materials needed for success in modern war showed that Latin America, for all its valuable raw materials, could not supply every critical item missing from North America.3 Nor was it realistic to imagine unaffected support for the United States to the south. The record of Washington in the region, where ‘our so-called painless imperialism has seemed painless only to us’, precluded that. Nothing like the ‘modern, capitalistic credit economy’ of the United States, with its highly developed industrial system, giant corporations, militant union struggles and strikebreaker vigilantes existed in the still largely feudal societies of Latin America, while the ABC states of its far south lay ‘too far from the centre of our power to be easily intimidated by measures short of war’.4 Any purely hemispheric defence was an illusion; still more so, quarter-sphere defence confined to North America alone, if the US was to avoid becoming a mere buffer state between German and Japanese empires. American strategy would have to be offensive, striking out across the seas at the two powers now at war—by the time the book came out—against the US on the other side of the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Spykman’s rebuttal of isolationism became conventional wisdom once the US entered the war. But not his wider vision, which in its cool dismissal of American verities that would be recycled by the administration as wartime objectives remained incompatible with any of the doctrines that came to be formulated in Washington during the conflict. America’s Strategy in World Politics explained that liberal democracy had become a stale myth; laissez-faire led to increasing monopoly and concentration of economic power; free trade was a fiction mocked by state subsidies; at home, class struggle, declared nonexistent, was settled by tear gas and violence; abroad, American bayonets taught lesser breeds modern accounting.5 Declining to take the standard rhetoric of the struggle at face value, Spykman arrived at conclusions that could only be jarring to the policy-makers of the hour. The US should already be reckoning on a reversal of alliances when the war was won. In Europe, Britain would not want to see Russia any more than Germany on the shores of the North Sea, and could be counted on to build Germany back up against Russia; while in Asia, America would have to build Japan back up against China, whose potential power was infinitely greater, and once ‘modernized, vitalized and militarized’ would be the principal threat to the position of the Western powers in the Pacific.6 As the Red Army fought off the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, and Japanese carriers moved towards Midway, such previsions were out of season. Their time would come.
II
The mental framework of the officials charged with American foreign policy was far from uniform. But central assumptions were widely shared. When European war broke out in 1939, virtually all its possible outcomes filled planners in Washington with alarm. Dire, certainly, would be German success: few had any illusions in Hitler. But a British victory won by statist mobilization, entrenching the sterling bloc yet further, might not be so much better. Worst of all, perhaps, would be such mutual destruction that, in the ensuing chaos, one form or another of socialism would take hold of the continent.7 Once Washington entered the war, and alliance with London and Moscow was essential to winning it, the priorities of the battlefield took precedence over the calculations of capital. But these remained, throughout, the strategic background to the global struggle. For Roosevelt’s planners the long-term priorities were twofold.8 The world must be made safe for capitalism at large; and within the world of capitalism, the United States should reign supreme. What would this dual objective mean for the postwar scene?
First and foremost, in point of conceptual time, the construction of an international framework for capital that would put an end to the dynamics of autarkic division and statist control that had precipitated the war itself, of which Hitler’s Third Reich and Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere had been the most destructive examples, but Britain’s Imperial Preference was another retrograde case. The free enterprise system in America itself was at risk without access to foreign markets.9 What would be needed after the war was a generalization of the Open Door that Washington had urged on its rivals in the race to seize command of markets in China: an all-round liberalization of trade, but henceforward—this was crucial—firmly embedded in new international institutions. Such an economic order would be not only a guarantee of peaceful relations between states, but allow the US to assume its natural place as first among them. From the time of Jefferson and Adams onwards, conspicuous national traditions had been generically expansionist, and as now far the largest and most advanced industrial power in the world, the US could be confident that free trade would ensure its hegemony at large, as it had Britain’s a century earlier. The political complement of this economic order would be founded on the principles of liberal democracy, as set forth in the Atlantic Charter.
From 1943 onwards, as victory came nearer, the requirements of this vision moved into sharper political focus. Three concerns were overriding.10 The first was the threat to a satisfactory post-war settlement from the potential maintenance of imperial preference by Britain. Washington would brook no barrier to American exports. From the outset, the US had insisted that a condition of the lend-lease on which Britain depended for survival after 1940 must be abandonment of imperial preference, once hostilities were over. Churchill, furious at the imposition of Article VII, could only seek to weaken the American diktat with a vaguely worded temporary escape clause. The second concern, mounting as the end of the war approached, and fully shared by Britain, was the spread of resistance movements in Europe—France, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece—in which variegated currents of the left were leading forces, just as planners in Washington had originally feared. The third was the advance from the spring of 1944 of the Red Army into Eastern Europe, which soon became an acute preoccupation. If the prospect most immediately present in the minds of American planners at the start of the war was the danger of any reversion to the conditions that had produced Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, as it drew to an end a still greater threat was taking shape in the form of its most important ally in the battle against them, the Soviet Union.
For here was not just an alternative form but a negation of capitalism, intending nothing less than its overthrow across the planet. Communism was an enemy far more radical than fascism had ever been: not an aberrant member of the family of polities respecting private ownership of the means of production, but an alien force dedicated to destroying it. American rulers had, of course, always been aware of the evils of Bolshevism, which Wilson had tried to stamp out at their inception by dispatching an expedition to help the Whites in 1919. But though foreign intervention had not succeeded in strangling it at birth, the USSR of the interwar years remained an isolated, and looked a weak, power. Soviet victories over the Wehrmacht, long before there was an Anglo-American foot on European soil, abruptly altered its position in the postwar calculus. So long as fighting lasted, Moscow remained an ally to be prudently assisted, and where necessary humoured. But once it was over, a reckoning would come.
III
At the helm during the Second World War, Roosevelt had manoeuvred his country into the conflict not out of any general anti-fascist conviction—though hostile to Hitler, he had admired Mussolini, helped Franco to power, and remained on good terms with Pétain11—but fear of Japanese and German expansion. Nor, for his class, was he especially anti-communist: at ease with the USSR as an ally, he was scarcely more realistic about Stalin than Stalin had been about Hitler. Though fond of Churchill, he was unsentimental about the empire he upheld, and had no time for De Gaulle. Strategic thought of any depth was foreign to him. Never a particularly well-informed or consistent performer on the world stage, personal self-confidence substituting for analytic grip, his vagaries frequently
