But an abiding set of premises he possessed. In the words of the most accomplished apologist for his conduct of foreign affairs, his consistency lay simply in the fact that ‘Roosevelt was a nationalist, an American whose ethnocentrism was part of his outlook’: a ruler possessed of the ‘calm, quiet conviction that Americanism’, conceived as a ‘combination of free enterprise and individual values’, would be eagerly adopted by the rest of the world, once American power had done away with obstacles to its spread. Though proud of the New Deal’s work in saving US capitalism, he was uncomfortable with economic questions. But ‘like most Americans, Roosevelt unquestioningly agreed with the expansionist goals of Hull’s economic program’. There, ‘he did not lead, but followed’.13
The president’s vision of the postwar world, formed as the USSR was still fighting for its life against the Third Reich, while the United States was basking untouched in the boom of the century, gave primacy to the construction of a liberal international order of trade and mutual security that the US could be sure of dominating. A product of the war, it marked an epochal break in American foreign policy. Hitherto, there had always been a tension within American expansionism, between the conviction of hemispheric separatism and the call of a redemptive interventionism, each generating its own ideological themes and political pressures, crisscrossing or colliding according to the conjuncture, without ever coalescing into a stable standpoint on the outside world. In the wave of patriotic indignation and prosperity that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the conflicts of the past were washed away. Traditionally, the strongholds of isolationist nationalism lay in the small-business and farmer population of the Mid-West; the bastions of a more interventionist nationalism—in local parlance, ‘internationalism’—in the banking and corporate elites of the East Coast. The war brought these together. The former had always looked more positively on the Pacific as a natural extension of the frontier, and sought no-holds-barred revenge for the attack on Hawaii. The latter, oriented to markets and investments across the Atlantic threatened by Hitler’s New Order, had wider horizons. Renovated by the rise of new capital-intensive firms and investment banks committed to free trade, each a key component in the political bloc behind Roosevelt, these interests supplied the managers of the war economy. They looked forward, beyond sky-high domestic profits during the fighting, to cleaning up in Europe after it.14
In these conditions, the two nationalisms—isolationist and interventionist—could finally start to fuse into a durable synthesis. For Franz Schurmann, whose Logic of World Power ranks with Spykman’s American Strategy and Kolko’s Politics of War for originality within the literature on US foreign policy, this was the true arrival of American imperialism, properly understood—not a natural outgrowth of the incremental expansionism from below of the past, but the sudden crystallization of a project from above to remake the world in the American image.15 That imperialism, he believed, was only possible because it rested on the democratic foundations of the New Deal and the leader of genius who sought to extend it overseas in a global order of comparable popular welfare, assuring the US a consensual hegemony over postwar humanity at large. ‘What Roosevelt sensed and gave visionary expression to was that the world was ripe for one of the most radical experiments in history: the unification of the entire world under a domination centred in America’.16 In this enterprise, the contrary impulses of isolation and intervention, nationalist pride and internationalist ambition, would be joined and sublimated in the task of reorganizing the world along US lines, to US advantage—and that of mankind.
Schurmann’s imaginative grasp of the impending mutation in the American imperium remains unsurpassed.17 But in its idealization of Roosevelt, however ambivalent, it outran the time and person by a good margin. The White House still had only sketchy notions of the order it sought when peace was restored, and these did not include bestowing a New Deal on humanity at large. Its concerns were focused in the first instance on power, not welfare. The postwar system FDR had in mind would have a place for Russia and Britain in running the world—even pro forma China, since Chiang Kai-shek could be relied on to do US bidding. But there could be no question which among the ‘four policemen’, as he liked to style them, would be chief constable. Its territory untouched by war, by 1945 the United States had an economy three times the size of the USSR’s and five times that of Britain, commanding half of the world’s industrial output and three quarters of its gold reserves. The institutional foundations of a stable peace would have to reflect that predominance.18 Before he died Roosevelt had laid down two of them. At Bretton Woods, birthplace of the World Bank and the IMF, Britain was obliged to abandon Imperial Preference, and the dollar installed as master of the international monetary system, the reserve currency against which all others had to be pegged.19 At Dumbarton Oaks, the structure of the Security Council in a future United Nations was hammered out, conferring permanent seats and veto rights on the four gendarmes-to-be, superimposed on a General Assembly in which two-fifths of the delegates would be supplied by client states of Washington in Latin America, hastily mustered for the purpose with last-minute declarations of war on Germany. Skirmishes with Britain and Russia were kept to a minimum.20 Hull, awarded—the first in a long line of such recipients—the Nobel Peace Prize for his role at the birth of the new organization, had reason to deem it a triumph. By the time the UN came into being at San Francisco in 1945, it was so firmly under the US thumb that the diplomatic traffic of the delegates to its founding conference was being intercepted round the clock by military surveillance in the nearby Presidio.21
Roosevelt was in his grave before Germany surrendered. The system whose foundations his administration had laid was incomplete at his death, with much still unsettled. Neither Britain nor France had consented to part with Asian or African colonies he viewed as an anachronism. Russia, its armies nearing Berlin, had designs on Eastern Europe. It might not fit so readily into the new architecture. But with its population decimated and much of its industry in ruins as the Wehrmacht retreated, the USSR would not represent a significant threat to the order to come, and might over time perhaps be coaxed towards it. Moscow’s exact role after victory was a secondary preoccupation.
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1Spykman had a remarkable career, whose early years have aroused no curiosity in his adopted country, and later years been ignored in his native country, where he appears to be still largely unknown. Educated at Delft, Spykman went to the Middle East in 1913 at the age of twenty, and to Batavia in 1916, as a journalist and—at least in Java, and perhaps also in Egypt—undercover agent of the Dutch state in the management of opinion, as references in Kees van Dijk, The Netherlands Indies and the Great War 1914–1918, Leiden 2007 reveal: pp. 229, 252, 477. While in Java, he published a bilingual—Dutch and Malay—book entitled Hindia Zelfbestuur [Self-Rule for the Indies], Batavia 1918, advising the national movement to think more seriously about the economics of independence, and develop cooperatives and trade unions rather than simply denouncing foreign investment. In 1920 he turned up in California, completed a doctorate on Simmel at Berkeley by 1923, published as a book by Chicago in 1925, when he was hired by Yale as a professor of international relations. Not a few mysteries remain to be unravelled in this trajectory, but it is clear that Spykman was from early on a cool and original mind, who unlike Morgenthau or Kelsen, the two other European intellectuals in America with whom he might otherwise be compared, arrived in the US not as a refugee, but as an esprit fort from the Indies who after naturalization felt no inhibition in delivering sharp judgements on his host society.
