World Order (37 page)

Great leaders often embody great ambiguities. When he was assassinated, was President John F. Kennedy on the verge of expanding
America’s commitment to Vietnam or withdrawing from it? Naïveté was not, generally speaking, a charge Roosevelt’s critics made against him. Probably the answer is that Roosevelt, like his people, was ambivalent about the two sides of international order. He hoped for a peace based on legitimacy, that is, trust between individuals, respect for international law, humanitarian objectives, and goodwill. But confronted with the Soviet Union’s insistently power-based approach, he would likely have reverted to the Machiavellian side that had brought him to leadership and made him the dominant figure of his period. The question of what balance he would have struck was preempted by his death in the fourth month of his fourth presidential term, before his design for dealing with the Soviet Union could be completed. Harry S. Truman, excluded by Roosevelt from any decision making, was suddenly catapulted into that role.

A
LL TWELVE POSTWAR
presidents
have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world. Each has treated it as axiomatic that the United States was embarked on an unselfish quest for the resolution of conflicts and the equality of all nations, in which the ultimate benchmark for success would be world peace and universal harmony.

All presidents from both political parties have proclaimed the applicability of American principles to the entire world, of which perhaps the most eloquent articulation (though in no sense unique) was President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961. Kennedy called on his country to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He made no distinction between threats; he established no priorities for American engagement. He specifically rejected the shifting calculations of the traditional balance of power. What he called for was a “new endeavor”—“not a balance of power, but a new world of law.” It would be a “grand and global alliance” against the “common enemies of mankind.” What in other countries would have been treated as a rhetorical flourish has, in
American discourse, been presented as a specific blueprint for global action. Speaking to the UN General Assembly one month after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson affirmed the same unconditional global commitment:

Any man and any nation
that seeks peace, and hates war, and is willing to fight the good fight against hunger and disease and misery, will find the United States of America by their side, willing to walk with them, walk with them every step of the way.

That sense of responsibility for world order and of the indispensability of American power, buttressed by a consensus that based the moral universalism of the leaders on the American people’s dedication to freedom and democracy, led to the extraordinary achievements of the Cold War period and beyond. America helped rebuild the devastated European economies, created the Atlantic Alliance, and formed a global network of security and economic partnerships. It moved from the isolation of China to a policy of cooperation with it. It designed a system of open world trade that has fueled productivity and prosperity, and was (as it has been over the past century) at the cutting edge of almost all of the technological revolutions of the period. It supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces behind the building of
a new international order
.

For a few decades, there was an extraordinary correspondence between America’s traditional beliefs and historical experience and the
world in which it found itself. For the generation of leaders who assumed the responsibility for constructing the postwar order, the two great experiences had been surmounting the recession of the 1930s and victory over aggression in the 1940s. Both tasks lent themselves to definite solutions: in the economic field, the restoration of growth and the inauguration of new social-welfare programs; in the war, unconditional surrender of the enemy.

At the end of the war, the United States, as the only major country to emerge essentially undamaged, produced about 60 percent of the world’s GNP. It was thereby able to define leadership as essentially practical progress along lines modeled on the American domestic experience; alliances as Wilsonian concepts of collective security; and governance as programs of economic recovery and democratic reform. America’s Cold War undertaking began as a defense of countries that shared the American view of world order. The adversary, the Soviet Union, was conceived as having strayed from the international community to which it would eventually return.

On the journey toward that vision, America began to encounter other historic views of world order. New nations with different histories and cultures appeared on the scene as colonialism ended. The nature of Communism became more complex and its impact more ambiguous. Governments and armed doctrines rejecting American concepts of domestic and international order mounted tenacious challenges. Limits to American capabilities, however vast, became apparent. Priorities needed to be set.

America’s encounters with these realities raised a new question that had not heretofore been put to the United States: Is American foreign policy a story with a beginning and an end, in which final victories are possible? Or is it a process of managing and tempering ever-recurring challenges? Does foreign policy have a destination, or is it a process of never-completed fulfillment?

In answering these questions, America put itself through
anguishing debates and domestic divisions about the nature of its world role. They were the reverse side of its historic idealism. By framing the issue of America’s world role as a test of moral perfection, it castigated itself—sometimes to profound effect—for falling short. In expectation of a final culmination to its efforts—the peaceful, democratic, rules-based world that Wilson prophesied—it was often uncomfortable with the prospect of foreign policy as a permanent endeavor for contingent aims. With nearly every president insisting that America had universal
principles
while other countries merely had national interests, the United States has risked extremes of overextension and disillusioned withdrawal.

