Allure of Normalcy: What America Still Owes the World

36 Pages·2015·0.67 MB·English

by  Sergio Imparato

Allure of Normalcy: What America Still Owes the World | The New Republic 9/18/15, 10:24 AM
MAY 26, 2014
Superpowers Don't Get to Retire
What our tired country still owes the world
By Robert Kagan
Photo: Zohar Lazar
I.
A lmost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II,
built by and around the power of the United States. Today that world order shows
signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing. The Russia-Ukraine and Syria
crises, and the world’s tepid response, the general upheaval in the greater Middle East and
North Africa, the growing nationalist and great-power tensions in East Asia, the worldwide
advance of autocracy and retreat of democracy—taken individually, these problems are
neither unprecedented nor unmanageable. But collectively they are a sign that something
is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine. They may signal a transition
into a different world order or into a world disorder of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring, it is not because
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America’s power is declining—America’s wealth, power, and potential influence remain
adequate to meet the present challenges. It is not because the world has become more
complex and intractable—the world has always been complex and intractable. And it is
not simply war-weariness. Strangely enough, it is an intellectual problem, a question of
identity and purpose.
Many Americans and their political leaders in both parties, including President Obama,
have either forgotten or rejected the assumptions that undergirded American foreign
policy for the past seven decades. In particular, American foreign policy may be moving
away from the sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the
interests of many others around the world and back toward the defense of narrower, more
parochial national interests. This is sometimes called “isolationism,” but that is not the
right word. It may be more correctly described as a search for normalcy. At the core of
American unease is a desire to shed the unusual burdens of responsibility that previous
generations of Americans took on in World War II and throughout the cold war and to
return to being a more normal kind of nation, more attuned to its own needs and less to
those of the wider world.
If this is indeed what a majority of Americans seek today, then the current period of
retrenchment will not be a temporary pause before an inevitable return to global activism.
It will mark a new phase in the evolution of America’s foreign policy. And because
America’s role in shaping the world order has been so unusually powerful and pervasive, it
will also begin a new phase in the international system, one that promises not to be
marginally different but radically different from what we have known these past 70 years.
Unless Americans can be led back to an understanding of their enlightened self-interest, to
see again how their fate is entangled with that of the world, then the prospects for a
peaceful twenty-first century in which Americans and American principles can thrive will
be bleak.

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T o understand where America, and the world, may be heading, it is useful to
remind ourselves where we have been—of the choices that Americans made
decades ago and of the profound, world-changing consequences of those choices.
For Americans, the choice was never been between isolationism and internationalism.
With their acquisitive drive for wealth and happiness, their love of commerce, their
economic and (in earlier times) territorial expansiveness, and their universalistic ideology,
they never had it in them to wall themselves off from the rest of the world. Tokugawa Japan
and Ming China were isolationist. Americans have always been more like republican Rome
or ancient Athens, a people and a nation on the move.
CREDIT: The Associated Press

