American Idealism – Foreign Policy

American Idealism

ALL TWELVE POSTWAR presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world. Each has treated it as axiomatic that the United States embarked on an unselfish quest for the resolution of conflicts and the equality of all nations, in which the ultimate benchmark for success would be world peace and universal harmony. All presidents from both political parties have proclaimed the applicability of American principles to the entire world, of which perhaps the most eloquent articulation (though in no sense unique) was President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961. Kennedy called on his country to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

He made no distinction between threats; he established no priorities for American engagement. He specifically rejected the shifting calculations of the traditional balance of power. What he called for was a “new endeavor”—“not a balance of power, but a new world of law.” It would be a “grand and global alliance” against the “common enemies of mankind.” What in other countries would have been treated as a rhetorical flourish has, in American discourse, been presented as a specific blueprint for global action.

Speaking to the UN General Assembly one month after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson affirmed the same unconditional global commitment: Any man and any nation that seeks peace, and hates war, and is willing to fight the good fight against hunger and disease and misery, will find the United States of America by their side, willing to walk with them, walk with them every step of the way. That sense of responsibility for world order and the indispensability of American power, buttressed by a consensus that based the moral universalism of the leaders on the American people’s dedication to freedom and democracy, led to the extraordinary achievements of the Cold War period and beyond. America helped rebuild the devastated European economies, created the Atlantic Alliance, and formed a global network of security and economic partnerships. It moved from the isolation of China to a policy of cooperation with it. It designed a system of open-world trade that has fueled productivity and prosperity and was (as it has been over the past century) at the cutting edge of almost all of the technological revolutions of the period.

It supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces behind the building of a new international order. For a few decades, there was an extraordinary correspondence between America’s traditional beliefs and historical experience and the world in which it found itself.

For the generation of leaders who assumed the responsibility for constructing the postwar order, the two great experiences had been surmounting the recession of the 1930s and victory over aggression in the 1940s. Both tasks lent themselves to definite solutions: in the economic field, the restoration of growth, and the inauguration of new social welfare programs; in the war, unconditional surrender of the enemy. At the end of the war, the United States, as the only major country to emerge essentially undamaged, produced about 60 percent of the world’s GNP.

It was thereby able to define leadership as essentially practical progress along lines modeled on the American domestic experience; alliances as Wilsonian concepts of collective security; and governance as programs of economic recovery and democratic reform. America’s Cold War undertaking began as a defense of countries that shared the American view of world order. The adversary, the Soviet Union, was conceived as having strayed from the international community to which it would eventually return. On the journey toward that vision, America began to encounter other historical views of world order. New nations with different histories and cultures appeared on the scene as colonialism ended. The nature of Communism became more complex and its impact more ambiguous. Governments and armed doctrines rejecting American concepts of domestic and international order mounted tenacious challenges. Limits to American capabilities, however vast, became apparent. Priorities needed to be set.

America’s encounters with these realities raised a new question that had not heretofore been put to the United States: Is American foreign policy a story with a beginning and an end, in which final victories are possible? Or is it a process of managing and tempering ever-recurring challenges? Does foreign policy have a destination, or is it a process of never-completed fulfillment? In answering these questions, America put itself through anguishing debates and domestic divisions about the nature of its world role. They were the reverse side of its historic idealism. By framing the issue of America’s world role as a test of moral perfection, it castigated itself—sometimes to profound effect—for falling short. In expectation of a final culmination to its efforts—the peaceful, democratic, rules-based world that Wilson prophesied—it was often uncomfortable with the prospect of foreign policy as a permanent endeavor for contingent aims. With nearly every president insisting that America had universal principles while other countries merely had national interests, the United States has risked extremes of over-extension and disillusioned withdrawal. Since the end of World War II, in quest of its vision of world order, America has embarked on five wars on behalf of expansive goals initially embraced with near-universal public support, which then turned into public discord—often on the brink of violence.

In three of these wars, the Establishment consensus shifted abruptly to embrace a program of effectively unconditional unilateral withdrawal. Three times in two generations, the United States abandoned wars midstream as inadequately transformative or as misconceived—in Vietnam as a result of congressional decisions, in Iraq and Afghanistan by choice of the President. Victory in the Cold War has been accompanied by congenital ambivalence. America has been searching its soul about the moral worth of its efforts to a degree for which it is difficult to find historical parallels. Either American objectives had been unfulfilled, or America did not pursue a strategy compatible with reaching these objectives. Critics will ascribe these setbacks to the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders. Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to resolve ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.