States and the Balance of Power, New York 1942, pp. 7, 21, 19.
3Six decades later, in the only serious engagement since with Spykman’s work, Robert Art has argued that his ‘masterful book’ erred in thinking North America was impregnable against military invasion, but vulnerable to economic strangulation by the Axis powers if they were victorious in Europe. The quarter-sphere, Art showed, had the raw materials to withstand any blockade: America could have stayed out of the Second World War without risk to itself. But its entry into the war was nevertheless rational, for purposes of the Cold War. ‘By fighting in World War Two and helping to defeat Germany and Japan, the United States, in effect, established forward operating bases against the Soviet Union in the form of Western Europe and Japan. Having these economic-industrial areas, together with Persian Gulf oil, on America’s side led to the Soviet Union’s encirclement, rather than America’s, which would have been the case had it not entered the war’: ‘The United States, the Balance of Power and World War II: Was Spykman Right?’, Security Studies: Spring 2005, pp. 365–406, now included in Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, New York 2009, pp. 69–106.
4Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 64, 213, 62.
5‘The whole social myth of liberal democracy has lost most of its revolutionary force since the middle of the nineteenth century, and in its present form is hardly adequate to sustain democratic practices in the countries where it originated, let alone inspire new loyalties in other peoples and other lands’. As for the country’s economic creed, ‘American business still believes that an invisible hand guides the economic process and that an intelligent selfishness and a free and unhampered operation of the price system will produce the greatest good for the greatest number’. Overall, ‘North American ideology, as might be expected, is essentially a middle-class business ideology’—though it also included, of course, ‘certain religious elements’: American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 215–7, 258, 7. For Spykman’s sardonic notations on the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt Corollary and the Good Neighbour policy in the ‘American Mediterranean’, see pp. 60–4.
6Spykman, American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 460, 466–70.
7For such fears, see the abundant documentation in Patrick Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II, Lafayetteville 2002, pp. 12–17 ff, by far the best and most detailed study of the US wartime planners.
8The critical wartime group included Hull, Welles, Acheson, Berle, Bowman, Davis and Taylor at State. Hopkins was an equerry more than a planner.
9‘We need these markets for the output of the United States’, Acheson told Congress in November 1944. ‘My contention is that we cannot have full employment and prosperity in the United States without foreign markets’. Denied these, America might be forced into statism too, a fear repeatedly expressed at the time. In 1940, the Fortune Round Table was worrying that ‘there is a real danger that as a result of a long war all the belligerent powers will permanently accept some form of state-directed economic system’, raising ‘the longer-range question of whether or not the American capitalist system could continue to function if most of Europe and Asia should abolish free enterprise in favour of totalitarian economics’: Hearden, Architects of Globalism, pp. 41, 14. Concern that the US could be forced in such direction had already been voiced by Brooks Adams at the turn of the century, who feared that if a European coalition ever dominated trade with China, ‘it will have good prospects of throwing back a considerable surplus on our hands, for us to digest as best as we can’, reducing America to the ‘semi-stationary’ condition of France, and a battle with rivals that could ‘only be won by surpassing the enemy with his own methods’. Result: ‘The Eastern and Western continents would be competing for the most perfect system of state socialism’: Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, pp. 52–3. In 1947 Adams’s book was republished with an introduction by Marquis Childs, as a prophetic vision of the challenge of Russia to America in the Cold War.
10These are the object of Gabriel Kolko’s great work, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945, New York 1968, whose magisterial sweep remains unequalled in the literature—covering overall US economic objectives; the cutting down to size of British imperial positions; checking of the left in Italy, Greece, France and Belgium; dealing with the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe; fixing up the UN; planning the future of Germany; sustaining the GMD in China; and nuclear bombing of Japan.
11Italy: soon after his inauguration in 1932, FDR was confiding to a friend that ‘I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’. Asked five years later by his ambassador in Rome if ‘he had anything against dictatorships’, he replied, ‘Of course not, unless they moved across their frontiers and sought to make trouble in other countries’. Spain: within a month of Franco’s uprising, he had imposed an unprecedented embargo on arms to the Republic—‘a gesture we Nationalists shall never forget’, declared the Generalísimo: ‘President Roosevelt behaved like a true gentleman’. France: he felt an ‘old and deep affection’ for Pétain, with whose regime in Vichy the US maintained diplomatic relations down to 1944, and matching detestation of De Gaulle—a ‘prima donna,’ ‘jackanapes’ and ‘fanatic’. See, respectively, David Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–1940, Chapel Hill 1988, pp. 139, 184; Douglas Little, Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War, Ithaca 1985, pp. 237–8, and Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, Durham, NC 2007, pp. 39, 45–7; Mario Rossi, Roosevelt and the French, Westport 1993, pp. 71–2, and John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan and Dean G. Acheson, Cambridge 1994, p. 113.
12For concurrent judgements of FDR’s failings as a wartime leader from antithetical observers, see Kennan: ‘Roosevelt, for all his charm and skill as a political leader was, when it came to foreign policy, a very superficial man, ignorant, dilettantish, with a severely limited intellectual horizon’, and Kolko: ‘As a leader Roosevelt was a consistently destabilizing element in the conduct of American affairs during the war-time crises, which were intricate and often assumed a command of facts as a prerequisite for serious judgements’: Harper, American Visions of Europe, p. 174; Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 348–50. Light-mindedness or ignorance led FDR to make commitments and take decisions—over Lend Lease, the Morgenthau Plan, Palestine, the French Empire—that often left his associates aghast, and had to be reversed.
13Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, Princeton 1991, pp. 185, 186, 10, 59. Culturally speaking, Roosevelt’s nationalism had a persistent edge of antipathy to the Old World. The dominant pre-war outlook of his administration is described by Harper as a ‘Europhobic hemispherism’: American Visions of Europe, pp. 60 ff—‘the record is full of presidential expressions of the anxiety, suspicion and disgust that animated this tendency’. At the same time, imagining that the world would fall over itself to adopt the American Way of Life, once given a chance, Roosevelt’s nationalism—Kimball captures this side of him well—was easygoing in tone, just because it was so innocently hubristic.
14See
