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The vacuum of longer-range reflections in Washington would be underlined with the appearance of a remarkable work composed before Pearl Harbour, but published shortly after it, America’s Strategy in World Politics. Its author Nicholas Spykman—a Dutchman with a background in Egypt and Java, then holding a chair at Yale—died a year later.¹ In what remains perhaps the most striking single exercise in geopolitical literature of any kind, Spykman laid out a basic conceptual grid for the understanding of contemporary relations between states, and a comprehensive map of American positions and prospects within it. In an international system without central authority, the primary objective of the foreign policy of every state was necessarily the preservation and improvement of its power, in a struggle to curb that of other states. Political equilibrium—a balance of power—was a noble ideal, but ‘the truth of the matter is that states are only interested in a balance which is in their favour. Not an equilibrium, but a generous margin is their objective’. The means of power were four: persuasion, purchase, barter and coercion. While military strength was the primary requirement of every sovereign state, all were instruments of an effective foreign policy. Combining them, hegemony was a ‘power position permitting the domination of all states within its reach’.²

Such hegemony the United States had long enjoyed over most of the Western hemisphere. But it was a dangerous mistake to think that it could therefore rely on the protection of two oceans, and the resources of the interlinked landmass lying between them, to maintain its power position vis-à-vis Germany and Japan. A detailed inventory of the strategic materials needed for success in modern war showed that Latin America, for all its valuable raw materials, could not supply every critical item missing from North America.³ Nor was it realistic to imagine unaffected support for the United States to the south. The record of Washington in the region, where ‘our so-called painless imperialism has seemed painless only to us’, precluded that. Nothing like the ‘modern, capitalistic credit economy’ of the United States, with its highly developed industrial system, giant corporations, militant union struggles and strikebreaker vigilantes existed in the still largely feudal societies of Latin America, while the ABC states of its far south lay ‘too far from the centre of our power to be easily intimidated by measures short of war’.⁴ Any purely hemispheric defence was an illusion; still more so, quarter-sphere defence confined to North America alone, if the US was to avoid becoming a mere buffer state between German and Japanese empires. American strategy would have to be offensive, striking out across the seas at the two powers now at war—by the time the book came out—against the US on the other side of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Spykman’s rebuttal of isolationism became conventional wisdom once the US entered the war. But not his wider vision, which in its cool dismissal of American verities that would be recycled by the administration as wartime objectives remained incompatible with any of the doctrines that came to be formulated in Washington during the conflict. America’s Strategy in World Politics explained that liberal democracy had become a stale myth; laissez-faire led to increasing monopoly and concentration of economic power; free trade was a fiction mocked by state subsidies; at home, class struggle, declared nonexistent, was settled by tear gas and violence; abroad, American bayonets taught lesser breeds modern accounting.⁵ Declining to take the standard rhetoric of the struggle at face value, Spykman arrived at conclusions that could only be jarring to the policy-makers of the hour. The US should already be reckoning on a reversal of alliances when the war was won. In Europe, Britain would not want to see Russia any more than Germany on the shores of the North Sea, and could be counted on to build Germany back up against Russia; while in Asia, America would have to build Japan back up against China, whose potential power was infinitely greater, and once ‘modernized, vitalized and militarized’ would be the principal threat to the position of the Western powers in the Pacific.⁶ As the Red Army fought off the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, and Japanese carriers moved towards Midway, such previsions were out of season. Their time would come.

II

The mental framework of the officials charged with American foreign policy was far from uniform. But central assumptions were widely shared. When European war broke out in 1939, virtually all its possible outcomes filled planners in Washington with alarm. Dire, certainly, would be German success: few had any illusions in Hitler. But a British victory won by statist mobilization, entrenching the sterling bloc yet further, might not be so much better. Worst of all, perhaps, would be such mutual destruction that, in the ensuing chaos, one form or another of socialism would take hold of the continent.⁷ Once Washington entered the war, and alliance with London and Moscow was essential to winning it, the priorities of the battlefield took precedence over the calculations of capital. But these remained, throughout, the strategic background to the global struggle. For Roosevelt’s planners the long-term priorities were twofold.⁸ The world must be made safe for capitalism at large; and within the world of capitalism, the United States should reign supreme. What would this dual objective mean for the postwar scene?

