A Nation Like All Others

A Brief History of American Foreign Relations

Warren Cohen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231545952
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Belief in the United States as a force for good in the world runs deep. Yet an honest consideration reveals a history marred by great crimes and ordinary errors, alongside many achievements and triumphs. In this comprehensive account of American foreign relations from the nation's founding through the present day, the diplomatic historian Warren I. Cohen calls attention to the uses—and abuses—of U.S. international leadership and the noble as well as the exploitative ends that American power has wrought.

In A Nation Like All Others, Cohen offers a brisk, argumentative history that confronts the concept of American exceptionalism and decries the lack of moral imagination in American foreign policy. He begins with the foreign policy of colonial and postrevolutionary America, exploring interactions with European powers and Native Americans and the implications of slavery and westward expansion. He then traces the rise of American empire; the nation's choices leading up to and in the wake of the First World War; and World War II and renewed military involvement in foreign affairs. Cohen provides a long history of the Cold War, from its roots under Truman through the Korean and Vietnam Wars to the transformation of the international system under Reagan and Gorbachev. Finally, he surveys America's recent history in the Middle East, with particular attention to the mismanagement of the War on Terror and Abu Ghraib. Written with great depth of knowledge and moral clarity, A Nation Like All Others suggests that an unflinching look at the nation's past is America's best option to shape a better future.

 

1

TO CREATE A NATION

Out of thirteen disparate, often unruly British colonies lining the Atlantic coast of North America in the mid-eighteenth century, there was to emerge a great and powerful nation. That outcome, believed by some to have been ordained by God, was apparent to few mortals at the time.

On the eve of what the American colonists called the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War of 1756–1763), they perceived themselves surrounded by hostile Indians and French and Spanish colonists—all engaged in a struggle for land. The war began as the Americans pressed westward from the coastal regions, contesting control of areas once dominated by Indians and now equally desired by the French. Soon the British military was drawn into what became the fifth Anglo-French war since 1689, a long-standing competition for dominance in Europe and North America.

In addition to lusting for land, the American colonists, specifically the merchants among them, craved greater opportunities for trade, circumventing the restrictions of British mercantilism whenever they could. But much of their freedom of action, whether to expand their landholdings or their trade, came under pressure after 1763. The British were exhausted financially by the war and found it necessary to impose new taxes on the colonies, enforce their navigation laws more rigorously, and restrict American settlers from crossing the Appalachians to provoke Indian uprisings or other European settlers.

The colonial elite was outraged by each perceived interference with its liberty, its freedom to speculate in western lands, its freedom to smuggle goods into and out of Dutch, French, or Spanish possessions. For generations the colonists had brought the blessings of civilization to the West, replacing heathen Indians with Christian settlers. For decades the colonies had been part of the Atlantic trading community, aspiring to free trade while ignoring the dictates of British mercantilism. Now London was tightening the reins, attacking what the colonists imagined to be their rights as Englishmen.

In the late 1760s and early 1770s, few of the men and women who occupied Britain’s American colonies thought to create an independent state. The prevailing demand was for autonomy, a continuation of the salutary neglect the colonies had enjoyed before the French and Indian War, those glorious days when there was minimal interference with westward expansion and illicit commerce. Parliament, however, was adamant: the colonies had to contribute financially to their own protection, fit snugly into the British mercantilist system, and stay east of the Appalachians where there would be fewer confrontations with Indians and other European settlers.

Gradually London and its American colonists became alienated and drifted toward forceful resistance by the colonists and a military response ordered by London. In 1774 a “Continental Congress” assembled to discuss means of achieving relief from Britain’s oppressive new rules. There was little talk of independence: the participants demanded the restoration of their rights as Englishmen. Neither king nor Parliament offered solace. By the time the second Congress met, in May 1775, tensions were great. British troops assembled in Massachusetts, under orders to tolerate no colonial impudence. In April they had marched on Concord and Lexington, where armed colonists awaited them. Scores died on both sides in the ensuing skirmishes.

It was obvious to the members of the Congress that a war had begun—a war the colonies could not win without outside assistance. They created a Committee of Secret Correspondence for negotiations with foreign countries, hoping to obtain aid with minimal involvement in the sordid affairs of Europe. They understood they were edging toward independence—that they could expect little if any support abroad if their aim was merely better treatment within the British Empire. Nonetheless, they were willing, initially, to countenance only commercial ties with their potential benefactors in Paris and Madrid. They imagined that by opening their ports to all, by substituting free trade for mercantilism, others in the Atlantic trading community would be willing to provide the needed support.

