America's 'Special Relationships'

Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance

John Dumbrell, Axel Schäfer, John Dumbrell, Axel Schäfer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135278892
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This unique volume offers an original collection of essays on the theme of America's 'special relationships'. It interrogates in an original and provocative manner the distinctive character of America's interactions with an array of allies and clients, both international and domestic.

The essays vary in their focus; some are primarily historical, some are more contemporary. All consider the quality of 'specialness' in the context of America's relationship with particular countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Russia, Iran and Israel. The collection also concerns the relationship between the American state and key 'special' foreign policy interests, notably ethnic lobbies and religious groups.

Bringing together a wide range of experts, this timely collection provides a valuable addition to the debates surrounding US foreign policy, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of American politics, American history and international relations.

1 Model nations

US allies and partners in the modernizing imagination

Nick Cullather

As John F. Kennedy pledged in his inaugural address to support any friend and oppose any foe, he stipulated that while foes were all of one type, friends came in three varieties, each entailing a different obligation. Addressing himself first to ‘those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share’ he promised unity and cooperation. To ‘our sister republics south of our border’ he offered an Alliance for Progress. His most vivid words were reserved for a third category. To ‘those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free … those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery’, he offered the vaguest but most quotable promises, namely to prevail in their long twilight struggle, to ameliorate poverty and to help them help themselves. Among allies and clients, there were crucial distinctions of wealth, geography and, especially, time. Kennedy’s speech located the United States at a historic juncture in the present moment (‘let the word go forth from this time and place’) from which he looked forward and backward at America’s partners, some as cultural forebears, others as inheritors of an American legacy.¹

Classifying nations into ‘old’ and ‘new’ is a recurring theme in American rhetoric. Woodrow Wilson, on returning from the Paris Peace Conference, contrasted the old and powerful nations of Europe with the ‘new nations’ anxious to construct an age of cooperation and justice.² In 2003, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outraged France and Germany by relegating them into an ‘old Europe’ whose centre of gravity was shifting to the East. Implicit in the rhetoric of Wilson, Kennedy and Rumsfeld was an invitation for all nations to break free of their antiquity and join ranks of the new, but for many it was a difficult invitation to accept. Mexico’s ambassador to India in the 1960s, Octavio Paz, explained that countries clung to their former selves for reasons the United States did not understand because it ‘was not founded on a common tradition, as has been the case elsewhere, but on the notion of creating a common future. For modern India, as it is for Mexico, the national project, the future to be realized, implies a critique of the past’³ However, with history, as with finances and roads, American advisers lent valuable assistance to Mexico, India and other clients by constructing narratives to explain their journey forward.

When historians use the term ‘special relationship’, most often they refer to affinities of language, geography or heritage. There were also partnerships of destiny, however. The United States exercised global power in the post-war years through a form of welfare imperialism usually known as development, nation building or modernization.⁴ This strategy gave considerable scope for projecting the American ego into imagined futures. It is often said that Americans sought to copy themselves, to recreate other nations in their own image, but this actually understates the modernizing ambition. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1958 blueprint for Greater Baghdad, in the neoclassical capital built by the Americans in Manila, or in the privatization of government services in Iraq during the 2003 occupation, there is evidence of grander aspirations, a search for heights unachieved in the original.⁵

By the mid-twentieth century, American nation-builders already saw the United States as too encumbered by habit and politics to live up to its own true character. The authentic America could only be built elsewhere. The historian Perry Miller, who participated in the post-war occupation of Japan, observed that General Douglas MacArthur wanted ‘to make of Japan a new Middle West – not, of course, the Middle West as it is, or in fact ever was – but how it perpetually dreams of being’.⁶ There was a tension inherent in the enterprise, as he implied, since the dreams cast abroad were idiosyncratic. MacArthur’s Japan might differ from Truman’s, and there might be a different Japan for each political complexion, each claiming to represent the essence of the American way.

Walt W. Rostow, probably the most eminent modernization theorist, observed that Kennedy came to office amid a mood of ‘romantic hope about the developing nations [prevailing] in the early 1960s – a hope that they, coming late to modernity and the arena of power, would be wiser than the old states of Europe. Perhaps they could avoid pedestrian and bloody struggles for real estate and glory and lead the whole community of nations to stable peace’.⁷ Kennedy was immune to these illusions, Rostow insisted, but both he and his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, believed the bar was set higher for the new nations. They would have to overcome burdens of tradition, overpopulation and colonial involution that the United States never faced, and their breakthrough to modernity would be a correspondingly greater triumph.

