that ’American policy-makers seem to have understood much more readily than most of us have believed that there was an intrinsic connection between the spread of capitalism as a system and the victory of American political values’: Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London 2000, p. 10. Five years later, The Global Cold War contains a few nervous, indecisive pages on economic considerations in US foreign policy, without significant bearing on the subsequent narrative, before concluding with perceptible relief at the end of it, that—as exemplified by the invasion of Iraq—‘freedom and security have been, and remain the driving forces of US foreign policy’: pp. 27–32, 405. A discreet footnote in Kimball informs us that ‘historians have only begun to grapple with the intriguing questions posed by William Appleman Williams’, and taken up Gardner and Kolko, as against ‘the more commonly accepted viewpoint which emphasizes power politics and Wilsonian idealism’ and does not ‘really deal with the question of America’s overall economic goals and their effect on foreign policy’—a topic handled somewhat gingerly, if not without a modicum of realism, in the ensuing chapter on Lend-Lease: The Juggler, pp. 218–9, 43–61. Of the typical modulations to traditional Cold War orthodoxy, McCormick once justly observed: ‘While post-revisionists may duly note materialist factors, they then hide them away in an undifferentiated and unconnected shopping-list of variables. The operative premise is that multiplicity, rather than articulation, is equivalent to sophistication’: ‘Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History’, Reviews in American History, December 1982, pp. 318–9.
34Robert W. Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, Baltimore 1971, pp. 11, 23, 58–64, 107–11, 149: a conservative study of great intellectual elegance. Likewise, from an English liberal, John A. Thompson, ‘William Appleman Williams and the “American Empire”’, Journal of American Studies, April 1973, pp. 91–104, a closer textual scrutiny.
Left unresolved in the exchanges of that period were both the general structure of the relations between state and capital in the modern era, and the particular historical form these had taken in the United States. That the pattern of incentives and constraints to which the two were subject could never be identical was written into the independent origins of each. Capitalism, as a system of production without borders, emerged into a European world already territorially divided into a plurality of late feudal states pitted in rivalry against each other, each with its own means of aggression and systems of coercion. In due course, when absolutist monarchies became capitalist nation-states, economic and political power, fused in the feudal order, became structurally separated. Once direct producers were deprived of the means of subsistence, becoming dependent for their livelihoods on a labour market, extra-economic coercion was no longer required to exploit them. But their exploiters were still divided into the multiplicity of states they had inherited, along with the tensions between them. The result, as classically formulated by Robert Brenner, was twofold.1 On the one hand, such states could not contradict the interests of capital without undermining themselves, since their power depended on the prosperity of an economy governed by the requirements of profitability. On the other hand, the activities of states could not be subject to the same set of incentives and constraints as those of firms. For while the field of inter-state—like that of inter-firm—relations was also one of competition, it lacked either the institutional rules of a market or the transparency of a price mechanism for adjudicating claims of rationality or efficiency. There was no external counterpart to the internal settlement of the coordination problem. The consequence was a continual risk of miscalculations and sub-optimal—at the limit, disastrous—outcomes for all contending parties.
The aim of capital is profit. What is the comparable objective of the state? In polite parlance, ‘security’, whose arrival as the conventional definition of the ultimate purpose of the state coincided, after 1945, with the universal sublimation of Ministries of War into Ministries of Defence. Nebulous as few others, the term was—as it remains—ideally suited for all-purpose ideological use.2 Spykman had coolly noted the reality behind it: ‘The struggle for power is identical with the struggle for survival, and the improvement of the relative power position becomes the primary objective of the internal and external policy of states’, for ‘there is no real security in being just as strong as a potential enemy; there is security only in being a little stronger’.3 After 1945, even that ‘little’ would become an archaism. Leffler’s study of the Truman years can be read as a vast scholarly exfoliation of Tucker’s incisive conclusion twenty years earlier: the meaning of national security had been extended to the limits of the earth.4 Conceptually, however, Leffler’s work retained a prudent ambiguity. ‘Fear and power’, he wrote—‘not unrelenting Soviet pressure, not humanitarian impulses, not domestic political considerations, not British influence’—were ‘the key factors shaping American policies’.5 Fear and power—the need for security, the drive for primacy: were they of equal significance, or was one of greater import than the other? The title and evidence of Leffler’s book point unambiguously one way; the judicious casuistics of its ending, the other.
In postwar Washington, a ‘preponderance of power’ was not simply, however, the standard goal of any major state—the pursuit, as Spykman put it, ‘not of an equilibrium, but a generous margin’ of strength. Objectively, it had another meaning, rooted in the unique character of the US as a capitalist state not only encompassing far the largest and most self-sufficient industrial economy in the world, but sheltering behind its oceans from any credible attack by rival or enemy. On the plane of Weltpolitik there thus emerged a wide gap between the potential power of the American state and the actual extent of American interests. Entry into the Second World War narrowed the distance and transformed the structure of the relationship between them. The Depression had made it clear to policy-makers that the US economy was not insulated from shockwaves in the worldwide system of capital, and the outbreak of war that autarkic trading blocs not only threatened exclusion of US capital from large geographical zones, but risked military conflagrations that could endanger the stability of bourgeois civilization at large. Thereafter, participation in the war yielded a double bonus: the American economy grew at a phenomenal rate under the stimulus of military procurements, GNP doubling between 1938 and 1945; and all three of its main industrial rivals—Germany, Britain, Japan—emerged from the conflict shattered or weakened, leaving Washington in a position to reshape the universe of capital to its requirements.
The elites of the Great Power that acquired this capacity were closer to business and banking than those of any other state of the time. The highest levels of policy-making in the Truman administration were packed with investment bankers and corporate lawyers, leading industrialists and traders: Forrestal, Lovett, Harriman, Stettinius, Acheson, Nitze, McCloy, Clayton, Snyder, Hoffman—a stratum unlikely to overlook the interests of American capital in redesigning the postwar landscape. Free enterprise was the foundation of every other freedom. The US alone could assure its preservation and extension worldwide, and was entitled to the benefits of doing so. In the immediate aftermath of the war, when fears of a possible return to depression in the wake of demobilization were common, the opening of overseas markets to US exports—an idée fixe within the wartime State Department—was widely regarded as vital for future prosperity.
The Cold War altered this calculus. Economic recovery of Western Europe and Japan had always been seen as a condition of the free-trade system in which American goods could flow to consumer markets restored to solvency abroad. But the Red Army’s arrival on the Elbe and the PLA’s crossing of the Yangzi imposed a different kind of urgency—and direction—on the building of a liberal international order. For the time being, the Open Door would have to be left somewhat ajar, European and Japanese markets more protected than American, or foreseen, if a totalitarian adversary of markets of any
