Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  As historian Heather Cox Richardson argues in West from Appomattox, postwar “reconstruction” was truly less about rebuilding the South than about knitting together the North, South, and—most important—the West into a coherent national whole for the very first time. To accomplish that, the country needed a coherent national identity, something that unified its citizens’ collective pursuit of individual happiness across a collection of far-flung regions and “sections.”

  In Richardson’s view, it was during that process of political unification that the integration of the trans-Mississippi West gave birth to the nation’s emerging “middle-class ideology,” a decidedly American worldview that divided people into two groups: so-called hardworking types that made up the vast middle and nefarious “special interests”—both rich and poor—that inhabited society’s margins. That admittedly expansive self-declaration of middle-class status (admit it, don’t most Americans still think of themselves as middle-class?) went on to define the stable center of U.S. politics across the twentieth century. Its erosion—both perceived and real—in the face of globalization’s many and growing competitive pressures over the past couple of decades should naturally concern us, because if anybody’s going to sabotage the emergence of a stabilizing global middle class, it’ll be a United States acting out of a fear that says our middle class must perish to accommodate what Fareed Zakaria calls the “rise of the rest.”

  Only Dr. Frankenstein can kill this monster—or meet its voracious demands by structuring a suitably resilient international system.

  So as we think about grand strategy, it’s crucial that we better understand how America built that middle-class ideology and, in doing so, formed the bulk of Americanism or the American national identity, something we still take for granted today. It’s crucial not just so America can realign itself ideologically with a world transforming today, but because mastering those dynamics of rapid integration is essential to forging a national grand strategy for effectively doing the same across the Non-Integrated Gap in the decades ahead, something with which the West in general has been struggling since the end of the Cold War. Like many thinkers at the end of the American Civil War, we made the assumption at the end of the Cold War that reconstructing the defeated East was our main task, when in reality, as we’ve since discovered, both the great challenge and the great opportunity of our age come in integrating what we used to call the Third World and what I now identify as the Gap. It is in that integration process, much as it was for post-Civil War America in the American West, that we locate the global identity—the global middle-class ideology—that will define this globalization process for the rest of this century. That global middle-class person, in aggregate, will reshape the planet with his pursuit of happiness across this century. There is no stopping this demand, only shaping it.

  A tough challenge, to be sure, but the best one we could face right now.

  But most important to remember is this: We’ve done this before, so now’s not the time to go all wobbly.

  Yes, in this process of global integration there will be insurgencies galore. There were plenty that raged on in the American South and parts of the West for decades after the Civil War, and as today, the lines between legitimate activists and “dangerous agitators” and simple criminals were often blurred. Back then, in our fears, we reached for many of the same options that we employ today: long-term occupational forces to settle down the “badlands,” private security corporations whose scary agents operate outside the law, ethnic enclaves that are part sanctuary and part prison, squatters’ rights finally recognized with land titles, individual ambition finally addressed with installment plans and micro-loans, sweet-heart deals given to big corporations so they’ll move in and build transportation and communications infrastructure (sometimes under fire, so we’ll offer them military bodyguards, too), first-time voting for previously disenfranchised populations, special treatment for various utopian religions that demand separation from an “evil world,” universal education that actually includes women as much as men, retailers that master the art of selling to poor people the things that everybody deserves to have, new state governments created seemingly out of thin air, making sure the farmer and the cowboy will be friends, electrification for all, and a chicken in every pot!

  Lincoln and Seward were real grand strategists because they recognized that when frontiers are closed, ambition is shut down, and when people cannot connect to their dreams, no amount of freedom or material goods or rule of law will forge a stable national identity. America had just fought a war of identity, very similar to the conflicts we now engage in across our world, and the only way you win a war of identity is to forge a transcendent synthesis of the conflicting worldviews. For Lincoln, simply imposing the North’s worldview on the South was no answer. No, the American System, in finally coming to fruition, offered the only way ahead: a Western, middle-class, frontier-integrating identity. Lincoln’s genius is found in his continued recognition, streaming back through Clay and Hamilton, of the identity-forging power of purposeful nation-building, and if the West represented his last great option, then the West it would be.

  THE AMERICAN SYSTEM MATURED, THEN EXTRAPOLATED

  Americans tend to forget just how young our country is, but I can, for example, run through our entire nation’s history by looking back just six generations into my family’s past. Joseph Barnett (born 1754) saw thirteen colonies form a new nation, and then grow to twenty-six states total, before he died in 1838. His son Andrew (born 1797) witnessed eighteen states join the Union, only to see it rip apart just as he passed in 1862. Then came Jared (1831-1911), who, across his tumultuous eight decades, watched nine new states join, eleven of them leave in a huff (only to be forcibly readmitted), and then another thirteen added! Jared’s boy Harry (1864-1948) had his national flag go from thirty-five stars to forty-eight. My grandfather, J.E. (1896-1983), got five new stars, and his only son, my dad, John (1922-2004), saw just two new states—Alaska and Hawaii.