First and foremost, in point of conceptual time, the construction of an international framework for capital that would put an end to the dynamics of autarkic division and statist control that had precipitated the war itself, of which Hitler’s Third Reich and Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere had been the most destructive examples, but Britain’s Imperial Preference was another retrograde case. The free enterprise system in America itself was at risk without access to foreign markets.⁹ What would be needed after the war was a generalization of the Open Door that Washington had urged on its rivals in the race to seize command of markets in China: an all-round liberalization of trade, but henceforward—this was crucial—firmly embedded in new international institutions. Such an economic order would be not only a guarantee of peaceful relations between states, but allow the US to assume its natural place as first among them. From the time of Jefferson and Adams onwards, conspicuous national traditions had been generically expansionist, and as now far the largest and most advanced industrial power in the world, the US could be confident that free trade would ensure its hegemony at large, as it had Britain’s a century earlier. The political complement of this economic order would be founded on the principles of liberal democracy, as set forth in the Atlantic Charter.

From 1943 onwards, as victory came nearer, the requirements of this vision moved into sharper political focus. Three concerns were overriding.¹⁰ The first was the threat to a satisfactory post-war settlement from the potential maintenance of imperial preference by Britain. Washington would brook no barrier to American exports. From the outset, the US had insisted that a condition of the lend-lease on which Britain depended for survival after 1940 must be abandonment of imperial preference, once hostilities were over. Churchill, furious at the imposition of Article VII, could only seek to weaken the American diktat with a vaguely worded temporary escape clause. The second concern, mounting as the end of the war approached, and fully shared by Britain, was the spread of resistance movements in Europe—France, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece—in which variegated currents of the left were leading forces, just as planners in Washington had originally feared. The third was the advance from the spring of 1944 of the Red Army into Eastern Europe, which soon became an acute preoccupation. If the prospect most immediately present in the minds of American planners at the start of the war was the danger of any reversion to the conditions that had produced Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, as it drew to an end a still greater threat was taking shape in the form of its most important ally in the battle against them, the Soviet Union.

For here was not just an alternative form but a negation of capitalism, intending nothing less than its overthrow across the planet. Communism was an enemy far more radical than fascism had ever been: not an aberrant member of the family of polities respecting private ownership of the means of production, but an alien force dedicated to destroying it. American rulers had, of course, always been aware of the evils of Bolshevism, which Wilson had tried to stamp out at their inception by dispatching an expedition to help the Whites in 1919. But though foreign intervention had not succeeded in strangling it at birth, the USSR of the interwar years remained an isolated, and looked a weak, power. Soviet victories over the Wehrmacht, long before there was an Anglo-American foot on European soil, abruptly altered its position in the postwar calculus. So long as fighting lasted, Moscow remained an ally to be prudently assisted, and where necessary humoured. But once it was over, a reckoning would come.

III

At the helm during the Second World War, Roosevelt had manoeuvred his country into the conflict not out of any general anti-fascist conviction—though hostile to Hitler, he had admired Mussolini, helped Franco to power, and remained on good terms with Pétain¹¹—but fear of Japanese and German expansion. Nor, for his class, was he especially anti-communist: at ease with the USSR as an ally, he was scarcely more realistic about Stalin than Stalin had been about Hitler. Though fond of Churchill, he was unsentimental about the empire he upheld, and had no time for De Gaulle. Strategic thought of any depth was foreign to him. Never a particularly well-informed or consistent performer on the world stage, personal self-confidence substituting for analytic grip, his vagaries frequently dismayed subordinates.¹² But an abiding set of premises he possessed. In the words of the most accomplished apologist for his conduct of foreign affairs, his consistency lay simply in the fact that ‘Roosevelt was a nationalist, an American whose ethnocentrism was part of his outlook’: a ruler possessed of the ‘calm, quiet conviction that Americanism’, conceived as a ‘combination of free enterprise and individual values’, would be eagerly adopted by the rest of the world, once American power had done away with obstacles to its spread. Though proud of the New Deal’s work in saving US capitalism, he was uncomfortable with economic questions. But ‘like most Americans, Roosevelt unquestioningly agreed with the expansionist goals of Hull’s economic program’. There, ‘he did not lead, but followed’.¹³

