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Roosevelt’s insouciance did not survive him. Once the Red Army was entrenched in Eastern Europe, and Communist regimes set up behind it, with mass Communist parties active to the west and north, in France, Italy and Finland, priorities in Washington were reversed. Meeting the Soviet threat was more urgent than fine-tuning a Pax Americana, some of whose principles might have to be deferred in resisting it. Winning what became the Cold War would have to come first. Truman, who had once rejoiced at the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, hoping that each state would destroy the other, was well equipped for the change of direction.¹ Within four days of the German surrender, he had cut off Lend-Lease to Russia without warning. At first insecure, tacking between bluster and joviality, his own temperament and that of his predecessor, once US nuclear weapons had shown what they could do in Japan, he scarcely looked back. By the spring of 1946, conciliatory relations with Moscow of the kind Roosevelt had vaguely envisaged, and Stalin doubtfully hoped, were finished. Within another year, the Truman Doctrine blew the bugle for a battle to defend free nations everywhere from aggression and subversion by totalitarianism, the president relishing his role in waking the country from its slumber.²

In the Cold War now set in motion, the two sides were asym-metrical. Under Stalin, Soviet foreign policy was essentially defensive: intransigent in its requirement of a security glacis in Eastern Europe to prevent any repetition of the invasion it had just suffered, no matter what degree of political or military repression was required to enforce this, but more than willing to ditch or hobble any revolution—in Greece or China—outside this zone that threatened to provoke trouble with a West plainly so much more powerful than itself.³ The USSR was still only building—re-building after Nazi wreckage—socialism in one country. Stalin never abandoned the Bolshevik conviction that communism and capitalism were mortal antagonists.⁴ But the ultimate horizon of a worldwide free association of producers—the classless society Marx had envisaged—lay far off. For the time being, the balance of forces remained lopsided in favour of capital. In the longer run inter-imperialist contradictions would flare up again and weaken the enemy, as they had twice done in the past, shifting the advantage to labour.⁵ In the interim, it was vital that revolutionary forces outside the perimeter of the Soviet bloc should neither threaten its security by provoking imperialism prematurely, nor question the authority of the CPSU over them.

In doctrine as in power, the position of the United States was altogether distinct. Ideologically, two universalisms were locked in struggle during the Cold War. But there was an ontological difference between them. In Stephanson’s trenchant formulation: ‘Whereas the Soviet Union, representing (it claimed) the penultimate stage of history, was locked in a dialectical struggle for the final liberation of humankind, the United States is that very liberation. It is the end, it is already a world empire, it can have no equal, no dialectical Other. What is not like the United States can, in principle, have no proper efficacy. It is either a perversion or, at best, a not-yet’.⁶ Materially, furthermore, there was no common measure between the rival states as they emerged from the war. The USSR of 1946–1947 had not the remotest hope of the ambition on which American grand strategy was fixed: a ‘preponderance of power’ across the world, its annunciation staged over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initiative in the conflict between the two lay with the stronger party. Its ideological label was ‘containment’, as if the aim of US planners was to stem a tide of Soviet aggression. But the substance of the doctrine was far from defensive. Nominally, it was a counsel of firmness and tactical patience to wear the enemy down, by ‘the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points’, as its originator put it. But from the beginning, the objective was not to check, but delete the adversary. Victory, not safety, was the aim.⁷

In later years Kennan would represent his conception of containment as a political strategy of limited geographical application—not a call for worldwide armed activity, as charged by Lippmann, a rare early critic—and contrast it as a stance of prudent defence with the adventurist notions of ‘rollback’ advocated by Dulles, and ‘flexible response’ by Kennedy. Legend has since canonized the image of a sober adviser whose counsels of moderation and wisdom were distorted into a reckless anti-communist activism that would bring disasters against which he spoke out, remaining true to himself as a critic of American hubris and intransigence. The reality was otherwise. Unstable and excitable, Kennan lacked the steadiness of his friend and successor Nitze, but in his days of power in Washington was a Cold Warrior à l’outrance, setting the course for decades of global intervention and counter-revolution.⁸ At the outset of his career as a diplomat, he had decided that the Bolsheviks were ‘a little group of spiteful Jewish parasites’, in their ‘innate cowardice’ and ‘intellectual insolence’ abandoning ‘the ship of Western European civilization like a swarm of rats’. There could be no compromise with them. Stationed in Prague during the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, his first reaction was that Czechs counted German rule a blessing; later, touring occupied Poland—he was now en poste in Berlin—he felt Poles too might come to regard rule by Hans Frank as an improvement in their lot. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he told his superiors that, from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, Russia was everywhere feared more than Germany, and must bear the ‘moral consequences’ of Operation Barbarossa alone, with ‘no claim on Western sympathies’.⁹

