War and the Liberal Hegemony

ROBERT KAGAN

Source Link

Why did the United States intervene in the Second World War? The question is rarely asked because the answers seem so obvious: Hitler, Pearl Harbor, and what more needs to be said? To most Americans, World War II was the quintessential “war of necessity.” As the late Charles Krauthammer once put it, “wars of choice,” among which he included Vietnam and the first Gulf War, are “fought for reasons of principle, ideology, geopolitics or sometimes pure humanitarianism,” whereas a “war of necessity” is a “life-or-death struggle in which the safety and security of the homeland are at stake.” If World War II is remembered as the “good war,” the idea that it was “necessary” is a big part of the reason why. The enemies were uniquely wicked and aggressive; Americans were attacked first; they had no choice but to fight.

This perception of World War II has had a paradoxical effect on the broader American foreign policy debate. On the one hand, writers of an anti-interventionist bent rightly perceive that the war’s reputation as “necessary” and therefore “good” has encouraged Americans to believe that other wars can be “necessary” and therefore “good,” too. (Krauthammer believed the “war on terror” was also one of “necessity,” and Richard Haass put the Gulf War in the “necessary” category, and in 1965 even David Halberstam and The New York Times editorial page believed that American intervention in Vietnam was necessary.) On the other hand, anti-interventionists are not alone in believing that, even if World War II was necessary, the circumstances were unique and therefore irrelevant to subsequent foreign policy discussions. There will never be another Hitler, and the idea that a foreign great power (as opposed to a terrorist group) might launch a direct attack on the United States seems far-fetched even today. World War II thus stands apart, bracketed from further relevance, as perhaps the only widely agreed “necessary” foreign war and therefore the only “good” foreign war that the United States has ever fought.

But what if even America’s intervention in World War II was not “necessary,” as most Americans would define the term? What if it, too, was a “choice” that Americans made, based on calculations not so different from those that produced the later wars of choice in Iraq, the Balkans, and Vietnam?

Those many Americans who opposed American involvement in Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s certainly did not believe the war was necessary. This was not because they were ignorant of the potential risks posed by Hitler and the Japanese Empire. The America First Committee, a group that combined corporate elites such as the chairman of Sears Roebuck with scions of the eastern establishment such as Joseph Kennedy and Chester Bowles, launched itself in September 1940, three months after the unexpected conquest of France by the German blitzkrieg. Its founders understood the implications of France’s defeat. They not only believed but predicted that Britain would be the next to fall, leaving the United States without a single meaningful ally in the European theater. (The bestselling author Anne Morrow Lindbergh wondered whether it was “courage” or “stupidity” that made the British fight on.)

With Japan on the march on the Asian continent — Japanese forces, having conquered much of China, invaded Indochina three weeks after the Committee’s founding — Americans in the fall of 1940 faced the real possibility of a world in which Europe and East Asia, along with the Eastern Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Western Pacific, could soon be dominated by a trio of militaristic dictatorships (Mussolini’s Italy being the third.) This was the moment — arguably the nadir of the future Allies’ fortunes — when the America First movement took its stand against further American aid to the victims and prospective victims of Nazi and Japanese aggression. Just a few weeks earlier, after the British evacuation at Dunkirk, Winston Churchill gave his famous “we shall fight on the beaches” speech, with its concluding prayer, mingled with reproach, that, “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might,” would come “to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” That was precisely what the American First movement aimed to prevent.

The anti-interventionists’ main practical argument was that even in those direst of international circumstances, American security was not immediately or even prospectively threatened. By virtue of its wealth, its strength, and, above all, its geography, the United States was effectively invulnerable to foreign attack. Those who held this view were not benighted cranks, nor even the well-respected men and women who led the America Fist movement. It was conventional wisdom among the nation’s leading foreign policy and military experts in the late 1930s. Respected analysts such as George Fielding Eliot concluded, after “a detailed consideration of America’s strategic position and military requirements,” that American security was not in danger from any European power so long as it maintained an adequate navy. This was also the view of self-described “realists” of the day, a new breed of professional foreign policy and military experts who prided themselves on what Eliot called “realistic thinking,” the “banishment of altruism and sentiment” from their analysis, and “single-minded attention to the national interests.” Yale’s Nicholas Spykman, one of the founders of the school of “classical realism,” argued that with “the European neighbors of the United States … three thousand miles away” and the Atlantic Ocean still “reassuringly” in between, America’s “frontiers” were secure. So long as the United States maintained a strong navy capable of protecting its shores and so long as bombers’ cruising radius remained less than four thousand miles, the Atlantic and Pacific would remain “the chief elements in the defense of the United States.”

