aircraft capable of targeting individuals on the ground from altitudes of up to thirty thousand feet. Under Obama, drones became the weapon of choice for the White House, the Predators of ‘Task Force Liberty’ raining Hellfire missiles on suspect villages in the North-West Frontier, wiping out women and children along with warriors in the ongoing battle against terrorism: seven times more covert strikes than launched by the Republican Administration. Determined to show he could be as tough as Bush, Obama readied for war with Pakistan should it resist the us raid dispatched to kill Bin Laden in Abbottabad, for domestic purposes the leading trophy in his conduct of international affairs. [137] ‘When confronted with various options during the preparations, Obama personally and repeatedly chose the riskiest ones. As a result, the plan that was carried out included contingencies for direct military conflict with Pakistan’: James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power, New York 2012, p. 303; ‘There was no American war with Pakistan, but Obama had been willing to chance it in order to get Bin Laden’. Assassinations by drone, initiated under his predecessor, became the Nobel laureate’s trademark. In his first term, Obama ordered one such execution every four days—over ten times the rate under Bush.

The War on Terror, now rebaptized at Presidential instruction ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’—a coinage to rank with the ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ of the Bush period—has proceeded unabated, at home and abroad. Torturers have been awarded impunity, while torture itself, officially disavowed and largely replaced by assassination, could still if necessary be outsourced to other intelligence services, above suspicion of maltreating captives rendered to them. [138] For the Obama Administration, murder was preferable to torture: ‘killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. It somehow seemed cleaner, less personal’, allowing the cia, under fewer legal constraints than the Pentagon, ‘to see its future: not as the long-term jailers of America’s enemies but as a military organization that could erase them’—not to speak of anyone within range of them, like a sixteen-year-old American citizen in the Yemen not even regarded as a terrorist, destroyed by a drone launched on Presidential instructions: Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The cia, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth, New York 2013, pp. 121, 310–1. Guantánamo, its closure once promised, has continued as before. Within two years of his election in 2008, Obama’s Administration had created no less than sixty-three new counter-terrorism agencies. [139] Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, New York 2011, p. 276.

Over all of this, the Presidential mantle of secrecy has been drawn tighter than ever before, with a more relentless harassment and prosecution of anyone daring to break official omertà than its predecessor. War criminals are protected; revelation of war crimes punished—notoriously, in the case of Private Manning, with an unprecedented cruelty, sanctioned by the Commander-in-Chief himself. The motto of the Administration’s campaign of killings has been, in the words of one of its senior officials, ‘precision, economy and deniability’. [140] David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, New York 2012, p. 246. Only the last is accurate; collateral damage covers the rest. Since the Second World War, Presidential lawlessness has been the rule rather than the exception, and Obama has lived up to it. To get rid of another military regime disliked by the us, he launched missile and air attacks on Libya without Congressional authorization, in violation both of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, claiming that this assault did not constitute ‘hostilities’, because no American troops were involved, but merely ‘kinetic military action’. [141] For this escalation in executive lawlessness, see the sober evaluation of Louis Fisher, ‘Obama, Libya and War Powers’, in The Obama Presidency: A Preliminary Assessment, Albany 2012, pp. 310–1, who comments that according to its reasoning, ‘a nation with superior military force could pulverize another country and there would be neither hostilities nor war’. Or as James Mann puts it, ‘Those drone and air attacks gave rise to another bizarre rationale: Obama administration officials took the position that since there were no American boots on the ground in Libya, the United States was not involved in the war. By that logic, a nuclear attack would not be a war’: The Obamians, p. 296. With this corollary to Nixon’s dictum that ‘if the President does it, that means it is not illegal’, a new benchmark for the exercise of imperial powers by the Presidency has been set. The upshot, if less rousing at home, was more substantial than the raid on Abbottabad. The Libyan campaign, the easy destruction of a weak state at bay to a rising against it, refurbished the credentials of humanitarian intervention dimmed by the war in Iraq, and restored working military cooperation—as in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan—with Europe under the banner of nato, Germany alone abstaining. An ideological and diplomatic success, Operation Odyssey Dawn offered a template for further defence of human rights in the Arab world, where these were not a domestic matter for friendly states.

A larger task remained. Gratified at the overthrow of two Sunni-based regimes by the us, Iran had colluded with the occupation of Afghanistan and of Iraq. But it had failed to make amends for the taking of the us embassy in Teheran, was not above meddling in Baghdad, and had long represented America as the Great Satan at large. These were ideological irritants. Much more serious was the clerical regime’s commitment to a nuclear programme that could take it within reach of a strategic weapon. Enshrining an oligarchy of powers with sole rights to these, the npt had been designed to preclude any such development. In practice, so long as a state was sufficiently accommodating to the us, Washington was prepared to overlook breaches in it: nothing was to be gained by punishing India or Pakistan. Iran was another matter. Its possession of a regional weapon would, of course, be no threat to the us itself. But, quite apart from the unsatisfactory nature of the Islamic Republic itself, there was another and over-riding reason why it could not be allowed the same. In the Middle East, Israel had long amassed a large nuclear arsenal of two to three hundred bombs, complete with advanced missile delivery systems, while the entire West—the United States in the lead—maintained the polite fiction that it knew nothing of this. An Iranian bomb would break the Israeli nuclear monopoly in the region, which Israel—without, of course, ever admitting its own weapons—made clear it was determined to maintain, if necessary by attacking Iran before it could reach capability.

The American tie to Israel automatically made this an imperative for the us too. But Washington could not simply rely on Tel Aviv to handle the danger, partly because Israel might not be able to knock out all underground installations in Iran, but mainly because such a blitz by the Jewish state risked uproar in the Arab world. If an attack had to be launched, it was safer that it be done by the super-power itself. Much ink had been spilled in the us and its allies over the Republican Administration’s grievous departure from the best American traditions in declaring its right to wage preventive war, often identified as the worst single error of its tenure. Pointlessly: the doctrine long predated Bush, and the Democratic Administration has continued it, Obama openly threatening preventive war on Iran. [142] For long-standing American traditions of preventive war, see Gaddis’s upbeat account in Surprise, Security and the American Experience. For Obama’s continuance of these, see his declaration to the Israeli lobby aipac in the spring of 2011: ‘My policy is not going to be one of containment. My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. When I say all options on the table, I mean it’. In the interim, just as Washington hoped to bring down the regime in Iraq by economic blockade and air-war, without having to resort to the ground invasion eventually rolled out, so now it hopes to bring the regime in Iran to its knees by economic blockade and cyber-war, without having to unleash a firestorm over the country. Sanctions have been steadily tightened, with the aim of weakening the social bases of the Islamic Republic by cutting off its trade and forcing up the price of necessities, hitting bazaari and popular classes alike, and confirming a middle-class and urban youth, on whose sympathies the West can count, in deep-rooted opposition to it.

Flanking this attack, while Israel has picked off Iranian scientists with a series of motorcycle and car-bomb assassinations, the Administration has launched a massive joint us–Israeli assault on Iranian computer networks to cripple development of its nuclear programme. A blatant violation of what passes for international law, the projection of the Stuxnet virus was personally supervised by Obama—in the words of an admiring portrait, ‘Perhaps not since Lyndon Johnson had sat in the same room, more than four decades before, had a president of the United States been so intimately involved in the step-by-step escalation of an attack on a foreign nation’s infrastructure’. [143] Sanger, Confront and Conceal, p. x. Against Iraq, the us waged an undeclared conventional war for the better part of a decade, before proceeding to conclusions. Against Iran, an undeclared cyber-war is in train. As in Iraq, the logic of the escalation is clear. It allows for only two outcomes: surrender by Teheran, or shock and awe by Washington. The American calculation that it can force the Iranian regime to abandon its only prospect of a sure deterrent against an Iraqi or Libyan fate is not irrational. If the price of internal survival is to give way, the Islamic Republic will do so. Its factional divisions, and the arrival of an accommodating President, point in that direction. But should it not be endangered to such a point within, how likely is it to cast aside the most obvious protection against dangers without?