After the war, promoted to Deputy Commandant of the National War College, he declared that if Russian military industry should make faster progress than American, ‘we would be justified in considering a preventive war’, unleashing nuclear weapons: ‘with probably ten good hits with atomic bombs you could, without any great loss of life or loss of the prestige or reputation of the United States, practically cripple Russia’s war-making potential’.¹⁰ At the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, and as consigliere to Acheson, he initiated covert paramilitary operations in Eastern Europe; advocated, if need be, US military intervention in Southern Europe and Southeast Asia; urged support for French colonialism in North Africa; supervised cancellation of reforms in Japan; endorsed repression in Latin America; proposed American seizure of Taiwan; exulted when US troops were dispatched to Korea.¹¹ Containment was limited neither in its range nor in its means. It was an Ermattungskrieg, not a Niederwerfungskrieg, but the objective was the same. America could hope that ‘within five or ten years’ the USSR would be ‘overwhelmed by clouds of civil disintegration’, and the Soviet regime soon ‘go down in violence’. Meanwhile ‘every possible means’ should be set in motion to destabilize Moscow and its relays in Eastern Europe.¹² In their intention, containment and rollback were one from the start.

II

A bureaucratic euphemism, containment was too arid a term to galvanize popular opinion for the launch to Cold War. But it could readily be translated into what was henceforward the centrepiece of the American imperial ideology: security. In the critical years 1945–1947, this became the key slogan linking internal atmospherics and external operations into a single front, and assuring passage from the New Deal to the Truman Doctrine.¹³ The Social Security Act had been the most popular reform of the Roosevelt era, enshrining a new value in the vocabulary of domestic politics. What more natural complement than a National Security Act, to meet the danger, no longer of depression, but subversion? In March 1947 came Truman’s speech warning of the apocalyptic dangers of communism in the Mediterranean, designed by Acheson ‘to scare the hell out of the country’ with a message that was perforce ‘clearer than truth’. Calling his countrymen to battle in the Cold War, Kennan expressed ‘a certain gratitude to Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear’.¹⁴ In the same month, the National Security Act created the Defence (no longer War) Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and—the pièce de résistance—the Central Intelligence Agency. Around this institutional complex developed the permanent ideology of national security presiding over the American empire to this day.¹⁵ If the depth of its grip on the national imaginary was a product of the Cold War, the fears on which it played had a long pre-history, in alarmist scenarios of US vulnerability to external attack and magnification of foreign dangers, from Lodge through Wilson to Roosevelt.¹⁶ Masking strategies of offence as exigencies of defence, no theme was better calculated to close the potential gap between popular sentiments and elite designs. The most authoritative study of the Truman administration’s entry into the Cold War offers a critique of the ‘expanded’ conception of national security that came to take hold in Washington. But the ideology of national security, US-style, was inherently expansionist.¹⁷ ‘There is literally no question, military or political, in which the United States is not interested’, Roosevelt cabled Stalin in 1944, during a global conflict it had not initiated. A fortiori, in a Cold War it had.

The organization of the postwar discourse of empire around security did not, of course, mean that the foundational themes of American patriotism were eclipsed by it. The legitimations of US expansionism had always formed a mobile complex of ideologemes, their order and emphasis shifting kaleidoscopically according to the historical conjuncture. The primacy of security after 1945 altered the hierarchy of appeals, without purging them. Immediately below it, now came democracy—the American gift to the world that security served to protect. What had to be secured—that is, expanded—against the totalitarian threat of communism was a Free World in the image of American liberty. In the struggle of the US with the USSR, the force of the claim to be what the enemy was not, a liberal democracy, was plain: where there was any experience or prospect of representative government, typically a trump card. In private, of course, the managers of national security were often contemptuous of the democracy they were supposedly defending. Kennan, an admirer of Schuschnigg and Salazar, rulers who showed that ‘benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good’ than democracy, argued on the eve of the Second World War that immigrants, women and blacks should be stripped of the vote in the United States. Democracy was a ‘fetish’: needed was ‘constitutional change to the authoritarian state’—an American Estado Novo.¹⁸ After the war Kennan compared democracy to ‘one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin’, and never lost his belief that the country was best governed by an enlightened elite immune to popular passions. Acheson dismissed ‘the premise that democracy is some good’, remarking ‘I don’t think it’s worth a damn’—‘I say the Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish’.¹⁹ Such confidences were not for public consumption. Officially, democracy was as prominent a value in the American mission to the world as in the time of Manifest Destiny.

