The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is one of these classic and famous books that's just faintly disappointing once you actually get around to reading it. I came to it knowing that it was supposed to be the definitive critique of U.S. foreign policy that launched the whole genre of New Left historiography. I found it instead to be somewhat leaden and clumsy in its prose, and basically focused on the wrong questions. 

To be sure, the core of William Appleman Williams's thesis is inarguable. The basic "tragedy" of American foreign policy, as he sees it, is that our nation proclaimed the ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, but then we lived to contradict them. 

Not only have we at times engaged in straightforward 19th century imperialism (we appear to have revived something on exactly that model in Venezuela today, for instance), but also—Williams's point is that our whole model of the "Open Door" or "free trade" penetration of foreign markers—what we would now call "neoliberalism"—was imperialistic in design from the beginning and a violation of self-determination. 

How could open markets and free competition be imperialistic? Well, because the U.S. enters that competition with a whole lot of unfair starting advantages (agricultural subsidies not least among them), and it leads to a lopsided development that leaves poor countries reliant on the Global North for imports and orients their entire economies to a single set of raw materials that often make them vulnerable to shocks in commodity prices, etc. 

This is all familiar to us today from longstanding critiques of U.S.-led development approaches; what Williams adds to it as a historian, however, is to show how long-standing these practices have been, and how overtly they were pitched to the American public as the goal of our foreign policy. 

Marxian methods of historical analysis are often criticized for being unfalsifiable. The Marxist historian posits "unconscious" or unacknowledged class or economic motives for all human behavior, all of which the elaborate "superstructure" of ideology and moral ideals serves merely to obscure.

But if the economic motives are unconscious anyway, how is the historian supposed to prove or disprove their presence? A person motivated by "superstructure" and a person motivated by sincere ethical ideals would, on this theory, be basically indistinguishable from one another. 

To this critique, Williams responds that he does not question the sincerity of American political leaders who pledged their devotion to the principle of "self-determination." The nature of tragedy is often that people end up betraying themselves for sympathetic reasons. 

Secondly, Williams points out that there is nothing "unconscious" or "unacknowledged" about the economic motives of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, he shows that time and again, the makers of U.S. policy overtly proclaimed the goals of opening foreign markets to penetration with U.S. exports. 

Across generations, U.S. politicians repeated the same lines about the dangers of a U.S. surplus product—both agricultural and manufactured—that needed to go find a market in order to maintain employment and prosperity domestically. This ties into Turner's famous "frontier thesis," and led, in Williams's telling, to a tendency to "externalize" U.S. economic policy in a way that is still with us today. 

Indeed, Williams plausibly suggests that even U.S. foreign aid and development loans had their origins in a drive on the part of U.S. policymakers to find a market for U.S. exports. As he quotes John Foster Dulles at one point: "We must finance our exports by loaning foreigners the where-with-all to pay for them." Nothing "unconscious" about that!

Williams is probably right about all this, up to a point. We still see today the consequences of U.S. "food dumping" in developing countries like Haiti, where a desire to secure contracts and boost exports for U.S. rice farmers ended up displacing and destroying the domestic agricultural industry, with disastrous consequences for local producers that are still unfolding today.  

But Williams perhaps goes astray when trying to apply this "economic" rationale even to explain the U.S. involvement in such complex global events as World War II, or the postwar reorganization of Eastern Europe that started the Cold War. 

When it comes to these matters, one can criticize Williams's position from at least two standpoints: 

First, does it matter? If the U.S. fought Hitler in part because someone made an economic argument, does that make the fight less justified? 

And second: in much the same way that moral and idealistic arguments can sometimes provide a smokescreen for mere economic self-interest—so too, economic arguments can sometimes play the role in political life of providing cover for what is actually a moral goal. 

It perhaps shouldn't surprise us that some people who actually favored fighting Hitler and aiding our European allies for principled reasons sometimes invoked "economic" arguments as well. They were trying to convince people who weren't already persuaded that joining the war effort would be in our nation's self-interest. 

So too, people today who actually oppose Trump's war in Iran on moral and legal grounds will also periodically point out: "it's terrible for gas prices too." 

This isn't because the anti-war crowd is actually primarily motivated by not having to pay so much at the pump. Their real reason for opposing the war is moral. They're just trying to preach to the unconverted by also appealing to their pocketbook. 