Hanson Baldwin, the military editor of The New York Times, explained in detail what an attack on the United States would require.

Under fire from bomb and gun, soldiers and heavy equipment would have to be transshipped to small boats from the transports anchored offshore. Then the small boats would have to make a landing through the surf. Once on the hostile beach, the enemy would have to struggle to get their tanks and field pieces off ramp-bowed landing boats onto the beach under shells and machine-gun fire, their only support, their carrier-based aviation, and the guns of their warships.

This proved a prescient description of the D-Day landing in 1944, but at the time Baldwin meant to show how unlikely it was that a foreign power would or even could launch an invasion of the United States. In the same spirit Senator Robert A. Taft, no one’s idea of a yahoo, argued that no foreign power “would be stupid enough” to try to land “troops in the United States from across thousands of miles of ocean.” A Council on Foreign Relations study group in February 1940 concluded that “no one believes that an actual military threat to this country exists, even if Britain and France were to be conquered by Germany.” Although some, such as Spykman, began to change their minds after the fall of France, most did not. Herbert Hoover denied that American security depended on the outcome of the war in Europe. The victor, if it was Germany, was not going to turn around and “attack 130,000,000 people 3000 miles overseas, who have a capacity of 10,000,000 soldiers and 25,000 aircraft.”

Not only was a foreign attack on the United States physically unlikely if not impossible, the anti-interventionists argued, but it was also avoidable if Americans simply attended to their own affairs and stayed out of the other great powers’ business. Neither Germany nor Japan had any reason to risk bringing the United States into the war. And the United States had no reason to stand in the way of nations seeking to expand their territory and spheres of influence. Most Americans agreed that the United States had no vital interests in Europe or Asia. At least that had been the dominant assumption of American policymakers throughout the 1920s and Franklin Roosevelt’s first term.

After the Pearl Harbor attack and the subsequent declaration of war by Germany, many of the anti-interventionists did not change their views. War had come to the United States not because Tokyo and Berlin had sought it, but because Franklin Roosevelt, departing from the policies of his predecessor Herbert Hoover, had interjected the United States into distant quarrels. While the great majority of Americans regarded Pearl Harbor as a treacherous act of “infamy,” the anti-interventionists made themselves unpopular by insisting, in the words of Arthur Vandenberg, that the United States had “asked for it.” The Roosevelt administration’s “dogmatic diplomatic attitudes” had driven the Japanese “needlessly into hostilities.” After all, as Hoover put it, if the United States insisted on “putting pins in rattlesnakes,” it should expect to get bitten.

The anti-interventionists’ arguments were not as weak as they are often portrayed. In retrospect it is clear that the Japanese would have preferred not to go to war with the United States, certainly not in 1941 but perhaps ever. Japanese military leaders did not even believe they could win a war with the United States absent divine intervention or a failure of American will. As the anti-interventionists pointed out, the Japanese would not have attacked Pearl Harbor had the Roosevelt administration not attempted to use its economic and diplomatic influence to try to block or slow Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland (and had Roosevelt not decided to place the U.S. Pacific Fleet there as a supposed deterrent).

And if Japan had not attacked when it did, Hitler would not have declared war on the United States when he did. In 1941 Hitler was actually trying to avoid pulling the Americans fully into the Atlantic war, despite Roosevelt’s deliberately provocative and aggressive expansion of the U.S. Navy’s role. There is some evidence that Hitler may have intended to go to war with the United States eventually. In 1941, while preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union in June, he had ordered plans for constructing a “big battleship navy,” likely for use against the United States. But such thoughts were shelved when the initial invasion of the Soviet Union bogged down and settled into a war of attrition.

With the war a stalemate with Britain in the west and Russia in the east, any German assault on the United States was likely years off and left the United States plenty of time to watch and to prepare. Even staunch pro-interventionists such as Henry Luce acknowledged, as late as February 1941, that no one could “say honestly that as a pure matter of defense — defense of our homeland — it is necessary to get into or be in this war.” Even if “the entire world came under the organized domination of evil tyrants,” it was “quite possible” that the United States “could make itself such a tough nut to crack that not all the tyrants in the world would care to come against us.” If Americans did enter the war, Luce argued, as he hoped they would, it would not be because the war was “necessary” as a matter of “survival.”