Happily for the us, a further lever lies to hand. In Syria, civil war has put Teheran’s sole reliable ally in the region under threat of proximate extinction. There the Baath regime never provoked the us to the degree its counterpart in Iraq had done, even joining Operation Desert Storm as a local ally. But its hostility to Israel, and traditional links with Russia nonetheless made it an unwelcome presence in the region, on and off the list of rogue states to be terminated if the chance ever arose. The rising against the Assad dynasty presented just such an opportunity. Any prompt repetition of the nato intervention in Libya was blocked by Russia and China, both—but especially Russia—angered by the way the West had manipulated the un resolution on Libya to which they assented for the uncovenanted barrage of Odyssey Dawn. The regime in Damascus, moreover, was better armed and had more social support than that in Tripoli. There was also now less domestic enthusiasm for overseas adventures. The safer path was a proxy war, at two removes. The us would not intervene directly, nor even itself—for the time being—arm or train the Syrian rebels. It would rely instead on Qatar and Saudi Arabia to funnel weapons and funds to them, and Turkey and Jordan to host and organize them.

That this option was itself not without risks the Democratic Administration, divided on the issue, was well aware. As the fighting in Syria wore on, it increasingly assumed the character of a sectarian conflict pitting Sunni against Alawite, in which the most effective warriors against the Assad regime became Salafist jihadis of just the sort that had wrought havoc among Shi’a in Iraq, not to speak of American forces themselves. Once triumphant, might they not turn on the West as the Taliban had done? But was not that a reason for intervening more directly, or at least supplying arms more openly and abundantly to the better elements in the Syrian rebellion, to avert such a prospect? Such tactical considerations are unlikely to affect the outcome. Syria is not Afghanistan: the social base for Sunni rigorism is far smaller, in a more developed, less tribal society, and playing the Islamist card safer for Washington—not least because Turkey, the very model of a staunchly capitalist, pro-Western Islamism, is virtually bound to be the overseeing power in any post-Baath order to emerge in Syria, that will inevitably be much weaker than its predecessor. To date, fierce Alawite loyalties, tepid Russian support, a precarious flow of weapons from Teheran and levies from Hizbollah have kept the Assad regime from falling. But the balance of forces is against it: not only Gulf and Western backing of the rebellion, but a pincer from Turkey and Israel, their long-time collusion in the region renewed at American insistence. For Israel, a golden opportunity looms: the chance of helping to knock out Damascus as a remaining adversary in the region, and neutralize or kill off Hizbollah in the Lebanon. For the us, the prize is a tightening of the noose around Iran.

Elsewhere in the region, the Arab Spring that caught the Administration by surprise, stirring some initial disquiet, has so far yielded a crop of equally positive developments for the us. Even had they the will, incompetent Islamist governments in Egypt and Tunisia, stumbling about between repression and recession, were in no position to tinker with the compliant foreign policies of the police regimes they replaced, remaining at the mercy of the imf and American good offices. Sisi’s assumption of power in Cairo, once the temporary awkwardness of his path to it fades, promises a more congenial partner for Washington, with long-standing ties to the Pentagon. In the Yemen, a smooth succession from the previous tyrant has been engineered, averting the danger of a combustible popular upheaval by preserving much of the power of his family. In the only trouble-spot in the Gulf, a timely Saudi intervention has restored order in Bahrain, headquarters of the us Fifth Fleet. For the Palestinians, masterly inactivity has long been taken as the best treatment. The Oslo Accords, written by Norwegian surrogates for Israel at American behest, have lost any credibility. But time has taken its toll. The will of Palestinians to resist has visibly diminished, Hamas following down the same path of overtures to Qatar as earlier Fatah. With Arab support of any kind fast vanishing, could they not be left to rot more safely than ever before? If not, made to accept Jewish settlements on the West Bank and idf units along the Jordan in perpetuity? Either way, Washington can reckon, they will eventually have to accept the facts on the ground, and a nominal statelet under Israeli guard.

A decade after the invasion of Iraq, the political landscape of the Middle East has undergone major changes. But though domestic support for its projection has declined, the relative position of American imperial power itself is not greatly altered in the region. One of its most trusted dictators has fallen—Obama thanking him for thirty years of service to his country—without producing any successor regime capable of more independence from Washington. Another, whom it distrusted, has been steadily weakened, sapped by proxy from the us. No strong government is on the horizon in either Egypt or Syria. Nor is Iraq, the Kurdish north virtually a breakaway state, any longer a force to be reckoned with. What the diminution of these populated centres of historic Arab civilization means for the balance of power in the region is a corresponding increase in the weight and influence of the oil-rich dynasties of the Arabian peninsula that have always been the staunchest supports of the American system in the Middle East.

Only where Arabic stops does Washington confront real difficulties. In Afghanistan, the good ‘war of necessity’ Obama upheld against the bad ‘war of choice’ in Iraq is likely to prove the worse of the two for the us, the battlefield where it faces raw defeat rather than bandaged victory. [144] To avert this fate, the treaty signed between the us and the Karzai regime ensures American bases, air-power, special forces and advisers in Afghanistan through to at least 2024, over a decade after exit from Iraq. Over Iran, the us, wagged by the Israeli tail, has left itself with as little room for manoeuvre as the regime it seeks to corner. Though it has good reason to hope that Teheran will give way, should it fail to suborn or break the will of the Islamic Republic, it risks paying a high price for executing its threat to it. But even with these caveats, the Greater Middle East offers no disastrous quicksand for the United States. Islam, though alien enough to God’s Own Country, was never a monolithic faith, and much of its Salafist current less radical than anxious Westerners believed. The reality, long obvious, is that from the Nile Delta to the Gangetic plain, the Muslim world is divided between Sunni and Shi’a communities, whose antagonism today offers the us the same kind of leverage as the Sino-Soviet dispute in the Communist bloc of yesterday, allowing it to play one off against the other—backing Shi’a against Sunni in Iraq, backing Sunni against Shi’a in Syria—as tactical logic indicates. A united front of Islamic resistance is a dream from which American rulers have nothing to fear.

Strategically speaking, for all practical purposes the United States continues to have the Middle East largely to itself. Russia’s relative economic recovery—it is currently still growing at a faster clip than America—has not translated into much capacity for effective political initiative outside former Soviet territory, or significant return to a zone where it once rivalled the us in influence. Seeking to ‘reset’ relations with Moscow, Obama cancelled the missile defence system Bush planned to install in Eastern Europe, ostensibly to guard against the Iranian menace. Perhaps as a quid pro quo, Russia did not oppose the un resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, supposedly to protect civilian life, quickly converted by the us and its eu allies into a war with predictable loss of civilian life. Angered at this use of its green light, Putin vetoed a not dissimilar resolution on Syria, without offering notably greater support to the regime in Damascus, and temporizing with the rebels. Weakened by increasing opposition at home, he has since sought to make an impact abroad with a scheme for un inspection of chemical weapons in Syria to avert an American missile attack on it. Intended to raise Moscow’s status as an interlocuteur valable for Washington, and afford a temporary respite to Damascus, the result is unlikely to be very different from the upshot in Libya. Born of the longing to be treated as a respectable partner by the us, naivety and incompetence have been hallmarks of Russian diplomacy in one episode after another since perestroika. Putin, fooled as easily over Libya as Gorbachev over nato, now risks playing Yeltsin over Yugoslavia—thinking to offer weak help to Assad, likely to end up sending him the way of Milošević. Whether Obama, rescued from the embarrassment of a defeat in Congress, will prove as grateful to his St Bernard as Clinton was for escape from the need for a ground war, remains to be seen. In the Security Council, Russia can continue to fumble between collusion and obstruction. Its more significant relationship with the us unfolds elsewhere, along the supply-lines it furnishes for the American war in Afghanistan. A foreign policy as aqueous as this gives little reason for Washington to pay over-much attention to relations with Moscow.

