase,” Diplomatic History 5, 2 (Spring 1981), 121. 33. Cited in Ernst H. van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership: European Integration as a Concern of American Foreign Policy (New York: Elsevier, 1966), 103. 34. Gerard Bossuat, “La Modernisation de la France (1945–1949): Une Affaire Européene?” 311. Marshall, memorandum of conversation, June 13, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 251–53. June 18, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 259–60. 35. Although Yugoslavia received some U.S. aid during this era, it was not formally part of the ERP. 36. On August 6, 1947, Clayton, Caffery, Douglas, Murphy, and Nitze requested Washington’s authority to advise the CEEC on a joint recovery plan. Clayton, Douglas, Caffery, Murphy, and Nitze, August 6, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 343–4. 37. Lovett to Clayton. August 26, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 386. 38. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 69 39. Lovett to Clayton, August 26, 1947, FRUS 1947, II, 386. Melandri, Les ÉtatsUnis Face à l’Unification de l’Europe 1945–1954, 119–20. Clayton meeting of 30 August with CEEC Executive Committee, noted in van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 79. Clayton to Marshall and Lovett, FRUS, August 31, 1947. 40. André Kaspi, “Jean Monnet,” Politique Étrangère 51 (1986), 70–1. Étienne Hirsch, Ainsi la Vie (Paris: 1988), 78–9. 41. CEEC report, cited by Clair Wilcox in November 13, 1947, address, “Trade Policy in Perspective,” Department of State Bulletin, 23 November 1947, 989–93. FRUS 1947, III, 433. Melandri, Les États-Uni, 121–25. Reitzel, Kaplan, and Coblenz, United States Foreign Policy, 120. 42. Lovett to Alphand, October 25, 1947, cited in Lacroix-Rix, “La Perception Française,” 134. Francois Bloch-Lainé and Jean Bouvier, La France Restaurée, 124. 43. Melandri, Les Etats-Unis, 119–20. 44. Italics added. Cited in Van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 114. 45. Lincoln Gordon, “The Organization for European Economic Cooperation,” International Organization 10, no. 1 (1956), 3. 46. Michael J. Hogan, “American Marshall Planners and the Search for a European Neo-Capitalism,” 66. 47. Van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 132–33. Lovett to Caffery, April 8, 1948, FRUS III, 414–17. 48. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 114. 49. William Burr, “Marshall Planners and the Politics of Empire: The United States and French Financial Policy, 1948,” Diplomatic History 15, no. 4 (1991): 495–522.

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50. Thomas McCormick, “America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War,” in The Cold War in Europe, ed. Charles S. Maier (New York: M. Weiner, 1991), 21–50. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 9–10. U.S. officials sought to dispel fears of U.S. imperialism. See Harriman to Marshall, June 26, 1948, FRUS 1948, III, 456–457. 51. Cited in Pollard, Economic Security, 156. 52. Lord Franks, “Lessons of the Marshall Plan Experience,” in OECD, From Marshall Plan to Global Interdependence (Paris: 1978), 20. 53. Lincoln Gordon, “Recollections of a Marshall Planner,” Journal of International Affairs 41, no. 2 (Summer 1988), 239. Harold van Buren Cleveland, in The Marshall Plan Forty Years After: Lessons for the International System Today, ed. David W. Elwood (Bologna: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 11–12. 54. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 435–36. Charles S. Maier, “Supranational Concepts and National Continuity in the Framework of the Marshall Plan,” in The Marshall Plan: A Retrospective, ed. by Stanley Hoffmann and Charles S. Maier (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 29–30. 55. Maier, “The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Europe,” pp. 342–43. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 465–66. 56. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 431–32. 57. Cited in Hogan, “American Marshall Planners,” 47. 58. Lincoln Gordon, “Recollections of a Marshall Planner,” 239–43. Van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 164. 59. Rappaport, “The United States and European Integration.” 60. Lovett to Harriman, FRUS 1948, III, 301–3. Max Beloff, The United States and the Unity of Europe (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1963), 166. Lovett’s vision presaged what students of the European Union today label “variable geometry” or “Europe à la carte.” 61. Gordon, “Recollections of a Marshall Planner,” 242. 62. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 59. “Economic Benefits of West European Integration,” undated State Department paper, FRUS 1949, III, 136–37. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 54. 63. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 428. 64. September 15, 1949, FRUS 1949, IV, 656. 65. Hoffman note to Harriman, October 6, 1949, cited in Melandri, Les ÉtatsUnis Face à l’Unification de l’Europe, 215. 66. Speech of October 31, 1949, cited in Van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 182–86. FRUS 1949, IV, 439. 67. Van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 199. 68. Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline, 108–9. 69. By June 1950 industrial production in ERP states had increased 24 percent over prewar figures, exports by 20 percent, and intra-European trade by 17 percent. Hogan, “American Marshall Planners,” 51–53. 70. “Policy Statement,” September 20, 1948, FRUS 1948, III, 652–53. Lacroix-Riz, “La Perception Française,” 133–34. 71. Monnet, Memoirs, 272–73.

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72. Frank, “The French Dilemma,” 279. Renaud de la Genière, “La Diplomatie Économique en France dans le Dernier Demi-Siècle,” Politique Étrangère 51, no. 1 (1986), 159. 73. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 61–65. Bossuat, “La Modernisation de la France (1945–1949),” 311–18. John W. Young, France, the Cold War, and the Western Alliance, 1944–49: French Foreign Policy and Post-War Europe (New York: St., Martin’s, 1990), 205. 74. Young, Britain, France, and the Unity of Europe, 124. Bossuat, “La Modernisation de la France,” 319–322 75. Kennan, “Principles of Basic Policy Concerning Germany,” February 7, 1949, FRUS 1949, III, 91. 76. Rappaport, “The United States and European Integration,” 137–38. 77. Bohlen to Kennan, October 6, 1949, cited in Melandri, Les États-Unis Face à l’Unification de l’Europe, 226. See also Raymond Poidevin, “Ambiguous Partnership: France, the Marshall Plan, and the Problem of Germany,” 472. 78. September 15, 1949, FRUS 1949, III, 600–1. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 326. Acheson, October 30, 1949, FRUS 1949, III, 622–625. 79. Schuman to National Assembly, May 1949, cited in Raymond Poidevin, Robert Schuman: Un Homme d’Etat 1886–1963 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1986), 215, 228. 80. Schuman comments from a conference in March 1951. Cited in Poidevin, Robert Schuman, 240–41. 81. Andrew Walter, World Power and World Money, 161–62. 82. Bossuat, “La Modernisation de la France,” 319–22. 83. Bruce to Secretary, 23 September 1949, FRUS 1949, IV, 663–65. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 172. 84. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 470. Frances M. B. Lynch, “Resolving the Paradox of the Monnet Plan,” The Economic History Review 37, no. 2 (May 1984), 229-43, 242. 85. Cited in Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 295–96 (italics in original). 86. Melandri, Les États-Unis Face à l’Unification de l’Europe, 272–75. Rene Massigli, Une Comédie des Erreurs, 1943–1946 (Paris: Plon, 1978), 194–95. 87. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 470. 88. Reproduced in “Le Memorandum Monnet du 3 Mai 1950,” Politique Étrangère, 1 (1993): 120–25. 89. “Le Memorandum Monnet du 3 Mai 1950,”120–5. Maier, “Supranational Concepts and National Continuity in the Framework of the Marshall Plan,” 34. 90. Text of early draft of Schuman Plan announcement, cited in Monnet, Memoirs, 296. 91. FRUS 1950, III, 696–724. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 382–84 92. J. William Fulbright, Foreign Affairs 40 (October 1961), 13. Max Beloff, The Unity of Europe, 166. 93. Van der Beugel, From Marshall Plan to Atlantic Partnership, 137–139, 220–221. 94. Truman cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 69. 95. Goldstein, “Creating the GATT Rules,” 215.

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96. Hawkins and British position cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 270–76. 97. Congress had rejected the Full Employment Act of 1945. The 1946 version was more consistent with U.S. notions of the limited responsibility of government. 98. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 71. 99. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 279. 100. The election gave the GOP a majority of 51–45 in the Senate, 245–178 in the House. 101. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 80–81. 102. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 78. 103. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 135. 104. June 16, 1947, FRUS 1947, II, 254–55. 105. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 105–10. 106. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 121. Stein, “The Hegemon’s Dilemma,” 374–75. Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline, 107. 107. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 186. 108. “Clayton and other supporters of U.S. multilateralism conjured an inclusive forum that empowered popular, foreign demands for the watering down of nondiscrimination rules, and thereby undermined the economic policies they believed were right for the world.” Miller, “Wartime Origins of Multilateralism,” 29–35. 109. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 136–37. 110. Wilcox and Truman cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 144–45. 111. Richard Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 378–79. 112. In Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 150. 113. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 156. 114. “Economic Policy and the ITO Charter,” Department of State Bulletin, 626. 115. Clayton, “How and Why We Came to Find Ourselves at the Havana Conference,” Department of State Department Bulletin, 1948. 116. Richard Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 373. 117. In Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 158. 118. Cited in Brett, “The Postwar Settlement,” 10; Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 376–77. 119. Cited in Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy, 378. 120. The GATT regime came into formal existence on January 1, 1948. . 121. Brett, “The Postwar Settlement,” 10. 122. Zeiller, Free Trade, Free World, 165–69. 123. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 1–5, 175–77. Stein, “The Hegemon’s Dilemma.” 124. Cited in Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World, 168. 125. Robert Pollard, Economic Security.

9 ✛

From Collective Security to Collective Defense: The Origins of NATO

To meet the challenge of our time, destiny has laid upon our country the responsibility of the free world’s leadership. So it is proper that we assure our friends once again that, in the discharge of this responsibility, we Americans know and we observe the difference between world leadership and imperialism; between firmness and truculence; between a thoughtfully calculated goal and spasmodic reaction to the stimulus of emergencies. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, January 1953. 1

J

ust as the Cold War altered but did not end the U.S. commitment to multilateralism in international commerce, so it led the United States to shift its postwar security strategy from collective security within the United Nations to collective defense through the narrower “Free World” community, featuring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Warily eyeing Soviet expansion in Europe, the United States organized this multilateral transatlantic alliance, which bound its members to the mutual and indivisible obligation to come to the defense of any member that confronted aggression. Initially, Washington hoped that the Marshall Plan would suffice to enable Europe to become one pillar of an open world, in which a more natural web of independent centers of power rather than American hegemony would undergird postwar order. In the event, the weakness of America’s European allies during the late 1940s quickly drew the United States into a more formal, dominant role than it wanted. Despite its intention to avoid sphere-of-influence responsibilities, the United States evolved 267

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from an offshore guarantor into an onshore organizer of European security.2 The North Atlantic Treaty establishing the postwar framework for transatlantic security relations emerged as a Euro-American compromise. From the start the United States insisted that the alliance take a multilateral form. The Europeans eventually agreed, after Washington promised arms and equipment, a strategy of forward defense, and a southern dimension to NATO. This collective defense regime satisfied U.S. desires by marshalling the resources and will of the West to contain the USSR, providing another framework for Franco-German reconciliation, and—not least—promoting the gradual appearance of an independent, integrated Europe as a leading actor in an open, plural world. The U.S. preference for multilateralism as the organizing principle for transatlantic security relations presents an enigma. Certainly, other viable models existed.3 Washington could have negotiated or even imposed a set of unequal bilateral deals on individual Western European states. Senator Robert Taft (R-OH), for one, favored a bilateral approach. It might have forged an alliance between two free-standing European and North American pillars, as George Kennan advocated during 1947–1948.4 Or it might have unilaterally extended the Monroe Doctrine eastward, declaring external meddling in Western Europe off-limits and subject to a U.S. response. Instead, Washington demanded—at times over European objections— that countries on both sides of the Atlantic regard their security as indivisible. Together, they would guarantee each other’s security and territorial integrity. Although the United States enjoyed special privileges and responsibilities by virtue of its acknowledged leadership position, particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War, Washington’s egalitarian approach gave its allies greater influence over Western security than other plausible arrangements would have afforded. The multilateral alliance that emerged united a community of Western states committed to defend their collective liberal values by protecting one another from aggression.

EXPLAINING U.S. MULTILATERALISM IN NATO Conventional rational choice approaches to international relations shed only modest light on why the United States pursued multilateralism in NATO. Neorealism predicts that states will ally to counterbalance perceived threats from potential adversaries, but says little about how alliances coalesce, the institutional form they take, or the mode of inter-allied relations. The neorealist logic actually pointed away from a multilateral strategic orientation for Washington.5 Given the bipolar environment and U.S. structural dominance over the West, neorealists

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would expect the United States to have constructed a more coercive order more akin to that of the Soviet Union in East and Central Europe by imposing a set of unequal bilateral treaties on its allies/satellites. Such an orientation would have maximized American power—i.e., U.S. freedom of choice, negotiating room, and leverage to extract resources and concessions from its “allies.” Bilateralism would have made security an excludable good—and, thus, a resource to be bargained, whereas multilateralism made security a public (or at least “club”) good, available to each alliance member without discrimination. As the principal supplier of security, the United States could have extorted payments for its protection, pursued policies of divide and rule over its European counterparts, sanctioned countries that tried to “free ride” on its power, or credibly threatened to abandon recalcitrant states. Given its atomic monopoly, the United States might have restricted security guarantees only to a handful of critical strategic partners. Events in 1948–1949 and thereafter took quite a different course. European leaders, alarmed at Soviet aggressiveness, practically clamored for institutionalized subordination to the United States in return for bilateral security guarantees and military assistance. Beseeched as it was, though, Washington insisted on a more encompassing, egalitarian structure of collective defense, one that actually ran counter to official desires in many European capitals. France was particularly skeptical, perceiving correctly that Washington would use its multilateral scheme to reintegrate a distrusted German enemy. Britain, too, expressed doubts, fearing a broader multilateral arrangement would dilute its “special relationship” with the United States. Washington’s multilateral course in security relations would to have real consequences for U.S. freedom of action and alliance management in the ensuing half century. The “all for one and one for all” ethos prevented discrimination against allies based on material or geopolitical importance. A threat to the Benelux countries henceforth equaled a threat to France or Britain. NATO also faced the normal pitfalls of collective action, with complicated decision making and disputes over burden sharing, notably contributions to defense budgets and military forces. Neoliberal institutionalism, another rational choice theory, provides a more compelling but still incomplete account of the U.S. turn to collective defense. Multilateralism in NATO did yield efficiency benefits, reducing transaction costs by replacing multiple bilateral agreements with a single one. More profoundly, Washington may have anticipated that its egalitarian approach would entrench its dominance within the Free World, boosting the legitimacy of its leadership so that changes in the underlying distribution of power would not incite challenges to the alliance structure itself. One astute observer argues that NATO embodies

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the logic of a postwar “institutional bargain,” whereby a hegemon pursuing enlightened self-interest assumes some short-term constraints to maximize “downstream” benefits.6 The limit of this explanation is its tacit reliance on the identity of a specific hegemon and that country’s perception of self-interest, as viewed through the prism of dominant ideas. As previously noted, other great powers would likely have taken a different approach to postwar European security and stability. Great Britain, for example, would probably have resumed the same off-shore balancer role that British statesmen had embraced in previous centuries. And faced with a similar strategic situation and distribution of power in its own “sphere,” the USSR certainly trod a different path to security. In the end, the United States did not aim to strike a new balance of power or an institutional bargain with NATO, but rather drew from its historical experience and liberal values to formulate a uniquely American security strategy. Having internalized the lessons and ideas of American history, which suggested the utility of dispersing political power rather than concentrating it, senior officials in the Truman administration believed that a multilateral transatlantic security arrangement would not only deter against a Soviet invasion but also most rapidly revitalize Europe as an important, independent center of power in a stable, multipolar world.7 American policymakers feared that bipolar rivalry would produce perpetual conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, contribute to U.S. overextension, and potentially corrupt America’s domestic institutions. Multipolarity, in contrast, would lead to a stable equilibrium, tempering the worst impulses of both the United States and USSR by reducing the imperial temptation to take bold, imprudent risks and indulge in reckless crusades. As European strength waxed, America’s military presence might wane. U.S. policy sought “a world order based not on superpower hegemony, but on the natural balance only diverse concentrations of authority, operating independently of one another, could provide.”8 Although it entailed forfeiting some bilateral advantages, the Truman Administration thought a plural world would pay dividends both abroad and at home, encouraging restraint in foreign affairs and safeguarding the domestic freedoms of Americans. U.S. officials, moreover, expected external multilateralism to foster political pluralism within NATO member states as the domestic polity in each country would come to mirror the international scene.9 Indeed, in contrast with the Asia-Pacific region and the Western Hemisphere, the Truman Administration viewed the countries of Western Europe in quasi-familial terms, as a natural community that shared, broadly speaking, similar political and cultural values as Americans. The existence of democracy in these states reinforced the U.S. predilection for a consensual style of hegemony and the egalitarianism of postwar multilateral insti-

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tutions. The norms of persuasion, compromise, and non-coercion already governed the domestic politics of the United States and its transatlantic partners. It was no great stretch, therefore, for Washington to extend these norms to international engagement with other “sister” democracies. This common political heritage bred a pattern of inter-allied relations that had little historical precedent. Because the allies could anticipate the demands of their partners prior to forming rigid national preferences, “consultation” tended to evolve into “co-determination” of each others’ policies. When intra-alliance conflicts arose, the norms of democratic bargaining produced a negotiating style that de-legitimated references to material power and threats of force, while justifying the invocation of domestic political constraints on diplomatic maneuvering room.10

EUROPE’S “CRAVING FOR DEPENDENCE” AND U.S. RESPONSES The failure of the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in November 1947 buried the U.S. dream of a postwar international order based on great power cooperation through the United Nations Organization. This so-called “conference of the last chance” marked the final significant effort to reach consensus among the Big Four on the future of Germany. With its collapse, U.S. postwar strategy quickly shifted to bolster Atlantic solidarity, integrate Western Europe, and revive the Western zones of Germany.11 Panicked by Soviet encroachment in Eastern Europe, West European governments in late 1947 began to approach Washington for security guarantees. France underwent the most dramatic metamorphosis, surrendering its hard line on Germany and its illusions of an independent Europe between the superpowers in the hopes of obtaining an American commitment to defend it from Soviet aggression. This “craving for dependence”12 manifested itself throughout Western Europe, as nonCommunist governments and parties deferred hypothetical “third force” schemes to solicit U.S. protection. On December 17, Bevin suggested that the time had come to create a “western democratic system” uniting Western Europe and the United States, “backed by power, money, and resolute action.” London envisioned a “spiritual federation,” rather than a formal alliance. Secretary of State Marshall was evasive, remarking that Western Europe would have to demonstrate its solidarity, the seriousness of its intentions, and a willingness to defend itself before the United States would make any commitment.13 In January 1948, Bevin proposed that free European countries create a “Western Defense Union.” The Europeans subsequently moved to establish such a regional security grouping.

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Washington used its influence to ensure this entity’s multilateral form. American diplomats considered such an arrangement a “magnificent” objective, but they doubted Bevin’s vehicle: a series of bilateral pacts directed against Germany, on the model of the 1947 Dunkirk Treaty between France and Great Britain. Instead, Washington recommended that London and its European partners pursue a multilateral defense pact similar to the recently negotiated Rio Treaty, or Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. (This stipulated collective action within the hemisphere and pledged its members to consult following aggression. Enforcement measures became binding in the event of a two-thirds majority vote in favor.) An analogous treaty would not only empower Western Europe as a whole to respond to any potential aggressor, but might even permit Germany’s accession to the anti-Soviet coalition.14 As John Hickerson, the State Department’s Director for European Affairs, explained to Lord Inverchapel on January 21, 1948, “It seems that any adequate regional defense system for western European countries should envisage defense measures to be taken in the event of aggression or attack from any source, even if one member of the group should attack another member. This is the underlying strength of the recent Inter-American Defense Treaty signed last year at Rio de Janeiro.” Equally important, the United States believed a multilateral framework would nurture the emergence of a “third force which is not merely the extension of U.S. influence but a real European organization strong enough to say ‘no’ both to the Soviet Union and to the United States.” Any future U.S. “association” with a European regional security arrangement was contingent on a prior demonstration of European resolve in the form of a multilateral pact.15 The Europeans took the hint. With an eye to roping in the Americans, Belgian Prime Minister Spaak on January 28, 1948, proposed a multilateral defense treaty for Western Europe consistent with the UN Charter’s provisions for collective and individual self-defense. At the same time, he believed, “Any defense arrangement which did not include the United States would be without practical value.”16 The French, meanwhile, sought a firm U.S. military commitment to defend Western Europe, while resisting any moves to create a West German state as a risky affront to the Soviet Union. Foreign Minister Bidault and Armed Forces Minister Pierre-Henri Teitgen complained that America’s preference for a strategy of “peripheral defense”—which envisioned an allied retreat to Great Britain and the Iberian Peninsula—would expose the continent to the Red Army’s onslaught. They painted a lurid picture of the ensuing apocalypse: Russian hordes will occupy the area, raping women and deporting the male population for slave labor in the Soviet Union. . . . France and Western Europe

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will be occupied and devastated. . . . There [will] be no Western civilization or population to share with the United States the task of reconstruction.17

To avoid this catastrophe, Washington must adopt a strategy of “forward defense.” Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett rebuffed the French ambassador on February 7, noting that Congress was in no mood for new and extensive military and political engagements. Not even scare tactics would dissuade the United States from entering into a formal alliance until Europe evinced a capacity for self-help.18 The grande peur that swept Western Europe during the Czech coup of February–March 1948 revealed a crisis of confidence on the Continent. The announcement of the Marshall Plan had promised a better economic future, but it did nothing to alleviate Europe’s vulnerability to the Soviet military threat. Europeans implored the United States to signal its readiness to defend Western Europe. The crisis dashed U.S. hopes for flexible postwar alliances and loose spheres. Unlike the One World of the postwar planners’ dreams, the Free World had frontiers to defend. Moscow’s brutality convinced French officials that the Soviet Union posed a more urgent threat than Germany—and rendered moot their concerns about antagonizing Russia. Hervé Alphand, director of economic affairs at the Quai d’Orsay, likened the shocking Prague events to Hitler’s moves in March 1939 and predicted that the “Soviet menace” would cement “Western solidarity.”19 Paris asked Washington for immediate staff talks and military aid, as well as a formal military alliance “with concrete promises of immediate military action.” Yet Bidault continued to hold out for “explicit mention of Germany” within any Brussels Pact “. . . for domestic political purposes.” He complained about Anglo-Saxon policy on Germany, “evolving much too fast for French public opinion.” 20 U.S. ambassadors in both London and Paris advised that the French would be more flexible on the nature of the pact and the eventual inclusion of Germany if they received a concrete American security guarantee.21 On March 4 Bidault cabled Marshall, effectively inviting American hegemony. He entreated Washington to “tighten at the political level, and as soon as possible at the military level, the collaboration between the Old and the New World, both closely connected by their common attachment to the only civilization that matters.”22 Marshall again declined to commit, advising Bidault to create a multilateral regional defense pact whose implicit target could shift from Germany to the Soviet Union. As with the Marshall Plan initiative, Washington leveraged the prospect of diplomatic and material support to stimulate multilateral cooperation in Europe. According to French Finance Minister René Mayer, Washington’s stance gave “vigorous impetus” to negotiations already under way among Britain, France, and

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the Benelux countries.23 On March 17, those nations signed the Brussels Treaty, creating a regional organization and mutual defense pact that bound parties to respond automatically to armed aggression. The treaty’s preamble reaffirmed the signatories’ shared values (among these the fundamental rights and dignity of man, democratic principles, constitutional traditions, and civic and individual liberties), as well as their commitment to tighten economic, social, and cultural ties.24 Truman met the European initiative head on, pledging that the “determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them protect themselves.”25

WHAT SORT OF AMERICAN COMMITMENT? THE ROAD TO THE VANDENBERG RESOLUTION The precise form of this security system became a matter of vigorous debate in Washington, within both the administration and Congress. Two main options emerged. The first was a regional collective defense agreement among the countries of the North Atlantic, with reciprocal obligations, including the possible provision of military assistance, consistent with Articles 51 and 52 of the UN Charter. The second involved a unilateral American security guarantee from the President of the United States pledging to come to the defense European nations if attacked. At the State Department, Lovett and Hickerson advocated the former approach, on the grounds that the United States must stiffen European morale by leading a multilateral defense agreement covering the Atlantic and Mediterranean.26 Others, like George Kennan, favored the latter. Kennan judged the United States ill-prepared “either institutionally or temperamentally” to serve as “an imperial power in the grand manner . . . holding the great peoples of Western Europe indefinitely in some sort of paternal tutelage.” He therefore recommended an informal security relationship between independent Atlantic pillars—the so-called “dumbbell” approach predicated on the President’s announcement of a unilateral security guarantee for West European states.27 Many legislators on Capitol Hill advocated something similar, believing that a unilateral declaration along the lines of the Monroe Doctrine would maximize American freedom of action to determine whether an act of aggression had occurred and how to respond.28 West European governments certainly treated the Brussels Pact as a device to secure an immediate and unequivocal U.S. commitment to their defense, including the prompt dispatch of U.S. military aid and GIs to the continent. The Brussels Pact was a kind of military counterpart to the CEEC. Just as the latter coordinated Marshall Aid, so this new “union

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of concerned parties [would] facilitate the implementation of American military assistance.”29 In late April 1948, Bevin suggested that only “an Atlantic security system” could win French acceptance of German reconstruction; an informal security guarantee, the Europeans stressed, was not enough. Canadian Foreign Minister St. Laurent then chimed in, proposing a single mutual defense system that included both Canada and the United States to supersede the Brussels Pact.30 At this stage the Truman Administration still remained unprepared to offer formal treaty guarantees to Europe, much less send additional military assets. On April 13, 1948, the National Security Council had endorsed NSC 9,31 recommending negotiations between the United States and the Brussels Pact countries for “a Collective Defense Agreement for the North Atlantic Area.” Such a pact would commit each party to consider an armed attack on one as an armed attack on all—and assist in repelling it, consistent with the UN Charter. Even this ambiguous commitment was too much for Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the powerful Republican chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations. He wanted a less formal scheme based on the principles of “mutual aid and self-help,” so as not to imply that the United States would shoulder the entire burden of European defense and rearmament. During consultations with Marshall and Lovett, Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles opposed provision of real “military guarantees” or “shopping lists” of arms and materiel to the Europeans.32 The State Department, hoping to mollify legislative (and particularly Republican) sentiment, invited Vandenberg to help draft a resolution supporting U.S. association with the Brussels Pact countries, which the administration might then use as the basis for negotiation with the Europeans. This was a shrewd tactic, since in spring 1945, Vandenberg had coauthored Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which permitted nations to pursue individual and collective self-defense, whether or not explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. (This provision provided a possible means for the United States and its allies to act “within the Charter but outside the veto,” as the Senator liked to say.) American diplomats worked with the Foreign Relations Committee on appropriate language. On May 11, Lovett presented a draft to Vandenberg endorsing the “association of the United States with such regional and other collective arrangements as are based on self-help and mutual aid, and affect its national security.” This formulation pleased the Senator, who thought it precluded an open-ended U.S. commitment to foot the entire bill. He considered the draft resolution successful in representing a “move forward into the field of security without involving ourselves in any permanent obligations of any nature,” and “by so moving we have provided a complete answer to those [Europeans] who are going to constantly press for greater movements in this direction.”33

