traditional ideas and values. After the war, these characteristics emerged so sharply as to bring, in the 1960s, a national crisis, with tumultuous conflict, agonizing disillusionment, and a movement for change beyond anything the nation had ever seen.
When President Roosevelt returned to the United States from his meeting with Marshal Joseph Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Yalta in early 1945, the end of the war now in sight, he said that the Big Three Conference
… ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that had been tried for centuries—and had always failed.
It sounded good—as had Wilson’s phrases of the same sort twenty-five years earlier. But his words represent an exact measure of how the postwar world failed to curb the same modes of international behavior of which both liberal and illiberal nations had been guilty for centuries. The foreign policy of the United States after the great war is almost a precise reproduction of what Roosevelt spoke of ending: unilateral action (in Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), exclusive alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Central Treaty Organization, the Rio Pact), spheres of influence (Latin America, the Middle East, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan), balances of power (war in Korea, conflict over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis).
The idea of intervention abroad became more acceptable during World War II, primarily because it seemed so clearly justified by Hitler’s invasions in Europe and Japan’s in Asia. After the war, it became easier to broaden the concept of interventions, responding not necessarily to invasions but to internal revolutions. Counter-revolutionary intervention was not something new. Since the turn of the century, the United States had sent armed forces into various countries in the Caribbean area (Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua) to prevent political changes or the inception of economic policies opposed by the American government or American business interests. After World War II, however, the methods of intervention and the justifications for intervention became far more sophisticated. Arms were now shipped, military and police advisers were sent in as coaches, counter-revolutionaries were trained, undercover operations were conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency—all of which left overt armed intervention by United States forces a policy of last resort. The justifications for intervention were firmly supported by a whole bag of symbols related to communism: “the Red menace,” “the Soviet threat,” “the Chinese hordes,” “the world communist conspiracy,” “we ‘lost’ China,” “the danger of internal subversion,” “better dead than Red,” and more. The postwar interventions were especially palatable because, while supported by conservative Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon, most of them were carried out by the liberal Democratic administrations of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and could therefore be effortlessly fitted into the liberal tradition.
It has taken a long time for a critical view of this policy of intervention to become widespread in America, perhaps because what is wrong with modern liberal society resembles Yossarian’s jaundice:
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. If it became jaundice, they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away, they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
If evil were unmitigated and consistent, Americans might recognize it easily and unite to get rid of it. But the modern liberal state runs its course jaggedly, especially with regard to war and the justifications for war. About once in each century the United States has fought a war in such a fire of idealistic benevolence as to shroud in smoke not only that war’s own sins and ambiguities, but all other wars and foreign policies for the next several decades. The self-glorification accompanying the Revolutionary War for independence lasted long enough to blur the expansionist sentiment behind the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. The half-truth that the Civil War was a noble war to end slavery made it easier for Americans to believe that their war with Spain over Cuba, and the accompanying seizure of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii, were untainted.
Similarly, World War II gave to the United States such a powerful feeling of righteousness as a fighter for “the free world” that Americans came to think fondly of themselves for the next twenty-five years as the saviors of oppressed peoples on every continent. The American interventions in Korea in the fifties and Vietnam in the sixties were both justified by the need to “stop communism.” The slogan was similiar to that used in World War II. The names were switched, the language and uniform of yesterday’s “enemy” were modified, but “Stopping the Russians” was an easy substitute for “Stopping the Germans”; “Stopping the Chinese” readily replaced “Stopping the Japanese.” In none of these uses of substitute enemies was any attention paid to the possibility that the older, unquestionable crusade may have been at least half-questionable.
The historian Frederick Merk says that the various acts of American expansionism in the nineteenth century were “never true expressions of national spirit” but “traps into which the nation was led in 1846 and 1899, and from which it extricated itself as well as it could afterward.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has spoken similarly of the Vietnam War. Is Vietnam another act of expansion that does not express America’s normal benevolence, its real “national spirit”? Is Vietnam the momentary aberration of the modern liberal democratic capitalist state? Or are expansionism and aggression persistent characteristics of America as of other states, whether liberal or illiberal, capitalist or socialist? Is it possible that Vietnam was not a deviation but a particularly blatant manifestation of power seeking, of which the American nation is as guilty as any other nation?
The liberal tradition educates us to think well of the modern liberal state, to think that this new phenomenon in world history emerging out of the British, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its widespread educational opportunities, its technical proficiency, its parliamentary government and constitutional rights, its long history of “reform,” would be free of that accusation Plutarch made of ancient societies: “The poor go to war to fight and to die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.” But why should the modern liberal state be different? Is not war in good part the result of a fragmented, chaotic world, in which constellations of nations vie, jostle, and kill for territory, wealth, and power? The rise of nation-states in the world, to replace city-states and feudal kingdoms, did not change this fact. Indeed, international chaos has heightened considerably through the centuries, because the newer constellations became larger, more fearsome, more aggressive, and commanded greater and greater resources than the older ones. Liberalism and nationalism both came into the world at roughly the same time in the modern epoch; and nationalism creates both the right geographical boundaries and the right spirit for barbarous warfare.
A simple economic explanation for wars need not be accepted, but it is hard to deny that the quest for profit—even in so flamboyantly religious a military venture as the Crusades—has played a considerable part in international warfare. The advent of capitalism—which, like nationalism, accompanied the birth of liberalism, and paid for the delivery—only added the fierce libido of profit seeking to other factors and thereby increased the probability of war. This is not to absolve noncapitalist countries of aggressive nationalism, but to point to the special impetus of business profit. And if liberalism is accompanied by the machine age, should it not be expected that wars would be more destructive than ever before through man’s sheer technical competence for mass murder?
Also, if liberalism is accompanied by mass education and mass communication, should it not be expected that the age-old