Europe, scarcely a diplomatic heavy-weight, has required more. France and Britain, once its leading imperial powers and each anxious to demonstrate its continuing military relevance, took the initiative in pressing for an intervention in Libya whose success depended on American drones and missiles. Paris and London have again been ahead of Washington in publicly urging delivery of Western arms to the rebels in Syria. Anglo-French belligerence in the Mediterranean has so far failed to carry the whole eu behind it, over German caution, and is hampered by lack of domestic support. But the Union has nevertheless played its role as the enforcer of sanctions against all three foes of peace and human rights, Libya, Syria and—crucially—Iran. Though benefiting from a general European wish to make up with Washington after differences over Iraq, and the Anglo-French desire to cut a figure once more on the world stage, the Obama Administration can legitimately claim it an accomplishment that Europe is not only beside it in supervising the Arab world, but on occasion even notionally in front of it, providing the best of advertisements for its own moderation in the region.

II

As under the second Bush, the priorities of Obama’s first term were set by the requirements of policing the less developed world. Lower down came the tasks of advancing the integration of the developed world. Chinese and later Russian entry into the wto were certainly gains for the organization, but in each case the initiative was local, the negotiation a matter for bureaucratic adjustment, not major diplomacy, with no progress made on the Doha Round. With Obama’s second term, international commerce has moved back up the agenda. To consolidate ties with Europe, a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement is now an official objective of the Presidency. Since tariffs are already minimal across most goods between the us and eu, the creation of an economic nato will make little material difference to either bloc—at most, perhaps, a yet greater share of Continental markets for American media companies, and entry of gm products into Europe. Its significance will be more symbolic: a reaffirmation, after passing squalls, of the unity of the West. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, launched by Washington somewhat earlier, is another matter. What it seeks to do is prise open the Japanese economy, protected by a maze of informal barriers that have frustrated decades of American attempts to penetrate local markets in retail, finance and manufactures, not to speak of farm products. Successful integration of Japan into the tpp would be a major us victory, ending the anomaly that its degree of commercial closure, conceded in a Cold War setting, has represented in the years since, and tying Japan, no longer even retaining its mercantilist autonomy, more firmly than ever into the American system of power. The willingness of the Abe government to accept this loss of the country’s historic privilege reflects the fear in the Japanese political and industrial class at the rise of China, generating a more aggressive nationalist outlook that—given the disparity between the size of the two countries—requires us insurance.

Overshadowing these developments is the shift in response to the growing power of the prc in America itself. While Obama was commanding successive overt and covert wars in the Greater Middle East, China was becoming the world’s largest exporter (2010) and greatest manufacturing economy (2012). In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008–09, its stimulus package was proportionately three times larger than Obama’s, at average growth rates nearly four times as fast. Pulled to attention by the strategic implication of these changes, the Administration let it be known that it would henceforward pivot to Asia, to check potential dangers in the ascent of China. The economies of the two powers are so interconnected that any open declaration of intent would be a breach of protocol, but the purpose of such a pivot is plain: to surround the prc with a necklace of us allies and military installations, and—in particular—to maintain American naval predominance across the Pacific, up to and including the East China Sea. As elsewhere in the world, but more flagrantly, an undisguised asymmetry of pretensions belongs to the prerogatives of empire, the us regarding as natural a claim to rule the seas seven thousand miles from its shores, when it would never permit a foreign fleet in its own waters. Early on, Obama helped to bring down a hapless Hatoyama government in Tokyo for daring to contemplate a change in us bases in Okinawa, and has since added to its seven hundred-plus others in the world with a marine base in northern Australia, [145] Far the best analytic information on us bases is to be found in Chalmers Johnson’s formidable trilogy: see the chapters on ‘Okinawa, Asia’s Last Colony’ in Blowback, p. 36 ff; ‘The Empire of Bases’—725 by an official Pentagon count, with others devoted to surveillance ‘cloaked in secrecy’—in The Sorrows of Empire, pp. 151–86; and ‘us Military Bases in Other Peoples’ Countries’ in Nemesis, taking the reader through the labyrinth of Main Operating Bases, Forward Location Sites and Cooperative Security Locations (‘lily pads’, supposedly pioneered in the Gulf): pp. 137–70. Current revelations of the nature and scale of nsa interception of communications world-wide find their trailer here. Unsurprisingly, given the closeness of cooperation between the two military and surveillance establishments, former British defence official Sandars, in his survey of American bases, concludes with satisfaction that ‘the United States has emerged with credit and honour from the unique experience of policing the world, not by imposing garrisons on occupied territory, but by agreement with her friends and allies’: America’s Overseas Garrisons, p. 331. while stepping up joint naval exercises with a newly complaisant India. The pivot is still in its early days, and its meaning is as much diplomatic as military. The higher us hope is to convert China, in the language of the State Department, into a responsible stake-holder in the international system—that is, not a presumptuous upstart, let alone menacing outsider, but a loyal second in the hierarchy of global capitalist power. Such will be the leading objectives of the grand strategy to come.

How distinct has Obama’s rule been, as a phase in the American empire? Over the course of the Cold War, the us Presidency has amassed steadily more unaccountable power. Between the time of Truman and of Reagan, staff in the White House grew ten-fold. The nsc today—over two hundred strong—is nearly four times as large as it was under Nixon, Carter, or even the elder Bush. The cia, whose size remains a secret, though it has grown exponentially since it was established in 1949, and whose budget has increased over ten-fold since the days of Kennedy—$4 billion in 1963, $44 billion in 2005 at constant prices—is in effect a private army at the disposal of the President. So-called signing statements now allow the Presidency to void legislation passed by Congress, but disliked by the White House. Executive acts in defiance of the law are regularly upheld by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, which furnished memoranda on the legality of torture, but even its degree of subservience has been insufficient for the Oval Office, which has acquired its own White House Counsel as a still more unconditional rubber-stamp for whatever it chooses to do. [146] For this development, see Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, Cambridge, ma 2010, pp. 87–115. Obama inherited this system of arbitrary power and violence, and like most of his predecessors, has extended it. Odyssey Dawn, Stuxnet, Targeted Killing, Prism have been the coinages of his tenure: war that does not even amount to hostilities, electronic assault by long-distance virus, assassination of us citizens, along with foreign nationals, wholesale surveillance of domestic, along with foreign, communications. The Executioner-in-Chief has even been reluctant to forego the ability to order the killing without trial of an American on native soil. No-one would accuse this incumbent of want of humane feeling: tears for the death of school-children in New England have moved the nation, and appeals for gun-control converted not a few. If a great many more children, most without even schools, have died at his own hands in Ghazni or Waziristan, that is no reason for loss of Presidential sleep. Predators are more accurate than automatic rifles, and the Pentagon can always express an occasional regret. The logic of empire, not the unction of the ruler, sets the moral standard.

The principal constraint on the exercise of imperial force by the United States has traditionally lain in the volatility of domestic opinion, repeatedly content to start but quick to tire of foreign engagements should these involve significant American casualties, for which public tolerance has dropped over time, despite the abolition of the draft—even the very low loss of American life in Iraq soon becoming unpopular. The main practical adjustments in us policy under Obama have been designed to avert this difficulty. The official term for these in the Administration is rebalancing, though rebranding would do as well. What this watchword actually signifies are three changes. To reduce American casualties to an absolute minimum—in principle, and in some cases in practice, zero—there has been ever increasing reliance on the long-distance technologies of the rma to obliterate the enemy from afar, without risking any battlefield contact. Where ground combat is unavoidable, proxies equipped with clandestine funds and arms are preferable to American regulars; where us troops have to be employed, the detachments to use are the secretive units of the Joint Special Operations Command, in charge of covert warfare.

Lastly, reputable allies from the First World should be sought, not spurned, for any major, or even minor, undertaking: whatever their military value, necessarily variable, they provide a political buffer against criticism of the wisdom or justice of any overseas action, giving it the ultimate seal of legitimacy—approval by the ‘international community’. A more multilateral approach to issues of global security is in no way a contradiction of the mission of the nation to govern the world. The immovable lodestone remains us primacy, now little short of an attribute of national identity itself. [147] As David Calleo wrote in 2009: ‘It is tempting to believe that America’s recent misadventures will discredit and suppress our hegemonic longings and that, following the presidential election of 2008, a new administration will abandon them. But so long as our identity as a nation is intimately bound up with seeing ourselves as the world’s most powerful country, at the heart of a global system, hegemony is likely to remain the recurring obsession of our official imagination, the idée fixe of our foreign policy’: Follies of Power: America’s Unipolar Fantasy, Cambridge 2009, p. 4. In the words of Obama’s stripling speech-writer Benjamin Rhodes, now deputy national security advisor: ‘What we’re trying to do is to get America another fifty years as leader’. The President himself is not willing to settle for half a loaf. In over thirty pronouncements, he has explained that all of this, like the last, will be the American Century. [148] Rhodes: The Obamians, p. 72; Obama: Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century, p. 249.

