Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  When the United States assumed a global role in World War II, it did so in pursuit of historic objectives—preventing Europe or Asia from falling under the domination of a single power, particularly a hostile one. When this heroic undertaking succeeded, many Americans, including some in government, expected to be able to withdraw from the conduct of global policy.

  Yet America was now the dominant country in the world. Concern with the balance of power shifted from internal European arrangements to the containment of Soviet expansionism globally, turning the international order operationally into a two-power world. The United States had emerged as the essential guarantor of allied security and international stability. Particularly in the North Atlantic region, America concentrated on mobilizing resources for an agreed mission. Washington saw its role as the director of the common enterprise of countering a specific challenge to peace, rather than as a participant in an equilibrium.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system gradually grew more multipolar. China emerged as a global economic power with an increasing military capacity. Traditional power centers ended periods of isolation, colonial rule, or underdevelopment and began to play influential international roles. Something like a global version of Westphalian diplomacy began to emerge—an equilibrium balancing the sometimes-compatible, sometimes-competitive aims of multiple sovereign units.

  Through all these transformations, the United States has been torn between its faith in its exceptional nature and global mission, and the pressures of a public opinion skeptical of open-ended commitments in distant regions. The ideal of universal democracy-promotion, if adopted as an operational strategy, implies a doctrine of permanent domestic engineering across the world. Yet the prevailing American view has regarded foreign policy as a series of episodes with definitive conclusions; it recoiled from the ambiguities of a historical process in which goals are achieved incrementally, through imperfect stages.

  As America evolved from a peripheral exception to international order to an essential component of it, it has been obliged to meld its noble ideals with a concept of the national interest sustainable across decades, administrations, and historical vicissitudes. America’s moral convictions are essential to its national purpose and to popular support for its policies. An understanding of equilibrium, and a distinction between essential tasks and long-term aspirations, is necessary to sustain American efforts in a world of disparate cultures and multiple centers of power. America’s ability to balance and synthesize these elements will define its future, and importantly shape twenty-first century prospects for world order.

  Conrad Black has brilliantly traced this evolution and framed thought-provoking questions about America’s world role in the coming decades. He has related domestic to international pressures, and evoked the key events, strategies, and dilemmas inherent in America’s rise. Through thoughtful sketches of the key actors—especially the presidents—and their policies, he has provided a book that will be indispensable reading for those who want to understand the past as well as sketch a roadmap for the future.

  ONE

  THE ASPIRANT STATE, 1754-1836

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Path to Independence

  The British and Americans Defeat

  the French in America, 1754–1774

  1. THE GREAT POWERS AND THE AMERICAS

  The long, swift rise of America to absolute preeminence in the world began in the obscure skirmishing of settlers, traders, natives, adventurers, and French and British (and some Spanish) soldiers and militiamen, more or less uniformed, in what is today the western parts of eastern seaboard states of the United States. Surges of idealism and desperation had propelled Quakers, Puritans, organized groups of Roman Catholics, more exotic non-conformists, and the routinely disaffected and abnormally adventurous to strike out for the New World. There was, with most, some notion of ultimately building a better society than those from which they had decamped. There was little thought, until well into the eighteenth century, of constructing there a political society that would influence the world. And there was almost no thought, until near the end of that century, that there would arise in America a country that would in physical and demographic strength, as well as moral example, lead the whole world.

  Political conditions at the approach of what became the Seven Years’ War (in America, the French and Indian Wars, in Russia and Sweden the Pomeranian War, in Austria and Prussia the Third Silesian War, and in India the Third Carnatic War) consisted of endless scrapping among the great continental powers along their borders. These were France; Austria, the polyglot Central European heir of the Holy Roman Empire; Russia; and, thrusting up to challenge Austria for leadership of the German center of Europe, Prussia. The other Great Power, Great Britain, when its Stuart Dynasty, half Protestant and half Roman Catholic, came to an end in 1714, recruited the Stuarts’ distant but reliably Protestant cousins, starting with George I to IV, 1714–1830, to succeed them. George I and George II scarcely spoke English and spent much time in their native Hanover, a placid little principality of 750,000 which they continued to rule and where they didn’t have to be bothered with an unruly parliament like that in London.

  The lengthy British rule of the great Whigs, Sir Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, and Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, 1721–1762, appeased the kings by using British money and power to secure Hanover. Apart from that, Britain cohered, before the king set up his own Church, to the policy of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1511–1529), Henry VIII’s chancellor, who devised the practice, followed to recent times, of putting England’s weight against whichever was the strongest of the continental powers (successively, roughly, Spain until the rise of Louis XIII’s great minister, Cardinal Richelieu in 1624; France until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815; Germany until the defeat of Hitler in 1945; and Russia until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991). An unprecedentedly benign Germany then resumed that position to no great consternation in Britain or elsewhere (Chapter 16).