Ultimately, a Declaration of Independence proved necessary—if not sufficient—to alert foreign capitals to the imminent creation of a new republican state, a redeemer state, dedicated to changing the existing international order. Presented to the world on July 4, 1776, at a time when George Washington’s disheveled forces had yet to win a battle, the Declaration gained little attention; nor would its republican principles have won much favor in the courts of European monarchs. Given the existence of slavery in the colonies and the brutality with which the colonists treated Indians who posed obstacles to their land grabs, the Declaration’s insistence that “all men are created equal” could not have been viewed as more than gross hypocrisy. No one could conceivably imagine how subsequent generations of Americans would struggle for centuries to turn that vision to reality.

They were not yet representatives of a country; nonetheless colonial leaders saw themselves and their people as a breed apart from Europeans. They were the occupants of the “city on the hill”; theirs was a model society, guided by God’s hand. And yet they feared negotiations with European diplomats they perceived as unscrupulous, ever-ready to take advantage of American innocence and commitment to principle. Fortunately, they had Benjamin Franklin on their side.

Franklin was enormously successful in manipulating a willing French court. Count Vergennes, the French foreign minister, was eager to weaken the British Empire in any way he could—short of going to war. No supporter of the republican principles that the Americans espoused, by no means eager to see an American nation arise that would challenge French interests in North America, he was nonetheless willing to proffer loans sufficient to keep the Americans in the field. Not until the colonists won their first major victory, at Saratoga in October 1777, was he willing to ally France openly with them.

In the Franco-American treaty of alliance in 1778, Franklin gained the essential American goal: France would fight until the Americans gained their independence. Military supplies, French troops, and French ships would be forthcoming. Virtually all the munitions with which Washington’s men were armed came from France. The critical battle of Yorktown, the surrender of Lord Cornwallis in 1781, was achieved only because of the participation of French troops and the presence of the French fleet in Chesapeake Bay. Without the role of France, the colonists could not have won their freedom from the British Empire.

It must be noted, however, that in accepting the terms of the treaty, the Americans capitulated to the norms of eighteenth-century world politics. They promised not to sign a separate peace with Great Britain, committing themselves to fight alongside their French ally—which in turn had committed itself to fight alongside Spain until the Spanish regained Gibraltar. What would have happened had the Americans honored the treaty, had they stood by their alleged principles as the Spanish continue to struggle to regain Gibraltar into the twenty-first century?

Fortunately for the soon to be independent country, its negotiators abandoned principle and violated the first treaty ever signed on its behalf—as well as their instructions from a Congress bribed and manipulated by the French. Franklin and his obstreperous and mistrustful colleagues John Adams and John Jay chose to meet with London’s envoy and, in due course, to sign a separate peace. The British terms were generous, astonishing Vergennes, who, steeped in Realpolitik, did not fault the Americans for abandoning their ally—especially when it gave him an excuse to renege on his promise to fight until Spain regained Gibraltar.

Thus in 1783 the thirteen colonies achieved independence, only to learn that the great empire their diplomats had won, westward to the Mississippi, northward to Canada, and south to the border of Spanish Florida, would be theirs only if they were willing to fight for it. Indians, most of whom had fought alongside the British, were no more willing to vacate their lands than they had been before the war. The British showed little inclination to leave their forts in the Northwest, and the Spanish and French plotted to thwart the imperial dreams of the Americans.

Jealous of their liberties, the Americans had intentionally created a government too weak to oppress them. It was also too weak to defend them and their interests. The government under the Articles of Confederation, conceived in 1777 but ratified only in 1781, lacked the power to tax, to regulate commerce, to provide for national defense. The states, though nominally united, pursued their disparate interests, often to the detriment of the nation. The economy was depressed, and no country anywhere in the world was volunteering assistance. Free from the monopoly of the British East India Company, American merchants immediately entered the China trade, but it was not nearly sufficient to compensate for the losses sustained by exclusion from historic markets within the British Empire. It was evident to European leaders that this new nation, conceived in liberty, would not survive for very long.

It was apparent to the American political elite as well that its vision for the republic was in danger, and that the central government had to be given greater authority—at minimum to regulate commerce, domestic and foreign. Gradually in the course of 1786, a consensus grew to call a convention to amend the articles, and a Constitutional Convention opened in May 1787, with Washington chosen unanimously to preside. Any thought of merely amending the Articles of Confederation vanished quickly, and the men assembled began work on a new constitution.

Obviously, the Constitutional Convention was necessitated by the exigencies of foreign affairs, by an existential threat to the United States of America. It remained to be seen whether the participants could produce a document that would both provide a foundation for a strong government and win the acceptance of states jealous of their powers and in conflict with one another over issues as vital as land borders and slavery.