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The French above all sought concrete U.S. security guarantees. During spring 1948, Paris had continued to resist the creation of a West German state. Before agreeing to fuse the three Western zones in Germany, those wavering in Paris needed some tangible insurance from the United States against the double danger of short-term Soviet reprisal and long-term German revival. Bevin counseled Marshall to give the French “some additional hope of a really workable security system if they are to be induced to accept the plan for Germany.”34 To change French calculations Washington employed both carrots and sticks. Marshall and other American officials promised to consider a security guarantee for Western Europe, keep U.S. occupation troops in Germany until a formal peace treaty was signed, and enforce Germany’s demilitarization. At the same time, they threatened to withhold ERP funds if Paris refused to join the Bizone. It worked; France capitulated. By the terms of the London Agreement of June 2, 1948, the French agreed to merge the Western occupation zones and to yield on longstanding demands regarding the Rhineland, the Ruhr, and the Saar as well as German political decentralization. Paris accepted West German participation in the ERP, an International Ruhr Authority, and the creation of West German political institutions.35 The Vandenberg Resolution, passed by Congress on June 11 by a vote of 64–4, played a critical role in the French National Assembly’s narrow endorsement (by a margin of 300–286) of the London Agreement on June 17. Although vague in its implications, the resolution authorized the Truman Administration to negotiate a collective defense arrangement with the Europeans.36

NEGOTIATING THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE The Soviets responded to the fusion of the Western zones of Germany on June 24 by closing the supply routes to West Berlin. Suddenly, war seemed imminent. The blockade confirmed French fears that American “boldness” in Germany would provoke Soviet aggression. Paris wanted “not a spectacular system of guarantees but an effective and concrete system of assistance,” including joint strategic planning and a unified military command.37 At this juncture France cared more about membership in an American protectorate than recognition of its equal diplomatic standing. On July 6 Lovett opened top-secret exploratory talks with the five Brussels Pact nations, pursuant to the Vandenberg resolution. He informed them that the United States was now prepared to push ahead on a “loose” association agreement similar to the Rio Pact, but still declined “automatic” obligations to respond to aggression.38 Any program of military assistance, moreover, would depend on an assessment of capabilities that

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European states themselves could mobilize. This stance disappointed Europeans, who sought precise U.S. military commitments, including to forward defense in Germany and the prompt dispatch of materiel and manpower.39 Complex negotiations on a transatlantic security treaty continued through winter 1948–1949. Disagreement centered on the form the treaty should take, the geographic scope of the alliance, the nature of the defense guarantees, and the prospect of military aid. As before, U.S. officials walked a diplomatic tightrope, reassuring the Europeans of America’s solid commitment while persuading Congress that the emerging treaty did not usurp national (and particularly legislative) control over issues of war and peace.40 Despite the preponderance of power on the western side of the Atlantic, the Europeans were not without leverage in these discussions for the United States had defined its national security to include the survival of non-communist Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty that resulted from these negotiations, and the accompanying Military Assistance Program, reflected a compromise between European and American objectives. From the start, Washington placed priority on a collective defense arrangement implying mutual obligations. After months of discussion, in September 1948, Washington finally won Paris’s assent that the goal of any treaty should be a multilateral pact of long duration. Assuaged by American offers to provide military divisions in Germany and drop a peripheral strategy by defending Europe on the Rhine (a commitment extended to the Elbe in 1950), the French government acceded to U.S. demands on the multilateral nature of the Atlantic alliance.41 Over the course of negotiations, U.S. officials further agreed to extend the membership of the treaty north and south from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. France’s position again proved pivotal. Concerned about watering down its influence, the French initially hoped to restrict Atlantic treaty membership to the Brussels Pact states, the United States, and Canada. When Washington pressed to include Norway, the Quai demanded admission for Italy and French North Africa, to ensure a strong Mediterranean dimension. Washington quickly acceded to Italy’s admission but, horrified of colonial entanglements, rejected Morocco and Tunisia. (It ultimately gave in on Algeria, which was constitutionally a part of France.)42 Transatlantic differences became most apparent in the language that the Europeans and Americans preferred to describe the nature of their commitment to respond to an armed attack on one of them. The Europeans proposed a text, similar to Article 4 of the Brussels Pact, that would require parties to “afford [any] Party so attacked all the military and other aid and assistance in their power.” American negotiators, seeking simultaneously to reassure anxious Europeans and sovereignty-minded Senators, suggested a more flexible provision analogous to Article 3 of the Rio Pact. This

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described an attack on one as an attack on all but preserved U.S. freedom of action to determine whether aggression had occurred and formulate an appropriate response, while protecting congressional prerogatives under the Constitution. The Europeans, particularly the French, wanted an automatic armed response to aggression and were disturbed by any language equating obligations with “consultation.”43 The United States and the Europeans finally agreed in December 1948 to a draft treaty with a fairly robust Article 5 commitment, stronger than in the Rio Treaty but weaker than in the Brussels Pact. It obliged alliance members to regard an attack on one as an attack on all and, consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter, committed each of them to take “forthwith such military or other action . . . as may be necessary to restore and assure the security of the North Atlantic area.”44 This language created problems on Capitol Hill. Senators Tom Connally (the new Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee) and Vandenberg (now the ranking Republican) objected to any implication of an automatic commitment. Acheson had to renegotiate the phrasing of Article 5. The final version, completed in mid-February 1949 and accepted by U.S. allies, softened the commitment. It declared that in event of armed attack, each ally would “assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other parties, such action, including the use of armed force, as it deems necessary to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” In deference to Congress, moreover, both the draft Preamble to the treaty and Article 11 contained important caveats dictating that this response should be “carried out in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.”45 Although the Europeans did not gain an unequivocal U.S. commitment to respond with force, they ironically ensnared U.S. military muscle through the “mutual aid” provisions contained in Article 3 of the draft North Atlantic Treaty. Vandenberg wished his resolution to encourage the Europeans to contribute to their own defense as quickly as possible, rather than relying on U.S. largesse in perpetuity, but in practice it had precisely the opposite effect, paving the way for a long-term U.S. resource commitment. In autumn 1948, U.S. officials proposed language for Article 3, calling for “continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, to strengthen the individual and collective capacity of the parties to resist aggression.”46 This deliberately ambiguous provision, entirely absent from the Rio Treaty, was crafted to serve two contradictory purposes. The Truman Administration hoped that the “mutual” aspect of the obligation would disarm congressional skeptics anxious that the United States alone would to subsidize Western defense, while reassuring Europeans that American materiel was on the way. Administration officials told Congress that, unlike wartime Lend-Lease, the benefits would not simply

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flow in one direction. The Europeans, meanwhile, interpreted Article 3 as a means to obtain armaments from the United States, and exploited it to build secure domestic support from their legislatures and publics for the treaty. In March 1949, Washington agreed to commence a Military Assistance Program (MAP) based on Article 3.47 The North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) was signed on April 4, 1949, by the United States, Canada, and ten European nations: Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Wartime visions of a universal system of collective security had yielded to a circumscribed multilateral alliance uniting industrial democracies. In addition to commitments in Articles 3 and 5, members pledged to strengthen free institutions, coordinate economic policies, and consult when the territory or security of one or more members was threatened.48 The treaty explicitly linked security to collaborative economic relations (Article 2) and to shared liberal values. The Preamble invoked the cultural and ideological ties that bound the allies, declaring their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilization of their people, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.” Acheson described the NAT as an embodiment and institutional corollary of the United Nations.49 The American commitment greatly relieved the French. Foreign Minister Robert Schuman put the achievement of the NAT in historical context: “We have today obtained what we hoped for in vain between the two wars: the United States recognizes that there is neither peace nor security for America if Europe is in danger.”50 On April 6, 1949, the State Department advised NATO allies that it would approach Congress about a program of military aid. America’s security guarantee and the prospect of military assistance allowed France to accept a new West German state. On April 8 Washington, London, Paris, and Bonn initialed the Petersberg Agreements reintegrating the Federal Republic into Western Europe. West Germany accepted the separation of the Saar and the International Authority for the Ruhr. The Western powers stopped dismantling German industry, Bonn entered the Council of Europe, and an Allied High Commission replaced military rule. The details of West Germany’s Basic Law were agreed on May 12—only four years after the defeat of the Nazis.

SENATE RATIFICATION When public hearings on the North Atlantic Treaty began in the Senate on April 27, 1949, a plurality of U.S. senators had accepted the Administration’s view of the treaty as a critical catalyst for Franco-German reconciliation and broader West European unity against the Soviets. Skeptics fell

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into two camps. One comprised the handful of diehard isolationists who sought to minimize U.S. foreign military entanglements. The other, larger group included conservative senators like Taft but also Vandenberg who continued to believe in a unilateral U.S. security guarantee rather than a formal alliance accompanied by military assistance. In advocating for congressional ratification of the treaty, Acheson and other Administration spokesmen had to tread a fine line on Article 5, describing it with sufficient ambiguity to persuade enough senators that it did not constitute a concrete guarantee, while retaining the faith of allied nations in exactly the opposite proposition. Echoing the League debate, treaty opponents tarred Article 5 as an unwise international commitment that also infringed on Constitutional prerogatives. Taft lobbied hard against the treaty, arguing against a “pact which binds us for twenty years to come to the defense of any country, no matter by whom it is attacked and even though the aggressor may be another member of the pact.”51 The question of U.S. military assistance similarly vexed proponents of ratification, as the Administration had to reassure legislators that the NAT would not infringe on their role in determining military aid, while signaling to Europeans that defense assistance was forthcoming. Acheson initially advised Congress to consider the NAT and the Military Assistance Program (MAP) on their own merits, but eventually conceded their inseparability—since the treaty presumed an obligation to provide mutual aid.52 Yet, he did not foresee, in any sense, an unlimited U.S. commitment. To Senator Hickenlooper’s (R-IA) question whether Article 3 required the United States “to send substantial numbers of troops over there as a more or less permanent contribution to the development of these countries’ capacity to resist,” Acheson replied, “The answer . . . is a clear and absolute ‘No.’” Though technically correct, since the MAP in mid-1949 centered on U.S. military sales to Europe, Acheson’s response was, as he recalls in his memoirs, “deplorably wrong,” “even as a short-range prediction.”53 The United States would soon adopt a “forward strategy,” deploying large numbers of troops to the continent, thereby in effect offering its own population hostage to protect its European allies. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee ultimately concluded that the treaty did not alter constitutional prerogatives, since the President would need to seek Congressional authorization for any military action. Vandenberg defended the treaty when it came before the full Senate. He allowed that the NAT might be “a literal departure from orthodox American diplomacy,” but he insisted on its consistency with the American “philosophy of preventive action against aggression” dating from the Monroe Doctrine. Taft remained unpersuaded, regarding Article 3’s provisions for re-arming Europe as “an incitation to war.” The Ohio senator won

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only a few senators to his cause, however. In the end, even most skeptics of Article 3 voted for treaty, which passed handily, 82-13, on July 21.54 A few days later, Democratic legislators in the House and the Senate introduced similar bills (H.R. 5748 and S. 2341) to “promote the foreign policy and provide for the defense and general welfare of the United States by furnishing military assistance to foreign nations.” Committees in both houses soon began hearings on the MAP, a proposed $1.4 billion requested by the Administration. Over the ensuing weeks, this amount was whittled down to only $500 million, consisting of interim assistance of $100 million and another $400 million forthcoming upon the establishment of the alliance’s actual organization structure. The final Military Assistance Program passed Congress and was signed into law on October 6, an outcome hastened by the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb on September 23.55 For the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty provided the necessary security to facilitate West European recovery, reintegrate West Germany into the European political system, and restore Western Europe as a strong pillar of world order. It established a military shield behind which these processes could occur in confidence. For the Europeans, the NAT and MAP committed the United States to forward defense and material support for the Continent. In particular, this dynamic represented a French diplomatic triumph, since it was France’s fears of German resurgence that drew the United States into a far tighter, more explicit involvement with the Continent than needed to deter Soviet attack. Nevertheless, the North Atlantic Treaty fell short of European wishes on several counts. To begin with, Article 5 did not commit the United States to an automatic military response to aggression, but merely stipulated consultation and joint action “including the use of force.” The Europeans, worried that the pact would goad Stalin into attacking an unprepared West, continued pushing for a military organization to put an “O” into the NAT. Nor did the treaty require the immediate dispatch of U.S. troops. Until the Korean War, Washington regarded the Red Army as a lesser threat to Western Europe than economic disintegration and communist subversion. The Truman Administration saw NATO as “an essential supplement to the Marshall Plan,” important less for its “intrinsic military value” than its “psychological effect.”56 In addition, there remained the question of how U.S. moves to bolster transatlantic security related to U.S. support for European economic (and conceivably political) integration through the OEEC. There were latent tensions between the two objectives. On the one hand, the creation of NATO could set back the construction of Europe by “giving the United States a taste for hegemony.”57 On the other, a united Europe could wind

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up challenging Washington for leadership of the Atlantic community. Publicly, U.S. officials depicted the two efforts as mutually reinforcing, rather than competing. The proposed North Atlantic treaty was “a complement and in no case a replacement for the efforts toward European unity,” Undersecretary of State Lovett declared in December 1948.58 As Acheson explained to Congress in March 1949, the NAT was “more than a purely military treaty.” It was a means and a vehicle for closer political, economic, and security cooperation with Western Europe. Together with the Inter-American Treaty, its purpose was to provide not only physical protection but the sense of security necessary to keep these two areas, which were essential to a viable free world and more susceptible than others to our influence, free of communist penetration, physical or political.59

The broader membership of the alliance quickly came to share this notion of NATO. In late November 1950, the Defense Committee of the North Atlantic Council endorsed a ”Strategic Concept for the Defense of Europe,” stating: “the North Atlantic Treaty requires the integration of the parties to the treaty to those political, economic, and psychological as well as purely military means, which are essential to the defense of the Atlantic area.”60 As Harimman testified to Congress, America’s NATO membership and the general “concept of the North Atlantic Community” were “very important factor[s] in getting these countries together.”61

PUTTING THE “O” IN NATO Gradually, the Western allies developed an organizational structure envisioned in Article 9 of the Washington Treaty. It consisted of an executive organ, the North Atlantic Council, and four subordinate institutions: a Defense Committee, a Military Committee, a Standing Committee, and five Regional Planning Groups. Remarkably, nothing in the treaty itself accorded the United States any special status within the alliance’s military or political structure. Each ally possessed a single vote in decision making. The first four-year defense plan, moreover, “preserved the principle of national command for military forces and had no special privileges, command or otherwise, for Washington.” It thus seems unfair to dismiss the collective aspects of NATO as mere “multilateral hocus-pocus” designed to clothe “the realities of hegemony in the trappings of pluralism,”62 and thereby alleviate European discomfort with dependence and American apprehension about U.S. imperialism. Although U.S. dominance would become increasingly apparent following the creation of an integrated

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force under a supreme commander, at first NATO “scored high as both a multilateral organization and an institution of multilateralism.”63 This egalitarian approach to Atlantic security presents something of a puzzle for “realist” scholars. Presumably, Washington could have exploited its dominance to impose unequal bilateral treaties on its dependent allies. Such a policy would have improved U.S. capacities to extract resources, to coerce its partners, to minimize free riding or to threaten abandonment. Not only did a multilateral approach make security indivisible, it also introduced cumbersome decision-making procedures and made consultation, bargaining, and compromise integral aspects of coalition policymaking. Washington’s egalitarian ethos derived from ideational and material factors. First, multilateralism resonated with America’s perception of international society as a “willful community,” as well as its self-assigned role as a constructive international force. Second, it promised to restrict U.S. commitments and to discourage prolonged allied dependence. As the authors of MAP noted, “programs of mutual aid and self-help supplemented by military assistance from the US” should be designed to enable partners “to stand on their own feet, economically, politically, and so far as possible, militarily.”64 Finally, treating partners as equals and providing collective goods made American leadership more attractive to potential followers, particularly when contrasted to heavy-handed Soviet behavior in the East bloc. NATO may have rounded up followers into one “corral,” as historian Frank Costigliola notes,65 but the allies retained substantial room to roam. Legitimacy lowered the costs of securing compliance with Washington’s preferences and decreased the likelihood that shifts in relative power would engender challenges from dissatisfied allies.66 Throughout the Cold War, the United States took responsibility for taking the initiative, setting the agenda, focusing collective action, and sustaining disproportionate costs. This acknowledged leadership role gave it legitimate authority to extract commitments from its partners and discretion to act decisively on their behalf. Although the North Atlantic Treaty provided the United States with no special military or political rights and privileges, the outbreak of the Korean War soon revealed the reality of American hegemony by accelerating NATO’s evolution from a security-oriented political association into an integrated military organization. In September 1950, President Truman publicly announced his intention to send additional ground troops to Europe. With strong European backing, the alliance in December created an integrated military force under an American Supreme Allied Commander (General Dwight D. Eisenhower).67 Over the next year, the Western Union Defense Organization merged into NATO’s unified command. Washington had originally hoped that Europe would soon regain its capacity

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for self-defense. Instead, the Soviet threat spurred the United States to entangle itself in a highly structured alliance, provide billions of dollars in military aid, and adopt a forward strategy (including tens of thousands of ground troops) to defend its allies in Europe. Far from “recruiting” client states as a security buffer—like a traditional great power—the United States actually assumed new burdens at great risk to itself, including the provision of a nuclear umbrella.68 Leadership had its perks, however. The forward defense strategy centralized military control under a Supreme Allied Commander, always an American. France chafed the most at America’s hegemonic privileges. Temporary economic dependence under the ERP was one thing, but permanent French military subordination quite another. Embittered that the existence of the North Atlantic Council neither ended Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States nor allowed France to take part in Anglo-American military planning, Paris repeatedly proposed to create a three-power directorate with the United States and Britain.69 Washington, however, deflected these French overtures. Not only did the NAC “conform to the formal egalitarianism of the alliance,” but the United States “could more easily ‘lead,’ or dominate, wider forums where the narrower interests of France and Britain had to accommodate to the wishes of Europe’s smaller powers.”70 Noting persistent French frustrations, Ambassador David Bruce in September 1949 recommended taking “immediate steps to dispel [the] impression [in France] and elsewhere in Europe that an Anglo-Saxon bloc has been formed.”71 Washington agreed to create a tripartite Standing Group of national military officers. Nevertheless, the United States retained primacy in allied decision making and denied French efforts to upgrade the Standing Group. In a speech on April 16, 1950, in Lyons, Prime Minister Bidault made yet another bid for a tripartite directorate, advocating an “Atlantic High Council for Peace” to “organize and orient the community’s development in the two areas which are inseparable: that of defense and that of economics.”72 Acheson, hesitant to alienate smaller allies and doubting France’s global role, responded coolly. NATO’s lack of collective leadership became most apparent in the field of nuclear weapons and strategy. Despite the alliance’s multilateral norms and the dedication to sharing jointly the burdens of collective defense, Atlantic security depended ultimately on weapons over which Washington then had sole command and control. Following the Soviet acquisition of the bomb in 1949, West Europe’s survival depended on a U.S. commitment to extended deterrence. The rapid militarization of containment also stimulated debates over allied burden sharing. In 1951 the United States created the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) to assist the West’s rearmament, but NATO members disagreed about how to finance collective defense and over Washington’s right to supervise allied

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defense budgets. The allies eventually assented to devote a continuing share of national income to collective defense. Like welfare burdens, high peacetime military expenditures became an accepted feature of the Western political economy.73

AN ETHIC OF SELF-RESTRAINT, NOT ALWAYS HONORED The Eisenhower Administration, like its predecessor, believed that alliances legitimated U.S. global leadership. “Only in collective security” did the President see “any future for the free world.”74 Whereas the Soviet bloc linked subordinates to a preponderant power, NATO embodied a Western community of sovereign equals united by common purposes. To avoid undermining the U.S. legitimacy to lead, Eisenhower consistently resisted calls for unilateral U.S. action. At the same time, he would not let self-restraint threaten America’s position as “primus inter pares,” either within NATO or the wider Free World. In discussion with Congressional leaders, Eisenhower described America’s grand strategy. United States was “the core of democracy, economically, militarily, and spiritually.” America’s Free World partners were its front line bastions. “In simple terms,” he explained, We are establishing international outposts where people can develop their strength and defend themselves. Here we are in the center, and with high mobility and destructive forces we can respond when our vital interests are affected. . . . We cannot publicly call our allies outposts, but we are trying to get that result.75

Indeed, Washington assigned to its allies roles corresponding to U.S. objectives and persistently endeavored to forge consensus around American preferences. Among NATO members France particularly resented Washington’s “unwelcome unilateralism,” objecting (as U.S. diplomats reported) to America’s “tendency . . . to act without . . . adequate consultation” and to insist on its own position “even when the US is at the start in a minority of one.” When such frustrations boiled over in 1953, U.S. ambassador Douglas Dillon advised Washington to show “due regard for the interests and opinions of our allies . . . to convince them that we sincerely desire them as partners, equals in rights if not in strength, rather than as satellites.”76 The director of the Mutual Security Agency echoed this sentiment: Leadership which demands blind obedience . . . is not leadership in the true sense of the word. . . . Europe cannot be pushed . . . threatened, [or] . . . frightened into any particular course of action. It can only be led, and

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a rational and frank discussion of such policies with our partners is vitally necessary if we are to achieve the true position as leader of the free world that is expected of us.77

Successful coalition leadership required gentle tact in exercising American power, periodic and timely consultations on policy, and the avoidance of unacceptable demands. During the early 1950s, tensions between the egalitarian ethos of collective defense and the hierarchical reality of U.S. hegemony erupted in a protracted, acrimonious struggle over the European Defense Community (EDC). In October 1950 France, hoping to retain control over inevitable German rearmament, proposed the creation of a single European army “under political institutions of a united Europe.”78 Ironically, as an initially skeptical Washington became a passionate advocate of the scheme, Paris began to back away, believing that the EDC portended a permanent abdication of sovereignty and institutionalized subordination to Washington. Mounting American pressure on France to ratify the treaty peaked in December 1953, when Secretary of State Dulles infamously warned of an “agonizing reappraisal of basic United States policy.” The ultimatum aroused a barrage of denunciations about U.S. interference. It also backfired, as France ultimately killed the project by declining to ratify the associated treaty. This debacle underlined the difficulties of consensual leadership, which required Washington to treat its allies truly as partners. By committing its prestige to a dubious project, attempting to impose a solution on an important ally, and remaining inflexible in the face of opposition, the United States risked undermining the legitimacy it needed to lead a voluntary coalition of democracies.