The United States should not range “over the world like a knight-errant,” argued Senator Robert
A. Taft.
When, roughly 70 years ago, American foreign policy underwent a revolutionary
transformation, it was not a transformation from isolationism to internationalism. What
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Americans had rejected before World War II was a steady global involvement, with
commitments to other nations and responsibilities for the general well-being of the world.
That was what the so-called “internationalists” of the time wanted for the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, Henry Stimson, Woodrow
Wilson, and many others believed that Americans ought to take on a much bigger role in
world affairs, as befitted their growing power. The United States had become “more and
more the balance of power of the whole globe,” Roosevelt observed, and it ought to behave
accordingly. And indeed, following the Spanish-American War and for the first two
decades of the twentieth century, the United States did pursue a wider and deeper global
involvement than it had ever done before, culminating in the dispatch of two million
troops to France. When World War I ended, Wilson, like Roosevelt before him, ambitiously
set out to make the United States a central player in world affairs. Beseeched by all the
European powers after the war—for American financing aid to steady their economies and
for American security guarantees against each other—Wilson wanted the United States to
commit itself to an enduring global role. The world, he warned Americans, would be
“absolutely in despair if America deserts it.” Wilson’s League of Nations (actually it had
been Roosevelt’s idea first), although couched in the idealistic language of universal
principles and collective security, was meant above all to serve as the vehicle for American
power and influence in support of a new liberal world order.
But Americans rejected this role. Disillusioned by the compromises and imperfections of
the Versailles Treaty, mourning the loss of more than 100,000 dead soldiers, skeptical
about American participation in the league, and spurred on by Republicans eager to defeat
Wilson and recapture the White House, a majority of Americans came to oppose not only
the league but also the internationalists’ broad vision of America’s global role. This was no
absentminded lapse back into nonexistent isolationist traditions. It was a deliberate
decision to turn away from the increasingly active global involvement of the previous two
decades, to adopt a foreign policy of far greater restraint, and above all to avoid future
military interventions beyond the Western Hemisphere. Wilson’s Republican successors
promised, and the American public welcomed, what Warren Harding called a “return to
normalcy.”
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CREDIT: Corbis
Franklin Roosevelt urged Americans to look beyond their immediate physical security.
Normalcy in the 1920s did not mean isolation. Americans continued to trade, to invest,
and to travel overseas; their navy was equaled in size only by Britain’s, and had fleets in the
Atlantic and the Pacific; and their diplomats pursued treaties to control the arms race and
to “outlaw” war. Normalcy simply meant defining America’s national interests the way
most other nations defined theirs. It meant defending the homeland, avoiding overseas
commitments, preserving the country’s independence and freedom of action, and creating
prosperity at home. The problems of Europe and Asia were not America’s problems, and
they could be solved, or not solved, without American help. This applied to global
economic issues as well. Harding wanted to “prosper America first,” and he did. The 1920s
were boom years for the American economy, while Europe’s postwar economies
stagnated.
To the vast majority of Americans, normalcy seemed a reasonable response to the world of
the 1920s, after the enormous exertions of the Wilson years. There were no obvious threats
on the horizon. Postwar Weimar Germany was a faltering republic more likely to collapse
than to take another stab at continental dominance. Bolshevik Russia was wracked by civil
war and economic crisis. Japan, though growing in power and ambition, was a fragile
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democracy with a seat on the League of Nations permanent council. To most Americans in
the 1920s, the greatest risk to America came not from foreign powers but from those
misguided “internationalists” and the greedy bankers and war profiteers who would
involve the nation in foreign conflicts that were none of America’s business.
This consensus was broad, deep, and bipartisan, and Americans stayed on the course of
normalcy for two full decades. They did so even as the world order—no longer upheld by
the old combination of British naval might and a relatively stable balance of power in
Europe and Asia—began to fray and then collapse. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in
1931; Hitler’s rise to power in 1933; Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935; Germany’s
remilitarization of the Rhineland, and the German and Italian intervention in the Spanish
Civil War, in 1936; Japan’s invasion of central China in 1937; Hitler’s absorption of Austria,
followed by his annexation and eventual conquest of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939—
all these events troubled and at times appalled Americans. They were not ignorant of what
was going on. Even back then information traveled widely and rapidly, and the
newspapers and newsreels were filled with stories about each unfolding crisis. Reports of
Mussolini’s dive-bombers dropping their ordnance on spear-carrying Ethiopians;
Germany’s aerial bombing of the civilian population of Guernica; Japan’s rampage of rape,
pillage, and murder in Nanking—they were horrific and regrettable. But they were not
reasons for the United States to get involved. On the contrary, they were reasons for not
getting involved. The worse things looked around the world, the more hopeless it all
seemed, the less Americans wanted to have anything to do with it. The United States, it
was widely believed, had no vital interests at stake in Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, or
Czechoslovakia.
In fact, it was not clear that the United States had vital interests anywhere outside the
Western Hemisphere. Even after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and the outbreak
of a general European war that followed, respected American strategic thinkers, priding
themselves on “realistic thinking,” the “banishment of altruism and sentiment” from their
analysis, and “single-minded attention to the national interests,” advised that, with two
oceans and a strong navy standing between America and every great power in the world,
the United States was invulnerable.A Japanese attack on, say, Hawaii, they ruled out as
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literally impossible. Republican Senator Robert A. Taft felt confident in saying that
no power “would be stupid enough” to attack the United States “from across thousands of
miles of ocean.” Nor would the United States suffer appreciably if Nazi Germany did
manage to conquer all of Europe, including Great Britain, which by 1940 the realists
regarded as a foregone conclusion. Taft saw no reason why the United States could not
trade and conduct normal diplomacy with a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany just as it
had with Great Britain and France. As the historian Howard K. Beale put it, nations “do not
trade with one another because they like each other’s governments but because both sides
find the exchange of goods desirable.”
Holders of such views were tagged with the disparaging label of “isolationist,” but as Hans
Morgenthau later pointed out, they believed at the time that they were upholding the
“realist tradition of American foreign policy.” The United States should not range “over the
world like a knight-errant,” Taft admonished, “[protecting] democracy and ideals of good
faith and [tilting] like Don Quixote against the windmills of fascism.” Taft insisted on seeing
the world as it was, not as idealists wished it to be. The European war was the product of
“national and racial animosities” that had existed “for centuries” and would continue to
exist “for centuries to come,” he argued. To make a difference in the war, the United States
would have to send millions of troops across the ocean, make an impossible amphibious
landing on shores heavily defended by German forces, and then march across Europe
against the world’s strongest army. The very thought was inconceivable. Much as they
might wish to help Europe, therefore, Americans had “no power, even if we have the will,
to be its savior.”
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CREDIT: Associated Press/HWG
Hans Morgenthau led a slashing attack on Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy.
This view was so dominant and so politically popular that Franklin Roosevelt spent his first
years in office muzzling his internationalist instincts and vowing to keep America out of
another war—“I hate war!” he roared in a famous address in 1936. After Munich, however,
he grew panicked, sensing that the Western powers, Britain and France, had lost the will to
stand up to Hitler. And so he began trying to warn Americans of what he regarded as the
coming threat. Yet it was difficult to counter the realists’ hardheaded analysis. Roosevelt
could not prove that American security was directly endangered by what was happening in
Europe. He was left making a case that really did appeal more to sentiment and idealism
than to demonstrable threats to the American homeland.
Even if the United States faced no immediate danger of military attack, Roosevelt argued, if
Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan were allowed to have their way, the world would be a
“shabby and dangerous place to live in—yes, even for Americans to live in.” America would
become a “lone island” in a world dominated by the “philosophy of force.” The
“institutions of democracy” would be placed at risk even if America’s security was not,
because America would have to become an armed camp to defend itself. Roosevelt urged
Americans to look beyond their immediate physical security. “There comes a time in the
affairs of men,” he said, “when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the
tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very
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civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy, and of good faith among
nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”
Such arguments, along with the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, did help convince
Americans that they had a stake in the outcome of the European struggle, but it did not
convince them to go to war. That decision followed only after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese
attack, Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war, and America’s full-scale entry into the
conflicts in both Europe and Asia were a traumatic shock to Americans, especially for
those in positions of power. That which had been deemed impossible had proved possible,
and long-held assumptions about American security in a troubled world collapsed in a
single day.

