International Relations: Never just an American Social Science

By A.J.R.Groom, University of Kent

 

It all depends upon which end of the telescope you are looking through, and indeed, whether or not you have put it to your blind eye.  In short, the question of whether International Relations (IR) is still an American Social Science, as Stanley Hoffman once so famously asserted (Hoffman 1977), may evoke a very different response depending on the end of the telescope and the positioning of that instrument in relation to the blind eye.  From the heartland of American neo-realism, neo-institutionalism or social constructivism  IR may seem to be an American Social Science, particularly if that eye can see no further than the boundaries of North America.  Seen, however, from the confines of the contemporary EU, nothing fundamental would be lost if North American IR were simply to shut up shop.  Everything that is of merit in North American IR, and there is much of very great merit in quality and impressive quantity, can be found in EU IR, and more besides.  Moreover, there is little difference in quality, although the quantity may be significantly less.  Excellence and dross can be found everywhere.

            Indeed as IR re-establishes itself in a liberal academic form in most of Central and Eastern Europe, we move into the historic heartland of another intellectual tradition in IR – the fructuous intellectual breeding ground of Marxist-Leninist approaches.  There are other added strengths in diversity in the shape of the legal approach in France and Mediterranean Europe, a long tradition of administrative science, in additional to a glorious background in conceptualised area studies, begotten by empire, however dubiously.  More recently an indigenous German tradition has reasserted itself with great strength in philosophy and sociological approaches to IR together with a long-standing Scandinavian penchant for this genre of research..   To be provocative, if forced in a Darwinian selection to choose, it might be better to preserve European IR rather than North American IR on grounds of comparable quality but greater diversity.  Such a question, however, denies the complex interdependencies of an intellectual world that is in many ways one and which has had, in the past, its centres and its peripheries.   It still does and they demonstrate that IR was never an American Social Science: it remains a unity in diversity even if it is still depressingly and parochially Western.

            Contemporary post-modern approaches and methodological debates aside, it is not difficult to conceive of IR intellectual history in terms of three traditions. Among the great names of European Political Thought we can cite Hobbes, Grotius, and Kant, as symbolising these three general approaches (Bull 1977). After the Second World War Martin Wight characterised them as realists, rationalists and revolutionists (Wight 1991). More recently, a similar categorisation has been made between realist, pluralist or world society approaches, and structuralists (Banks 1985), acknowledging thereby inter alia the Marxist tradition.  This overall conceptual framework has proved useful as a guide, and it owes little to North American IR.

            The disciplinary background of the founding professors of International Relations was predominantly international law in the United States and diplomatic history in the UK.   On the continent both traditions prevailed, but with a predominance for law.  The founding professors inherited from the nineteenth century the three intellectual traditions with the balance of power, as institutionalised in the Congress and Concert System illustrating the realist approach. The growth of liberal internationalism, and particularly the activities of intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations and other non-state actors as well as the attempts at creating systems of arbitration and arms control in the second part of the nineteenth century, exemplified the pluralist approach. Structuralist approaches could be found in the newly-founded traditions of Marxism and geopolitics.  The influence of North America in these developments was significant, but certainly not hegemonic. 

            In the nineteenth century the United States government ostensibly kept clear of the machinations of the European great Powers, although it acted in a realist manner in the Americas and Pacific – not to forget the Barbary Coast.  As the bourgeois liberal reformists began to exert their influence there was a strong American participation in the meetings of concerned individuals and private societies.  Yet there was, in the Americas, little on the scale of the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross or of the Anti-Slave Trade Movement.  However, there was a major contribution in the area of arbitration and the growth of mediation as a means of managing disputes.  The Alabama Case between Britain and the United States is a case in point.  Moreover, there was a growing willingness to accept legal obligations to submit to arbitration in the Americas which was also a tribute to this pluralist Liberal Internationalist approach. In addition, there was a considerable and important literature on integration theory as the states of the USA sought to come together, fell apart in the Civil War and then built a new integrated community over the decades out of its smouldering embers (which have still not been finally extinguished).  There are striking parallels between the American debates and issues and those around the current European Convention.  Integration theory has long been and remains an American forte.   On the other hand, in the structuralist revolutionary framework there is little to be found.  Nevertheless, the writings of Admiral Mahan on the use of sea power by the British and earlier by the Romans had significant  influence of the continent, especially in Germany, and gave credence to a different form of structuralism – geopolitics (Mahan 1965).  But the greatest  influence of the United States came later.  It was in the philosophy and political drive to establish the League of Nations on the foundation of collective security and also in the major role played by the United States in an important thrust for arms control as exemplified by the Washington Naval Treaty.  Here, indeed, the United States had a leading role and somewhat reluctant followers.  This was something that was meat and drink to a country which had built itself from a group of not always co-operating colonies to be the dominating Power on a continent and, on the basis of that experience, now proposed to create a new world order.  The apogee of this approach of social engineering and institution building, based on the tenets of liberal internationalism, gave rise to the founding of International Relations as a discipline, both in the United States and the UK and it was the foundation of the first consensus in the field.

            It has long been a matter of pride for Welsh, that the first Chair in International Relations in a modern university system was that funded by Lord David Davies at Aberystwyth in the University of Wales as the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics [2].   In the aftermath of the First World War a number of Chairs were founded in Britain, notably at Oxford and LSE, as well as at Aberystwyth.  Chatham House, later to become the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was established as a link between the academic world and that of government in pursuit of the ‘scientific study’ of what was, and still remains, part of the agenda of the day, namely, the understanding of the causes of war and the conditions for a stable, enduring and self-sustaining peace.  In the United States Chairs were also founded and the sister institute of Chatham House was the Council on Foreign Relations.

            Although much of the energy that lead to the founding of these Chairs and to the idea of progressive rationalism and social engineering had been shared widely in the continent, particularly in France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, International Relations as a formal discipline did not flourish, except in Geneva where the Graduate Institute of International Studies was founded in 1927.  The institute received a considerable sum of foundation money from the United States, although its Directors were from France and Switzerland.  It quickly became a haven for refugees from fascism in all branches of international studies including history, politics, economics, and law.  The rise of fascism as a dominant political doctrine in Europe put liberal internationalism very much on the defensive, apart from France, Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and parts of Scandinavia.  Elsewhere all branches of political science, and not least International Relations, were stifled except where they were used as a prop for expansionist and racist theories, as in the use of geopolitics by the Munich School led by Haushofer to support Hitler’s policies of, Lebensraum, Drang Nach Osten and racism.  Britain and the United States benefited immensely from the intellectual plight and physical flight of scholars such as Georg Schwarzenberger and Hans Morgenthau (Schwarzenberger 1964; Morgenthau 1985), who together with E.H. Carr (Carr 1981) were the intellectual pivots of the second consensus in International Relations on realism.

            The rise of fascism, theories of Social Darwinism, the depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War created a climate in which liberal internationalism was found wanting.  The dark tenets of a Hobbesian world of anarchy, self-help in a security dilemma and the drive to dominate came to blinker intellectual life.  It was not that such phenomena did not exist – they did, and in plenitude – but that other phenomena were ignored.  The pendulum, as perhaps in the 1920s, had once again swung too far.  What cannot, however, be gainsaid, is that realist International Relations was now overwhelmingly dominant in the United States and the subject was essentially American-based in terms of the sheer size, and often the quality, of the work produced.  Moreover, as the subject spread, it spread as the American science of International Relations, whether in Africa, India or elsewhere in the English speaking world.  On the continent the Germans were re-learning their Political Science and International Relations from the Americans, while in many other countries IR had retreated into the rather arid framework of Faculties of Law.  Some notable figures joined the American debate, such as Raymond Aron (Aron, 1967), and while there were some in Britain, such as Martin Wight, who had a wider view imbued with Christianity, or who were diplomatic historians of an old school (Butterfield & Wight 1966, Hinsley 1963), their influence was nevertheless slight and the debate was truly an American debate, (albeit often fired by European immigrants).  But this did not last for long.  Moreover, there was much going on in areas not then normally conceived as IR insofar as Britain and the United States were concerned.  This was especially marked in area studies in the tiers-monde of a sociological or anthropological nature.  This was particularly the case in France, hence the coining of the French phrase and its adoption in English.    

            The challenges to realism were not long in coming.  Because they were for the most part grounded outside the United States, their success in establishing other points of view in effect undermined the hegemony of the American discipline of IR.  John Burton, David Mitrany, Karl Deutsch and James Rosenau (Burton 1968, 1972; Mitrany 1966, 1975; Deutsch 1963, 1966; Rosenau 1967, 1969) developed transnationalist ideas in different but related ways. In France, Marcel Merle moved in the same direction (Merle 88).    Pluralist approaches were back and Burton and Mitrany were based in Britain, although neither was British.  Deutsch moved between the old and new worlds, and Rosenau was a powerful indigenous, but somewhat lonely voice, in the American academic establishment.  The realist approach engendered a practical and theoretical response in the form of non-alignment under the intellectual authority of writers such as Leo Mates and A.P. Rana (Mates 1972; Rana 1979).  Structural theories came back into fashion, emanating initially from Latin America and gradually spread in the tiers-monde, as well as being adopted in the developed world.   An initial impulse came from the work of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America under the direction of Raoul Prebisch.   Ironically, rather as Marx and Lenin had predicted, the road to the citadels of capitalism, or rather its intellectual fortresses, was through the tiers-monde.  Although eventually some leading scholars in the United States did embrace this approach, it was only after currency had been given to the ideas elsewhere.

            A further challenge to realism came from historical sociology. Leading figures in this area operated on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the British writer Michael Mann (Mann 1986, 1993). Mann agreed that there has never been an holistic ‘international’ society at any point in human history since, while the four bases of social power – economic, political, military and ideology – interact and interpenetrate they never congeal into a coherent whole.  Moreover, the political–military factors do not necessarily predominate as realists would have it.   Indeed, for the last 500 years capitalism has dominated and it is now being challenged by ideology in a religious form whether in the mountains of Central Asia or the backwoods of the Southern United States. Taking their lead from Braudel (Braudel 1972) a group of American scholars associated with Wallerstein (Wallersatein 1979) developed centre-periphery models with a deep historical richness and developed long-cycle theories (Modelski 1987).  The former were imbued with Marxist traditions and the latter put a new and attenuating gloss on realism.

            Curiously, one area in which the challenge to realism was strongest was in fact dominated, at times almost exclusively, by scholars from the United States namely in the development of integration theory.  Although the phenomenon was European, it posed a major anomaly for realist theory. The intellectual lead in broaching this new phenomenon was essentially American, as the impact of the likes of Ernst Haas and Leon Lindberg attests (Haas 1964; Lindberg 1963).  Nevertheless, on the whole what we can discern is that the cutting edge of International Relations in the 1960s and later was not only in the United States but also elsewhere, and notably, beyond the confines of the developed world.  If there had been an American social science of International Relations, it was a short lived phenomenon.

            What of the present situation?  The high priests of both post-modernism and critical theory, such as Foucault and Habermas (Foucault 1968; Habermas 1972), are not American, but those who have developed their ideas in the context of International Relations are mainly Anglo-Americans (Brown 1994).  Even if we accept the point that the Enlightenment project has its epistemological weaknesses, then we might as well shut up shop if we have nothing to replace it with or if we are not prepared to make the best of what we think we have for the time being.  Manifestly, to shut up shop on social science goes somewhat against the grain of human history and the seeming motivation of human beings.  One way or another, we seem to want and need ‘to know’, however imperfectly. 

            Critical theory helps us to come to terms with this since its manifest aim is liberation, but within a context.  It abjures us to be aware of and not to take our intersubjectivities too seriously, but it does not deny foundations, nor does it deconstruct into dusty rubble.  Rather, it simply warns us that we are only working with the best intersubjectivity currently available for whatever we are interested in – and that we had better not get too ambitious about our ‘findings’.  Methodology has from time to time engendered a debate in IR.  That concerning behaviouralism is a case in point where a strong positivistic school held court in the United States (Singer 1968), but received a stringing if not always fair rebuff in Britain (Bull 1969).   Nevertheless positivism does have powerful if rather lonely advocates in British IR  (Nicholson 1983) and in the peace research communities in Germany and Scandinavia.   As we have seen the European balance was more towards crucial theory rather than anti-foundationalism  à l’outrance.   Critical theory is an attitude of mind that is running strong but which only makes sense in the context of praxis  and in a spirit of transformation.     

            On the continent, while critical theory has its place, and indeed a strong place, in the UK there are two developments one of which clearly derives its impetus from continental thought but not from continental IR. Rather it has a philosophical and sociological geneses, mainly from French thought, and concerns itself with discourse analysis and deconstruction as a method (Jabri 1996; George 1994).   To be sure  this is also evident in the United States but if the programmes of BISA and ISA are compared it is evident why American scholars in this genre felt particularly at home in the British context.   The same can be said of international political thought and particularly its concern with ethics and human rights  (Frost 1986).   On the other hand, in feminist approaches to IR, the balance is the other way with the focus more on the United States, with Britain in the middle and the Continent somewhat on the periphery (Sylvester 1992).  There is, if anything, a more activist stream in North American feminist writing and a greater philosophical bent writing in Europe, even by resident Americans.   