The power of the Soviet and Chinese examples was that they unfolded in the punishing social environment of Asia. China’s struggle to overcome immemorial poverty and backwardness was, Walter Lippmann wrote shortly before Kennedy’s inaugural address, ‘a terrible and awe-inspiring spectacle’. Comparisons to America’s achievements only stoked the communist propaganda mill because they had come too easily. ‘Our system, which grew up on a rich and empty continent, cannot be duplicated in Asia’. For that reason, the United States needed a surrogate, a crowded, destitute, tradition-bound country in which to demonstrate that American principles could conquer poverty. ‘We are NOT an example that backward peoples can follow, and unless we manage to create an example which they can follow, we shall almost certainly lose the Cold War in Asia, and Africa, and perhaps elsewhere’.⁸

Hardheaded realists, as well as softhearted idealists, had a stake in creating showcases of American progress around the world. This project became urgent at the same time that mathematical modelling, the technique that revealed the inner workings of the atom, began to be widely used to analyse complex social systems. Joseph Schumpeter’s models of business fluctuations, Wassily Leontief’s simulations of organizational structures and John von Neumann’s and Oskar Morgenstern’s mathematical maps of multiplayer games lent a new scientific credibility to sociology, economics and political science in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps inevitably, ‘model’ joined the vocabulary of development, referring to a loose, descriptive analogue pairing a nation with a strategy – the Taiwan model of export-led growth or the Chilean model of monetary reform – encapsulating a country’s economic or political history as a sequence of strategic moves open to imitation.⁹

Timothy Mitchell notes that in this usage ‘the nation-state appears to be a functional unit – something akin to a refrigerator or a pump – that can be compared with and used as a model for improving other such units’.¹⁰ All models are seen as elaborations on some aspect of the American template, but each is different. They reflect the strategic or economic priorities of a given moment, as well as varying opinions on the image that best represents modernity, and choices about what other nations can and will imitate. Barbara Ward, a journalist and popularizer of modernization theory, wrote that much depended on discovering ‘the version of our society which is appreciable to the backward peoples of Asia’.¹¹

This essay will examine two models: Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s became a model for post-war reconstruction and the revitalization of agriculture, and India in the 1950s came to be seen as the West’s contender in a race for modernization against China. In each case, the politics of representation became the principal dynamic in a bilateral relationship with the United States. As nations, each provoked ambivalence or antagonism in Washington, but as models, they became partners in global strategy.

Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas earned the nickname el FDR mexicano, partly because his time in office (1934–40) roughly coincided with Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms, but also because his social experiment, involving reforms of health care, trade, labour and agriculture, came to be seen as the first real application of the New Deal outside the United States. His most impressive breakthrough was in agriculture. Scientific techniques and village outreach combined to produce a boom in staple crops. By 1950, Mexico was recognized as ‘a blueprint for hungry nations’, a prototype for the US government’s Point IV initiative and for Ford and Rockefeller Foundation projects in Asia. India’s food ministry announced in 1964 that ‘if Mexico can do it, so can India’.¹²

Cárdenas had little to do with making his country a model. American tourists, social scientists, image-makers and politicians did most of the work. In 1935, the Sunset Limited began daily rail service between Los Angeles and Mexico City. The following year, the Pan American Highway was completed from Nuevo Laredo to the capital, and 10,000 American tourists a year descended on Mexico. A popular guidebook reassured travellers that there was no need to cross an ocean to find the attractions ‘of the cold north and the lower tropics; of Persia, India, Arabia, Spain, and the Holy Land’.¹³ Mexico was better than Europe, Katherine dos Passos noted, ‘because the country is not standardized or touristed’.¹⁴ Its untouched villages lured sociologists such as Robert Redfield, eager to study the workings of a preindustrial community, social critics such as John Steinbeck, and filmmakers such as John Huston.

Hollywood found in Mexico, according to Richard Slotkin, ‘a mythic space par excellence’ into which it could project America’s struggle to build a civilization. This was the glory era of the Mexican western. Viva Villa! (1933), Juarez (1939), The Fugitive (1947), and Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) – all had political themes.¹⁵ Malcolm Lowry, whose novel Under the Volcano was also filmed by Huston, sketched this figurative landscape: ‘The scene is Mexico, the meeting place, according to some, of mankind itself … the age-old arena of racial and political conflicts of every nature’, he told his publisher. ‘We can see it as a kind of timeless symbol of the world on which we can place the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel and indeed anything else we please’.¹⁶

