Dr Patrick Porter on the Rise and Fall of America

These are all things to think about, as we go through the books. Your first author, Walter Lippmann, is said to have put the phrase ‘the Cold War’ on the map and this is a theme he explores in US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic.

Yes, that’s right, he did. Actually the word was first coined, I believe, by Bernard Baruch. Lippmann was the one who popularised it. This book was actually written in World War II and he was partly looking ahead to the possibility of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. He could see the seeds of it even in the middle of World War II. So it really is a far-sighted book.

How do you think he managed to do that?

The book is a powerful critique of failures of US foreign policy in the interwar period – that is where it begins. Lippmann argued that Americans had fallen prey to the delusions of liberal and universal ideas. They believed that peace could be achieved without calculations based on real strength, whether by insulating itself from power politics or placing its trust in international institutions and law. The country, he believed, also fell prey to the false notion that geographical distance, rich resources and ocean flanks gave America ‘free security’. The net result was an insolvent foreign policy that left the nation vulnerable and polarised.

The book is a plea by Walter Lippmann for America to rediscover the realities of power politics that he believed the Founding Fathers had grasped. Lippmann counselled that America needed to rebalance its power and commitments and use the classical tools of negotiated spheres of influence, military muscle and alliances. Not only was a renaissance in strategy necessary to secure America by restoring a favourable balance of power abroad, it was also needed to prevent foreign policy dividing the country at home and creating a damaging internal conflict. Also, in the moment of victory it could overreach itself and get involved in a new antagonism and collide with another great power.

Lippmann’s fear was that the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States would fall apart after the war and the world’s hope for peace rested on those great powers. He argued that in order to avoid new confrontations, the US needed to recognise the limits of its own domain and the legitimate orbit of other states like the Soviet Union. That is where he saw the Cold War potentially originating – America wouldn’t know the limits of its own power, particularly in the moment of victory. The true shield of the republic was not nature’s blessings or utopian idealism, but clear-eyed statecraft that respected both power and the limits of power. It is an eloquent vision of tough restraint in the age of the masses – a vision that resonates today.

I think this is a book about America finding itself becoming increasing powerful as it mobilised itself for its intense struggle. It was lurching from a country that before World War II was much more reluctant to generate military power and intervene abroad to becoming a country that didn’t know where to stop. The way that America lurched from one extreme to the other was something he referred to as the deadly cycle. He says that it is ‘too pacifist in times of peace and too bellicose in times of war’. He thought there was not enough middle ground.

Your next book is by one of President Obama’s most favourite philosophers. This is The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Yes, Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic book. It is also a prophecy by a theologian, the son of a German émigré to America. It’s one of the most important books in American self-criticism. It was written after America had risen as a giant, as victor in World War II, when many believed it had won the mandate of Heaven and had ‘dreams of managing history’, when some even entertained the thought of a preventative nuclear war, as the US became embroiled in global antagonism with the Soviet Union.

Reinhold Niebuhr, as a pessimistic theologian, was uneasy with American idealism and self-exaltation. He wrestled with the dangerous and intoxicating idea of American exceptionalism, and he found in that ideology the seeds of American self-destruction. The book is called The Irony of American History and there were a number of ironies in America’s condition. First, America became a superpower without a conscious grand design, without its people lusting for world conquest and despite the fact that it was created partly in order to reject the power struggles of the old world. It stepped into a vacuum created by war and the exhaustion of European nations. Drawing on its heritage as the ‘light on the hill’, it assigned itself the role as ‘tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection’.

Second, America as a superpower controlled its destiny less than as a continental power, because the more far-flung and global it became, the more it collided with other wills and forces which it could never ultimately master. And third, as the country reached for power and interpreted history as the triumph of the American way after World War II, it was becoming like the enemy in milder form and could destroy itself. Like Marxism-Leninism, Atlantic liberal democracy married with the might of the American superpower was becoming heedless of the ‘limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historical configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue’.

Unlike quite a lot of American patriotic visionaries at the end of World War II, who believed they were trying to interpret history and the meaning of America’s role in it, Reinhold was more pessimistic. He believed that not only was history indecipherable, but it would never end.

Do you agree with him?

Yes, I think he pointed up a number of great dangers in what can happen with a country which has ‘the victory disease’. This is the idea that in a moment of great success the country starts thinking that its strength alone makes it wise, and it starts to assign itself a role of global superpower. It is very understandable why that happened because America was stepping into a huge vacuum of the old European empires which had exhausted themselves. And the world we know benefited hugely from America’s new role as it rebuilt Europe and extended its military shield. But the temptation to see itself as the world’s great redeemer and all-powerful was almost irresistible, even though it was very dangerous.

Tell me about Melvyn Leffler’s book – A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War.

This book is really going back to the seeds of the Cold War and what Leffler sees as the tragedy of the Cold War. He asks the very important question: was the Cold War actually avoidable? He looks at whether there were moments between 1946 and the early 50s when we could have stepped back from the brink and had some kind of modus vivendi with the Soviet Union instead of having this confrontation.

Leffler, as a revisionist historian, finds some of the seeds of the conflict in the evolving world view of the Truman administration, where America’s new sense of its own relative power in the world, mixed with a sense of Messianic crusading, culminated in the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Leffler asks the question, that as tyrannical and dangerous as Stalin was in his own region, was he ultimately an old power tsar who could be accommodated with classical spheres of influence rather than having a global struggle? He tests out this idea that the revolutionary tyrant at home actually was a tsar abroad and could be lived with, and that Stalin, in a very cold and calculating way, was someone you could do business with.

This particularly centres in the debate about whether or not to commit to containing Communism everywhere all the time, and also how realistic it was that America and the Soviet Union could have negotiated a mutual withdrawal from Germany and left a buffer zone between them.

This, of course, throws up lots of moral issues about whether America was prepared to operate like that.

Oh it does, and part of the difficulty of foreign policy is that you have to hold your nose and compromise with all sorts of regimes. The Allies had, after all, been dealing with Stalin during World War II from 1941, in order to defeat something that we thought was even worse – Hitler. So foreign policy is difficult because it involves that moral compromise. Leffler poses the question whether dealing with and accommodating Stalin would have been better for the world than this terrifying new conflict with the potential for World War III, and, with catastrophic ventures like the Afghan War, Vietnam, Cambodia and Chile, how the trillions of dollars that America sunk into it could have been spent on more productive things. So the morality question is a very interesting one and very difficult. Sometimes the most immoral thing you can do as a great power is be at war with other great powers, and it is better to compromise around that with a negotiated and imperfect peace.

Do you begin to see this time as the fall of America?

In a way I do, because it takes on a role as the guardian of world order that ultimately is exhausting, although in some ways it is the making of America. It emerges from World War II as the biggest power, the biggest financier and creditor, the centre of dynamism and intellectual achievement and scientific innovation. It is also the military superpower with global reach. But in other ways America was being drawn into this imperial temptation, which means it chooses to shoulder burdens on others’ behalf. Every time there is a crisis America is increasingly expected to solve it. Also, I think it is dangerous because becoming an empire makes it harder to be a republic. It results in things like the rise of an imperial presidency, which becomes less balanced with the constitution and the erosion of civil liberties. There is this coarsening of domestic policies and weakening of the economy, which are things that damage what is meant to be the constitutional identity of the country – so it is a very mixed bag.