Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  American planning for WWII’s postwar actually began before our entry into the war, and it was overwhelmingly economic in its perspective, as evidenced by FDR’s Lend-Lease program and the Article 7 obligation forced upon Great Britain, as well as Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s consistent prewar push for a liberal trade order. After an abortive attempt to launch a government-wide postwar planning effort in 1940, Hull’s State Department began planning for real in 1941, engaging, among so many “technicians,” a young official by the name of Dean Acheson, who, over the course of the next several years, would play a key role in either planning or selling virtually every aspect of the proposed international order, only to shift from articulation to execution as Truman’s secretary of state from 1949 to 1953. From conceptualization through precedent-setting implementation, Acheson is arguably the most consistently seminal figure among the so-called “wise men” who guided America’s postwar planning and execution. In one form or another, Acheson worked it all: the postwar implications of Lend-Lease (conversing with Keynes himself), the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the Bretton Woods Agreements, the United Nations (writing Truman’s speech for the inaugural San Francisco meeting and guiding the Senate’s ratification for State), the H-bomb program, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the National Security Council’s creation and its historic policy document (NSC- 68) setting up the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, the NATO treaty, right on through the conduct of the Korean War—the first great conflict of the Cold War. His Pulitzer Prize-winning 1970 autobiography said it all, for Acheson was indeed “present at the creation.”

  What Acheson’s career progression represented was America’s instinctive reach to own the postwar order as much as—or more than—it tried to dominate the war’s conduct. In that instinctive ambition, not much has changed, the big difference between now and then being the talent pool the U.S. government could bring to bear and the confidence it had on the subject of nation-building.

  8. RECOGNIZE THAT YOUR RECENT EXPERIENCES DETERMINE YOUR USABLE SKILLS.

  WWI-era America wasn’t ready for any proactive postwar reconstruction role in Europe or really anywhere else; its government lacked the institutions, the people, and the experience. Most of all, it lacked the idea of such work because similar domestic efforts had only begun inside of America since the advent of the progressive era in the mid-1890s. The pre-Keynesian American presidency prior to the Great Depression likewise lacked an overarching mandate for such broad economic stewardship.

  The Great Depression, of course, changed all that, empowering FDR’s administration to become, as Keynes put it, the “economic laboratory of the world.” Keynes himself was fascinated by Roosevelt, who, on the basis of one brief face-to-face encounter, appeared to return the compliment to the man whose theories would encapsulate much of FDR’s own instinct that America needed to “spend to save” itself from the clutches of the Great Depression’s monetary trap. As my own Depression-era mother always describes the times, “Everybody wanted work, but nobody had any money.” Many economic historians have argued that FDR’s New Deal did little on its own to lift America out of depression, because that hard time was not simply limited to the U.S. economy but rather reflected a global capitalist crisis extended—seemingly ad infinitum—by the trade protectionism to which so many governments resorted across the 1930s. FDR could reverse that policy tide at home, but he couldn’t force larger architectural changes on international trade—until WWII gave him the opportunity.

  Almost immediately once the war started, the nation’s best and brightest, an entire generation of New Dealers with years of experience in economic-stimulus packaging, institution-building, and state-building in general, were put to work thinking ahead about how the New Deal could be translated into a new international economic order. Paramount in their thinking, as Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky notes, was “one overriding aim: to do better than last time.” As policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic knew, America was—in Skidelsky’s description—the “great unknown” in this equation, having chosen withdrawal after the last world war. As long as Roosevelt remained in power, America’s commitment to follow through seemed clear. Sensing that FDR did not have long to live, the Democratic Party experienced a tremendous struggle leading up to the 1944 convention to determine who would serve as vice president. Because there were many prominent New Dealers in the mix, the selection of Harry Truman was hailed as “the Missouri Compromise.” With no foreign policy experience to claim and a tainted association with one of the era’s most infamous power brokers, the legendary Tom Pendergast, this “failed haberdasher” (referring to a business co-owned by Truman that went bankrupt in the post-WWI bust) struck many Americans as an obscure choice. Even FDR admitted as late as July 1944, “I hardly know Truman.”

  But here are the two key connections that explain FDR’s choice in the end: (1) as Truman himself was to brag, “I was a New Dealer from the start”; and (2) Truman was a popular and trusted member of the Senate, the key decision-making body for the cluster of treaties FDR had envisaged getting passed to cement his postwar economic and security order. Truman’s initial instincts in this regard seemed to bear out FDR’s wisdom. When stunned by his new responsibilities and the fact that FDR made no effort whatsoever to prepare him (he confessed to the press that he felt “like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me”), Truman made a surprise visit to Congress on his first day after being sworn in. The symbolism was not missed among his former colleagues. As journalist Allen Drury noted, “Characteristically, he came to them. He did not, this first time, ask them to come to him.” If that first impression endeared him to the Hill, his first postwar message to Congress five months later confirmed his commitment to FDR’s New Deal philosophy, as he asked for a stunning package of new federal spending for domestic stimulus programs and extension of his war-powers control over the economy. This single request, coming in the highly charged political atmosphere where, as Truman biographer David McCullough notes, “prophecies of economic doom had become commonplace,” was greater than any FDR himself had attempted “at one sitting,” complained the House minority leader.