The anti-interventionists were also right to point out that American policy had turned against Germany and Japan well before the latter were in any position even to think about an attack on the United States. The critical event in that regard, the fall of France, did not occur until the summer of 1940. Prior to that, most observers regarded it as impossible that French forces, dug in behind their Maginot Line, could possibly be overrun by an as-yet largely untested German military. Yet Roosevelt began bringing American influence to bear against Germany as early as 1937, after Japan’s full-scale invasion of China but before Hitler had committed any act of aggression at all, when he labeled Germany, Italy, and Japan “bandit” nations that needed to be isolated and quarantined like a disease. Thereafter he worked to modify the neutrality legislation that had prevented him from helping Britain and others; he enacted an increasing array of economic sanctions against Japan; and he brought the U.S. Navy into the Battle of the Atlantic as a belligerent in all but name. Were these steps necessary to the defense of the American homeland? Certainly not in any immediate sense. If anything, as the anti-interventionists argued, they brought the threat of war closer, a possibility of which Roosevelt was aware and which gave him no pause.

Why, then, did Americans start sticking pins in rattlesnakes in the late 1930s, increasing the risk of war, before any direct threat to American security had materialized? The answer had more to do with belief and ideology than with raw assessments of German and Japanese military capabilities. Roosevelt and many other Americans concluded that the Nazi regime was dangerous well before it had committed any act of external aggression. As Hugh Wilson, the one-time American ambassador to Berlin, observed, fears about Germany’s course began immediately after Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship in 1933. That year brought early signs of the coming persecution of Jews as well as celebrations of book-burning in the squares of German cities and towns, which people in the West found disturbing.

But it was the infamous “night of the long knives” in 1934 that shocked the liberal world. As Ambassador Wilson noted, the Nazi’s murderous purge “profoundly” affected the “attitude toward Germany of every man of politics in Europe and of most of them in our own country. The temper of Europe toward Germany changed from indignation and exasperation to fear and horror.” The fears grew as the Nazis consolidated control and began the systematic persecution of Jews and other minorities. For many American observers, the turning point came in the fall of 1938 after the mass persecution and killing of Jews in what became known as Kristallnacht. Even more than the Munich settlement six weeks earlier, which Roosevelt privately condemned but publicly praised, Kristallnacht convinced Roosevelt and others that, as the historian John A. Thompson has put it, the Nazi regime could never be “incorporated into a stable, norm-governed European order.” That perception shaped American policies going forward as Hitler rearmed and began working more aggressively to overturn the Versailles settlement, but its origins preceded those efforts.

Not only could such a regime never become part of a stable liberal peace, but in the eyes of many Americans, especially liberals, the very nature of the regime guaranteed conflict. Most liberals believed that because Germany and Japan were “totalitarian” states, they would never cease their struggle against democracy and liberalism at home and abroad. As the critic Lewis Mumford put it, the fascists could not co-exist with “the ever-rising, ever-recurrent forces of civilization.” Their “propulsive system of beliefs” would drive them onward until the world was “made over in the fascist image.” In 1937 the American diplomat George Messersmith insisted that what was occurring was a “basic clash of ideologies” and that the dictators were embarked on “a long road” that must end in an attack on the United States. Roosevelt spoke for many when he divided the world neatly along ideological lines, insisting that unlike nations “devoted to the democratic ideal …autocracy in world affairs endangers peace.”