WHY NO SECURITY MULTILATERALISM IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC? In the Asia-Pacific region, the United States did not seek a comprehensive multilateral institution with extensive, reciprocal obligations akin to NATO. Instead, it pursued a rather different Cold War strategy. It created a “hub and spokes” framework that bilaterally linked itself, at the core of the system, to a series of regional allies. These bilateral treaties came to include those with the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Nationalist China, and Japan, as well as a trilateral (ANZUS) arrangement with Australia and New Zealand. Although Washington did later sponsor a regional security arrangement, signing the Manila Treaty in 1954 to establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), this was very different from NATO, with

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much weaker commitments to collective defense. SEATO assembled Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand, together with France, the United Kingdom, and the United States itself. (South Korea and South Vietnam would join later). Unlike Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, Article IV of the Manila Treaty simply called an attack on one a threat to peace and security—not an attack on all, significantly. From an organizational perspective, moreover, SEATO lacked any parallel to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, nor did it have any specific designation of allied forces under unified command. All military contributions to joint action remained solely under the control of the member states. Tellingly, moreover, American diplomats were reluctant to suggest kinship between the two organizations, a reticence evinced by the following diplomatic cable sent to John Foster Dulles: In accordance with your suggestion . . . we have attempted to get away from the designation “SEATO” so as to avoid fostering the idea that an organization is envisioned for SEA and the Pacific similar to NATO. . . . In spite of our efforts, the designation “SEATO” has stuck. . . . I suggest that we accept that “SEATO” is here to stay and that we continue to make clear in our substantive discussions that so far as the US is concerned, the SEA PACT is not conceived as parallel to NATO.79

Why did the United States prefer multilateral security cooperation with its European allies but bilateralism in Asia? Neither geopolitical context nor the respective benefits of these alternative (bilateral versus multilateral) institutional forms can account for divergent U.S. approaches to security in the Atlantic versus the Pacific—though both sets of analyses no doubt factored into U.S. calculations. To some degree, bilateralism reflected a U.S. desire to preserve its room for maneuver. As one DoD official wrote in 1954, creating an Asian NATO would be “inimical to U.S. interests in that it could . . . tend to reduce, without compensating military advantage, United States military freedom of action and it could give other countries of the PACT power of veto over the type and scope of plans evolved.”80 Yet, similar arguments could easily apply to Europe, where the United States happily countenanced the emergence of competing power centers. Another important factor was Japan’s recent legacy of brutal aggression in Asia, which left other countries in the region, including South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, as well as Australia and New Zealand, leery of including that country in a common collective defense framework. As Dulles discovered in 1952, the countries of the region “have memories of Japanese aggression that are so vivid that they are reluctant to create a Mutual Security Pact with Japan.”81 Of course, as we have seen, such concerns were at play in the case of West Germany, another pariah state with its own recent, rapacious history. But there was

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a difference: Unlike Japan, West Germany was an indispensable component of any collective defense effort in Europe by virtue of its territorial contiguity with neighboring U.S. allies and its central geopolitical role in the East-West battle for control of the Continent. Japan was important, but less so, in its region. Other strategic factors may also have played a role in the American pursuit of multilateralism in Europe and bilateralism in Asia. First, Washington viewed Europe as the central battleground in the nascent Cold War. It perceived fewer vital interests in the Asia-Pacific realm. American officials predicted that Western Europe, once restored to economic health, could emerge as an independent center of power and a bulwark of freedom in its own right. But until that day arrived, it was imperative to defend it against Soviet invasion. In contrast, with the exception of Japan—which the United States moved to revive after the outbreak of the Korean War—most of the countries of East Asia (including among America’s SEATO allies) were poor, traditional agrarian societies whose postwar recovery and industrial development would take decades. Even after the Korean War, Washington saw the Communist threat in Asia primarily in terms of subversion and insurgency, to be countered by building up the internal capacities of individual friendly governments to quash radicalism. Military firepower, per se, could not address this threat. Furthermore, unlike with NATO, the United States hoped to reduce its commitment of ground troops in the region. Second, the extreme asymmetry in power between the United States and the Asia-Pacific countries, which possessed only modest resources to devote to the anti-Communist struggle, encouraged Washington to take a more hierarchical approach in Asia. America also emphasized maneuverability, relying on U.S. assets held at a distance that could be brought to bear quickly—an approach that nicely dovetailed with the U.S. military’s policy of creating strategic stepping stones off the coast of Asia. Thus, with no indispensable strategic allies in the region, geographically or materially, to accommodate, the United States could dispense with the necessity of coalition decision making. Despite these obstacles, the United States and its Asia-Pacific allies could have enjoyed an array of efficiency gains by creating a regional multilateral security arrangement. In theory, an “Asian NATO” would have created a focal point for coordination, reduced transaction costs, stimulated information flow, and had ancillary economic benefits. In the end, as Christopher Hemmer and Peter Katzenstein argue, the most important factor in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations’ decision to pursue a bilateral course in Asia was the absence of any collective identity binding Americans to the peoples of the region. In sum, a single overarching civilizational identity (or “we-feeling”) that could provide a normative underpinning to a new security community did not exist.82 At both the popular and elite levels, nativist, even racist notions of the

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United States as a white, “civilized” country influenced American attitudes about Asians. The fact that most Asia-Pacific countries—unlike their European counterparts—had few influential ethnic constituencies in the United States during this era reinforced this dynamic. Contrast this (largely tacit) feeling with the widespread sentiment among the “founding generation” of the Atlantic alliance that NATO embodied a natural, even organic socio-political community that had long existed. As Dean Acheson explained in 1949, The really successful national and international institutions are those that recognize and express underlying realities. The North Atlantic community of nations is such a reality. It is based on the affinity and natural identity of interests of the North Atlantic powers. The North Atlantic Treaty, which now formally unites them, is the product of at least three-hundred and fifty years of history, perhaps more. There developed on our Atlantic coast a community which has spread across the continent, connected with Western Europe by common institutions and moral and ethical values. Similarities of this kind are not superficial, but fundamental. They are the strongest kinds of ties, because they are based on moral conviction, on acceptance of the same values in life. . . . North America and Western Europe have formed two halves of what is in reality one community.83

During the era of NATO’s founding, U.S. officials repeatedly invoked the idea of the “North Atlantic community” as a real entity that the alliance merely codified, based on shared ideals and like-minded peoples. In American eyes, the peoples of East Asia did not belong to this political community. U.S. officials and the American public, therefore, did not embrace the idea of dispersing power to them as a foundation for U.S. strategy in Asia because they either did not trust such people to wield such prerogatives or think them capable of doing so responsibly. As Dulles himself later explained: “The North Atlantic Treaty reflected a sense of common destiny as between the peoples of the West, which grew out of a community of race, religion, and political institutions, and it had been tested between two wars before it was formalized.” In contrast, “It has seemed impractical to operate [in Asia] except on a bilateral basis . . . the differences between the different areas are so considerable and the lack of homogeneity is such that it is not easy to bring them together.”84

LATIN AMERICA: A CLOSED HEMISPHERE IN AN OPEN WORLD? Within the Western Hemisphere, America’s predilection was for a multilateral framework whose formal egalitarianism would cushion the reality of U.S. hegemony. During World War II, Washington had launched a

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major campaign for hemispheric solidarity against fascism, building on FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s. In July 1940, the countries of the hemisphere had initialed the Act of Havana, offering the first legal endorsement of the Monroe Doctrine. Following the war, most Latin American governments sought continued U.S. membership in a formal inter-American political-military system, partly to create a legal framework to constrain the legitimate use of American power in the Western hemisphere. The Act of Chapultepec of March 1945, signed by all countries of the Americas (save Argentina), anticipated an institutionalized, multilateral system of hemispheric defense. The United States initially resisted this appeal, for fear that such a regional bloc would undermine universal collective security within the United Nations Organization, but by the San Francisco Conference the U.S. attitude had begun to change. With one eye toward preserving good relations with its southern neighbors and another focused on possible Soviet/Communist subversion, the Truman Administration endorsed an independent regional security system, consistent with the UN Charter. From a U.S. perspective, a Western Hemisphere politico-security arrangement would cast a multilateral imprimatur upon the Monroe Doctrine, providing a legal basis for excluding the involvement of hostile outside powers in the Americas. As Senator Vandenberg commented to Secretary of State Byrnes in August 3, 1945, “We might well accept, in connection with our inter-American allies and pursuant to the Treaty which will soon implement the Act of Chapultepec, the exclusive responsibility for any armed forces required to maintain peace and security in the Western Hemisphere. I doubt whether we shall ever want any other armed forces to enter this area.”85 In August 1947, the countries of the Hemisphere convened in Rio de Janeiro to negotiate the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. The resulting Rio Treaty bound the signatories to consult in the event of aggression from within or outside the hemisphere but did not automatically commit them to use armed force. It contained, in Article 3, an “all for one and one for all” collective defense clause, but it left the nature of the “obligated” response to the discretion of each state. Article 4 carefully delimited the geographic application of these obligations to the Western Hemisphere. At the same time, with an eye to mobilizing hemispheric solidarity if the United States confronted Soviet aggression in Europe, the United States insisted on Article 6, which provided for consultations in the event that the security of any member was threatened from outside this zone. In contrast to the NAT, the Rio Treaty neither created an integrated alliance structure nor required its members to place dedicated troop contingents at the disposal of the alliance. Nor did it include an Article 5–like

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provision implying the provision of military assistance during peacetime. The Truman Administration drafted an Inter-American Military Cooperation bill in May 1946, but the Senate never took up this legislation. Latin American governments did not receive a single dollar from the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949, which allowed the expenditure of $1.3 billion on U.S. allies. The lack of military aid signaled that the perceived threat to Latin America was not external invasion but rather internal subversion.86 In March-April of 1948, the United States and Latin American countries assembled in Bogotá at the Ninth International Conference of American States to sign the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS). This document balanced Latin concerns about potential U.S. interventionism and growing U.S. anxiety (shared by many Latin American governments) of Communist subversion. Articles 15–17 insisted on the right of all parties to non-intervention in their political, military, and economic affairs. But the United States also obtained an accompanying resolution on the “Preservation and Defense of Democracy in America,” which decried “international Communism or any other totalitarian doctrine” as “incompatible with the concept of American freedom” and a direct threat to hemispheric security.87 The Rio Pact and OAS Charter helped cushion the historic domination of the United States over its southern neighbors, while legitimating periodic U.S. military intervention against perceived Communist political incursions. These frameworks institutionally linked the American hegemon to subordinate states in its traditional sphere of influence, maintaining consensual appearances but permitting the United States to play its historical role of policeman.88 In adopting the egalitarian form of the Atlantic community without the substance of NATO, these multilateral arrangements served Washington’s Cold War aim of creating “a closed hemisphere in an otherwise open world.”89

CONCLUSION The early years of the Cold War challenged the United States to decide how best to organize the non-Soviet world—economically, politically, and militarily—in the cause of containment. Washington responded by abandoning the wartime objective of universal collective security through the United Nations in favor of assembling a broad “free world” coalition that included both formal multilateral alliances and bilateral security arrangements. By the mid-1950s, the United States had negotiated multilateral defense arrangements with some forty-one countries (fourteen in NATO, twenty-one in the Rio Treaty, and seven in SEATO), as well as other bilateral security treaties90

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NATO was by far the most mature and institutionalized of these arrangements. But the Atlantic alliance was not a foregone conclusion. U.S. efforts to achieve transatlantic security through a multilateral structure derived not primarily from geopolitical considerations or expected efficiency gains. On the contrary, by linking its own security almost inextricably to that of Europe, the United States assumed a tremendous burden of risk, resource transfers, and diplomatic headaches (from demanding allies). Instead, America’s historical experience, political culture—and national biases—drove its multilateral approach to the military element of containment. In the end, what spurred NATO was the United States’ belief that multilateralism would foster the reemergence of a powerful, independent Europe, able to stand on its own feet, and a sense of shared democratic identity bridging the Atlantic.

NOTES 1. The First Inaugural Address of Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 20, 1953, Avalon Project at Yale Law School, (December 5, 2007). 2. Timothy Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 3–8. Richard Ullman, Securing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 3. Ruggie, Winning the Peace, 42–43. 4. George Kennan, Memoirs, 407–9. 5. Steve Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power: Multilateralism in NATO,” in Mutilateralism Matters, ed. Ruggie, 236–37. 6. Ikenberry, After Victory, 205–10. 7. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 4. Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance,” 267–268. 8. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 44. Gaddis, “The United States and the Question of a Sphere of Influence,” 71–76. 9. Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power.” 10. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Katzenstein, 356–71. 11. John Young, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe, 77. 12. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony, 35. Gaddis, “The Insecurities of Victory,” 267. 13. December 22, 1947, FRUS 1948, III, 1. 14. FRUS 1948, III, 4–8. 15. January 20, 21, FRUS 1948, III, 8–9, 9–12. 16. January 19, 1948, FRUS 1948, III, 6. 17. January 29, 1948, FRUS 1948, III, 617–22. 18. FRUS 1948, III. 19. Alphand cited in Melandri, L’Alliance Atlantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 37–38.

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20. FRUS 1948, III, 29–30, 33–34. FRUS 1948, II, 87–88, 92–3, 98–100. Georges Bidault, Resistance: The Political Biography of Georges Bidault (New York: Praeger, 1967), 158–59. 21. FRUS 1948, III, 34–35. 22. FRUS 1948, III, 38, 628–29. Bidault, Resistance, 155–56. 23. Massigli, Une Comédie des Erreurs, 135. Jacques Frémaux and André Martel, “French Defense Policy 1947–1949,” in Western Security: The Formative Years. European and Atlantic Defence 1947–1953, ed. Olav Riste (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1985), 97. 24. “Treaty for Collaboration in Economic, Social, and Cultural Matters and for Collective Self-Defense,” Treaties and International Agreements Registered or Filed and Reported with the Secretariat of the United Nations 19, no. 304 (1948), 51. 25. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 73–74. 26. On proponents of a multilateral framework, see FRUS 1948, III, 40–42. 27. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 406–8, 464. See also FRUS 1948, III, 58–59. 28. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 80. 29. Jean Chauvel (Secretary-General at the Quai), Commentaire, 207. 30. Cited in Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power in NATO,” 245. 31. NSC 9/2, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Support for Western Union and other Related Free Countries.” FRUS 1948, III, 117–18. 32. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 89–90. 33. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 92–93. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Vandenberg Resolution and the North Atlantic Treaty, Executive Session, 80th Congress, second session. 81st Congress, 1st session. 34. FRUS 1948, III, 135–8. Melandri, L’Alliance Atlantique, 45. 35. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 207–8. FRUS 1948, II, 111. FRUS 1948, III, 141–144. 36. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 138. 37. FRUS 1948, III, 19, 142–43. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 101–2. 38. Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power.” 39. Young, France, 216. On American and French views, see FRUS 1948, III, 200–19. 40. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 119. 41. Young, France, 216. Irwin M. Wall, “France and the North Atlantic Alliance,” in NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic Alliance and the Integration of Europe, ed. Francis H. Heller and John R. Gillingham (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 49. “Policy Statement” on France, September 20, 1948, FRUS 1948, II, 658. 42. FRUS 1949, IV, 126–35, 141–48, 306–9, 318, 321. Melandri, L’Alliance Atlantique, 52–57. Young, France, 216. 43. FRUS 1948, III, 206. 44. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 103–110 45. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 110–13. 46. FRUS 1948, III, 239–48. 47. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 126–32. FRUS 1949, IV, 147–49. 48. April 4, 1949, FRUS 1949, IV, 281–85. 49. Acheson testimony to Congress, cited in Melandri, L’Alliance Atlantique, 57.

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50. Edgar Furniss, France, the Troubled Ally (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 37. 51. Cited in Ruggie, Winning the Peace, 45. 52. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 142–43. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 283. 53. Exchange cited in Acheson, Present at the Creation, 285. 54. Vandenberg and Taft cited in Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 145–46. 55. Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 152–57. 56. Lovett to Harriman, December 3, 1948, FRUS 1948, III, 303–6. 57. Melandri, L’Alliance Atlantique, 61–2. Melandri, Les États-Unis, 185–87. 58. FRUS 1948, III, 303. FRUS 1949, IV, 109. 59. Acheson, summarizing his message to Congress, in Present at the Creation, 493. 60. Cited in Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance, 166. 61. Cited in Beloff, The United States and the Unity of Europe, 47; see also 84–5. 62. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony, 36–37. 63. Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power,” 247. 64. “Basic Points of the Military Assistance Program,” February 7, 1949, FRUS 1949, I, 254. 65. Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II (New York: Twayne, 1992), 71. 66. Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power.” FRUS 1949, I, 254. 67. Cited in Weber, “Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power,” 248. 68. Ernest May, “The American Commitment to Germany, 1949–55,” Diplomatic History 13, no. 4 (Fall 1987), 431–460, 432–33. 69. FRUS 1949, IV, 4, 108, 156. 70. Michael Harrison, The Reluctant Ally: France and Atlantic Security (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 13–19. 71. FRUS 1949, IV, 665. 72. Cited in Melandri, L’Alliance Atlantique, 77. 73. Maier, “Analog of Empire,” 8, 30–1. 74. Eisenhower to General Alfred Gruenther. Cited in Brian R. Duchin, “The ‘Agonizing Reappraisal’: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the European Defense Community,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 2 (1990), 201–221, 202 75. Eisenhower comments during 1954 Geneva conference, in Gardner, “Lost Empires,” 6. 76. Ambassador Douglas Dillon, “The Decline of French Confidence in American Leadership,” August 4, 1953, State Department Central Files (SDCF), France, frames 292–307. 77. Special Representative Hughes, August 6, 1953, SDCF, France, frame 313. 78. Edward Fursdon, The European Defense Community: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 89. 79. FRUS 1948, 740–41, emphasis in original. Cited in Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism,” International Organization 56, no. 3 (Summer 2002), 575–607, 579.

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80. Cited in Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?”, 580. 81. Cited in Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?”, 581. 82. Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?”, 575. 83. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 385. 84. Dulles, quoted in 1952. Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?” 85. Vandenberg to Byrnes, August 3, 1945, cited in David Green, “The Cold War Comes to Latin America,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 166. 86. Leslie Bethell, “From the Second World War to the Cold War: 1944–1954,” in Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 60. 87. Bethell, “From the Second World War to the Cold War,” 61. 88. Mark T. Gilderhus, “An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.-Latin American Relations since the Second World War,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 3 (Summer 1992), 429–452, 437. 89. David Green, “The Cold War Comes to Latin America,” 191. 90. Reitzel, Kaplan, and Coblenz, American Foreign Policy, 365.

10 ✛

Between Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Communism: The Search for a Post-Imperial Order [Communism] represents a tyranny far more onerous and degrading than European colonialism at its worst and the complete negation of those values of religion, community organization, and personal worth that are the very heart beat of Asian life and culture. If Southeast Asia could be convinced of these ugly facts and strengthened in its inherent belief that they are also the core of America and of American interest in self-determination, there would be no question of which way it would go. —Final Report of the Melby Mission, 19501

T

he hegemonic rise of the United States after 1945 coincided with and, indeed, encouraged one of the great transformations of the twentieth century: the decolonization of large tracts of the globe and their integration into international society as sovereign states. When founded in 1945, the United Nations Organization had 51 member states. Twenty years later, it had 117 and counting. America’s wartime support for selfdetermination inspired countless nationalist leaders. Yet, the Cold War’s arrival posed excruciating dilemmas for U.S. policymakers, torn between their longstanding hopes for colonial independence and their newfound fear of Communist expansion. Conventional wisdom holds that anti-Communism quickly overwhelmed anti-colonialism as a motive for U.S. policy choices. In fact, the Cold War elevated and exacerbated the colonial problem, making the issue more prominent and vexing in U.S. calculations, since it threatened both allied solidarity and prospects of winning the allegiance of new 297

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nations. Washington sought, often in vain, a middle ground between unreconstructed imperialism and the demands of colonial nationalists for immediate independence. The United States had a vested interest in bolstering the strategic position of its allies, including their access to markets and raw materials in the developing world. But the persistence of exploitative imperial systems mocked America’s espoused principles and deepest values. It also constituted a geopolitical vulnerability by fuelling nationalist rebellions and enabling Communist inroads among colonial peoples that sapped the strength of metropolitan powers and undermined U.S. leadership within the United Nations. The State Department in June 1945 concluded months of internal wrangling by embracing a “hands-off” policy toward Asian nationalism. According to documents prepared for the Potsdam Conference, the United States would seek to “harmonize . . . its policies in regard to two objectives: increased political freedom for the Far East and the maintenance of the unity of the leading United Nations.” American officials understood that failure to secure a smooth transition to colonial independence would undermine Western influence in Asia and stimulate regional conflicts, and they were alarmed by Britain’s intransigence on granting increased self-government to its dependencies. Nevertheless, Washington ruled out coercive diplomacy in favor of normative persuasion to change its imperial allies’ calculations.2 In effect, U.S. ambivalence facilitated the reassertion of British, French, and Dutch colonialism in the region. America’s ideal decolonization scenario involved the metropolitan powers granting progressive self-government, culminating in independence, to moderate elites who would maintain close diplomatic, security, and economic relations with the West—precisely the strategy the United States followed in the Philippines in 1946.3 This rosy scenario was not always possible, however, particularly when the nationalist movements appeared (in America’s eyes if not necessarily in fact) infiltrated by Communist elements or inspired by the Kremlin. In such situations, Washington tended to conclude that rapid decolonization would advance neither self-determination nor U.S. security, since the native population would simply exchange one tyranny—European imperialism—for an even more onerous totalitarian system, one that would threaten the United States and its allies.4 Nowhere was this predicament more acute than in French Indochina, where the United States struggled during the late 1940s and early 1950s to persuade the French to transfer political power to indigenous antiCommunist forces. Vietminh domination of Indochinese nationalism complicated U.S. policy, leaving no apparent alternative between dilapidated, exploitative French colonialism and Communist triumph. Washington hoped that a combination of gently prodding Paris to emancipate

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its possessions and pointing to its own success in the Philippines would spur a more enlightened French policy. Unfortunately, the Constitution of the Fourth Republic repudiated American ideals, creating a French Union based on metropolitan primacy that excluded the principle of colonial self-government. Paris might tolerate substantial internal autonomy for its possessions, but no more. Into the early 1950s, Washington pressed Paris to transfer more of the substance of independence, which U.S. officials considered essential for a non-Communist victory. Still, U.S. pressure had inherent limits, given America’s concerns about French political stability, preoccupation with European defense, and unwillingness to assume France’s burdens in Indochina. As the Cold War moved to East Asia, Washington began to subsidize the French campaign against the Vietminh, while still hounding Paris to liberate Indochina. France, for its part, gained resources it needed to prosecute the war but gradually ceded control over the direction of the conflict and its own influence in Indochina. Following the debacle of Dien Bien Phu, France surrendered the field to the Americans, who would seek for another two decades to find a nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh. While the story of French Indochina cannot capture the totality of U.S. attitudes toward and engagement with the colonial world in the early postwar years, it provides a useful window into the difficulties the United States encountered in applying the principle of self-determination in a Cold War context. This case study dissects and foreshadows a challenge that would consume a growing share of U.S. foreign policy attention and resources through the final withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Vietnam in 1972.

THE CRUMBLING IMPERIAL EDIFICE In March 1946, American diplomat P. Bagby recorded the dramatic aftershocks of the Second World War in the developing world. “In the six months since the termination of hostilities with Japan it has become clear that the world is going through a colonial crisis unparalleled in history. The great empires built up by the Western powers during four centuries have been shaken to their foundations. They are crumbling before our eyes.”5 This upheaval was most pronounced in Asia, where the wartime collapse of the European empires and sweeping U.S. rhetoric had inspired and empowered local actors to seek liberation. To avoid alienating either Europeans or Asian nationalists, Washington transferred the responsibility for accepting Japan’s surrender in the colonial empires to the British South East Asia Command, under Lord Mountbatten.6 America’s postwar response to this crisis of empire depended strongly

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on local circumstances, particularly the character of local nationalist movements. Where nationalists proved their anti-Communist bona fides, as in Indonesia, they could generally count on U.S. sympathy for their aspirations; where they seemed to be dominated by Communist or radical elements, as in Indochina, Washington tended to side with the imperial powers—on the grounds that a Communist, and presumably Kremlininspired, regime precluded true self-determination—while pushing the Europeans to identify and strengthen “authentic” (i.e., non-Communist) local independence movements. The optimal solution, in American eyes, would be for Europeans to follow the path the United States had blazed in the Philippines: nurturing and then granting independence to moderate, western-oriented nationalists. As Truman later explained, colonialism was “hateful to Americans. . . . I hoped that by making the Philippines as free as we had made Cuba it would have an effect on British, Dutch, and French policy in Far Eastern affairs.”7 Truman’s reference to Cuba, of course, suggested that surrendering legal sovereignty need entail neither a grievous loss of metropolitan privileges nor the outbreak of local chaos. In the case of the Philippines, the United States immediately reconsolidated its domination through economic and security arrangements. The Bell Trade Act of 1946 entrenched the U.S. commercial monopoly by pegging an overvalued Philippine peso to the dollar, prohibiting the export to the United States of manufactures that competed with U.S. goods, mandating “parity” in the treatment of American investors in the islands, and otherwise preserving bilateral free trade between the two countries for twenty years. With the Military Base Agreement negotiated in March 1947 (and a Military Assistance Agreement signed later that year), the United States acquired ninety-nine-year leases and extraterritorial rights in twenty-two bases and installations in the country. (Two of these, Clark Airfield and Subic Bay Naval Base, became the largest outside the United States.)8 Some in the Truman Administration criticized these bilateral arrangements as inconsistent with political self-determination and economic multilateralism. Assistant Secretaries of State Acheson and Clayton, for example, worried that the discriminatory commercial clauses of the trade act, upon which protectionists in Congress had insisted, would undermine Washington’s broader campaign against imperial preference.9 Similarly, State Department political adviser Robert Murphy likened the base agreement to Soviet conduct in Eastern Europe, entreating Congress, “let us not expect our allies to be satellites.”10 Others had fewer qualms. As Senator Robert Taft explained, the United States “shall always be a big brother, if you please, to the Philippines.”11 For the ruling Filipino oligarchy, such infringements on sovereignty were a trivial price to pay for national security and access to U.S. markets. President Manuel Roxas

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marked the Philippines’ Independence Day, on July 4, 1946, with an obsequious declaration of subordination: “Our safest course [is to follow] in the glistening wake of America whose sure advance with mighty prow breaks for smaller crafts the waves of fear.”12 Elsewhere in Asia, London’s promises (in December 1946 and February 1947, respectively) to emancipate Burma and India delighted Washington. The outburst of revolutionary nationalism in Southeast Asia, however, and the ferocity of the French and Dutch determination to forcibly restore imperial authority in Indochina and Indonesia and the East Indies, respectively, took the United States by surprise.13 American officials wanted to avoid weakening their European allies but understood as well that unreformed imperialism could impede containment both in the developing world and in Europe, if nationalist revolutions broke out and drained the resources of metropolitan powers. Acheson recognized this challenge to “satisfy nationalist aims” while “minimiz[ing] the strain on Western European allies.”14 In the Dutch East Indies, because nationalists had proven their antiCommunist credentials, the United States ultimately intervened against the Netherlands to ensure independence. As in the rest of Southeast Asia, the United States had stood aside as the metropolitan power sought to reassert its authority over colonial nationalists. In November 1946, the Dutch administration and Indonesian nationalists signed the Linggadjati Agreement, which committed The Hague to “peaceful evolution toward native self-rule,” while retaining Dutch political, economic, and military influence. The accord explicitly recognized republican rule over Java, Sumatra, and Madura and envisioned an eventual United States of Indonesia in political union with the Netherlands. After the lower house of the Dutch Parliament ratified a diluted version of the treaty in March 1947, however, Indonesian nationalists rejected the agreement. When the Dutch moved to crush the nationalist guerrillas in July 1947, Washington quickly abandoned neutrality to side with the latter.15 “The sympathetic encouragement of Indonesian nationalism is bound to be rough passage,” reasoned National Security Council directive 51, “but it is the only channel lying between polarization and Stalinization.”16 Following a second Dutch police action, Acheson told Foreign Minister Dirk Stikker bluntly on March 31, 1949, that the United States believed the Dutch guilty of aggression. Without full Indonesian independence there was “no chance whatever of the Congress authorizing funds for military supplies to the Netherlands.”17 American policymakers saw a protracted military campaign by the Netherlands not only as futile but detracting from the Netherlands’ contribution to the defense of Western Europe. Faced with a potential cut-off of Marshall Aid, the Dutch capitulated, pledging to transfer sovereignty within months to Sukarno’s nationalist forces.

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THE INDOCHINA DILEMMA American policy toward revolutionary nationalism in Indochina took a very different course. Certainly, France’s larger size, UN veto, governmental instability, and importance to European recovery and defense moderated U.S. pressure on Paris. Most of all, though, the perceived Communist orientation of the Viet Minh led Washington first to condone and then to subsidize a French military campaign designed to prevent Indochinese independence. Opposed to imperialism but convinced that Ho Chi Minh was a Kremlin tool, U.S. officials searched futilely for an “authentic” Vietnamese nationalism that might rival his appeal. By their own admission, they found no middle ground between an independent Vietnam “run on orders by Moscow” or a policy of “keeping the natives down by force of arms.” By late 1949 the Indochina struggle had grown from a local episode of decolonization to a defining contest between the Free World and Communism. Washington opted for a two-pronged strategy of financing France’s Indochina war while insisting on “evolutionary statements” from Paris promising ultimate independence.18 In August 1945, General de Gaulle assured Truman that Paris favored colonial self-government within the French Union, but at varying speeds depending upon local circumstances. Such decisions, moreover, were purely French matters.19 Despite misgivings about guilt by association, the United States allowed France a free hand in postwar Indochina.20 Hints that Paris would open its possessions to American commerce probably encouraged U.S. “neutrality.” Jean Chauvel, the Secretary General at the Quai, advised U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery that Indochina might provide “the only real [economic] foothold on the Asiatic mainland for the occidental democracies.”21 Exploiting the postwar power vacuum created by Japan’s surrender, the Vietminh declared independence for Vietnam on September 2, 1945. Invoking the U.S. Declaration of Independence as a model, Ho Chi Minh closed with a reference to the wartime statements of the allied powers. “We are confident that the allied nations, which at Teheran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination, and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.”22 Ho was not alone among colonial nationalists in finding inspiration—and rhetorical ammunition—in America’s wartime proclamations. Ferhat Abbas’s “Manifesto of the Algerian People” likewise cited Roosevelt’s assurances that “in the organization of a new world, the rights of all peoples, large and small, would be respected.”23 Unfortunately for Ho (as well as Abbas), these pleas fell on deaf ears in Washington. De Gaulle immediately offered Indochina a new partnership within a reformed French Union. But full independence was out of the question.

