The World America Made (2 page)

But this self-perception, while sincere, bears no relation to reality. Since the late nineteenth century, when the United States became a world power, Americans have used force dozens of times, and rarely because they had no choice.
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They have sent troops to Mexico and Central America to depose troublesome leaders; they have fought the Spanish in Cuba and independence-minded guerrillas in the Philippines; they have fought anti-Western forces in China and communists in Vietnam and Korea, and have sent millions of troops to Europe, twice; they have
fought dictators and jihadis in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. And they have done so for many reasons: to defend themselves from distant threats, to preserve economic interests, to protect peoples from slaughter, to resist aggression, to fight tyranny, to support democracy. Far more than any other democratic people in the world today, Americans see war as a legitimate, even essential, tool of foreign policy.
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Few modern nations, and no modern democracies, more revere their military heroes, both past and present. But every time they go to war, Americans promise themselves they’ll never do it again.

They are even ambivalent about the cause of democracy, with which they have always been so closely identified. Americans, even in Woodrow Wilson’s day, never had a master plan for making the world over in their image. They have often ignored the dictators in their midst, allied with them, aided them, and done business with them. They are not missionaries. But neither have they been able to escape their democratic identity, their democratic conscience, and their conviction that their special cause is, as Ben Franklin said, the “cause of all mankind.” To be an American is to believe in and be committed to what Americans, and only Americans, like to call “our way of life.” Since they believe their founding principles are universal, they measure all other peoples against the same rigid standard. This highly ideological view of the world tells them that all nondemocratic governments are inherently illegitimate and therefore transient. Even John Quincy Adams, in the same speech in which he warned against seeking monsters to destroy, urged the peoples of Europe to follow the American example and mount revolutions
against centuries-old monarchies: “Go thou and do likewise!”

Often Americans have done more than exhort. They have gone out to destroy the monsters, and usually much to the monsters’ surprise. A century ago it was José Santos Zelaya and Victoriano Huerta. In recent years it has been Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi who have had their rules, and in some cases their lives, ended with the help of American force. Yet having leaped into action against these dictators, Americans have often been plagued by doubt. They have resented the costs, both material and moral. Wars are expensive, and occupations even more so. They have also repeatedly rediscovered the unavoidable ethical quandaries of exercising power. Liberating a people requires the same brutal force as conquering them. Even moral wars have immoral consequences. Neither people nor nations can use the tools of war and coercion and hope to keep their hands clean.

Americans have never been comfortable with these brutal facts of life. Their founding ideology contains an irresolvable tension between universalism, the belief that every human being must be allowed to exercise his or her individual rights, and individualism, the belief that among those rights is the right to be left alone. This has made them ambivalent and suspicious about power, even their own, and this ambivalence is often paralyzing. No sooner do they invade and occupy a country than they begin looking for the exits. Critics point out how inferior to the British Empire they are in this respect, but the British for centuries had few if any moral qualms about ruling
other peoples. They believed they had a vocation to rule. They maintained a professional imperial service and a permanent colonial office. Americans may be “imperialists” in the eyes of many, but if so, they are reluctant, conscience-ridden, distracted, halfhearted imperialists. They did not want colonies, even the ones they seized and held for decades. They have no trained cadres for rebuilding and managing the nations they invade and occupy. To give themselves such capabilities would be to acknowledge that they are actually in the business of foreign intervention and occupation. Americans will station forces overseas for decades, so long as no one tells them in advance that that is what they are going to do.
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But they have never considered themselves more than temporarily involved in the management of others’ affairs, even as they have kept troops in some foreign lands for a half century or more.

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that Americans have been ambivalent about their role as global leader. When first challenged to take on that responsibility after World War I, a majority of Americans balked. Only after World War II, with some shame and misgiving for their global abstention in the 1930s, did they grudgingly accept an unusual share of responsibility for the state of the world. But it was a frightening and, at first, unwelcome burden, shouldered not out of magnanimity but only in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union. Harry Truman spoke for many when he declared it “the most terrible responsibility that any nation ever faced.”
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Yet, for all their misgivings, most Americans have also developed a degree of satisfaction in their special role.
During the seventh-inning stretch in every game at Yankee Stadium, the fans rise and offer “a moment of silent prayer for the men and women who are stationed around the globe” defending freedom and “our way of life.” A tribute to those serving, yes, but with an unmistakable glint of pride in the nation’s role “around the globe.”

“We are Americans: part of something larger than ourselves,” declared George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. “For two centuries we’ve done the hard work of freedom.” Even today, presidents and politicians speak of the “leader of the free world” (Barack Obama), the “indispensable nation” (Madeleine Albright) upon which “the world is counting” for “global leadership” (Hillary Clinton). Of course, no sooner are these words uttered than the pride fades and the concerns rise, and the same leaders start talking about the need to focus on “nation building at home.”

Americans, in foreign policy, are torn to the point of schizophrenia. They are reluctant, then aggressive; asleep at the switch, then quick on the trigger; indifferent, then obsessed, then indifferent again. They act out of a sense of responsibility and then resent and fear the burden of responsibility they have taken on themselves. Their effect on the world, not surprisingly, is often the opposite of what they intend. Americans say they want stability in the international system, but they are often the greatest disrupters of stability. They extol the virtues of international laws and institutions but then violate and ignore them with barely a second thought. They are a revolutionary power but think they are a status quo power. They want to be left alone but can’t seem to leave anyone else alone.
They are continually surprising the world with their behavior, but not nearly as much as they are continually surprising themselves.

