Tomorrow, the World

The book examines when and why the United States decided “to become the supreme political and military power holding itself responsible for enforcing world order?”. Wertheim seeks to study the origins of the U.S. will to lead the world. This book labels U.S. global leadership for what it was: a choice. It locates and explains that decision in history by posing the historical question of why the United States opted to install itself as the world’s armed superpower.

Wertheim informs that the decision arose from the response of “American officials and intellectuals” to the fall of France in the early summer of 1940 and the consequent prospect that Adolf Hitler’s Germany would hold sway over most of the developed world outside North America. This prospect led “the U.S. foreign policy elite as a group” to conclude that “the superior coercive power of the United States is required to underwrite a decent world”. Without glossing over the way “the United States brutally extended its dominion across North America”, he points out that before World War II, the nation “pursued capitalist growth and fancied itself exceptional while shunning political and military entanglements in Europe and Asia.” Americans were confident that they “could generally conduct commerce without imposing its terms by force.” Moreover, this geopolitical stance was strongly buaressed ideologically by the belief that participation in power politics was incompatible with republican liberty, and the related contrast between the Old World and the New. As economic growth elevated the nation’s standing, Americans, as private citizens and government officials, promoted an ‘internationalism’ involving the peaceful resolution of disputes and the development of international law. In its aspiration to supersede power politics, Wertheim sees Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations as expressive of this approach. He posits that the commitment to global “armed dominance” required a “rupture” in how Americans conceived their nation’s role. Before World War II, he argues, “the United States pursued capitalist growth and fancied itself exceptionally while shunning political and military entanglements in Europe and Asia”. ‘Isolationism’ had never been the goal of U.S. policy and is a bogey term invented in the 1930s by advocates of greater involvement in overseas conflicts. ‘Internationalism’ was also redefined to mean participation in collective security. In contrast, earlier, the term had referred to aaempts to supersede power politics with a system based on international law and public opinion.

The core of this book is an analytical narrative of the evolving thinking of the ‘experts’ involved in the War and Peace Studies project set up by the Council on Foreign Relations in collaboration with the State Department ajer the outbreak of the European war in 1939. Ajer the fall of France, the various groups of the Project began producing reports defining the extent of the world that the United States could hope to defend successfully. At first, this was conceived as a ‘quarter-sphere’ centred on North America. S5ll, as Britain’s continued resistance led to an assumption of Anglo-American cooperation, this expanded to include the British Commonwealth and Empire, east Asia, and the entire Western Hemisphere. A memorandum in October 1940 called for an “integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States within the non-German world”. By December 1940, Wertheim concludes, not only had the conception of America’s world role been transformed, but “internationalism” meant “less the realization of world harmony than the projection of world power by the United States”. In 1941, as U.S. collaboration with Britain’s war effort increased, the planners envisaged “an Americo-British” world order. The realization that this Project lacked appeal to the American public, Wertheim argues, led to the commitment to a more inclusive peacekeeping organization despite the disenchantment of many with the League of Nations. This ‘instrumental internationalism,’ however, was designed to legitimate the exercise of U.S. power rather than to subordinate it to international law and multilateral procedures. Wertheim argues that until the late 1930s, ‘internationalism’ continued to signify belief in measures to promote the peaceful sealement of interstate disputes rather than the assumption of overseas diplomatic and military commitments. There was continuity, Wertheim concedes, in the goal of “ordering the world along liberal, American lines,” but he insists that the conviction “that peaceful forms of engagement required hegemonic force behind them” was both novel and transformative.

The book is an original, carefully researched examination of the thinking of foreign policy elites and their effect in American history on rewiring American foreign policy. It is a powerful account that insists that scholars revisit their understandings of the U.S. rise to global dominance”, above all, by showing that it was “a choice – or rather, a constellation of choices” rather than a policy dictated by the requirements of self-defence or an accidental happening.

Overall, it is a very well-researched book that richly deserves to be read by geopolitically inclined scholars and thinkers.

My Rating 4/5