American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Perry Anderson
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Название: American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

Автор: Perry Anderson

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Политика, политология

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isbn: 9781781687024

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СКАЧАТЬ a change. After the Spanish–American War, it had ceased to be territorial, becoming with Wilson all but metaphysical. During the Cold War, it was articulated with less rapture, in a moral-political register occupying a lower position in the ideological hierarchy. But the connexion with religion remained. In his final inaugural address of 1944, Roosevelt had declared: ‘The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for our freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.’ Truman, speaking on the day he dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, was equally forthright about the country’s strong arms: ‘We thank God that it [the atomic bomb] has come to us, and not our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His Ways and for His purposes.’ Amid the postwar ruins, the president was more expansive. ‘We are going forward to meet our destiny, which I think Almighty God intended us to have’, he announced: ‘We are going to be the leaders’.20 Viewing the destruction in Germany, Kennan found himself ‘hushed by the realization that it was we who had been chosen by the Almighty to be the agents of it’,21 but in due course uplifted by the awesome challenge that the same Providence had granted Americans in the form of the Cold War. Since then, the deity has continued to guide the United States, from the time of Eisenhower, when ‘In God We Trust’ was made the official motto of the nation, to Kennedy exclaiming: ‘With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own’—down to the declaration of the younger Bush, that ‘Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world’, and Obama’s confidence that God continues to call Americans to their destiny: to bring, with His grace, ‘the great gift of freedom’ to posterity.22 America would not be America without faith in the supernatural. But for obvious reasons this component of the national ideology is inner-directed, without much appeal abroad, and so now relegated to the lowest rung in the structure of imperial justification.

      III

      That exception came from the tradition which pioneered modern study of American imperialism, founded in Wisconsin by William Appleman Williams in the fifties. Williams’s American–Russian Relations (1952), Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and The Contours of American History (1961) argued that the march to the internal frontier within North America, allowing a settler society to escape the contradictions of race and class of an emergent capitalist economy, had been extended across the Pacific in the drive for an Open Door empire of commerce, and then in the fuite en avant of a bid for global dominion that could not brook even a defensive Soviet Union. For Williams, this was a morally disastrous trajectory, generated by a turning away from the vision of a community of equals that had inspired the first arrivals from the Old World. Produced before the US assault in Vietnam, Williams’s account of a long-standing American imperialism struck with prophetic force in the sixties. The historians who learnt from him—Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Patrick Hearden—shed the idealism of his explanatory framework, exploring with greater documentation and precision the economic dynamics of American diplomacy, investment and warfare from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. The Wisconsin School was not alone in its critical historiography of empire. Kolko’s monumental Politics of War shared the same political background, of revulsion at the war in Vietnam, if not intellectual affiliation.