That destiny, however, had undergone a change. After the Spanish–American War, it had ceased to be territorial, becoming with Wilson all but metaphysical. During the Cold War, it was articulated with less rapture, in a moral-political register occupying a lower position in the ideological hierarchy. But the connexion with religion remained. In his final inaugural address of 1944, Roosevelt had declared: ‘The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for our freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.’ Truman, speaking on the day he dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, was equally forthright about the country’s strong arms: ‘We thank God that it [the atomic bomb] has come to us, and not our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His Ways and for His purposes.’ Amid the postwar ruins, the president was more expansive. ‘We are going forward to meet our destiny, which I think Almighty God intended us to have’, he announced: ‘We are going to be the leaders’.²⁰ Viewing the destruction in Germany, Kennan found himself ‘hushed by the realization that it was we who had been chosen by the Almighty to be the agents of it’,²¹ but in due course uplifted by the awesome challenge that the same Providence had granted Americans in the form of the Cold War. Since then, the deity has continued to guide the United States, from the time of Eisenhower, when ‘In God We Trust’ was made the official motto of the nation, to Kennedy exclaiming: ‘With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own’—down to the declaration of the younger Bush, that ‘Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world’, and Obama’s confidence that God continues to call Americans to their destiny: to bring, with His grace, ‘the great gift of freedom’ to posterity.²² America would not be America without faith in the supernatural. But for obvious reasons this component of the national ideology is inner-directed, without much appeal abroad, and so now relegated to the lowest rung in the structure of imperial justification.

To be effective, an ideology must reflect as well as distort, or conceal, reality. At the outset, as at the conclusion, of the Cold War, the United States possessed few colonies, was indeed an electoral democracy, did confront a sociopolitical system that was not, and as in the past enjoyed extraordinary natural advantages of size, location and endowments. All these could be, and were, synthesized into an imperial ideology commanding popular consensus, if never unanimity, at home, and power of attraction, if never ubiquitous, abroad. But the ultimately determinant instance in the formation of American foreign policy lay elsewhere, and could receive only circumspect articulation until the Cold War was won. So long as communism was a threat, capitalism was all but a taboo term in the vocabulary of the West. In the US itself, the virtues of free enterprise were certainly always prominent in the national liturgy, but even in this idiom were rarely projected as leitmotifs of the global defence of liberty against the totalitarian danger. The managers of the empire were aware that it would be counterproductive to foreground them. Early drafts of the presidential speech that would become the Truman Doctrine, prepared by his aides Clifford and Elsey, presented Greece as a strategic line of defence for access to oil in the Middle East and, noting that ‘there has been a world-wide trend away from the system of free enterprise’, warned that ‘if, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in the other nations of the world, the very existence of our own economy and our own democracy will be gravely threatened’. This was speaking too plainly. Truman objected that it ‘made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus’, and Acheson made sure such cats were not let out of the bag.²³ Even free trade, however essential to a Pax Americana, was not accorded top billing as an ideological imperative. But what, for the time being, was least conspicuous in the hierarchy of its legitimations would, as events were going to show, be most decisive in the map of its operations. For the moment, the Cold War had to be won, and the catechism of security was paramount.

III

The Great Contest, as Deutscher called it, is still generally taken as the defining framework of American grand strategy in the postwar epoch. But the exigencies of the struggle against communism, all-consuming as these became, were only one, if protracted, phase within a longer and wider arc of American power-projection, which has outlived them by half as many years again. Since it came to an end, the Cold War has produced an often remarkable body of international scholarship. But this has nearly always remained unseeing of the dynamic predating, encompassing and exceeding it. For all its scope and intensity, the Cold War was—in the words of an outstanding exception to this literature—‘merely a sub-plot’ within the larger history of American global domination.²⁴