  Over time, Truman’s New Deal instinct to “spend to save” proved out. Upon surviving those initial, scary postwar months that saw nationwide strikes, rising Soviet aggression in Europe, and Great Britain’s economic collapse, Truman’s willingness to spend both at home and abroad (the Marshall Plan) won him a narrow reelection in 1948. As McCullough writes of his subsequent inauguration, “No president in history had ever taken office at a time of such prosperity and power.” And what did Truman do with that power? McCullough notes of his inaugural address, “The speech was devoted exclusively to foreign policy. Though a major statement of American aspirations, its focus was the world—the ‘peace of the world,’ ‘world recovery,’ ‘people all over the world.’ ” Truman’s four-point program emphasized the following: (1) America’s continued support for the United Nations—FDR’s great legacy; (2) continued funding of the Marshall Plan, logically extending FDR’s Lend-Lease philosophy; (3) the administration’s commitment to join what would eventually become NATO, cementing the transatlantic security bond that Roosevelt had built; and (4) Truman’s famous “Point Four” proposal to share American scientific knowledge with the world—in effect, a global stimulus package leveraging America’s tremendous scientific gains from the war.

  The Washington Post headline said it all: “Truman Proposes ‘Fair Deal’ Plan for the World,” and the New York Times compared Truman at once to FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln!

  9. ONCE THE WAR IS WON, THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO WITHDRAWAL OR DOMINATION IS TRANSFORMATION.

  After achieving decisive victory in war, a dominant world power faces one of three choices, according to political scientist John Ikenberry: It can withdraw from the field, it can dominate the resu
lting environment “as is,” or it can seek to transform that strategic landscape “into a durable order that commands the allegiance of other states within the order.” Woodrow Wilson knew, as Franklin Roosevelt himself later argued, that “the colonial system means war,” and thus he sought to end that system. He was not successful primarily because America had not amassed sufficient Leviathan-like power to force such change upon Eurasia’s imperial order. His League of Nations plan twice defeated in the Senate, Wilson served out his second term an invalid, weakened from strokes brought on by his exhausting attempts to rally public support for the treaty. His replacement, elected in 1920, was Republican Warren G. Harding, who promised a return to “normalcy,” withdrawing America from world power.

  Roosevelt, by contrast, clearly sought to transform the system rather than dominate it (Stalin’s choice). Stalin clearly recognized Roosevelt’s planned new world order for what it was: a political revolution in interstate trade, and thus chose to remain outside its economic purview. This made possible America’s Cold War policy of containment by forcing an unpalatable choice upon Stalin, who simply couldn’t stomach the transparency demanded as the price for membership (indeed, it’s why Stalin turned down Marshall Plan aid). If FDR hadn’t sought such system transformation, containment would have lacked its technological “stick” and détente would have lacked its trade “carrot.” Because FDR demanded, and won, Britain’s commitment to end its imperial trade preferences, the world’s largest colonial empire was sent into inevitable collapse, eventually taking that of France and other European powers with it in a stunningly rapid period of decolonization, in effect birthing the so-called Third World that would later serve as playing field for superpower rivalry in the Cold War. You may view all these outcomes as suboptimal, and indeed they were. But they were the next logical iteration, given the circumstances presented by World War II. In short, FDR played the best hand possible, transforming the international system as much as America could manage at that time and generating all the positive system dynamics that favored the West throughout the Cold War. And that’s all any good grand strategy delivers—the next, best possible iteration.

  To the extent that George Bush sought system transformation with his “global war on terror” and focus on democratization, he came closer to repeating Wilson’s sins than seeking FDR’s salvation. Viewing baseline security (terrorism prevention) and top-line political freedom (democracy) as the two extremes of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Bush neglected the vast middle that concerns meeting economic needs and progress through individual self-improvement—that essential definition of American democracy. That’s too bad, because the global economy is presently witnessing an explosion in its middle class; thus any American grand strategy that does not speak to that perspective—engaging that middle-class ideology—is doomed to have limited worldwide appeal.

  A more critical appreciation of Bush, à la Ikenberry, says he sought domination and, in his failure, achieved a strong American impulse toward withdrawal.