  What about me, born in 1962? Bupkes! So far.

  But hold that thought for now, because I’d like to give you another example of what a small world it really is here in America by showing you how I’m linked, by six degrees of separation, to a Founding Father, John Adams: (1) As a young Marine officer in World War I, my grandfather (who loved to tell me these stories when I was a kid) got to meet a lot of famous Americans through his cousin, General George Barnett. (2) As commandant of the Marines, General Barnett had long-standing relationships with President Woodrow Wilson and former presidents William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. (3) Roosevelt’s first secretary of state was John Hay. (4) As a young man, Hay served as personal secretary to President Abraham Lincoln. (5) Lincoln, with his idol Henry Clay, served in the U.S. Congress alongside ex-president John Quincy Adams, with Clay holding Old Man Eloquent’s hand on his deathbed and Lincoln helping to organize his state funeral. (6) Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence and our nation’s second president.

  My point is this: If you think American foreign policy is dominated today by a small network of policymakers and strategic thinkers (say, a thousand or so individuals), then you have to realize how much smaller and more durable that network was throughout most of our nation’s history. Indeed, until we reach the rise of the military-industrial complex in World War II, you can track most of America’s grand strategic thinking through a couple of dozen individuals at most. One of those individuals is John Hay, who links our storyline from Lincoln all the way through Teddy Roosevelt.

  If you view the American Civil War the way Robert Kagan does, as the “second American Revolution,” then you can sort of cast John Hay as an American Zhou Enlai, the famously taciturn but strategically minded minister of China’s foreign affairs from the end of its Communist revolution (1949) through the opening to America in the early 1970s. Hay didn’t hold the top diplomatic job anywhere near as long as Zhou, but as one of America’s longest
-serving senior diplomats, he has a legacy that clearly links Lincoln’s American System writ large to Roosevelt’s writ even-large-r version. After his wartime service to Lincoln and a stint in the upper echelons of the Union Army, Hay went into the diplomatic service and represented America for years in Europe, moving from Paris to Vienna and Madrid and finally reaching the rank of ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1897. A year later President William McKinley made Hay his secretary of state, a job he held under McKinley’s successor, Roosevelt, until his death in 1905.

  Before TR started meddling in Asian wars, it was John Hay who formulated and announced America’s Open Door policy regarding China, and before Teddy got to stick his shovel in Panama’s isthmus, it was John Hay who concluded three treaties with Panama, Colombia, and Great Britain to smooth the way. In all, Hay concluded fifty treaties across his seven years as secretary, an amazing total indicative of America’s sudden and vigorous entry onto the world stage at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  It’s hard for Americans to remember a time when our country wasn’t deeply engaged in global affairs, but again, I only have to go back as far as my grandparents’ childhoods to locate an upstart United States just beginning to demand a seat at the table of great powers. Much like China and India today, the America of that era had already come to the conclusion that its exploding economic and network connectivity with the outside world had far outpaced its diplomatic and military capacity to defend its expanding national interests. While populists and progressives alike took turns at taming America’s rough-and-tumble capitalism, America’s leading strategic thinkers, like Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, looked ahead to a day when the United States would need a bigger “stick.”

  The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, constituted America’s coming-out party as an aspiring world power (not unlike what the 2008 Beijing Olympics did for China). It was at this historic event that a University of Wisconsin professor, Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered one of the great lectures of American history. His “frontier thesis” traced American exceptionalism, even the very definition of American identity, to the historical process of westward expansion, beginning with the original colonies and culminating in the “closing” identified in the 1890 census that revealed—for the first time ever—the lack of unassigned land in the West. This verdict was both revelatory (This is why we’re different from Europeans!) and distressing (How will our character change if we have no new frontiers to conquer?). There was a profound economic dimension as well: With immigrants once again pouring in, how would American workers rise above the limits of wage labor if there was no more open land offering them refuge and freedom?

  Part of the answer was clearly continuous technological advancement. Before the American Civil War, the leading American industries were cotton textiles, lumber, boots, and shoes—the very profile of a low-end emerging economy. After the war, machinery manufacturing rapidly became our number-one export, followed by iron and steel—the profile of a rapidly maturing economy. Railroad companies dominated the economic and social landscape: telling us what time it was (railroad standard time), creating corporate behemoths through vertical integration, scheduling both our booms and our busts, and determining even where we should live (railroads were laid between towns in the East, but it was the other way around in the West). Leap ahead to our current information revolution and you can easily insert into a similar description of modern life things like “Internet time,” Microsoft and Google, the tech boom and the tech crash, and telecommuting from home. My point again is that we’ve done it all before.