That exception came from the tradition which pioneered modern study of American imperialism, founded in Wisconsin by William Appleman Williams in the fifties. Williams’s American–Russian Relations (1952), Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and The Contours of American History (1961) argued that the march to the internal frontier within North America, allowing a settler society to escape the contradictions of race and class of an emergent capitalist economy, had been extended across the Pacific in the drive for an Open Door empire of commerce, and then in the fuite en avant of a bid for global dominion that could not brook even a defensive Soviet Union. For Williams, this was a morally disastrous trajectory, generated by a turning away from the vision of a community of equals that had inspired the first arrivals from the Old World. Produced before the US assault in Vietnam, Williams’s account of a long-standing American imperialism struck with prophetic force in the sixties. The historians who learnt from him—Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Patrick Hearden—shed the idealism of his explanatory framework, exploring with greater documentation and precision the economic dynamics of American diplomacy, investment and warfare from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. The Wisconsin School was not alone in its critical historiography of empire. Kolko’s monumental Politics of War shared the same political background, of revulsion at the war in Vietnam, if not intellectual affiliation.

To the regnant liberalism of the time, and since, this was an aberrant optic for viewing America’s postwar role in the world. It was not requirements of profitability, but of security that formed the guideline of US foreign policy, set by the conflict of the Cold War rather than the objectives of the Open Door. Leading the reaction was John Lewis Gaddis, who over four decades has tirelessly upheld patriotic truths about his country and the dangers it faced. The Cold War, he explained at the peak of the US bombing of Vietnam in 1972, had been forced on a reluctant American government that did not want it, but wanted insecurity even less. Responsibility for the conflict fell on a Soviet dictator who was not answerable to any public opinion, and so could have avoided a confrontation that democratic rulers in Washington, who had to heed popular feelings outraged by Russian behaviour, could not. The domestic political system, rather than anything to do with the economy, determined the nation’s conduct of foreign affairs.²⁵ If there was such a thing as an American empire—perhaps ‘revisionism’, after all, had a case there—it was one by invitation, freely sought in Western Europe from fear of Soviet aggression, unlike the Russian empire imposed by force on Eastern Europe.²⁶ American policy towards the world, he insisted a decade later, had always been primarily defensive. Its leitmotif was containment, traceable across successive declensions from the time of Truman to that of Kissinger, in an arc of impressive restraint and clairvoyance.²⁷

Another ten years on, the Cold War now won, Gaddis could reveal what ‘We Now Know’ of its real nature: a battle of good against evil as contemporaries saw it, in which American conceptions of collective security, embodied in a NATO alliance inspired by federal principles akin to those of the US Constitution, had triumphed over narrow Soviet conceptions of unilateral security, and in doing so diffused democracy across the world. The nuclear arms race alone had deferred a collapse of the USSR that would otherwise have occurred much earlier.²⁸ But not all dangers to freedom had been laid to rest. In 2001 the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, like the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbour, had ‘given the US yet another chance to lead the world into a new era’, and George W. Bush—the underestimated Prince Hal of the hour—was rising to the challenge of creating an ‘empire of liberty’, in keeping with the nation’s calling as, in Lincoln’s words, ‘the last, best hope of mankind’.²⁹

By the time of these pronouncements, the intellectual climate had changed. From the mid-eighties onwards, the record of the American state during the Cold War came to be viewed in a more sceptical light. Its performance in two theatres of its operation attracted particular criticism in much subsequent scholarship, as overly and unnecessarily aggressive. The first was the role of the US at the inception of the Cold War in Europe, the second its subsequent interventions in the Third World. Studies of these have flowed in turn into a general broadening and deepening of the historiography of the Cold War, enabled by the opening of Soviet and Chinese archives as well as a more critical sense of Western sources.³⁰ The imposing three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), a monument to current research, is testimony to the change; and its co-editors, Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, can stand as illustrations of the advance the new literature represents, and its limits. Each is author of the finest single work in their respective fields, in both cases deeply felt, humane works of historical reflection: Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992) and Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005). Leffler’s massive, meticulous analysis of American doctrines and actions in the first five years of the Cold War left no doubt of Washington’s drive for global hegemony—‘preponderance’ at large—and dismissal of the predictable apprehensions it aroused in Moscow, in the wake of one invasion from Germany and fear of another, as the US divided the country to keep the Ruhr securely within its grasp.³¹ Westad’s study broke decisively from a conventional focus on Europe, for a powerful narrative of the battlefields of the Third World, treated as the most important single front of the Cold War, and most disastrous for the peoples caught in the crossfire of American and Soviet attempts to control their fate.

