US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy

The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower

Derek S. Reveron, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Mackubin Thomas Owens

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781626160910, 9781626161580
• eBook ISBN: 9781626161597
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Safe from the battlefields of Europe and Asia, the United States led the post–World War II global economic recovery through international assistance and foreign direct investment. With an ardent decolonization agenda and a postwar legitimacy, the United States attempted to construct a world characterized by cooperation. When American optimism clashed with Soviet expansionism, the United States started on a path to global hegemony.

In US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy, the authors analyze the strategic underpinnings of hegemony, assess the national security establishment that sustains dominance, consider the impact on civil-military relations, and explore the intertwining relationships between foreign policy, defense strategy, and commercial activities. Eschewing conventional analyses, the volume not only identifies drivers and continuities in foreign policy, but it also examines how the legacy of the last sixty-five years will influence future national security policy that will be characterized by US leadership in an increasingly competitive world.

From civil-military relations to finance, and from competing visions of how America should make war to its philosophy of securing peace through reconstruction and reconciliation, US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy offers unique insights into the links between military and commercial power as it charts the rise of a historical rarity: the incidental superpower. This accessibly written book is suitable for students and general readers as well as scholars.

1

From Regional Power to Global Superpower

What we need in this coming period is faith in ourselves, courage to do the difficult and distasteful things, consideration and forbearance for our allies, without whose confidence and help our purposes will not be accomplished.

—Harry S. Truman, address to the National War College, 1952

In August 1943, speaking before the Canadian parliament, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reiterated a statement that he had delivered five years earlier: “The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce, and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.”¹ With this recognition, Roosevelt envisioned the United States playing a much greater role in postwar international affairs as one of the dominant powers of the global system. Yet as he and other senior American leaders began to strategize about the shape of international relations once the Second World War concluded, they had no master plan for ascending to superpower status. Further, there was no expectation that American leadership—seen primarily at this time to mean American coordination of joint efforts undertaken by a coalition of major powers—required massive American military, economic, and political engagement with other parts of the world, the maintenance of a huge military establishment, or continued, sustained deployments of US forces outside the territory of the United States. Instead, the United States conceived of a postwar world where the allies could maintain peace through regional hegemony.

The Four Policemen

Without intention or master plan, the United States did not want to inherit the British Empire or establish its own empire. Yet the destroyed industrial base of Europe and Asia and the killing of 60 to 85 million people in World War II (both combat fatalities plus associated war deaths) put the United States on a path to global hegemony. In 1945, the United States became the de facto global economy, responsible for more than half of the world’s gross domestic product. Further, while there were some four hundred thousand US casualties in World War II, that number was low relative to an entire generation of Europeans, Soviets, Chinese, and Japanese that the war claimed; this demographic advantage set up the US industrial base to expand rapidly when the war ended, which was later sustained through the baby boom.

While some privately advised the president that the United States should take the world for itself following the war, Roosevelt eschewed sole global dominance.² He conceived of the United States as one of the world’s “Four Policemen” (along with the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Nationalist China)—with each bearing primary responsibility for creating security in different parts of the world.³ Collectively the Four Policemen would maintain sufficient armed forces to discourage future aggressors and would “jointly blockade the disturber of the peace and confront him militarily if he would not abandon his aggressive stand.”⁴ He believed that this vision of international peace and security could cross ideological lines, accommodating capitalist, communist, and nationalist perspectives, and unlike Woodrow Wilson’s blueprint for a League of Nations, which was predicated on liberal-democratic values, this system would be more durable.

Within each region, each “policeman” would be expected to do what the United States had achieved at the 1940 Havana Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics. At this conference, the nations of the Western Hemisphere had agreed to form an emergency committee to take over the administration of any European colony whose home country had fallen under occupation. In addition, the countries of the region agreed “that any attempt on the part of a non-American state against the integrity or inviolability of the territory, the sovereignty or the political independence of an American state shall be considered as an act of aggression against the states which sign this declaration” and committed them to “consult among themselves in order to agree upon the measure it may be advisable to take.”⁵ The Havana Conference signaled that a majority of Latin American states agreed with the US view of hemispheric defense and set up a pattern in the future whereby US policy would be voluntarily endorsed by a larger coalition of states.⁶

At the Tehran Conference (November 28 to December 1, 1943), Roosevelt built on this idea of the Four Policemen in his proposals to Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill for dealing with postwar issues. He also briefed Stalin on US policy in Latin America, holding it out as a model for how the Soviet Union could police the Eurasian space.⁷ In envisioning the US international role, Roosevelt expected the United States, although serving as the de facto “chairman of the board” of the great powers, to work collaboratively and in concert with the other major powers in settling disputes and preventing the outbreak of further wars as well as taking over and administering via trusteeship both the overseas territories and colonies of the Axis powers. However, while Roosevelt anticipated that the United States would play a much more active role around the world, not simply in the Western Hemisphere, he was still thinking largely in terms of the nation functioning as an offshore balancer, working with the other policemen to tip the balance against aggressors that might rise. Indeed, rather than foreseeing the forward deployment of a large number of US forces to forestall aggression, Roosevelt believed that the other policemen, in the event of any security challenge arising outside the Western Hemisphere, would provide the bulk of the ground forces needed to deal with any situation, with the United States providing naval and air support when needed.⁸