III

Seventy years after Roosevelt’s planners conceived the outline of a Pax Americana, what is the balance-sheet? From the beginning, duality defined the structure of us strategy: the universal and the particular were always intertwined. The original vision postulated a liberal-capitalist order of free trade stretching around the world, in which the United States would automatically—by virtue of its economic power and example—hold first place. The outbreak of the Cold War deflected this scheme. The defeat of communism became an over-riding priority, relegating the construction of a liberal ecumene to a second-order concern, whose principles would have to be tempered or set aside to secure victory over an enemy that threatened capitalism of any kind, free trade or protectionist, laissez-faire or dirigiste, democratic or dictatorial. In this mortal conflict, America came to play an even more commanding role, on a still wider stage, than the projections of Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks had envisaged, as the uncontested leader of the Free World. In the course of four decades of unremitting struggle, a military and political order was constructed that transformed what had once been a merely hemispheric hegemony into a global empire, remoulding the form of the us state itself.

In the Cold War, triumph was in the end complete. But the empire created to win it did not dissolve back into the liberal ecumene out of whose ideological vision it had emerged. The institutions and acquisitions, ideologies and reflexes bequeathed by the battle against communism now constituted a massive historical complex with its own dynamics, no longer needing to be driven by the threat from the Soviet Union. Special forces in over a hundred countries round the world; a military budget larger than that of all other major powers combined; tentacular apparatuses of infiltration, espionage and surveillance; ramifying national security personnel; and last but not least, an intellectual establishment devoted to revising, refining, amplifying and updating the tasks of grand strategy, of a higher quality and productivity than any counterpart concerned with domestic affairs—how could all this be expected to shrink once again to the slender maxims of 1945? The Cold War was over, but a gendarme’s day is never done. More armed expeditions followed than ever before; more advanced weapons were rolled out; more bases were added to the chain; more far-reaching doctrines of intervention developed. There could be no looking back.

But beside the inertial momentum of a victorious empire, another pressure was at work in the trajectory of the now sole superpower. The liberal-capitalist order it set out to create had started, before it had even cleared the field of its historic antagonist, to escape the designs of its architect. The restoration of Germany and Japan had not proved of unambiguous benefit to the United States after all, the system of Bretton Woods capsizing under the pressure of their competition: power that had once exceeded interest, permitting its conversion into hegemony, had begun to inflict costs on it. Out of that setback emerged a more radical free-market model at home, which when the Cold War was won could be exported without inhibition as the norm of a neo-liberal order. But against the gains to the us of globalized deregulation came further, more radical losses, as its trade deficit and the borrowing needed to cover it steadily mounted. With the emergence of China—capitalist in its fashion, certainly, but far from liberal, indeed still ruled by a Communist party—as an economic power not only of superior dynamism but of soon comparable magnitude, on whose financial reserves its own public credit had come to depend, the logic of long-term American grand strategy threatened to turn against itself. Its premise had always been the harmony of the universal and the particular—the general interests of capital secured by the national supremacy of the United States. To solder the two into a single system, a global empire was built. But though the empire has survived, it is becoming disarticulated from the order it sought to extend. American primacy is no longer the automatic capstone of the civilization of capital. A liberal international order with the United States at its head risks becoming something else, less congenial to the Land of the Free. A reconciliation, never perfect, of the universal with the particular was a constitutive condition of American hegemony. Today they are drifting apart. Can they be reconjugated? If so, how? Around these two questions, the discourse of empire now revolves, its strategists divide.

 

For the former: ‘Homeland’, nlr 81, May–June 2013. In presidential contests campaign rhetoric will routinely assail incumbents for weakness or mismanagement of foreign policy. Victors will then proceed much as before.

[2] For the general composition of foreign policy-makers, see the best succinct study of the arc of us foreign policy in the twentieth century, Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century, Baltimore 1995, 2nd edn, pp. 13–15: one third made up of career bureaucrats, to two-thirds of—typically more influential—‘in-and-outers’, recruited 40 per cent from investment banks and corporations, 40 per cent from law firms, and most of the rest from political science departments.

[3] See Robert Kagan’s clear-eyed Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600–1900, London 2006, pp. 80, 156; for an assessment, ‘Consilium’, pp. 136–41, below.

[4] John O’Sullivan, coiner of the slogan and author of these declarations, was an ideologue for Jackson and Van Buren: see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right, New York 1995, pp. 39–42, unsurpassed in its field.

[5] Seward did not neglect territorial expansion, acquiring Alaska and the Midway Islands and pressing for Hawaii, but regarded this as means not end in the build-up of American power.

[6] Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, pp. xii–xiii; it is one of the strengths of this study, which assembles a bouquet of the most extravagant pronouncements of American chauvinism, that it also supplies the (often impassioned) counterpoint of its opponents.

[7] Victor Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony, London 1978, p. 57, which offers a graphic account of imperial imaginings in the ‘Middle Decades’ of the nineteenth century.

[8] Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, London 1890, p. 87. A prolific commentator on international affairs, adviser to Hay on the Open Door Notes and intimate of the first Roosevelt, Mahan was a vigorous proponent of a martial spirit and robust navalism: peace was merely the ‘tutelary deity of the stock-market’.

[9] ‘Within two generations’, Adams told his readers, America’s ‘great interests will cover the Pacific, which it will hold like an inland sea’, and presiding over ‘the development of Eastern Asia, reduce it to a part of our system’. To that end, ‘America must expand and concentrate until the limit of the possible is attained; for Governments are simply huge corporations in competition, in which the most economical, in proportion to its energy, survives, and in which the wasteful and the slow are undersold and eliminated’. Given that ‘these great struggles sometimes involve an appeal to force, safety lies in being armed and organized against all emergencies’. America’s Economic Supremacy, New York 1900, pp. 194, 50–1, 85, 222. Adams and Mahan were friends, in the White House circle of tr.

[10] Address to the World’s Salesmanship Congress in Detroit, 10 July 1916: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 37, Princeton 1981, p. 387.

[11] Campaign address in Jersey City, 26 May 1912: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 24, Princeton 1977, p. 443.

[12] Address to the Southern Commercial Congress in Mobile, 27 October 1913: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 28, Princeton 1978, p. 52.

[13] Address in the Princess Theatre in Cheyenne, 24 September 1919: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 63, Princeton 1990, p. 469.

[14] Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 61, Princeton 1981, p. 436. After whipping up hysteria against anyone of German origin during the war, Wilson had no compunction in declaring that ‘the only organized forces in this country’ against the Versailles Treaty he presented to the Senate were ‘the forces of hyphenated Americans’—‘hyphen is the knife that is being stuck into the document’ (sic): vol. 63, pp. 469, 493.

[15] Spykman 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 bi-lingual—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.

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

[17] Six 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.

[18] Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 64, 213, 62.

[19] ‘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.

[20] Spykman, American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 460, 466–70.

[21] For such fears, see the abundant documentation in Patrick Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II, Lafayetteville 2002, pp. 12–7 ff, far the best and most detailed study of the us war-time planners.

[22] The critical war-time group included Hull, Welles, Acheson, Berle, Bowman, Davis and Taylor at State. Hopkins was an equerry more than a planner.

[23] ‘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 re-published with an introduction by Marquis Childs, as a prophetic vision of the challenge of Russia to America in the Cold War.

[24] These 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.

[25] Italy: 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.

[26] For concurrent judgements of fdr’s failings as a war-time 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.

[27] Warren 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 easy-going in tone, just because it was so innocently hubristic.

[28] See 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.

[29] ‘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, world-wide 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.

[30] ‘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.

[31] Schurmann’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.

