The New American Empire?
Americans have an enduring aversion to planting the flag on foreign soil. Is that attitude changing?
Containment. The post-World War II reality soon compelled American statesmen and politicians to think beyond the vision of benign multilateral cooperation. Joseph Stalin made it clear in a 1946 speech that there could be no real cooperation between capitalist and communist nations. In the same year, Winston Churchill warned about an "iron curtain" descending across Europe, while diplomat George F. Kennan sent in his famous "long telegram," which warned of the Kremlin's "neurotic view of world affairs" and its determination to destroy "our traditional way of life" to secure Soviet supremacy. Kennan's later article for Foreign Affairs, signed "X," called for "firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." Other warnings and Soviet actions led to the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Thanks to his masterful salesmanship, Harry Truman managed, as Kupchan writes, "to galvanize the support of the public behind economic aid, re-armament, and the formation of the alliance network needed to contain communism." In 1950, Kennan's successor as head of the State Department's policy planning staff, Paul Nitze, called for a massive buildup of U.S. military might. With the Korean War underway, Congress responded by quadrupling the defense budget. Containment would undergo many modifications until the collapse of the Soviet empire, as it continues to do today in American policies against rogue states and terrorists.
Global meliorism. McDougall's ungainly phrase encompasses a range of policies, all connected with doing good works abroad and generally making the world a better place to live. Such policies had been occasionally implemented even before the middle of the 20th century. For instance, the Herbert Hoover-directed War Food and American Relief administrations brought necessities to Belgium and other European nations during and after World War I. But foreign aid and development efforts took off as World War II ended, with Roosevelt championing the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to help pay for postwar reconstruction. After the war, Truman's $13 billion Marshall Plan spurred Europe's miraculous economic recovery and created the momentum for its growing integration. Just as important, the plan served as a model of what aid and democracy building might achieve. Critics, including Henry Kissinger, voiced their skepticism that big government-to-government aid would lead other nations to democracy, but assistance became an arm of the struggle against communism. The huge but ultimately failed experiment in "nation-building" in Vietnam dealt a stinging, though not fatal, blow to the confidence of the meliorists. In varying degrees, Washington supported improvement efforts up to and through the end of the Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a growing faith that the spread of free markets and democracy would occur almost inevitably. The odd rogue state would have to be restrained, as the first President Bush made clear in the Gulf War; and military muscle might be needed to back humanitarian interventions when ethnic conflict flared, as President Clinton showed in Bosnia and Kosovo. Otherwise, it was believed, the road to a new world order needed little maintenance. "We clearly have it within our means . . . to lift billions and billions of people around the world into the global middle class," Clinton declared in 1998.
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