            Perhaps the most exciting current development in IR is the growing loss of Western provincialism.  IR started off as a bourgeois Western European and North American enterprise.  As an Anglo-American phenomenon it initially eschewed structural approaches until they were forced on it through centre-periphery and historical-sociological analyses often, but not always tinged with a Marxist flavour.  Even non-alignment often seemed merely to be realism from a different place in the structure.  This provincialism is at long last beginning to change.

            Over the last few years Western scholars, and in particular those in Britain, have begun to explore the IR literature in non-European cultures and in particular in China, Japan and the Arab world.  They have made a sharp differentiation between what was essentially Western cloning by local scholars – often to good effect – and an analysis of political thought organic to the indigenous political culture.  (Chan 2001; Jones 2003).  This opens the way to an IR that is more than Western.  It is not that there were no studies of such thought and philosophy, but in the past these did not penetrate the closed Western world of IR.  Ironically, at the same time as there is an opening in Europe to a world beyond the West, American IR seems to be closing in upon itself reading fewer non-American authors and being concerned with its debates on neo-realism, neo-institutionalism and social constructivism, in which others join to be sure, but which nevertheless seem to have much of a muchness as an academic profession is embroiled in its turf wars. IR is, surely, more than that which is why the legacies of Japan and China are so fascinating and the promise is of more to come from India, the Islamic world and, who knows, perhaps Africa.  This linkage to the non-Western world comes through philosophy and it is of the greater interest to international political theory in Europe, especially Britain, that acts as a bridge to other worlds.   Americans in their philosophical work seem to be mesmerised by the clash of civilisation rather than learn from a  different attempt to understand our human condition.  (Huntingdon 1993).

            If we consider some of the principal sub-fields of IR at the present time we can see that there is an healthy mix of leading figures from the United States and elsewhere.  In normative theory the thrust is as much in Britain as in the United States but, somewhat strangely, there appears not to be a strong interest on the continent.  In international organisation there is a clear division between the Anglo-Americans and the continental legal tradition, with scholars such as Marie-Claude Smouts (Smouts 1995) bridging the divide.   International organisation is now enjoying a modest revival in its traditional institutional sense because such institutions are fora through     which important political and socio-economic questions are raised and programmes pass.  In the UN system peacekeeping and peace-building are major endeavours, while in the EU there is an innovative process of building up, building down, building across and building beyond, thus creating a zone of peace on the former cockpit of world war.  But beyond this are the questions of globalisation, global problems and global governance which excite scholars beyond the confines of Europe and North America.

            Conflict research, on the other hand, has had a very strong impulse from Europe, notably in Scandinavia where Johan Galtung was one of the founding fathers.  Galtung, an highly prolific writer was also instrumental in launching the influential Journal of Peace Research.  In the Netherlands the Groningen School had an early contribution while in Germany there has been a long-standing important contribution of the Hessen Institute.  In France Gaston Bouthoul (Bouthoul 1962) had a different, highly positivistic approach while in Britain a group lead by John Burton (Burton 1969) was highly innovative in both theory and practice.       IPE has a long history in Britain, which has provided its Mother Superior, Susan Strange (Strange 1988), while the fundamental contribution of the Latin Americans has already been mentioned.   It is thus a general pursuit with no particular location.

            Strategic Studies were for long an Anglo-American preserve with important contributions, but of a like ilk, from Britain and Australia.    Although there was a major imbalance in quantity between Britain and the United States and American guru’s such as Brodie and Schelling held great sway in policy fields (Brodie 1946; Schelling 1960), nevertheless the early debate on massive retaliation, graduated deterrence and arms control was significantly influenced by the formulations of Slessor, Buzzard and Bull (Slessor 1954; Buzzard 1956; Bull 1961) and the (International) Institute for Strategic Studies proved a forum for much seminal thought.  Most of this was predicated upon the Cold War and for a while Strategic Studies was adrift following the end of the Cold War until it began to reformulate around wider nations of human security, environmental security and the like.  Those strategists who felt uneasy or even lost in this new setting now have their manna from heaven in the form of terrorism and US imperialism through preventive war.   A different voice was heard from France, where one can conjure up names such as Gallois, Beaufre and, in a different context, Regis Debray (Gallois 1961; Beaufre 1965; Debray 1967).

            While political geography has been kept alive by the French as much as anyone, it too is now flourishing including its post-modern wing .  Yet nowhere have its implications been fully integrated into mainstream IR except perhaps in geostrategic and geoeconomic aspects as, for example, in American strategic thought and military expansion and the development of the EU, particularly the French ‘widening’ of the Rhine Valley though the TGV network..  Foreign Policy Analysis, on the other hand, is very nearly a North American phenomenon.    There are, of course some distinguished exceptions in Europe such as Walter Carlsnaes (Carlsnaes 1986), but European IR does not seem to take decision-making models, psychological theories and the like to heart in the sense of an indigenous European contribution.  Instead those in the field in Europe play the American game again with the exception of some younger scholars such as Frédéric Charillon (Charillon 2002).  Harold and Margaret Sprout deserve our thanks for keeping the ecological aspects of human affairs on the agenda (Sprout 1965), but environmental politics is well established in universities in Europe, as well as in practice through Green parties. Students on both sides of the Atlantic not only study such issues but act upon them.

            A great deal of the work of continental scholars is only known in Britain and the United States if it is translated into English. Thereby hangs a structural difficulty since it is likely that the work of continental scholars will be translated only if it concerns the central debates of the English speaking world, either conceptually, methodologically, or in terms of substantive issue.  It is thus by extension part of the American science of International Relations, and to a lesser extent the British variant.  We pick up, and in this instance, translate, that which we know, and we know that which we understand, or which is taken back to Europe from North America by graduate students and visiting lecturers.  What we miss all too often is that which is hard to find because we do not know what we are looking for.  But is there something there?  We know that there is a legal tradition in the study of International Relations in much of continental Europe, and indeed, Latin America.  We know that there is a tradition of public administration studies and we also know that there is a rich tradition of area studies in the research institutes of the old imperial Powers of Britain, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.  Where then are we in Europe now?

            International Relations has had a critical mass in IR in Britain since the mid-1960s with the expansion of the University system at that time.  Nevertheless, in the mid-1980s there were only nine full Professors in the subject.  However, the subject was already being organised professionally through BISA which now has a membership of 950.  This should, however, be seen in the context of ISA (3300), JAIR (2100) and KISA (2500).  The establishment of the ECPR Standing Group for International Relations in the late 1980s and the pan European Conferences beginning in 1992, together with the EJIR,  has given meaningful expression to a European dimension together with other sub-European regional associations such as NISA and CEEISA and IR sections of national associations, e.g. AFSP.  In total the European IR community is both numerous, diverse and lively although not as well-organised or interpreted as that in the United States.  In France (Groom 2002), Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Austria and Switzerland a national critical mass has been reached and it is gaining strength in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey.  In Eastern Europe IR is weak, as is political science generally in that part of the continent, but the CEEISA and the Russian ISA are very promising developments catering to a burgeoning post-Cold War academic generation.  The past  problem of a lack of institutionalisation, in the sense that International Relations was part of a broad Political Science Faculty or a Law Faculty with no professional associations, is now being overcome. Moreover, there is a growth in new professional IR journals in different languages in Europe which go beyond policy analysis.  In short, the  North American ISA now has some interlocuteurs valables.

            During the past decade there has been a change in the location of training of young European  scholars in IR.  Whereas the traditional pattern of studying abroad in the United States, France, Britain and Russia continues, it does so to a lesser extent since as the subject develops, albeit unevenly, the possibilities for high level training in local universities and research institutes has increased.  Thus there is no particular pattern, and it is not necessary to go abroad to study to make a successful career in IR,   This is one of the manifestations of the weakening or decline of North American hegemony in the field.  A North American, French, British or Russian period of postgraduate training is no longer a rite de passage.  While it is true that many continental scholars now write in English, they do it, not so much as to break into the Anglo-American debate, although this is a factor, but because English has become the lingua franca of social science.  Indeed, much postgraduate teaching and training, as well as research, takes place in English in continental universities and research institutes.  In a sense too, money talks, in that foundations may be more likely to give funding for a research project in English than one in another language, further exacerbating the paradox of the overwhelming predominance of the English language in a discipline which lays claims to a global vision.  In some senses the use of English destroys the nuance of thought of non-native speakers and often leads to a loss of subtlety and insight. Because it imposes upon them the structures and thought patterns of a different culture, many feel that they cannot give the best of themselves in English.  The point is  that it is a matter of professional responsibility for scholars in a discipline such as International Relations to be aware of contributions from colleagues in other parts of the world.  Happily the exploration of non-Western thought relevant for IR is a new and helpfully countervailing trend.

 

We return to our starting point.  What hegemony?   There have always been differences of  intellectual tradition, method and of agenda.  However, even at the height of American political domination in the formative years of the Cold War there was a plurality in IR.  In the Western world there was an independent Francophone tradition and in the East there was an official Marxist one.  Since then the devastation of German Political Science by the Nazis and its subsequent revival, together with a strong Scandinavian input, has revived a third tradition.  Now as we look to Asia, there is greater diversity, but we are still blessed with strong means of communication and understanding.   What is exciting is that polarisation and isolation seem to be breaking down..   There is now an European IR community which is alive and well and living, for the most part, in the EU.  It has the advantage of easy access to the glories of North American academia, but at the same time it can dig deeply into its own national intellectual traditions conceived within a broader European framework.  The Europeanisation of IR is a notion whose time has come, and it interacts on a somewhat separate, but largely equal basis, with North American IR.  There are no hegemonies, and this may also be true beyond the confines of the EU and North America.  It is in both our interests to explore whether this is the case.  After all the sun does rise in the East.

 

Canterbury, April 2003.

 

Notes

[1] This article draws substantially in parts upon an earlier essay by A.J.R. Groom and Peter Mandaville:  ‘Hegemony and  Autonomy in IR’ in Robert Crawford and Darryl Jarvis (eds):  IR: Still an American Social Science?  Albany, SUNY Press, 2001.  I am grateful to a number of colleagues for their views and advice on subsequent developments.

[2]  We should note that an important precursor was Emily Greene Balch who taught courses in international politics and economics at Wellesley College in the United States from 1896 to 1918.  Dismissed from her post at Wellesley on account of her pacifism, Balch went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  I am indebted to Craig Murphy for bringing this to my attention.

 

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International Political Economy: Beyond Hegemonic Stability

By Helen Milner

International political economy is a growth industry. Beginning its boom after the oil crises in the 1970s shook both world markets and states, the field now encompasses not only a great deal of political economy but of comparative and international politics as well. The end of the Cold War also helped shift attention to the field’s main focus: how markets and states affect one another.

Scholars in the field have tried to explain at least four aspects of the international political economy. First, many of its pioneers thought that economics was too narrow to explain central aspects of the international economy. Consider one of the more visible theoretical gaps: Although economic theory showed that free trade was optimal, in reality, protectionism characterized most states’ trade policies for years. Seeking to explain such paradoxes created by economic theory, scholars have proposed explanations that are more political. In particular, they have emphasized how politics determines the stability and openness of the international economy, a focus inspired by the trauma of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the desire to avoid repeating any such experience.

Second, scholars have focused on explaining states’ foreign economic policy choices. In part, many believe that these choices are the most important factor shaping the nature of the international economy. For example, explaining why states choose to protect their economies, or how they set their exchange rates, or why they give foreign aid have been central preoccupations for the field. These explanations, however, have sought to interpret such choices by adducing domestic and international factors as well as economic and political ones.

Third, the field has paid attention to why certain states grow rapidly and develop over time, while others fail to do so or decline. This interest in the changing positions of states in the world economy has also been approached eclectically. Economic causes for such changes are usually supplemented by political ones, while domestic causes of the rise and decline of states are paired with international factors.

Finally, scholars have been interested in the impact of the international economy on domestic politics, an issue often explored under the rubric of the globalization of national economies.

Researchers in this field have generally sought answers to these kinds of questions by looking into four categories of explanatory factors: 1) the distribution of world power, especially the role of a hegemonic state; 2) the structure, function, and consequences of international institutions; 3) the impact of nonmaterialist factors such as ideas and beliefs; and 4) the effect of domestic politics.

 

Does hegemony breed stability?

Robert Gilpin, Stephen Krasner, and other scholars from the realist tradition have identified the distribution of power among states as a central factor in explaining the openness and stability of the international economy. “Hegemonic stability theory,” first espoused by Charles Kindleberger in the 1970s, focuses on the role of leading states for example, Great Britain in the nineteenth and the United States in the twentieth centuries – and on how changes in the distribution of capabilities affect the world economy. This theory argued that the overwhelming dominance of one country was necessary for the existence of an open and stable world economy. Such a hegemon served to coordinate and discipline other countries so that each could feel secure enough to open its markets and avoid beggar-thy-neighbor policies. Conversely, the theory asserted that the decline of a hegemon tends to be associated with economic closure, instability, and the creation of competing regional blocs.