[32] ‘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.

[33] Ironically, 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 good will of the United States towards Britain.

[34] To 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 post-war 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.

[35] For the lavish stage-managing and clandestine wire-tapping 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’, nlr 24, Nov–Dec 2003.

[36] Famously: ‘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.

[37] The 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.

[38] In 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 post-war 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 over-reaching, but anxious under-reaching, as World War Two came to a close.

[39] For 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.

[40] This 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.

[41] ‘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.

[42] ‘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.

[43] In 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 in so far 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 1979.

[44] Under 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 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 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.

[45] C. 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’.

[46] Taiwan: ‘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, who, with pre-war 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.

[47] David 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’.

[48] It 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.

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

[50] For 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.

[51] The 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’.

[52] For 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.

[53] ‘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.

[54] Acheson: 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.

[55] John Fousek, To Lead the 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.

[56] Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York 1968, p. 429.

[57] Kennedy 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.

[58] McCormick, 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’.

[59] McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. xiii.

[60] Gaddis, 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.

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

[62] Gaddis, 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.

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

[64] Gaddis, ‘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.

[65] For 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.

[66] For 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.

[67] In 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, of exceptional brilliance.

[68] Tackled 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.

[69] Robert 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.

[70] Robert Brenner, ‘What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism?’, Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4, 2006, pp. 79–95, esp. pp. 83–5.

[71] For a contemporary adept of the locution, Joseph Nye—Chairman of the National Intelligence Council under Clinton—‘security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice until you lose it’: ‘East Asian Security—The Case for Deep Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, July–August 1995, p. 91. As Lloyd Gardner remarked of Gaddis’s ubiquitous use of the term, ‘it hangs before us like an abstraction or, with apologies to T. S. Eliot, “shape without form, shade without colour”’: ‘Responses to John Lewis Gaddis’, Diplomatic History, July 1983, p. 191. For Gaddis’s elaboration two decades later, that American security has always meant expansion, see note 52 above.

[72] Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 18, 20.

[73] Tucker’s critique of this inflation was the more radical: ‘By interpreting security as a function not only of a balance between states but of the internal order maintained by states, the Truman Doctrine equated America’s security with interests that evidently went well beyond conventional security requirements. This conception cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric, designed at the time only to mobilize public opinion in support of limited policy actions, though rhetoric taken seriously by succeeding administrations. Instead, it accurately expressed the magnitude of America’s conception of its role and interests in the world from the very inception of the Cold War’: The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, p. 107.

[74] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 51.

[75] Letter to Chandler Gurney, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 8 December 1947: Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, p. 336. For Forrestal, the struggle with the Soviet Union was best described, more bluntly, as ‘semi-war’, rather than Cold War.

[76] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 277.

[77] ‘Truman’s signing of the British loan legislation on July 15, 1946 launched the pound sterling on an agonizing yearlong death march’, remarks Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods, p. 309—apt phrasing for the ruthlessness of the American diktat.

[78] Also, of course, congenial electoral outcomes: ‘The Marshall Plan sent a strong message to European voters that American largesse depended on their electing governments willing to accept the accompanying rules of multilateral trade and fiscal conservatism’, while at the same time sparing them drastic wage repression that might otherwise have caused social unrest: McCormick, America’s Half-Century, pp. 78–9; Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 242. That the actual economic effect of Marshall aid on European recovery, well underway by the time it arrived, was less than advertised, has been shown by Alan Milward: ‘Was the Marshall Plan Necessary?’, Diplomatic History, April 1989, pp. 231–52. What was critical was its ideological, more than its material, impact.

[79] See the definitive account in Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949, Cambridge 1996, passim. The case that us reneging on the reparations promised the ussr at Yalta—not only eminently justifiable, but perfectly feasible—was the decisive act in launching the Cold War, is made by Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy pp. 127–32. In his view, the us refusal after mid-1947 to engage in normal diplomacy was the defining element of the Cold War, and must be seen as a ‘development of the concept of “unconditional surrender”, taken directly from the Civil War’, and proclaimed by Roosevelt at Casablanca: see ‘Liberty or Death: The Cold War as American Ideology’, in Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War, p. 83. More powerfully and clearly than any other writer, Stephanson has argued that ‘the Cold War was from the outset not only a us term but a us project’. For this, see his ‘Cold War Degree Zero’, in Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds, Uncertain Empire, Oxford 2012, pp. 19–49.

[80] Confident that he had ‘turned our whole occupation policy’, Kennan regarded his role in Japan as ‘the most significant constructive contribution I was ever able to make in government’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, pp. 299–303. Miscamble—an admirer—comments: ‘Kennan evinced no real concern for developments in Japan on their own terms. He appeared not only quite uninterested in and unperturbed by the fact that the Zaibatsu had proved willing partners of the Japanese militarists but also unconcerned that their preservation would limit the genuine openness of the Japanese economy. He possessed no reforming zeal or inclination’: George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, Princeton 1992, p. 255. The pps paper Kennan delivered on his return from Tokyo called for the purge of war-time officials to be curtailed.

[81] From the outset, Roosevelt had backed Churchill’s dispatch of British troops in 1944 to crush the main body of the Greek resistance. Under Truman the country became the Very light for American advance to the Cold War, Acheson telling Congressmen that failure to maintain a friendly government in place might ‘open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would affect Iran and all to the East’. Nothing less than the fate of ‘two thirds of the area of the world’ was at stake. Marshall was soon instructing the American embassy ‘not to interfere with the administration of Greek justice’, as mass execution of political prisoners proceeded. Twenty years later, with a junta in power in Athens, Acheson instructed locals that there was ‘no realistic alternative to your colonels’, since Greece was ‘not ready for democracy’: Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949, New York 1982, pp. 12–3, 71, 145; Gigantes, I Should Have Died, pp. 122–4.

[82] See, for such contingencies, Kennan’s cable to Acheson, 15 March 1948: ‘Italy is obviously key point. If Communists were to win election there our whole position in Mediterranean, and possibly Western Europe as well, would be undermined. I am persuaded that the Communists could not win without strong factor of intimidation on their side, and it would clearly be better that elections not take place at all than that the Communists win in these circumstances. For these reasons I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war, which would give us grounds for reoccupation of Foggia fields and any other facilities we might wish. This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to a deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas’: Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, p. 99.

[83] Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945, Oxford 2003, pp. 2–3, passim.

[84] There was never any question that America would use its atomic weapons on Japan, regardless of either military requirements or moral considerations: ‘The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945’. Two months before they were used, Stimson recorded a typical exchange with Truman: ‘I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength’. To this, the President ‘laughed [sic] and said he understood’. Kolko, The Politics of War, pp. 539–40. Jubilant at what Stimson called the ‘royal straight flush’ behind his hand at Potsdam, Truman sailed home on the battleship Augusta. ‘As the Augusta approached the New Jersey coast on August 6, Map Room watch officer Captain Frank Graham brought first word that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Ten minutes later a cable from Stimson reported that the bombing had been even more “conspicuous” than in New Mexico. “This is the greatest thing in history”, Truman exclaimed to Graham, and then raced about the ship to spread the news, insisting that he had never made a happier announcement. “We have won the gamble”, he told the assembled and cheering crew. The President’s behaviour lacked remorse, compassion or humility in the wake of nearly incomprehensible destruction—about 80,000 dead at once, and tens of thousands dying of radiation’: Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 92, who adds that the number of American deaths supposedly averted by the nuclear attacks on Japan, the standard rationale for them, would have been nowhere near Truman’s subsequent claim of 500,000 gi lives saved, or Stimson’s 1,000,000—perhaps 20,000: p. 97.

[85] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 56–9, 135, 171. The planners of 1945 had, of course, not only the ussr in mind. ‘In designating bases in the Pacific, for example, Army and Navy officers underscored their utility for quelling prospective unrest in Northeast and Southeast Asia and for maintaining access to critical raw materials’: p. 56.

[86] C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, Oxford 2000, p. 9.

[87] ‘Our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere’. nsc–68 was initially rejected by Nitze’s superiors as over-wrought, then ratified by Truman in the autumn, after the Cold War had finally exploded into fighting in the Far East. The document was top secret, an arcanum imperii only declassified a quarter of a century later.