The president’s vision of the postwar world, formed as the USSR was still fighting for its life against the Third Reich, while the United States was basking untouched in the boom of the century, gave primacy to the construction of a liberal international order of trade and mutual security that the US could be sure of dominating. A product of the war, it marked an epochal break in American foreign policy. Hitherto, there had always been a tension within American expansionism, between the conviction of hemispheric separatism and the call of a redemptive interventionism, each generating its own ideological themes and political pressures, crisscrossing or colliding according to the conjuncture, without ever coalescing into a stable standpoint on the outside world. In the wave of patriotic indignation and prosperity that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the conflicts of the past were washed away. Traditionally, the strongholds of isolationist nationalism lay in the small-business and farmer population of the Mid-West; the bastions of a more interventionist nationalism—in local parlance, ‘internationalism’—in the banking and corporate elites of the East Coast. The war brought these together. The former had always looked more positively on the Pacific as a natural extension of the frontier, and sought no-holds-barred revenge for the attack on Hawaii. The latter, oriented to markets and investments across the Atlantic threatened by Hitler’s New Order, had wider horizons. Renovated by the rise of new capital-intensive firms and investment banks committed to free trade, each a key component in the political bloc behind Roosevelt, these interests supplied the managers of the war economy. They looked forward, beyond sky-high domestic profits during the fighting, to cleaning up in Europe after it.¹⁴

In these conditions, the two nationalisms—isolationist and interventionist—could finally start to fuse into a durable synthesis. For Franz Schurmann, whose Logic of World Power ranks with Spykman’s American Strategy and Kolko’s Politics of War for originality within the literature on US foreign policy, this was the true arrival of American imperialism, properly understood—not a natural outgrowth of the incremental expansionism from below of the past, but the sudden crystallization of a project from above to remake the world in the American image.¹⁵ That imperialism, he believed, was only possible because it rested on the democratic foundations of the New Deal and the leader of genius who sought to extend it overseas in a global order of comparable popular welfare, assuring the US a consensual hegemony over postwar humanity at large. ‘What Roosevelt sensed and gave visionary expression to was that the world was ripe for one of the most radical experiments in history: the unification of the entire world under a domination centred in America’.¹⁶ In this enterprise, the contrary impulses of isolation and intervention, nationalist pride and internationalist ambition, would be joined and sublimated in the task of reorganizing the world along US lines, to US advantage—and that of mankind.

Schurmann’s imaginative grasp of the impending mutation in the American imperium remains unsurpassed.¹⁷ But in its idealization of Roosevelt, however ambivalent, it outran the time and person by a good margin. The White House still had only sketchy notions of the order it sought when peace was restored, and these did not include bestowing a New Deal on humanity at large. Its concerns were focused in the first instance on power, not welfare. The postwar system FDR had in mind would have a place for Russia and Britain in running the world—even pro forma China, since Chiang Kai-shek could be relied on to do US bidding. But there could be no question which among the ‘four policemen’, as he liked to style them, would be chief constable. Its territory untouched by war, by 1945 the United States had an economy three times the size of the USSR’s and five times that of Britain, commanding half of the world’s industrial output and three quarters of its gold reserves. The institutional foundations of a stable peace would have to reflect that predominance.¹⁸ Before he died Roosevelt had laid down two of them. At Bretton Woods, birthplace of the World Bank and the IMF, Britain was obliged to abandon Imperial Preference, and the dollar installed as master of the international monetary system, the reserve currency against which all others had to be pegged.¹⁹ At Dumbarton Oaks, the structure of the Security Council in a future United Nations was hammered out, conferring permanent seats and veto rights on the four gendarmes-to-be, superimposed on a General Assembly in which two-fifths of the delegates would be supplied by client states of Washington in Latin America, hastily mustered for the purpose with last-minute declarations of war on Germany. Skirmishes with Britain and Russia were kept to a minimum.²⁰ Hull, awarded—the first in a long line of such recipients—the Nobel Peace Prize for his role at the birth of the new organization, had reason to deem it a triumph. By the time the UN came into being at San Francisco in 1945, it was so firmly under the US thumb that the diplomatic traffic of the delegates to its founding conference was being intercepted round the clock by military surveillance in the nearby Presidio.²¹

