of regimes supported by the Soviet Union and the United States is proof enough that their major postwar aims have been to buttress their own national power. It is easy for Americans to accept this realpolitik as Soviet policy—they know Communist states are ruthless. It is harder to accept the same truth about themselves.
The romantic aura surrounding sociopolitical theories—the enthusiasm for “socialism,” “fascism,” “democracy,” “liberalism”—has obscured the fact that all ideologies in modern times have been morally limited by national boundaries. This has enabled political leaders to pass off external conflicts over national power as conflicts between ideologies, that is, between good and evil. Nationalist feelings are played upon too, of course; in the Soviet Union it was a war for the motherland as well as for socialism, and in the United States it was a war for national identity as well as for democracy. But nationalism came into the modern world as an ambiguity—it meant the safety and unity of people formerly divided or formerly controlled, as well as the rule by national leaders over their own people, and over others.
It was not the actions of Japan, Germany, and Italy against other people that prompted the United States to go to war. The United States had maintained neutrality while the Fascist powers destroyed a moderately left-wing parliamentary democracy in Spain; it did not protest against the deliverance by France and England of part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler; it continued to send scrap iron to Japan even after the Japanese slaughter of Chinese in Nanking and Shanghai. True, the United States did begin to give material aid to the Allies after the fall of France in June, 1940. But it did not fully enter the conflict against the Axis until the American naval base at Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese.
It was this challenge to the national power of the United States, which meant the power and the prestige of those who held office and wealth in America, that was the main reason America entered World War II. The welfare of the American people—or of any people, as American inaction in rescuing Jewish refugees in Germany attests—was not the chief concern of America’s wartime leaders. The rhetoric might deal with fighting for freedom, but the reality was expressed by Henry Luce, the multimillionaire publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune; in a Life editorial in 1941, entitled “The American Century,” Luce said it was time “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
This bald assertion of power as the justification for American involvement in World War II was avoided in the language of Roosevelt and other national leaders. Nonetheless, the behavior of the United States during the war was clearly in line with Luce’s ideas about “the American Century,” and after the war the phrase “world responsibility” became the prime euphemism for what the British had called “empire.”
The economic base for America’s postwar “world responsibility”—that is, for the American Empire—was laid during the war. The nation’s objective was simply to move into the vacuum that would be left by the collapse of British imperial power, and to become the undisputed economic leader of the nonsocialist world. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared early in the war:
Through international investment, capital must be made available for the sound development of latent natural resources and productive capacity in relatively undeveloped areas. … Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.
“No other problem, without exception, received as much space in the Department of State Bulletins during 1944 and 1945 as postwar foreign economic policy,” Kolko notes. Vice President Henry Wallace, who became secretary of commerce in 1945, said after a world tour in July, 1944—one month after the Allies had invaded western Europe and victory did not appear too far off: “The new frontier extends from Minneapolis … all the way to Central Asia.” (Was Kennedy, in making “The New Frontier” the slogan for his administration in the sixties, aware of this earlier use of the phrase? His administration was also conscious of the international reach of American business.)
The war did in fact prove to be an opportunity for the United States to take control of the huge Middle East oil resources from England. Great unexploited oil reserves existed, for instance, in Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt met with its king, Ibn-Saud, after the Yalta Conference, and later recalled telling him, as a State Department summary put it, “that essentially he, the President, was a businessman. … and that as a businessman he would be very much interested in Arabia.” Forrestal, then secretary of the navy, wrote in his diary that he had told Byrnes about the importance of spending money in Saudi Arabia to promote American over British interests. “I told him that, roughly speaking, Saudi Arabia, according to oil people in whom I had confidence, is one of the three great puddles left in the world. …” A Department of State Bulletin put the issue succinctly:
The desirability of control by American nationals over petroleum properties abroad is based on two considerations: (a) that the talent of the American oil industry for discovery and development is historically demonstrated so that results are likely to be better according to the extent to which American private interests participate, and (b) that other things being equal, oil controlled by United States nationals is likely to be a little more accessible to the United States for commercial uses in times of peace and for strategic purposes in times of war.
The postwar outlook for foreign trade and foreign investment of American private capital was extremely important to leaders of the government. Lloyd Gardner in his detailed study of economic foreign policy in these years, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, says of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s chief adviser: “No conservative outdid Hopkins in championing foreign investment, and its protection.” Gardner quotes Hopkins as saying in 1944:
Whoever borrows must see to it that expropriation will be impossible. The people of this country have a right to expect that kind of protection from their Government. It must be further agreed that money lent by the Government to other nations must be spent for purchases in this country. … And it is highly important that business and government have an early meeting of minds as to general policy governing private investments abroad.
In that same year, however, poet Archibald MacLeish, then assistant secretary of state, spoke critically of what he saw shaping up in the aftermath of a war filled with grand pronouncements about the common man:
As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief, of factual situations, a peace without moral purpose or human interest, a peace of dicker and trade, about the facts of commerce, the facts of banking, the facts of transportation, which will lead us where the treaties made by dicker and trade have always led.
Throughout the war, England and the United States dickered and bickered about the shape of international trade in the postwar world, with the United States anxious to acquire equal access to the raw materials in the British-dominated nations. The rapidly expanding manufacturing apparatus of the United States would desperately require more raw materials than were to be found within its continental limits. America’s “open door” policy was similar to that under William McKinley at the turn of the century, a policy of pretending to want nothing but fairness for all while being intensely concerned with American economic access to regions formerly controlled by older empires. At the Bretton Woods Conference of July, 1944, England and the United States set up the International Monetary Fund to regulate international exchanges of currency; voting in the fund, however, was to be roughly proportional to capital contributed, thereby assuring American dominance. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was presumably established to help
