Authors: Henry Kissinger
Despite such soaring ambitions, America’s favorable geography and vast resources facilitated a perception that foreign policy was an optional activity. Secure behind two great oceans, the United States was in a position to treat foreign policy as a series of episodic challenges rather than as a permanent enterprise. Diplomacy and force, in this conception, were distinct stages of activity, each following its own autonomous rules. A doctrine of universal sweep was paired with an ambivalent attitude toward countries—necessarily less fortunate than the United States—that felt the compulsion to conduct foreign policy as a permanent exercise based on the elaboration of the national interest and the balance of power.
Even after the United States assumed great-power status in the course of the nineteenth century, these habits endured. Three times in as many generations, in the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States took decisive action to shore up international order against hostile and potentially terminal threats. In each case, America preserved the Westphalian state system and the balance of power while blaming the very institutions of that system for the outbreak of hostilities and proclaiming a desire to construct an entirely new world. For much of this period, the implicit goal of American strategy beyond
the Western Hemisphere was to transform the world in a manner that would make an American strategic role unnecessary.
From the beginning, America’s intrusion into European consciousness had forced a reexamination of received wisdom; its settlement would open new vistas for individuals promising to fundamentally reinvent world order.
For the early settlers
of the New World, the Americas were a frontier of a Western civilization whose unity was fracturing, a new stage on which to dramatize the possibility of a moral order. These settlers left Europe not because they no longer believed in its centrality but because they thought it had fallen short of its calling. As religious disputes and bloody wars drove Europe in the Peace of Westphalia to the painful conclusion that its ideal of a continent unified by a single divine governance would never be achieved, America provided a place to do so on distant shores. Where Europe reconciled itself to achieving security through equilibrium, Americans (as they began to think of themselves) entertained dreams of unity and governance enabling a redeemed purpose. The early Puritans spoke of demonstrating their virtue on the new continent as the way to transform the lands of which they had taken leave. As John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer who left East Anglia to escape religious suppression, preached aboard the
Arbella
in 1630, bound for New England, God intended America as an example for “all people”:
We shall find that the God of Israel
is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
None doubted that humanity and its purpose would in some way be revealed and fulfilled in America.
Setting out to affirm its independence, the United States defined itself as a new kind of power. The Declaration of Independence put forth its principles and assumed as its audience “the opinions of mankind.” In the opening essay of
The Federalist Papers,
published in 1787, Alexander Hamilton described the new republic as “
an empire in many respects
the most interesting in the world” whose success or failure would prove the viability of self-governance anywhere. He treated this proposition not as a novel interpretation but as a matter of common knowledge that “has been frequently remarked”—an assertion all the more notable considering that the United States at the time comprised only the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Georgia.
Even while propounding these doctrines, the Founders were sophisticated men who understood the European balance of power and manipulated it to the new country’s advantage. An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address—delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars—counseled that the United States “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and instead “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies,” he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America’s comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. It joined alliances not to protect a concept of international order but simply to serve its national interests strictly defined. As long as the European balance held, America was better served by a strategy of preserving its freedom of maneuver and consolidating at home—a
course of conduct substantially followed by former colonial countries (for example, India) after their independence a century and a half later.
This strategy prevailed for a century, following the last short war with Britain in 1812, allowing the United States to accomplish what no other country was in a position to conceive: it became a great power and a nation of continental scope through the sheer accumulation of domestic power, with a foreign policy focused almost entirely on the negative goal of keeping foreign developments as far at bay as possible.