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At the end of the war none of the three main French political parties advocated immediate decolonization or even admitted the principle of secession.24 Even the powerful French Communist Party (PCF), though ideologically opposed to imperialism, rejected early emancipation as dangerous for indigenous peoples. France’s goal, declared party leader Maurice Thorez, should be to foster a “free, trusting, and brotherly union . . . by radical reform.” The Socialist Party, meanwhile, hoped to extend French citizenship gradually within a democratic federal community. “In our Republican doctrine,” Leon Blum explained, “colonial possession does not reach its final goal and find its true justification until . . . colonial people [have been] rendered fully capable as an emancipated people of governing [themselves].” Finally, the Christian Democratic Mouvement Republicain Populaire (MRP), steeped in Catholic moral teaching, advocated a progressive conferral of responsibilities onto colonial inhabitants.25 The relationship between France’s imperial possessions and the metropole were fixed during the Constituent Assembly of 1946, which produced the constitution of the Fourth Republic. Thanks to agitation by deputies from the colonies, a first draft declared the French Union based on the “free consent” and the “self-determination” of dependent peoples.26 The liberal tide quickly turned, however. French citizens rejected the document in a May 1946 referendum, and defenders of empire mobilized against a second progressive draft that pledged to “abandon all unilateral sovereignty over colonized peoples” and to recognize “their freedom to self-government and to conduct their own affairs democratically.” Le Monde complained that the draft, by justifying secession, would condemn the French Empire to death.27 The offending clauses were excised, and the new document was ratified on October 27. The Constitution of the Fourth Republic established a French Union governed by a Federal Assembly, a President (also President of the Republic), and a High Council representing France and the “Associated” States (i.e., other members of the Union). The preamble revealed the ambiguities of this new community. The first paragraph paid homage to the traditional French principles of assimilation and equality, describing “a union founded on the equality of rights and responsibilities [of individuals], without distinction of race or religion.” The second suggested a federal system of equal “nations and peoples who place in common or coordinate their efforts to develop their respective civilizations, increase their well-being and assure their security.” The third reasserted metropolitan privilege and the incremental character of local autonomy. “Faithful to its traditional mission, France intends to direct the peoples in its charge toward the freedom to administer themselves and to manage their own affairs democratically.”28 Articles 61 and 62 reinforced metropolitan primacy, by prescribing that relations among the Associated States derived

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from their relations with France and by giving Paris control over defense issues in the French Union. To avoid creating a waiting room for independence, the Constitution made no provisions for secession.29 On balance, the document was a rebuke to the U.S. vision for a post-colonial world of independent, self-determining states. Though determined to restore control over Indochina as quickly as possible, Paris did permit some local autonomy. The Ho-Sainteny Agreement of March 1946 recognized the Republic of Vietnam as a “free state” within the Indochinese Federation and the French Union, possessing its “own government, parliament, army, and finances.” A referendum would decide the unity of the three kys (Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina). The accord gave France breathing space to return troops to Indochina but left profound differences unsolved. It did not pronounce “independence,” deferred authority over external relations, left ties between the French Union and Indochinese Federation imprecise, and kept unspecified metropolitan cultural and economic privileges. Paris continued to treat bilateral relations as internal policy, whereas the Vietminh sought a sovereign state linked to France by diplomatic association.30 France’s High Commissioner, Thierry d’Argenlieu, offered this “first freely-debated accord between a colonial power and a Southeast Asian nation” as proof of French fidelity to the UN Charter.31 In the venerable tradition of colonial administrators, however, he unilaterally proclaimed the autonomy of Cochinchina, sabotaging the imminent Fontainbleau Conference of July–August 1946, where Ho negotiated a meager modus vivendi. Convinced that the French Union could be “one and indivisible” only if member states were subject to metropolitan authority and denied UN membership, Paris had concluded that the price of peace—an independent and Communist Vietnam—exceeded the price of war.32 In November, d’Argenlieu responded to Vietminh provocations by bombarding Haiphong Harbor. The conflict escalated. Truman initially professed American neutrality in the Indochina war, prohibiting the use of Lend-Lease supplies to suppress the rebellion and advising Paris not to count on U.S. support in the UN, while offering to mediate the dispute. Within the State Department, intramural disputes persisted about the appropriate U.S. attitude toward Indochina. Far Eastern experts like John Carter Vincent predicted disaster for the French. He noted France’s attempt, “with inadequate forces, with public opinion sharply at odds, with a government rendered largely ineffective through internal divisions . . . to accomplish in Indochina what a strong and united Britain has found it unwise to attempt in Burma.” Deriding the Administration’s “hands off” policy, his colleague Abbot Low Moffat appealed for “U.S. moral leadership,” i.e., Washington’s insistence that France confer independence.33 The Department’s Europeanists, though, won the debate

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by successfully casting the war in East-West terms. Counseling Moffat to “[k]eep in mind Ho’s clear record as [an] agent [of] international Communism,” Assistant Secretary Acheson identified the establishment of a pro-Soviet Marxist regime spreading revolution throughout the region as the “[l]east desirable eventuality.”34 America’s predicament crystallized during 1947. Though committed to France’s economic, political, and military resurgence, Secretary of State George Marshall noted, “We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that there are two sides [to] this [Indochina] problem.” Paris’s “dangerously outmoded colonial outlook and methods” would effectively exchange “colonial empire administrators” for a “philosophy and political organizations emanating from and controlled by [the] Kremlin.” Marshall’s glum assessment: “Frankly we have no solution.”35 U.S. officials thought Southeast Asia was passing through a “critical phase.” Disintegrating European control portended “racial, religious, and national” conflict, “anti-Western Pan-Asiatic tendencies,” and Communist advances. To avoid such an outcome, Washington favored decolonization that preserved links between colonial metropole and fledgling nationstates. Marshall believed only a “nation steeped like France in democratic tradition[s] and confirmed in [its] respect [for] human liberties” could provide the “material and technical assistance and enlightened policy guidance” for independence to succeed. Unfortunately, French bigotry and sense of colonial entitlement threatened to “leave [a] legacy [of] permanent bitterness and irrevocably alienate [the] Vietnamese.”36 With mounting frustration, the United States saw no middle ground between an independent Vietnam “run on orders from Moscow” and “keeping the natives down by force of arms.” “Morally,” wrote the U.S. consul in Saigon, Charles Reed, French goals and tactics merited condemnation. But “practically,” Washington could not tolerate a totalitarian victory.37 James O’Sullivan, U.S. consul in Hanoi, worried that rigid French imperialism would be “catastrophic to United States prestige,” threatening to drive the Vietnamese “into a virulent anti-white bloc,” and risk the “irretrievable orientation of intellectuals and the people toward communism and Moscow and against the West.”38 Could the Americans reach a modus vivendi with Ho? Both Reed and O’Sullivan thought so, but the European Office considered a policy of evenhandedness towards the Vietminh “one hell of a big chance to take.”39 By autumn 1947 the French were depicting their anachronistic imperial campaign as part of the global anti-Communist crusade. Challenged by U.S. senators to justify the colonial conflicts draining France’s ailing economy, Foreign Minister Bidault offered a containment rationale for its savage wars of peace. “If France’s pacification efforts do not succeed, Indochina will have a Communist government, and Madagascar as well.”40

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Rather than negotiate with the Vietminh directly, the French tried to co-opt indigenous support for Emperor Bao Dai. Timely concessions to nationalist sentiment might have averted disaster, but France refused to change.41 The first Baie d’Along Agreement of December 7, 1947, so qualified Indochinese independence that Bao Dai resisted its implementation; the second, of June 5, 1948, kept Vietnam’s army and external policy in French hands. Bao Dai temporized in the hope of more concessions. The State Department wondered how to encourage France to give Vietnam “real political and economic autonomy.” Instability in Paris complicated U.S. overtures. French diplomats compared their own government to an overburdened ship likely to capsize with the next passenger—“and Indochina is that passenger.”42 The fall of Premier Schuman in July 1948 inaugurated a prolonged governmental crisis. When Marshall proposed pressing the succeeding Queille government to implement the Baie d’Along accords, U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery advised against weakening a friendly ally.43 American diplomats increasingly viewed the conflict in Vietnam through a Cold War lens. Although possessing “no evidence” of Vietminh connections with Moscow, Acheson wrote the embassy in China, the Department “assumes it exists.” Despite the “impression [that] Ho . . . is retaining [a] large degree [of] latitude,” Washington rejected the “Titoist” option of seeking to split Communism in Asia.44 There is no doubt the United States wanted to satisfy nationalist aspirations. Doing so would advance several critical objectives: defeating communist influence, creating a self-governing nation “patterned on our conception of a democratic state,” forging a close association between France and Indochina, raising local productivity and standards of living, and integrating Indochina into the global economy.45 Ever sensitive to the risk of discrediting itself in the developing world by association with European imperialism, the State Department launched a propaganda effort designed to “harp incessantly upon our willingness to assist [colonial peoples] to attain national independence . . . with our record in the Philippines ever in the foreground.”46 Such a campaign was essential to counter a Soviet disinformation campaign depicting the United States as “lead . . . oppress[or] of colonial peoples” in Southeast Asia.47 Despite its profound dissatisfaction with French policy in Indochina, however, Washington’s “immediate and vital” priority of stabilizing the French government undermined America’s anti-colonial agenda. Washington was also “naturally hesitant to press Paris too strongly or become too deeply involved as we are not in a position to suggest a solution or . . . to accept the onus of intervention.”48 Meanwhile, paradoxically, the advent of Marshall Aid enabled Paris to reallocate its budget to sustain more than 100,000 troops in Indochina.

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WASHINGTON EMBRACES THE BAO DAI “EXPERIMENT” After courting Bao Dai unsuccessfully for two years, Paris finally met his conditions. The Elysée Agreements of March 8, 1949, granted the Emperor what France had denied Ho in 1946—the conferral of “independence” on a unitary Vietnamese state with its own army and limited diplomatic relations.49 Still, the Bao Dai experiment faltered. As General Revers, Head of the French General Staff, observed, France’s only hope lay in transferring political administration to the Indochinese—and establishing a Vietnamese national army. Unfortunately, these moves would effectively eliminate French influence. Over the next eleven months, Washington came to accept Bao Dai as the “only foreseeable opportunity for [an] anti-Communist nationalist solution.” Reed warned that this policy might require Washington to “follow blindly down a dead-end alley,” wasting limited money and prestige in a “hopeless” cause, but Acheson saw no alternative. He deemed Ho’s “nationalist” credentials “irrelevant,” inasmuch as “all Stalinists in colonial areas [were] nationalists” who, after independence, “ruthless[ly] exterminat[ed]” political pluralism.50 Fears of jeopardizing the survival of an embattled French government reinforced these instincts.51 By late 1949 the Asian Cold War had transformed the Indochina conflict from a peripheral episode of decolonization into a defining chapter of the East-West struggle. Mao’s triumph in China brought Communism to the Tonkin border—as well as political and material support for the Vietminh. American policymakers agreed that the local communists were implementing a “coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.” The Truman Administration, pilloried by the Republican Party for “losing” China, desperately sought to avoid a similar fiasco in Indochina. China represented “a grievous political defeat.” A similar result in Southeast Asia would mark “a grievous political rout.” Washington viewed Indochina as a critical source of raw materials for Japan, now envisioned as a bulwark of the Free World in Asia.52 Meanwhile, the Hukbalahap insurgency in the Philippines challenged America’s much-vaunted model for decolonization. To Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk, the islands provided “a laboratory sample of the kind of choice which exists between our kind of world and the kind of world that exists on the other side of the iron curtain.”53 The Manila embassy concurred. New Asian nations, “casting about for adaptable social patterns,” would “accept or reject ours on the basis of its success or failure in the Philippines,” which represented both a “show window of democracy” and “testing ground for American leadership.”54 Communist victory there would embarrass the United States “vis-à-vis the British, French, and Dutch whom we have

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been persuading to recognize the realities and legitimacy of Asiatic nationalism and self-determination.”55 The United States, therefore, launched a massive counterinsurgency campaign, under Colonel Edward Landsdale. American support for a “genuine” nationalist alternative, in the person of Ramon Magsaysay, played a key role.56 Elsewhere in Asia the increasingly progressive nature of British policy in Malaya pleased the United States. Although London had heavy-handedly reasserted imperial control in 1945, replacing indirect rule with direct rule from the crown, the British had made significant commitments to advance social welfare, economic development, and eventual self-government.57 In Indochina, Washington remained convinced that independence was the key to defeating Communism. Unfortunately, France would only continue its sacrifices in order to preserve the French Union. Stoking Washington’s Cold War fears, Paris requested U.S. recognition of and aid for the Associated States in late 1949, depicting Indochina as the front line of containment. Far from a selfish colonial conflict, Schuman declared, “France was . . . fighting the battle of all the democratic powers.”58 In December the State Department retreated for the third time that year from “stern representations [to Paris] on behalf of a liberal colonial policy.”59 Ambassador David Bruce likewise fended off demands for specific timetables and international supervision, claiming, “No French government could remain in power that advocated complete independence either now or in the future.” Since the financial hemorrhage in Indochina jeopardized “the whole French recovery and stabilization effort” as well as France’s “keystone” role in Western defense, he advocated extending the Mutual Defense Assistance Program to Indochina, to help Paris strike at both European and Asian Communism.60 For Acheson, Chinese and Soviet recognition of the Vietminh as the legitimate government of Vietnam removed “any illusions as to the ‘nationalist’ nature of Ho Chi Minh’s aims and reveal[ed] Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.”61 In his famous National Press Club speech of January 12, 1950, the Secretary of State intimated that U.S. military aid might be the “missing ingredient” for French success.62 On February 3, Washington and London extended political recognition to the Associated States of Indochina. Though a dim prospect, the Bao Dai “experiment” seemed the only alternative to Vietnam’s satellization by Moscow.63 Bidault, obscuring France’s intentions to retain unique privileges in Southeast Asia, described the struggle as “no longer a localized conflict” but “a full-scale war between two ways of life” with “serious repercussions for all the civilized world.”64 U.S. officials predicted that American leverage would evaporate “the minute we give [France] aid,” but deluded themselves that Paris had renounced colonialism. The State Department clearly understood the “true

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character” and “ultimate intentions” of French concessions in the March 8 agreements.65 The challenge remained to persuade the Indochinese of France’s good will by getting France to consider “issuance at the earliest possible moment of a public statement” on plans for complete independence of the Associated States. On May 8, just before Schuman’s historic proposal for a European Coal and Steel Community, Acheson announced a generous economic and military package to sustain the French war effort.66 In turn, Paris agreed to appoint a special minister to govern relations with Indochina. The colonial issue poisoned Franco-American cooperation in Southeast Asia for the next several years. Paris continued to demand special relations with an Indochina tightly linked to the French Union. Washington regarded France’s persistent imperial mentality as the main obstacle to containment in Southeast Asia. Reconciling these positions proved impossible, so American officials adopted the dual policy of financing France’s war while insisting on “evolutionary statements” advancing decolonization. This inherently contradictory strategy floundered, since the very aid that enabled France’s war effort also undermined its rationale.67 Washington’s decision to support the French in Indochina reflected a broader reorientation of U.S. policy toward the developing world. By 1950, the exigencies of the Cold War led Washington to subsume selfdetermination beneath the requirements of allied solidarity and political stability in colonial areas. The Colonial Policy Review Committee on Problems in Dependent Areas saw “little value in throwing [U.S.] support to dependent peoples with a view to developing worthwhile democratic friends in half a century if, by so doing, we might seriously jeopardize American security and the survival of democracy itself.”68 “Evidence of a growing conservatism” in the American approach to decolonization became manifest on the UN Trusteeship Council, where the United States often sided with European allies or abstained on controversial matters, to the consternation of the strongly anti-imperialist non-administering states. In 1947, the United States cast the deciding vote against permitting the presentation of oral petitions from inhabitants of Trust Territories in the Council. In 1949 it joined the administering powers in denying the right of trust territories’ inhabitants to send non-voting representatives to participate in consideration of the Council’s annual reports.69 American support for decolonization remained especially cautious in sub-Saharan Africa. While recognizing the legitimate aspirations of nationalist movements, the Truman Administration worried about alienating European allies, depriving them of access to African raw materials for defense and recovery, and the consequences of premature emancipation— namely, the potential proliferation of unstable, weak states vulnerable to Communism. A racially tinged perception of black Africans as backward

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peoples fragmented by tribal loyalties and ill-prepared to govern their own affairs reinforced these strategic concerns. The State Department’s Office of Dependent Area Affairs warned that U.S. leadership in the UN required more robust support for independence, but Washington feared undermining NATO by applying too much pressure on the imperial powers. As elsewhere in the colonial world, the United States undertook an impossible balancing act, supporting the European metropolitan powers while encouraging bolder steps to advance self-determination and social and economic development.70

THE KOREAN WAR AND INTENSIFIED U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN INDOCHINA The Korean War deepened and broadened the U.S. partnership with France in Southeast Asia, without resolving its underlying contradictions. Interpreting the invasion of South Korea as Kremlin-inspired, portending a pattern of Communist assaults on free people worldwide, Acheson soon persuaded Truman to accelerate assistance to Indochina.71 In July 1950, President Truman dispatched the Melby-Erskine Mission to survey the situation in Southeast Asia as part of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP). Three months later, Washington promised Paris intensified aid for the Indochina war, to exceed $133 million by the end of the year.72 In December 1950, the Final Report of the Melby-Erskine mission made the case, on both geopolitical and ideological grounds, for a largescale economic and military aid program to assist the French struggle. “America without Asia,” it asserted, “would be reduced to the Western Hemisphere and a precarious foothold on the Western fringe of the Eurasian continent.” On the other hand, “success will vindicate and give added meaning to the American way of life.”73 Underlining the necessity of a firm commitment to Vietnamese independence, the report reckoned with the challenges of remaining true to American liberal values during the Cold War: The overwhelming motif of Southeast Asian thought is nationalism. Now whatever the cost or the time interval involved, the peoples of Southeast Asia will for all purposes in the end become self-determining. The United States has never denied the validity of this concept, and in general has for that matter expressed its sympathy with the movement, thereby incurring the regrettable, if understandable, resentment of the slowly receding colonial powers. . . . Where we have lost sympathy—and we are losing it at an alarming rate—it is because we have been less vigorous in our support of nationalism than Asia would have wished.74

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How could the United States reconcile a massive aid program with its alleged support for self-determination? To square this circle, U.S. foreign policy elites reasoned that Communist-dominated nationalist movements precluded true self-determination. As John Foster Dulles, then consulting to the State Department, explained to Acheson in August 1950, “We may not get much sympathy in the United Nations with our Asiatic policy unless we emphasize that the colonial struggle for independence will be lost to the aggression and imperialism of Russia, using communism as bait.” Dulles saw the Soviets following a strategy for Communist expansion outlined in Stalin’s 1924 work Problems of Communism. Stalin advocated first “arousing the spirit of nationalism in colonial and dependent peoples of Asia so that they will fight the west” and then “subverting this nationalism into a ‘amalgamation’ with the Soviet socialist regime.”75 The United States had to convince Asians that it was the true defender of independence in Asia. As the Melby Mission report noted, Asians must be made to realize that Communism “represents a tyranny far more onerous and degrading than European colonialism at its worst.”76 By placing Indochina clearly in the context of the Cold War in Asia, the Korean War gave enormous leverage to France. Washington had effectively ensnared itself. Its aid now funded a war which remained imperial at heart with only anti-Communist trappings—and slight chances for success. American officials hoped to transform French war aims but had aligned themselves with the colonialism antithetical to their own espoused principles by sending aid prior to full Associated State independence. Unwilling to assume France’s military burden and preoccupied with European defense, the United States had difficulty influencing the prosecution of the war and the transfer of local power.77 Washington continued to urge Paris to offer “evolutionary statements” consistent with “self-government within the French Union,” but tread carefully for fear that if pressed too hard, Paris might respond, “All right, take over the damned country. We don’t want it.” MDAP director, John Ohly, doubting the United States could “simultaneously pursue all of its objectives in all parts of the world,” challenged his superiors to abandon soberly those regions—like Indochina—of lower priority. “These situations, unfortunately, have a way of snowballing.”78 Although Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos gradually gained internal autonomy during 1950–1953, this failed to slake the nationalists’ thirst for sovereign diplomacy, a national army, and UN membership—privileges available in the British Commonwealth but not French Union. Paris’s strategy at this time involved demanding ever greater U.S. aid while resisting any American encroachment on its prosecution of the war. U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Donald Heath griped that Indochina was the only place where Washington expended significant funds and effort

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without influencing policy. The French had quite a different view. President Auriol bemoaned, “They give us money and we pay for it with our independence. It is shocking.”79 On December 23, 1950 the United States, France, and the Associated States signed a Mutual Defense Assistance agreement for Indochina.80 The State Department nonetheless expressed continued frustration that France’s colonial practice “lagged behind the liberal intentions of [its] Constitution.” Paris had underestimated “the political realities of nationalism and the demand for self-government” worldwide, but “most acute[ly] in Indochina,” where they granted concessions “only in the face of impending military disaster and complete loss of control and then, after much delay and hesitation.”81 France’s shortcomings risked undermining the “keystone” of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.82 American spirits rose when General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny became Indochina’s High Commissioner and Commander in Chief in December 1950. The general, claiming he had come “to complete [Indochinese] independence, not to limit it,” transferred control over post, customs, coal mines, agricultural services to local authorities and allowed the Associated States to have diplomatic representation in London and UNESCO. The long-promised Vietnamese national army, however, emerged more slowly.83 De Lattre’s tenure, moreover, witnessed intensified Franco-American competition over Southeast Asia, where the United States had begun to apply its own liberal model of economic and political development. Confident that the Marshall Plan model could transfer to illiberal and technologically primitive societies and convinced of the inextricable linkage among economic development, anti-Communism, and popular democracy, the Truman Administration embraced a “bold new program” to make science and industrial progress available to underdeveloped regions of the world.84 Proposed in the President’s inaugural address of 1949 and realized in the 1950 Act for International Development, this Point Four program of technical assistance promised to replace the “old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit” with “democratic American know-how” to bring not “the ideal of democracy alone, but the tangible benefits of better living through intelligent cooperation.”85 Vietnam soon became host to a vast nation-building apparatus composed of various U.S. specialized agencies. A Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) screened French aid requests, trained Vietnamese soldiers and offered strategic advice. A Special Technical and Economic Mission (STEM) implemented Point Four objectives. An ECA mission supervised Marshall Aid. USIA offices conducted cultural-informational diplomacy. Brash and self-righteous, the not-so-quiet Americans dismissed their ostensible French partners as antiquated and impractical imperialists. The French, resentful of their growing dependence on the

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United States and disdainful of the Americans’ naïvete, sought to retain local control by circumventing MAAG oversight and limiting ECA, USIA, and STEM activities.86 De Lattre whined to U.S. officials that America’s massive presence overshadowed decades of French sacrifice, made France a “poor cousin” in local eyes, and threatened to “drive a wedge” between the metropole and the Associated States. The French general also startled the American ambassador by observing that “of course, [the] Associated states could not enjoy the same status as former British colonies since France had spent too much wealth and blood in protecting them.”87 Demonstrating the limits of Indochina’s liberty, de Lattre in June 1951 blocked a bilateral ECA-Vietnam economic agreement because “the future of the French Union would be imperiled” if the Vietnamese could “negotiate and sign international treaties without full prior consultation and approval.” ECA mission chief Robert Blum declared that French imperialism had “largely negated” the “psychological results” of U.S. efforts, leaving America with little choice but a “holding operation” pending France’s inevitable withdrawal.88 Despite these run-ins, de Lattre garnered American praise and rallied French morale. Optimism reached a crescendo during the general’s visit to the United States in September 1951. The general termed Hanoi “the Berlin of Southeast Asia” and warned that if Tonkin were lost, there would be “no barrier to Communism before Suez.” India would “burn like a match” and “the Moslems of North Africa would fall into line . . . Europe itself would be outflanked.” The French had given their “shirts” and “blood” in the Free World struggle. As General Lawton Collins observed prophetically from Saigon in November, “This is largely a General de Lattre show. If anything should happen to him, there could well be collapse in Indochina.”89 Within two months de Lattre had died of cancer. French political support for the war had begun to fade along with U.S. hopes.90 Monnet conceded to U.S. officials in March 1952 that although “catastrophic,” withdrawal “might nevertheless be dictated by events.”91 The U.S. chargé in Paris reported that Assembly deputies could no longer justify expending “French blood and funds . . . only in order to hand over the country to the Vietnamese when it is all over.” Evaluating France’s lackluster military performance and the resultant stalemate, American officials concluded that nationalism doomed any prospect of retaining Indochina as “a conspicuous remnant of French colonialism in the Far East.”92 By 1952, Paris was devoting more money to the conflict in Indochina than it received in ECA funds. At the Lisbon Summit of the North Atlantic Council in February, Prime Minister Edgar Faure sought to place the war on NATO’s agenda, claiming that France could not enter the EDC “unless freed from the special burden of the Indochina affair.” Instead, Paris merely