During the nineteenth century, Britain exercised a form of economic hegemony over much of the world. Britain’s leadership was associated with the globalization of markets, the openness of international trade and capital movements, the rise of multinational corporations, and the general economic and political stability that characterized at least Europe. World War I brought an abrupt end to both British hegemony and the conditions that it had promoted. Increasing protectionism, the formation of regional blocs, and the decline in capital mobility in the 1920s and early 1930s ate away at the foundations of the global economy, contributing to growing economic instability and the depression.

The cause of this tragic chain of events has often been laid at America’s doorstep. The United States was, at the end of World War I, the world’s strongest economic power. But it steadfastly refused to take on the leadership role that Britain could no longer play. This “irresponsibility” was most vividly exemplified in the minds of many people by the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930), which raised the average tax on imports to the United States by about 40 percent. At the beginning of the depression, the United States shut its markets to foreign goods and thus helped propel the world economy into its worst swoon ever. The unwillingness of the United States to coordinate its monetary and currency policies with other countries merely exacerbated the situation. This isolationist posture on the part of the world’s economic hegemon had negative consequences for most other countries and the United States itself.

The perils of isolationism seemed to have been well learned by American policymakers after the end of World War II. Then, the United States quickly assumed a leadership role and steadily moved forward to create an open international trade system based on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and a stable monetary system founded on the Bretton Woods system. The Marshall Plan was perhaps the direct antithesis of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. It symbolized recognition of America’s special role and responsibility for peace and prosperity beyond its borders – indeed, globally. U.S. leadership, it is asserted, helped create the conditions necessary for the steady economic growth experienced by the industrial countries up to the 1970s and the rapid development of countries such as Japan and South Korea.

Concerns about U.S. power arose again in the late 1960s and early 1970s. America’s economic advantages over the rest of the world seemed to be rapidly dissipating, while other countries were catching up. In response, protectionist sentiment within the United States grew, leading to many domestic challenges to the traditional policy of freer trade. The stability of international currency markets was also disrupted by American behavior. The simultaneous pursuit of the Vietnam War and the Great Society program helped fuel inflation in the United States, which was exported abroad because of the dollar’s role in international exchange. America’s allies, especially France and Germany, became very concerned over the impact of this erosion in the dollar’s value as the world’s reserve currency. Ultimately, these problems led to the U.S. abandonment of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system and to the emergence of a more volatile era of floating exchange rates. Hence, although American policy may have laid the groundwork for the growing globalization of markets, the decline of American leadership prompted many, especially in the United States, to worry about the future stability and direction of the world economy. Critics of U.S. power, however, especially Susan Strange, have either denied any decline in U.S. capabilities or lauded the effects of the decline of “irresponsible” U.S. power.

 

Why Power Isn’t Everything

Nowadays, such concerns about American power have receded. By the mid-1990s, the decline of U.S. hegemony no longer seemed so assured. Claims about the decrease in U.S. power appeared exaggerated given the demise of the Soviet Union, persistent recession in Japan, high unemployment and slow growth in Europe combined with the challenge of integrating Eastern Europe into the European Union, and American industry’s return to competitiveness. Moreover, the relationship between hegemony and an open, stable world economy has been cast into doubt by a number of scholars, such as Robert Keohane and David Lake. As U.S. behavior during the interwar period illustrates, the possession of superior resources by a nation does not translate automatically into great influence or beneficial outcomes for the world.

 

Institutions to Govern the World Economy

One reason why the distribution of power among countries is not seen as the exclusive factor shaping the workings of the international economy is the important role played by international institutions. Keohane has made the most ambitious claims about the role of these institutions. He argues that although hegemony might be necessary for creating such institutions, once begun, they take on a life of their own, and states come to see them as worth preserving. Multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and EU provide information to states about each others’ behavior, reduce the cost of negotiating agreements, and can expose, and sometimes even punish, violations of agreements by states. The claim is that without these institutions the international economy – and international politics – would be much more unstable, less open, and more conflictual. In the case of the EU, for example, many see peace in Western Europe over the past 40 years as partially a product of this institution; and scholars and politicians often cite the maintenance of peace in Europe as a primary motivation for monetary union.

The impact and role of international institutions are controversial. Realists, with their emphasis on power, denigrate the role of such institutions, often seeing them as having little independent impact, and argue that their influence is derived from the actions of the states within them. In the EU example, they might cite the hegemonic role of Germany as the key to monetary union. Others, especially European scholars, believe that many international institutions are controlled by the United States, and thus reflect its interests. In particular, the United States is seen as using the IMF and World Bank as subtle mechanisms to exert its influence on countries. As realists, these scholars emphasize the impact of state power over the character of the institutions themselves.

 

The Power of Values

The emphasis on power and international institutions misses a central element necessary to explain political behavior: the purposes or goals that states and their leaders choose to pursue with their resources. Nonmaterialist explanations of the international political economy attach key interest to how states’ purposes or goals are defined. Two central approaches have taken on the task of explaining this. The “ideas approach,” exemplified by the work of Keohane and Judith Goldstein, proposes that the ideas that policymakers carry in their heads are very important in explaining their policy choices. Ideas, whether about the proper role of the state in the economy or the means-ends relationship between economic policy instruments and outcomes, shape how policymakers act.

Dominant ideas – ones that capture the attention of large segments of the policy-making community – define states’ actions and coordinate their behaviors in critical ways. Scholars have identified both the rise of the belief in Keynesian macroeconomics after World War II and the later dominance of monetarist beliefs as central explanations for the creation of various international institutions and the coordination of states’ policies within them. Some attribute the movement toward European monetary union to the spread of monetarist ideas among European policymakers. In another area, Anne Krueger has shown how changes in the prevailing ideas on how to induce economic development led, in the 1950s, to the use of import substitution policies and, more recently, to their abandonment.

Like scholars who emphasize ideas, the so-called constructivists focus on how policymakers’ and states’ purposes are defined. This approach goes beyond the adoption of ideas to the definition of social identity. A core proposition of this approach is that the social construction – hence, the term “constructivism” – of states’ identities constrains the choices that states can make and propels them toward certain behaviors. For instance, Peter Katzenstein has argued that the Japanese embrace of pacifism since the end of World War II has affected Japan’s behavior and its policy choices in the security area. Others have suggested that the construction of a European social identity has helped promote European integration. And certainly the growing concern with nationalism and national identity as sources of conflict or cooperation in international politics has been part of the constructivists’ agenda; as evidenced in the work of Ronald Jepperson and Alexander Wendt. These nonmaterialist explanations of the international political economy emphasize states’ purposes and choice of goals, which their proponents see as fundamental to states’ behavior.

 

The Impact of Domestic Politics

Domestic political explanations of the international political economy also focus on the definition of states’ purposes, but they tend to emphasize political processes and examine the way that national interests are defined through a struggle among domestic actors. Scholars in this area usually focus on two sets of factors: In the first case, they see social groups such as labor organizations, capitalists, multinational corporations, import-competing firms, and ethnic groups as having identifiable preferences about international economic policy that often translate into national policy. Those domestic groups who benefit from international economic exposure or have strong international ties already will favor greater international openness and stability and press their governments to enact policies that promote such market characteristics. The more such groups exist domestically, the greater will be the pressure on policymakers to orient their policies in this direction. For example, Jeffrey Frieden has argued that European monetary union has become more tenable because of the growing external orientation of European firms and banks and their concomitant interest in European economic openness and currency stability.

In the second case, some scholars point to a greater role for the state and policymakers in both the definition and execution of international economic policy. For them, the character of the state is what matters. The institutional structure of the state and its imperviousness to societal pressures shape the policy preferences of political actors and their capacity to implement these preferences. For example, Katzenstein and others identified France and Japan as states with institutional structures that allow technocratically inclined policymakers to play a leading role in defining foreign economic policy and pursuing interventionist policies.

The impact of a state’s institutional structures on its development prospects has also been a topic of interest. Why is it that in some countries (mostly in East Asia) the state has played a central role in fostering economic development, while in others (mostly in Africa and Latin America) state action seems to have impaired economic progress? Some scholars such as Chalmers Johnson and Stephan Haggard have concluded that certain institutional characteristics are more conducive than others to making the state an effective promoter of economic development. These institutional traits often enable the state to mediate between the international and domestic economies. More recently, concerns have grown about the extent of democracy within states. Some scholars such as Donald Wittman and Gerald Scully have argued that economic growth and international openness depend greatly on whether a state’s institutions are democratic or not.

In more recent work, scholars such as Judith Goldstein, Beth Simmons, and I have tried to focus on both societal actors and state institutions, realizing that each plays a role in shaping foreign economic policy. Moreover, scholars have tried to connect international and domestic factors. Thus, two-level games, which link both the international and domestic environments and societal and state actors, have become more prominent. Robert Putnam’s early version of this approach has been refined by others seeking to derive more specific propositions about how all of these factors interact. For example, a number of scholars have shown how divided government affects trade policy choices. These two-level models promise a better understanding of the interaction of the complex factors that create the international political economy.

 

The Pressures Of Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasing integration of national economies into a global one. As mentioned before, globalization peaked in the late nineteenth century, reached its nadir in the early 1940s, and has since rebounded to levels comparable to the earlier highs. Globalization has thus increased, as most agree, but it is far from being complete. For many economists, globalization is a beneficial process since it produces net gains for most countries. More concern has been raised by political scientists over its political effects, especially domestic ones.

In the 1970s, the buzzword for globalization was interdependence. It was argued that rising interdependence was not only changing international politics but also rendering the nation-state obsolete. The expectation was that it would severely limit the range of action that states could take. The state would gradually become less and less important to its citizens as interdependence rose. This debate aroused much controversy and inspired a strong defense of the continuing relevance of the state in international and domestic politics.

In the 1990s, this debate has revived as globalization reaches new heights. Three issues are central to it: First, globalization has been seen as exerting pressure on all states to change their policies and institutions in certain ways. Globalization, scholars have argued, is forcing convergence in policies among countries most exposed to it. Liberalizing trade policy, removing capital controls, opening financial markets to foreign investors, and downsizing the role of the state in the economy are the generic policy prescriptions for effective participation in a global economy. Pressure for the reduction – or even abandonment of – the welfare state in developed countries, and for the liberalization of the economy in developing ones, has been seen as a byproduct of globalization.

Second, globalization has been seen as giving increased power to the holders of capital – investors, multinational firms, and global financial institutions. These actors now can demand that states make changes in their economic policies and can punish them if they do not comply by exiting the country or, better yet, speculating against the country in world currency markets. In contrast, labor has been weakened. Having less freedom to move from country to country, workers find their power to bargain with firms impaired. Membership in unions worldwide has declined, and unions have faced challenges to their acquired power in many states. Globalization moves jobs around the world and imposes constraints on wage increases as never before.

Finally, globalization, it is sometimes claimed, is irreversible. That is, no actor can resist its advance. This again calls into question the role of the nation-state. Can any state resist, or even reshape, the pressures generated by global markets? Or must a state submit to the ineluctable pressures of globalization and lose the capacity to direct its national economy?

On none of these issues is there much consensus. Although many events seem to support the above views – the rush to free trade and capital market liberalization, the reforms of many welfare states, and the creation of independent central banks globally – some critics have seen the other side of the coin. They note that the percentage of government spending in the economy has declined only slightly or not at all (even in Margaret Thatcher’s England), countries have maintained extensive and distinct welfare systems, national ways of doing business have persisted, and unions have actually made a resurgence lately in some nations, including in the United States and France. These events suggest that globalization is neither producing convergence nor undermining labor, and may not be irreversible. States in fact are ever more important, for they are the means for countries to resist and reshape the pressures generated by globalization. In this view, strengthening the institutions of the state may be the most effective way for countries to reap the maximum benefits from a world of global markets. These contradictory perspectives on globalization are likely to persist until we have more evidence about its effects.

The relationship between American power and globalization is also a topic of much interest. It is undeniable that U.S. policies have helped create the current international economy. But some claim that globalization is not only a creation of the United States but also a creature controlled by it. Countries such as France and Malaysia have vehemently expressed the view that globalization is basically the extension of American economic practices and ideals to the world, and a tool for the exertion of American power. They see resistance to global market pressures as defiance of the United States. Or, as some South Koreans have claimed during the recent financial crisis there, the IMF is just doing America’s bidding. That may be leadership, but it is not the type of leadership these countries would like to see.

Ironically, many Americans see globalization as beyond their country’s control. Indeed, in their eyes, the United States is ever more constrained by global forces, just like everyone else: All states must heed the dictates of international bond traders and investors or face the consequences. The United States let globalization out of the bottle and now cannot contain it. This loss of national control is bemoaned by some and applauded by others, but none doubt its reality. What is striking in this debate is the difference in perception between Americans and the rest of the world about the relationship between globalization and American influence.

