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Overview
A new intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the present
Worldmaking is a compelling new take on the history of American diplomacy. Rather than retelling the story of realism versus idealism, David Milne suggests that U.S. foreign policy has also been crucially divided between those who view statecraft as an art and those who believe it can aspire to the certainty of science.
Worldmaking follows a cast of characters who built on one another’s ideas to create the policies we have today. Woodrow Wilson’s Universalism and moralism led Sigmund Freud to diagnose him with a messiah complex. Walter Lippmann was a syndicated columnist who commanded the attention of leaders as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Charles de Gaulle. Paul Wolfowitz was the intellectual architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and an admirer of Wilson’s attempt to “make the world safe for democracy.” Each was engaged in a process of worldmaking, formulating strategies that sought to deploy the nation’s vast military and economic power—or sought to retrench and focus on domestic issues—to shape a world in which the United States would be best positioned to thrive.
Tracing American statecraft from the age of steam engines to the age of drones, Milne reveals patterns of worldmaking that have remained impervious to the passage of time. The result is a panoramic history of U.S. foreign policy driven by ideas and by the lives and times of their authors.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374714239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 624 |
| File size: | 944 KB |
About the Author
David Milne is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War and senior editor of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. Milne has held visiting fellowships at Yale University, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition to academic journals, his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation.
Read an Excerpt
Worldmaking
The Art and Science of American Diplomacy
By David Milne
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 David MilneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71423-9
CHAPTER 1
THE PHILOSOPHER OF SEA POWER
ALFRED THAYER MAHAN
The ideas contained in Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History have certainly resonated through the ages. Published in 1890, the book's principal argument was that the United States must abandon the small satisfactions of regional hegemony and any hope of attaining economic self-sufficiency. Instead the nation should consciously emulate Great Britain in building a dominant navy to enhance its security, project power globally, and hence expand economically through free trade — where the nation's advantages in natural resources and ingenuity could best be brought to bear. Mahan's biographer, Robert Seager II, described the volume as "perhaps the most powerful and influential book written by an American in America in the nineteenth century."
This provocative claim invites us to reflect on what is meant by power and influence when comparing literature to history. Yet if we stick to nonfiction, Seager's judgment appears broadly sound. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 2005, "No American since the Founding Fathers had worked out so systematic an analysis of the Republic's geopolitical position in the world. To a people accustomed to thinking of foreign policy in terms of legal right or moral purpose, Mahan now offered hard talk about national interest, naval bases, firepower, lines of communication." The Influence of Sea Power upon History was read and admired by Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Admiral John Fisher of Britain's Royal Navy, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the decades after publication, the book was translated and used as a textbook for sailors in the German and Japanese navies. Charles Beard detected the book's insidious influence on multiple levels: "Besides setting politicians aflame in the United States, Mahan set their rivals on fire in Europe and Asia and prepared the way for a world conflagration which began in 1914 in full force." Whether Mahan's theory of sea power helped cause the First World War is an exotic open question. What we do know is that The Influence figures prominently on naval training syllabi in the United States and across the world today — in China, most notably and, from a U.S. perspective, perhaps most worryingly. When China's president Xi Jinping observed in July 2013 that the "oceans and seas have an increasingly important strategic status concerning global competition in the spheres of politics, economic development, military, and technology," he was speaking Mahan's language.
Mahan's body of work, which ultimately ran to 20 books and 137 articles, was an inescapable point of reference for many of the individuals discussed herein. Woodrow Wilson drew little instruction from Mahan's Anglophilia, hardheaded realism, and incessant lobbying for greater naval "preparedness." In 1914, the Wilson administration forbade all former naval officers from writing on the European war, silencing Mahan's agitation for a more explicitly pro-entente stance. Wilson and Mahan disagreed sharply over the leadership America owed the world. Mahan viewed international arbitration as an unnecessary constraint to action that powerful nations like the United States should avoid — for this Achilles should have no unprotected heel. Wilson, conversely, believed that history's cycle of devastating wars — destined to become more and more lethal due to technological advances — could be broken only if every nation ceded sovereignty and committed seriously to the success of a supranational entity vested with genuine power.
