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AMERICAN FOREIGNPOLICY AND ITS THINKERS
Perry Anderson
This paperback edition published by Verso 2017
First published by Verso 2015
‘Imperium’ and ‘Consilium’ first published in New Left Review 83, September/October 2013 and republished here by kind permission
© Perry Anderson 2015, 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 978-1-78663-048-3
ISBN 978-1-78168-668-3 (US EBK)
ISBN 978-1-78168-702-4 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
The Hardback Edition Has Been Cataloged by the Library of Congress as Follows
Anderson, Perry.
American foreign policy and its thinkers / Perry Anderson.
pages cm
Originally published: London : New Left Review Ltd., 2013.
ISBN 978-1-78168-667-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-78168-668-3 (ebook)
1. United States–Foreign relations–1945–1989.
2. United States–Foreign relations–1989–
3. Imperialism–History–20th century.
4. Imperialism–History–21st century. I. Title.
E744.A64 2014
327.73009′04–dc23
Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in Sweden by ScandBook AB
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
I. IMPERIUM
1.Prodromes
2.Crystallization
3.Security
4.Keystones
5.Perimeters
6.Recalibration
7.Liberalism Militant
8.The Incumbent
II. CONSILIUM
9.Native Traditions
10.Crusaders
11.Realist Ideals
12.Economy First
13.Outside the Castle
Annexe
Postscript
Index
The two parts of this book, ‘Imperium’ and ‘Consilium’, offer an account of the American imperial system that reaches across the world today. It is reasonable to ask what particular contribution they could make to a subject that has attracted a large existing literature, composed essentially of diplomatic history and geopolitical strategy. The scope of ‘Imperium’ differs from much of the former in three ways, temporal, spatial and political. The first is a question of chronological span. An extensive body of research, much of it of the highest quality, exists on American foreign policy. But it characteristically divides into widely separate bodies of historical writing—principally, studies of US territorial and overseas expansion in the nineteenth century; analyses of US conduct in the struggle against the USSR during the Cold War; and discussions of US power projection since the last decade of the twentieth century. What is attempted here, by contrast, is a connected understanding of the dynamics of American strategy and diplomacy in a single arc from the war on Mexico to the war on Terror. The second difference is a question of geographical attention. Coverage of the exercise of US imperial power has tended to focus either on its operations in what was once the Third World of former colonial lands, or on its battle with what was once the Second World of communist states. There has on the whole been less concern with the objectives pursued by Washington within the First World of advanced capitalism itself. Here an effort is made to keep all three fronts of US expansion concurrently in focus.
Finally, there is a political difference. Much of the literature on American imperial power is critical of it, often—though, as I will note, by no means invariably—written from standpoints that can be regarded as broadly of the left, as distinct from mainstream celebrations of the role of the United States in the world, which tend to come from the centre or right of the ideological spectrum. A common characteristic of this writing on the left is not only criticism of the global hegemony of the United States, but confidence that it is in steepening decline, if not terminal crisis. Radical opposition to the American empire, however, does not require reassurance of its impending collapse or retreat. The changing balance of forces at whose centre its hegemony continues to lie must