Indeed, reading Williams makes me almost hesitate to point out things like: "Trump's warmongering is throwing the stock market into turmoil!" lest some future Marxian historian spot the quote and cry: "aha! See! The anti-interventionists you thought were principled were actually motivated by class interest!"

In the same way that moral arguments made in public don't necessarily mean there wasn't an economic interest at play (to the Marxian historians' point), so too, the presence of an economic or self-interested argument doesn't mean that the real reason people acted wasn't on some moral and principled ground. 

"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life," as Oscar Wilde put it, in one of his favorite paradoxes. People really are as prone to act out of weird romantic and sentimental notions as they are out of concrete economic ones. 

It is a lesson to us all, however, that we should perhaps say what we really mean. If we oppose war because we think war is wrong, we should just say that, instead of trying to find some way to reach people at the level of their bank accounts that will later be misunderstood. 

I think of that passage from Mencius (in the D.C. Lau translation): 

Sung K'eng was on his way to Ch'u. Mencius, meeting him at Shih Ch'iu, asked him, "Where are you going, sir?"

"I heard that hostilities had broken out between Ch'in and Ch'u. I am going to see the king of Ch'u and try to persuade him to bring an end to them. [...]

"I do not wish to know the details, but may I ask about the gist of your argument? How are you going to persuade the kings?"

"I shall explain to them the unprofitability of war."

"Your purpose is lofty indeed, but your slogan is wrong. If you place profit before the kings of Ch'in and Ch'u, and they call off their armies because they are drawn to profit, then it means that the soldiers in their armies retire because they are drawn to profit. If a subject, in serving his prince, cherished the profit motive, and a son, in serving his father, and a younger brother, in serving his elder brother, did likewise, then it would mean that in their mutual relations, prince and subject, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, all cherished the profit motive to the total exclusion of morality. The prince of such a state is sure to perish. 

If, on the other hand, you placed morality before the kings of Ch'in and Ch'u and they called off their armies because they were drawn to morality, then it would mean that the soldiers in their armies retired because they were drawn to morality. If a subject in serving his prince, cherished morality, and a son, in serving his father, and a younger brother, in serving his elder brother, did likewise, then it would mean that in their mutual relations, prince and subject, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, all cherished morality to the exclusion of profit. The prince of such a state is sure to become a true King. What is the point of mentioning the word 'profit'?"

Many of the politicians Williams was describing may have been like Sung K'eng. They may, that is, actually been motivated by things other than "profit" in making their foreign policy decisions—they just chose it as their "slogan" because they thought this is how to persuade kings. 

All they managed to do by invoking it, however, was to furnish Williams with a bunch of quotes that now make it sound like the only reason we fought Germany and Japan was in order to penetrate foreign markets, and the only reason we opposed Stalin's expansionism in Eastern Europe was because we wanted to keep Hungary and Poland open to U.S. exports. 

Speaking of which, it is really when he comes to the Cold War that Williams's argument starts to make the least sense—which is all the more unfortunate, since this was probably the most famous and influential section of his book. 

Williams's core criticism of U.S. foreign policy, as we've seen, is that it didn't actually honor the principle of the self-determination of smaller nations that it had proclaimed. 

Yet, when it comes to the self-determination of small states that happen to have the misfortune of sharing a border with Russia, Williams is suddenly far less concerned with consistently adhering to this principle. He repeatedly refers to Ukraine and the Baltic countries as "western provinces" of Russia, and seems to see nothing problematic in Stalin's revanchist desire to add them back into his orbit. 

Of course, Williams responds to this by saying that he is not writing the Tragedy of Russian Diplomacy, but of American Diplomacy, and that if he had been writing the former, he might have portrayed things very differently. 

Nevertheless, he seems to genuinely lack any sympathy for the notion that Ukraine or the Baltic countries might feel that Russian imperialism was as great or greater a threat in their world than the American variety. 

To be sure, he does eventually acknowledge that Soviet actions in Hungary or Czechoslovakia, say, were "ruthless" and bad. But he sees these as later developments that only came about because the U.S. had earlier provoked Stalin, by refusing his "reasonable" good-faith demands to harvest a bunch of territory in Eastern Europe to rebuild the Czarists' former empire. 