Roosevelt was in his grave before Germany surrendered. The system whose foundations his administration had laid was incomplete at his death, with much still unsettled. Neither Britain nor France had consented to part with Asian or African colonies he viewed as an anachronism. Russia, its armies nearing Berlin, had designs on Eastern Europe. It might not fit so readily into the new architecture. But with its population decimated and much of its industry in ruins as the Wehrmacht retreated, the USSR would not represent a significant threat to the order to come, and might over time perhaps be coaxed towards it. Moscow’s exact role after victory was a secondary preoccupation.

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1Spykman had a remarkable career, whose early years have aroused no curiosity in his adopted country, and later years been ignored in his native country, where he appears to be still largely unknown. Educated at Delft, Spykman went to the Middle East in 1913 at the age of twenty, and to Batavia in 1916, as a journalist and—at least in Java, and perhaps also in Egypt—undercover agent of the Dutch state in the management of opinion, as references in Kees van Dijk, The Netherlands Indies and the Great War 1914–1918, Leiden 2007 reveal: pp. 229, 252, 477. While in Java, he published a bilingual—Dutch and Malay—book entitled Hindia Zelfbestuur [Self-Rule for the Indies], Batavia 1918, advising the national movement to think more seriously about the economics of independence, and develop cooperatives and trade unions rather than simply denouncing foreign investment. In 1920 he turned up in California, completed a doctorate on Simmel at Berkeley by 1923, published as a book by Chicago in 1925, when he was hired by Yale as a professor of international relations. Not a few mysteries remain to be unravelled in this trajectory, but it is clear that Spykman was from early on a cool and original mind, who unlike Morgenthau or Kelsen, the two other European intellectuals in America with whom he might otherwise be compared, arrived in the US not as a refugee, but as an esprit fort from the Indies who after naturalization felt no inhibition in delivering sharp judgements on his host society.

2Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, New York 1942, pp. 7, 21, 19.

3Six decades later, in the only serious engagement since with Spykman’s work, Robert Art has argued that his ‘masterful book’ erred in thinking North America was impregnable against military invasion, but vulnerable to economic strangulation by the Axis powers if they were victorious in Europe. The quarter-sphere, Art showed, had the raw materials to withstand any blockade: America could have stayed out of the Second World War without risk to itself. But its entry into the war was nevertheless rational, for purposes of the Cold War. ‘By fighting in World War Two and helping to defeat Germany and Japan, the United States, in effect, established forward operating bases against the Soviet Union in the form of Western Europe and Japan. Having these economic-industrial areas, together with Persian Gulf oil, on America’s side led to the Soviet Union’s encirclement, rather than America’s, which would have been the case had it not entered the war’: ‘The United States, the Balance of Power and World War II: Was Spykman Right?’, Security Studies: Spring 2005, pp. 365–406, now included in Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, New York 2009, pp. 69–106.

4Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 64, 213, 62.