The impact of globalization remains an area of intense research. The recent economic travails in Asia have underlined how even well-developed states can be affected by international investors and the vast capital flows they now control. How this crisis is resolved will have important consequences for many countries and for the future of the global economy. Will the pressures exerted by international financial actors fundamentally change the relationship between Asian governments and their economies? Will the crisis lead to greater convergence between the economic practices of Asian institutions and those common in the West? Will the famed “industrial policy” practiced by many Asian governments disappear? This issue is especially important for China and other developing countries seeking models of how best to foster economic development.

Such questions beg a look at the role of the state in economic policy, both foreign and domestic. In the aftermath of the two world wars, government intervention in the economy became accepted practice at both the micro and macro levels for eliminating boom and bust cycles in the economy. Indeed, the twentieth century has witnessed the greatest growth in government intervention in the economy ever seen. Globalization and the spread of more “orthodox” economic ideas, however, have undermined confidence in such intervention in many areas. As states’ roles in their economies are reduced, what will happen to both the economy and the states? Or is the withdrawal of the state from the economy a passing trend? Will new ideas arise that sanction a greater role for the state in the economy?

Finally, the impact of power and international policies on the global economy is of great interest. After all, political conflict and war after 1914 destroyed the global economy created in the late nineteenth century. What effects will the post-Cold War international system have on the world economy? Will major international conflicts reappear, thus fracturing it into blocs? Will institutions that have helped to keep the peace such as the EU, NATO, and UN disappear, while new political alliances form, reshaping economic flows? Critically, what impact will such changes in the distribution of power and the organization of international politics have on the global economy? These issues will form some of the general research agendas for scholars in international political economy.

Sumber: (Foreign Policy, No. 110, Spring 1998)

 

 

Is democratization making international relations more peaceful?

“Democracies don’t attack each other” declared President Clinton in his 1994 State of the Union address. This tenet has been variably described as “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations” and dismissed as “a myth.” Nonetheless, it is a feature of the area of international relations research that in the last twenty years the democratic peace thesis has emerged to challenge the accepted view of real-world events as dictated by the broadly accepted paradigm of the realist approach. What is even more important about the idea that democracies posses innate characteristics that preclude conflict between them (simply as a result of being democracies) are the policy implications that this suggests – the spread of democracy can instantly be recognised as the quickest solution to preventing international conflict once one accepts the democratic peace thesis. It is for this reason that Clinton has made democratization the “third pillar” of his foreign policy. Yet the danger may be that such a simple postulate really is “too good to be true,” and consequently a close examination is required to determine if democratic peace theory offers a credible alternative to realism that can be practised in the post-Cold War era, or if it is utopian wishful-thinking.

The notion of an absence of conflict between democracies (in the modern sense of the word) is not new – Kant wrote in 1795 of his belief in the emergence of a “perpetual peace” between liberal republics in the future. Modern democratic peace theory attempts to build on this base, but in doing so encounters several conceptual and methodological difficulties as are highlighted by Chan. Firstly, Kant was referring not specifically to democracies as we would understand them, but republics instead, meaning polities where market economies were present, the citizens had legal equality with one another, and there existed representative and separated government. In practice, all democracies as exist today are in fact republics, but it is not necessarily the case that modern democracies are liberal as Kant’s perception of a republic would have entailed. For example, Britain before the 1832 Reform Act was liberal, but not a democracy, and during the Civil War in the United States, the Confederacy was democratic, but not liberal. A related difficulty is what we understand in our definition of a “democratic” regime. Proponents of democratic peace theory have often been accused by their detractors of modifying their interpretation of terms such as this (as well as what actually constitutes a war or even peace, inasmuch as peace may not be simply the absence of war) to suit their data on historical conflicts to supporting their theory. In response, democratic peace theorists have extended their propositions to phenomena such as foreign intervention, dispute mediation, civil strife, covert subversion, and alliance membership in attempts to show the widespread utility and applicability of their theories. The danger is that in doing so, there is more likelihood that valid counterarguments can be found that will damage democratic peace theory in a manner that would destroy it as described below.

Regardless of these distractions, the rationale behind why democracies should be inherently more peace-loving than non-democracies can be divided into three areas, starting off with the ideas of Kant, who identified public opinion, the spirit of commerce, and the existence of a pacific union as restraints on the outbreak of war between democracies. The nature of democratic institutions and public control over their representatives is a major factor in averting war, as citizens of one liberal democracy respect the integrity of other liberal democratic states and forego violence and coercion in favour of tolerance and freedom. The more people that are free, the better all are; furthermore, as liberalism is cosmopolitan, it posits that all citizens, and not just those of one’s own state, should be free. By allowing free debate on issues of foreign policy, citizens can evaluate alternative strategies and articulate these preferences to their elected representatives, either directly or indirectly through periodic elections. The fact that war costs all citizens “blood and treasure” (as Owen puts it) dictates that conversion to acceptance of the proposed war will be necessary by those who believe in it, and this will not be an easy task; thus there will be a tendency to avoid conflict and achieve a peaceful resolution of crises. Liberal ideas thus work through ideology and institutions to constrain the actions of government. Secondly, the development of economic links between nations will lead both to realise that they have much to lost from conflict, and will reinforce the desire to avoid war. Finally, the emergence of a pacific union will reinforce the idea that democracies share common goals and interests, and further mitigate the desire for armed conflict between two countries with similar regimes.

These ideals have been challenged by realists, who argue that public opinion is too reactionary to be a driving force in restraining the policies of politicians, and further that its efficiency depends on the structure of institutions in translating the citizens’ policy preferences to the decision-makers; this ability varies between countries to such an extent that in some countries it fails to have any impact on the political elites. Secondly, it is argued that there is a lack of distinction between cause and effect in arguing that the idea of commerce restrains war – it could just as easily be the case that a lack of war leads to commerce, rather than vice-versa. Given the growing concerns with lack of accountability in current government structures in developed countries, these arguments weaken the case of why democratic peace emerges. Nonetheless, the other arguments that democratic peace theorists advance are compelling, these being normative rather than structural in origin, and argue that democracies are satiated powers who wish to maintain the status quo (inasmuch as that does not present a challenge from an illiberal power to the security of the democracies). Secondly, the rationalist, calculating approach of politicians as to the penalties of losing a war, especially given the transparency of democratic politics to domestic citizens, as well as foreign policymakers, will foster a sense of futility towards initiating conflicts that cannot be won without exacting a high cost.

The question of whether there indeed exists meaningful peace between democracies has lent itself to three interpretations: firstly, that democracies are inherently more peaceful than non-democracies; secondly, that this is only true of relations between different democracies; and thirdly that democracies are in fact no more peaceful than non-democracies. It is thus an endeavour of proponents of democratic peace theory to demonstrate that there are no historical cases where two democracies have gone to war with one another, for to admit of just one instance of where this is the case would be sufficient to disconfirm totally their hypothesis. Opponents would on the other hand not only seek to demonstrate that this has been the case, but further to adopt a second line of attack by arguing that if there has existed peace between democracies, this is a mere historical contingency. The consensus that has emerged among supporters of democratic peace theory is that although democracies are not generally less warlike than non-democracies, they rarely (if ever) fight one another. Owen has examined several instances where democracies have come close to war over disputes, but have restrained themselves and their actions so as to avoid general conflict; he believes that the liberal ideals that were present in these cases produced an aversion to conflict through the causal process as was explained above. Layne also examines some of the same crises, and adopts a different interpretation as to why they did not proliferate into full-scale wars, arguing instead that traditional realist security and national interest calculations can explain the outcomes. However, this critique fails to take into account the subtleties of perception as explained by Owen, whereby wars may arise between democracies because one fails to recognise the other as such. Layne’s assertion that “[I]f democratic public opinion really had the effect ascribed to it, democracies would be peaceful in their relations with all states, whether democratic or not” reveals this. It is surely the case that public opinion with regard to different countries can differ, and that being peace-loving does not have to be an absolute – to maintain this outlook in the face of the rise of an illiberal aggressor would be to invite disaster for the country in question. Thus this can further be used to explain – along with traditional balance-of-power theory why liberal democracies appear to act inconsistently with liberal ideas in regard to their dealings with illiberal countries. Layne’s critique fails to appreciate this important part of the democratic peace camp’s argument, and thus fails to achieve a significant victory. Indeed, it is this assumption of mutual incompatibility between liberalism and realism that is apparent in the realist responses to democratic peace theory – for as has been pointed out above, foreign policy towards different countries can be dictated be the two different approaches simultaneously. Secondly, to address the issue that the lack of conflict could merely be coincidence as at any particular moment, the probability of two named states being at war with one another is remote, new research has been conducted to show that the standard systemic realist variables that would account for lack of conflict – such as geographical distance, alliances against common enemies, and a prudent desire to avoid unnecessary wars – have been controlled for, and thus show that the absence of conflict between democracies is therefore statistically significant.

The implications of democratic peace theory for foreign policy approaches have been alluded to above. The peace that was maintained in the Cold War was certainly a result of the bipolar balancing that was undertaken between the two superpowers. The resultant system that is being shaped as a replacement for this has not yet had time to become fully defined. As it appears that the ideal of collective security has not been accepted and will not become so in the future, it may be that, given the assumed validity of democratic peace theory, perhaps the best way for securing international peace and security in the future may be to encourage the spread of democracy. However, it must be noted that if this is not the case then attempts by democratic powers to impose a democratic norm on other countries may be resisted and resented, and this could lead to rifts in relations between these countries in the future.

Sumber: http://www.geocities.com/lylbf/essays/democrat.html

Realism and Idealism

Philosophically, realism and idealism comprise opposing approaches to the definition and pursuit of national objectives abroad. Realists tend to accept conditions as they are and to define the ends and means of policy by the measures of anticipated gains, costs, necessities, and chances of success. Idealists tend to define goals in ideal, often visionary, forms, and presume that the means for their achievement lie less in measured policies, relying on diplomacy or force, than in the attractiveness of the goals themselves.

 

Conflicting Perceptions

These two modes of perceiving world politics were never uniquely American in precept or experience. Western political thought always recognized the tension between realist and idealist views toward the actions of governments in both domestic and international transactions. The stark realism of Niccolò Machiavelli stood in profound opposition to the dominant Christian teachings that favored ethical constraints upon rulers. In the eighteenth century, doctrines of raison d’état contended with Enlightenment doctrines propounded by philosophers who objected to such practices of monarchical statecraft as mercantilism, balance-of-power politics, and the pursuit of dynastic goals at the expense of peace and human welfare.

While the American clash between realism and idealism owes an intellectual debt to antecedent European thought, it was in the United States that both doctrines were fully established, in theory and in practice. Whereas in continental Europe, utopian idealism remained excluded from the realm of practice, in the United States it became a recurrent, contrapuntal theme of statesmen and politicians, commentators and theorists. What underlay the conflicting presumptions regarding the requirements and possibilities of external action was the anarchical nature of the international environment. Whereas governmental structures within established countries assured some degree of order and security, the absence of international authority compelled individual countries to fend for themselves, relying on their own capacities to coexist in what social contract theorists termed a state of nature. Realists and idealists disagreed totally over the capacity of human society, and especially international politics, to eliminate the vagaries of existence in an anarchic state system.

Realists, recognizing no genuine alternative to coexistence in an anarchical world of individual sovereign nations, accepted the modern state system as a necessity. They would defend the country’s interests by following the rules of diplomacy and war as propounded by a host of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers and statesmen. These rules of conduct were not designed to prevent conflict and war, but rather to mitigate their effects and thereby assure the survival of states. For realists, moreover, war was not an aberration, but a condition sometimes unavoidable, a contingency for which to prepare, but also, when possible, to deter by force or accommodation. Wars, they knew, were generally the only means available for changing unwanted political or territorial conditions. Realists thus accepted power politics as a natural phenomenon of international life, with the concomitant reliance on armies and navies, secret diplomacy, and alliances. Asserting the primacy of national over individual interests, they viewed the universal norms governing human rights as conditional when they threatened the national welfare. Realists observed the essential truth that nations existed successfully amid the world’s anarchy. The evidence lay in the precedence of peace over war, as well as the continued material advancement in human affairs.

Idealists viewed the international system, with its accoutrements of conflict and war, as not only deeply flawed but also capable of melioration, if not total cure. For them, international strife was the unnecessary and reprehensible product of outmoded forms of human organization, both in the internal structuring of states and in their international practices. Idealists saw in the trappings of power politics little but ambition, opportunism, deception, and impositions. Whereas realist doctrine focused on national interests and security, idealist concerns looked to individual welfare and the general interests of humanity. Idealists presumed that the objective validity and authority of universal norms, laws, and principles could and should apply to international as well as domestic affairs.

Realists and idealists disagreed fundamentally on the primary determinants of state behavior in international politics. For realists, external factors defined the options available to policy-makers. Those options were uncertain and elusive, requiring preparedness as well as caution. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once remarked: “The future is unpredictable. Only one thing—the unexpected—can be reasonably anticipated…. The part of wisdom is to be prepared for what may happen, rather than to base our course upon faith in what should happen.” The German historian Leopold von Ranke formulated this view in terms congenial to American realists. The dangers and uncertainties of international life, he wrote, not only established the primacy of foreign affairs but also dictated the precedence of security interests over domestic concerns. While cognizant of the historical vicissitudes in national fortunes, realists nevertheless saw constancy in the essential traits and behavior of nations. Policies might vary with regimes, but fundamental interests, once established, tended to remain consistent.