The United States soon set out to expand this maxim to all of the Americas. A tacit accommodation with Britain, the premier naval power, allowed the United States to declare in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 its entire hemisphere off-limits for foreign colonization, decades before it had anything close to the power to enforce so sweeping a pronouncement. In the United States, the Monroe Doctrine was interpreted as the extension of the War of Independence, sheltering the Western Hemisphere from the operation of the European balance of power. No Latin American countries were consulted (not least because few existed at the time). As the frontiers of the nation crept across the continent, the expansion of America was seen as the operation of a kind of law of nature. When the United States practiced what elsewhere was defined as imperialism, Americans gave it another name: “the fulfillment of
our manifest destiny
to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The acquisition of vast tracts of territory was treated as a commercial transaction in the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France and as the inevitable consequence of this Manifest Destiny in the case of Mexico. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century, in the Spanish-American War of 1898, that the United States engaged in full-scale hostilities overseas with another major power.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States had the good fortune of being able to address its challenges sequentially, and
frequently to the point of definitive resolution. The drive to the Pacific and the establishment of favorable northern and southern borders; the vindication of the Union in the Civil War; the projection of power against the Spanish Empire and the inheritance of many of its possessions: each took place as a discrete phase of activity, after which Americans returned to the task of building prosperity and refining democracy. The American experience supported the assumption that peace was the natural condition of humanity, prevented only by other countries’ unreasonableness or ill will. The European style of statecraft, with its shifting alliances and elastic maneuvers on the spectrum between peace and hostility, seemed to the American mind a perverse departure from common sense. In this view, the Old World’s entire system of foreign policy and international order was an outgrowth of despotic caprice or a malignant cultural penchant for aristocratic ceremony and secretive maneuver. America would forgo these practices, disclaiming colonial interests, remaining warily at arm’s length from the European-designed international system, and relating to other countries on the basis of mutual interests and fair dealing.
John Quincy Adams summed up these sentiments in 1821, in a tone verging on exasperation at other countries’ determination to pursue more complicated and devious courses:
America, in the assembly of nations
, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others,
even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Because America sought “not
dominion,
but
liberty,
” it should avoid, Adams argued, involvement in all the contests of the European world. America would maintain its uniquely reasonable and disinterested stance, seeking freedom and human dignity by offering moral sympathy from afar. The assertion of the universality of American principles was coupled with the refusal to vindicate them outside the Western (that is, American) Hemisphere:
[America] 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.
In the Western Hemisphere, no such restraint prevailed. As early as 1792, the Massachusetts minister and geographer Jedidiah Morse argued that the United States—whose existence had been internationally recognized for less than a decade and whose Constitution was only four years old—marked the apogee of history. The new country, he predicted, would expand westward, spread principles of liberty throughout the Americas, and become the crowning achievement of human civilization:
Besides, it is well known
that empire has been
travelling from east to west
. Probably her last and broadest feat will be America … [W]e cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the
AMERICAN EMPIRE
will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.
All the while America ardently maintained that the endeavor was not territorial expansion in the traditional sense but the divinely
ordained spread of principles of liberty. In 1839, as the official United States Exploring Expedition reconnoitered the far reaches of the hemisphere and the South Pacific, the
United States Magazine and Democratic Review
published an article heralding the United States as “the great nation of futurity,” disconnected from and superior to everything in history that had preceded it:
The American people having derived
their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history.
The success of the United States, the author confidently predicted, would serve as a standing rebuke to all other forms of government, ushering in a future democratic age. A great, free union, divinely sanctioned and towering above all other states, would spread its principles throughout the Western Hemisphere—a power destined to become greater in scope and in moral purpose than any previous human endeavor:
We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can.
The United States was thus not simply a country but an engine of God’s plan and the epitome of world order.
In 1845, when American westward expansion embroiled the country in a dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory and with
Mexico over the Republic of Texas (which had seceded from Mexico and declared its intent to join the United States), the magazine concluded that the annexation of Texas was a defensive measure against the foes of liberty. The author reasoned that “California will probably, next fall away” from Mexico, and an American sweep north into Canada would likely follow. The continental force of America, he reasoned, would eventually render Europe’s balance of power inconsequential by its sheer countervailing weight. Indeed the author of the
Democratic Review
article foresaw a day, one hundred years hence—that is, 1945—when the United States would outweigh even a unified, hostile Europe:
Though they should cast into the opposite
scale all the bayonets and cannon, not only of France and England, but of Europe entire, how would it kick the beam against the simple, solid weight of the two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!
This is, in fact, what transpired (except that the Canadian border was peacefully demarcated, and England was not part of a hostile Europe in 1945, but rather an ally). Bombastic and prophetic, the vision of America transcending and counterbalancing the harsh doctrines of the Old World would inspire a nation—often while being largely ignored elsewhere or prompting consternation—and reshape the course of history.