When Winston Churchill observed that Americans could always be counted on to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other alternatives, it was a sardonic, backhanded kind of compliment. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century he watched them try to do the wrong thing many times. He watched them stay out of World War I in Europe until it was almost too late to prevent a German victory. In the interwar years, he saw them reject participation in the League of Nations and then waited anxiously for them to abandon neutrality and throw their weight against Hitler, which they did only after the attack on Pearl Harbor and only when it was almost too late again. At the dawn of the Cold War he found them insufficiently attentive to the threat of the Soviet Union; then he found them too uncompromising. He knew Americans when they were “sunk in selfishness,” and yet he marveled “at America’s altruism, her sublime disinterestedness.” He compared the United States to some “gigantic boiler,” quiet and cold until “the fire is lighted under it,” and then with “no limit to the power it can generate.”
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Above all, he knew Americans were human beings, neither devils nor angels.

T
HAT IS IMPORTANT TO
keep in mind. It is nations, made up of people, that shape the world, not gods or angels. That is why the present order, shaped by Americans, often unconsciously, and with all their peculiarities
and flaws, is all the more remarkable. The great mastermind of Germany’s unification, Otto von Bismarck, is supposed to have said that God looks out for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America. Perhaps that extends to the world order that Americans have built and maintained, almost despite themselves.

T
HE IRONY IS THAT
the peculiar blend of qualities that Americans have displayed, not all of them admirable, not all of them noble, and not all of them obvious traits of effective leadership, have nevertheless been a strange kind of asset to American foreign policy. For while it is true that the United States has been a powerful if unpredictable and often unwitting agent of change in the world, the ambivalence of the American people as well as their lack of self-awareness has paradoxically made their awesome power less threatening than it might be. Americans would be scarier if they actually had a plan. Their very distractedness, their evident desire to hold themselves apart from the world even as they shape it with their power, makes them an often frustrating ally, a confusing adversary, but also a less imposing, less frightening hegemon.

These qualities proved indispensable more than six decades ago when the United States laid the main foundation for today’s liberal world order by cementing its economic and strategic alliance with Europe. It is easy to forget, now that Europe is supposedly passé and we’ve
entered the “Asian century,” that the world we know today—the political, economic, and strategic order in which Asia itself has prospered—was born atop the rubble of Europe after World War II. And it was born only because the United States supplied a novel solution to Europe’s insoluble problem.

The European powers after the mid-nineteenth century had fallen into a tragic syndrome from which they were unable to extricate themselves. Too many strong and ambitious powers were too close to one another to offer any of them a measure of security. The European balance of power had worked for stretches of time, but it had also failed periodically and catastrophically. Between 1850 and 1945, France and Germany (or Prussia in the first instance) went to war three times—in 1870, 1914, and 1940. Russia and Germany went to war twice. Britain and France together fought Russia once. In between these major wars were several near wars as tensions rose, especially in the Balkans but also in the division of colonial spoils in Africa and East Asia. Even when the European balance of power succeeded in keeping the peace, it was through the constant threat of war, the dispatch of battle fleets to contested waters, the menacing mobilization of ground forces during crises. Europe had become a cockpit of geopolitical rivalry between heavily armed great powers, with no way of ending the cycle of insecurity. All this had transpired despite a common European culture and civilization, an increasingly integrated and interdependent European economy, and blood relations among some of the ruling families.

Enter the United States, reluctantly. Even after World
War II most Americans had never intended to become a global power. Preserving world peace, most imagined vaguely, would somehow be the job of the United Nations. When war ended, the Truman administration looked to pull back across the ocean, rapidly demobilize its armed forces, cut the defense budget, and establish Europe as an independent “third force,” capable of standing up to the Soviet Union by itself. That was the original aim of the Marshall Plan and other efforts to boost Europeans’ shattered confidence, rebuild their devastated economies, and turn onetime enemies into a united European entity. The Europeans, however, were not interested in being a third force, nor, as quickly became apparent, were they capable of it on their own. They wanted “American troops” standing “between them and the Red Army” and to keep a revived Germany in check.
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The NATO alliance was really Europe’s idea more than America’s, an “invitation to empire,” which the Americans grudgingly accepted only when it became clear their original plan was hopeless.
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George Kennan opposed the idea of NATO or any extended American presence in Europe. He feared Americans were “not fitted, either institutionally or temperamentally, to be an imperial power in the grand manner,” and he much preferred to divest “ourselves gradually of the basic responsibility for the security of western Europe.”
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Yet it was precisely Americans’ limitations and hesitations that made them such an attractive leader of the transatlantic “empire.” With the Soviet version of empire taking hold in the East, the great power across the ocean, distant both physically and emotionally, appeared
to Europeans as the perfect deus ex machina to solve their dilemma. The United States was geographically far enough away to be a less threatening hegemon, and with no enemies on its own borders, it was secure enough at home to keep large numbers of its powerful armed forces on permanent station thousands of miles away. It helped that America was a democracy, not only because Americans shared common values with the British and the French, but also because, as the historian John Lewis Gaddis has noted, their style of working with allies had a democratic quality that permitted weaker powers a very unimperial autonomy.
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The United States played a similarly critical role in East Asia after World War II. There, too, large-scale war among neighboring powers had become common by the end of the nineteenth century. Japan and China fought each other several times between 1895 and 1945, at a cost of tens of millions of lives, mostly Chinese. Japan and Russia fought each other twice. Korea served as the battleground for a number of conflicts, and of course the civil war in Korea sucked in both the United States and China. The entrance of the United States into a permanent security role in the region did not put an end to war—the United States itself fought in both Korea and Vietnam—but it did put an end to the cycle of warfare among the region’s great powers. The close American security relationship with Japan mirrored the role the United States played in Germany. The region’s most aggressive power was put out of the aggression business, its people’s vast energies channeled instead into economic growth, technological innovation, and world trade.