Idealists, on the contrary, tended to view the sources of external state action as residing in internal political processes, based largely on political structures, the distribution of political power, and the ambitions of ruling elites. Involvements abroad reflected not external necessity, but internal choice. To idealists, different forms of government led to different modes of foreign policy. Autocratic states, some idealists presumed, too readily threatened the cause of humanity by placing demands on individuals that were sharply at odds with private conscience. By ordering men into mortal combat with other members of the human race, they shattered the peace and defied the civilized norms of human conduct. Authentic republics did not wage aggressive wars, nor did free peoples impose imperial control over others.

However apparent the wellsprings of aggressive national behavior, realists accepted limits on both their intentions and their power to interfere. They recognized the barriers that national sovereignty placed on meliorist efforts to alter the political structures and domestic decisions of other countries. Idealists, as children of the Enlightenment, expected more of themselves and society. For them, the world was not hopelessly corrupt, but could, through proper leadership and motivation, advance morally and politically. This optimistic view of the world became endemic to the idealists’ presumptions of human progress and the concomitant conviction that the United States, because of the superiority of its institutions, was ideally constituted to lead the world toward an improving future. The belief that institutional and moral superiority distinguished the United States from other countries found its central expression in the concept of “exceptionalism.” This assigned to American suppositions of exceptional virtue the imperative of exceptional obligation to serve the peace and improve the human condition.

 

The Revolutionary Era

America’s idealist crusade to minimize the country’s role in power politics was heavily influenced by the debates of eighteenth-century British politicians, journalists, and pamphleteers. Despite the quarrel between Britain and its American colonies after the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), largely over Parliament’s jurisdiction in imperial, commercial, and political matters, the contestants were closely linked intellectually. What troubled English critics of Britain’s role in European politics was the heavy burden of taxation, alliances, and perennial wars demanded of Britain because of its continental connections. By steering clear of such attachments, Britain could concentrate on the pacific activities of trade and commerce, assigning the saved resources to benign uses. Such arguments for reducing Britain’s role in European politics applied as well to America’s ties with Britain.

Thomas Paine, above all other American writers, created the link between English reformist thought and that of the colonies. Bankrupt and a failure at everything he attempted, Paine immigrated to America in 1774. There he quickly emerged as the chief pamphleteer for American independence. In his famed essay CommonSense (1776), Paine argued that America’s attachment to Britain alone endangered its security. It was the British connection that tended “to involve this Continent in European wars and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship, and against whom we have neither anger nor complaint.” More specifically, Paine predicted that France and Spain, both New World powers, would never be “our enemies as Americans, but as our being subjects of Great Britain.” An independent United States would have no cause to defy other countries with demanding foreign policies. He assured his readers that “our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” American independence would symbolize the rejection of Europe and the entire system of power politics. During the ratification debates regarding the U.S. Constitution a decade later, the Antifederalists employed these isolationist arguments against ratification, convinced that the oceans assured the country’s security without the Constitution’s warmaking powers.

Paine’s writings contained the fundamental assumptions of idealist thought on foreign policy. For him the young republic, freed from the contamination and constraints of power politics, appeared ideally constituted to create a new order in world affairs. The American Revolution, as a triumphant avowal of the principle of free government, seemed an auspicious event in the eternal quest for peace and human rights. “The cause of America,” proclaimed Paine, “is in great measure the cause of mankind.” He regarded the institution of monarchy the chief cause of human misery and war. “Man is not the enemy of man,” he wrote, “but through the medium of a false system of government.” How, he wondered, could the monarchies of Europe, unable to satisfy the needs of their citizens, survive the revolutionary pressures being unleashed by events in America? Those moral principles, which allegedly maintained peaceful and just relations among individuals, would, in time, rule the behavior of nations.

Other American contemporaries found Paine’s views highly congenial. Benjamin Franklin proclaimed such sentiments when, in April 1782, he said: “Establishing the liberties of America will not only make that people happy, but will have some effect in diminishing the misery of those, who in other parts of the world groan under despotism, by rendering it more circumspect, and inducing it to govern with a lighter hand.” Thomas Jefferson elaborated virtually identical views in both his public and private observations. “I have sworn upon the altar of God,” he wrote, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” For Jefferson, force was evil unless informed by some moral purpose. But whereas Paine harbored visions of an activist, messianic role for the United States in world politics, Jefferson generally held to more modest aspirations. America would best serve the interests of mankind by setting an example of purity and perfection, and by offering an asylum for the wretched and oppressed. “A single good government,” he once wrote, “becomes a blessing to the whole earth.” James Madison, a contemporary idealist, echoed the sentiment: “Our Country, if it does justice to itself, will be the workshop of liberty to the Civilized World, and do more than any other for the uncivilized.”

Contemporary conservatives attacked as utopian Paine’s idealist notions regarding the world’s future and America’s role in its creation. They knew that the United States could not project a successful international crusade beyond the reach of American law. What determined the external behavior of republics, they believed, was not the uniqueness of their political structures or the outlook of their people, but the international environment beyond their control, the demands imposed by their own ambitions, and the countering requirements of other states. James Madison, no less than others, denied that the foreign policies of republics differed essentially from those of monarchies. Hard experience had taught the revolutionary generation that nations dealt with others solely on the bases of interests and the capacity to render them effective.

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist (1788), questioned the assumption that commerce softened the manners of men and extinguished “those inflammable humors which have so often kindled into wars.” He observed that nations responded more readily to immediate interests than to general or humane considerations of policy. He asked: “Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies?…Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities?…Has commerce hitherto done any thing more than change the objects of war?” Hamilton suggested that Americans look to experience for answers to such questions. Carthage, a commercial republic, was the aggressor in the very war that terminated its existence. Holland, another trading republic, played a conspicuous role in the wars of modern Europe—as did Britain, markedly addicted to commerce. Hamilton concluded: “The cries of the nation and the importunities of their representatives have, upon various occasions, dragged their monarchs into war, or continued them in it, contrary to their inclinations, and sometimes contrary to the real interests of the state.”

Hamilton dwelled on the dangers that the real world of power politics posed for the United States. Some Americans, he warned, had been amused too long by theories that promised them “an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses, and evils incident to society in every shape.” It would be better for the country to assume, as did all other nations, that the happy empire of wisdom and virtue did not exist. “To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties…,” he wrote in The Federalist No. 6, “would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of [the] ages.” Because constant disputes could lead to war, he concluded that national safety required a strong central government, with a capacity to wage war and advance common interests in a potentially hostile world. For him, defense against the nation’s external challenges lay in the powers granted by the new U.S. Constitution.

 

The Early National Period

Not surprisingly, the French Revolution, and the subsequent war between revolutionary France and England after 1792, kindled the burgeoning rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton, members of President George Washington’s cabinet as, respectively, secretary of state and secretary of the Treasury. Earlier, such idealists as Paine and Jefferson had abhorred power politics and war; Hamilton, the realist, had preached preparedness with its warlike implications. The idealism generated by the French Revolution compelled a reversal of positions. Paine, supported by Jefferson, roused public clamors for support of the French Revolution and its principles. Idealists demanded that the United States support France’s war effort. Hamilton, with Washington, inclined to peaceful neutrality, with the effect, if not the intention, of serving the British cause. The idealists argued from principle, the realists from prudence and experience. Hamilton’s view prevailed when Washington issued his Neutrality Proclamation of 1793.

In Jefferson’s subsequent debate with Hamilton over the wisdom and morality of Washington’s proclamation, he based his advocacy of U.S. support for revolutionary France on the grounds that the United States must be faithful to its obligations under the Franco-American alliance of 1778, demonstrate gratitude for French assistance during the war against Britain, and reveal its affinity for republican institutions in a monarchical world. Jefferson’s three arguments rested on sentiment, not interests. Hamilton attacked these propositions head-on in a series of long public letters. In “Pacificus” of 6 July 1793, he argued that a country’s first obligation was to itself. The United States, he noted, had no power to aid France in its European war. No country, he concluded, could be obligated to do what it could not do. Next, Hamilton attacked Jefferson’s notion of gratitude to France for past favors, noting simply that France had aided the United States to serve its own interests in England’s defeat, not those of the United States. Governments, he argued, could not operate as individuals. Individuals could engage in actions of generosity or benevolence at the expense of their own interests, but a government, he said, could rarely be justified in pursuing such a course. It was responsible for the welfare of all of its citizens and for all time. In his “Americanus” papers of 1794, Hamilton denied, thirdly, that the cause of revolutionary France, with all of its excesses, was the cause of liberty, or that the failure of French revolutionary principles would undermine the security of the United States.

Hamilton read the nation another series of lectures on the fundamentals of a realist foreign policy in his “Camillus” essays of 1795. He published these papers in defense of Jay’s Treaty, negotiated with Britain and signed in November 1794. Hamilton made little effort to defend the treaty’s specific provisions or omissions, but lauded the settlement’s role in preventing war. In no way, he declared, were the negotiations dishonorable, the terms disgraceful. He counseled moderation: “Nations ought to calculate as well as individuals, to compare evils, and to prefer the lesser to the greater; to act otherwise, is to act unreasonably; those who advocate it are imposters and madmen.” Hamilton admonished Americans to recall that the United States, no less than the powers of Europe, were bound by the established modes of international behavior. “In national controversies,” Hamilton averred, “it is of real importance to conciliate the good opinion of mankind, and it is even useful to preserve or gain that of our enemy. The latter facilitates accommodation and peace—the former attracts good offices, friendly interventions, sometimes direct support, from others.” Against such appeals to tradition and common sense, Jefferson stood helpless. He confessed to Madison that Hamilton was “really a colossus…. In truth, when he comes forward, there is no one but yourself who can meet him.” “For God’s sake,” he pleaded, “take up your pen, and give a fundamental reply to…Camillus.” Madison declined the challenge.

Washington’s Farewell Address of 17 September 1796 was the culminating statement of Federalist thought on matters of external policy. It reflected the views of Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay, the three authors of The Federalist. Hamilton, in revising it, made it largely his own. Washington’s valedictory was a message for the times, but it was far more. He admonished the country to behave in accordance with established eighteenth-century principles as they applied to international affairs. Throughout his second term, Washington had been troubled by the dangerous attachments of too many Americans to the European belligerents. In October 1795 he had stressed the necessity of greater independence in a letter to Patrick Henry: “My ardent desire is…to see that [the United States] may be independent of all, and under the influence of none. In a word, I want an American character, that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves and not for others.” In his Farewell Address, Washington explained why foreign attachments endangered the country’s well-being: “The Nation, which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.” Sympathy for favored countries or governments, he warned, assumed common interests that seldom existed and enmeshed a people in the enmities of others without justification. For Washington, there was no room in the country’s external relations for crusades against evil.

Hamilton’s voluminous writings during Washington’s two administrations comprised a single, massive plea that the United States weigh its interests carefully before venturing abroad. Still, the persistent upheavals on the European continent, and their extension onto the Atlantic, touched American interests and sentiments sufficiently to keep alive the tensions between realists and idealists as they sought to influence national reactions to events abroad. The Napoleonic wars, especially as they ventured onto the Atlantic in one gigantic commercial conflict between the British navy and Napoleon’s continental system, challenged the profits of America’s neutral trade with Europe’s belligerents. President Jefferson demanded both British and French recognition of American neutral rights and responded to his failure to obtain either with his embargo on American trade in late 1807. Under President Madison, after 1809 the country’s frustration and animosity began to center on Britain because its infringements on the principle of freedom of the seas were more apparent than those of France.

As anti-British sentiment pushed the country toward war, it separated idealist sentiment, which focused on British immorality and the need to defend the principle of neutral trade, from realist arguments that war with Britain would be needless and futile. What those known as the War Hawks in Congress required was a rationale that would justify a declaration of war; the Republican Party, generally cohesive, would readily fall into line. That rationale lay in the supposition that Britain sought less the defense of belligerent rights than the ruination of the United States itself. Henry Clay of Kentucky claimed proof that Britain “will do everything to destroy us.” Peter B. Porter of New York added that if the United States continued to submit to British indignities, it “might safely calculate to be kicked and cuffed for the whole of the remainder of [its] life.” For some War Hawks, Britain desired no less than the recolonization of America. John A. Harper of New Hampshire charged that British conduct “bespeaks a determination to rule us, and can only be answered by the appeal to the God of Battles.” Similarly, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina warned Congress that Britain was determined to reduce the United States to a colonial status.

