a change. After the Spanish–American War, it had ceased to be territorial, becoming with Wilson all but metaphysical. During the Cold War, it was articulated with less rapture, in a moral-political register occupying a lower position in the ideological hierarchy. But the connexion with religion remained. In his final inaugural address of 1944, Roosevelt had declared: ‘The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for our freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.’ Truman, speaking on the day he dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, was equally forthright about the country’s strong arms: ‘We thank God that it [the atomic bomb] has come to us, and not our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His Ways and for His purposes.’ Amid the postwar ruins, the president was more expansive. ‘We are going forward to meet our destiny, which I think Almighty God intended us to have’, he announced: ‘We are going to be the leaders’.20 Viewing the destruction in Germany, Kennan found himself ‘hushed by the realization that it was we who had been chosen by the Almighty to be the agents of it’,21 but in due course uplifted by the awesome challenge that the same Providence had granted Americans in the form of the Cold War. Since then, the deity has continued to guide the United States, from the time of Eisenhower, when ‘In God We Trust’ was made the official motto of the nation, to Kennedy exclaiming: ‘With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own’—down to the declaration of the younger Bush, that ‘Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world’, and Obama’s confidence that God continues to call Americans to their destiny: to bring, with His grace, ‘the great gift of freedom’ to posterity.22 America would not be America without faith in the supernatural. But for obvious reasons this component of the national ideology is inner-directed, without much appeal abroad, and so now relegated to the lowest rung in the structure of imperial justification.
To be effective, an ideology must reflect as well as distort, or conceal, reality. At the outset, as at the conclusion, of the Cold War, the United States possessed few colonies, was indeed an electoral democracy, did confront a sociopolitical system that was not, and as in the past enjoyed extraordinary natural advantages of size, location and endowments. All these could be, and were, synthesized into an imperial ideology commanding popular consensus, if never unanimity, at home, and power of attraction, if never ubiquitous, abroad. But the ultimately determinant instance in the formation of American foreign policy lay elsewhere, and could receive only circumspect articulation until the Cold War was won. So long as communism was a threat, capitalism was all but a taboo term in the vocabulary of the West. In the US itself, the virtues of free enterprise were certainly always prominent in the national liturgy, but even in this idiom were rarely projected as leitmotifs of the global defence of liberty against the totalitarian danger. The managers of the empire were aware that it would be counterproductive to foreground them. Early drafts of the presidential speech that would become the Truman Doctrine, prepared by his aides Clifford and Elsey, presented Greece as a strategic line of defence for access to oil in the Middle East and, noting that ‘there has been a world-wide trend away from the system of free enterprise’, warned that ‘if, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in the other nations of the world, the very existence of our own economy and our own democracy will be gravely threatened’. This was speaking too plainly. Truman objected that it ‘made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus’, and Acheson made sure such cats were not let out of the bag.23 Even free trade, however essential to a Pax Americana, was not accorded top billing as an ideological imperative. But what, for the time being, was least conspicuous in the hierarchy of its legitimations would, as events were going to show, be most decisive in the map of its operations. For the moment, the Cold War had to be won, and the catechism of security was paramount.
III
The Great Contest, as Deutscher called it, is still generally taken as the defining framework of American grand strategy in the postwar epoch. But the exigencies of the struggle against communism, all-consuming as these became, were only one, if protracted, phase within a longer and wider arc of American power-projection, which has outlived them by half as many years again. Since it came to an end, the Cold War has produced an often remarkable body of international scholarship. But this has nearly always remained unseeing of the dynamic predating, encompassing and exceeding it. For all its scope and intensity, the Cold War was—in the words of an outstanding exception to this literature—‘merely a sub-plot’ within the larger history of American global domination.24
That exception came from the tradition which pioneered modern study of American imperialism, founded in Wisconsin by William Appleman Williams in the fifties. Williams’s American–Russian Relations (1952), Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and The Contours of American History (1961) argued that the march to the internal frontier within North America, allowing a settler society to escape the contradictions of race and class of an emergent capitalist economy, had been extended across the Pacific in the drive for an Open Door empire of commerce, and then in the fuite en avant of a bid for global dominion that could not brook even a defensive Soviet Union. For Williams, this was a morally disastrous trajectory, generated by a turning away from the vision of a community of equals that had inspired the first arrivals from the Old World. Produced before the US assault in Vietnam, Williams’s account of a long-standing American imperialism struck with prophetic force in the sixties. The historians who learnt from him—Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Patrick Hearden—shed the idealism of his explanatory framework, exploring with greater documentation and precision the economic dynamics of American diplomacy, investment and warfare from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. The Wisconsin School was not alone in its critical historiography of empire. Kolko’s monumental Politics of War shared the same political background, of revulsion at the war in Vietnam, if not intellectual affiliation.
To the regnant liberalism of the time, and since, this was an aberrant optic for viewing America’s postwar role in the world. It was not requirements of profitability, but of security that formed the guideline of US foreign policy, set by the conflict of the Cold War rather than the objectives of the Open Door. Leading the reaction was John Lewis Gaddis, who over four decades has tirelessly upheld patriotic truths about his country and the dangers it faced. The Cold War, he explained at the peak of the US bombing of Vietnam in 1972, had been forced on a reluctant American government that did not want it, but wanted insecurity even less. Responsibility for the conflict fell on a Soviet dictator who was not answerable to any public opinion, and so could have avoided a confrontation that democratic rulers in Washington, who had to heed popular feelings outraged by Russian behaviour, could not. The domestic political system, rather than anything to do with the economy, determined the nation’s conduct of foreign affairs.25 If there was such a thing as an American empire—perhaps ‘revisionism’, after all, had a case there—it was one by invitation, freely sought in Western Europe from fear of Soviet aggression, unlike the Russian empire imposed by force on Eastern Europe.26 American policy towards the world, he insisted a decade later, had always been primarily defensive. Its leitmotif was containment, traceable across successive declensions from the time of Truman to that of Kissinger, in an arc of impressive restraint and clairvoyance.27
Another ten years on, the Cold War now won, Gaddis could reveal what ‘We Now Know’ of its real nature: a battle of good against evil as contemporaries