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got a resolution from the NAC at the end of the year expressing “wholehearted admiration for the valiant and long-continued struggle . . . in fullest sympathy with the aims and ideals of the Atlantic Community.”93 Despite its frustrations with France, Acheson recalls, the Truman Administration never considered it “wise to end, or threaten to end, aid to Indochina unless an American plan of military and political reform was carried out,” including the extension of full independence. Washington’s consensual approach to hegemony—its reliance on followers—constrained its range of actions and “limit[ed the extent to which [it could] successfully coerce an ally.”94 So too did the Administration’s belief in the importance of Indochina’s fate to the superpower struggle. As Bohlen wrote in 1952, “If we lose Southeast Asia we have, in my judgment, lost the Cold War, and in that case we would be headed for war with the Soviet Union, sooner or later.”95 Despite tangible and consistent American support, many Frenchmen suspected the United States of conspiring to undermine the French Union, both in Indochina and elsewhere. In autumn 1951, America’s failure to back France at the UN after the Arab League lodged complaints against French conduct in Morocco outraged French public opinion.96 The next April, Washington recorded its displeasure with the slow pace of reform in the French protectorates in North Africa by abstaining rather than voting to keep the Tunisian question off the Security Council agenda. An indignant Paris press branded the United States “public enemy number one.” Premier Pinay, Colonial Minister Letourneau, and three former prime ministers castigated Washington’s Maghreb policy. American prestige in France suffered again in October when the U.S. delegation voted to permit UN discussion of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.97 Indochina was not the only bastion of European empire in Southeast Asia to which the United States devoted resources during the early Cold War. By 1952, the United States regarded the “the present struggle in Malaya is an integral part of the free world’s common effort to halt Communist aggression.”98 Seeing no viable nationalist alternative to British rule, American officials declared it U.S. policy to “support the British in their measures to eradicate communist forces and restore order.”99 During the Malayan Emergency, the British reaped significant U.S. economic aid and technical assistance, while the Americans consoled themselves that London’s counterinsurgency efforts meant to restore “law and order” and promote “orderly stages of transition to self-government.”100

THE ROAD TO DIEN BIEN PHU In early 1953, new governments in Paris and Washington jockeyed to increase their influence over one another. France hoped to link EDC ratifica-

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tion to deeper U.S. commitments to the war but avert what Prime Minister René Mayer termed “an American grasp of Indochina.” As Colonial Minster Letourneau warned colleagues, “The day that the American financial effort becomes superior to ours, we risk seeing the direction of operations escape us.” Pressing Washington to implement the previous September’s NAC declaration of support for the French war effort, Mayer suggested either a “logical” approach, whereby NATO would assume a proportion of France’s defense budget, or a “practical” one, in which America would boost its aid to Indochina.101 U.S. officials, however, wanted a better return on current investments. They notified Paris in March that any future aid disbursements must go directly to the Associated States and have greater American oversight. What is more, additional assistance would be predicated on a comprehensive strategic concept and unequivocal Indochinese independence.102 The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were skeptical about Letourneau’s prediction of victory over the Vietminh by mid-1955. Without a realistic military and political strategy, including the establishment of complete sovereignty to win over Indochinese “fence sitters,” U.S. assistance amounted to “pouring money down a rat hole.”103 Vice-President Richard Nixon agreed that France’s difficulties “[b]oiled down to the fact the native peoples were unwilling to fight communism in order to perpetuate French colonialism.” President Eisenhower expected Paris to behave “magnanimously,” by offering a “clear and unequivocal public announcement” that full liberty would follow Communist defeat.104 In short, despite the change of Administrations (even from Democratic to Republican), U.S. objectives and general strategy remained unchanged—and irreconcilable. America still aimed “toward solving [Indochinese] nationalist aspirations without at the same time destroying or weakening French will” to fight on.105 By summer 1953, however, half of all poll respondents in France favored either a negotiated settlement or abandonment.106 Eisenhower groused that the French had made promises in an “obscure and roundabout fashion instead of boldly, forthrightly, and repeatedly.”107 But his Administration had no more desire than its predecessor to replace the French effort with an American one—even in a region deemed critical to U.S. national security. Paris could, therefore, extract American resources by threatening collapse. Still, the U.S. consul in Hanoi felt this placed the United States in the “humiliating” position of “getting down on our hands and knees to ask the French to stay here.” He wondered why “are we to refrain from urging [France] to adopt policies of liberalism which might gain the cooperation needed to win victory?” Again and again, Paris alerted Washington that without additional U.S. funds, France’s “only alternative would be eventual withdrawal, the only question being the exact method and date.” Apparently hoping “to give part of the baby to the United States,” Paris seemed ”prepared to accept

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all the logical consequences of that wish in granting the Associated States an independent status.” The U.S. ambassador considered the present French government the first in seven years (and probably the last) to offer “real hope of solving this problem which is at the core of French weakness and hesitancy in Europe.”108 In a critical meeting on September 9, 1953, the National Security Council convinced itself that with U.S. support France’s “Navarre Plan” could bring victory in Indochina. Brushing aside years of military stalemate and political obstinacy, Dulles reduced France’s difficulty to “essentially a financial problem.” Washington approved $400 million in military assistance. In return, Paris promised to furnish U.S. officials with operational plans and take U.S. views “into consideration.”109 Unfortunately, French will to continue fighting shattered as American resolve to defeat the Vietminh hardened. Just one day after the pivotal NSC gathering, Commissioner-General Dejean lamented France’s eroding military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural position in Indochina. As earlier dreams of an integrated French Union evaporated, Paris had little incentive to devote additional men and resources to the costly and bloody war.110 To stiffen French determination, Washington promised another $400 million in late 1953. American aid to Indochina totaled almost $3 billion in the four years following the outbreak of the Korean War. By May 1954, Washington was financing four-fifths of the French war effort. Yet, the United States, France, and the Associated States continued to disagree on the nature of the enemy and the ultimate objectives of the conflict. Americans saw it as a local theater of global containment. Anti-Communist Vietnamese were fighting the Vietminh but hoped to eliminate the French, too. As for France, recalls General Henri Navarre, “[She] no longer knew why she was fighting.” 111 Rhetorically committed to defeating communism and conferring independence on Indochina, France was spilling blood to preserve meager cultural and economic privileges. Paris had won U.S. financing at the cost of allowing the United States to run the war without actually putting its own troops in harm’s way. Washington’s hard line against “appeasement” antagonized an exhausted French public, a majority of whom now favored either a negotiated peace or abandoning the war altogether. Unfortunately, no Assembly majority existed for either redoubling the war effort or withdrawing immediately.112 Washington reluctantly permitted Paris to place Indochina on the agenda of the Geneva Five Power Conference of spring 1954. As the French military inched closer to defeat, Washington contemplated military intervention to save the situation. But U.S. officials hesitated to commit American prestige to an uncertain enterprise.113 As the Vietminh attacked the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu with unexpected ferocity, the fortress acquired a symbolism far out of proportion to

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its strategic significance. Dulles believed the world was witnessing “the collapse or evaporation of France as a great power.”114 On April 4, Paris formally requested an American air strike to relieve the garrison. U.S. officials outlined several preconditions for intervention, including that it be a coalition effort. Washington also demanded pledges from Paris to maintain troops in Indochina indefinitely, complete the independence of the Associated States, and give the United States a larger role in strategy and training of Vietnamese troops. France rejected these requirements. Paris wanted air strikes rather than internationalization and continued to reject full independence for the Associated States. General Navarre and France refused to serve as “simple mercenaries” in a war with goals determined by the United States.115 Eisenhower was thoroughly disgusted with the French. Paris had sought “to prove to the world that it was not colonialism, but only the defeat of communism they were after,” but had used “weasel words in promising independence.”116 Still, as he told the National Security Council on April 29, the American people could not handle another land war in Asia, particularly one that would appear to “replace French colonialism with American colonialism.” Rejecting unilateral U.S. intervention on the premise of America’s “leadership responsibility for the free world,” Eisenhower declared that “the concept of leadership implie[s] associates. Without allies and associates the leader is just an adventurer like Genghis Khan.”117 American hegemony, in other words, depended on a multilateral coalition willing to follow. Dien Bien Phu fell on May 7, 1954, as the Geneva Conference opened. By now, Paris had lost control over the war’s financing, terms, and objectives. It no longer possessed a clear reason to fight on. The fact that Washington did not intervene at Dien Bien Phu convinced many French officials that the United States had prolonged France’s agony with extensive aid, only to abandon it at the most painful moment. Pierre Mendés-France, who assumed the premiership on June 12, immediately announced his intention to achieve peace in Indochina within one month. Three weeks later the French National Assembly overwhelmingly approved the Geneva results partitioning Vietnam. France, having lost its central rationale for the conflict, soon began its withdrawal, phasing out its historical presence in Southeast Asia—even as the United States redoubled its campaign against Communism in Indochina.118

CONCLUSION The Indochina War provides an instructive case study of the difficulty for the United States of applying both its doctrine of self-determination and

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its strategy of containment in a colonial world engulfed in revolutionary nationalism. America’s carefully laid plans for a liberal, post-imperial order encountered resistance from developing world Communists and erstwhile European allies alike. Ikenberry and Kupchan have argued that “by convincing the Europeans to depart from notions of colonialism and economic nationalism, the United States was able to forge a normative consensus around which the postwar order took shape.”119 The record of the first Indochina war suggests otherwise. When it came to the future of the European overseas empires, things were a bit more complicated. Committed to the ideal of self-determination, the Truman administration and its successor strove—often in vain—for a third way between unreconstructed imperialism and anti-Western nationalism. This dilemma proved particularly excruciating in Indochina. The French Fourth Republic, convinced of the indissoluble bond between the metropole and its overseas territories, committed to restore France’s great power status, and skeptical of the motives behind U.S. anti-colonialism, stubbornly resisted American pressure to grant Indochina full independence. By the end of the 1940s, the advent of the Asian Cold War and the “loss” of China enabled Paris to exploit Washington’s containment anxieties to secure assistance for its military campaign in Indochina. The United States began to finance the French effort directly, and its involvement deepened after the outbreak of the Korean War. Although Washington and Paris got into bed together to wage war against the Vietminh, their aims remained fundamentally irreconcilable. Washington consistently pressed France to transfer full sovereignty to the Indochinese, but the very reason Paris persisted with the war was to preserve Indochina as a core component of a French Union. So it took America’s aid but rejected its advice. By spring 1954, however, France had lost control over the war’s financing, terms, and objectives and with the fall of Dien Bien Phu, its will to fight. After the Geneva accords the Americans gradually took over Indochina, convinced, in Dulles’s words, that they could now “salvage something from Southeast Asia free of the taint of French colonialism.”120

NOTES 1. “Final Report of the Joint MDAP Survey Mission to Southeast Asia,” December 6, 1950, FRUS 1950, East Asia Pacific, 164–173. 2. “An Estimate of Conditions in Asia and the Pacific at the Close of the War in the Far East and the Objectives and Policies of the United States,” June 22, 1945, FRUS 1945, VI, 556–580.

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3. William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, no. 3 (September 1994): 462–511. 4. Cary Fraser, “Understanding American Policy Toward the Decolonization of European Empires, 1945–64,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 3, no. 1 (1992), 105–7. David Ryan, “By Way of Introduction: The United States, Decolonization, and the World System,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed., Ryan and Pungong, 16. 5. P. Bagby, “United States Policy with Respect to the Decline of Western European Imperialism,” March 13, 1946, cited in A. J. Stockwell, “The United States and Britain’s Decolonization of Malaya, 1942–1957,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pungong, 188. 6. R. J. McMahon, “Toward a Post-Colonial Order,” 342–343. 7. Truman, Memoirs, Volume I: Year of Decisions, 275. “We have long boasted of our enlightened policy in the Philippines,” High Commissioner Paul McNutt wrote in January 1946, “and we have assumed that the example of their independence will serve to destroy European imperialism in Asia.” FRUS 1946, VIII, 866. 8. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 87–103. 9. Acheson to Truman, October 1, 1945, FRUS 1945, VI, 1218. 10. Alejandro M. Fernandez, The Philippines and the United States: The Forging of New Relations (Quezon City, Philippines: NSDB-UP Integrated Research Program, 1977), 240. 11. Taft in Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 333–35. 12. Cited in Fernandez, The Philippines and the United States, 214. Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), 1–65. 13. Robert C. Good, “The United States and the Colonial Debate,” in Alliance Politics and the Cold War, ed. Wolfers, 233. FRUS 1945, VI, 556–8 and 574–8. 14. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 671. NSC 48/2, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Asia,” December 30, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 1215. 15. McMahon, “Toward a Post-Colonial Order,” 346–51. 16. FRUS 1947, VI, 1099–1100. MacMahon, Colonialism and Cold War, 312. 17. D.C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull, 247. FRUS 1949, IV, 258–61. 18. FRUS 1946, VIII, 67–69; FRUS 1947, VI, 67–68, 95–97, 113–14, 123–26, 141–42. Gary Hess, “The First American Commitment to Indochina,” Diplomatic History 2, no. 4 (Fall 1978), 335–39. FRUS 1949, VII, 23–24, 29–30. FRUS 1950, VI, 160–64, 711, 889, 945–53. 19. Dreifort, Myopic Grandeur, 250–51. 20. A “lost opportunity” school argues that the United States could have avoided three decades of tragic involvement in Southeast Asia by blocking France’s return and accommodating Vietminh nationalism. Perhaps, but overt U.S. resistance to French intentions would inevitably have precipitated a disastrous rupture of Franco-American. Given its European priorities, Washington could not risk such a split. Gary Hess, “United States Policy,” 21, 28–29

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21. August 16, 1945, FRUS 1945, IV, 704. 22. Gary Hess, “United States Policy and the Origins of the French-Viet Minh War, 1945–46,” Peace and Change III, 2 and 3 (Summer Fall 1975), 24 23. Betts, France and Decolonisation, 75. 24. Serge Bernstein, “French Power as Seen by the Political Parties after World War II,” and André Nouschi, “France, the Empire, and Power (1945–1949),” both in Power in Europe?, ed. by Becker and Knipping, 177–79 and 475–83. 25. Thorez in Dalloz, The War in Indochina, 1945–1954, 74. Blum in Betts, France and Decolonisation, 26. Paul Isoart, “L’Elaboration de la Constitution de l’Union Française: Les Assemblees Constituantes et le Probleme Colonial: Les Chemins de La Décolonisation Française (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1986), 19. 26. Self-determination was rendered as “la libre disposition d’eux-memes.” Marshall, The French Colonial Myth, 206, 217. 27. Cited in Dalloz, The War in Indochina, 75–76. 28. Jean Planchais, “L’Empire Embrasé 1946–1962 (Paris: Denoel, 1990), 57–58. 29. Marshall, The French Colonial Myth, 205. 30. R. E. M. Irving, The First Indochina War: French and American Policy, 1945– 1954, (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 18. Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London: Longman, 1989), 49–52. 31. Dalloz, The War in Indochina, 70. 32. Irving, The First Indochina War, 33. 33. December 23, 1946, cited in Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, p. 76. FRUS 1947, VI, 54–55. Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War, 63. 34. Acheson to Moffatt, December 5, 1946, FRUS 1946, VIII, pp. 67–69. 35. February 3, 1947, FRUS 1947, VI, 67–68. 36. Marshall to Caffery, May 13, 1947, FRUS 1947, VI, 95–97. 37. Reed, July 11, 1947, FRUS 1947, VI, 113–14. July 24, 1947, FRUS 1947, VI, 123–6. 38. O’Sullivan, September 26, 1947, FRUS 1947, VI, 141–42. 39. Woodruff Wallner, cited in Gary Hess, “The First American Commitment in Indochina: The Acceptance of the ‘Bao Dai Solution’,” Diplomatic History 2, no. 4 (Fall 1978), 335. 40. Conversation of October 17, 1947, in Caffery to Secretary of State, October 24, 1947, FRUS 1947, III, 788. 41. Irving, the First Indochina War, 56. 42. July 3 and 27, 1948, FRUS 1948, VI, 29, 32. 43. August 30, 1948, FRUS 1948, VI, 40. 44. Secretary of State to Embassy in China, July 2, 1948, FRUS 1948, VI, 28. 45. “Policy Statement: Indochina,” September 27, 1948, FRUS 1948, VI, 43–49. 46. Charles S. Reed, Division of SEA affairs, to Director, Far East Asian Affair, Butterworth, August 13, 1948, FRUS, I, 607–9. 47. Walter Bedell Smith, ambassador to Moscow, to Secretary of State, August 21, 1948, FRUS 1948, I, 611–44. 48. France continued to dominate Indochina’s foreign and defense policies, enjoy legal extraterritoriality, and retain economic privileges. “Policy Statement: Indochina,” FRUS 1948, VI 43–49. “Policy Statement: France,” September 20, 1948, FRUS 1948, III, 651–59.

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49. Irving, The First Indochina War, 58–60. 50. March 16, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 13–14. Reed to Butterworth, April 14, 1949, cited in Hess, “The First American Commitment in Indochina,” 339. May 10, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 23–24. May 20, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 29–30. 51. June 6, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 38–45; June 13, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 45–46. 52. NSC 48/1, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Asia,” approved December 30, 1949, as NSC 48/2. Cited in Hess, “The First American Commitment,” 346. R. J. McMahon, “The Cold War in Asia: Toward a New Synthesis?” Diplomatic History 12, no. 3 (Summer 1988), 321–24. Lloyd Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 81. 53. Rusk cited in Shalom, The United States and the Philippines, 73. State Report to NSC, FRUS 1950, VI, 1461–62. Karnow, In Our Image. 54. FRUS 1951, VI, 1560–62. State to NSC, June 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 1461–62. 55. Acheson to Truman, April 20, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 1440–43. 56. Schirmer and Shalom, The Philippines Reader, 105–23. 57. Stockwell, “The United States and Britain’s Decolonization of Malaya,” 193. 58. September 15, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 86. 59. Hess, “The First American Commitment” 349. 60. December 11, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 105–110. December 22, 1949, FRUS 1949, VII, 112–13. January 6, 1950, FRUS 1950, I, 127. 61. February 1, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 711. 62. Acheson cited in Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 92. See working group paper, “Military Aid for Indochina,” 1 February 1950, FRUS 1950, 711–15. 63. February 16, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 734–35. Dalloz, The War in Indochina 1945–1954, 130. 64. March 14, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 760–761. 65. March 29, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 769. 66. FRUS 1950, VI, 812. 67. Harrison, The Reluctant Ally, 39. George C. Herring, “Franco-American Conflict in Indochina, 1950–1954,” in Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 1954–1955, ed. Lawrence S. Kaplan, Denise Artaud, and Mark Rubin (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1990), 30. 68. State Department Colonial Policy Review Subcommittee on Problems in Dependent Areas, cited in Victor Pungong, “The U.S. and the Trusteeship System,” 99. 69. Pungong, “The US and the Trusteeship System,” 99. 70. John Kent, “The United States and the Decolonization of Black Africa, 1945–1963,” in The United States and Decolonization, ed. Ryan and Pungong. Paper by the Colonial Policy Review Subcommittee of the Committee on Dependent Area Affairs, April 26, 1950, FRUS 1952–1954, III, 1077–1102. 71. FRUS 1950, VI, 840–88. 72. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979), 16. FRUS 1950, VI, 863–64. 73. “Final Report of the Joint MDAP Survey Mission to Southeast Asia,” December 6, 1950, FRUS 1950, East Asia Pacific, 164–173. The Mission’s chairman was John F. Melby.

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74. “Final Report of the Joint MDAP Survey Mission to Southeast Asia.” 75. FRUS 1950, East Asia-Pacific, 128–30. 76. Cited in Lloyd Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 104. 77. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1983), 169–70. 78. “Proposed Statement of U.S. Policy on Indo-China for NSC Consideration,” October 11, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 889. Acheson, November 9, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 160–64. JCS, FRUS 1950, VI, pp. 945–53. Acheson cited in Herring, America’s Longest War, 17. Ohly, November 20, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 928–30. 79. November 15, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 922. Auriol, journal entry of October 19, 1950, in Journal du Septennat, 1947–54 (IV) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975). 80. FRUS 1950, VI, 954. 81. Negotiation paper for Truman-Pleven talks of January 29–30, 1951, State Department Central Files, frames 938–948. 82. Rusk to Matthews, FRUS 1951, VI, 20. NIE-5, “Indochina: Current Situation and Probable Developments,” December 29, 1950, FRUS 1950, VI, 963. 83. Irving, The First Indochina War, 88. 84. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, xxi–xxii. Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 7. 85. “The Genesis of the Point Four Program,” remarks by Acheson, January 27, 1949, FRUS 1949, I, 757–58. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, 228, 323. FRUS 1949, I, 774–786. 86. George Herring, “Franco-American Conflict in Indochina,” 30–31. 87. FRUS 1951, VI, 390, 418–419, 425–427. 88. FRUS 1951, VI, 439–440, 448–449, 451, 463. 89. FRUS 1951, VI, 507–520. Irving, The First Indochina War, 102–3. Collins, November 13, 1951, FRUS 1951, VI, 545. 90. December 26, 1951, FRUS 1951, VI, 573–78. 91. March 21, 1952, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 75–76. 92. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 95–96 “Cold War Program to Save Southeast Asia for the Free World,” April 2, 1952, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 119–23. NSC 164/2 drafted February 13, 1952 (approved June 25, 1952), FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 127–34. 93. Lawrence S. Kaplan, “The United States, NATO, and French Indochina,” in Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 1954–1955, 229–50, 231–32. December 15–18, 1952, FRUS 1952–4, 321 ff. 94. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 673–76. 95. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 362. 96. Poidevin, Robert Schuman, 360. 97. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 647–49. Melandri, “France and the Atlantic Alliance 1950–1953,” 273–74. 98. March 4, 1952, cable to London embassy and consuls in Malaya and Singapore. Stockwell, “The United States and Britain’s Decolonization of Malaya,” 199. 99. “United States Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Southeast Asia,” NSC 5405, FRUS 1952–1954, XII, 1, 366. 100. Charles E. Baldwin, U.S. Consul General in Malaya, to State Department, cited in Stockwell, “The United States and Britain’s Decolonization of Malaya,” 200.

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101. Wall, The United States, 1947–1954, 250. February 2, 1953, SDCF, 96–97. 102. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 423–28, 431, 458. 103. April 26, 29, 1953, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 507–510, 517. 104. May 19, 1953, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 547–48. 105. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 584–85. 106. Benyamin, “Fluctuations in the Approval of the United States in France,” 371. 107. Eisenhower, July 7, 1953, in Herring, “Franco-American Conflict in Indochina,” 38. 108. July 8 and 9, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 643–45. July 21, 1953, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 692. July 29, 31, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 706–9, 714–5. August 4, 1953, FRUS 1952–4, France, 1367. 109. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 781–82. 110. Dalloz, The War in Indochina, 155. 111. Cited in Grosser, La Quatrieme Republique et sa Politique Exterieure, 285–86. 112. Irving, The First Indochina War, 114, 116. 113. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 1141, 1150. 114. Dulles comments in NSC, March 25, 1954, FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 1166. 115. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, pp. 1361–62, 1371–73, 1534–35. Navarre cited in Herring, “Franco-American Conflict in Indochina,” 43. 116. April 27, 1954, letter to Swede Hazlett, in Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, 247. 117. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 1439–40. 118. FRUS 1952–4, XII, 680. George C. Herring, Gary R. Hess, and Richard H. Immerman, “Passage of Empire: The United States, France, and South Vietnam, 1954–5,” in Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations. 119. Ikenberry and Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power,” 287. 120. FRUS 1952–4, XIII, 1732–33.

Conclusion ✛

The Sources of American Conduct

We had the experience but missed the meaning. —T. S. Eliot

T

he questions and challenges of establishing world order that preoccupied American statesmen during the tumultuous 1940s have shown impressive staying power. Six decades ago, U.S. policymakers and commentators debated the appropriate role of multilateralism in the pursuit of national security objectives. They strove to develop an institutional framework to encourage commercial openness and manage economic interdependence. And they struggled to identify a promising means of channeling the forces of nationalism in a moderate, democratic direction. Today, these broad tasks remain much the same. As after World War II, the United States is considering how best to respond to new security threats, address the trade-offs of economic globalization, and foster the emergence of wellgoverned, democratic states in the developing world. While the precise objectives of the current century may be distinctive (e.g., neutralizing transnational terrorists and halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction, expanding the international trade regime and coping with global financial crises, and fostering “nation-building” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia), one underlying dilemma remains consistent. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States stood at the apex of world power, facing pressing global challenges that it realized no single state, even the mightiest, could address on its own. Yet, the euphoria and opportunity of the immediate postwar period quickly gave way to a bipolar world of emerging superpower confrontation. In the aftermath of 325

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the Cold War, another, perhaps fleeting unipolar moment arrived. In the early twenty-first century, the United States again faces critical decisions about how best to deploy its unmatched capabilities to shape the global environment, influence the preferences of other actors and advance its national purposes. Once again, America finds itself torn between the impulse to go it alone, in the interest of short-term expediency, and the requirements of international legitimacy and long-term stability. And once again, America has allies, rising powers, and potential adversaries nipping at its heels. In charting the nation’s course for the twenty-first century, current and future stewards of U.S. foreign policy would be wise to reflect on the experiences and legacy of a preceding generation of American leaders. Between 1940 and 1950 the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations chose to embrace a hard-headed vision of liberal internationalism consistent with American political culture, informed by the lessons of American history, calibrated to achieve U.S. interests, and conducive to enduring U.S. global leadership. This open world vision, which blossomed during World War II, had three key pillars: support for collective security, tempered by great power responsibility; a commitment to open and non-discriminatory commerce; and faith in the principle of political self-determination. They endeavored to realize this vision by creating new international institutions to enable the nations of the world to adjust their differences peacefully, prosper through equal participation in the international economy, and find an outlet for their political aspirations. While hardly perfect in concept—or, indeed, perfectly implemented—this progressive vision nevertheless offered partner countries, as well as the United States, the prospect of a more stable, wealthier, just, and rule-bound international order, one characterized by self-restraint on the part of its most powerful constituent actor. This liberal internationalism both preceded and, in important respects, survived the onset of the Cold War. Within its half of the bipolar balance, Washington continued to pursue the notion of “multilaterally harmonized sovereign interests.”1 Unable to realize the “One World” dreams of FDR’s postwar planners, Truman made the best of a bad situation and set out to construct a narrower “free world” community committed to and organized under the same principles. Washington’s grand hopes for collective security through the United Nations yielded to a policy of collective defense, based primarily on the NATO alliance but supported by a wider system of regional security arrangements. In the commercial arena, Washington deferred its dream for a rapid transition to an open system of global trade and payments and focused instead on the recovery of its allies, the establishment of an integrated European economy, and the gradual liberalization of world trade through the GATT. In the

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developing world, Washington sought to adapt its ideal of political selfdetermination and distaste for imperialism to the dual realities of anticolonial nationalism in a Cold War context. Liberal multilateralism proved a critical component of U.S. containment policy during this founding cycle of American hegemony. As others have argued, the West’s ultimate victory in the Cold War signified more than a vindication of the values of democracy and capitalism: “it was also a triumph of Western multilateralism.”2 Washington’s consensual, egalitarian approach to leadership and negotiation within the anti-Communist coalition gave structure, strength, and legitimacy to Western purposes, nurturing a “zone of peace,” at least among the rich world of industrial democracies. Over time, the members of this community came to share an interest in an open world that transcended pure calculations of shortterm expediency. The resiliency of U.S.-sponsored multilateral institutions—because of the political solidarity and economic integration they fostered—helped alter Western perceptions of international “anarchy,” effectively nurturing a security community within the OECD world.

