John A. Thompson on Stephen Wertheim’s *Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy*

When and why did the United States decide “to become the supreme political and military power holding itself responsible for enforcing world order?”[1] This is the question from which Stephen Wertheim’s original and challenging book takes off. In it, he presents an answer to the question that accords with neither of the common, and contending, historiographical explanations for the enormous expansion of America’s military power across the world since the 1940s. Broadly speaking, critics of that expansion attribute it to some internally-generated drive (whether for export markets and the acquisition of overseas resources, ideological supremacy, simple national aggrandizement, or a combination of these desires), while defenders of the U.S. role in world politics portray it as a necessary response to external developments that posed a vital threat to the nation’s security.

Wertheim argues that the first perspective posits a continuity in U.S. foreign policy that did not exist. Without glossing over the way “the United States brutally extended its dominion across North America”, he points out that before World War II the nation “pursued capitalist growth and fancied itself exceptional while shunning political and military entanglements in Europe and Asia.” Americans were confident that they “could generally conduct commerce without imposing its terms by force.”[2] Moreover, this geopolitical stance was strongly buttressed ideologically by the belief that participation in power politics was incompatible with republican liberty, and the related contrast between the Old World and the New. As economic growth elevated the nation’s standing, Americans, both as private citizens and as government officials, promoted an ‘internationalism’ involving the pacific resolution of disputes and the development of international law.  In its aspiration to supersede power politics, Wertheim sees Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations as expressive of this approach.  Thus,the commitment to global “armed dominance” required a “rupture” in the way Americans conceived of their nation’s role in the world.

In the body of the book, Wertheim analyses the causes and nature of this rupture, which he sees as occurring following the fall of France in the early summer of 1940 and the consequent prospect that Adolf Hitler’s Germany would hold sway over most of the developed world outside North America. But these external events did not in themselves dictate the U.S. response; it was not, Wertheim insists, fears for the safety of the continental United States that led “the U.S. foreign policy elite as a group” to re-think their assumptions. As articulate anti-interventionists stressed, geography and its own strength shielded the United States, and “hardly anyone at the time regarded an attack on North America as more than a distant prospect, even if Britain fell.” It was upon internationalists, Wertheim interestingly argues, that the impact of Hitler’s triumph was greatest because it was their previous assumptions about global politics that were discredited; “the fall of France seemed to prove, once and for all, that pacific forms of engagement, and indeed ‘civilization’ itself, would extend only as far as military force permitted. … Confident in the safety of the continental United States, U.S. foreign policy elites experienced Hitler’s conquests instead as a crisis of what they called world order.”[3]

In good part, this argument is based upon the public debate of the time, drawing in particular upon articles by commentators like Walter Lippmann.  But the research heart of this book is an analytical narrative of the evolving thinking of the ‘experts’ involved in the War and Peace Studies project set up by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in collaboration with the State Department after the outbreak of the European war in 1939. Originally planning for peace after a conflict that was expected to replicate the stalemate of 1914-16, the various groups into which participants in the project were divided found themselves after the fall of France producing reports defining the extent of the world that the United States could hope to defend successfully. At first, this was conceived as a ‘quarter-sphere’ centered on North America, but as Britain’s continued resistance led to an assumption of Anglo-American cooperation this expanded to include the whole of the British Commonwealth and Empire and also east Asia as well as the entire western hemisphere. A memorandum in October 1940 called for an “integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States within the non-German world.” By December, Wertheim concludes, not only had the conception of America’s world role been transformed but ‘internationalism’ had come to mean “less the realization of world harmony than the projection of world power by the United States.”  In 1941, as U.S. collaboration with Britain’s war effort increased, the planners came to envisage “an Americo-British” world order.[4]

It was the realization that this project lacked appeal to the American public, Wertheim argues, that led to the commitment to a more inclusive peacekeeping organization, despite the disenchantment of many (not least President Franklin D. Roosevelt) with the League of Nations. But this ‘instrumental internationalism’ was, in Wertheim’s view, very different from the earlier Wilsonian version because it was designed to legitimate the exercise of U.S. power rather than to subordinate it to international law and multilateral procedures. Wertheim highlights the way Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles overcame FDR’s hostility to any revival of the League of Nations by arguing that, under the proposed structure for the new organization, the United States would have more influence than in an informal four-power concert. [5]. However, in the energetic and lavishly financed campaign to win public support for the United Nations the difference between it and the League of Nations was elided. Then the issue was couched as a binary choice between ‘isolationism’ and ‘internationalism’.  The former, Wertheim stresses, was a novel term coined in the late 1930s by the advocates of ‘collective security’ whereas the latter was now conceived as meaning ‘world leadership’.

Such a bold and sweeping reinterpretation of history as Wertheim’s will naturally encounter objections.  Some have doubted the significance of the CFR group’s deliberations.  Conceding that these ‘experts’ had no part in the conduct of wartime strategy and diplomacy, Wertheim persuasively argues that with respect to postwar planning they did have influence on policymaking, as well as being representative of other opinion in official circles.  Certainly at the end of the war the nation’s leaders clearly affirmed the need for the United States to retain its pre-eminent military power and sought overseas bases across the globe.[6]  However, it is also true that it was not until the early Cold War that the stationing of substantial U.S. forces on other continents was established on a long-term basis in a manner that won consensual support at home.

More fundamental are questions about the nature and causes of the “fracture” that Wertheim perceives in elite thinking about U.S. policy in 1940-41.  It is undoubtedly true that Hitler’s victories, following other events in the late 1930s, led American international relations scholars and commentators to a new appreciation of the central role power played in world politics; so much is common knowledge.  But by no means all Americans had ever had, and even fewer had retained, confidence that the vision of Wilsonian internationalists was realistic and self-sustaining.  A very traditional historiography attributes the adoption of a global military role in the 1940s less to a re-appraisal of the nature of international politics than to the decline of British capacities, and the increasing recognition by U.S. policymakers that the country could no longer be a free rider in a world order managed and policed by another power.  Wertheim makes passing reference to “the faltering of British hegemony” but as an historical interpretation his argument would have been stronger if he had taken more account of this alternative narrative.[7]

But, of course, this book is only in part an interpretation of history.  It is also a tract for our times.  As such, its key point is that the United States’ commitment to global military dominance arose from the specific, unforeseen and exceptional circumstances of 1940-41 and represented a departure from the nation’s previous path. And, even in these critical circumstances, the policy was not a necessity but a choice, and one from which some well-informed Americans dissented; the division of opinion reflected the fact that what was at stake was not the physical safety of the nation but a conception of world order. Yet over the years domestic support for the commitment to global military supremacy has been upheld by portraying it as the only alternative to ‘isolationism’.  It is hard to dispute Wertheim’s conclusion that it would be healthy for American political debate if the country’s policy options were no longer presented as being between these two stark alternatives.

[1]  Stephen Wertheim. Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 3.

[2]  Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, 19,6.

[3]  Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, 7, 49-51, also 10, 56, 77.

[4] Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, 69, 78-9, 80-114.

[5]  Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, 142.

[6] See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), especially 16-19, 41. 56-9.

[7] Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, 11.