#USIH2020 Roundtable: African-American Intellectuals and Their Critics

On 10 December 2009, President Barack Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, “A Just and Lasting Peace,” in Oslo, Norway. The speech was surprisingly bellicose. As “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” Obama mounted a defense of the use of force in certain instances as “not only necessary but morally justified.” Quoting the words of his fellow Nobel laureate, Martin Luther King, that “Violence never brings permanent peace,” Obama acknowledged his indebtedness to King’s life and work. At the same time, Obama, as a head of state, was bound to confront “the world as it is.” The implication was clear. Unlike King, Obama saw himself as a realist who, because of the responsibilities of his office, was forced to contend with geopolitical power relationships.

This image of a US president accepting the necessity of violence and a civil rights leader refusing to resort to it is too facile. In reality, both men faced “the world as it is” but from different vantage points and frames of reference. Andrew Bacevich contends that “[w]hen it comes to foreign policy, the fundamental divide in American politics today is not between left and right but between those who subscribe to the myth of the ‘American Century’ and those who do not.” The term, it will be remembered, came from an essay by Henry Luce in Life magazine in 1941. He identified a paradox: the US, “the most powerful and vital nation in the world,” had chosen to remain on the sidelines of world affairs. It was high time that the country accept what Luce regarded as its responsibility “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Obama, it would seem, subscribes to this myth. In his commencement address to the Air Force Academy in 2012, the President, (echoing the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), called the US “the one indispensable nation in world affairs.” “I firmly believe,” he predicted, “that if we rise to this moment in history, if we meet our responsibilities, then—just like the 20^th century—the 21^st century will be another great American Century.”

The year after Luce published his essay, Vice President Henry Wallace delivered a speech, “The Price of Free World Victory,” in which he countered Luce’s American Century with the century of the common man free of military and economic imperialism. In 1945, Wallace wrote President Truman that the development of the atomic raised the frightening prospect of “one world or no world.” This phrase was also the title of “A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb,” which included contributions from some of the scientists who had developed nuclear technology. In 1943, Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, published the bestseller, One World, a travelogue which indicted colonialism and advocated peace and global governance. It is uncertain whether King read these publications, but he was no doubt familiar with these globalist views. It is likely that they influenced his idea of a World House.

As a student at Antioch College, Coretta Scott volunteered for Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign. She later joined the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and participated in a number of antiwar rallies in the 1960s. When asked by a journalist if he had educated his wife on issues of war and peace, King replied, “She educated me.”

King’s often stated view that the choice facing the world was between coexistence and nonexistence was testimony to this influence. It was clearly opposed to what Bacevich calls the myth of the American Century. He came from a different tradition. Luce’s essay made no mention of racial issues. In contrast, King’s global vision was influenced by the Pan-African movement and independence movements among the colored peoples of the global South. At Versailles in 1919, W.E.B. Du Bois and Nguyen Ai Quoc (later Ho Chi Minh) and others appealed to President Woodrow Wilson to honor principles of self-determination and racial equality but were rebuffed. The following year, Lothrop Stoddard published a book with the ominous title The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). It was this rising tide that MLK embraced. While at Crozer Theological Seminary, King was introduced to Mohandas Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent resistance and A. J. Muste’s absolute pacifism. Gandhi’s satyagraha became part of his own struggle against racism. Muste influenced his own antiwar views and the idea that the nuclear age had rendered war obsolete. In a speech to the War Resister’s League in 1959, declared that the choice facing the world was “either nonviolence or nonexistence,” a phrase he would repeat in years to come.

King’s worldview was heavily influenced by events in the global South during the Cold War. Apart from brief stays in European capitals, all of King’s foreign travel was to countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia: Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, and India. His orientation in world affairs was decidedly more North-South than East-West.

King met with a number of leading figures in India, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been a close associate of Gandhi’s. Nehru was a driving force behind the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1955, 29 countries from Africa and Asia, representing more than half the world’s population met in Bandung, Indonesia. The Bandung Conference issued a Communique on 24 April 1955 that incorporated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, or Panchsheel Treaty, signed by India and the PRC the year before. In 1954, Nehru and Zhou Enlai proposed what in Sanskrit was called Panchsheel, five principles of peaceful co-existence: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in domestic affairs; equality; and peaceful co-existence. Panchsheel would later constitute the founding principles of the Non-Aligned Movement. The five principles—respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty; non-aggression; non-interference; equality; peaceful coexistence—were expanded and broadened geographically to include the 29 nations attending Bandung. The Communique condemned colonialism, intervention, and any form of collective defense designed to serve the interests of the great powers. It called for economic cooperation, cultural cooperation, human rights and self-determination, and world peace and cooperation. It emphasized the role of the United Nations in promoting human rights, arms reduction, and peaceful resolution of conflict by negotiation.

King was perhaps not directly inspired by the Bandung Communique and the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement, but it is highly likely he knew about them. In 1959, on his way to India, he visited Richard Wright in Paris. Wright had been at Bandung and had published an account of the conference, The Color Curtain, in 1956. It is unknown whether King and Wright discussed Bandung, but King would certainly have agreed to its principles.

In 1957, King attended the ceremonies marking the independence of Ghana from British rule. He held talks with the newly independent nation’s first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. In a sermon, “The Birth of a New Nation” (the title no doubt a play on D. W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 film), King declared that “Ghana tells us that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice.” Nkrumah did not attend the Bandung Conference, but became a prominent figure in the Non-Aligned Movement. He worked with King’s associate Bayard Rustin on the Sahara Project, which attempted to prevent France from testing nuclear weapons in Algeria in 1959.