Uniting the Nations

Roosevelt “democratized” his concept of the Four Policemen by vesting their authority within a proposed new international organization, the United Nations (UN), to which other states could add their voice, although the addition of a Security Council defined by the presence of five veto-wielding permanent members (through the addition of France because of its global presence through colonies in Africa and Asia) meant that the policemen would still bear much of the responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in the postwar world.⁹ While the UN would form the backbone of international politics—and the major powers would control the Security Council—the Bretton Woods institutions would form the backbone of international economics. However, just as with the Security Council, the new economic institutions were deliberately crafted to give the “Big Four the greatest voting power as well as permanent seats on the boards of directors.”¹⁰ In the proposed International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the top shareholders were envisioned to be the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

At the same time the international order was being shaped by diplomacy and economic policy, the US military establishment crafted plans for the postwar world that operationalized the Rooseveltian vision. The first consideration was to provide for “defense in depth” of the Western Hemisphere by creating “a defensive ring of outlying bases” that would “enable the United States to possess complete control of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and to keep hostile powers far from American territory.”¹¹ The second was to ensure that American power, particularly air and naval forces, could be quickly and easily deployed to other parts of the world from the continental United States.¹² The latter was based on the assessment that North America would not become a battlefield. Instead the United States would fight its enemies abroad, and it would do so by developing an expeditionary-oriented military (a theme that we explore further in chapter 6).

Roosevelt was also confident that he had found a solution to dealing with the Soviet Union. With hindsight, we can criticize the apparent naiveté of the Roosevelt administration expecting that the USSR would be a reliable partner with the United States in maintaining global security, but it is important to recall that the prevailing view in 1944 and early 1945 (when the USSR and the United States were allies) was that the Soviet Union was indeed “in a mood to accept decent compromises” and that it “needs no more territory, but badly needs several decades of peace.”¹³ Similarly, US officials who had engaged with their Soviet counterparts at the conferences at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks, where the architecture of the postwar world was being assembled, had left these sessions confident that the Soviet Union would play an active and constructive role in the new institutions.¹⁴

In assessing the reason for his confidence that the Soviet Union under Stalin could be a responsible partner for peace, Roosevelt noted, “I bank on his realism. He must be tired of sitting on bayonets.”¹⁵ At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, after initial discussions with the Soviets faltered on a variety of issues (notably the composition of a postwar Polish government), Roosevelt sent a personal letter to Stalin on February 6th stressing the importance of finding a “meeting of minds” on these matters. He noted that if the major powers could find satisfactory compromises, it would enable the continuation of the wartime partnership in order to “get an understanding on even more vital things in the future.”¹⁶ The transcripts of subsequent sessions indicate that compromise agreements could be reached, providing for governments in Eastern Europe that would be pro-Soviet in terms of their foreign and defense policies but otherwise permitted to retain their domestic institutions.¹⁷ Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill were prepared to recognize a “pre-eminent role” for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe but insisted that noncommunists be part of coalition governments and that reasonably free elections be held in the region.¹⁸

Roosevelt and Stalin also again expanded on the idea of joint Soviet-American trusteeships for former colonies in Asia. Both seemed confident that they could work together to provide security for these territories and prepare them for full independence, with only a short occupation period required.¹⁹ Roosevelt’s expectation was that there would be a free flow of ideas and goods between the different spheres policed by each of the major powers, by which he hoped to prevent the emergence of rival and hostile blocs.²⁰

By and large, Americans themselves believed that the outcome of the Yalta Conference had been positive. This included a series of compromises on Eastern Europe, Soviet entry into the Pacific war, and the creation of a new international organization. It seemed to validate Roosevelt’s instinct that the major powers could cooperate to maintain international peace. Opinion polls taken in March 1945 noted that some 51 percent of Americans rated the Yalta meetings a success, and satisfaction with the tenor of cooperation between the major powers rose from 46 percent (prior to the Yalta Conference) to 71 percent.²¹ In the month prior to his death, Roosevelt had, in his mind, laid the foundations for what he believed was an “appropriate international role” (and one that was sustainable in terms of US domestic politics) for the United States—regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and a consultative role on ensuring security in other parts of the world—without committing it to being dragged into their day-to-day issues and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 From Regional Power to Global Superpower
• 2 The American Way of Organizing for Defense
• 3 The American Way of Civil-Military Relations
• 4 Drivers, Continuities, and Challenges of US Foreign Policy
• 5 The American Way of Warfare
• 6 The American Way of Peace
• 7 Financing the American Way
• 8 Conclusion: The Future of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy
• About the Authors
• Index