Wilson had a low opinion of Mahan's worldview, but his hostility was a mere trifling compared to the contempt Charles Beard felt toward a man he considered one of the great villains in American history. Beard described Mahan as "the most successful propagandist ever produced in the United States." He observed that Theodore Roosevelt "made Mahan's work his bible of politics for the United States," and decried the expansionary, imperialistic policies — culminating in the Spanish-American War — that his works had encouraged. He charged that Mahan had helped transform the United States from a nation that tilled its own land — a Jeffersonian idyll — into one that emulated Britain in exploiting other nations for the fiduciary advantage of a narrow elite. In attacking Mahan, Beard rounded on his compromised, politically motivated scholarship (a charge, ironically, that was often leveled at Beard):
What Mahan did in his propaganda was to "historicize" his creed for popular consumption, that is, to use history to "prove" that it was true, inevitable, and desirable. He had no training whatever in historical research, the scrutiny and authentication of documents, or the philosophy of historical composition. In all this he was a veritable ignoramus. He took such old works as suited his preconceived purposes, tore passages and fragments out of their context, and pieced his notes together in such a fashion as to represent his own image of life, economy, sea power, greed, and war.
Beard believed that Mahan had played a pivotal role in transforming the United States into a more violent and materialistic nation — shredding its virtuous, exceptional nature in the process. Thanks to Mahan and his policymaking acolytes, America left Arcadia and became as flawed and self-interested as every other nation.
It was during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and in the early Cold War that Mahan appeared less like a siren and more like a prophet. In the late 1930s, as Adolf Hitler's Germany dismantled the Treaty of Versailles with ever-increasing confidence, the journalist Walter Lippmann led the way in calling for a stronger appreciation for Mahanian principles: chief among them that no hostile power, such as Nazi Germany, be permitted to assume control of the Atlantic. George Kennan similarly viewed Mahan in positive terms, as a man who rejected isolationism as a comforting unhistorical dream, and who anticipated the importance of naval expansion and free trade: he charted "new paths at that time in the analysis of international realities — paths which led in the direction of a more profound appraisal of the sources of American security." Kennan identified in Mahan and the historian Brooks Adams (brother of Henry) "an isolated spurt of intellectual activity against a background of general torpor and smugness in American thinking about foreign affairs." For Kennan, it was Woodrow Wilson's idealistic illusions that caused American foreign policy to become disastrously unmoored from reality.
Mahan's antagonists have raised some strong objections to his writings through the ages. A common theme is that Mahan's worldview does not resonate with American values — a charge later leveled at Henry Kissinger. One can follow Charles Beard in criticizing Mahan's worldview for being "based on the pure materialism of biological greed." Or one can follow Woodrow Wilson in rejecting Mahan's pessimistic view that war is interwoven into the fabric of the international system, that the United States should shun arbitration proposals and prepare for the worst. But it is impossible to deny Mahan's prescience on so much of what would unfold. The world in which we live resembles the one he said would come to pass in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Washington-led world economic system is dominated by free trade facilitated by open shipping lanes; the U.S. Navy has no peer competitor in its global reach; significant world crises are rarely resolved through the good offices of the United Nations; and the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally if its interests are threatened. In all of these matters, for good and for worse, Mahan anticipated the shape of the modern world. And so the story begins here.