[88] Allen Dulles, one of the products of this experience, would later say: ‘I sometimes wonder why Wilson was not the originator of the Central Intelligence Agency’. His brother was equally keen on the dispatch of operatives to subvert Bolshevism. See Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism, pp. 126–9, who provides full coverage of Wilson’s projects, ‘shrouded by a misty combination of self-deception and expedient fictions’: p. 295. Leffler’s exonerations of Wilson’s role in the Russian Civil War—‘he viewed the Bolsheviks with contempt. But he did not fear their power’—appeared before the publication of Fogelsong’s book, which makes short work of the conventional apologies for Wilson in the literature. Leffler’s version of these can be found in The Spectre of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1917–1953, New York 1994, pp. 8–9 ff.

[89] For Kennan’s role in introducing the term and practice of clandestine ‘political warfare’, and launching the para-military expeditions of Operation Valuable into Albania, see Corke, us Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy, pp. 45–6, 54–5, 61–2, 84; and Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 110–1: ‘Kennan approached covert operations with enthusiasm in 1948 and does not appear to have made apparent any sentiment on his part that covert operations would be limited in extent. Nor did he display any reservations concerning the extralegal character of much of what the opc would undertake’. For the recruitment of ex-Nazis to its work, see Christopher Simpson, Blowback, New York 1988, pp. 112–4. Kennan’s connexions to the underworld of American intelligence, foreign and domestic, went back to his time in Portugal during the war, and would extend over the next three decades, to the time of the Vietnam War.

[90] The front organizations set up by the cia for cultural penetration at home and abroad—the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the like—were another initiative of Kennan, an enthusiast for this kind of work: see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, Cambridge, ma 2008 , pp. 25–8.

[91] In his critique of Kennan’s ‘X’ article, Walter Lippmann had foreseen this landscape from the outset. ‘The Eurasian continent is a big place and the military power of the United States, though it is very great, has certain limitations which must be borne in mind if it is to be used effectively’, he observed dryly. ‘The counterforces which Mr X requires have to be composed of Chinese, Afghans, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Austrians, of anti-Soviet Poles, Czechoslovaks, Bulgars, Yugoslavs, Albanians, Hungarians, Finns and Germans. The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets’: The Cold War: A Study in us Foreign Policy, New York 1947, pp. 11, 14.

[92] For Gramsci, corruption as a mode of power lay between consent and coercion. Logically enough, therefore, its use has spanned the entire arc of imperial action, across all zones of the Cold War. The worldwide role of the clandestine distribution of money in securing the American empire—Spykman’s ‘purchase’—has tended to be cast into the shadow by the role of covert violence. More discreet, its scale remains more secret than that of resort to force, but has been more universal, extending from the financing of parties of the post-war political establishment in Italy, France, Japan and cultural institutions throughout the West, to renting of crowds in Iran and rewards for officers in Latin America, subsidies for Afghan warlords or Polish dissidents, and beyond. A full reckoning of it remains, of course, to date impossible, given that even the overall budget of the cia, let alone its record of disbursements, is a state secret in the us.

[93] Kennan, whose opinions about China skittered wildly from one direction to another in 1948–49, could write in September 1951: ‘The less we Americans have to do with China the better. We need neither covet the favour, nor fear the enmity, of any Chinese regime. China is not the great power of the Orient’: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 45. There was no doubt an element of sour grapes, along with blindness, in this pronouncement, at which Spykman might have smiled.

[94] Not least because of the 75,000–100,000 Korean veterans who fought alongside the pla in China during the Anti-Japanese and Civil Wars; the indigenous culture of the regime set up in the North; and the strength of post-war guerrillas in the South: see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York 1997, pp. 199, 239–42 ff; Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution 1945–1950, Ithaca 2003, pp. 241–4, passim. In November 1947, Kennan lugubriously concluded that whereas communists were ‘in their element’ in Korea, ‘we cannot count on native Korean forces to hold the line against Soviet expansion’: State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. I, p. 135. Division of the country was one of Stalin’s two great timorous blunders in the last months of the War, its consequences more disastrous than his failure at Berlin. Without any necessity, as Khrushchev later complained, he acceded to an American request that us troops occupy the southern half of the country, when none were anywhere near it, and the Red Army could without breaking any agreement have strolled to Pusan. Naturally, Truman did not reciprocate the favour and allowed not so much as a Soviet military band into Japan.

[95] Kennan, ‘United States Policy Towards South-East Asia’, pps 51, in Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. III, p. 49. See, on this document, Walter Hixson, ‘Containment on the Perimeter: George F. Kennan and Vietnam’: Diplomatic History, April 1988, pp. 151–2, who italicizes the phrase above. In the same paper, Kennan explained that South-East Asia was a ‘vital segment in the line of containment’, whose loss would constitute a ‘major political rout, the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia’ [sic]. Kennan would later support Johnson’s expansion of the war after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, endorsing the massive bombing of the drv—Operation Rolling Thunder—in February 1965 as a weapon to force, Kissinger-style, the enemy to the negotiating table. Though increasingly critical of the war as damaging to the national interest, it was not until November 1969 that Kennan called for us withdrawal from Vietnam. At home, meanwhile, he wanted student protesters against the war to be locked up, and collaborated with William Sullivan, head of cointelpro, a long-time associate, in the fbi’s covert operations against student and black opponents of the government. See Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War, New York 2009, pp. 221–2—a characteristic exercise in New Yorker schlock, by a staffer who is Nitze’s grandson, that sporadically contains material at variance with its tenor.

[96] For documentation, see Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, New York 2013, pp. 11–15, 79–80, 174–91, based on, among other sources, discovery of ‘the yellowing records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’, a secret Pentagon task force, whose findings lay hidden for half a century, as well as extensive interview material.

[97] The presence of communists in the anti-colonial struggle had been cause for acute alarm in Washington—Kennan deciding, in typical vein, that Indonesia was ‘the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin’. Its fall would lead to nothing less than ‘a bisecting of the world from Siberia to Sumatra’, cutting ‘our global east–west communications’, making it ‘only a matter of time before the infection would sweep westwards through the continent to Burma, India and Pakistan’: Miscamble, Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, p. 274.

[98] Robert McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–49, Ithaca 1971, pp. 242–4, 290–4.

[99] Hearden, Architects of Globalization, p. 124. Hull’s over-riding concern was to keep Saudi petroleum out of British hands: ‘the expansion of British facilities serves to build up their post-war position in the Middle East at the expense of American interests’. As early as February 1943 Roosevelt issued a finding that ‘the defence of Saudi Arabia’ was ‘vital to the defence of the United States’: see David Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of us Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954, Baltimore 1986: ‘the idea that the United States had a preemptive right to the world’s oil resources was well entrenched by World War II’: pp. 37, 208. Such was the spirit in which fdr told Halifax: ‘Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours’. In August 1945, Ibn Saud granted Washington its first military base in the region, in Dhahran. But it was still British bases in the Cairo–Suez area that counted as the Cold War got under way. ‘From British-controlled airstrips in Egypt, us bombers could strike more key cities and petroleum refineries in the Soviet Union and Romania than from any other prospective base in the globe’: Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 113.

[100] Kennan was indignant, arguing in 1952 that the us should give full support to a British expedition to recapture Abadan. Only ‘the cold gleam of adequate and determined force’ could save Western positions in the Middle East. ‘Abadan and Suez are important to the local peoples only in terms of their amour propre . . . To us, some of these things are important in a much more serious sense, and for reasons that today are sounder and better and more defensible than they ever were in history’, he wrote to Acheson. ‘To retain these facilities and positions we can use today only one thing: military strength, backed by the resolution and courage to use it’: Mayers, Kennan and the Dilemmas of us Foreign Policy, pp. 253–5. Kennan went on to deplore the Republican Administration’s opposition to the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, and applaud its landing of troops in the Lebanon.