Since the end of World War II, in quest of its vision of world order, America has embarked on five wars on behalf of expansive goals initially embraced with near-universal public support, which then turned into public discord—often on the brink of violence. In three of these wars, the Establishment consensus shifted abruptly to embrace a program of effectively unconditional unilateral withdrawal. Three times in two generations, the United States abandoned wars midstream as inadequately transformative or as misconceived—in Vietnam as a result of congressional decisions, in Iraq and Afghanistan by choice of the President.

Victory in the Cold War has been accompanied by congenital ambivalence. America has been searching its soul about the moral worth of its efforts to a degree for which it is difficult to find historical parallels. Either American objectives had been unfulfillable, or America did not pursue a strategy compatible with reaching these objectives. Critics will ascribe these setbacks to the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders. Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.

Nothing in Harry S. Truman’s career would have suggested that he would become President, even less that he would preside over the creation of a structure of international order that would last through the Cold War and help decide it. Yet this quintessentially American “common man” would emerge as one of the seminal American presidents.

No president has faced a more daunting task. The war had ended without any attempt by the powers to redefine international order as in the Westphalian settlement of 1648 and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Therefore, Truman’s first task was to make concrete Roosevelt’s vision of a realistically conceived international organization, named the United Nations. Signed in San Francisco in 1945, its charter merged two forms of international decision making. The General Assembly would be universal in membership and based upon the doctrine of the equality of states—“one state, one vote.” At the same time, the United Nations would implement collective security via a global concert, the Security Council, designating five major powers (the United States, Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., and China) as “permanent members” wielding veto power. (Britain, France, and China were included as much in homage to their record of great achievements as in reflection of their current capacities.) Together with a rotating group of nine additional countries, the Security Council was vested with special responsibility “to maintain international peace and security.”

The United Nations could achieve its designated purpose only if the permanent members shared a conception of world order. On issues where they disagreed, the world organization might enshrine, rather than assuage, their differences. The last summit meeting of the wartime allies at Potsdam in July and August 1945 of Truman, Winston Churchill, and Stalin established the zones of occupation of Germany. (Churchill was replaced as the result of electoral defeat halfway
through by Clement Attlee, his wartime deputy.) It also put Berlin under joint administration by the four victorious powers, with guaranteed access to the Western zones of occupation through Soviet-occupied territory. It turned out to be the last significant agreement between the wartime allies.

In the negotiations to implement the accords, the Western allies and the Soviet Union found themselves in mounting deadlock. The Soviet Union insisted on shaping a new international, social, and political structure of Eastern Europe on a principle laid down by Stalin in 1945: “
Whoever occupies a territory also imposes
on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” Abandoning any notion of Westphalian principles in favor of “objective factors,” Stalin now imposed Moscow’s Marxist-Leninist system ruthlessly, though gradually, across Eastern Europe.

The first direct military confrontation between the wartime allies occurred over access routes to the capital of the erstwhile enemy, Berlin. In 1948, Stalin, in response to the merging of the three occupation zones of the Western allies, cut the access routes to Berlin, which until the end of the blockade was sustained by a largely American airlift.

How Stalin analyzed “objective” factors is illustrated by a conversation in 1989 I had with Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for twenty-eight years until he was kicked upstairs by the newly installed Mikhail Gorbachev into the largely ceremonial office of President. He therefore had much time for discussions about what he had observed of Russian history and no future to protect by discretion. I raised a question of how, in light of the vast casualties and devastation it had suffered in the war, the Soviet Union could have dealt with an American military response to the Berlin blockade. Gromyko replied that Stalin had answered similar questions from subordinates to this effect: he doubted the United States would use nuclear weapons on so local an issue. If the Western allies undertook a conventional ground
force probe along the access routes to Berlin, Soviet forces were ordered to resist without referring the decision to Stalin. If American forces were mobilizing along the entire front, Stalin said, “Come to me.” In other words, Stalin felt strong enough for a local war but would not risk general war with the United States.

Henceforth two power blocs were seeking to stare each other down, without resolving the causes of the underlying crisis. Europe, liberated from Nazism, stood in danger of falling under the sway of a new hegemonic power. The newly independent states in Asia, with fragile institutions and deep domestic and often ethnic divisions, might be delivered to self-government only to be confronted by a doctrine hostile to the West and inimical to pluralism domestically or internationally.

At this juncture, Truman made a strategic choice fundamental for American history and the evolution of the international order. He put an end to the historical temptation of “going it alone” by committing America to the permanent shaping of a new international order. He advanced a series of crucial initiatives. The Greek-Turkish aid program of 1947 replaced the subsidies with which Britain had sustained these pivotal Mediterranean countries and which Britain could no longer afford; the Marshall Plan in 1948 put forward a recovery plan that in time restored Europe’s economic health. In 1949, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, presided over a ceremony marking the creation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) as the capstone of the American-sponsored new international order.