  Russia, under Peter the Great, Czar from 1689 to 1725, joined the ranks of the Great Powers at the start of the eighteenth century. For the purposes of this book, the first important Russian leader was the Empress Catherine the Great,1 who reigned from 1762 to 1796, and we are also concerned with the Prussian king Frederick II, the Great (1740–1786), and the Austrian empress Maria Theresa (reigned from 1740 to 1780). These three rulers provided strong military and diplomatic government in Central and Eastern Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

  2. THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND EARLY SKIRMISHING IN AMERICA

  William Pitt was the first leading British public figure to limn out a vision of a growing and flourishing British civilization on both sides of the Atlantic and in the East and West Indies, arising to give the British the status and strength of an incomparable giant straddling the great ocean. Even he pitched his vision, naturally, mainly in terms of ending, in Britain’s favor, the great contest with France because of the scale and size and wealth the British nationality would grow into, vast and rich, and relatively secure as not having to fend off the invasions of adjoining landward neighbors. In Britain, his philippics against the French went down better than his visions of the New World. But as Pitt gained force and support in Britain, the leading Americans considered that the Thirteen Colonies were coming close to self-sufficiency, if the French threat in Canada could be disposed of, and could indeed then have a splendid autonomous political future, if they could coordinate better between themselves, and agree on their collective purpose. As the formal beginning of the new Anglo-French war approached, the most astute leaders of both Britain and America were groping for a raison d’etre of the American project. In London and Westminster, going it alone was unthinkable for the colonies, and so was not given any thought. In America, if France could be driven from Canada, it was an idea whose attractions were bound to grow, and, if it were not headed off by a competing imperial vision, its time would come.
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br />   From the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, European diplomacy was a minuet, with the partners constantly changing, but disputing the same adjoining areas, a horribly expensive struggle between hired and often mercenary armies. The only country that had a vision that transcended this pattern of self-inflicted destruction, through the attrition of endless conflict on the frontiers, was Britain, with its concept of manipulating the balance of power while steadily expanding its empire overseas and asserting mastery of the world’s oceans. This was the long-standing British strategy. France oscillated between trying to dominate Germany and trying to contest overseas theaters with Britain, and couldn’t do both simultaneously. Prussia and Russia were trying to expand at the expense of their neighbors, which in Russia’s case meant much of Eurasia. Austria, Turkey, and Spain were trying to hold on to what they had. Sweden and the Netherlands were second-tier opportunists and Portugal was outward-facing from Europe to an empire that was large for the size of the home country (in South America, Africa, India, and the Far East). By opposing larger Spain, Portugal gained the protection of the Royal Navy to maintain its empire, which it would not otherwise have been able to defend from larger predators.

  The French, when they finally developed a plan, wanted to distract the British to the nether regions of empire and strike a mortal blow at the home island of Britain. Of these long-standing British and French strategic designs, the British generally succeeded in imposing theirs, and the French, perpetually unsure whether they wanted to make a crossing in force of the Rhine or the English Channel, never really came close to a serious invasion of the British Isles. (The Pyrenees and the Alps were less promising and tempting places of trespass, though they were occasionally traversed.)

  By the 1750s there were just the first glimmerings of an American strategy, spontaneously derived but starting to receive direction to work with the British to remove the French from Canada and then favorably alter the relationship with Britain.

  There was a loyalty in the colonies to the abstract entity of the Crown, and the impersonal wearer of the crown, but affections between the English and the Americans became frayed (as did relations between the Canadians and the French), and if the Crown (in the one case and the other) was seen as exclusively favoring the mother country, colonial fealty to the overseas king-protector would prove very fungible.

  Combat was so routine in North America that even full-scale battles and reductions of opposing forts, involving the deaths of hundreds of men on both sides, did not provoke declarations of war. Until 1756, wars could be generated only by European matters. By the early 1750s, the race was on between the French, pushing down from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and then to and down the Mississippi, and the English (Americans in practice but constantly seeking British military reinforcement when challenged), settling and exploring ever westward, for control of the Ohio country and the vast hinterland of North America. Alert American landowners, including young George Washington, 21 in 1753, were large land acquirers west of the Alleghenies. The French, who had an entirely developed rival claim, constructed a series of forts connecting Quebec to their traders in Illinois. These forts were at Presque Isle on the south shore of Lake Erie, another on a tributary of the Allegheny River, a third on the Allegheny itself, and the fourth at the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers to form the Ohio, the site of the modern city of Pittsburgh (whose name gives a hint of the outcome of the Anglo-French rivalry).

  The French fort at the forks of the Ohio was called Fort Duquesne, after the builder, a French naval officer who was entrusted with the Canadian military command, and mobilized 11,000 Canadians, trained them thoroughly by colonial standards, and pressed south with them organized into 165 companies, supported by thousands of Indians whom the French had enticed with generous offers of trading rights. The Indians tended to take the promises of the French more seriously than those of the English, because the French seemed much less inclined to people the New World themselves with immigration, rather than just taking what the fur trade and other commerce would yield. The British had planned a fort on the same site and the rivalry, in the names of Duquesne and Pitt, and over the same geography, presaged future conflicts over many colonial places claimed as a matter of right by different nationalities. Duquesne expended the lives of over 400 of his men and spent over four million livres, erecting his forts and developing trails between them, but the effort did wonders to galvanize American colonial opinion, especially in the unison of the chorus it raised up to London to repel the French interloper.

