Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama

423 Pages·2014·3.08 MB·English

by  Stephen Sestanovich

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Sestanovich All rights reserved. Published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sestanovich, Stephen, 1950–
Maximalist : America in the world from Truman to Obama / Stephen Sestanovich. —First
Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-26817-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-38534966-6 (eBook)
1. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 2. United States—
Foreign relations—1989– I. Title.
E744 .S5473 327.73009′04—dc23
2013030396
Jacket design by Jason Booher
v3.1
For
Ann, Ben, and Clare
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: “We Do Big Things”
Part One: 1947–1960
1. Truman at the Creation: “The United States Must Run This Show”
2. Truman at War: “Victory Is a Strong Magnet”
3. “Enough Is Enough”: Eisenhower and Retrenchment
Part Two: 1961–1980
4. “Boy Commandos” of the New Frontier: Kennedy’s Anxious Activism
5. “Mainly Violins, with Touches of Brass”: Johnson Against His Advisers
6. “We Have Not Been Divided”: Johnson at War
7. Retrenchment and Vietnam: “Get Going, Take Risks, Be Exciting”
8. Retrenchment and Détente: “A Nihilistic Nightmare”
Part Three: 1981 to the Present
9. “Outspend Them Forever”: Reagan and the End of the Cold War
10. “No One Else Can Do This”: Bush, Clinton, and the Retrenchment That Wasn’t
11. “Things Related and Not”: Bush and September 11
12. “No Wiggle Room”: Obama and Retrenchment
Epilogue: “If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Overdoing”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Author
PROLOGUE
“We Do Big Things”
In 2003, forty years after [President Kennedy’s] death, when
America’s reputation abroad was in tatters, I was in Rome for
a speaking engagement, and invited by a local foreign policy
group to give an address. “On what subject?” I asked the
chairman. “Tell us about the good America, when Kennedy
was president,” he said. I did. I talked about an America
admired for its values, respected for its principles, not feared
for its might or resented for its success; an America that led by
listening, worked with the rest of the world, and respected
international law; an America that stood for peace, not one
that started wars.
—Ted Sorensen1
of any country that has ever put a larger stamp on its time
IT IS HARD TO THINK
than the United States of America in the second half of the twentieth
century. In the wake of two world wars, which left other major powers
severely crippled, America made the decisive contributions to global
recovery. During the Cold War and long afterward, it was an anchor of
security, an agent of prosperity, an advocate of national independence
and political modernization. The most valuable institutions of
international cooperation were, directly or indirectly, inspired by the
United States. Its impact, moreover, extended far beyond high politics.
American ways of doing things encouraged economic, social, cultural,
intellectual, and technological innovation around the world.
That, at any rate, was the twentieth century. The twenty-first has
already been different. Its early years brought terrorist attacks,
diplomatic isolation, a burst of global anti-Americanism, and military
campaigns that the United States found easy to start, impossible to win,
and extremely difficult to end. To these travails were added a global
financial crisis, widely blamed on American mismanagement, and a
shake-up in the international economic pecking order. The United States
is now on track, some say a fast one, to lose its position as the world’s
largest economy. Scholars and pundits argue that its central role in
international politics is also at risk. And with Washington policy making
blocked by partisan gridlock, many question the country’s ability to cope
with significant new challenges.
America’s past and present, in short, have rarely seemed so different
from each other. One result of this mismatch has been a surge of interest
in the ingredients of our previous success. What was it that once enabled
the United States to deal so effectively with so many international
problems—to give the world so much while also getting so much in
return? Military power and economic growth are essential ingredients of
a large global role, but many find the real secret of America’s large
achievements in its readiness to create equal partnerships with other
nations, to take their interests and ideas into account, and to play by
mutually agreed rules. For others, the key lies in policy continuity over
long periods, the kind of steadfastness across decades that—to take the
most glorious example—produced victory in the Cold War. Still others
point to the importance of national consensus. In the past, it is said,
when Americans agreed on how to handle big problems, they were able
—in Barack Obama’s words—to “do big things.”2
of this book that there is much to learn from the history of
IT IS THE ARGUMENT
American foreign policy, but that we can’t learn it from the sepia-tinted
versions of the past that have dominated public discussion in recent
years. Play well with others; make sure the country is united; find a good
strategy and stick to it: our history has a more interesting story to tell us
than these homilies suggest. The reason that the past can help us chart
the future is that it was just as confused and chaotic as the present. It
reminds us how often we have clashed with our friends and
misunderstood our enemies, how often policy makers have miscalculated
what they could accomplish, how rarely they kept commitments in
balance with available resources, and how often they acted in full
knowledge that public opinion was against them.
To take even a half-serious look at the history of American alliances is
to learn how ambivalent Washington policy makers have been about
working with others. Yes, they always aspired to join with like-minded
governments in a spirit of give and take. They sincerely believed in the
value of multilateral institutions and the advantages of observing
accepted rules of the road. Yet in tackling the toughest problems, our
leaders have—with some justice—usually come to doubt that
collaborative approaches would succeed. Consulting with allies is one
thing; letting their interests, not to mention their chronic indecision and
feebleness, undermine American policy is something else entirely. It is
