Dreams of Freedom, Temptations of Power

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.

The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948

This chapter considers how the concept of national security evolved. It demonstrates that U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders did not think that the Kremlin was poised to engage in premeditated military aggression during the Cold War. They did not think Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to begin another war. They grasped Stalin's view of his own military vulnerabilities and intuited that he wished to avoid military conflict. Nonetheless, U.S. officials felt threatened. They felt threatened precisely because of the lessons they had learned from World War II itself and the definition of America's vital interests that waging World War II had taught them. They had learned that an adversary, or coalition of adversaries, that conquered other countries could assimilate their resources into their own military machine, wage aggressive war, and challenge America's vital interests. Although the Kremlin seemed unlikely to wage war, it nevertheless had the capacity to gain indirect leverage or control over many countries in Europe and Asia because of the political ferment, economic chaos, social strife, and revolutionary nationalist fervor that existed in the aftermath of war.

Austerity and U.S. Strategy

This chapter argues that austere times presented opportunities to reassess strategic concepts, think rigorously about goals, recalibrate priorities, and link means and ends. Constraints on defense spending forced policymakers to think more creatively about diplomatic solutions. This sometimes catalyzed bold initiatives to reassure friends and engage adversaries. In the past, budgetary austerity also forced officials to wrestle more forthrightly with the trade-offs between priorities at home and commitments abroad. It was an exercise that invariably reminded all Americans that the real sources of U.S. strength in the world were the health of its domestic economy, the vitality of its people, and the resilience of its political institutions.

9/11 and American Foreign Policy

This chapter emphasizes that 9/11 dramatically altered the threat perception of U.S. policymakers. “The greater the threat,” said the strategy statement, “the greater the risk of inaction.” In this new threat environment, policymakers declared that the old tactics of deterrence and containment could not work. Although the employment of preemptive or preventative action was not entirely new in the U.S. diplomatic experience, the emphasis accorded to it was much more pronounced. Threat perception altered tactics, not goals. To justify the new tactics, President George W. Bush raised the rhetorical trope of democracy promotion to a new level of importance, and this was even more true after weapons of mass destruction were not located in Iraq. For this chapter, 9/11 raised interesting and complicated questions about the relationships between interests, values, threat perception, and the employment of power.

Victory

This chapter argues that the West “won” the Cold War because statesmen made systems of democratic capitalism and social democracy work effectively. The challenge for democratic leaders throughout the world was to thwart the appeal of communism and co-opt revolutionary nationalist movements. To do so, they had to reinvent the role of government—not to supplant markets, but to make markets work more effectively and equitably. They avoided intracapitalist conflict, won the support of their own peoples, and created a culture of consumption that engendered the envy of peoples everywhere. In this contest over rival systems of political economy, the role of government was not the problem; it was part of the solution. But it had to be calibrated carefully.

Introduction

This introductory chapter chronicles how the author's study of American foreign policy over the decades gravitated toward an analysis of the meaning of national security. This was not intentional. It resulted from a long struggle to wrestle with evidence that led to attempts to synthesize the three levels of analysis that scholars of international relations often talk about: the individual, the domestic/state, and the international. By using the concept of national security, the author was able to analyze the motives shaping U.S. policymakers, examine their perception of threat and opportunity, assess their willingness to incur commitments and responsibilities abroad, study their readiness to employ military power, and gain an appreciation of how they saw the links between external configurations of power and the preservation of democratic capitalism at home. As the author embraced complexity, studied the evolving literature on grand strategy, and grappled with contingency, his empathy for the policymakers grew.

National Security

This chapter reflects on the concept of national security in early American foreign policy. It also illuminates the relationships between the concept of national security and the burgeoning numbers of books and articles dealing with grand strategy. Here, national security had come to mean the defense of core values from external threats. As understood by U.S. officials, national security was a dynamic, changing concept, responding to the evolution of threats abroad and the definition of core values at home. Core values themselves were elusive, forcing historians and scholars of international relations to discover and analyze precisely what interests, ideals, or values policymakers most wanted to defend. Similarly, external threats existed in the eyes of beholders; different observers perceived danger in dramatically different ways. What were real threats and what were perceived threats might only be resolved in the aftermath of events, and perhaps not even then. Nonetheless, to understand the making of national security policy, the historian had to empathize with the policymakers and had to understand their perception of threat (however accurate or skewed).

Adherence to Agreements

This chapter charts a middle road between traditional and revisionist scholars on the Cold War and highlights how ambiguities and uncertainties influenced the behavior of both Washington and Moscow. It reveals that the Yalta agreements were vague, purposefully so, because Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were seeking to pave over their differences, sustain the wartime alliance, and establish a framework for postwar cooperation. Once victory was assured, the impulse to cooperate waned as new circumstances and new fears intensified mutual distrust and catalyzed unilateral moves to insure security. These actions were coupled with harsh condemnations of one another's treachery. Yet neither the Americans nor the Russians really wanted to antagonize the potential rival; they wanted to seize upon ambiguities in the wartime agreements to enhance their respective notions of security. By engaging in rhetorical overkill, leaders in both capitals made compromise and accommodation more difficult. Few Americans, however, understood how their own rhetoric, charges, and actions contributed to the collapse of the wartime alliance.

Herbert Hoover, the “New Era,” and American Foreign Policy, 1921–1929

This chapter reveals that Herbert C. Hoover was a “forgotten progressive.” In the 1970s, his place in American history was being reconceived by historians, who argued that Hoover was not the heartless and dogmatic conservative who waged relentless war against the New Deal. Trained as an engineer, widely traveled, and committed to scientific management, Hoover wanted to use knowledge to transcend class divisions and national rivalries without overextending the reach of government. Serving as an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson during World War I and orchestrating the distribution of relief after the conflict, he believed that the system of democratic capitalism was beleaguered by mass politics and the ideological appeal of rival systems of political economy. He wanted to safeguard the American way of life, the defining quality of which was individual opportunity. He believed that to achieve this goal he had to encourage businessmen, workers, and farmers to see that their interests could be served through voluntary cooperation.

The Origins of Republican War Debt Policy, 1921–1923

This chapter argues that elite factions of the American business, banking, and farm sectors grasped that war debt payments were intimately related to the controversies over German reparations, the restoration of European currency stability, the promotion of American exports, the alleviation of unemployment, and the revival of agricultural prosperity. In short, they were far from ignorant about the needs of European reconstruction after World War I. The chapter studies the origins of war debt legislation in a microscopic way. In doing so, it reveals the complexity of the policymaking process and the diversity of motives bearing on decision-makers. Here, the chapter demonstrates the role of business and economics in the making of U.S. foreign policy, as well as the pluralism within the business community, the messiness of the legislative process, and the salience of organizational pressures within executive branch departments.