5‘The whole social myth of liberal democracy has lost most of its revolutionary force since the middle of the nineteenth century, and in its present form is hardly adequate to sustain democratic practices in the countries where it originated, let alone inspire new loyalties in other peoples and other lands’. As for the country’s economic creed, ‘American business still believes that an invisible hand guides the economic process and that an intelligent selfishness and a free and unhampered operation of the price system will produce the greatest good for the greatest number’. Overall, ‘North American ideology, as might be expected, is essentially a middle-class business ideology’—though it also included, of course, ‘certain religious elements’: American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 215–7, 258, 7. For Spykman’s sardonic notations on the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt Corollary and the Good Neighbour policy in the ‘American Mediterranean’, see pp. 60–4.

6Spykman, American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 460, 466–70.

7For such fears, see the abundant documentation in Patrick Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II, Lafayetteville 2002, pp. 12–17 ff, by far the best and most detailed study of the US wartime planners.

8The critical wartime group included Hull, Welles, Acheson, Berle, Bowman, Davis and Taylor at State. Hopkins was an equerry more than a planner.

9‘We need these markets for the output of the United States’, Acheson told Congress in November 1944. ‘My contention is that we cannot have full employment and prosperity in the United States without foreign markets’. Denied these, America might be forced into statism too, a fear repeatedly expressed at the time. In 1940, the Fortune Round Table was worrying that ‘there is a real danger that as a result of a long war all the belligerent powers will permanently accept some form of state-directed economic system’, raising ‘the longer-range question of whether or not the American capitalist system could continue to function if most of Europe and Asia should abolish free enterprise in favour of totalitarian economics’: Hearden, Architects of Globalism, pp. 41, 14. Concern that the US could be forced in such direction had already been voiced by Brooks Adams at the turn of the century, who feared that if a European coalition ever dominated trade with China, ‘it will have good prospects of throwing back a considerable surplus on our hands, for us to digest as best as we can’, reducing America to the ‘semi-stationary’ condition of France, and a battle with rivals that could ‘only be won by surpassing the enemy with his own methods’. Result: ‘The Eastern and Western continents would be competing for the most perfect system of state socialism’: Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, pp. 52–3. In 1947 Adams’s book was republished with an introduction by Marquis Childs, as a prophetic vision of the challenge of Russia to America in the Cold War.

10These are the object of Gabriel Kolko’s great work, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945, New York 1968, whose magisterial sweep remains unequalled in the literature—covering overall US economic objectives; the cutting down to size of British imperial positions; checking of the left in Italy, Greece, France and Belgium; dealing with the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe; fixing up the UN; planning the future of Germany; sustaining the GMD in China; and nuclear bombing of Japan.

11Italy: soon after his inauguration in 1932, FDR was confiding to a friend that ‘I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’. Asked five years later by his ambassador in Rome if ‘he had anything against dictatorships’, he replied, ‘Of course not, unless they moved across their frontiers and sought to make trouble in other countries’. Spain: within a month of Franco’s uprising, he had imposed an unprecedented embargo on arms to the Republic—‘a gesture we Nationalists shall never forget’, declared the Generalísimo: ‘President Roosevelt behaved like a true gentleman’. France: he felt an ‘old and deep affection’ for Pétain, with whose regime in Vichy the US maintained diplomatic relations down to 1944, and matching detestation of De Gaulle—a ‘prima donna,’ ‘jackanapes’ and ‘fanatic’. See, respectively, David Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–1940, Chapel Hill 1988, pp. 139, 184; Douglas Little, Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War, Ithaca 1985, pp. 237–8, and Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War, Durham, NC 2007, pp. 39, 45–7; Mario Rossi, Roosevelt and the French, Westport 1993, pp. 71–2, and John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan and Dean G. Acheson, Cambridge 1994, p. 113.

12For concurrent judgements of FDR’s failings as a wartime leader from antithetical observers, see Kennan: ‘Roosevelt, for all his charm and skill as a political leader was, when it came to foreign policy, a very superficial man, ignorant, dilettantish, with a severely limited intellectual horizon’, and Kolko: ‘As a leader Roosevelt was a consistently destabilizing element in the conduct of American affairs during the war-time crises, which were intricate and often assumed a command of facts as a prerequisite for serious judgements’: Harper, American Visions of Europe, p. 174; Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 348–50. Light-mindedness or ignorance led FDR to make commitments and take decisions—over Lend Lease, the Morgenthau Plan, Palestine, the French Empire—that often left his associates aghast, and had to be reversed.

13Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, Princeton 1991, pp. 185, 186, 10, 59. Culturally speaking, Roosevelt’s nationalism had a persistent edge of antipathy to the Old World. The dominant pre-war outlook of his administration is described by Harper as a ‘Europhobic hemispherism’: American Visions of Europe, pp. 60 ff—‘the record is full of presidential expressions of the anxiety, suspicion and disgust that animated this tendency’. At the same time, imagining that the world would fall over itself to adopt the American Way of Life, once given a chance, Roosevelt’s nationalism—Kimball captures this side of him well—was easygoing in tone, just because it was so innocently hubristic.

14See the famous taxonomy of interests in Thomas Ferguson, ‘From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition and American Public Policy in the Great Depression’, International Organization, Winter 1984, pp. 41–94. In 1936, FDR could count on support from Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, Manufacturers Trust and Dillon, Read; Standard Oil, General Electric, International Harvester, Zenith, IBM, ITT, Sears, United Fruit and Pan Am.

15‘There is an important qualitative difference between expansionism and imperialism’. Expansionism was the step-by-step adding on of territory, productive assets, strategic bases and the like, as always practised by older empires, and continued by America since the war through a spreading network of investments, client states and overseas garrisons on every continent. By contrast, ‘imperialism as a vision and a doctrine has a total, worldwide quality. It envisages the organization of large parts of the world from the top down, in contrast to expansionism, which is accretion from the bottom up’. Schurmann, The Logic of World Power, New York 1974, p. 6.

16‘American imperialism was not the natural extension of an expansionism which began with the very origins of America itself. Nor was it the natural outgrowth of a capitalist world market system which America helped to revive after 1945. American imperialism, whereby America undertook to dominate, organize and direct the free world, was a product of Rooseveltian New Dealism’: Schurmann, The Logic of World Power, pp. 5, 114.

17Schurmann’s formation set him apart from both main currents, radical and liberal, of writing about US foreign policy. Schumpeter, Polanyi, Schmitt, along with Marx and Mao, all left their mark on his thought: see his self-description, The Logic of World Power, pp. 561–5. He was a significant influence on Giovanni Arrighi.

18‘Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” notion had the appearance of international equality while, in fact, it assumes a weak China and an Anglo-Soviet standoff in Europe’: Kimball, The Juggler, p. 191.

19Ironically, the architect of the imposition of American will at Bretton Woods, Harry Dexter White, a closet sympathizer with Russia, was in private himself a critic of the ‘rampant imperialism’ that was urging ‘the US to make the most of our financial domination and military strength and become the most powerful nation in the world’: Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order, Princeton 2013, pp. 40–1. Steil’s account makes clear not only how completely Keynes was outmanoeuvred by White in fumbling attempts to defend British interests in 1944, but how deluded he was in persuading himself that the proceedings of the conference reflected the utmost goodwill of the United States towards Britain.

20To offset the entry of his bête noire Gaullist France into the Security Council, on which Churchill insisted, Roosevelt pressed without success for the inclusion of Brazil as another subordinate of Washington, and over British opposition sought to create ‘trusteeships’ to screen postwar American designs on key islands in the Pacific. The veto had to be made unconditional at Soviet insistence. For these manoeuvres, see Robert Hilderbrand’s authoritative study, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security, Chapel Hill 1990, pp. 123–7, 170–4, 192–228.

21For the lavish stage-managing and clandestine wiretapping of the Conference, see Stephen Schlesinger’s enthusiastic account, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, Boulder 2003, passim, and Peter Gowan’s scathing reconstruction, ‘US: UN’ New Left Review 24, Nov–Dec 2003.