Realists in Congress contested the march toward war. John Randolph, Virginia’s noted conservative, questioned the assumption that American honor and security required a British-American conflict. In December 1811, he reminded Congress that the United States had no interest in contributing to Napoleon’s success. Why, he wondered, should the country regard Britain as its special enemy? Every consideration of blood, language, religion, and interest, he observed, should incline the American people toward England. Randolph reminded Congress that the United States had no power to defeat England in war. Similarly, John Quincy Adams, U.S. minister in St. Petersburg, recalled from the Gospel of Saint Luke (14:31): “Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand.” The conditions confronting the United States, Adams reminded his wife, Abigail, on 1 January 1812, were even less favorable than that. When Congress, without preparation, declared war on 19 June 1812, Obadiah German of New York condemned the action. “After the war is once commenced…,” he warned, “I presume gentlemen will find something more forcible than empty war speeches will be necessary.” It was his purpose, said German, “to check the precipitate step of plunging [the] country prematurely into a war, without any of the means of making the war terrible to the enemy; and with the certainty that it will be terrible to ourselves.” Having declared war, the country would have peace only with the enemy’s consent.

 

Latin America and Greece

In 1815 the United States emerged from the War of 1812 amid a burst of nationalism and a sense of deep satisfaction from having faced England. On the one hand, the war experience encouraged a pervading interest in the future of the North American continent and a pride of distinctness and separation from Europe’s international politics. On the other hand, it perpetuated a popular sensitivity to events abroad that repeatedly reopened the realist-idealist debate in the United States. The immediate postwar challenge to U.S. sentiment was Latin America’s struggle for independence from Spain. Determined to sever Europe’s ties to the New World in what they believed would be a triumph for humanity, editors led by William Duane of Philadelphia’s Aurora demanded U.S. guardianship of Latin American independence. In Congress, the powerful Henry Clay denounced the administration of James Monroe, with John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, for neglecting U.S. interests and the cause of liberty in Latin America. Adams was appalled at the widespread defiance of the official U.S. policy of neutrality. “There seems to me,” he complained in June 1816, “too much of the warlike humor in the debates of Congress—propositions even to take up the cause of the South Americans…, as if they were talking of the expense of building a light house.”

As the public pressure for involvement continued, Adams, in December 1817, reminded his father, John Adams, that Latin America had replaced the French Revolution as the great source of discord in the United States. “The republican spirit of our country…sympathizes with people struggling in a cause…. And now, as at the early stage of the French Revolution, we have ardent spirits who are for rushing into the conflict, without looking to the consequences.” Monroe and Adams, against mounting public and congressional pressures, sustained the country’s official neutrality until, in 1821, the striking victories of the revolutionary forces all but destroyed Spain’s remaining authority in South America. In a special message to Congress on 8 March 1822, Monroe recognized the independence of Argentina, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

Already, a similar debate over the future of Greece had divided the Monroe administration as well as much of the country. The Greek revolution had gathered momentum until, by 1821, it posed an immediate threat to Turkey’s Ottoman rule. Turkish sultan Mahmud II retaliated against the Greek revolutionaries with such violence that he aroused anti-Turkish sentiment throughout western Europe and the United States. American idealists took up the cause of the repressed Greeks even as Adams expressed his total disapproval of foreign crusades. In his famed speech of 4 July 1821, Adams declared that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Monroe expressed regret over Turkey’s despotic rule in his annual message of December 1822. Then, in 1823, Edward Everett, professor of Greek at Harvard, championed Greece’s independence in a long essay that appeared in the North American Review, a journal that he edited. Adams was not impressed and argued strongly against any U.S. meddling in the affairs of Greece and Turkey, especially since the country was not prepared financially or militarily to intervene.

In January 1824, Adams’s allies in Congress disposed of the Greek issue. Among Everett’s converts was Daniel Webster, then a U.S. representative from Massachusetts. In December 1823, Webster introduced a resolution into the House that provided for defraying the expense of an agent or commissioner to Greece, whenever the president might deem such an appointment expedient. On 19 January 1824, while discussing this apparently noncommittal text, Webster launched into an eloquent appeal to American humanitarian sentiment. The Greeks, he said, look to “the great Republic of the earth—and they ask us by our common faith, whether we can forget that they are struggling, as we once struggled, for what we now so happily enjoy?” He asked nothing of Congress. Previously, he acknowledged, “there was no making an impression on a nation but by bayonets, and subsidies, by fleets and armies; but…there is a force in public opinion which, in the long run, will outweigh all the physical force that can be brought to oppose it…. Let us direct the force, the vast moral force of this engine, to the aid of others.”

In his reply on 24 January, Randolph challenged Webster’s effort to commit the country abroad to what it could not accomplish, except at enormous cost to its own interests. How, Randolph wondered, would the United States operate effectively in a country as distant as Greece? “Do gentlemen seriously reflect,” he asked, “on the work they have cut out for us? Why, sir, these projects of ambition surpass those of Bonaparte himself.” Finally, Randolph attacked the resolution itself:

We are absolutely combatting shadows. The gentleman would have us to believe his resolution is all but nothing; yet again it is to prove omnipotent, and fills the whole globe with its influence. Either it is nothing, or it is something. If it is nothing, let us lay it on the table, and have done with it at once; but, if it is that something which it has been on the other hand represented to be, let us beware how we touch it. For my part, I would sooner put the shirt of Nessus on my back, than sanction these doctrines.

Such argumentation, much to Adams’s delight, eliminated the issue of Greek independence from the nation’s consideration.

 

The Monroe Doctrine

Although scarcely a subject of controversy, the Monroe Doctrine, after its promulgation in 1823, remained vulnerable to disagreement over its meaning. For realists, the Monroe Doctrine represented a fundamental interest in preserving the nation’s unique position as the predominant force in the hemisphere. As such, it was a policy rendered effective by the realities of power and interest in the Atlantic world. So realistic, indeed, was American purpose in preventing the establishment of rival power in the Western Hemisphere that the United States required neither war nor the threat of war to protect this essential interest. British leaders tended to accept the Monroe Doctrine as a statement of policy and nothing more.

Idealists viewed the Monroe Doctrine as a broad declaration of liberal principles. For them, the United States, in defying the Holy Alliance, had promoted less the nation’s interests than the liberty of Latin America. Because the doctrine appeared to attach American purpose to a universal democratic ideal, many European masters of Realpolitik viewed it as purely utopian. They condemned it because, as a body of abstract principle, it would overreach actual U.S. economic and security interests, as well as seek to diminish European influence in Latin American affairs, solely on claims to superior political virtue. For Prince Metternich of Austria, such suppositions were nothing less than sheer arrogance. “The United States of America,” he complained, “have cast blame and scorn on the institutions of Europe most worthy of respect…. In permitting themselves these unprovoked attacks, in fostering revolutions wherever they show themselves, in regretting those which have failed, in extending a helping hand to those which seem to prosper, they lend new strength to the apostles of sedition and reanimate the courage of every conspirator.” In practice, every administration from Monroe to John Tyler recognized the Monroe Doctrine as policy, not principle. They accepted changes in the region, such as the British seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1833, because they did not endanger U.S. economic or security interests.

In 1845, President James K. Polk provided John C. Calhoun, at the time one of the nation’s stellar realists, an opportunity to read the country a lesson on the Monroe Doctrine. During the summer of 1845, the president received reports of British designs on California. In June, François Guizot, in a speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, claimed a European interest in preserving “the balance of the Great Powers among which America is divided.” In his December message to Congress, Polk, under pressure from American expansionists, repeated Monroe’s declaration on noncolonization. On 14 January 1846, Senator William Allen of Ohio, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, introduced a resolution designed to commit Congress to the principles of the Monroe Doctrine as repeated by the president. Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan led the enthusiastic response of Democratic expansionists.

Calhoun challenged the resolution as a dangerous commitment; it seemed to invoke U.S. guardianship for all New World states against foreign aggression. If this be settled policy that was intended to have meaning, Calhoun warned, the country must concentrate its energies to carry out the policy. For Calhoun, policy required that the ends of policy be determined not by rhetoric, but by the means that the country intended to use. For him, the country had no intention of acting. Thus, Calhoun advised the Senate that it was

the part of wisdom to select wise ends in a wise manner. No wise man, with a full understanding of the subject, would pledge himself, by declaration, to do that which was beyond the power of execution, and without mature reflection as to the consequences. There would be no dignity in it. True dignity consists in making no declaration which we are not prepared to maintain. If we make the declaration, we ought to be prepared to carry it into effect against all opposition.

Cass, in another exchange with Calhoun, argued that the United States could enunciate principles without assuming any obligation to act on them. “Will mere vaporing bravado,” Calhoun replied, “have any practical effect?” Effective policy, if resistance seemed proper, Calhoun asserted, required armies, navies, powerful revenues, and a determination to act. Declarations of principle would achieve nothing except to needlessly antagonize countries normally well disposed to the United States. The Senate returned the Allen resolution to committee—from which it never reemerged.

In April 1848, President Polk inaugurated the most searching examination of the Monroe Doctrine and its relevance to U.S. foreign policy in the nation’s history. That month an agent of the Yucatán government, Don Justo Sierra, appealed to Polk for military aid against the rebellious Indians of the Mexican interior who threatened to drive the whites into the sea. He offered the United States, in return for its support, “dominion and sovereignty” over the state of Yucatán, adding that the same appeal had been extended to England and Spain. On 19 April, Polk, in his message to Congress, repeated his earlier sweeping assertion that it was the settled policy of the United States “that no future European colony or dominion shall…be planted or established on any part of the American continent.” Polk anchored his appeal for U.S. involvement in Yucatán on both the moral obligation to rescue its white inhabitants and to prevent the possible reduction of the region to the status of a European colony. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations quickly reported a bill to provide for an American military occupation of Yucatán. Democratic nationalists rushed to the defense of the president’s request.

Again it was left for Calhoun, in a major speech of his long career, to dispose of the president’s appeal to the Monroe Doctrine by demonstrating historically that the doctrine had no relevance to the Yucatán question. As a member of Monroe’s cabinet in 1823, Calhoun reminded the Senate that Monroe’s message was directed at one specific threat to Latin American independence—the Holy Alliance. That alliance’s disintegration rendered the doctrine meaningless. Then Calhoun turned to the Monroe Doctrine as policy. In response to the president’s insistence that Monroe’s declarations were the settled policy of the United States, Calhoun retorted: “Declarations are not policy and cannot become settled policy.” Then he asked, “Has there been one instance in which these declarations have been carried into effect? If there be, let it be pointed out.” Control of Yucatán, declared Calhoun, would add nothing to the protection of Cuba or U.S. commerce in the Gulf of Mexico. For Mexico, U.S. intervention in Yucatán would be a breach of faith. Mere occupancy would resolve nothing, and without some resolution, would either collapse or become permanent. Fortunately, a sudden, unanticipated agreement between the Yucatán contestants terminated the question of U.S. intervention.

 

Kossuth and Hungary

America’s seldom expressed but widely shared antagonism toward Europe’s monarchical governments broke loose at the first news of the revolutions that, beginning in France during February 1848, swept rapidly across Germany and the whole continent. The U.S. minister in Paris recognized France’s provisional government. Senator Edward Hannegan of Indiana reported a joint resolution from the Committee on Foreign Relations that offered the country’s congratulations to the people of France. The absence of any obligations to France assured the resolution’s overwhelming approval.

By 1849, the spontaneous uprising of one European people after another diverted attention from France to Hungary, where the Magyar patriots were engaged in a heroic struggle against Austrian rule. That summer, while the American people applauded the successive Hungarian triumphs, Secretary of State John M. Clayton dispatched Ambrose Dudley Mann as a special agent to report on the progress of the revolution and offer the nation’s encouragement. After winning momentary success under their eloquent leader, Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarians suffered disaster at the hands of Russian troops brought to the aid of the Austrian emperor. Early in 1850 Cass proposed a resolution demanding that the administration sever diplomatic relations with Austria. Clay, a realist since his stint as secretary of state under John Quincy Adams, turned his ridicule on Cass’s proposal. There was, he told the Senate on 7 January, no relationship between the Michigan senator’s premises and his conclusions. His resolution offered nothing to the Hungarians. Why, Clay asked, single out Austria? Hungary lost its independence struggle to Russian, not Austrian, forces. The country’s very greatness, Clay cautioned, “draws after it great responsibilities…to avoid unnecessary wars, maintaining our own rights with firmness, but invading the rights of no others.” The Senate tabled Cass’s resolution.

Meanwhile, the exiled Kossuth languished under detention in Turkey. But in September 1851, Webster, now secretary of state, with the cooperation of U.S. minister George Perkins Marsh, secured the release of Kossuth and fifty of his Magyar associates. Congress passed a resolution inviting Kossuth to visit the United States, while the president dispatched the USS Mississippi, already in the Mediterranean, to carry him to England. After a triumphal stop in England, he proceeded to the United States. Upon his arrival in New York City on 5 December, announced by the booming of cannon, Kossuth received the city’s greatest ovation since the visit of Lafayette a quarter century earlier. New York experienced a Magyar-mania epidemic. Soon the Kossuth craze spread from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. American orators used the occasion of his presence to express sympathy for the oppressed of Europe. Whigs—largely realists—were not amused; they resented both the cleverness of Kossuth’s appeal to the country’s idealist sentiment, as well as the approval his words apparently received. What troubled Kossuth’s realist critics especially was his open quest for diplomatic, economic, and even military assistance to rekindle the Hungarian independence movement. For them, such appeals exceeded the bounds of acceptable international behavior.

