collapse of the Creditanstalt in Austria in 1931, and its knock-on effects across Europe. The crisis brought home that, however relatively insulated American factories—farms less so—might still be from world trade, American deposits were not from international financial markets, in a signal that with the passing of London’s role as pivot of the system, and the default of New York as successor, the order of capital as a whole was at risk in the absence of a stabilizing centre. The immediate concerns of Roosevelt’s first term lay in domestic measures to overcome the crisis, prompting unceremonious abandonment of the gold standard and brusque rejection of any coordinated international attempt to manage exchange rates. But by previous standards the New Deal was not protectionist. The Smoot–Hawley Act was dismantled, tariffs selectively lowered, and an impassioned champion of free trade—to American specifications—put in charge of foreign policy: Cordell Hull, the ‘Tennessee Cobden’, becoming the longest-serving secretary of state in US history.
Towards the end of Roosevelt’s second term, as war raged in East Asia and threatened in Europe, rearmament started to make good the weaknesses (highlighted by the recession in 1937) of domestic recovery, giving the New Deal a second wind. The internal fortunes of the American economy and external postures of the American state were henceforward joined as they had never been before. But though the White House was increasingly on the qui vive to developments abroad, and military readiness stepped up, public opinion remained averse to any prospect of a rerun of 1917–1920, and within the administration there was little or no conception of what the American role or priorities might be, should one materialize. Roosevelt had become increasingly alarmed at German and to a lesser extent Japanese belligerence. Hull was concerned above all by the retreat of national economies behind tariff walls, and the erection of trade blocs. At the War Department, Woodring resisted any thought of involvement in a new round of great power conflicts. Beyond conflicting negative apprehensions, there was not yet much positive sense of the place of American power in the world ahead.
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3See Robert Kagan’s clear-eyed Dangerous Nation: America in the World 1600–1900, London 2006, pp. 80, 156; for an assessment, ‘Consilium’, pp. 136–41, below.
4John O’Sullivan, coiner of the slogan and author of these declarations, was an ideologue for Jackson and Van Buren: see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right, New York 1995, pp. 39–42, unsurpassed in its field.
5Seward did not neglect territorial expansion, acquiring Alaska and the Midway Islands and pressing for Hawaii, but regarded this as means not end in the build-up of American power.
6Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, pp. xii–xiii; it is one of the strengths of this study, which assembles a bouquet of the most extravagant pronouncements of American chauvinism, that it also supplies the (often impassioned) counterpoint of its opponents.
7Victor Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony, London 1978, p. 57, which offers a graphic account of imperial imaginings in the ‘Middle Decades’ of the nineteenth century.
8Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, London 1890, p. 87. A prolific commentator on international affairs, adviser to Hay on the Open Door Notes and intimate of the first Roosevelt, Mahan was a vigorous proponent of a martial spirit and robust navalism: peace was merely the ‘tutelary deity of the stock-market’.
9‘Within two generations’, Adams told his readers, America’s ‘great interests will cover the Pacific, which it will hold like an inland sea’, and presiding over ‘the development of Eastern Asia, reduce it to a part of our system’. To that end, ‘America must expand and concentrate until the limit of the possible is attained; for Governments are simply huge corporations in competition, in which the most economical, in proportion to its energy, survives, and in which the wasteful and the slow are undersold and eliminated’. Given that ‘these great struggles sometimes involve an appeal to force, safety lies in being armed and organized against all emergencies’. America’s Economic Supremacy, New York 1900, pp. 194, 50–1, 85, 222. Adams and Mahan were friends, in the White House circle of TR.
10Address to the World’s Salesmanship Congress in Detroit, 10 July 1916: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 37, Princeton 1981, p. 387.
11Campaign address in Jersey City, 26 May 1912: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 24, Princeton 1977, p. 443.
12Address to the Southern Commercial Congress in Mobile, 27 October 1913: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 28, Princeton 1978, p. 52.
13Address in the Princess Theatre in Cheyenne, 24 September 1919: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 63, Princeton 1990, p. 469.
14Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 61, Princeton 1981, p. 436. After whipping up hysteria against anyone of German origin during the war, Wilson had no compunction in declaring that ‘the only organized forces in this country’ against the Versailles Treaty he presented to the Senate were ‘the forces of hyphenated Americans’—‘hyphen is the knife that is being stuck into the document’ (sic): vol. 63, pp. 469, 493.
The vacuum of longer-range reflections in Washington would be underlined with the appearance of a remarkable work composed before Pearl Harbour, but published shortly after it, America’s Strategy in World Politics. Its author Nicholas Spykman—a Dutchman with a background in Egypt and Java, then holding a chair at Yale—died a year later.1 In what remains perhaps the most striking single exercise in geopolitical literature of any kind, Spykman laid out a basic conceptual grid for the understanding of contemporary relations between states, and a comprehensive map of American positions and prospects within it. In an international system without central authority, the primary objective of the foreign policy of every state was necessarily the preservation and improvement of its power, in a struggle to curb that of other states. Political equilibrium—a balance of power—was a noble ideal, but ‘the truth of the matter is that states are only interested in a balance which is in their favour. Not an equilibrium, but a generous margin is their objective’. The means of power were four: persuasion, purchase, barter and coercion. While military strength was the primary requirement of every sovereign state, all were instruments of an effective foreign policy. Combining them, hegemony was a ‘power position permitting the domination of all states within its reach’.2
Such hegemony the United States had long enjoyed over most of the Western hemisphere. But it was a dangerous mistake to think that it could therefore rely on the protection of two oceans, and the resources of the interlinked landmass lying between them, to maintain its power position vis-à-vis Germany and