no exaggeration to say that the history of American foreign policy is the
history of what presidents and their advisers do once they conclude that
others, at home and abroad, are not likely to help them very much.
No president illustrates this point better, as it happens, than the hero
of Ted Sorensen’s “good America” story. John Kennedy’s exceptionally
difficult relations with allied governments were captured in the title of
Henry Kissinger’s 1965 book on the subject, The Troubled Partnership. As
we will see, the animosity between Kennedy, on the one hand, and the
leaders of France and West Germany, on the other, exceeded any case of
transatlantic discord until the presidency of George W. Bush. Charles de
Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer complained that Kennedy, when not simply
deceiving them, was pursuing policies that put the security and
independence of their countries at risk. Adenauer had a special reason to
resent the young U.S. president, who openly maneuvered to oust him
from his job. And De Gaulle may have known that American officials
thought he needed “a psychiatrist.”3
John Kennedy was usually able to count on greater support from the
British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, than from the leaders of
France and Germany. (So, of course, was George W. Bush.) But the
Anglo-American “special relationship” had many lapses of understanding
and outbursts of bad feeling. When the United States decided, in August
1962, to breach an international embargo on major arms sales to Israel,
Macmillan sent Kennedy a furious protest. The prime minister expressed
his personal “disgust and despair” at what he called a “disgraceful piece
of trickery.” As always, when British and American priorities in the
Middle East diverged, Washington insisted on taking its own approach
and left London to adjust as best it could. (Macmillan had long been
unhappy with Britain’s subservience to America. Early in his career, he
compared relations between the two countries to the way “Greek slaves
ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”)4
Relations between the United States and its close allies have evolved
since Kennedy’s day, but the problems that frustrated him have not gone
away. American policy makers still find it difficult to get others to work
with them as productively as they would like. In July 2009, in her first
major speech as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton explained why.
Multilateral cooperation, she said, often fails because other countries are
so heavily influenced by things like “history, geography, ideology and
inertia.” Even when a common interest is at stake, uncooperative
governments “sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division.”
Speaking for a new administration committed to treating other
countries with greater respect, Clinton expressed a dilemma that has
vexed American policy makers for decades. She set forth principles of
liberal internationalism with verve and conviction, but she was also
clear-eyed about how much stood in the way of making these principles
a reality. Obstacles to cooperation—which she gave their correct
academic name, “collective action problems”—could only be overcome,
Clinton insisted, by American leadership. “No challenge,” she said, “can
be met without America.”5
Hillary Clinton’s predecessors, and presidential advisers of both
parties, shared her view, and they were often far less polite about it.
John Connally, Nixon’s treasury secretary, said of the economic disputes
he handled, “The foreigners are trying to screw us, but I intend to screw
them first.” John Foster Dulles, who served Eisenhower as secretary of
state, dismissed Europe’s leaders as a group of “shattered ‘old people.’ ”
Allied governments, complained Dean Rusk, who served Kennedy in the
same job, had grown too accustomed to having all problems addressed
by “an American plan put together as a complete plan from A to Z.”
(Rusk’s exasperation showed when he snapped at a British journalist:
“When the Russians invade Sussex, don’t expect us to come and help
you.”) With other countries able to contribute so little, Walt Rostow,
Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, thought the United States
had to act on “a relatively lonely stage.” It had to play this solitary role
for years, “without throwing our sheriff’s badge in the dust.”6
Because working with others has been so maddeningly hard for the
United States, we cannot look to the past for ready-made solutions to
“collective action problems.” For those who have convinced themselves
that the troubles of the past decade were caused by simple neglect of
some well-established collaborative tradition, this will be a
disappointment. We don’t really have such a tradition. (And our doubts
go way back. Consider Emerson: “We believe in ourselves as we do not
believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we
call sin in others is experiment to us.”) All the same, the difficulties
faced by past presidents and policy makers also mean that their
experiences were closer to ours than we think. They too dealt with allies
who couldn’t agree on much, with semifunctional multilateral
institutions, and with the thankless consequences of trying to solve every
problem through American “leadership.”7
The lessons of this story can aid our thinking now and in the future.
To learn them, we have to look closely at what past administrations
accomplished and failed to accomplish. We will not get the answers right
if we think we know them in advance.
of our history also makes it impossible to believe that the
A QUICK SCAN
global role of the United States was based on strategic continuity from
one decade to the next. We are not wrong to consider American
diplomacy in the second half of the twentieth century a gigantic success
story, but it usually didn’t feel that way at the time. Until the very last
years of the Cold War, every president leaving Washington at the end of
an administration was widely condemned for his foreign policy record.
Some were virtually run out of town. Almost every new occupant of the
Oval Office thought the world had changed in some fundamental way
that his predecessor either totally misunderstood or failed to manage
effectively.
This was how Truman viewed Roosevelt, how Eisenhower viewed
Truman, how Kennedy viewed Eisenhower, and so on. Twenty years
later, when Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter, his verdict was
harsher still. Reagan believed that America had been losing the Cold