Congress voted to invite Kossuth to Washington, D.C. The Hungarian accepted with alacrity; the success of his mission in America hinged on his acceptance by an administration that was determined to offer him nothing. On 23 December, Webster acknowledged privately the need for caution in dealing with Kossuth: “We shall treat him with respect, but shall give him no encouragement that the established policy of the country will be in any degree departed from.” Two days later, Webster admitted that Kossuth’s presence in Washington would be embarrassing. Upon Kossuth’s arrival, Webster privately outlined his course of action: “I shall treat him with all personal and individual respect, but if he should speak to me of the policy of ‘intervention,’ I shall ‘have ears more deaf than adders.’” At the White House on 31 December, Kossuth, despite Webster’s request, could not resist the temptation to make a lengthy plea for American aid. President Millard Fillmore reminded the Hungarian leader that U.S. policy on intervention had been uniform since the Republic’s founding. At subsequent dinners hosted by the Websters and the president, Kossuth’s scarcely concealed anger embarrassed all who attended.

At a congressional banquet in Kossuth’s honor, Webster expressed his hope to see the American model established upon the Lower Danube. He toasted Hungarian independence but refused to offer what Kossuth needed: something tangible for the Hungarian cause. On 9 January 1852, Clay received Kossuth in his chamber. Clay assured the Hungarian leader that the United States could not transport men and arms to eastern Europe in sufficient quantity to be effective against Russia and Austria. Such an attempt, he added, would depart from the country’s historic policy of nonintervention. “Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty,” Clay concluded, “that, adhering to our wise, pacific system…, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen and falling republics in Europe.” Kossuth soon returned to Europe, suffering the disillusionment of those who expect too much of sentiment.

 

War With Spain

During the generations of general peace between 18l5 and 1898, American idealism and realism remained compartmentalized, the former residing in the realm of opinion, ideas, and moral posturing, the latter existing in the realm of policy and action. On occasion, the levers of policy were put at the disposal of moral purposes, but not in a manner that would deflect the basic guidelines of American external policy. But in 1898 the compartments began to break down; the surge of popular passion on behalf of other peoples, against which realists such as Hamilton had warned, erupted on behalf of moral crusades in defense of Cuba, the Philippines, and China.

Following the outbreak of the Cuban revolt in February 1895, the Cuban junta, with headquarters in New York, supported by the Cuban League, its American counterpart with branches in all large cities, launched a campaign to involve the United States in this renewal of the Cuban struggle for independence. Cuban rebels understood the peculiar appeal of humanitarian causes to nineteenth-century Americans. The Spanish government, by employing measures of extreme repression, played into their hands. The Madrid government damaged its image almost beyond recall when, in 1896, it dispatched General Valeriano Weyler to Cuba, where he proceeded to herd civilians suspected of rebel leanings into concentration camps. President Grover Cleveland resented the Cuban assault on American emotions and held to a policy of neutrality against the rising tide of pro-Cuban sentiment. The Spanish government offered Cuba autonomy, but President William McKinley’s decision of 1897 to oppose any arrangement unacceptable to the revolutionaries, whose minimum goal was indepen-dence, eliminated every possibility of a peaceful Cuban settlement. Washington gave Spain the choice of capitulation or war. The sinking of the battleship Maine on 15 February 1898, along with other unfortunate incidents, aroused a congressional demand for war, a responsibility that McKinley accepted to protect the principle of executive leadership in external affairs. On 21 April the United States broke diplomatic relations with Spain and embarked on a war for Cuban independence.

Few Americans attempted to justify the war except in humanitarian terms. Such motives were not strange to American liberal thought, but before 1898 they had never governed action. Whether it was a people’s war, forced on a reluctant administration, or one reflecting a slow, steady evolution of presidential policy, it did not result from any deliberate weighing of interests and responsibilities. The president asked for war in the name of humanity and civilization as well as endangered American interests. “Our own direct interests [in Cuba] were great,” observed Theodore Roosevelt in his An Autobiography (1913), “but even greater were our interests from the standpoint of humanity. Cuba was at our very doors. It was dreadful things for us to sit supinely and watch her death agony.” Similarly, Senator George F. Hoar acknowledged that the American people could not “look idly on while hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, women and children and old men, die of hunger close to our doors.” Had Cuba not lain off the coast of the United States, there would have been no war of liberation in 1898. Previous generations of Americans had sought new deals for Greeks and Hungarians in vain. In 1898 sentiment mattered because it was directed at oppression by a weak power in an adjacent region where the United States held the clear strategic advantage.

Commodore George Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila harbor on 1 May did not presage an annexationist movement in the Pacific. But almost immediately a number of expansionists, both inside and outside the administration, clamored for the occupation and annexation of the Philippines—islands in the western Pacific where other nations possessed greater naval power than did the United States. Succumbing to expansionist pressure, the administration, in its instructions to the peace commission dated 16 September, announced its intention to acquire the Philippines. McKinley rationalized the decision by citing the country’s obligation to humanity. This theme dominated his speeches during his midwestern tour in October 1898. Always he dwelt on the accidental nature of the country’s de facto possession of the Philippines and its special responsibility to the Filipinos that, he insisted, flowed from that possession. He declared at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that “we accepted war for humanity. We can accept no terms of peace which shall not be in the interests of humanity.” He repeated that appeal in Omaha: “The war was no more invited by us than were the questions which are laid at our door by its results. Now as then we will do our duty.” Later, in Boston, he declared that “our concern was not for territory or trade or empire, but for the people whose interests and destiny, without our willing, had been put into our hands.” Thucydides, the Greek historian, wrote many centuries earlier: “You cannot decline the burdens of empire and still expect to share its honours.” McKinley, however, failed to dwell on the burdens of empire at all. It was not strange that the American people, given the simple choice between humanity and irresponsibility, assured him of their overwhelming support.

Realists charged that the acquisition of the Philippines was a serious departure from the country’s traditional conservatism in foreign affairs. They noted that the annexation of distant territories would entail financial and military burdens with few rewards. The United States, wrote Andrew Carnegie, lacked not only the naval power to protect the Philippines but also the will to create it. The former U.S. Senator Carl Schurz feared that Philippine annexation would so completely over commit the nation that it would reduce the United States to complete reliance on the British fleet. Such reliance would demand a heavy price. “If we do take the Philippines,” he predicted, “and thus entangle ourselves in the rivalries of Asiatic affairs, the future will be…one of wars and rumors of wars, and the time will be forever past when we could look down with condescending pity on the nations of the old world groaning under militarism and is burdens.” Senator Augustus O. Bacon of Georgia foresaw “peace at evening, perhaps, with no certainty but that the morrow will find us participants in a world’s war.” Against such arguments Senate approval of the annexation treaty came hard. The final vote was fifty-seven to twenty-seven, one more than necessary to gain the required two-thirds.

 

China and the Open Door

Events in China drew the United States ever deeper into the politics of the western Pacific, largely as the consequence of another moral crusade. After 1897, China’s political and military weakness exposed it to foreign encroachments that threatened to reduce it to colonial status. The McKinley administration, through Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900, saved China from further disintegration. In the process, however, the United States assumed an immense, if informal, obligation to defend the commercial and administrative integrity of China. For its adherents, these apparently cost-free obligations comprised not a burden, but a remarkable triumph for American humanitarian principles. Some observers hailed Hay’s achievement equal to those of the country’s greatest nineteenth-century diplomats. Senator Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois offered a characteristic eulogy: “The magnitude of the man [Hay] will only appear in the magnitude of his work when it reaches its colossal proportions in the proper perspective of the past.” Much of the press lauded the secretary for his momentous success. The New York Journal of Commerce called the Open Door episode “one of the most important diplomatic negotiations of our time.” The Nation praised the Open Door policy as a great national triumph. “Our intervention in China,” ran its conclusion, “has given the world a transcendent exhibition of American leadership in the world of ideas and the world of action. We have proved that we are guided by a diplomacy unsurpassed…in its patient moderation, its firmness, its moral impulse.”

Others explained why Hay’s apparent achievements on behalf of China carried the seeds of disaster. Like the acquisition of the Philippines, Hay’s easy successes confirmed the illusion that the United States could have its way in Asia at little or no cost to itself. Realistic observers noted, however, that Hay’s diplomacy either had committed the United States to the use of force in a distant, disorganized region of the Far East, or it had achieved nothing; no nation would have compromised its essential interests in China merely at Hay’s request. “Diplomacy has done nothing to change the situation,” warned the Springfield Republican, “while the Government has gone far toward placing itself in a position where, to be consistent, it must guarantee by military force the territorial integrity of China, or share in its possible partition.” Similarly, Alfred Thayer Mahan observed in November 1900 that the United States could not “count on respect for the territory of China unless we are ready to throw not only our moral influence but, if necessity arise, our physical weight into the conflict.” Mahan noted that both Russia and Japan, the two dominant powers in the Far East, had far greater interests in China than did the United States. The Open Door policy, by establishing a powerful and exaggerated American concern for the commercial and territorial integrity of China, rendered any country that might interfere in Chinese affairs the potential enemy of the United States.

 

Wilsonian Diplomacy

This repeated willingness of the United States to permit its burgeoning obligations, especially in the Pacific, to be driven by moral considerations culminated in Woodrow Wilson’s crusade in Europe. The outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 thoroughly conjoined the realist and idealist elements in U.S. foreign policy. While realists and idealists differed in their judgments of the causes and meaning of the war, they agreed on the necessity of the struggle. Theodore Roosevelt, like other realists, feared that a German victory would endanger U.S. interests by undermining the historic European balance of power—a balance that had provided the United States almost perfect security through much of its history. Wilson, however, quickly turned the war into another moral crusade. For him, the breakdown of the peace revealed serious flaws in the international system that required correction. Determined to exert a powerful voice in world affairs at the war’s end, he favored a policy of strict neutrality to hold America above the fray. When German submarine warfare brought the United States into the war, Wilson would seek to reform the world through his dominant voice in erecting the postwar peace structure.

Wilson’s program for avoiding another catastrophic crisis, such as that of 1914, required both changes in the quality of national behavior and an international mechanism for settling international disputes peacefully. To that end, he believed it essential that the world relieve itself of the traditional accoutrements of power politics: the balance of power and the pursuit of national interests. His solution lay in the principle of collective security, in which all peace-loving nations would pledge themselves to joint action in behalf of peace. The necessary multilateral institutions, through which the protectors of the peace would function, took the form of the League of Nations and the World Court, both enforcing the rule of law. Wilson found additional hope for a peaceful future in the expansion of world commerce, operating under a body of most-favored-nation treaties that would assure equal access to world markets. The result would be both a more prosperous and a more peaceful international system. For Wilson, finally, the new world order would require the active leadership of the United States.

Wilson’s vision of enduring peace required, as well, a democratic foundation that would assure the necessary fusion of policy and moral purpose. In his war message to Congress in April 1917, Wilson declared:

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion…. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Wilson’s faith in a concert of democracies to maintain the peace presumed a common interest that would eliminate conflict and war. In his advocacy of a world of law and order, Wilson identified the interests of humanity with the interests of the United States and other democratic, status quo powers. This vision of universal peace acquired its special appeal from Wilson’s insistence that peace required not the wielding of superior power by advocates of the status quo, but the limitation of change to general agreement and the rule of law. In a world governed by law, based on a common interest in peace, neither the United States nor any other country had the right to bargain with aggressors over changes in established treaties. Peaceful change alone was a morally acceptable burden of diplomacy.

Unfortunately, the essential assumption of a common interest in peace ignored the reality that, while all nations favored peace, some favored the status quo and some did not. E. H. Carr addressed this dilemma in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939): “The utopian assumption that there is a world interest in peace which is identifiable with the interest of each individual nation helped politicians and political writers everywhere to evade the unpalatable fact of a fundamental divergence of interest between nations desirous of maintaining the status quo and nations desiring to change it.” Nowhere in the Wilsonian approach to international affairs was there any recognition of the persistence of conflict that defied easy solution or the need to define the interests of the United States in a still troubled world and prepare a strategy for their defense. It was not strange that wishful thinking and generalization soon prevailed over analysis of the ongoing realities of international life. The end of lasting and universal peace overwhelmed the problem of means. Wilson once quieted the doubts of his adversaries who questioned the effectiveness of the League of Nations by assuring them that “if it won’t work, it must be made to work.” Schemes for rendering the league effective did not require explanations of how they would work; the consequences of failure were too disastrous to contemplate.

 

Isolationism, Internationalism, and World War Ii

In proclaiming goals whose achievements always eluded the possibilities of his prescriptions, Wilson laid the foundation for a pervading postwar isolationism. For countless Americans, nothing in the country’s recent experience dictated the necessity of a permanent, continuous American involvement in European politics.

For other Americans, often intellectuals and academicians, Wilson’s vision of a new world order, free of all reliance on force, was too essential for the world’s welfare to be discarded in deference to isolationism. Inasmuch as both groups were antagonistic to the conservative tradition of American diplomacy, there was little to separate idealists from realists in the national debate. Isolationism insisted that the nation had no external interests that merited the use of force, that events outside the hemisphere were inconsequential.