  10. SOCIALIZE THE PROBLEM, INSTITUTIONALIZE THE SOLUTION.

  The key is to institutionalize the postwar order in sustainable, mutually reinforcing packages: not just the politics (League of Nations-cum- United Nations), and not just the law (Permanent Court of International Justice-cum-World Court), but also the economics (Bretton Woods institutions). The last piece was clearly missing in Wilson’s post-WWI package; it was clearly the revolutionary centerpiece of FDR’s New Deal- gone-global, post-WWII package. That Bretton Woods package (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) has proven—despite what its critics claim—to be fairly flexible. The IMF began life as the stabilizer of global currencies, and once that function fell by the wayside with Richard Nixon’s decision to abandon the gold standard in 1971, it transformed itself into the lender of last resort, and increasingly in recent years, the processor of sovereign bankruptcy (e.g., Russia, Argentina). The World Bank’s lending focus has shifted greatly over the years, marking it as either responsive to new trends or a development fad chaser—depending on your point of view. GATT, of course, underwent the most profound transformation, in further institutionalizing itself in the World Trade Organization in 1995. In sum, the legacy of Bretton Woods is an undeniably positive one, if for no other reason than that its institutions promoted the spread of economic best practices throughout the global economy over time—in effect, credentializing its expansion with new and improved rules.

  The spread of these best practices represents the ultimate triumph of American capitalism and makes possible the effective replication of the American System of rapid economic development: to first include internal integration (infrastructure development) coupled with a high degree of trade protectionism, and later to expand toward external integration based on the efficiencies afforded by the “open door” philosophy of unhindered trade. When we say globalization integrates trade while disintegrating production chains, we’re essentially describing the trade/development aspects of the American System—a sort of “Build it (your national economy) and they (other nations) will trade.” As with all things American, it is inherently focused on self-improvement, but tempered with the understanding that progress is not a zero-sum game.

  Here again, the Bush administration failed us in its narrowing of America’s cooperation with international institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court—although its efforts on the WTO’s Doha Development Round were laudably correct and vigorous, especially on the issue of trying to reduce agricultural subsidies among the world’s richest economies. Alas, not every leader possesses cat-herding skills, the most essential skill of global trade-pact negotiators, and Bush-Cheney possessed fewer than most.

  11. EXPECT A CHALLENGE TO YOUR BEST-LAID PLANS.

  All success attracts critics, and all power attracts challengers. Sometimes it’s personal, like Henry Cabot Lodge’s animus toward Woodrow Wilson, while other times it’s structural. America’s unprecedented prosperity and power at the end of the Second World War naturally generated hostility from the other great remaining pole in the international order. To our great good fortune, that challenger was unable, in ideological terms, and unwilling, in its cultural paranoia, to engage American power where it mattered most—building a successful global economy.

  Here we must judge the Truman administration in a very favorable light. When presented with rising Soviet intransigence and hostility in Europe, Truman met every challenge with a strong response that suggested both the capacity for sustainability and the commitment for endurance: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the creation of NATO, and the significant military response to the Korean War. Better yet, the Truman administration gave strategic voice to this pattern of responses, taking its cues from George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and later “X” article (“The Sources of Soviet Conduct”), and codifying that approach in NSC-68’s creation of the Cold War national security architecture that remains, unfortunately, largely unchanged to this day. Kennan’s approach to the Soviets had the blessing of simplicity: behavior modification. By making clear to the Soviets what behavior we would allow and that which we would actively target, we created a basic Cold War rule set, or what Dean Acheson called a “corpus diplomaticum” that would guide subsequent presidential administrations, starting with Truman’s second term.

  Did Soviet aggression and the resulting Cold War put many of FDR’s dreams for a liberal postwar economic order on hold? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that containment’s military component overshadowed everything else in our subsequent foreign policy, to Kennan’s eternal regret, but no in the sense that that economic order not only successfully emerged but also grew in strength beyond all expectations. By the early 1980s, just as the Soviet Union began its long series of withdrawals from Third World adventurism and China embraced market reforms, the economic bloc of the West, Roosevelt’s ultimate legacy, controlled roughly two-thirds of the global eco
nomy’s wealth and productive capacity on a population base of not much more than 10 percent of humanity. Again, if Roosevelt had not created that liberal economic order, then Truman’s subsequent initiation of the containment grand strategy would have gone nowhere over the long run.

  12. SELLING GRAND STRATEGY IS ONE THING, EXECUTING IT IS QUITE ANOTHER.

  Clearly, Wilson failed badly in the selling aspect, so the question of execution never really arose regarding the League of Nations and the post-WWI international order. America went its way, as did Germany and Soviet Russia, and the rematch was unfortunately set for a generation later.