Worldmaking (2 page)

Acheson admired the professional manner in which Nitze set about his task and was convinced by his recommendations. Nitze had figured the science, taken soundings, prepared the bureaucracy, placated critics, and decisively rebutted Kennan. Acheson, conversely, had nothing but scorn for Kennan's methods and advice. His approach—which did not extend beyond deployment of his principal weapon: his prose—had fallen flat. The secretary of state remembered Kennan telling him that it was preferable for Americans to “perish rather than be party to a course so evil as producing that weapon.” Acheson snapped in response, “If that is your view you ought to resign from the foreign service and go out and preach your Quaker gospel, but don't do it within the department.”
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President Truman's decision was now a formality.

But this did not even come down to a majority vote. In a meeting on January 31, 1950, Truman asked Acheson, Lilienthal, and Johnson just one question: “Can the Russians do it?” When the trio came back with a unanimous yes, the president replied, “In that case we have no choice. We'll go ahead.” According to one despondent opponent of the fusion bomb, it was “like saying no to a steamroller.”
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But subsequent events appeared to vindicate Nitze and Truman's belief that the decision could not have been otherwise. The day after the president's announcement was cheered on the floor of the House of Representatives, Truman was informed that Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was in fact a Soviet spy. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, noted that the revelations “would very much reinforce the hands of the president on the strength of [his H-bomb] decision [and] it will make a good many men who are in the same profession as Fuchs very careful of what they say publicly.” After learning of Fuchs's espionage, Lilienthal wrote in his diary: “The roof fell in today … It is a world catastrophe, and a sad day for the human race.”
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*   *   *

Nitze and Kennan's disagreement over the so-called Super bomb is fascinating on multiple levels. For one thing, Kennan's case against the H-bomb did not stem from a cold appraisal of Soviet capabilities and intentions; rather, it was moral, instinctive, and emotional. In an obvious way, Kennan—usually identified as a foreign policy “realist,” someone who believes that all states seek to maximize power and advantage in an anarchic world system—was dispensing unrealistic advice.
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No nation in modern history had ever declined to develop a more lethal weapons system. When technology and resources permitted, the English developed the longbow in the twelfth century; the Swedish developed the howitzer in the seventeenth; the Germans developed the V1 and V2 rocket-propelled missiles—thankfully, at a late stage in the Second World War. For a man so steeped in history, Kennan's opposition to the hydrogen bomb was curiously unhistorical. It was based on the Wilsonesque hypothesis that declining to develop a fusion bomb and vesting faith in an international organization would persuade the Soviet Union to do the same, principally by the moral quality of American restraint. It was an original proposition, to be sure, and the laws of history would have been altered had the experiment succeeded, for genies like these are not easily returned to lamps.

But Kennan's recommendation was highly risky, as we now know. Three months before Truman's January decision, Stalin had ordered the development of a Soviet H-bomb. The United States tested its first fusion device in 1952, and the Soviet Union did so just a year later—which again was far ahead of American expectations. Had Kennan's voice carried, Moscow alone might have possessed thermonuclear weapons—a very real “missile gap” with potentially dire consequences. The physicist (and later dissident) Andrei Sakharov, who led the development of the Soviet Union's H-bomb, later suggested that his political masters would not have been impressed by American restraint: “Any American steps to suspend or permanently cancel the development of a thermonuclear weapon would have been judged as either a sly, deceptive move, or the manifestation of stupidity and weakness. In both cases the reaction would have been unambiguous—not to get caught in the trap and to take immediate advantage of the stupidity of the enemy.”
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Kennan's advice was well-intentioned but dangerous; Nitze's, less clouded by emotion, counseling what could be construed, counterintuitively, as a “safer” course of action. Kennan viewed a thermonuclear world as intolerable; the United States should play no part in its creation. His advice was shaped by adherence to an absolute moral principle, a perspective with which one can easily sympathize given the nature of the weapon. But Nitze confronted a hard reality and was more attentive than Kennan—in this rare instance—to the lessons of history.

Yet there is more to it than that. The debate over the hydrogen bomb also suggests that U.S. foreign policy is often best understood as intellectual history.
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Divergent philosophies, disciplinary preferences, religious sensibilities, and life experiences indelibly shape the structure and quality of the advice that foreign policymakers dispense. Kennan's civilizational pessimism, religiosity, and wide reading in moral philosophy; the horror evoked by visiting his beloved Hamburg in 1949—“The immensity of its ruin overwhelmed me”—and his conviction that the hydrogen bomb posed an existential threat—all these sources combined to shape a policy recommendation that departed from his usual skepticism about the ability of Wilsonian supranational institutions to achieve meaningful results.
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It was an artful and emotional response.

Nitze was not as well-read or as contemplative as Kennan. But he understood that September 1949—the month that Mao Zedong secured victory in the Chinese Civil War and just a few months after the Soviet Union ended its blockade of Berlin—was no time to attempt a bold play conditioned by notions of pure morality. Nitze excised emotion from his thought process because he believed the circumstances demanded it. Kennan and Nitze both intellectualized the dilemma—Kennan pondered ethics; Nitze, science and the strategic balance—and arrived at opposite conclusions. Each believed his recommendation stood the better chance of saving the world.