IDEAS AND IDENTITY IN AMERICAN MULTILATERALISM Because U.S. foreign policy choices can reflect a wide variety of individual, bureaucratic, societal, and systemic factors, a degree of humility should accompany any purported “explanations” for American conduct in the world. This book has argued that U.S. support for liberal internationalism during and after World War II cannot be understood without reference to new ideas, gleaned from the lessons of the past and the enduring values of America’s unique political culture. As so-called “rational choice” theorists suggest, the international system did present the United States with important opportunities and constraints, and U.S. officials comprehended (and calculated) the trade-offs of different courses of action. It is also true, however, that new beliefs embraced by U.S. officials, as well as long-held values, defined the boundaries of the possible and permissible, in their own minds and in those of the U.S. public. Indeed, these ideas and American identity informed policymakers’ calculations of cost and benefits and shaped their approach to exercising the preponderant power of the United States. Until the early twentieth century, America’s leaders invoked the unquestioned doctrine of exceptionalism to justify standing apart from the political and military machinations of the Old World, while according the United States a special position in its own hemisphere. America’s rise to world power, however, forced U.S. officials to summon this distinctive national identity to validate more extensive global engagement. Teddy

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Roosevelt’s great power internationalism vied with Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism for primacy in this debate over America’s new role in the world. During the bitter fight over the League of Nations, these two global visions paradoxically negated one another, leading the interwar United States to adopt a detached and inward-looking foreign policy that married promotion of U.S. business interests abroad with strategic aloofness. American “isolationist” tendencies deepened during the early and mid-1930s, in response to the global economic crisis and rising militarism of the fascist powers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt skillfully resuscitated internationalism, which emerged during World War II as the dominant framework for U.S. global engagement. The comeback of this foreign policy orientation, left for dead just a generation before, reflected a new consensus—based on the hard lessons of recent experience—about the fundamental preconditions for world peace, economic prosperity, and political stability. The Roosevelt Administration pursued a middle ground between utopian collective security (as embodied in the League) and the traditional balance of power. The resulting United Nations Organization sought to blend an institution-based conception of international order with realistic appreciation for the role of power in enforcing peace and ensuring security. At home, the Administration sold this new framework as an international projection of America’s liberal ideals and the arrangements governing American domestic political life. Abroad, FDR viewed the UNO as the best means to co-opt the Soviet Union into a continuation of the wartime alliance and avoid a recrudescence of unilateral great power action. To complement this multilateral structure of peace, the Roosevelt Administration laid similar institutional foundations for a postwar economic order based on the principles of non-discrimination, reciprocity, and openness, embodied in international commercial and monetary organizations. Again, recent experiences—particularly the Great Depression and the resulting slide into war—shaped the political-economic convictions of the postwar planners. Desperate to avoid a postwar fragmentation of the world economy into rival protectionist blocs, the United States at Bretton Woods and in ensuing commercial negotiations formulated plans for a rule-bound multilateral monetary and trading system to promote gradual liberalization while permitting reasonable flexibility for domestic intervention to pursue social welfare goals. The relative balance between liberalism and interventionism reflected hard bargaining between the United States and its European allies, especially Great Britain. Beyond trying to institutionalize new norms and rules of interstate behavior, U.S. policymakers wanted to shape the very constitutive principles of the international system, by advocating self-determination as a basic foundation of international political legitimacy. During the Second

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World War, FDR and senior administration officials repeatedly invoked a new era of world politics, in which European empires would gradually transfer sovereignty to subject peoples yearning for liberty. This posture drew heavily on the longstanding anti-imperial sentiments of the American people, who saw themselves—rightly or wrongly—as a model for decolonization that could easily extend to contemporary dependent territories. Here again, the lessons of experience, particularly the perception that the scramble for overseas empire had repeatedly caused wars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reinforced American support for self-determination. That the United States stood to gain strategic and commercial advantage from the diminution of the colonial empires only sharpened this instinct.

ADAPTATION TO COLD WAR REALITY Unfortunately, the best laid plans of the Roosevelt Administration soon collided with unanticipated and unpleasant developments in the real world, notably the outbreak of the Cold War, the exhaustion of the European powers, and an outburst of revolutionary nationalism in colonial territories. And yet, the underlying tenets of U.S. liberal multilateralism remained surprisingly intact and unquestioned. The Truman Administration pressed them into the service of a new postwar mission: creating a broad “free world” coalition to contain the Soviet Union. With Europe’s economic weakness and political vulnerability threatening U.S. plans for a stable open-world trading system, the United States launched the Marshall Plan in June 1947, believing that for global commercial multilateralism to survive, it would first need to coalesce in Europe. The United States thus insisted that Europeans formulate their recovery plan jointly and make gradual efforts to liberalize intra-European trade and payments. In May 1950, the United States strongly endorsed the proposal of a European Coal and Steel Community as the foundation for continental political-economic integration. American officials had persuaded themselves that Europe’s effort at regional economic integration did not constitute an alternative to the universal vision put forth at Bretton Woods but indeed was a precondition for the realization of an open global economy. Despite the frustrations of the ITO and its abandonment, Washington continued to advance the cause of trade liberalization in the postwar period through the framework of the GATT. Although the norms and scope of the GATT largely reflected U.S. predilections, the United States sometimes found that its commitment to “procedural” multilateralism undercut its aim of “substantive” multilateralism. This increasingly occurred as GATT’s membership incorporated more and more developing countries

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and social welfare–oriented industrialized countries with national agendas different from that of the United States. Nevertheless, American leadership within the GATT achieved a historic liberalization of international trade following World War II. Multilateralism showed remarkable staying power in America’s approach to postwar international security as well. In response to Soviet expansionism in Europe and intransigence at the United Nations, the Truman Administration shifted from collective security to collective defense. The centerpiece of this strategy became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. When fearful West European governments began clamoring in 1947–1948 for firm bilateral U.S. security guarantees, Washington leveraged its possible association with European defense to ensure that first the Brussels Pact and then the North Atlantic Treaty took a multilateral form. This not only established security among members as indivisible, it also made consultation, bargaining, and compromise as well as cumbersome decision-making procedures legitimate aspects of coalition policymaking. NATO imposed non-trivial costs on the United States—not least by reducing its room to maneuver and extract concessions from its weaker partners, but bestowed substantial benefits, too. On a psychological level, it comported with Americans’ domestic conception of any legitimate political community as a pluralist association of equals bound by common values and governed by agreed-upon rules. It also resonated with the Americans’ self-perception, engrained in their liberal-exceptionalist political culture, of serving as a force for good in the world. More practically, the multilateralism of NATO won over followers to U.S. leadership, made them less restive about its hegemony, and spread the burdens of enduring regional order across the coalition. Still, navigating the tensions between the egalitarian ethos of collective defense and the hierarchical reality of American power in NATO would pose an enduring challenge for successive U.S. presidents in managing relations with the main Western allies for the remainder of the Cold War and beyond. Outside of the North Atlantic region, admittedly, U.S. multilateralism in security affairs proved either more formal than substantive (as in the Western Hemisphere) or largely gave way to bilateral arrangements (notably in East Asia). Though it is convenient to dismiss the frequent invocation of shared identity as the fundamental foundation for transatlantic collective defense, it remains the case that Truman Administration officials saw the United States and the countries of Western Europe as members of the same civilization, with a shared fidelity to the values of democracy and the free market America’s principle of self-determination ultimately spawned the most frustrating dilemmas for its liberal internationalist ideal. By the end of World War II, the United States had retreated from its bold anti-colonial

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rhetoric and pressure on the European powers to liberate their subject peoples. Washington envisioned an evolutionary process whereby the metropolitan powers would gradually prepare colonial territories for independence through a period of benign tutelage. This measured stance seemed eminently reasonable and possible, but in practice, such gradualism proved unworkable given the explosion of revolutionary nationalism that accompanied the Western powers’ determination to regain their colonial possessions after the war, by force if necessary. The Truman Administration searched in vain for a policy that would accommodate the aspirations of colonial nationalists without alienating its European allies or enabling Communist ascendancy in the developing world. Where nationalists proved their “authenticity” (i.e., anti-Communism), as in Indonesia, the United States did indeed compel a reluctant imperial power to grant independence. But where it perceived Communist-led nationalist movements, most notably in French Indochina, Washington found its room for maneuver maddeningly circumscribed, unable to countenance either a return to the pre-war imperial status quo or a victory by socalled Kremlin proxies. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the United States looked for a “genuine” moderate Vietnamese nationalism and pressed France to promise the Indochinese people full independence, while tacitly supporting and ultimately subsidizing at great expense a French military effort to retain colonial privilege in Indochina. This episode, culminating in the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, underlined the extraordinary difficulty of applying a liberal conception of self-determination in an era of nationalist awakening and Cold War anxiety. It also revealed the limitations of America’s consensual approach to postwar leadership, which limited the pressure that it could bring to bear on an ally. In promoting liberal multilateralism as a framework for postwar international order and adapting that vision to subsequent strategic realities, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations respectively, engaged in a “two-level game.” They had to forge consensus both within the American political system and among their main foreign partners. On the home front, they strove to persuade Congress, important domestic constituencies, and the wider public that collective security (or later, collective defense), commercial multilateralism, and self-determination not only derived from American values and traditions but served U.S. interests and protected America’s sovereignty and freedom of action. They also had to convince often skeptical allies, particularly in Europe, that new institutions could liberalize commerce while allowing national economic experiments, that new security arrangements would provide both adequate defense and sufficient voice for all in their implementation, and that long-term peace and prosperity required the emancipation of colonial peoples.

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THE RELEVANCE OF THE PAST The multilateral vision of world order conceived by FDR’s postwar planners and subsequently erected by the Truman Administration profoundly influenced the trajectory of twentieth century international politics. The decisions taken during that pivotal decade reverberate today. Because of American leadership, the years since 1950 have witnessed a proliferation of multilateral organizations and regimes that enable sovereign states—in the free world and beyond—to collaborate in addressing common political, security, economic, and social challenges. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, these institutions had penetrated innumerable areas of human activity and concern, from nuclear energy to environmental protection to human trafficking. In no small measure, this U.S.-inspired “movement to institutions” has succeeded, over time, in changing the strategic and normative context in which countries perceive and pursue their national interest.3 For the United States, the spread of these norms and institutions creates a predicament more acute than for any other country. Having toiled the hardest of any nation to cultivate and nurture the emergence of a multilateral world order, America, still the world’s most powerful state, finds itself caught in an increasingly dense thicket of international rules, commitments, and expectations. As we have seen repeatedly since 2000 and before, the United States often chafes at these real and implied constraints. Ambivalence is an enduring feature of the American attitude toward multilateral institutions, which critics denounce as overly restrictive of U.S. freedom of action and threatening to America’s sovereignty.4 Unilateralists further charge that multilateralism substitutes pusillanimous consensus-building for moral clarity and effective action. This ambivalence has often resulted in selective participation in multilateral bodies, treaties, and initiatives. It has spurred high-profile decisions to go it alone or opt out of collective obligations. This pattern is a byproduct of America’s overwhelming power, which affords many more options than others enjoy; of America’s exceptionalist creed, which can at times predispose the United States to act alone or stand apart; and of the U.S. Constitution, which gives the Congress a veto over America’s international obligations.5 Despite America’s long-held ambivalence about multilateral engagement and cooperation, the rise of George W. Bush to the presidency in 2001 signaled a profound break with six decades of American history. An overriding skepticism of the capacity of international institutions and alliances to serve U.S. interests and advance America’s well-being dominated the new administration’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks

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on the United States of September 11, 2001, accentuated this attitude. The Bush Administration’s new approach reflected several convictions. First, too many standing international institutions, particularly the UN, were hopelessly dysfunctional, sclerotic, or obsolete. Second, existing multilateral alliances, notably NATO, could not address the world’s (and America’s) urgent contemporary threats, from transnational terrorism to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Third, multilateralism had become an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve concrete foreign policy ends. Fourth, multilateral bodies and the expanding reach of international law increasingly undermined U.S. freedom of action abroad and domestic sovereignty at home. Finally, the international community actively sought to reduce the power of the United States. This mistrust of institutions, treaties, and multilateral principles sometimes translated into straightforward unilateralism—i.e., the decision to act alone or to opt out of international agreements endorsed by most other countries. More commonly, the Administration championed a more flexible variant of collective action, ad hoc (and often temporary) “coalitions of the willing” that would coalesce around specific tasks—an instinct exemplified by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s insistent phrase: “The mission determines the coalition.” This posture strongly influenced the signature policies of the Bush Administration: a “global war on terrorism,” a “doctrine” of unilateral “preemption,” counterinsurgency and state-building in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq without UN backing, the Proliferation Security Initiative, and rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.6 In comparison to its predecessors, Republican and Democratic, the George W. Bush Administration chafed harder at the constraints of multilateral cooperation—institutionalized or not. At the same time, however, it came to discover the costs of going it alone and operating through ad hoc coalitions, in terms of squandered international legitimacy for U.S. leadership and actions, lost opportunities for burden-sharing, and the erosion of world order. With hindsight, both the White House and the American people came to realize the pitfalls of isolationism (on some issues) and daring unilateralism on other fronts. Future architects of U.S. foreign policy will ignore the standing capacity, legitimacy, and legal status of formal multilateral organizations at their (and our) peril. In responding to the new transnational challenges and enduring great power contests that will define the twenty-first century, the United States has little realistic alternative but to rededicate its ideals and devote its still preponderant power to creating and leading a new world order based on rejuvenated international institutions, reflecting a multilateralism both principled and pragmatic.

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NOTES 1. Reitzel, Kaplan and Coblenz, 302. 2. Patrick M. Morgan, “Multilateralism and Security: Prospects for Europe,” in Multilateralism Matters, ed. Ruggie, 345. 3. Reisman, “Unilateral Action and the Transformation of the World Constitutive Process.” 4. Edward Luck, Mixed Messages. 5. Stewart Patrick, “Multilateralism and Its Discontents.” 6. Stewart Patrick, “‘The Mission Determines the Coalition’: The United States and Multilateral Cooperation after 9/11,” in Cooperating for Peace and Security: Evolving Institutions and Arrangements in a Context of Changing US Security Policy, ed. Shepard Forman and Bruce Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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Index

Abbas, Ferhat, 302 Acheson, Dean, 149, 217, 235, 279, 284, 300, 307–8, 311; and British Loan, 160; and Lend-Lease, 131; lobbying for ITO by, 256–57; NATO’s purpose and commitments in view of, 280–82, 289; reflections on postwar planning by, 54–55; reflections on U.S. foreign policy traditions by, 52; support for Truman Doctrine by, 219–20; thoughts on European integration of, 246–49; thoughts on Ho Chi Minh by, 306–8 Act for International Development, 223, 312 Act of Chapultepec, 96, 290 Act of Havana, 290 Adams, John, 2 Adams, John Quincy, 5, 113, 220 Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, 52, 192 Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, 46 “agonizing reappraisal,” 286 Agricultural Adjustment Act, 118

Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 118 Algeciras Conference, 10 Allied High Commission, 247, 279 Alphand, Hervé, 235, 273 American Association of the United Nations, 80 “American Century,” 50 America First Committee, 43–44 American “empire,” 224 “American System,” 5 American way of life, xxi Anglo-American Financial Agreement. See British Loan Anglo-American Trade Agreement, 124 anticolonialism, American: agitation for specific timetables for emancipation, 206 as naïve and cynical, in European eyes, 195; historical legacy of, 173; impact of, on imperial allies, 173, 194, 202; moderating influence of allied solidarity on, 195, 202, 306, 310; moral and material motivations for,

353

354

Index

xxviii, 185; reinforced by U.S. public diplomacy, 187; versus anticommunism in U.S. policy, 297–318; wartime, xxviii, 173 anticommunism: and U.S. support for self-determination, 297–98; as impetus for containment, 221; foreign policy complications created by, 221 ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, United States) Security Treaty, 286 Aron, Raymond, 215 “arsenal of democracy” speech, FDR’s, 45 Articles of Confederation, 2–3, 189 Asia: destabilizing impact of imperialism in, 193; nationalist aspirations in, 193; restoration of colonial empires in, 194, 201–2 Asia-Pacific: Bilateral U.S. approach to security in, 223, 270, 286–89; Lack of common identity with the United States, 288–89, 330; Legacy of Japanese aggression in, 287; Limited U.S. vital interests in, 288; Nature of communist threat in, 288 “asymmetric bargains,” 111, 232, 253–54, 261 Atlantic Charter, xxvi, xxviii, 47–50, 74, 214; and economic multilateralism, 131–32; and U.S. world order vision, 47–49, 88; Anglo-American differences over, 49, 131–32; as statement of allied war aims, 50; impact on colonial nationalists of, 187; practical implications of, 49–50; self-determination clause of, 185; Soviet behavior as a threat to goals of, 74; Stalin’s cynicism about, 82; universality of, in U.S. view, 185–87 Atlee, Clement, 154, 156, 158, 233 Auriol, Vincent, 312 Austin, Warren, 64 “B2-H2” Resolution, 62 Bagby, P., 299 Baie d’Along Agreement, 306

balance of power: FDR thoughts on, 56–57, 89; Versus balance of threat, 224; Versus collective security, xxv; Wilson’s rejection of, 15 Ball, George, 248 Ball, Joseph, 62 Baltic States, Soviet control over, 83 Bao Dai, 306–307 Barkley, Alben, 64 Basic Law, West Germany’s, 279 beliefs. See ideas Berlin Blockade, 276 Beveridge Report, 152 Bevin, Ernest, 154, 238, 253, 271, 276 Bidault, Georges, 162, 198, 203, 237, 238, 272, 273, 284, 305 Bidwell, Percy Wells, 150 Big Three, xvi bilateralism, xiv, xvi, xxiii; and U.S. approach to the AsiaPacific, 286–289; in the service of multilateralism, 118–22; in U.S trade policy, 118, 120, 126; Substantive versus formal, 120; Trade-offs with multilateralism, 268–69, 283 Bizone, 219 Bloom, Sol, 90 Blum, Robert, 313 Blum, Leon, 164–65, 303 Blum-Byrnes Accords, 162–65; and transatlantic consensus on multilateralism, 166; French caveats to multilateralism in, 165–66 Boggs, Thomas Hale, 237, 240 Bohlen, Charles (Chip), 90, 216, 314; European integration views of, 246; Recognition by, of “two worlds instead of one,” 213, 222 Bolshevik Revolution, 14 Borah, William, 14, 23, 27, 31 Boris, Georges, 134 Brazzaville Conference of French Colonial Governors, 197–98 Bretton Woods, xi, xxix, 54, 67, 141, 144, 168, 214, 232, 328; and postwar peace, 149; and U.S.

Index universalism, 148–149; AngloAmerican differences at, 144–147; burden of adjustment under, 145; Congressional and public opinion regarding, 147–49; “gold-exchange standard” created at, 145; impact of Cold War on, 161; inclusion of Soviet Union at, 147; liquidity options at, 145–46; managed multilateral system created at, 144, 328; postwar “transition period” envisioned at, 146 Bretton Woods institutions, 142, 147, 231, 260; as instruments of U.S. foreign policy, 149; governance structures created for, 146–47, 149; inadequacy to address postwar financial disequilibrium, 148, 154, 232 Bricker, John, 65 British Empire: as a target of U.S. anticolonialism, 184–88; as an obstacle to economic multilateralism, 123–24, 126; Churchill’s wartime defense of, 186, 196; denial of independence within, 195–96; role of sterling bloc in, 126 British Loan, xxviii, 141–42, 156–62, 168, 231; Anglo-American negotiations over, 156–58; as an antidote to socialism and economic fragmentation, 159–60; inadequacy to meet postwar needs, 168; linkage with British multilateralism, 156, 159; London’s exhaustion of the, 233; magnitude and terms of, 156–58; selling a skeptical Congress on, 159–60; trade proposals accompanying the, 158 Brown, Winthrop, 254 Bruce, David, 284, 308 Brussels Treaty (or Pact), 272–74 Bunche, Ralph, 90, 198 Burma, 301 Burton, Harold, 62 Bush, George W., 332

355

Bush Administration, George W., 332–33 Byrnes, James F., 158, 161, 163, 216, 219; hard line against Moscow of, 217; opposition to spheres of influence by, 213–14 Cadogan, 74 Caffery, Jefferson, 164, 302, 306 Caribbean, as U.S. sphere, 10 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 25 Carr, E. H., 29 CEEC. See Conference of European Economic Cooperation Chauvel, Jean, 198, 302 Chiang Kai-shek, 194 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 25 China: anticolonial stance of, 194; as one of the Four Policemen, 194; as potential trustee for Indochina, 194; Japanese invasion of, 30; “Loss” of, 226, 307, 318 Churchill, Winston, 47, 49, 57–58, 84–85, 87, 131–133, 159–60, 169n25, 184–85, 188–89, 194, 196, 200, 218; “Iron curtain” speech, 160, 218 Civil War, U.S., 3, 6–7, 112–13 Clark Airfield, 300 Clayton, William, 99, 124, 141, 148, 154, 156–60, 162, 165, 219, 233–35, 238, 252–53, 255, 300; On risks of European disintegration, 233 Cleveland, Grover, 6 coalitions of the willing, xvi, 333 Cold War, ix–x, xii, xv, xviii–xxx; as collision of irreconcilable world views, 215–19; as rationale for U.S. trade liberalization, 252, 258–59; European quest for U.S. security guarantees in, 271–72; flawed realist explanations for, 215; ideological origins of, 215–21, 236; impact on U.S. multilateralism, xii, xv–xvi, 142, 213–27, 260, 329–31; impact on U.S. support for

356

Index

self-determination, 299, 302–310; in Asia, 299, 318; marginalization of the UN during, 221; U.S. shift from collective security to collective defense in, 267–68, 291–92; ultimate cause of, xxviii; victory in, as triumph of Western multilateralism, 327 collective action problems, xv–xvi Collective defense, xiii; Article 51 of UN Charter provisions for, 96, 275; egalitarian ethos versus hierarchical reality of, 286; in NATO, xxix, 277–79; in Western Hemisphere, 290; in Western Hemisphere, 96; versus collective security, xxix, 223, 267, 279, 330 Collective security: as alternative to alliances, balances of power, and spheres of influence, xxv; definition, xiii–xiv; dilemmas of, 18–19, 28; impact of Cold War on U.S. support for, 227; limits to, 77; role of Four Policemen in FDR approach to, 55–57; Wilson’s support for, 13–15 Collins, General Lawton, 313 Colonial empires, European, xxviii; as a threat to postwar stability, 193–99; as targets of U.S. anticolonialism, 184–99, 298; debates at San Francisco over future of, 203–4; in Asia, doomed by Japanese conquests, 186–87, 206; State Department debates on U.S. policy toward, 202, 205; vulnerability of, to communist penetration, 311 Comintern, xvii Commissariat General au Plan, 164 Commission on Postwar Economic, Financial, and Social Problems, French, 134 Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, 61 Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace, 46

Committee for Reciprocity Information, 120, 122 Committee on Trade Agreements, 118, 120 Committee on Trade Barriers, 153 Committee to Defend America by Defending the Allies, 43–43 Commonwealth, British, 106, 113, 123, 130, 154, 158, 239; attitude toward trade liberalization of, 126, 151, 249–50, 253–54 Conference of Allied Ministers of Education, 54 Conference of European Economic Cooperation, 238, 274; FrancoBritish differences within, 239; negotiations on collaborative recovery, 239; U.S. hopes for and frustrations with, 238–39 Cooper, John Milton, 10 Congress, U.S.: debate over the League of Nations within, 16–17, 21–22; pressure for European integration by, 237–40; rising anger at Soviet behavior in, 85; role in U.S. trade policy, 112–19; sentiment toward United Nations, 62–64 Connally, Tom, 62–63, 90, 93, 97–98, 278 Constitution, U.S., xxi; as a model for world order, 3 Constructivism: utility in understanding U.S. postwar multilateralism, xx; versus rational choice theory, xix–xx Containment: American exceptionalism and, 220; as rationale for U.S. postwar global activism, 221; doctrine of, as articulated by Kennan, 217–18; impact on U.S. multilateralism, x, xvii, 214, 223–26; implications for U.S foreign policy, 218, 221–22; role of U.S. anticommunism in, 215–21; U.S. coalition approach to, 222–23 Coolidge, Calvin, 26

Index Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s Greater East Asian, 123 Council of Europe, 245–46, 279 Council of Foreign Ministers, 218; failure of London meeting of, 271 Council on Foreign Relations, 25, 31, 46, 150 Counterpart funds, 241 Courtin Report, 135 Courtin, René, 135 Cox, James, 24, 32 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 189, 253 customs union, U.S. push for European, 238–39 Czechoslovakia: coup in, 240, 273; German annexation of, 34 D’Argenlieu, Thierry, 304 Davies, John Patton, 194 Davis, Forrest, 63 Dawes Plan, 27 Declaration of Independence, U.S., xxi, 175, 302 Declaration of Liberated Europe, 87– 89; as test of Soviet intentions, 87; Soviet violation of, 89, 216 Declaration on National Independence, 191–92; British opposition to, 195 Declaration Regarding non-SelfGoverning Territories, 204, 207 decolonization: Cold War conservatism of U.S. approach to, 309; French resistance to, 198, 303; ideal U.S. scenario for, 298; impact on world order of process of, xxviii, 297; of sub-Saharan Africa, 309; practical impact of U.S. support for, 174, 207; U.S. desire for gradual rather than abrupt, 190–91, 298; U.S. hope for specific dates from Europeans on, 195; U.S. support for, xxviii, xxx “defense in depth,” 199 defense officials, American; Desire to annex former Japanese mandates,

357

199–200; Plans for expanded postwar military presence, 99–100, 199; Skepticism of trusteeship plans, 199–200 De Gaulle, Charles, 134, 164; insistence on unity of French empire, 198; position on Indochina, 194, 201, 302–3; preoccupation with French grandeur, 162; reflections on U.S. anticolonialism, 190, 198 “Destroyers for bases” agreement, 43–44 De Lattre de Tassigny, Jean, 312–13 Delta Council, 235 Democratic Party, 13, 25, 65, 112, 118 Democratic-Republicans, 4 DePorte, Anton, xxii Dewey, Thomas, 65, 78, 237; on postwar international organization, 66; support for Bretton Woods and multilateral trade by, 149–50 Dien Bien Phu, 299, 314, 316–17, 331 Dillon, Douglas, 285 Discrimination. See non-discrimination Division of Commercial Policy, State Department, 150 Division of Special Research, State Department, 47 Douglas, Lewis, 248 Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance, 30 Dulles, John Foster, 91, 93, 98, 161, 237, 275, 286–87, 289, 311, 316–18; Support for international organization, 61, 65–66 Dumbarton Oaks Conference on International Organization, xxvi, 67, 74–78, 86; deferral of colonial questions at, 77, 196; issues unresolved at, 78; Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization, 77; Roosevelt administration effort to sell to U.S. public and Congress, 78–81 Dunkirk Treaty, 272