These theories echoed Americans’ ideological preferences going back to the founding era, but they were, nevertheless, only theories. As a practical matter, Germany and Japan might not ever find the circumstances propitious for launching an attack on a United States that was, indeed, substantially invulnerable. In his State of the Union address in January 1939 — months before Germany’s invasion of Poland — Roosevelt barely talked about national security per se. He talked about belief and principle. “There comes a time in the affairs of men,” he told Americans, “when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy and of good faith among nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.” Roosevelt’s most arresting image was not of a German invasion or massive bombing raid, but of a democratic America isolated in a world of dictatorships. In a speech at the University of Virginia following the fall of France, he warned Americans that they were at risk of becoming a “lone island” in a world dominated by the “philosophy of force,” “a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.” Among other concerns, Roosevelt and others worried that the United States could not long survive as an open, free-market, democratic society in such a world, that confronting the dictatorships over the long term would require a controlled economy and limits on individual freedoms. This was also just a theory — did free market capitalism and individual liberties die during the long Cold War? — but it reflected a timeless American anxiety. It was just another way that American. policy was shaped more by matters of belief and ideology than by tangible measures of threat. Roosevelt and other Americans believed that preserving American democracy — the ultimate American “interest” — required a global balance of power that favored liberalism.

The nascent school of foreign policy realism was appalled at the “giddy” moralism and emotionalism that, in Charles A. Beard’s words, prevented Americans from dealing “with the world as it is.” Hugh Wilson, a senior member of the “realist” camp at the State Department in the 1930s, observed of Americans in general that “our most certain reaction to the stimulus of a piece of news from a foreign land is to judge it ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘righteous’ or ‘unjust’… we instantly assess it by a moral evaluation based on our own standards.” This moralistic approach had “poison[ed] our relations with Japan,” and with the Nazis as well. The historian and critic C. Hartley Grattan complained that such “powerful currents of emotion and opinion” had led Americans to “throw cold reason out of the window.”

For the realists and other anti-interventionists, accepting the world “as it is” meant accommodating historical shifts in the global balance of power, not fighting them. In one of the seminal works of realist thought, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, published in 1939, the British diplomat and intellectual E. H. Carr defended Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler at Munich on the grounds that the “change in the European equilibrium of forces,” that is, the growth of German power, made it “inevitable that Czechoslovakia should lose part of its territory and eventually her independence.” The American diplomat George F. Kennan, then serving in Prague, agreed that Czechoslovakia was “after all, a central European state,” and its “fortunes must in the long run lie with — and not against — the dominant forces in this area.” Carr argued that if dissatisfied “have-not” powers such as Germany were bent on changing the existing system, “the responsibility for seeing that these changes take place … in an orderly way” rested as much on the defenders of the existing order as on its challengers. Americans, of all people, should respect “the right of an able and virile nation to expand,” Charles Lindbergh argued. As for Japan, the journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, winner of the first Pulitzer Prize, maintained that “sixty-three million people living on rocky islands” had “the right to exist,” and if their existence required expansion, “then why forbid Japanese expansion to follow natural lines?”

To do so was more than a mistake, the anti-interventionists believed. It was immoral and contrary to American traditions and principles. Americans’ refusal to accept the world “as it is” amounted to a form of imperialism. Even if the United States managed to defeat Hitler “after many years” of brutal war, Taft warned, it would just be the start of an open-ended American commitment to European peace and security. American forces “would have to police Europe or maintain the balance of power there by force of arms.” If Roosevelt’s commitment to the Atlantic Charter was to be taken seriously, the historian Howard K. Beale ominously observed, then the “victorious Anglo-Americans” were not just going to have to “maintain democracy by armed force on the Continent of Europe and then ‘police’ that Continent.” They were also going to have to establish and defend the “four freedoms all over the world.” This would require “an Anglo-American navy large enough to establish ‘freedom of the seas’… on all the oceans of the world.” For Beale and other anti-interventionists, this was a prescription for “unadulterated imperialism.” The famous Christian pacifist A. J. Muste worried that “we shall be the next nation to seek world-domination — in other words, to do what we condemn Hitler for trying to do.” The Germans, Beale argued, would probably regard “Anglo-American ‘policing’” much as Germany’s victims in Europe now regarded German occupation: they might even call it “slavery.” Beale did not want to see “a German imperialism” replaced by an “Anglo-American world imperialism.” He did not want the United States to “dominate the world.”

The vast majority of Americans, of course, would have denied any such intention. They saw their actions in purely defensive terms. They preferred to believe they were responding to an unprovoked attack from Japan and an equally unprovoked declaration of war by Germany. Once these were dealt with, once the aggressors had been defeated, most Americans likely assumed their nation would return to something like normalcy again. Indeed, in what would become a central paradox in American foreign policy going forward, most Americans probably thought that they were fighting a war precisely so that they might return to the relative passivity of the interwar years or the decades before World War I. A few internationalists talked about shouldering global “responsibilities,” and that may have sounded like a good thing to some, but few Americans believed they were engaging in a massive reshaping of the world, exerting hegemony, imposing a liberal order, or even establishing the United States at the center of world affairs.