[101] Of the coup, the cia could record in its secret history of the operation: ‘It was a day that should never have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful if any other can come up to it’: see Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II, New York 2009, p. 123. For a recent neo-royalist attempt, by a former functionary of the Shah, to downplay the role of the cia in the coup, on the grounds that Mossadegh had aroused opposition in the Shi’a hierarchy, see Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the cia: The Fall of Mossadeq Revisited, New York 2010, and successive rebuttals in Iranian Studies, September 2012.

[102] Should Britain and France send in troops, Eisenhower cautioned Eden on September 2, ‘the peoples of the Near East and of North Africa and, to some extent, of all of Asia and all of Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation and, perhaps, not even in a century, particularly having in mind the capacity of the Russians to make mischief.’ Counselling patience, us policy-makers believed the crisis could be resolved by diplomacy and covert action. ‘The Americans’ main contention’, Eden remarked on September 23, ‘is that we can bring Nasser down by degrees rather on the Mossadegh lines’: Douglas Little, ‘The Cold War in the Middle East: Suez Crisis to Camp David Accords’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. II, Cambridge 2010, p. 308.

[103] See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, New York 1993, p. 109. On getting back to Washington, Kennan hammered his message home: ‘Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of the communist attack, then we must concede that harsh measures of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedures; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternatives, to communist success’: see Roger Trask, ‘George F. Kennan’s Report on Latin America (1950)’, Diplomatic History, July 1978, p. 311. The Southern hemisphere, in Kennan’s view, was an all-round cultural disaster zone: he doubted whether there existed ‘any other region of the earth in which nature and human behaviour could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of life’.

[104] In 1952, Truman had already approved a plan developed by Somoza after a visit to the President for a cia operation to overthrow Arbenz, countermanded at the last minute by Acheson, probably out of fear it would fail: Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States 1944–1955, Princeton 1992, pp. 228–31. Richard Helms, promoted to Chief of Operations at the cia the following year, explained to Gleijeses: ‘Truman okayed a good many decisions for covert operations that in later years he said he knew nothing about. It’s all presidential deniability’: p. 366.

[105] At which the overthrow of the regime in Havana rapidly became ‘the top priority of the us government’, in the younger Kennedy’s words: ‘All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.’ Kennan, consulted by the elder Kennedy before his inauguration, approved an invasion of Cuba, provided it was successful: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 172.

[106] McGeorge Bundy to the nsc, 28 March 1964: ‘The shape of the problem in Brazil is such that we should not be worrying that the military will react; we should be worrying that the military will not react’: Westad, Global Cold War, p. 150. On April 1, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon could teletype Washington that it was ‘all over, with the democratic rebellion already 95 per cent successful’, and the next day celebrate ‘a great victory for the free world’, without which there could have been ‘a total loss to the West of all South American Republics’. For these and other particulars of ‘Operation Brother Sam’, see Phyllis Parker, Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964, Austin 1979, pp. 72–87.

[107] For this development, the indispensable account is Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006, pp. 99–142.

[108] The Director of the cia cabled its station chief in Santiago on 16 October 1970: ‘It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure towards this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that usg and American hand be well hidden.’ See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, New York 2003, p. 64. In dealing with Chile, Kissinger was true to Kennan’s recommendations two decades earlier. In 1971, Kennan remarked: ‘Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has’, and eight days after the coup in Chile wrote to Kissinger, who had just become Secretary of State, ‘I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, p. 621.

[109] Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 190, 206–7; The Boom and the Bubble, London and New York 2002, pp. 60–1, 106–7, 122–3, 127.

[110] Though, of course, never entirely out of sight in Washington. There is no better illustration of how imaginary is the belief that Kennan’s doctrine of containment was geographically limited, rather than uncompromisingly global, than pps 25 of March 1948 on North Africa, which—after remarking that ‘the people of Morocco can best advance under French tutelage’—concluded: ‘The development of the us into a major world power together with the wars that have been fought by this country to prevent the Atlantic littoral of Europe and Africa from falling into hostile hands, the increasing dependency of England upon the us and the situation brought about by the rise of air power and other technological advances, have made it necessary that a new concept should be applied to the entire group of territories bordering on the Eastern Atlantic at least down to the “Bulge” of Africa. The close interflexion of the French African territories bordering on the Mediterranean must also be considered an integral part of this concept. This would mean, in modern terms, that we could not tolerate from the standpoint of our national security the extension into this area of any system of power which is not a member of the Atlantic community, or a transfer of sovereignty to any power which does not have full consciousness of its obligations with respect to the peace of the Atlantic order’: Anna Kasten Nelson, ed., State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. II, pp. 146–7.

[111] The un bureaucracy and the us secret state were in full agreement, Hammarskjöld opining that ‘Lumumba must be broken’, his American deputy Cordier that Lumumba was Africa’s ‘Little Hitler’, and Allen Dulles cabling the cia station chief in Leopoldville: ‘In high quarters here it is held that if [Lumumba] continues to hold office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the un and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.’ In Washington, Eisenhower gave a green light to the disposal of Lumumba, and an emissary was dispatched to poison him. The best documentation of his fate is Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, London and New York 2001, pp. 17–20 ff and passim. The Congo operation was much more important in setting a benchmark for subsequent use of the un as an instrument of American will than its function as an international fig-leaf for the war in Korea.

[112] See the fine account in Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 218–46, 390–2.

[113] Somoza, to whom Stimson had taken a liking on a visit during the second us occupation of Nicaragua in 1927, became the first head of the National Guard created by the Marines as Roosevelt took office. After murdering Sandino in 1934, he was in due course welcomed to Washington in unprecedented style by the President: ‘Plans called for Roosevelt, for the first time since entering office in 1933, to leave the White House to greet a chief of state. The vice-president, the full cabinet, and the principal leaders of Congress and the judiciary were all scheduled to be present for the arrival of Somoza’s train. A large military honour guard, a twenty-one gun salute, a presidential motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a state dinner, and an overnight stay at the White House were all part of the official itinerary’, with ‘over five thousand soldiers, sailors and Marines lining the streets and fifty aircraft flying overhead. Government employees released from work for the occasion swelled the crowds along the procession’: Paul Coe Clark, The United States and Somoza: A Revisionist Look, Westport 1992, pp. 63–4.

[114] ‘Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the us government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of us military forces, three by means of cia-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct us participation, usually through military coups d’état . . . The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Between 1975 and 1991, the death toll alone stood at nearly 300,000 in a population of less than 30 million. More than 1 million refugees fled from the region—most to the United States. The economic costs have never been calculated, but were huge. In the 1980s, these costs did not affect us policy because the burden on the United States was negligible’: John Coatsworth, ‘The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, pp. 220–1.

[115] On the last day of 1977, Carter had toasted the Shah in Teheran—‘there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship’—as a fellow-spirit in the cause of ‘human rights’, and a pillar of stability in the region, upheld by ‘the admiration and love your people give to you’: see Lloyd Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad, New York 2008, p. 51. When the us embassy in Teheran was seized by students two years later, Kennan urged an American declaration of war on Iran: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 278.

[116] See Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990, New York 1994, pp. 42–8.

[117] Vladimir Popov, ‘Life Cycle of the Centrally Planned Economy: Why Soviet Growth Rates Peaked in the 1950s’, cefir/nes Working Paper no. 152, November 2010, pp. 5–11—a fundamental diagnosis, showing that in effect the Soviet economy suffered from its own, much more drastic, version of the same problem that would slow American growth rates from the seventies onwards, in Robert Brenner’s analysis.

[118] Gorbachev to the Politburo in October 1986: ‘We will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it, because we are at the limit of our capabilities. Moreover, we can expect that Japan and the frg could very soon add their economic potential to the American one. If the new round begins, the pressure on our economy will be unbelievable’: Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill 2007, p. 292. As Reagan candidly recalled: ‘The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever’: An American Life, New York 1990, p. 267.

[119] ‘Secretary Schultz, not then deep in nuclear matters, nevertheless caught the drift. We had triumphed’: Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, New York 1989, p. 55. Adelman was Arms Control Director under Reagan.

[120] Harper, The Cold War, p. 238.