The stakes are not always so high, nor the personalities so colorful and dramatically intertwined, but a basic principle holds true throughout American history: its foreign policy is difficult to understand without an ideational frame. There are multiple divides that can shape decision making: realism versus idealism; ethics versus technics; emotionality versus instrumental rationality; theory versus intuition; pragmatism versus monism.
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The debate between Kennan and Nitze involved all these categories to varying degrees. Binaries like these can be helpful because they capture elemental forces that sometimes prove irresistible within policymaking. But I am mindful that they can also sometimes mislead, for to paraphrase Walt Whitman in
Leaves of Grass
, people are “large” and “contain multitudes.”

This book is an intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy. It focuses on ideas, their authors, and the context in which ideas were formed and examines their traction and consequences. My purpose is to identify, explain, and critique the disputatious ideas that have informed the making of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the nineteenth century—the moment when America truly announced itself as a great power with its resounding military victory against Spain. I do so through an interlinked narrative history of nine intellectuals—Alfred Thayer Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Barack Obama—whose ideas and disagreements about America's role in the world take the story of U.S. foreign relations from the Civil War (in which Mahan served) to the present. While each chapter focuses primarily on an individual, the broad approach is dialogic rather than biographical. Each figure was consciously engaged in a process of worldmaking, formulating strategies that sought to deploy the nation's vast military and economic power—or indeed its retraction through a domestic reorientation—to “make” a world in which America is best positioned to thrive.
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In writing a book with a biographical frame, I am conscious that choices can appear arbitrary. Individuals such as Woodrow Wilson, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Barack Obama are well known as shapers of American foreign policy. Presidents and high-level policy advisers, after all, are less likely to raise hackles about the criteria for their inclusion. The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky described this phenomenon as the “availability heuristic,” which applied to this book suggests that if a name is easily recognizable, that person must be important.
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But Alfred Mahan, Charles Beard, and Walter Lippmann are not so prominent, did not assume direct policymaking roles, and require more by way of explanation.

Alfred Thayer Mahan's ideas are alive today, possessed of a timeless quality also evident in Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz. Author of the seminal
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
, Mahan was prescient on the big issues of war, trade, and the central importance of sea power, making his inclusion a straightforward decision. As the subject of my first chapter, I might have discussed Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, or Secretary of State John Hay, who all presented powerful and influential diplomatic visions at the end of the nineteenth century. But none of their foreign-policy contributions rivaled Mahan's in sweep and originality. Inspired by Pax Britannica, Mahan anticipated a Pax Americana that was historically unprecedented: an economic and cultural empire that did not require the formal annexation of vast swaths of territory. His books and essays propelled the debate about American expansion through the 1890s and beyond.

Until, that is, Woodrow Wilson rejected the materialism and amorality of Mahan's worldview—the president believed that narrowly emulating British practice betrayed America's promise—and set U.S. foreign policy on a very different course. When he became president in 1913, Wilson's foreign-policy philosophy was inchoate. But when he concluded in 1917 that there was no choice but to declare war on Germany, he proposed nothing less than a revolution in world affairs. On how to reincorporate Germany into the international system after its likely defeat, Wilson sought a “peace without victory” that would disavow retribution and secure postwar stability through its broad-based legitimacy. More broadly, however, Wilson believed that the establishment of a League of Nations was the only sure way to prevent cataclysmic wars from occurring again. At the Paris Peace Conference, the president hoped to craft a “scientific peace.”
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Wilson's hopes for the League of Nations wilted on home soil as the nation reverted to its long-standing tradition of eyeing Europe's major powers warily and haughtily from a comfortable distance. It is essential for any study of U.S. foreign policy to understand why this happened, to engage with the real historical rather than the epithet version of isolationism.
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And so the book turns next to discuss the historian and political scientist Charles Beard, who believed Mahan and Wilson were reckless interventionists, similarly driven by the illusory benefits to America of free trade—although the amoral Mahan was the guiltier party. Beard became the most articulate and intellectually coherent advocate of “continental Americanism,” an autarkic version of isolationism, in the interwar years.

The 1920s and 1930s are vitally important decades in the history of American foreign relations, and many other individuals—such as Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota; Senator William Borah of Idaho; the aviator and chairman of the America First Committee, Charles Lindbergh; and the radio priest and demagogue, Charles Coughlin—also argued that the United States should abjure involvement in the looming European crisis. But none presented a sustained and coherent exploration of how America's isolation from global conflict and trading patterns might plausibly be achieved. (Plus Lindbergh and Coughlin were shallow thinkers motivated by a crude chauvinism and anti-Semitism.) With a series of books and articles published during the 1930s and 1940s Charles Beard made the strongest case that retrenchment would make the United States a fairer and more successful nation—at all societal strata—and that this would allow it to serve as a beacon for other nations.

Of course, Beard's “continental Americanism,” and the less edifying visions of other isolationists, did not carry the day. Instead, Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the United States toward activist global leadership—which leads directly to the nation's pivotal world role today. Yet while Roosevelt's presidency is of vast significance in the history of U.S. foreign relations, it is difficult to identify a grand strategy or strategist that defined his presidency. The president himself was not a deep thinker. George Kennan later described FDR as an “intellectually superficial but courageous and charming man,” which is fair in one sense, although it scarcely does justice to his qualities of political judgment, which were superior to Kennan's.
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Roosevelt was adept at improvisation and placed great store in the importance of personal diplomacy; he danced around fixed principles, blurring lines where he believed it served the greater good.
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“You know, I am a juggler,” FDR observed in 1942, “and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does … I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help me win the war.”
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