358

Index

Dunn, James C., 202 Dutch East Indies, 301 Eastern Europe: Soviet intention to dominate, 78, 81–90, 216; U.S.Soviet tensions over, 89 Eaton, Charles, 90 Eccles, Marriner, 160, 165 Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), 235; agitation for single European market, 243; alleged tool of U.S. imperialism, 241–42; and Indochina, 312–13 Economic Cooperation Agreements, 241 economic diplomacy, interwar U.S., 26–28 economic multilateralism: AngloAmerican differences over, 128–33, 141–42, 158–59; As alternative to autarky and rival economic blocs, 166, 328; As antidote to postwar slump, 127; as component of U.S. postwar vision, xxvi; As cornerstone of world peace, 116–17, 123–25; as predicated on domestic intervention and welfare state, 127–30, 136, 143, 151–54, 156, 158–59, 161, 328; attitude of private sector regarding, 153; conventional explanations for U.S. support for, 106–9; elements of, xxv; Franco-US differences over, 162–66; impact of Cold War on U.S., xxix, 231, 253; lessons of 1930s for postwar, 110, 328; loopholes to, in ITO Charter, 251–57; low tariffs and, 112–13; Marxist perspectives on U.S., 109; modifications and abridgements of U.S. vision of, 167–68; nondiscrimination, as element of, 113– 15, 328; postponed, 233; qualified nature of U.S. embrace of, 107; role of ideas and identity in U.S. support for, 110–11; transatlantic negotiations over postwar, 128–36; Treasury versus State Department

views on, 142–43; versus economic nationalism, 123 “Economic security,” 125, 260 Eden, Anthony, 58, 82, 195, 196 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 267, 315; concept of U.S. leadership, 267, 285, 317; rejection of unilateral intervention in Indochina, 317; views on role of allies, 285 Elysée Agreements, 307 embedded liberalism, the compromise of: defined, 127–28; transatlantic views on openness versus interventionism in, 128–30, 132–36, 167; versus nineteenth century free trade, 128 “empire by invitation,” 224 Emergency/Farmer’s Tariff Act, 113 Enlightenment, values of the, xxi, 3 entangling alliances, xxiv, 12; early U.S. opposition to, xi, 2–5; interwar avoidance of, 25 Ethiopia, Italian invasion of, 30 European Coal and Steel Community, 232, 309, 329; national sovereignty implications of, 249; as a solution to French insecurity and weakness, 247; origins of, 247–50 European Defense Community, 286, 313, 314 European dependency, U.S. efforts to avoid, 234 European Economic Community, 247 European economic crisis of 1946–1947: need for massive U.S. assistance to respond to the, 234; structural dollar deficit as cause of the, 233; as threat to postwar multilateralism, 234, 260, 329; failure of Bretton Woods to anticipate the, 232–33 European integration: ambiguous goal of, 243; and the German problem, 245–46; as a catalyst for productivity gains, 236, 244; as a stepping stone to multilateral world economy, 231, 243–44; as an

Index antidote to economic nationalism, 244; being a matter for Europeans to decide, 256; Congressional agitation for, 237–40, 246; divergent British and French perspectives on, 239, 245–46; French leadership in, 245–50; implications for sovereignty of, 244–45; limits to U.S. capacity to effect, 246, 249, 260; Relevance of U.S. historical experience for, 243; tensions between Atlanticism and, 250; tensions between global multilateralism and, 235, 244; U.S. support for, 227, 231, 237, 240, 242–47, 249, 260, 326; variable pace of, 243, 254n60 European Payments Union, 244–45 European recovery: needs, underestimated by US, 233–34; as threatened by balance of payments crisis, 233; U.S. insistence on multilateral approach to, 231 European Recovery Program, 166, 222; and postwar multialralism, 231–32, 255; as a transmission belt for U.S. economic; philosophy, 236; as shaped by the politics of productivity of, 236; criticisms of U.S. economic imperialism in the, 241–42; transatlantic consensus on contours of, 241–42. See also Marshall Plan. European unity. See European integration Evatt, Herbert Vere, 93 Exceptionalism, American: as component of isolationism, unilateralism, and multilateralism, xxiii, xxvi, 2; basis in Lockian ideals of, xx–xxii; definition of, xix–xxiii; impact on U.S. foreign policy of, xx–xxiii, xxiii, 327 Executive Committee on Commercial Policy, 126 Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy, 153–54 Export-Import Bank, 165

359

Farewell Address, Washington’s, 3–4, 45 Faure, Edgar, 313 FDR. See Roosevelt, Franklin D. Federalist Papers, 3 Federalist Party, 4 Feis, Herbert, 125 Finland, Soviet influence in, 216 First World War. See World War I Fletcher, Henry P, 74 Flynn, John T., 44 Fontainbleau Conference, 304 Food and Agricultural Conference, 54 Fordney-McCumber Act, 113 Foreign Affairs, 32, 218 Foreign Assistance Act, 240 Foreign Policy Association, 25 Forrestal, James, 99–100, 260 “forward defense,” 273, 280–81 Founding Fathers, 2, 76 “Four Freedoms” speech, 47 Four Policemen, Roosevelt’s conception of, 55–57; Incorporation into the design for the UNO of, 67 Fourteen Points, Wilson’s, 14–15, 178 France: anxiety about U.S. hegemony, 134–35, 248–49; bitterness over U.S.; Indochina policy, 311–17; commitment to a planned economy, 135, 245; Communist influence in, 219; Constitution of Fourth Republic of, 299, 303; debates over postwar economic multilateralism in, 134–35, 245; desire for U.S. security guarantee, 270–71, 273, 276, 279; fall of, 43, 44; fear of German power in, 236–37, 245, 247, 250, 273; financial dependence on the United States of, 162–66, 245; futile interwar search for security, 29–30; history of protectionism and dirigisme in 134, 162, 164, 245, 249; Imperial preference and postwar, 164; importance of empire to postwar,

360

Index

197–98, 317; negotiations with US on postwar economy by, 133–34; resentment at subordination in NATO, 284–86; resistance to German reconstruction, 276 Franco-American Treaty, 113 Franco-German reconciliation, 237–38 free trade, 15, 107, 109, 112, 116, 127, 130, 134–35, 136, 143, 154, 163, 183–84, 251–53, 258–59 “free trade empire,” 174 Free World, the, ix, xii, xv, 107, 285, 232, 235, 256, 259–61, 273, 283–85, 332; as a replacement for “One World” concept, xxviii–xxix, 214, 222, 267–69, 326, 329; Indochina in the context of, 302, 307–8, 313–14, 317; legitimacy of U.S. leadership within, 225–26; multilateral institutions as cornerstone of, 224– 25; U.S. coalition leadership within, xxviii–xxix, 226, 291; U.S. steps to organize, 221–22, 291; vulnerability of, 273; wide scope for allied autonomy within, 225 freedom of action, U.S., xxvi–xxvii, 333; as a topic in the debate over League of Nations, 20; in the AsiaPacific, 287; in the proposed UNO, 60; within NATO, 269 French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), 134, 190 French Communist Party, 219, 303 French Empire: absence of provision for independence or selfgovernment in the, 197; as focus of U.S. anticolonialism, 189–191; FDR’s antipathy toward the, 189–90; principles of assimilation and union at core of the, 197; progressive reform of the, 197–98; psychic importance after 1940 of the, 197–99; wartime vulnerability of the, 190 French Revolution, as distinct from American Revolution, 179

French Union, the: creation of, 201; impossibility of independence or secession from, 302–3; Indochina and, 302, 309, 313; metropolitan primacy in, 299, 303; perceived U.S. efforts to undermine, 314 Fulbright, J. William, 62, 237, 240, 249 Fulbright Resolution, 62–63 Gallup, 33 The Gambia, 185–86 Gandhi, 189 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), xxix, 101, 110, 225, 257–60, 326, 329–30; agricultural exceptions to, 259; Annecy Round of, 254; as a bulwark for the Free World, 232, 253, 258–61; as a pragmatic approach to trade liberalization, 232, 250, 256, 257–58; “bilateral-multilateral” approach of the, 258; exceptions and escape clauses to multilateralism in the, 252, 258; Geneva Round achievements of the, 253–54; role of Congress in the, 258–59 Geneva Conference on Indochina, 316 Geneva Preparatory Conference of the ITO: Endorsement of intervention and discrimination at, 252–53; U.S. multilateralism on defensive at, 252–53 Geneva Protocol, 30 George, Walter F., 64 Germany: division of, 218–19; impact of Cold War on U.S. policy toward, 218–19, 222, 271–72, 276; legacy of Versailles for, 21, 27–29; Marshall Plan and, 236–37; NATO and Western, 273–81; postwar French strategy toward, 236–37, 245, 247–48; US-Soviet conflict over, 219. See also Nazi Germany Gildersleeve, Virginia, 90 Gillette, Guy, 64 global power, U.S. emergence as a, 7

Index global responsibilities, perceived U.S. for postwar period, xxvi gold standard, 32, 127, 143 Good Neighbor policy, 216, 290 Gouin, Felix, 166 Grady, Henry, 125 Great Britain, xvii, xxii, xxvii, 4, 6, 19, 43–44; collapse in Eastern Mediterranean of, 219; determination to pursue postwar full employment and welfare state by, 129–30, 142, 151–54, 250–51; domestic debates over economic multilateralism in, 128–30; enthusiasm for spheres of influence by, 82–85; financial dependence on US of, 132–33, 153–54, 156; nineteenth century leadership in trade liberalization by, 107, 253; restrictive interpretation of Atlantic Charter, 186; skepticism of free trade, 130; tensions with US over India, 188–89; wartime negotiations with U.S. over multilateralism, 127–33, 141–62, 253. See also British Empire Great Depression: impact on public expectations of the state, 122, 134–35; impact on U.S. trade policy, 117–18; lessons of, xxv, 328; opening for policy change provided by, 110; self-defeating international responses to, 31–32 great power internationalism, xxvi, 1, 7–12, 328; role in the League debate of, 17–18 Great War. See World War I Grew, Joseph, 80, 99, 202 Gromyko, Andrei, 74, 76, 94 Halifax, Lord, 187, 194 Hamilton, Alexander, 4 Harding, Warren G., 24–26 Harriman, Averell, 82, 86, 93, 158, 249, 262n17, 282; on irreconcilable U.S.Soviet differences, 89

361

Hatch, Carl, 62 Havana Charter of ITO, 258; provisions at odds with multilateralism, 255–57; U.S. disappointment with, 255 Havana Conference on Trade and Employment, negotiating leverage of developing countries at, 255; U.S. opposition to discrimination and protectionism at, 255 Hawkins, Harry, 120, 124–26, 150 Hay, John, 7, 114 Hearst, William Randolph, 32 Heath, Donald, 311 hegemonic stability theory, 107–9, 137 n8 hegemony, xiii; alternative styles of, xvii–xviii; America’s benevolent, 98–100, 242, 161; Consensual nature of U.S., 158–59, 166–67, 224–25, 270–71, 283, 285–86, 317, 330, 331; International institutions as foundation for U.S., 98–99; liberal nature of U.S., x–xi, xx; U.S. efforts to avoid prolonged, 222, 234, 267, 270, 272, 287; U.S., as a moment of opportunity, 99, 105, 125; U.S., in Western Hemisphere, 289–91; U.S., self-imposed limits of, 158 Hemmer, Christopher, 288 Hickenlooper, Bourke B., 280 Hickerson, John, 272 Hill, Lister, 62 Hiss, 90 Hitchcock, Gilbert, 20 Ho Chi Minh, 299, 302; possible modus vivendi with, 305; U.S. perceptions of, as communist tool, 302, 305–8 Hoffman, Paul, 243–45 Hoover, Herbert, 26 Hopkins, Harry, 94 Ho-Sainteny Agreement, 304 “hub and spoke” approach to U.S. security in Asia-Pacific, xxix–xxx, 223, 286

362

Index

Hughes, Charles Evans, 13, 27 Hull, Cordell, xxvii, 34, 46–47, 75–82, 132, 155; championing of RTAA by, 120–24; cultivation of Congress on behalf of UN by, 63–64, 66, 74; defense of Dumbarton Oaks Proposals by, 80; development of ideas for UNO, 56–60; lessons of American history as identified by, 73; non-discrimination convictions of, 49, 111–15; opposition to annexing former Japanese mandates by, 199–200; opposition to spheres of influence by, 81–83; postwar planning under, 48–53; reflections on U.S. isolationism by, 32; self-determination of dependent peoples as goal of, 190–91, 197; support for international trade congress by, 115–16; support for lower tariffs by, 111–12; thesis on the trade and world peace held by, 105, 116–17, 125; trade liberalization program of, 111–17, 122, 124–26; views on Security Council veto of, 64 Hurley, General Patrick, 193 idealism: perceived congruent with U.S. material interests, xxv–xxvi; versus realism, xix ideas, new, xvii–xix, xxii–xxvi; and policy change, 111; and U.S. multilateralism, 327–29; impact on national interests and preferences of, xviii–xix, xxiv–xxv; influence following policy failure of, xxiv– xxv; relationship to political culture and identity of, xxvi identity: America’s liberal national, xix–xxiii; common, as an underpinning for the NATO alliance, 289; impact on U.S. foreign policy of, xx–xxiii; impact on U.S. multilateralism of American, 327– 29. See also political culture, Lockian liberalism

Ikenberry, G. John, xv, 318 imagined communities, nations as, xx, 181 Imperial Japan, world order vision of, xvii–xviii imperial preference: as a barrier to open commerce, 123–24; as a source of US-UK friction, 123–24, 126, 131, 151–53; implications of British Loan for, 158; linkage of U.S. tariff levels to, 154, 157, 252; persistence into postwar years of, 252; relative evils of U.S. tariffs and, 152–53; survival under GATT of, 258; the Philippines and, 300 imperialism, European: as a cause of World War II, 184; as abhorrent to Americans, 205–6; as unjust, antithetical to free trade, and conducive to war, 175, 184; contrast with U.S. “Good Neighbor” policy, 185; crumbling of, 299; dangers of unreconstructed, 298, 301; opposition of Roosevelt administration to, 184; reassertion in Southeast Asia of, 298 India: Anglo-American frictions over, 187–89; Application of Atlantic Charter to, 186; British pledge to emancipate, 301; Congress Party agitation for independence in, 188; Cripps Mission to, 189; Dilemma of U.S. wartime policy toward, 188 indivisibility, xiii Indochina, xxx, 194; the Cold War in Asia and, 311; as the key to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, 305, 312–13; contradictions of U.S. policy on, 309; dilemmas for U.S. anticolonialism presented by, 298, 302–6, 311, 318, 331; France’s return to, 201–2; French failure to satisfy nationalist aspirations in, 304–5, 308, 312, 315; French withdrawal from, 317; installation of Bao Dai in, 201; irreconcilable French and U.S. goals in, 298, 311–13, 315–18; limits

Index of U.S. leverage in, 299, 311–15; perceived Communist threat in, 302, 306, 310; Vietminh domination in, 298 Indochina War: as a drain on European defense, 308, 313–15; as central front in Cold War, 305, 307–8, 312–15; growing French disillusionment with, 313, 316; initial U.S. neutrality in, 304; links between French political stability and, 306, 308; possible U.S. military intervention in, 316–17; State Department debates over U.S. response to, 304–5; U.S. role in subsidizing, 299, 309, 316, 331 Indonesia, xxx; U.S. insistence that Dutch liberate, 301 “institutional bargain,” 269–270 institutional change, role of crises and new beliefs in, 110 inter-allied debts, 26–27 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. See Rio Treaty International Authority for the Ruhr, 279 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. See World Bank International Civil Aviation Conference, 54 International Clearing Union, proposed by Keynes, 145–146 International Court of Justice, 77 international financial institutions. See Bretton Woods Institutions international institutions, as basis for U.S. postwar leadership, xxii, xxv, 326 International Labor Conference, 50, 54 International law, early U.S. attitudes toward, 4 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 101, 110, 142, 154, 232–33; AngloAmerican differences over, 142–47; “double screen” offered by, 144; magnitude of credits available to, 146; purpose and function of, 143;

363

“scarce currency clause” of, 146; versus bilateral “key currency” approach, 148 international monetary system, the postwar: British and U.S. conceptions of, 142–47; Treasury Department leadership in designing, 110; U.S. domination of, 149; U.S. planning for, 105, 141–68 International Ruhr Authority, 276 international trade: Anglo-American negotiations over, 151–54, 158, 161, 250–51; contraction during the 1930s of, 113; FrancoAmerican negotiations over, 162–66; non-discrimination versus full employment as goals for, 250–51, 256; postwar multilateral negotations over, 232, 250–60; State Department planning for postwar, 150–54; U.S. principles for, 250 International Trade Organization (ITO), xxix, 110, 168, 231, 235, 239, 250–57, 329; Anglo-American differences over, 256; as a complement to the Marshall Plan, 255; as a vehicle for government intervention, 253; condemnation by U.S. business community of the, 253–57; Congressional attitudes toward, 251–52, 256–57; Demise of the, 232, 257; Exemptions to multilateralism permitted under the, 253; Preparatory Committee of, the 250–51; relationship to U.S. national security, 256–57; Suggested Charter for an, 153–54, 161; Swelling domestic opposition to, 232, 256–57 ITO Charter, 260; exemptions to multilateral principles in the, 251; full employment provisions of the, 255; London draft of the, 251; protectionist and statist dimensions in the, 260–61 “Irreconcilables,” in the League debate, 16, 20–21, 23

364

Index

International Trusteeship Administration, metropolitan duties under, 191–92 interventionism, xxii isolationism, American, xi, xxvi, 1, 52, 149, 220, 328; apogee in the 1930s of, 30–35; as the victor in the League debate, 8; Congressional attitudes toward, 25, 32–33; effect of the Great Depression on, 31; erosion in the face of Axis aggression of, 33–35, 42–44, 46; erosion of assumptions behind, 33– 34; evolution in Republican Party attitude toward, 26, 44–45, 61–63; FDR maneuvering to overcome, 32– 35; Fulbright Resolution and, 62–63; impact of Pearl Harbor on, 42; motivations for, 8–9, 25–26; nature and limits during 1920s of, 24–26; Political vs. economic aspects of, 26–28; public opinion regarding, 25, 31, 33–35, 60–61

American exceptionalism by, 220–21; Worries about European dependency of, 222 Keynes, John Maynard, 127–28; author of Economic Consequences of the Peace, 21; conditional support for postwar multilateralism by, 130; devastating portrait of Wilson by, 18, 21; implications of UK financial dependence, according to, 154–56; reflections on U.S. separation of powers by, 132; role at Bretton Woods of, 145–46; role in AngloAmerican financial negotiations of, 130, 156–58 Kimball, Warren, 88 Knox, Philander K., 18 Korean War, 318; U.S. aid to Indochina of the, 310; impact on NATO of the, 283–84; impact on U.S. policy in East Asia of the, 288 Koumintang, 194 Kupchan, Charles A., 318

Jacksonian tradition, 5 Japanese mandated islands in the Pacific: agitation by U.S. defense officials to annex, 199–200; designation as “strategic” trust territories, 203; insistence by FDR on UN trusteeship for, 199–200, 203 Jay, John, 4 Jefferson, Thomas, 4–5 Johnson, Louis, 189 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 221; Desire for postwar military bases, 100, 200

LaFollette, Robert, 25, 64, 74 Landsdale, Edward, 308 Lansing, Robert, 178 Latin America, U.S. Cold War approach to, 289–91 Law, Richard, 41 Leadership, global: American exceptionalism and U.S. destiny to embrace, 99; consensual approach to U.S. postwar, 224–25, 268, 286, 327, 331; Eisenhower views of, 267; implications for U.S. military posture of U.S., 100; now slipping from Britain’s hands, 219; requirements for legitimate, 285–86; trade liberalization and U.S., 150; U.S. abdication of, after World War I, xxvi League of Nations, the, xxiv, xxvi; American sovereignty and freedom of action concerns regarding, 2, 19– 24; as an issue in the 1920 election, 24; Commission of Inquiry of, 30;

Katzenstein, Peter J., 288 Kellogg, Frank, 28 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 8, 27 Kennan, George F, 216, 219, 234, 268; “dumbbell” approach to transatlantic security of, 274; “long telegram” and “X” article by, 217–18; Fears of U.S. imperial role of, 274; Ideas about European integration of, 246; views on

Index crippling weaknesses of, 28–30; failure to stop Axis aggression of, 29–30, 33; Mechanisms to deter and respond to aggression, within, 19, 29–30; U.S. debate over, 2, 16–24, 280, 328; U.S. interwar posture toward, 25; U.S. absence from, 28; Wilson’s view of, 19–20 League of Nations Association, 25, 43, 80 League Council, 19 League Covenant, the: Article 10 obligations in, 19, 22; as an institution of collective security, 18– 19; consistency between the Monroe Doctrine and, 21; implications for U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action of, 20–23; linkage between the Versailles Treaty and, 21; Lodge’s 14 reservations to, 23–24; Congressional criticism of, 16–18, 21–22; Senate rejection of, 2, 23–24; Wilson’s intransigence regarding, 22–24 League to Enforce the Peace, 11 Legitimacy, international, xvi; as a factor in the U.S. approach to NATO, 269–70, 283; Requirements for, 245, 285–86, 326; U.S. efforts to cultivate, through consensual leadership, 224–25 Lend-Lease Agreement, the, xxviii, 43, 130–33, 135–36, 278; abrupt termination of, 156; AngloAmerican negotiations over, 131– 33; British financial dependence and, 154–55; Congressional reservations about, 133, 155; multilateral commitments under Article VII of, 131, 133, 155–56; passage by Congress of, 45 Lessons of historical experience: impact on U.S. world order vision, xxiv–xxvi, 52 Letourneau, Jean, 314–15 Liberal internationalism, xxiii, xxvi, 1, 7–9; pursuit by Roosevelt and

365

Truman of hard-headed, 326; revival of during World War II of, xxvi, 33–35, 51, 60–66, 328; Woodrow Wilson embrace of, 12–16 Liesching, Percivale, 157 Lincoln, Abraham, 141, 160 Lindbergh, Charles A., 44 Linggadjati Agreement, 301 Lippmann, Walter, 51, 65–66, 77, 186 Little Entente, 30 Locke, John, xxi, 114 Lockian liberalism, xx–xxiii; as foundation for U.S. exceptionalism, xxi; costs and benefits of, xxi–xxii Lodge, Henry Cabot, 11–12; debate with A. Lawrence Lowell, 20; skepticism of League, 14, 20–24 logic of appropriateness, xx logic of consequences, xix–xx London Agreement, 276 London Economic Conference, 117 London. See Great Britain Long, Huey, 25 Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 44 Lovett, Robert, 238, 253, 273, 275, 276, 282; reflections on European integration by, 243 Luce, Henry, 50 Mackinac Declaration, 63, 65 MacLeish, Archibald, 79 MacMillan, Margaret, 178 Magsaysay, Raymond, 308 Malaya, 308, 314 Malayan Emergency, 314 Manchuria, Japanese invasion of, 30 Mandates System, the, 182–84, 191; classification of territories under, 182; metropolitan accountability and progressive elements of, 182–183; impact on decolonization of, 184 “manifest destiny,” 6, 176 Marjolin, Robert, 134 Marshall, George, 200, 201, 222, 231, 234–25, 237, 275–76; Frustrations

366

Index

with French Indochina, 305–6; Harvard speech of, 234, 238; Resistance to European entreaties, 271–274 Marshall Plan, the, xxix, 166, 168, 222, 223, 255, 260, 267, 329; as a framework for Franco-German reconciliation, 236–37; as a stepping stone to global multilateralism, 234–35; as an instrument of containment, 233–35; bilateral and multilateral elements of, 234, 237; European integration and, 237; European response to, 237–40; failure of, to alleviate European fears of Soviets, 273; France’s war in Indochina and, 306, 313; impact on European recovery of, 242; Interdepartmental Committee on, 238; multilateral U.S. approach to, 231, 242; national security justifications for, 236; origins and objectives of, 234–37; the ITO and, 235; U.S. and European roles in, 234 Martin, Joseph, 252 Massigli, René, 248 Matthews, H. Freeman, 217 Mayer, René, 273–74, 315 McCloy, John, 90, 248; defense of a U.S. sphere in Western Hemisphere, 96 McCormick, Thomas, 109 Meade, James, 154 Melby-Erskine Mission, 297, 310 Mendés-France, Pierre, 317 mercantilism, 110, 118 “merchants of death,” 31 Military Assistance and Advisory Group, 312–13 Military Assistance Program, 277, 279–81 military power, surging U.S., 99–100 Miller, Jamie, 254 Millikin, Eugene, 98, 150, 252 Moffatt, Abbot Low, 304 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 83, 86, 89, 191, 238

Monnet, Jean, 135, 313; futility of economic nationalism, in view of, 162; on need for postwar U.S. aid, 135, 162; paternity of the European Coal and Steel Community of, 247–49; role in cementing FrancoAmerican commercial consensus of, 163–66 Monnet Plan, 163–67, 245, 247, 248–49; dependence on U.S. financing, 164, 166; precursor of and model for Marshall Plan, 166, 238 Monroe, President James, 4–5 Monroe Doctrine, the, 5–7, 28; as an expression of unilateralism, 6; compatibility between the North Atlantic Treaty, 274; European attitudes toward, 5–6; hemispheric defense and, 290; League of Nations and, 21 Morgenthau, Hans, xviii Morgenthau, Henry, 133, 143, 148–49, 218 Moscow Conference of the Big Three (1943), 83 Moscow. See Soviet Union most-favored nation (MFN) principle, xiii, 114, 254; conditional versus unconditional, 115, 118 Mountbatten, Lord, 299 Mouvement Republican Populaire, 303 “movement to institutions,” 332 “multilateral paradox,” 254–55 multilateralism, ix; adaptation of, to Cold War imperatives, xii, xv, 213–27, 327, 329–32; as a foundation for U.S. postwar global leadership, ix, xi, xvi, xxii, 325; as a reflection of American identity and political culture, 42, 270, 327; as a solution to collective action problems, xv; as an organizing principle for the Free World, 214; as the global projection of New Deal regulatory state, 54 as the U.S. vision for postwar world order, 1, 213; conducive to multipolarity, 270, 272; constraints

