American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Perry Anderson

Polanyi, Schmitt, along with Marx and Mao, all left their mark on his thought: see his self-description, The Logic of World Power, pp. 561–5. He was a significant influence on Giovanni Arrighi.

18‘Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” notion had the appearance of international equality while, in fact, it assumes a weak China and an Anglo-Soviet standoff in Europe’: Kimball, The Juggler, p. 191.

19Ironically, the architect of the imposition of American will at Bretton Woods, Harry Dexter White, a closet sympathizer with Russia, was in private himself a critic of the ‘rampant imperialism’ that was urging ‘the US to make the most of our financial domination and military strength and become the most powerful nation in the world’: Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order, Princeton 2013, pp. 40–1. Steil’s account makes clear not only how completely Keynes was outmanoeuvred by White in fumbling attempts to defend British interests in 1944, but how deluded he was in persuading himself that the proceedings of the conference reflected the utmost goodwill of the United States towards Britain.

20To offset the entry of his bête noire Gaullist France into the Security Council, on which Churchill insisted, Roosevelt pressed without success for the inclusion of Brazil as another subordinate of Washington, and over British opposition sought to create ‘trusteeships’ to screen postwar American designs on key islands in the Pacific. The veto had to be made unconditional at Soviet insistence. For these manoeuvres, see Robert Hilderbrand’s authoritative study, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security, Chapel Hill 1990, pp. 123–7, 170–4, 192–228.

21For the lavish stage-managing and clandestine wiretapping of the Conference, see Stephen Schlesinger’s enthusiastic account, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, Boulder 2003, passim, and Peter Gowan’s scathing reconstruction, ‘US: UN’ New Left Review 24, Nov–Dec 2003.

       3

       SECURITY

Roosevelt’s insouciance did not survive him. Once the Red Army was entrenched in Eastern Europe, and Communist regimes set up behind it, with mass Communist parties active to the west and north, in France, Italy and Finland, priorities in Washington were reversed. Meeting the Soviet threat was more urgent than fine-tuning a Pax Americana, some of whose principles might have to be deferred in resisting it. Winning what became the Cold War would have to come first. Truman, who had once rejoiced at the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, hoping that each state would destroy the other, was well equipped for the change of direction.¹ Within four days of the German surrender, he had cut off Lend-Lease to Russia without warning. At first insecure, tacking between bluster and joviality, his own temperament and that of his predecessor, once US nuclear weapons had shown what they could do in Japan, he scarcely looked back. By the spring of 1946, conciliatory relations with Moscow of the kind Roosevelt had vaguely envisaged, and Stalin doubtfully hoped, were finished. Within another year, the Truman Doctrine blew the bugle for a battle to defend free nations everywhere from aggression and subversion by totalitarianism, the president relishing his role in waking the country from its slumber.²

In the Cold War now set in motion, the two sides were asym-metrical. Under Stalin, Soviet foreign policy was essentially defensive: intransigent in its requirement of a security glacis in Eastern Europe to prevent any repetition of the invasion it had just suffered, no matter what degree of political or military repression was required to enforce this, but more than willing to ditch or hobble any revolution—in Greece or China—outside this zone that threatened to provoke trouble with a West plainly so much more powerful than itself.³ The USSR was still only building—re-building after Nazi wreckage—socialism in one country. Stalin never abandoned the Bolshevik conviction that communism and capitalism were mortal antagonists.⁴ But the ultimate horizon of a worldwide free association of producers—the classless society Marx had envisaged—lay far off. For the time being, the balance of forces remained lopsided in favour of capital. In the longer run inter-imperialist contradictions would flare up again and weaken the enemy, as they had twice done in the past, shifting the advantage to labour.⁵ In the interim, it was vital that revolutionary forces outside the perimeter of the Soviet bloc should neither threaten its security by provoking imperialism prematurely, nor question the authority of the CPSU over them.

In doctrine as in power, the position of the United States was altogether distinct. Ideologically, two universalisms were locked in struggle during the Cold War. But there was an ontological difference between them. In Stephanson’s trenchant formulation: ‘Whereas the Soviet Union, representing (it claimed) the penultimate stage of history, was locked in a dialectical struggle for the final liberation of humankind, the United States is that very liberation. It is the end, it is already a world empire, it can have no equal, no dialectical Other. What is not like the United States can, in principle, have no proper efficacy. It is either a perversion or, at best, a not-yet’.⁶ Materially, furthermore, there was no common measure between the rival states as they emerged from the war. The USSR of 1946–1947 had not the remotest hope of the ambition on which American grand strategy was fixed: a ‘preponderance of power’ across the world, its annunciation staged over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initiative in the conflict between the two lay with the stronger party. Its ideological label was ‘containment’, as if the aim of US planners was to stem a tide of Soviet aggression. But the substance of the doctrine was far from defensive. Nominally, it was a counsel of firmness and tactical patience to wear the enemy down, by ‘the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points’, as its originator put it. But from the beginning, the objective was not to check, but delete the adversary. Victory, not safety, was the aim.⁷

In later years Kennan would represent his conception of containment as a political strategy of limited geographical application—not a call for worldwide armed activity, as charged by Lippmann, a rare early critic—and contrast it as a stance of prudent defence with the adventurist notions of ‘rollback’ advocated by Dulles, and ‘flexible response’ by Kennedy. Legend has since canonized the image of a sober adviser whose counsels of moderation and wisdom were distorted into a reckless anti-communist activism that would bring disasters against which he spoke out, remaining true to himself as a critic of American hubris and intransigence. The reality was otherwise. Unstable and excitable, Kennan lacked the steadiness of his friend and successor Nitze, but in his days of power in Washington was a Cold Warrior à l’outrance, setting the course for decades of global intervention and counter-revolution.⁸ At the outset of his career as a diplomat, he had decided that the Bolsheviks were ‘a little group of spiteful Jewish parasites’, in their ‘innate cowardice’ and ‘intellectual insolence’ abandoning ‘the ship of Western European civilization like a swarm of rats’. There could be no compromise with them. Stationed in Prague during the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, his first reaction was that Czechs counted German rule a blessing; later, touring occupied Poland—he was now en poste in Berlin—he felt Poles too might