  But the post-Civil War long boom—punctuated by nasty busts, mind you—was also a clear tipping point in our journey from states uniting to the United States. In the metaphors Thomas Friedman uses to explain modern globalization, America was leaving behind the “olive tree” world that focused on blood ties, the land, and sectionalism, and began moving toward modernity, or the “Lexus” world of increasingly high-tech production and international commerce. As historian Edmund Morris notes, “America was no longer a patchwork of small self-sufficient communities,” but “a great grid of monopolistic cities doing concentrated business with one another: steel cities and rubber cities, cities of salt and cloth and corn and copper.” The United States was the rising China of the age, zooming up to and—in many categories—zooming past our model, Great Britain. If you think Americans use Chinese products to the exclusion of all else now, the same realization was dawning on the British regarding America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Consider this account from Morris:

  Current advertisements in British magazines gave the impression that the typical Englishman woke to the ring of an Ingersoll alarm, shaved with a Gillette razor, combed his hair with Vaseline tonic, buttoned his Arrow shirt, hurried downstairs for Quaker Oats, California figs, and Maxwell House coffee, commuted in a Westinghouse tram (body by Fisher), rose to his office in an Otis elevator, and worked all day with his Waterman pen under the efficient glare of Edison light bulbs.

  As China today markets tequila to Mexico (!), back then America was managing the equally inconceivable, coal-to-Newcastle feat of exporting beer to Germany! America could consume only a fraction of what it produced, meaning the rest had to be exported, resulting in a trade surplus and an inflow of foreign direct investment that left Wall Street awash in capital, much the way Shanghai’s stock market finds itself so popular among international investors today. If Americans today fear that China, with its $2 trillion reserve, could buy our economy tomorrow, back then steel magnate Andrew Carnegie “calculated that America could afford to buy the entire United Kingdom, and settle Britain’s national debt in the bargain.” What the world’s economies feared most back then was the all-powerful “American price,” much as so many U.S. manufacturers today fear the seemingly bottomless “China price.”

  But as with China today, the ease with which America conquered foreign markets and expanded commercially (the Hamiltonian dream) hid a lot of rising problems at home in a capitalism that seemed at once unforgivably cruel, hopelessly unequal, and increasingly unmanageable. If that is globalization’s nightmare image today, with China serving as poster boy for all that’s out of control, then America served the same function in that earlier globalization age. But unlike China today, which feels little responsibility for fixing a global economic model that it had no real hand in shaping, the United States would eventually come to the conclusion that reformation of the European-style, imperial model of glo-colonialization, if you will, was both inevitable and much needed. But before America could display such ambition for “big” foreign policy, it would need, as Robert Kagan notes, a “big” government to manage it, and that big government would arise first in response to the dire challenges of the American Civil War, but next in response to the moral challenges of taming America’s too-brutal markets in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

  See if any of this rings a bell with regard to today’s globalization and its many discontents.

  Already in the 1870s, America began to see a wave of corporate and political scandals, including many that connected those two communities in a web of seamy corruption. Like China and Russia today, America back then had a hard time separating business and politics, as congressmen were easily bought and sold by “gilded age” private-sector behemoths helmed by lavishly compensated executives. Workers were feeling increasingly alienated from the upper class. Before the Civil War, America’s nonagricultural workers identified themselves by the section of the country where they lived, in part because they worked for smaller, regional companies, and usually knew their companies’ owners personally. After the Civil War, all that began to change: Workers identified themselves more as an economic class, labored for national companies, and never met their companies’ owners face-to-face. Before the Civil War, public corporations needed to cite some public good to justify their formation. After the war, private ambition wa
s enough. Despite the incredible rise of disposable income and mass consumerism in the 1880s, this decade was viewed as “hard times” for most Americans in an economy where inequality among households was greater than it’s been at any other time in our nation’s history.

  There was also a growing sense that manipulators of all sorts were keeping the average worker down by restricting the supply of money (backed by limited gold supplies), fixing laws to benefit certain companies, and monopolizing markets to charge usury rates. “Dangerous” ideas about trade unionism were filtering in from Europe, where, in 1871, the Paris Commune briefly institutionalized the notion of worker control of the economy. Cities were becoming overly crowded, unmanageable, and downright deadly to their inhabitants. In the 1880s, it was common for one-quarter of American babies born in urban metropolises to die before reaching the age of one. Only half made it to the age of five. Not surprisingly, hard times amid apparent plenty created angry people, and so America entered into a rather harsh, populist phase that extended into the mid-1890s. As many laborers saw their incomes flatten, the public turned increasingly antiblack, anti-immigrant, antibusiness, and antipolitics. Jim Crow laws proliferated in the South, along with lynchings, while Eastern European immigrants in northern cities were increasingly greeted with more open hostility and job discrimination. Popular demand was growing for trust-busting, improving public health and working conditions, cleaning up disorganized and corrupt elections, and reforming and professionalizing government service. The crystallizing moment? In 1881, a deranged man, angry over being denied a government job, gunned down President John Garfield. For the second time in sixteen years, an American president had been murdered by one of his fellow citizens.