Williams describes these ambition's on Stalin's part as a reflection of Russia's desire merely for "security" and a "perimeter" (to be obtained, apparently, by means of cultivating a stable of subject client states). 

In these regards, Williams is thus an early example of a school of criticism of U.S. foreign policy that is still with us today. 

So long as the critic is merely accusing U.S. foreign policy of being hypocritical and imperialistic, they are usually on safe ground. 

Where they so often go astray is when they pivot to arguing, "meanwhile, Russian foreign policy is not so bad as it's portrayed." 

As Walter Kaufmann once aptly wrote of the New Left: "The world is full of outrages, and it is easy to sympathize with the indignation of those who paint them black. It is less easy to follow such rhetoric when it goes on to paint the other side as white. As a rule, wrong clashes with greater wrong." 

If the experience of Stalin and then Putin has taught us anything, after all, it's that an authoritarian Russian government will indeed often be just as bad toward its neighbors as it's been painted. 

This isn't to say that Stalin or Putin were always true megalomaniacs with ambitions of global conquest. If all this genre of criticism is trying to demonstrate is that Russia generally behaves no differently than your average cynical, bullying great power, and that Britain and the U.S. have done the same kinds of things at times too, then they're probably not wrong. 

But how much have they really proved? It's a classic "leveling down" move. 

I for one am still holding out for a world in which we don't have cynical imperialism from either the U.S. or Russia. Is that too much to ask? 

Here, indeed, is the greatest disappointment of Williams's book. It is less a criticism of U.S. foreign policy (which would be justified) than it is an apologia for Stalin's (which is not). I was hoping that a book about the history of U.S. imperialism would discuss at greater length our military interventions in Latin America and Asia. Instead, Williams spends far more time trying to minimize the evils of Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe. 

Time and again, Williams derisively rejects the analogy between Stalin and Hitler, or his ambitions in Eastern Europe and Hitler's expansion into the Sudetenland—just as many leftists today similarly spurn any comparison between Putin's invasion of Ukraine and Hitler's invasion of Poland. 

The "Munich analogy" is one that Williams simply cannot stomach, and many left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy today still sneer whenever it is used against Putin. 

But, as Arthur Koestler showed, the analogy keeps getting invoked in these debates because it is actually a pretty strong one. 

As he writes in The Yogi and the Commissar: 

"The attitude of the Left and Liberal press in the Russian-Polish conflict was an uncanny replica of the Conservative attitude in the German-Czech conflict of 1939. The same flimsy arguments about ethnic minorities (Sudetan-Germans in the first, Ukrainians and Belorussians in the second case) were invoked to mollify an act of conquest by terror and military might; there was the same impatience with the annoying victim who refuses to be murdered in silence, and the same desire not to antagonize the aggressor; there were the same symptoms of uneasy conscience and the same veiled admissions that small nations and big principles have sometimes to be sacrificed in the interests of peace between the great powers." 

We could say the same today about how many Putin apologists (of both the left and the right) dealt with the war in Ukraine. 

And we can say the same of Williams, who seems at times genuinely confused as to why a little country like Latvia, say, didn't just want to be "murdered in silence." 

If Williams had confined himself to the long and disgraceful litany of U.S. interventions, coups, wars, and despoliations in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and on and on—all the way up to our ongoing war in Iran and our apparently neo-colonial indirect rule over Venezuela today—he would not at all have been wrong. 

It's when he switches around to saying, "but meanwhile, Stalin was just looking for security"—as so many Putin apologists today say that the Russian dictator was just looking for a buffer zone within his "sphere of influence" and so on—that he really loses the plot. 

I think with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Kaufmann was much closer to the truth. Much in U.S. foreign policy does indeed deserve to be "painted black"—but "It is less easy to follow such rhetoric when it goes on to paint the other side as white." 

The Cold War was indeed one of those times in history when "wrong clashed with greater wrong." 

It's odd to reach this conclusion, since we usually think the "revisionist" take—of the sort Williams represented—coming as it does with the benefit of a bit more experience under its belt, and after emotions have had a chance to cool—as likely to be the more correct one. 

But in actual fact, the people who seem to have gotten the Cold War mostly right were the ones who reacted to it in real time—people like Camus, in his "Neither Victims Nor Executioners"—people, in other words, who recognized that we shouldn't have to pick either of these two bullying Goliaths—that the abuses of one would-be imperial power do not justify or excuse another.