Index on U.S. power inherent in, 254–55; conventional accounts for postwar U.S., xi, xiv–xviii, 268–71, 283; costs and benefits of, xiv–xvi, 268–70, 283, 332–33; definition of, xiii–xiv; enigma of postwar U.S., xiii–xvi, 283; formal, in Western Hemisphere, 289–91, 330; historical lessons as an influence on U.S., 42, 270, 327–28; in NATO, xxix, 223, 267–92, 268–72, 283; in transatlantic relations, 224–25; ironies of hegemonic, 254; linkage between domestic pluralism and, 270; principle versus pragmatism in U.S. support for, x–xi, 42, 213; procedural versus substantive, xxix, 232, 254, 329; resilience and continued relevance of postwar, 325, 327, 33–333; the rule of law and, xiv; U.S. ambivalence about, xii, 232, 326, 332–33; versus bilateralism, in US approaches to Europe and Asia, 286–89 Mundt, Karl, 62 Munich, agreement on Sudetenland, 34 Murphy, Robert, 190, 300 Mutual Defense Assistance Program, 223, 310–11 Mutual Security Agency, 284 Napoleonic Wars, 4 National Advisory Council on International and Financial Problems, 149, 164, 235 National Association of Manufacturers, 253, 256 National Foreign Trade Council, 153 National Industrial Recovery Act, 118 national interests: defined, xviii; role of identity and ideas in shaping, xviii–xix; versus national ideals, xxv–xxvi national self-determination: defined, 179; influence of French Revolution on, 179; versus political self-

367

determination, 179. See also selfdetermination nationalism: as a form of political romanticism, 179; challenge of channeling, in a non-radical direction, 206, 318; definition, 179; geopolitical implications of rising, 298, 310; “hands off” policy toward Asian, 298, 304; postwar outburst of revolutionary, 214 nationalists: differential U.S. support for colonial, 300–301; U.S. search for “authentic,” non-communist, xxx, 298, 300, 302, 331 national security: evolving U.S. concepts of, xxiv; U.S. coalition approach to, 223 National Recovery Administration, 118 National Security Council directive 68 (NSC 68): Ideological nature of, 226; Impact on containment and U.S. world leadership of, 226 national self-determination, origins in French Revolution, 179–80 Navarre, General Henri, 316–17 Nazi Germany, xxiv; World order vision of, xvii–xviii Nehru, Jawaharlal, 189 The Netherlands, and Indonesian nationalism, 301 Neutrality Acts, 32–34, 43, 46 New Deal, the: backlash against, 152, 155, 164; interventionist nature of, 117–18; tensions with liberal multilateralism, 117–18 New Order, Hitler’s, 123 Nitze, Paul, 223 Nixon, Richard M., 315 non-discrimination, xiii, 3, 106, 122, 232; GATT norm of, 258; supportive of world peace, 124; as an integral element in the U.S. vision for postwar trade, 113–15, 126; Atlantic Charter provision for, 131; in American history and political culture, 113–14; inclusion in the

368

Index

Master Lend Lease Agreement of, 131–33, 135–36; versus full employment in postwar trade, 250– 51; versus tariff reductions, 252 North Atlantic Council, 282, 284, 314–15 North Atlantic Treaty, the, 247; and Congressional prerogatives, 277–78; consistency with UN Charter of, 274, 277–78; Article 3 provisions for military aid in, 277–81; Article 5 provisions for collective defense in, 278–89; Article 9 provisions on organization structure in, 282; as a compromise between U.S. and European views, 268; as a French diplomatic triumph, 281; Consistency between the Monroe Doctrine and, 274; European disappointments with, 281; geographic scope of, 277; military versus psychological value of, 281; nature of commitments under, 277–79; negotiations over, 276–79; shared values invoked in preamble to, 279; the Rio Pact and, 276–77; Senate debate and ratification of, 279–81; U.S. insistence on a multilateral form for, 277–79 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), xxix, 222–23, 330; American hegemony within, 267–71, 282–85; Anglo-American relations within, 284; as a pillar of “Free World,” 267, 271, 292; collective defense aspects of, 223, 227, 267–82, 326; cultural, normative, and civilization underpinnings of, 268, 270–71, 289; decolonization and, 310; egalitarian U.S. approach to leadership in, 283, 285, 330; extended deterrence through, 284; French proposals for 3–power directorate in, 284; genesis of, 271; impact on reintegration of West Germany of, 268, 276, 281; multilateralism in, xxix, 222,

267–70, 277–78, 282–83, 330; norms of behavior within, 271, 283, 330; nuclear weapons policy within, 284; organizational structure of, 282–85; peacetime military expenditures within, 285; relationship to European recovery of, 270; Supreme Allied Commander of, 283–84; tensions with European integration, 281–82; U.S. primacy within, 282–84; U.S. self-restraint within, 285–86 Notter, Harley, 53, 125 NSC 68. See National Security Council directive 68 Nye, Gerald P., 31, 133 Nye Committee report, 31 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 202 Ohly, John, 311 Old World, corrupting influence of, 2–3 Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 6 “One World,” ix, xii, xxviii; Cold War fragmentation of, xxviii, 213, 218, 326; versus “Free World,” 214; Wendell Wilkie’s conception of, 51 Open Door, U.S. support for the economic, 7, 14, 27, 109, 114, 166, 176, 194, 202 open world, U.S. vision of an, xi, xvii, xix; America’s liberal identity reflected in the, xix; collective security, economic multilateralism and self-determination as components of the, xi, 326; Soviet Union as a threat to the, 73–74; versus Soviet conception of a closed world, 215 Organization of American States (OAS), the, xxx, 223; nonintervention principles of, 291; Resolution on the Preservation and Defense of Democracy in America of, 291

Index Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), 232, 242, 244; as a vehicle for European integration, 246, 249, 281; impact on multilateral cooperation in Europe of the, 243; plan of action of the, 240; U.S. engagement with the, 243–44 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 232; As security community, 327 O’Sullivan, James, 305 Ottawa Agreements, 113, 123, 131–32, 154 Paine, Thomas, 1, 3 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 8 Paris Peace Treaty (1783), 2 Paris. See France Pasvolsky, Leo, 46, 57, 86, 90, 96 Pearl Harbor: impact on U.S. isolationism, xxiv, 50; effect on postwar planning, 50, 52 Peek, George N., 118 “peril points,” 252 “peripheral defense,” of Europe, 272 permanent alliances, U.S. historical opposition toward, 3 Petersberg Agreements, 279 Philippines, The: as a model for decolonization, xxviii, 177, 186, 191, 298, 300, 307; Bell Trade Act with, 300; consolidation of postwar U.S. hegemony over, 300; Hukbalahap insurgency in, 307; Military Trade Agreement with, 300; U.S. pledge to emancipate, 186–87, 193 Phillips, William, 189 Pinay, Antoine, 314 Plan de Modernisation et d’Equipement, 164 Point Four program, 223, 312 Poland: as a test of Soviet intentions, 85; Big Three disagreements over postwar government of, 85, 87, 89; FDR policy toward, 85, 87; German

369

invasion of, 41; westward shift of frontiers of, 87 Political culture: influence on U.S. foreign policy of, xx–xxiii; liberal and republican nature of U.S., 3; Unique nature of American, xx–xxi. See also Exceptionalism, American politics of productivity, the, 236 Polk, James K, 6 Pollard, Robert, 214 Portsmouth, Treaty of, 10 postwar planning, U.S., xxvi, 46–47, 50, 52–55; changing concepts of national security in, 53; Connection to real world problems, 54–55; emphasis on multilateralism and international institutions in, 51, 53; for the postwar world economy, 110, 122–28, 142–47, 150–54; for world organization, 46, 52–60; guiding assumptions behind, 52–53, 217, 254; impact of U.S. political culture and historical traditions on, 51, 53–54; influence of historical lessons on, 51; New Deal as a model for, 54 Potsdam, 217–18, 298 power, structural vs. relational, 106 Proposals for Expansion of World Trade and Employment, 161 protectionism, xxiii, 108, 111, 112, 117–118, 122, 130, 134, 144, 162–63, 167, 233, 236, 248, 258–59, 261 Quebec Conference, 196 rational choice theory: as an explanation for postwar multilateralism, xiv–xvi, 107–9, 268–69, 327; limitations of, xviii, 108–109; versus constructivism, xix–xx realism: as approach to international relations; versus idealism, xix, 8–10 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), the, 109, 118–122, 232; as a catalyst in U.S. liberalization,

370

Index

120–21; as a landmark in U.S. trade policy, 119, 122; domestic constituency for, 121; GATT reliance on, 251, 255; legislative history of, 121, 123, 150, 153, 259; multilateral implications of, 122; political and security benefits of, 124; role in weakening of protectionist constituencies, 119; safeguards for domestic producers under, 121; unconditional MFN principle embodied in, 120 Reciprocity, 232; diffuse, xiv; in U.S. trade policy, 114; vs. parity, 121 Red Army, 83 Reed, Charles, 305, 307 regionalism: Anglo-American differences over, 57; as a possible element of postwar world organization, 46, 57–60; collision between a universal conception of the UN and, 57–59; as legitimated in UN Charter, 76 reparations, German, 26–27 Report on Postwar Economic Policy. See Courtin Report Republican Party, 11, 13, 17, 44, 307; economic nationalists within, 252; evolution of attitudes toward international organization, 61–66; gains in 1942 elections, 150; Victory in 1946 elections, 221, 251–52 Revers, General, 307 Reynolds, Robert, 63 Rhineland, 30, 236, 276 Rio Treaty, xxx; as a model for regional European defense, 272; as a model for NATO, 277–78; collective defense provisions of, 290–91; lack of U.S. military assistance under, 291; multilateral form of, 223 Rockefeller, Nelson, 90, 96 Roosevelt, Elliot, 190 Roosevelt, Franklin D., x, xxiii, 220, 328; “Quarantine” speech, 33; anticolonial sentiments of, 184–85,

187, 190, 194; death of, 89; defense of Dumbarton Oaks by, 79; desire to reconcile balance of power with collective security of, 55–56, 328; “Four Freedoms” speech by, 47; “Four Policemen” concept of, 56–57; “Grand Design” of, 56, 63; Landslide victory of 1936 by, 33; maneuvering against isolationism by, 32–35, 45–46 55, 62; “Methods short of War” speech, 34; optimism about co-opting Moscow, 84, 84; posture toward League of Nations, 32; pressure on British Empire, 186; realism and idealism in thinking of, 49, 59; reelection in 1944 of, 79, 153; rejection of spheres of influence and unilateralism, 55, 73–74, 89; support for UN Trusteeship system of, 191–93; victory in 1940 election of, 45 Roosevelt Administration (FDR): anticolonialism of, 184–95, 329; assumptions of US-Soviet cooperation held by, 60; campaign against global economic fragmentation by, 122–24; cultivation of Congress by, 63–64, 73, 148–49; invocations of American exceptionalism, 80; public education on Dumbarton Oaks by, 79–80; skepticism of Wilsonian internationalism within, 51; support for postwar international organization, 55–62, 73–74; trade liberalization program of, 106–7, 122–24, 136; world order vision of, 35, 41–42, 328 Roosevelt, Theodore: as both realist and idealist, 10; Corollary to Monroe Doctrine pronounced by, 10; defense of U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action by, 64–65; great power internationalism of, 1, 10–12, 327–28; “Great White Fleet” dispatched by, 10; influence of American exceptionalism in

Index thinking of, 10–11; Nobel Prize speech of, 11; skepticism about League of Nations of, 17; sudden death of, 38n54; support for an international “police power” by, 10; versus Woodrow Wilson, 11 Root, Elihu, 20, 23 Roxas, Manuel, 300 Ruggie, John Gerard, xvii, 82 Ruhr, 29, 236, 247, 248, 276 Rumsfeld, Donald, 333 Rusk, Dean, 307 Saar, 237, 248, 276, 279 San Francisco Conference, the, 74, 90–97, 290; Big Five domination of, 92; constraints of multilateral diplomacy evident at, 92; debate over colonial empires at, 203; gambit by lesser powers to amend Charter at, 91; regionalism versus universalism debate at, 96; Truman instructions to U.S. delegation bound for, 91; Truman’s closing remarks to, 96–97; U.S. efforts to coopt small countries at, 91–92 Sayre, Francis B., 122, 125 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 87, 215 Schuman, Robert, 279, 246–47 Schuman Plan, 247–50; as a solution to France’s predicament, 248–49; U.S. endorsement of, 249 Schurman, Franz, 98–99 self-determination: ambiguous meaning of, 178–79; as a pillar of America’s open world vision, xxvi, xxviii, 173–75; as a U.S. war aim in World War I, 178; as impossible under communism, 311; Atlantic Charter provisions for, 185–87; consistency of Monroe Doctrine with, 176; difficulties in practical application of, 175, 179, 180–82, 206, 299, 317–18; empire and spheres of influence as antithetical to, 174–75; global peace and, xxv, 173–75, 177–78, 185, 193–94, 206, 329;

371

historical U.S. attachment to, xxviii, 174–78; impact of Cold War on U.S. support for, xxx, 214, 297–99, 331; impact on dependent peoples of doctrine of, 178; motivations for U.S. support for, 174–175, 185, 329; of the Philippines, 177; Political versus ethno-national, 179; potentially destabilizing impact of, 178–80; selective application at the Paris Peace Conference of, 174, 180– 81, 183; U.S. retreat from, at end of World War II, 174, 202–5, 331; universal applicability of doctrine, in U.S. view, 185, 187, 183, 206. See also: National Self determination Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 11, 62, 98, 188, 240, 275, 278, 280 Shotwell, James, 46 Smith, Adam, xxi, 114, 127–28 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, 31, 113, 119, 254 Socialist Party, French, 303 South East Asia Command, 299 Southeast Asia: outburst of nationalism in, 301, 305; vulnerability to Communist inroads of, 305 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 287; differences between NATO and the, 286–88; Eisenhower administration view of the, 287–88 Sovereignty, U.S. national, xxvi–xxvii; The League of Nations and, 19–24; Bretton Woods and, 148; Implications of UN Charter for, 78 Soviet Union, the, x, xxviii; acquisition of atomic bomb by, 226, 281; refusal to participate in ITO of, 158; sources of conduct of, 215–18; sphere of influence in Eastern Europe of, 76, 216, 269; stance on Security Council veto by, 76, 78, 86– 87; U.S. efforts to co-opt, 217, 328; world order vision of, xvii–xviii, xxviii Spaak, Paul-Henri, 272

372

Index

Spanish Civil War, 30 Spanish-American War, 7 Special Technical and Economic Mission, 312–313 Spheres of influence: as a threat to U.S. open world vision, xxvii–xviii, 83, 84, 88, 213–214, 216; as source of conflict, 81–82; British exasperation at U.S. policy regarding, 82–85; Churchill-Stalin “percentages agreement” regarding, 84–85; nuances of U.S. opposition to, 216, 291; NATO and, 267; “open” versus “closed,” 88, 216; perceived as unAmerican, 81–83, 216 Soviet policy regarding, 82–90; thoughts of Bohlen and Kennan on, 216; U.S. wartime resistance to negotiating, xxvii, 81–86 Spykman, Nicholas, 50 St. Laurent, Louis, 275 Stalin, 76, 86, 87, 93, 311; “Two camps” speech by, 160, 217 Stalingrad, 83 Stassen, Harold, 90 sterling, postwar role of, 146, 148, 233 sterling bloc, as obstacle to multilateral trade, 156 Stettinius, Edward, 74, 85, 89, 90, 93, 98, 153; defense of UNO by, 79; reassurance to British on trusteeship by, 200–201 Stikker, Dirk, 301 Stimson, Henry L., 96; support for Kellogg-Briand Pact by, 28; desire to annex former Japanese mandates of, 203; reflections on U.S. sphere in Latin America of, 216 strategic restraint, xv Streit, Clarence K, 50–51 Subcommittee on Economic Problems, 125 Subic Bay Naval Base, 300 Suggested Charter for an International Trade Organization, 161, 232, 250 Sukarno, 301

Taft, Robert, 44, 133, 149, 217, 252, 268, 300; attack on Lend-Lease by, 155; criticism of Bretton Woods from, 148; opposition to British Loan and multilateralism by, 160; skepticism of North Atlantic Treaty of, 280–81; skepticism regarding UNO of, 62, 65 Taft, William Howard, 11 Tariff Commission, U.S., 115, 252, 259 Tariff policy, U.S.: Advantages of executive control over, 119; Credibility of executive branch pledges on, 153, 157; Historical trends in, 112–14, 119 Taussig, Frank, 115 Teheran Conference, 58, 196 Teitgen, Pierre-Henri, 272 Teller Amendment, 177 Thorez, Maurice, 303 trade policy, U.S.: impact of Cold War on, 161, 168, 252; nondiscrimination as a principle of, 113–15; shifting preferences in, 109; State Department leadership in planning postwar, 110, 150–54; tariff reduction as a component of postwar, 152–54 transatlantic security: German reconstruction and, 275; Kennan’s views on, 274; nature of U.S. commitment to, 268, 274–82; postwar options for, 268–69, 274, 283; U.S. insistence on multilateral approach to, 267–73, 277 Transparency, xiv Truman, Harry S., x, xxii, 89, 158, 218–20, 253, 255, 274, 302; advocacy of United Nations, 80; emphasis on great power restraint within UNO by, 97; hard line against Soviets by, 89–90; multilateral vision of, 213; support for decolonization by, 300; termination of Lend-Lease by, 155– 56; warnings of global economic fragmentation of, 233

Index Truman Administration: and the ITO by, 257; and the Marshall Plan, 234–37; continuity between Roosevelt Administration and, 227; European integration as a goal of, 240, 242–50; frustrations with French policy in Indochina of, 314; multilateral approach to European recovery of, 242; negotiations and lobbying for NATO by, 277–80; opposition to closed, Axis-style blocs of, 216; role in the origins of NATO of, 270–75; sale of British Loan to Congress, 159–60; support for collective defense in Western Hemisphere, 290 Truman Doctrine, the, xxviii, 219–22; American exceptionalism reflected in, 220; assumptions behind, 219; Implications for U.S. global leadership of, 220; Mannichean world view embodied in, 220; Mediterranean crisis precipitating, 219; Sweeping nature of, 220 Trusteeship, UN, xxviii, 173, 191–93; as a spur to decolonization, 192; as middle ground between unreconstructed imperialism and precipitous decolonization, 193–94, 206; attitude of U.S. defense officials toward, 199–200; De Gaulle’s cynical view of, 198; debate over scope of system, 191–92, 207; evolution of State Department thinking, 192; former Japanese mandated islands and, 196, 203, 206–7; Hull’s views on, 192; intention by FDR to apply to all colonies, 191; OSS skepticism of, 202; principle and calculation in U.S. support for, 192–93; resistance of imperial powers to concept, 195–99, 202; retreat from ambitious wartime schemes for, 195, 200–206; role in delegitimation of empire of, 202, 204–5; support of

373

State Department Asian specialists for, 194 Trusteeship Council, UN, 196–97; as a forum for anti-colonial sentiments, 204; provisions for international supervision and accountability within, 204–5; U.S. position on, 309; “Two-level game,” 17, 331 Unilateralism, xiv–xvi, xxiii, xxvi, 1, 331, 333; Allied objections to perceived U.S., 285; As contrary to the American ethos, 223; costs of, 333; Expanding nineteenth century scope of U.S., 5–7; FDR rejection of as basis for U.S. global engagement, 52, 64; Limits in achieving U.S. foreign policy objectives, xxx; Soviet, in East and Central Europe, 74 Unipolar moment, 326 United Nations, Joint Declaration of the, 50 United Nations Charter: amendments at San Francisco, 91; balance between collective security and realities of power in, 91, 98, 328; Chapter 7 provisions of, 93; consistency with Monroe Doctrine, 95–96, 98; Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories in, 95, 204; discretion given to Security Council by, 93; hearings and ratification by Senate, 97–99; historical lessons reflected in, 75; human rights concerns within, 77, 91; impact on decolonization, 95; implications for U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action, 93, 97–98; International Trusteeship System in, 95, 204; Military Staff Committee envisioned in, 93; open, rule-bound conception of world order reflected in, 99; Preamble of, 92; press commentary on, 97; presumption of Soviet

374

Index

restraint within, 214; protection of Congressional prerogatives under, 74–75, 78–79, 98; provision for regional security arrangements in, 75, 95–96; self-defense provisions of, 275; Vandenberg’s support for, 98; versus League Covenant, 93, 97–98 United Nations Conference on International Organization. See San Francisco Conference United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), purpose of, 77; Motivations for creating, 94–95; Supervision of specialized agencies, 94–95 United Nations General Assembly: Soviet insistence on additional seats in, 77, 87, 89; question of extra U.S. seats in, 87, 89; Mandate and role of, 56, 59, 77–78, 94 United Nations Organization (UNO), xi, xxvii, 42, 73–104, 143, 290, 328; as global expression of U.S. domestic principles, 80, 328; balance between sovereign equality and great power privilege in, 60, 67, 74, 77, 79; dependence on great power restraint to function, 60, 74, 75, 78, 84, 100; expansion of membership, 297; impact on U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action, 60, 64–65, 78–79, 96; international police force envisioned for, 62; marginalization during Cold War, 221, 271; multipurpose nature of, 77, 92; planning for postwar, 57–60; potential U.S. military commitments to, 76; regional dimension within, 57–60; SecretaryGeneral’s role in, 95; shifting domestic support for, 60–66, 80; U.S. Outline Plan for, 59 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 155, 232

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Conference, 54 United Nations Security Council, xxvii, 93–98; decisions binding on member states within, 75, 92; inability to operate as Concert, 100; negotiations over role of, 75; provision of standby military forces to, 76, 93; responsibilities for international peace and security, 92; versus League Council, 92; veto within, U.S. views on, 64, 75–76. See also veto “United States of Europe,” 240, 243 United States Information Agency (USIA), 312–13 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 153, 257 U.S. Council of the International Chamber of Commerce, 257 U.S. foreign policy: competing visions in early twentieth century, 7–10; Re-orientation during World War II, ix, 67 Urquhart, Sir Brian, 95 Vandenberg, Arthur, 34, 44–45, 50, 74, 90, 94, 96, 98, 123, 133, 150, 161, 237, 252, 290; conditional support for international organization by, 80–81; intellectual evolution from isolationism to internationalism of, 63–64, 80–81; Role in Truman Doctrine of, 219, 221; support for Dumbarton Oaks by, 86; thoughts on nature of NATO commitment of, 275, 278–80; warnings about Soviet unilateralism from, 85–86, 89–90 Vandenberg Resolution, 274–76 Versailles Treaty: depicted as a failed Carthagenian peace, 29; France’s strategic dilemma undressed by, 29; Senate failure to ratify, 23–24; U.S. public skepticism of, 25 veto, within Security Council: Big Three disagreements over limits to,

Index 75–76, 78, 86–87, 95; Congressional and administration views on, 64; efforts by small states to circumscribe, 93; FDR thoughts on use of, 87; great power solidarity dependent on, 77–78, 93; U.S. compromise formula, 86, 93 Vichy, 190 Viet Minh, 302 Vincent, John Carter, 304 Wallace, Henry, 38–39n81, 50 War of 1812, U.S. neutrality in, 4–5 Washington Commercial and Financial Accords. See Blum-Byrnes Accords Washington Naval Conference and Treaties, 27 Washington, George, 3–4, 12 Washington. See United States Weber, Max, xvi Welles, Sumner, 46, 55, 57, 131, 173, 187, 192–95; A Time for Decision, book by, 65 Western Hemisphere: collective defense in, 290; regional collective security system for, 12; U.S. approach to postwar security of, 289–91 Western Union Defense Organization, 283 Wheeler, Burton K., 25, 45 White, Harry Dexter, 90, 143 White, Wallace, 64 White Paper on Employment, 152 White Plan, for postwar monetary relations, 143–44 White, William Allen, 43 Wilcox, Clair, 125, 157, 250–52, 255–56 Wilkie, Wendell, 44, 51, 78, 97; anticolonial attitudes of, 187; world tour and publication of One World by, 61 Williams, John H., 148 Wilson, Woodrow, ix, xxvi, 220; advocacy of a “community of power” by, 13; hemispheric

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plans for collective security, 12–13; international institutions as foundation of world order, in view of, 15–16; liberal internationalism of, 12–16; rehabilitation of image during World War II, 65; role in League of Nations debate of, 16–24; stroke and debility, 23; support for collective security and rejection of balance of power by, 15 support for open trade by, 15, 114–16; support for self-determination by, 174, 177– 78, 181; world order vision of, 15 Wolfers, Arnold: concept of “milieu” versus “possession” goals, 50 Wood, Robert E., 44 World Bank, 101, 111, 142, 154, 232–33; irrelevance to European recovery, 233; purpose and function, 143 World Court, U.S. rejection of, 32 world economy: competing visions of, among U.S. trade partners, 253; divergent U.S. and European approaches to, 167–68; need for postwar multilateral management of, 142–43; postponement of multilateral, 213–61; specter of fragmentation of, 119, 122, 147, 162, 184, 260; transatlantic negotiations over postwar, 108, 111, 127–30; U.S. domination of, 105, 125, 142, 154; U.S. planning for postwar, xxvii, 106, 125–26, 141–42, 150–54 world order: clashing US and Soviet visions of, 100, 215–17, 219; competing great power visions of, xvii–xix, xxii, xvii, 270; crumbling of during 1930s, 28–30; multilateralism and, x; multipolar, U.S. support for, 222; persistence of European empires as threat to postwar, 193–95; role of international institutions in U.S. approach to, xxii, 98–99, 224–25; twenty-first century relevance of multilateral, 332–33; U.S. role in

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Index

shaping postwar, 99–100, 213; U.S. vision of post-war, ix, 35, 41–42, 50–51, 213 World War I: Perceived lessons of, for Roosevelt administration, 55; U.S. public disillusionment following, 25; U.S. war aims in, 14 World War II, ix; domestic debate over entry into, 43–45; impact on colonial world of, 299; negative impact on other world powers of, 105–6; perceived roots in economic

rivalry of, 117; start of U.S. postwar planning during, 41, 46–47, 50; U.S. response to outbreak of, 42–43 Yalta, 74, 86–90: canard that Roosevelt “sold out” Eastern Europe at, 88; Declaration on Liberated Europe at, 88; question of Poland at, 87; Churchill’s attack on trusteeship at, 200; Roosevelt’s limited leverage at, 89–90; U.S. priorities at, 87 Young Plan, 27

About the Author

Stewart Patrick is senior fellow and director of the program on international institutions and global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining the Council, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, directing the center’s work on weak states and U.S. national security. From 2002–2005 he served on the Secretary of State’s policy planning staff, helping formulate U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and a range of global and transnational issues. Prior to government service, he was a research associate at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. He is the author, co-author, or editor of four books, including Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement, and has written numerous articles on multilateral cooperation, fragile states, post-conflict reconstruction, and U.S. foreign and national security policy. A graduate of Stanford University, he earned two masters degrees and a doctorate from Oxford University.

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