Commanding though each of these works is on its terrain, that remains delimited. In historical scope, neither matches Kolko’s integration within a single compass of the full range of American strategic aims and actions while the Red Army fought the Wehrmacht, with a full sense of popular experiences of suffering and revolt from the Yangzi to the Seine, in the world beyond Washington.³² The forty pages of bibliography in the first volume of the Cambridge History contain no reference to The Politics of War, a telltale omission. At its best, this literature has produced major works of clear-minded political history. But while no longer apologetic, often dwelling on unwarranted blunders and excesses of American foreign policy that compromised the chance of better diplomatic outcomes after the war, or crimes committed in fear of worse in the underdeveloped world, it has proved consistently unable to come to terms with the matrix that rendered these rational enough for their purposes. The symptom of this inability is the general silence with which it has treated the cumulative work of those US historians who have made that the principal object of their research. Distortions of ideology and exaggerations of insecurity are the acceptable causes of American misjudgement or misconduct abroad. The political logic of a dynamic continental economy that was the headquarters of world capital is matter—at best—for evasion or embarrassment.³³

That was not the case in the early seventies, when the influence of Williams was at its height. At that time, two penetrating critiques of the Wisconsin School appeared, whose clarity and rigour are in notable contrast with the foot-shuffling that followed. Robert Tucker and John Thompson each took aim at the elisions of the term ‘expansion’ in Wisconsin usage, pointing out that territorial expansion across North America, or even the Pacific, did not mean the US economy required foreign markets to thrive in either the nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century, nor that mistaken beliefs by politicians or businessmen to the contrary could be adduced as evidence of any purposeful continuity in American foreign policy, conspicuously absent. Expansion, Tucker readily conceded, there had been. But it was better understood, not as a projection of the socioeconomic structure of American capitalism, but of the sheer growth of American power and the dynamics of inter-state competition, accompanied by ideas of a mission to spread American values abroad. For Thompson, any number of beliefs were expressed by Americans as justifications of their country’s foreign policy, and there was no reason to attach a priori more importance to commercial than to strategic or moral or political arguments for them. Considerations of security, often invoked, were among the repertoire. Legitimate up to the mid-fifties, in Tucker’s view, these had become excessive thereafter, abandoning the rational pursuit of a balance of power for the will to hegemony of an expansionist globalism. In that respect, the Wisconsin critique of American foreign policy in the Cold War was sound. ‘To contain the expansion of others, or what was perceived as such, it became necessary to expand ourselves. In this manner, the course of containment became the course of empire’.³⁴

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1Famously: ‘If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible’: speech in the Senate, 5 June 1941. In the White House, he would more than once cite the forged Testament of Peter the Great—a nineteenth-century Polish counterpart of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—as the blueprint for Soviet plans of world conquest. In the severe judgement of his most lucid biographer, whose conclusions from it are damning, ‘Throughout his presidency, Truman remained a parochial nationalist’: Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953, Stanford 2002, p. 177.

2The crudity and violence of Truman’s outlook distinguished him from Roosevelt, entitling him to high marks from Wilson Miscamble’s vehement From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War, Cambridge 2007, whose only complaint is that he did not break fast enough with Roosevelt’s collaboration with Stalin: pp. 323–8. FDR would have been unlikely, in dismissing a member of his Cabinet, to rage at ‘All the ‘Artists” with a capital A, the parlour pinkos and the soprano-voiced men’ as a ‘national danger’ and ‘sabotage front’ for Stalin. See Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 177.

3In the last months of the war, Stalin had been so concerned with maintaining good relations with the allies that he bungled the capture of Berlin when Zhukov’s Army Group was a mere forty miles from the city across open country, with orders from its commander on February 5 to storm it on February 15–16. Stalin cancelled these instructions the following day, for fear of ruffling Allied feathers at Yalta, where the Big Three had just started to convene, and he received no favours in return. Had he let his generals advance as he had earlier agreed, the whole Soviet bargaining position in postwar Germany would been transformed. ‘Towards the end of March, Zhukov found him very tired, tense and visibly depressed. His anguish was hardly alleviated by the thought that all the uncertainties might have been avoided if he had allowed the Red Army to attack Berlin and possibly end the war in February, as originally planned’: Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War. Diplomacy, Warfare and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945, New York 1979, pp. 238–9, 243–4, 261. This would not be his only disastrous blunder, not of aggressive overreaching, but anxious under-reaching, as World War Two came to a close.