* * *
On an early autumn day in 1871, an agitated elderly gentleman paced the decks of a Hudson River steamboat, mulling the indignities of government service. Adorned in quality fabrics, with piercing eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, Dennis Hart Mahan's distinguished appearance did not deceive. Through his long career as a professor of engineering at West Point, Mahan dined with the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris, taught military science to virtually every senior officer who fought in the Civil War, and wrote seminal texts that revolutionized battlefield tactics. West Point made the man, and Mahan in turn had indelibly shaped its graduates: William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson all benefited from his instruction. Yet despite compiling a towering record of achievement, Mahan was not reconciled to retirement. Although President Grant had previously assured Mahan that he could remain in his post for as long as he desired, West Point's Board of Visitors had insisted on placing the sixty-nine-year-old professor on the retired list. As the steamboat approached Stony Point, Mahan decided with finality that the wrench of leaving his beloved West Point was too much to take — that life without purposeful labor was not worth living. He climbed the railings of the boat and cast himself onto the paddle wheel rotating below.
Obituaries attributed Dennis Mahan's suicide to a momentary "fit of insanity," the exculpation deployed in that era when distinguished gentlemen committed suicide. But the actual cause of Mahan's death was the prospect of enforced indolence — compelling testimony to his unbalanced work ethic. The dangers of this trait were deftly avoided by his eldest son, Alfred Thayer, who bequeathed a legacy even more substantial than that of his father, but who managed his work-life balance with greater care. Alfred found his father impressive in certain aspects: upstanding, diligent, and possessed of a virtuous value system. Yet he could scarcely bring himself to acknowledge the shameful manner in which his father had abandoned his family. His only recorded reflections speak privately to his "seasons of great apprehension" that he might have inherited his father's tendency toward melancholy and, potentially, self-destruction.
Beyond these words, Alfred spoke little of his father's suicide, either in his memoir or in his voluminous correspondence to friends and family. His reticence was indicative of the Victorian age in which he lived, but it also dovetailed with Mahan's yearning for privacy and an aversion to making a spectacle of himself. While Alfred followed his father in educating the military's brightest prospects, he never lost his dread of having to stand at a lectern and hold court for an hour or more. "I have ... an abhorrence of public speaking," Mahan confessed, "and a desire to slip unobserved into a backseat wherever I am, which amount to a mania." It was the timeliness and logic of Mahan's ideas — not an attention-seeking disposition — that brought him renown.
Born in West Point on September 27, 1840, Alfred was the first of six children raised in a solvent, stable family that set great store in the value of education. His father was raised in Virginia to Irish parents, although his Anglophilia — he shed his Irish affectations with breezy abandon — was untypical of second-generation emigrants from the old country. Alfred's mother, Mary Okill, was a devout Christian who prayed daily that her eldest son would pursue a career as a clergyman. Mary was a northerner, and this was the only flaw that her husband could discern in his wife, informing Alfred that "your mother is Northern and very few can approach her but still, in the general, none compare for me with the Southern woman." That Mahan was a child of the South is reflected in his father's reaction to discovering him reading a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: "My father took it out of my hands," Alfred recalled, "and I came to regard it much as I would a bottle labeled Poison." Living in remote West Point — accessible only by steamboats in its prerailroad years and isolated by a frozen Hudson through the winter — ensured that Alfred's early years were closeted but conducive to scholarly endeavor. Surrounded by his father's books on military history, and compelled daily to display his mastery of Scripture by his loving but demanding mother, Alfred's intellectual development was impressive, even if his parents' stern pedagogical instruction left his social skills, hampered by a narrow circle of playmates, lagging behind the swiftness of his reading and the fluency of his writing.
Dennis Mahan's desire to immerse his children in the societal norms of the genteel, slaveholding South informed his decision to send Alfred to Saint James School in Maryland, an Episcopalian boarding school attended overwhelmingly by the well-heeled offspring of conservative southerners desirous of an education that ignored Uncle Tom's Cabin and treated chattel slavery as part of the natural order of things. Yet Alfred's father was also pragmatic, so when Saint James failed to provide Alfred with what he took to be adequate instruction in mathematics, he had few qualms about sending him northward to the racier, cosmopolitan setting of Columbia College in New York City. Alfred entered the college as a freshman in 1854 and remained in New York for two years — the time it took for him to identify his calling. Keen to expand his horizons beyond the northeastern seaboard, Mahan decided that a career in the Navy offered an unparalleled combination of discipline, travel opportunities, and the moral and spiritual well-being that comes with pursuing a selfless life in the service of one's nation.