[121] ‘Disappointed by the failure of his personal relations with Western leaders to yield returns, Gorbachev tried to make a more pragmatic case for major aid. As he told Bush in July 1991, if the United States was prepared to spend $100 billion on regional problems (the Gulf), why was it not ready to expend similar sums to help sustain perestroika, which had yielded enormous foreign-policy dividends, including unprecedented Soviet support in the Middle East? But such appeals fell on deaf ears. Not even the relatively modest $30 billion package suggested by American and Soviet specialists—comparable to the scale of Western aid commitments to Eastern Europe—found political favour’: Alex Pravda, ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1990–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, p. 376.

[122] Bush: ‘A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent superpower: the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power—and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained; they trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right’: State of the Union Address, January 1992.

[123] Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty’, nlr 54, Nov–Dec 2008—the only serious historical, let alone critical, reconstruction of the background and history of the Treaty.

[124] Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, New York 2008, pp. 35–7. Robert Kagan was another supporter of Clinton in 1992.

[125] For the latter, see Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble, London and New York 1999, pp. 76–9, 84–92, 103–15.

[126] ‘A final reason for enlargement was the Clinton Administration’s belief that nato needed a new lease of life to remain viable. nato’s viability, in turn, was important because the alliance not only helped maintain America’s position as a European power, it also preserved America’s hegemony in Europe’: Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, p. 222. Art is the most straightforward and lucidly authoritative theorist of us power-projection today. See ‘Consilium’, pp. 150–5 below.

[127] Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, pp. 124, 134.

[128] For a critical review of the evidence, see Michael Spagat, ‘Truth and death in Iraq under sanctions’, Significance, September 2010, pp. 116–20.

[129] See Tariq Ali, ‘Our Herods’, nlr 5, Sept–Oct 2000, pp. 5–7.

[130] See ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, nlr 48, Nov–Dec 2007, pp. 15–18.

[131] See ‘Scurrying towards Bethlehem’, nlr 10, July–Aug 2001, pp. 10–15 ff.

[132] For a level-headed discussion: Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London and New York 2003, pp. 113–5.

[133] As at every stage of American imperial expansion, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there was a scattering of eloquent voices of domestic opposition, without echo in the political system. Strikingly, virtually every one of the most powerful critiques of the new course of empire came from writers of a conservative, not a radical, background. This pattern goes back to the Gulf War itself, of which Robert Tucker co-authored with David Hendrickson a firm rejection: the United States had taken on ‘an imperial role without discharging the classic duties of imperial rule’, one in which ‘fear of American casualties accounts for the extraordinarily destructive character of the conflict’, giving ‘military force a position in our statecraft that is excessive and disproportionate’, with ‘the consent and even enthusiasm of the nation’: The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America’s Purpose, New York 1992, pp. 15–16, 162, 185, 195. Within a few weeks of the attentats of 11 September 2001, when such a reaction was unheard-of, the great historian Paul Schroeder published a prophetic warning of the likely consequences of a successful lunge into Afghanistan: ‘The Risks of Victory’, The National Interest, Winter 2001–2002, pp. 22–36. The three outstanding bodies of critical analysis of American foreign policy in the new century, each distinctive in its own way, share similar features. Chalmers Johnson, in his day an adviser to the cia, published Blowback (2000), predicting that America would not enjoy impunity for its imperial intrusions around the world, followed by The Sorrows of Empire (2004) and Nemesis (2006), a trilogy packed with pungent detail, delivering an unsparing diagnosis of the contemporary Pax Americana. Andrew Bacevich, once a colonel in the us Army, brought out American Empire in 2002, followed by The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), in a series of works that recover the tradition of William Appleman Williams—to some extent also Beard—in lucid contemporary form, without being confined to it. Christopher Layne, holder of the Robert Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas a&m, has developed the most trenchant realist critique of the overall arc of American action from the Second World War into and after the Cold War, in the more theoretically conceived The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (2006)—a fundamental work.

[134] For this figure, see the Iraq Body Count, which relies essentially on media-documented fatalities, for March 2013: civilian deaths 120–130,000.

[135] ‘Iraq Ten Years On’, Economist, 2 March 2013, p. 19.

[136] The underlying spirit of the American invasion was captured by Kennan when the pla drove back MacArthur’s troops from the Yalu in December 1950: ‘The Chinese have now committed an affront of the greatest magnitude to the United States. They have done us something we cannot forget for years and the Chinese will have to worry about righting themselves with us not us with them. We owe China nothing but a lesson’: Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. vii, pp. 1345–6. In his final years, Kennan had broken with this outlook and vigorously opposed the attack on Iraq.

[137] ‘When confronted with various options during the preparations, Obama personally and repeatedly chose the riskiest ones. As a result, the plan that was carried out included contingencies for direct military conflict with Pakistan’: James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power, New York 2012, p. 303; ‘There was no American war with Pakistan, but Obama had been willing to chance it in order to get Bin Laden’.

[138] For the Obama Administration, murder was preferable to torture: ‘killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. It somehow seemed cleaner, less personal’, allowing the cia, under fewer legal constraints than the Pentagon, ‘to see its future: not as the long-term jailers of America’s enemies but as a military organization that could erase them’—not to speak of anyone within range of them, like a sixteen-year-old American citizen in the Yemen not even regarded as a terrorist, destroyed by a drone launched on Presidential instructions: Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The cia, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth, New York 2013, pp. 121, 310–1.

[139] Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, New York 2011, p. 276.

[140] David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, New York 2012, p. 246.

[141] For this escalation in executive lawlessness, see the sober evaluation of Louis Fisher, ‘Obama, Libya and War Powers’, in The Obama Presidency: A Preliminary Assessment, Albany 2012, pp. 310–1, who comments that according to its reasoning, ‘a nation with superior military force could pulverize another country and there would be neither hostilities nor war’. Or as James Mann puts it, ‘Those drone and air attacks gave rise to another bizarre rationale: Obama administration officials took the position that since there were no American boots on the ground in Libya, the United States was not involved in the war. By that logic, a nuclear attack would not be a war’: The Obamians, p. 296.

[142] For long-standing American traditions of preventive war, see Gaddis’s upbeat account in Surprise, Security and the American Experience. For Obama’s continuance of these, see his declaration to the Israeli lobby aipac in the spring of 2011: ‘My policy is not going to be one of containment. My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. When I say all options on the table, I mean it’.

[143] Sanger, Confront and Conceal, p. x.

[144] To avert this fate, the treaty signed between the us and the Karzai regime ensures American bases, air-power, special forces and advisers in Afghanistan through to at least 2024, over a decade after exit from Iraq.

[145] Far the best analytic information on us bases is to be found in Chalmers Johnson’s formidable trilogy: see the chapters on ‘Okinawa, Asia’s Last Colony’ in Blowback, p. 36 ff; ‘The Empire of Bases’—725 by an official Pentagon count, with others devoted to surveillance ‘cloaked in secrecy’—in The Sorrows of Empire, pp. 151–86; and ‘us Military Bases in Other Peoples’ Countries’ in Nemesis, taking the reader through the labyrinth of Main Operating Bases, Forward Location Sites and Cooperative Security Locations (‘lily pads’, supposedly pioneered in the Gulf): pp. 137–70. Current revelations of the nature and scale of nsa interception of communications world-wide find their trailer here. Unsurprisingly, given the closeness of cooperation between the two military and surveillance establishments, former British defence official Sandars, in his survey of American bases, concludes with satisfaction that ‘the United States has emerged with credit and honour from the unique experience of policing the world, not by imposing garrisons on occupied territory, but by agreement with her friends and allies’: America’s Overseas Garrisons, p. 331.

[146] For this development, see Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, Cambridge, ma 2010, pp. 87–115.

[147] As David Calleo wrote in 2009: ‘It is tempting to believe that America’s recent misadventures will discredit and suppress our hegemonic longings and that, following the presidential election of 2008, a new administration will abandon them. But so long as our identity as a nation is intimately bound up with seeing ourselves as the world’s most powerful country, at the heart of a global system, hegemony is likely to remain the recurring obsession of our official imagination, the idée fixe of our foreign policy’: Follies of Power: America’s Unipolar Fantasy, Cambridge 2009, p. 4.

[148] Rhodes: The Obamians, p. 72; Obama: Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century, p. 249.