4For a penetrating depiction of Stalin’s outlook at the close of the War, see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, Cambridge, MA 1996, pp. 11–46.

5This was the theme of his speech to the Supreme Soviet of 9 February 1946. Since the first inter-imperialist war had generated the October Revolution, and the second taken the Red Army to Berlin, a third could finish off capitalism—a prospect offering ultimate victory without altering strategic passivity. To the end of his life, Stalin held to the position that inter-imperialist contradictions remained for the time being primary, contradictions between the capitalist and socialist camp secondary.

6‘If the end of history as emancipated humankind is embodied in the ‘United States”, then the outside can never be identical or ultimately equal. Difference there is, but it is a difference that is intrinsically unjust and illegitimate, there only to be overcome and eradicated’. These passages come from Stephanson, ‘Kennan: Realism as Desire’, in Nicolas Guilhot, ed., The Invention of International Relations Theory, New York 2011, pp. 177–8.

7‘A battle to the death the Cold War certainly was, but to a kind of abstract death. Elimination of the enemy’s will to fight—victory—meant more than military victory on the battlefield. It meant, in principle, the very liquidation of the enemy whose right to exist, let alone equality, one did not recognize. Liquidation alone could bring real peace. Liquidation is thus the “truth” of the Cold War’: Stephanson, ‘Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War’, in Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics, London 1998, p. 82.

8In the extravagance of his fluctuations between elated self-regard and tortured self-flagellation—as in the volatility of his opinions: he would frequently say one thing and its opposite virtually overnight—Kennan was closer to a character out of Dostoevsky than any figure in Chekhov, with whom he claimed an affinity. His inconsistencies, which made it easier to portray him in retrospect as an oracle of temperate realism, were such that he could never be taken as a simple concentrate or archetype of the foreign-policy establishment that conducted America into the Cold War, his role as policy-maker in any case coming to an end in 1950. But just insofar as he has come to be represented as the sane keeper of the conscience of US foreign policy, his actual record—violent and erratic into his mid-seventies—serves as a marker of what could pass for a sense of proportion in the pursuit of the national interest. In the voluminous literature on Kennan, Stephanson’s study Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge, MA 1989 stands out as the only serious examination of the intellectual substance of his writings, a courteous but devastating deconstruction of them. An acute, not unsympathetic, cultural-political portrait of him as a conservative out of his time is to be found in Harper’s American Visions of Europe, pp. 135–232. In later life, Kennan sought to cover his tracks in the period when he held a modicum of power, to protect his reputation and that of his slogan. We owe some striking pages to that impulse, so have no reason to complain, though also none to take his self-presentation at face value. His best writing was autobiographical and historical: vivid, if far from candid Memoirs—skirting suggestio falsi, rife with suppressio veri; desolate vignettes of the American scene in Sketches from a Life; and the late Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875–1890, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

9Under Nazi rule, ‘the Czechs enjoyed privileges and satisfaction in excess of anything they “dreamed of in Austrian days”’, and could ‘cheerfully align themselves with the single most dynamic movement in Europe’, as the best account of this phase in his career summarizes his opinion. In Poland, Kennan reported, ‘the hope of improved material conditions and of an efficient, orderly administration may be sufficient to exhaust the aspirations of a people whose political education has always been primitive’: see David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 71–3. For Kennan’s letter on 24 June 1941, two days after the launching of Hitler’s attack on the USSR, described simply as ‘the German war effort’, see his Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1968, pp. 133–4, which give no hint of his initial response to the Nazi seizure of what remained of Czechoslovakia, and make no mention of his trip to occupied Poland.

10C. Ben Wright, ‘Mr “X” and Containment’, Slavic Review, March 1976, p. 19. Furious at the disclosure of his record, Kennan published a petulant attempt at denial in the same issue, demolished by Wright in ‘A Reply to George F. Kennan’, Slavic Review, June 1976, pp. 318–20, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of his documentation of it. In the course of his critique of Kennan, Wright accurately observed of him: ‘His mastery of the English language is undeniable, but one should not confuse gift of expression with clarity of thought’.