On the way back from Ghana, King stopped in London and met with Trinidadian activists C. L. R. James and George Padmore, British Labour Party politician David Pitt, and Barbadian novelist George Lamming. It is likely that they discussed Pan-Africanism, since Padmore had worked with Nkrumah to arrange the 5^th Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. Padmore gave King a copy of his book Pan-Africanism or Communism?, which argued against a widespread view in the West that many African independence movements were influenced by communists. In his book Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), James, aware of Nkrumah’s flaws, nevertheless compares his national liberation movement with that of King’s in the US.

 In 1967, antiwar activist and pediatrician Benjamin Spock urged King to run for president in 1968. With Spock as his running mate, the ticket would merge the civil rights and peace movements. King wisely refused to run, recognizing that he had no chance of winning. However, the non-candidate did have a coherent foreign policy based on his global vision. In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, King said that he regarded the award as a “commission” to go “beyond national allegiances.” In Where Do We Go From Here?, he stated emphatically that racial equality could not be realized “if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.”

He accused President Lyndon Johnson of needlessly escalating the war in Vietnam and in doing so diverting funds for his Great Society programs, in particular the War on Poverty. He indicted the US for pursuing a neocolonialist policy in Vietnam, and for resorting to military solutions to political problems. In his eyes, the US was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” a dangerous counterrevolutionary force. He proposed including unilateral withdrawal of all foreign troops, an immediate cessation of US bombing campaigns, and negotiations which would include the National Liberation Front.

As part of his fight against poverty, King worked with A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin on the Freedom Budget, a plan to eliminate poverty in the US in 10 years. In Where Do We Go From Here?, he proposed that “The wealthy nations of the world…promptly initiate a massive, sustained Marshall Plan for Asia, Africa and South America.”

The plans put together by the Council on Foreign Relations members of the State Department in 1940 for US global military supremacy, as laid out in the important new book by Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, were seemingly at odds with the rhetoric of the Roosevelt administration: the Four Freedoms (1941), the Atlantic Charter (1941), and plans for a United Nations at Dumbarton Oaks (1944) and the UN Charter (1945) adopted after FDRs death. According to Wertheim, the UN was designed, citing the cynical words of FDR foreign policy adviser Sumner Welles, as a “sop” to the smaller nations, essentially a debating society with no real influence. Despite the gap between rhetoric and policy, King nevertheless continued to believe that the UN could play a positive role in resolving world conflicts, as did a number of African American organizations, who submitted appeals for UN support of racial justice. King proposed that the UN admit the People’s Republic of China in order to defuse Cold War tensions. He remained an unwavering supporter of the UN mission as part of a World House of interdependent nations and as a force for human rights and world peace.

Obama’s idea of confronting “the world as it is” produced a foreign policy that draws on the kind of thinking that has characterized liberal internationalism and that King opposed. Some of Obama’s policies, such as the Iran nuclear deal and the opening toward Cuba, do point to a more progressive view of the US role in the world. However, during his tenure, Obama expanded the use of drones, ordered a “surge” in Afghanistan, and intervened in conflicts in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, with disastrous results. The 21^st century raises the prospect, not of a new American century, but a century of what Samuel Moyn and Wertheim call infinite war.

Obama’s views are in line with those of the foreign policy establishment that continues to look at the world through the lens of military supremacy. King, on the other hand, represents an antimilitarist, anti-imperialist, pro-diplomacy foreign policy that urges restraint instead of interventionism. In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Obama chose to focus exclusively on King’s (and Gandhi’s) nonviolent strategy for social change, dismissing it as an unrealistic (and unrealizable) way to confront “the world as it is.” From King’s writings and speeches, which were constrained by the constant accusations of communist sympathies and criticism of his opposition to the Vietnam War, an alternative foreign policy can be gleaned, one that emphasizes restraint and diplomacy in place of militarism and a Pax Americana.

King recognized the limits of power and the dangers of a militarized foreign policy that had as its end goal US global hegemony. He laid out an alternative to the ongoing tragedy of US foreign policy that emphasized a rejection of military solutions to political problems, a willingness to negotiate, and reliance on international institutions that promote human rights.

In his speech at Riverside Church in New York City, “Beyond Vietnam,” in the last chapter of his last book, “The World House,” and in other speeches and writings during the last year of his life King put forward a global vision at odds with the establishment thinking that has characterized US foreign policy since 1940. It aimed to fight against what he called the “three evils” of racism, poverty, and militarism by a worldwide revolution against imperialism and colonialism, a massive program of foreign aid, and a “peace race” to replace the arms race. Instead of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain or Andrei Zhdanov’s Two Camps—the idea of two hostile superpowers irreconcilably opposed to each other—King envisioned a World House that emphasized international cooperation, military restraint, and global governance through a strengthening of the UN. He rejected the diversion of much needed funds for President Johnson’s Great Society programs, particularly the War on Poverty, to the war in Vietnam. The world as it is was, and still is, based on US global hegemony. The world as it ought to be was, as King envisioned it, based on racial and economic equality and peaceful coexistence with no single nation as an omnipotent hegemon. Unfortunately, it would seem that the global military supremacy that the policy planners from the Council on Foreign Relations proposed in 1940, stills hold sway in Washington. That is the real tragedy of US foreign policy.