2

A NOT QUITE PERFECT UNION

The government created by the Articles of Confederation had proved inadequate to meet the needs of the new nation, primarily in its foreign affairs. The men who inspired the Constitutional Convention were determined to remedy this and other deficiencies. The constitution they constructed gave the central government the powers they thought it required to control commerce and other relations with an indifferent, often hostile world. Where authority to determine foreign policy would rest within the new government, the balance between executive and legislative power, was left ambiguous. The certainty that George Washington would be the first president mitigated fears that republican ideals would be subverted by a monarchial figure.

The country Washington came forward to lead was in serious trouble. It was threatened on all sides by nations that had no interest in seeing it prosper. The British had failed to honor the peace treaty of 1783, continuing to operate their forts in the northwestern territories and to support Indian nations struggling to hold on to lands coveted by American settlers. In the South, Spanish authorities hemmed in other settlers as best they could and fostered separatist movements to deny American access to the Mississippi. And trade had suffered significantly as a result of lost access to the British West Indies and restrictive mercantilist practices against which government under the Articles of Confederation lacked recourse.

With Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton at his side, Washington perceived three goals: the expansion of commerce, the expansion of territory under the control of his government, and the respect of the Western world. His first success came in the confrontation with the Indians who fought to protect their homes, with British support, in the Ohio territory. After several disastrous expeditions, decimated by the Indians, General “Mad Anthony” Wayne drove them out of their lands, razing their villages as his men moved forward in late 1790 and early 1791. Sensibly, Wayne and his British counterparts avoided direct conflict.

Success in getting the British to withdraw from their forts, as pledged in 1783, came later. Progress in expanding trade was slower yet—enormously important not only for the economy generally but because customs duties were usually the federal government’s primary source of income before the twentieth century. And respect was a long way off.

The French Revolution, to which most Americans appear to have been sympathetic initially, imagining France would pursue their model of democratic republicanism, soon divided the country. Jefferson and his followers remained supportive of France, despite abuses by the revolutionaries. Washington, Hamilton, and others, appalled by the chaos and violence, turned against the revolution. When the wars provoked by the revolutionaries erupted in 1792, Washington, despite the alliance of 1778 with France, proclaimed American neutrality. Neither he nor Hamilton was unaware of the extent to which the American economic system was tied to Britain. He never doubted the need to avoid being dragged into a war, the need to give the new nation time to strengthen.

The outbreak of war in Europe intensified partisanship in the United States. Those who would tilt toward France, led by Jefferson, perceived Hamilton and the president, who appeared to follow his lead, to be Anglophiles, despite the contempt with which London treated their country. This, indeed, was the context in which the first political parties emerged.

The British navy refused to respect American neutrality and the American contention that “free ships make free goods.” It seized American merchant ships and impressed seamen from those ships, many of whom were deserters from the Royal Navy. Control of the seas—the ability to deny resources to France—was central to British strategy. London was also inciting Indians in the Northwest as insurance against American inroads into Canada. By 1794 an Anglo-American war seemed likely.

Determined to avert war, believing his country needed another generation of peace to assure its security, Washington sent John Jay to London to seek a compromise. The British, too, were eager to avoid war but not so eager that they were willing to ease restrictions on American trade with France. They did end the seizure of American shipping in the British West Indies and evacuated their forts in the Northwest, nothing more than what they had agreed to do in 1783, but Jay could get no further concessions. The treaty he signed in 1794 disappointed Washington and outraged Jefferson and others who sympathized with France. Washington understood, however, that the United States lacked the power to exact more from the British and signed the treaty into law after the Senate ratified it in secret.

Remarkably, in the years that followed, arguably as a result of Jay’s treaty, the United States prospered. Betrayed by the British, the Indians of the Northwest were driven back and brutalized by the American army, opening their land for further settlement. American exports soared, bringing great wealth to the port cities. And the South and Southwest gained as well: Spain, fearing an Anglo-American rapprochement, yielded to demands of the frontiersmen for access to the Mississippi and the use of New Orleans as a depot. Madrid even yielded to the Americans in the Florida border dispute.

None of this, however, prevented the country’s political elite from dividing into a Federalist Party dominated by Hamilton and commercial interests in the Northeast and a Republican Party led by Jefferson and James Madison with support primarily from agricultural interests in the South and West. The Federalists tilted toward Great Britain and the Republicans toward France.

In 1796 Washington prepared to step down as his countrymen narrowly selected John Adams to succeed him. In his Farewell Address, fully aware of French efforts to interfere in the election on behalf of Jefferson and troubled by partisanship, he warned against the dangers of foreign influence. He argued that permanent alliances, such as Americans had signed with France in 1778, were a mistake. Given that the nation’s prosperity depended on international trade, isolation was impossible, but it was essential for the United States to maintain its freedom of action.

British pressures on American trade continued, but it was the French depredations that most troubled the Adams administration. Angered by French efforts to intimidate the United States, Adams built up the American navy. When the French negotiat...