11Taiwan: ‘Carried through with sufficient resolution, speed, ruthlessness and self-assurance, the way Theodore Roosevelt might have done it’, conquest of the island ‘would have an electrifying effect on this country and throughout the Far East’: Anna Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, New York 1983, vol. III, PPS 53, p. 65. Korea: ‘George was dancing on air because MacArthur’s men were mobilized for combat under auspices of the United Nations. He was carrying his balalaika, a Russian instrument he used to play with some skill at social gatherings, and with a great, vigorous swing, he clapped me on the back with it, nearly striking me to the sidewalk. “Well, Joe,” he cried, “What do you think of the democracies now?”’: Joseph Alsop, ‘I’ve Seen The Best of It’. Memoirs, New York 1992, pp. 308–9. Alsop, with prewar memories of the young Kennan telling him that ‘the United States was doomed to destruction because it was no longer run by its “aristocracy”’, reminded him tartly of his excoriations of democracy only a few days earlier: pp. 274, 307. Two million Koreans perished during an American intervention whose carpet-bombing obliterated the north of the country over three successive years: see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War, New York 2010, pp. 147–61.

12David Foglesong, ‘Roots of “Liberation”: American Images of the Future of Russia in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953’, International History Review, March 1999, pp. 73–4; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956, Ithaca 2009, pp. 6, 29, 180, who observes: ‘There would be no delay: containment and a “compellent” strategy would be pursued in parallel, not in sequence’.

13It was Schurmann who first saw this, and put it at the heart of his account of American imperialism: ‘A new ideology, different from both nationalism and internationalism, forged the basis on which bipartisanship could be created. The key word and concept in that new ideology was security’: The Logic of World Power, pp. 64–8.

14“X”, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, July 1947, p. 582.

15For the bureaucratic background to the Act, and the ideology that both generated and crystallized around it, the essential study is Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954, Cambridge 1998: its title a poignant allusion to Bryan’s famous cry, ‘You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold’. Forrestal was the principal architect of the Act, becoming the country’s first Secretary of Defence, before personal and political paranoia exploded in a leap to his death from a hospital window.

16The extensive record of such scares is surveyed in John A. Thompson, ‘The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition’, Diplomatic History, Winter 1992, pp. 23–43, who concludes: ‘The dramatic extension of America’s overseas involvement and commitments in the past hundred years has reflected a growth of power rather the decline of security. Yet the full and effective deployment of that power has required from the American people disciplines and sacrifices that they are prepared to sustain only if they are persuaded the nation’s safety is directly at stake’. Among the results have been ‘the expansion of national security to include the upholding of American values and the maintenance of world order’, and ‘the recurrent tendency to exaggerate the country’s vulnerability to attack’.

17For the leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis this was, admirably, a long-standing tradition of the country: ‘Expansion, we have assumed, is the path to security’: Surprise, Security and the American Experience, Cambridge, MA 2004, p. 13.

18‘Fair Day Adieu!’ and ‘The Prerequisites: Notes on Problems of the United States in 1938’, documents still kept under wraps—the fullest summary is in Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, pp. 49–55. For a cogent discussion of Kennan’s outlook in these texts, see Joshua Botts, ‘“Nothing to Seek and … Nothing to Defend”: George F. Kennan’s Core Values and American Foreign Policy, 1938–1993’, Diplomatic History, November 2006, pp. 839–66.

19Acheson: interview with Theodore Wilson and Richard McKinzie, 30 June 1971. Johnson was cruder still: ‘We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr Ambassador’, he told an envoy, after drawling an expletive, ‘If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long’: Philip Deane [Gerassimos Gigantes], I Should Have Died, London 1976, pp. 113–4. Nixon and Kissinger could be no less colourful.

20John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War, Chapel Hill 2000, pp. 44, 23; Lloyd Gardner, in Gardner, Schlesinger, Morgenthau, The Origins of The Cold War, Ann Arbor 1970, p. 8. In 1933, Roosevelt could in all seriousness warn Litvinov that on his deathbed he would want ‘to make his peace with God’, adding ‘God will punish you Russians if you go on persecuting the church’: David Foglesong, The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’, Cambridge 2007, p. 77.

21Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York 1968, p. 429.

22Kennedy inaugural, 20 January 1961: ‘The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God’; George W. Bush, speech to the International Jewish B’nai B’rith Convention, 28 August 2000; Obama inaugural, 20 January 2009: ‘This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny’—an address reminding his audience, inter alia, of the heroism of those who fought for freedom at Gettysburg and Khe Sanh.

23McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. 77. Business Week could afford to be blunter, observing that the task of the US government was ‘keeping capitalism afloat in the Mediterranean—and in Europe’, while in the Middle East ‘it is already certain that business has an enormous stake in whatever role the United States is to play’.

24McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. xiii.

25Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947, New York 1972, pp. 353, 356–8, 360–1. In a preface to the re-edition of the book in 2000, Gaddis congratulated himself on his good fortune, as a student in Texas, in feeling no obligation ‘to condemn the American establishment and all its works’: p. x.

26Gaddis, ‘The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis and the Origins of the Cold War’; Diplomatic History, July 1983, pp. 181–3.

27Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, New York 1982, p. viii, passim. Gaddis had by then become Kennan’s leading exegete, earning his passage to official biographer, and the sobriquet ‘godfather of containment’. For the latter, see Sarah-Jane Corke, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945–1953, pp. 39–42 ff.

28Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford 1997, pp. 51, 199–201, 280, 286–7, 292.

29Gaddis, ‘And Now This: Lessons from the Old Era for the New One’, in Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, eds, The Age of Terror, New York 2001, p. 21; Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, pp. 115, 117. For ‘one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V’, prompting comparison of Afghanistan with Agincourt, see pp. 82, 92; and further pp. 115, 117. In due course Gaddis would write speeches for the Texan president.

30For the successive phases of this historiography, see Stephanson, ‘The United States’, in David Reynolds, ed., The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives, New Haven 1994, pp. 25–48. A shorter update is contained in John Lamberton Harper, The Cold War, Oxford 2011, pp. 83–9, a graceful work that is now the best synthesis in the field.

31For the degree of Leffler’s rejection of Gaddis’s version of the Cold War, see his biting demolition of We Now Know: ‘The Cold War: What Do “We Now Know”?’, American Historical Review, April 1999, pp. 501–24. He had started to question it as early as 1984: ‘The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–48’, American Historical Review, April 1984, pp. 346–81.

32In 1990, Kolko added a preface to the re-publication of The Politics of War that extends its argument to comparative reflections on the German and Japanese regimes and their rulers, and the differing political outcomes of French and German popular experiences of the war: a text of exceptional brilliance.

33Tackled by Bruce Cumings for his failure either to address or even mention the work of Kolko, or more generally the Wisconsin School of historians descending from Williams, Leffler could only reply defensively that for him, ‘the writings of William Appleman Williams still provide the best foundation for the architectural reconfigurations that I envision’ since ‘Williams captured the essential truth that American foreign policy has revolved around the expansion of American territory, commerce and culture’—a trinity, however, of which only the last figures significantly in his work on the Cold War. See, for this exchange, Michael Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, Cambridge 1995, pp. 52–9, 86–9. For his part, Westad could write wide-eyed as late as 2000 that ’American policy-makers seem to have understood much more readily than most of us have believed that there was an intrinsic connection between the spread of capitalism as a system and the victory of American political values’: Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London 2000, p. 10. Five years later, The Global Cold War contains a few nervous, indecisive pages on economic considerations in US foreign policy, without significant bearing on the subsequent narrative, before concluding with perceptible relief at the end of it, that—as exemplified by the invasion of Iraq—‘freedom and security have been, and remain the driving forces of US foreign policy’: pp. 27–32, 405. A discreet footnote in Kimball informs us that ‘historians have only begun to grapple with the intriguing questions posed by William Appleman Williams’, and taken up Gardner and Kolko, as against ‘the more commonly accepted viewpoint which emphasizes power politics and Wilsonian idealism’ and does not ‘really deal with the question of America’s overall economic goals and their effect on foreign policy’—a topic handled somewhat gingerly, if not without a modicum of realism, in the ensuing chapter on Lend-Lease: The Juggler, pp. 218–9, 43–61. Of the typical modulations to traditional Cold War orthodoxy, McCormick once justly observed: ‘While post-revisionists may duly note materialist factors, they then hide them away in an undifferentiated and unconnected shopping-list of variables. The operative premise is that multiplicity, rather than articulation, is equivalent to sophistication’: ‘Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History’, Reviews in American History, December 1982, pp. 318–9.

34Robert W. Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, Baltimore 1971, pp. 11, 23, 58–64, 107–11, 149: a conservative study of great intellectual elegance. Likewise, from an English liberal, John A. Thompson, ‘William Appleman Williams and the “American Empire”’, Journal of American Studies, April 1973, pp. 91–104, a closer textual scrutiny.