Dennis Mahan's reaction to his son's plans for a career at sea was distinctly cool. Looking back in later years, Alfred could not help but applaud his father's prescience: "My entrance into the navy was greatly against my father's wish. I do not remember all his arguments, but he told me he thought me much less fit for a military than for a civilian profession, having watched me carefully. I think myself now that he was right; for, though I have no cause to complain of unsuccess, I believe I should have done better elsewhere." So why did his father judge Alfred so unsuitable for naval life? The answer lies largely in the fact that the earnest and bookish young Mahan lacked the spirit of camaraderie that lured so many young men to the Navy. Reveling in the company of his fellow men was simply not Mahan's thing. He was upstanding to the point of sanctimony, and his introspective nature and unbending interpretation of the rules made him a lonely student through his college years. "It takes at least twenty gentlemen to remove the bad impression made by one rowdy," he complained to his father after observing uncouth behavior on a New York ferryboat. His sense of right and wrong was wound to an unsustainably high level, and this trait tended to antagonize all but the most prissy.
Placing his reservations to one side, Dennis Mahan went to great lengths to secure his son's acceptance to the Naval Academy. He arranged an audience with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who had trailed Dennis by just three classes at West Point. Davis advised the aspiring sailor to meet with Congressman Ambrose S. Murray from New York, who in turn agreed to support Alfred's admission to Annapolis. As Mahan acknowledged, "It has pleased me to believe, as I do, that I owed my entrance to the United States Navy to the interposition of the first and only President of the Southern Confederacy, whose influence with Mr. [President] Pierce is a matter of history." Mahan had Jefferson Davis to partly thank for his success, but his route to Annapolis would have been much less certain with a different surname. His father offered unequivocal support, in the form of his personal prestige, when the stakes were highest for his cerebral, straitlaced son.
* * *
Mahan was struck down by "melancholia" upon arriving in Annapolis — a pretty but provincial town of approximately eight thousand residents — in September 1856. The immediate onset of this affliction did not augur well for his career as a sailor, but he soon shook off his blues and in a warm letter to Elizabeth Lewis, the stepdaughter of his uncle, the Reverend Milo Mahan, professed himself wholly satisfied with both his classmates and his early experiences of sailing: "You can form no idea what a nice class we have ... Our mutual attachment renders us I fear rather disloyal to the fair sex ... Life at sea, so far as I have experienced it, is the most happy careless and entrancing life that there is. In a stiff breeze when the ship is heeling well over there is a wild sort of delight that I never experienced before."
These words are joyful and without guile. Yet this would be the first and last time that Mahan would wax lyrical about his fellow classmates and being at sea. Mahan concluded that Annapolis was "a miserable little town" and that he was destined for greater things than carousing with his philistine cohort of midshipmen. Mahan also soon discovered that he wasn't really much of a sailor. In fact, he actively disliked the sea — the tedium of sailing broken only by sudden storms that he failed to endure stoically.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Worldmaking by David Milne. Copyright © 2015 David Milne. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Introduction,
1. The Philosopher of Sea Power: Alfred Thayer Mahan,
2. Kant's Best Hope: Woodrow Wilson,
3. Americans First: Charles Beard,
4. The Syndicated Oracle: Walter Lippmann,
5. The Artist: George Kennan,
6. The Scientist: Paul Nitze,
7. Metternich Redux: Henry Kissinger,
8. The Worldmaker: Paul Wolfowitz,
9. Barack Obama and the Pragmatic Renewal,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
A Note About the Author,
Also by David Milne,
Copyright,