T he events of 1941 forced a fundamental reassessment not only of America’s global
strategy but also of how to define America’s interests. Even as they waged the
struggle against Germany and Japan, Roosevelt and his advisers during the war
began thinking of how the postwar world ought to be shaped, and they took as their guide
what they considered the lessons of the previous two decades.
The first had to do with security. The Japanese attack had proved that vast oceans and even
a strong navy no longer provided adequate defense against attack. More broadly, there was
the realization—or rather the rediscovery—of an old understanding: that the rise of a
hostile hegemonic power on the Eurasian landmass could eventually threaten America’s
core security interests as well as its economic well-being. As a corollary, there was the
“lesson of Munich”: would-be aggressors in Eurasia had to be deterred before they became
too strong to be stopped short of all-out war.
Another lesson was that the United States had an interest in political developments in
Eurasia. Walter Lippmann argued that, for Americans to enjoy both “physical security” and
the preservation of their “free way of life,” they had to ensure that “the other shore of the
Atlantic” remained always in the hands of “friendly,” “trustworthy” democracies. For two
decades, people had sneered at “Woodrow Wilson’s demand that the world must be made
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safe for democracy,” Lippmann commented, but Wilson had been right. Under the control
of “free governments the shores and waters of the Atlantic” had become the “geographical
center of human liberty.” The Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms reflected
this revived conviction that the well-being of democracy in the world was not only
desirable but important to America’s security.
CREDIT: AFP/Getty Images
Henry Kissinger championed a “concert” of nations poised in rough equilibrium.
Then there was the global economy. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the
United States had sought mostly domestic remedies for the Great Depression, raising its
own tariffs, choking off lending abroad, refusing to join other nations in a common
monetary policy, and generally protecting the American economy while ignoring the
world economy. By 1941, however, Roosevelt and his advisers had concluded that both
America’s prosperity and its security depended on a healthy world economy. Poverty and
economic dislocation had played a major role in the rise of both Hitler and Bolshevism.
The United States bore much of the blame, for although it had been the world’s leading
economic power in the 1920s and 1930s, it had failed to play a constructive and
responsible role in stabilizing the global economy.
Finally, there was the issue of American public support for global involvement. In the
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