Americans discovered in Mexico a baseline against which to gauge their modernity. As Texas State Highway 96 turned south onto the Pan American Highway, Ernest Gruening, editor of The Nation, noticed that ‘the swift-moving mechanized patter of a modern society gives way to a simple, less regulated, earlier stage of development’. Downshifting for the ascent into the Sierra Madre, the motorist travelled ‘backward also, through the long reaches of the past’. The indigenous inhabitants, he explained, were ‘original Americans’ preserving traditions ‘rejected and neglected by us’.¹⁷ Academic and popular interest in Mexico revealed a discontent with the barrenness and uncertainty of modern life. For those unable to make the trip, Abby Rockefeller sponsored travelling folk art exhibits, giving Depression-weary Americans a glimpse of a simpler time. Stuart Chase, the economist who gave the New Deal its name, penned a bestselling travel account that contrasted the United States, ‘the outstanding exhibit of the power age’, against Mexico, ‘the outstanding exhibit of the handicraft age’. Mexico’s pueblos, he estimated, stood roughly 100 years behind Muncie, Indiana, but Americans could nonetheless envy the villagers’ self-reliant indifference to the laws of supply and demand. An ultimate solution to the ravages of the business cycle, he proposed, might be found in a merger of old and new cultures.¹⁸

Cárdenas’s experiment with autonomous village communes (ejidos) fascinated intellectuals who saw in urban slums and rural ‘dust bowls’ evidence that industrial economies had become dangerously unbalanced. Redford, Steinbeck, Lewis Mumford and other critics argued that wealth, population and knowledge had become overly concentrated in cities. Eyler N. Simpson, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Chicago, studied the ejido system and admired Mexico’s policy of sending young, urban doctors, teachers and technicians to help build self-sufficient rural villages. In The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out, he portrayed Mexico as a neutral terrain ideal for social experimentation, a ‘clear and unencumbered’ ground without the ‘vested interests and antiquated institutional structures’ that bedevilled planning in the United States. Like Chase, he sought a middle way between urban congestion and bucolic poverty. He predicted that ejidos would grow into balanced farming and manufacturing villages interlinked by highways and power lines, creating an economy both spiritually and materially enriching. It was a way out not just for Mexico, but for Americans, too.¹⁹

When he came into office, Roosevelt attributed the Depression to ‘the dislocation of a proper balance between urban and rural life’. As farm groups were felling telephone polls to block roads into the cities and the Oklahoma and Nebraska breadbaskets were engulfed in massive dust storms, Roosevelt saw the economic catastrophe facing industry and natural disasters in the countryside as symptoms. Rebalancing the vital functions of modern life called for ‘something deeper and far more important’ than Herbert Hoover’s emergency measures – ‘in other words state planning’.²⁰ Domestic concerns gave New Dealers an interest in Cárdenas’s experiment, but liberals watched Mexico for other reasons too. Gruening, Chase, Simpson, Frank Tannenbaum of the New York Times and other observers argued that a social revolution was underway throughout the rural world, and that Mexico offered ‘a moderate answer to the radical solutions unfolding in Russia and Spain’. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace and Josephus Daniels, the US ambassador to Mexico, urged Roosevelt to send aid and advisers to prevent Mexico from becoming ‘another Spain’.²¹

These voices were counterbalanced by conservatives who saw Mexico as a renegade nation. Cárdenas’s redistribution of US-owned lands and his 1938 nationalization of oil and railroad properties outraged the American financial community almost as much as his aid to the Republican side in Spain’s civil war offended anti-communists. To Sumner Welles and Cordell Hull in the State Department, Cárdenismo was not far removed from Bolshevism. The United States imposed sanctions and demanded restitution for expropriated property at terms Mexico was unwilling to accept. Pro-Mexican New Dealers urged lifting the sanctions, but the issue of restitution proved unresolvable because each side spoke of a different Mexico. Conservatives demanded that Mexico perform on its obligations as a nation, while liberals valued Mexico for its example to other nations. The term had not yet come into diplomatic parlance, but they saw it as a model.²²

Ultimately, the approach of war and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The politics of special relationships
• 1 Model nations: US allies and partners in the modernizing imagination
• 2 Old world, new world: Great Britain and America from the beginning
• 3 Hating Bush, supporting Washington: George W. Bush, anti-Americanism and the US–UK special relationship
• 4 The US–Canada relationship: How ‘special’ is America’s oldest unbroken alliance?
• 5 Australia, the United States and the unassailable alliance
• 6 Yearning and spurning: New Zealand’s special relationships with Britain and the United States
• 7 Testing the limits of a special relationship: US unilateralism and Dutch multilateralism in the twenty-first century
• 8 An aborted special relationship: US–Russia relations in the post-Cold War world: 1989–2007
• 9 The ecstasy and the agony: The rise and fall of US–Iran relations
• 10 America’s Israel/ Israel’s America
• 11 US–Israel relations: A special friendship
• 12 The death of a peculiar special relationship: Myron Taylor and the religious roots of America’s Cold War
• 13 ‘What Marx, Lenin, and Stalin needed was … to be born again’: Evangelicals and the special relationship between church and state in US Cold War foreign policy