  In the autumn of 1753 an enterprising 21-year-old Adjutant George Washington volunteered to carry a letter to the French at the forks of the Ohio, asking them to “desist” and withdraw. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, sent 200 men with Washington for this mission. Before Washington got clear of the Allegheny Mountains, one of Duquesne’s officers had repulsed the British contingent that tried to occupy the coveted site, majestic to this day, where the Ohio River begins. Undaunted and showing a boldness, indeed impetuosity, a trait for which he would not be well-known at the height of his career, Washington chose to advance against the French, who greatly outnumbered him. Washington fell upon a 35-man French and Indian scouting party and killed the commander of the French unit, a M. Jumonville, and nine others. Accounts differ and Washington’s own is a truncated and rather self-serving description of a provoked and measured response, rather than, as is claimed by the French and some of the colonial militiamen, a massacre begun by an Indian ally of the Americans who sank his hatchet into Jumonville’s skull, preparatory to relieving him of his scalp. The young Adjutant Washington, after the astonishing precocity of carrying out an act of war of one Great Power on another, on the instructions of Dinwiddie, who had no authority to order anything of the kind, then sagely retreated to a hastily constructed stockade, christened—in a divine service where Washington, not a demonstrably religious man, presided—Fort Necessity.

  It was a modest affair and was soon invested by 700 French and Canadians and 100 of their Indian allies. The French rained down musket-fire on the garrison, which Dinwiddie had bulked up to 400, and at sunset of the first day of the siege, Washington’s force panicked and broke into the rum issue. The French mercifully offered the Americans, retirement from Fort Necessity provided they returned French prisoners, promised not to return to the Ohio Valley within a year, left two hostages behind as an earnest, and admitted the “assassination” of Jumonville. Washington accepted all this, having taken 30 dead and 70 wounded, compared with three French dead and a handful of wounded. He retired, with most of his men carrying the wounded and the corpses of their fallen comrades. Most of his force deserted and scattered at the first opportunity. He rightly counted himself lucky, but had effectively accepted responsibility for starting one of the most important wars of modern times, and with an uncivilized act at that. Washington has presented posterity a rather bowdlerized version of this fiasco and his subsequent renown has somewhat obscured the facts, though it must be said that he was personally brave and collected, and swiftly seized the prospect of honorable deliverance when it appeared.

  Even the placatory British prime minister, Newcastle, was outraged and worried when he learned of this debacle. He relied on what he portentously described as his continental “system” of alliances with the Spanish, Austrian Empire, Danes, Hanover, and some other German states to contain France, while he launched a counter-blow in America. With George II’s favored son, the Duke of Cumberland, Newcastle concerted a plan for sending two Irish regiments out to America under the command of Major General Edward Braddock, a spit-and-polish professional with no experience or knowledge at all of American warfare, to uproot the French fort system that Duquesne had built. Cumberland blew any security with public announcements about the new armed mission, which came to the attention of the French ambassador in London as to any informed person in the British capital. The French rushed to send reinforcements to Canada, though they suf
fered from the ice-shortened season for dispatching forces up the St. Lawrence.

  3. THE OUTBREAK OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

  The English position in those colonies was not much strengthened by the arrival of Braddock and his Irishmen in February 1755. The colonists resented Braddock’s high-handed manner and the British army’s rules, which were that any British officer, even a lieutenant, could order about like pirates any colonial officer, even Washington and his few peers, and that the colonial militias were subject to British military discipline. This was heavy going for these rough and ready frontiersmen, who were unaccustomed to taking orders, other than at the approach of and during outright exchanges of live fire. Nor were they much enamored of submitting themselves to a regimen that was unsparing in meting out floggings and even drum-head executions.

  From May to July 1754 in Albany, New York, there was what was called the Albany Congress, to pursue unity of the colonies. The leading figure at the Congress was the ambitious Philadelphia inventor, scientist, printer, postmaster, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Behind his jaunty humor there lurked a sophisticated political operator who would prove himself more than able to master the sternest and most tortuous challenges that could be posed in the chancelleries of Europe. He was already the principal public figure among the colonists, and Washington was a rising young officer and landowner, the one an amiable intellectual and sly maneuverer, the other a physically imposing and capable officer, though personally stiff and somewhat limited by being a plantation inheritor and, beyond elemental education, an autodidact. But both were investors in and advocates of trans-Allegheny development, and both had a vision of a rapidly expanding America that would brook no interference from the French, and whose attachment to the British was essentially much less a reflexive submission to the Crown than a tactical association with the presumed facilitator of their local ambitions.