In apparent contrast, internationalism declared that U.S. interests existed wherever governments challenged peace or human rights. It insisted not only that they mattered but also that the universal acceptance of democratically inspired principles of peaceful change would control them. Every program fostered by American internationalists during the two postwar decades—membership in the League of Nations and the World Court, the employment of arbitration conventions, the resort to consultation in the event of crises, collective security, naval disarmament, or the outlawry of war—denied the need of any precise definition of ends and means in American foreign policy. The burgeoning fields of diplomatic history and international law rested on Wilsonian principles. Under the presumptions of a controlling public opinion and a common interest in peace, international lawyers joined national leaders in rationalizing inaction in the face of growing threats. Notions of collective security served as a device of the status quo powers to prevent change in the international system. The Western preference for the status quo, in the absence of any program to change it peacefully, never recommended the means for preserving it beyond the acceptance of war.

Whatever remained of the realist-idealist cleavage in American thought and action was again clouded by the almost universal national acceptance of U.S. involvement in World War II. Realists presumed that the war, like the Great War of 1914, would, with the defeat of the Axis, reaffirm Europe’s traditional balance of power and reestablish the essential elements of the Versailles settlement of 1919. To that end, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, advocated the return of East-Central Europe to its prewar status. American idealism, however, assigned the war a deeper, largely humanitarian purpose. In his lend-lease proposal of January 1941, Roosevelt adopted the goal of the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—in his crusade against the Axis powers. In his book Price of a Free World (1942), Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace proposed, as the war’s true purpose, not only the elimination of fascism from the world, but also the establishment of freedom for all peoples, the final triumph of democracy, and the elimination of poverty and hunger everywhere. At the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, Roosevelt announced his goal of unconditional surrender to eliminate any German, Italian, or Japanese influence from the postwar treaty-making process—essential for the construction of the perfect peace. Unfortunately, such idealist presumptions failed to anticipate the Soviet Union’s overwhelming contribution to the allied victory and the demands that the Kremlin would make on any postwar settlement.

 

The Cold War

It required no more than the postwar Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, in defiance of the Western principle of self-determination, to create doubts regarding the Kremlin’s ultimate intentions. As early as 1946, anti-Soviet officials and members of Congress predicted further Soviet expansion into war torn Europe and elsewhere. Clark Clifford’s September 1946 report to President Truman, reflecting the views of top U.S. officials, described a deeply threatened world. When suspected Soviet ambitions, in early 1947, seemed to focus on Greece and Turkey, the Truman administration framed the Truman Doctrine, with its corresponding rhetorical predictions of falling dominoes across Europe, Africa, or Asia, should Greece fall to the country’s communist-led guerrillas. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan accepted the administration’s dire predictions uncritically. “Greece,” he wrote on 12 March, “must be helped or Greece sinks permanently into the communist order. Turkey inevitably follows. Then comes the chain reaction which might sweep from the Dardanelles to the China Seas.” Never before, critics noted, had U.S. leaders described external dangers in such limitless, imprecise terms. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Soviet expert George Kennan, and columnist Walter Lippmann objected to the language. Lippmann accused the administration of launching a crusade, not defining a policy.

Even as the West triumphed in all of its anti-Soviet policies during the next two years, including the creation of West Germany and the formation of NATO, U.S. fears of the Soviet Union continued to mount. The National Security Council’s study NCS 7, dated 30 March 1948, defined the Kremlin’s challenge in global terms. “The ultimate objective of Soviet-directed world communism,” the document averred, “is the domination of the world.” NCS 68, of April 1950, comprised the final and most elaborate attempt of the Truman Cold War elite to arrive at a definition of the burgeoning Soviet threat. It concluded that the Soviet Union, “unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” What underwrote such fears was not the prospect of Soviet military expansionism; Soviet armed forces were not prepared to march anywhere. Rather, it was the fear that the Kremlin, with its alleged control of international communism, could expand endlessly, without force, merely by inciting communist revolutions. Actually, by mid-century, Europe was stabilized with a vengeance. The United States and its allies would not risk war to change the status quo on the European continent; the Soviets had no power to do so. Europe was divided, but incredibly stable.

Events in East Asia, where the United States faced two unwanted, powerfully led communist revolutions in China and Indochina, seemed to confirm the fears of Soviet expansionism. The reason is clear. Washington officials presumed, logically, that both revolutions were under Soviet control. The State Department’s China experts, in a memorandum of October 1948, concluded that the Soviets had established control of China as firmly “as in the satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain.” The Soviet Union, apparently, had taken over China without one conquering or occupying soldier. Dean Acheson claimed no less. “The communist leaders,” he declared, “have foresworn their Chinese heritage and have publicly announced their subservience to a foreign power, Russia.” Following the Chinese communist victory in late 1949, NSC 48/1 declared: “The USSR is now an Asiatic power of the first magnitude with expanding influence and interests extending throughout continental Asia and into the Pacific.”

By the 1960s, much of America’s predominant realism had become soft, emphasizing less the requirements of security and defense than the need of accommodation with the realities of coexistence. Convinced that previous administrations had exaggerated the Soviet threat, President Jimmy Carter set out in 1977 to establish a more relaxed, flexible, nonideological relationship with the Soviet Union and China. With the U.S. failure in Vietnam, the country could no longer maintain the illusion of global power. Carter recognized that reality by lessening the strategic importance of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Nationalism, he believed, limited Soviet as well as American influence in the Third World. In dismissing the Cold War commitment to global containment, the Carter administration accepted Soviet activity in the Afro-Asian world with profound indifference. It expected the Soviets to respond by showing strategic restraint in exploiting opportunities for adventurism created by the new burst of revolutionary turmoil across the Third World. By the mid-1970s, former Democratic liberals launched, as neoconservatives, an anticommunist crusade to reassert America’s role as defender of the free world against the renewed Soviet danger. The neoconservatives found themselves aligned with the traditional Right, characterized by Republican columnists William Buckley, George Will, William Safire, and Patrick Buchanan.

Already facing open challenges to its alleged loss of will, the Carter administration reacted to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in late December 1979, with bewilderment and rage. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned the country that the Soviet Union now threatened American interests from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan. On 4 January, the president revealed his fears to the nation. “A Soviet-occupied Afghanistan,” he declared, “threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a stepping stone to possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies…. If the Soviets…maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed.”

The widespread assumptions that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan exposed south and Southwest Asia to further Soviet encroachment pushed American hawkishness to a new high. For many journalists and public officials, the Soviet invasion sounded the inauguration of another cold war. Polls as well as the reports of newspaper correspondents around the country revealed the return of an assertive, Cold War mentality.

Ronald Reagan caught the country’s post-Afghan alarms at full tide, embellished them, and rode them to victory in the presidential campaign of 1980. He and the Republican Party pilloried the Carter administration for leading the country into the posture of “weakness, inconsistency, vacillation, and bluff” that enabled the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in military power. Under Reagan, the Committee on the Present Danger gained the influence that Carter had denied it; fifty-one of its members secured positions in the Reagan administration. The Reagan team determined to counter the global Soviet threat by aiding Nicaragua and El Salvador, thereby preventing the rhetorical dominoes from falling across both South America and North America.

Despite the new administration’s tough rhetoric and massive expansion of the military budget, it maintained the same defense posture of previous administrations, much to the disgust of those who took the Reagan rhetoric of rollback seriously. The Reagan administration made no effort to recover the alleged losses of the Carter years in Africa and the Middle East. It accepted the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, but held the established containment lines. Indeed, what perpetuated the decades of laudable superpower coexistence was the decision of successive administrations to abjure the dictates of ideology and pursue the limited goals of containment.

The process of Soviet disintegration culminated in the collapse of the Soviet satellite empire in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the demise of the Cold War during the following year. Reagan supporters attributed the Soviet collapse to the rhetorical toughness and military buildup of the Reagan years. For Soviet experts, the communist regime’s crash flowed naturally from its internal flaws, its political erosion, and its ideological rejection.

 

The Post–cold War Era

With the termination of the Cold War and collapse of the USSR in 1990–1991, the United States quickly emerged as the world’s lone superpower. Under the leadership of President Bill Clinton, the realization of the country’s superpower status inaugurated another massive disagreement over the country’s proper role in world affairs. Not since classic Rome had a single state towered so completely over its potential rivals. Behind the debate over American global responsibility was President George H. W. Bush’s refusal, in 1992, to confront the well-publicized genocide in Bosnia and his tardy, reluctant involvement in feeding the starving people of Somalia. For his critics, the end of the Cold War presented the United States, with all its power, an unprecedented opportunity to embrace the country’s historic mission to humanity. The risk-avoiding approaches of the Bush years seemed to assure only the loss of national self-respect and the denial of America’s proper role in world affairs. The country, some argued, had the obligation to exercise its exceptional power aggressively in its own and the world’s deepest interests.

Undaunted by the doubtful relevance of America’s self-assigned obligations to humanity, President Clinton promised that, after January 1993, U.S. foreign policy would focus on the goal of expanding democracy and humane values. In his inaugural address, he pledged U.S. action whenever “the will and conscience of the international community is defied.” There would be interventions, he promised, not only to defend national interests, but also to satisfy the national conscience. On becoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in February 1993, Madeleine Albright acknowledged: “If there is one overriding principle that will guide me in this job, it will be the inescapable responsibility…to build a peaceful world and to terminate the abominable injustices and conditions that still plague civilization.” Clinton elucidated his agenda before the UN General Assembly on 27 September 1993. “During the Cold War,” he said, “we sought to contain a threat to [the] survival of free institutions. Now we seek to enlarge the circle of nations that live under those free institutions.” For the first time in history, he added, “we have the chance to expand the reach of democracy and economic progress across the whole of Europe and to the far reaches of the world.” From the outset, Clinton faced a powerful realist critique of the necessity and feasibility of his burgeoning campaign, much of it based on the admonitions of Hamilton, Washington, and John Quincy Adams against foreign crusading.

For the Clinton administration, three countries seemed to require immediate attention—Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. It launched immediate interventions in all three, with doubtful results. In none of the three did Washington achieve its stated objectives. Haiti remained a basket case, economically and politically; the death of American soldiers in Somalia late in 1993 prompted Clinton to withdrew those that remained. In Bosnia, the three goals of U.S. involvement—the return of the refugees, the creation of a multiethnic state, and the arrest and trial of Serb war criminals—remained unfulfilled. In 1999, Kosovo emerged as the defining issue in Clinton’s crusade for human rights by scolding and chastising foreign transgressors. On 24 March he unleashed a NATO-backed air war against Serbia, both to protect the Kosovars and to bring Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, to justice. Clinton’s Kosovo intervention was the first resort to force for purely humanitarian objectives in the nation’s history. The seventy-eight days of bombing brought a Serb capitulation without creating the desired peaceful, multi-ethnic regime in Kosovo. NATO leaders, meeting in Washington during April 1999, accepted membership in Clinton’s global crusade for human rights. They proclaimed human rights, not national sovereignty, as the guiding principle in international affairs. It mattered little. U.S. critics of both the ends and the means of the Kosovo war predicted that the experiment would not be repeated.

Clinton’s idealist crusade to improve the human condition turned out to be Euro centric; in the Atlantic world, at least, massive repression had become unacceptable, especially if it occurred in a small, defenseless region. The Serbian experience was no measure of the West’s response to ubiquitous challenges to Western values elsewhere. Neither Washington nor the European capitals responded to the pervading horrors of Africa and Asia, beginning in Rwanda in 1994 and continuing through central Africa to Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Continued global suffering illustrated the magnitude and tenacity of the world’s political and societal disabilities, as well as the absence of external power and will to confront them.

Through two centuries of its history, the United States experienced a persistent debate over approaches to foreign policy. It was a controversy absent in nations whose political philosophy derived from different assumptions about humanity and the state. In general, the American debate embraced a realist-idealist contest, although at times the issues produced shifting positions and clouded the fundamental clash between realist and idealist goals and assumptions. But the continued debate, with neither side acknowledging defeat, attested to the abiding fundamentals of both positions. Realists argued that the country’s external policies be guided by national interests and the simple desire to maximize stability and minimize harm. They asked that the United States exert its leverage in pursuit of humane objectives only where assured successes were commensurate with costs and effort. For them, no policy choice would achieve utopia. Idealist proposals comprised largely sentimental and rhetorical responses to meliorist visions of a malleable world, supposedly subject to the reforming influences of American political and economic institutions. It was an approach dominated by seductive ends, with little concern for means.

America’s vibrant civilization enhanced the attractiveness of the American model, while the uniqueness of the country’s traditions and environment limited the expansive power of its example. The country’s long pursuit of meliorist dreams demonstrated its limited knowledge and authority to institute democracy and a humane order in other lands. Still, the meliorist vision never faltered and always remained subject to arousal by the trials of other lands. In practice, however, realism defined the fundamental formulations of all U.S. foreign policy, except the moral crusading in Cuba and East Asia at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as the Wilson-dominated responses to the challenges of the interwar decades. The country’s long experience in foreign affairs demonstrated that objectives that ignored or transcended the nation’s interests could not long endure.

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