But whether they understood it that way or not, the United States was imposing its preferences on a resistant world. Americans were engaged in hegemonic behavior, perhaps not on behalf of themselves, but on behalf of liberalism, which to their opponents amounted to the same thing. Whatever else Germany and Japan were doing, and however unpleasant their methods, they were attempting to break free of the restraints of an Anglo-American world order they had no part in establishing, which did not serve their interests as they perceived them but, on the contrary, was created specifically to constrain them. The Versailles settlement, which the United States had played a central role in shaping, had made Germany a “have-not” power, and the Washington Naval treaty, with its Nine-Power agreement on East Asia, had attempted to clamp a lid on Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland. The Germans and Japanese were thereby denied an empire and the regional sphere of interest that the other great powers enjoyed. And now, as Germany and Japan attempted to break out of the cage of these postwar peace agreements and resist the liberal hegemony, the United States once again roused itself to slam the cage door shut.

It was not unreasonable to ask what gave Americans the right to decide that it was unacceptable for Germany and Japan to enjoy the same kind of regional dominance that the United States enjoyed, or to acquire the kinds of empires that Britain and France had acquired over the previous three centuries. The Japanese made this argument repeatedly, claiming to seek only their own version of the Monroe Doctrine. Many Germans, too, and not just Hitler, believed that Germany required the kind of room to grow — the “living space” — that the United States enjoyed in abundance, thanks to its own past aggressions on the vast North American continent. Roosevelt could not even claim, as Wilson had in the lead-up to the First World War, that he was defending American neutral rights, since Hitler had been careful to avoid attacks on American shipping. So whether they had right on their side or not, Americans simply insisted, by dint of their power, that the liberal hegemony be preserved and strengthened and the international balance of power remain favorable to the liberal powers.

That, in the end, was what American intervention in World War II was about, and it was also what World War I had been about. If either war could be regarded as “necessary,” it was not to defend the United States against an immediate threat, but to restore the kind of liberal order in which Americans preferred to live and which seemed to provide the greatest degree of protection against possible future threats.

Americans roused themselves to defend the liberal hegemony not because they were eager to make a “bid for world supremacy” or because they feared being supplanted as the world’s “Number One power,” as the historian Stephen Wertheim now argues, echoing the charges of the America First Committee and other anti-interventionists at the time. Americans had for most of the twentieth century consistently and deliberately avoided taking on such a role. They had not been jealous of British and French world leadership prior to World War One, and they would have preferred to see that leadership resumed after the war rather than take on the responsibilities of global “leadership” themselves. When they emerged as the world’s dominant power after World War I, they did not seek to exploit it but pulled back from exercising it.

American diplomacy in the 1920s had aimed at establishing a framework for international peace that would require little if anything of the United States: the Washington Treaties governing naval arms levels and outlining the terms of an Asian peace; the Dawes Plan which aimed at bringing economic stability to Europe; the Kellogg-Briand Pact which aimed to codify international strictures against aggression. In the late 1930s it was not with eagerness but with resignation that so many Americans who had once abjured any significant international role decided that, with the evident failure of these efforts, there was no choice but to place the United States at the center of world affairs. Suddenly, there was much talk of America’s “world responsibilities,” a concept most Americans had rejected throughout the two decades after Versailles.

Americans had simply changed their minds, both about the nature of the threats out there and about America’s role in addressing them. Just a few years earlier, intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr had abandoned their World War I idealism and interventionism for a postwar cynicism, or “realism,” or, in Niebuhr’s case, Marxism. Lippmann by the end of the 1920s had begun arguing that the United States “should withdraw from all commitments.” Now, he and the others reversed course again. Like Senator Harry Truman, who had discarded his own anti-interventionist views after Munich and Kristallnacht, they believed Americans’ failure to accept “our responsibility as a world power” had led to the catastrophic breakdown of the postwar world.

But the line between assuming “world responsibility” and exerting hegemony was a thin one. As Roosevelt put it, “destiny” had made Americans heirs of European civilization, and “fate” now compelled the United States “to assume the task of helping to maintain in the Western world a citadel wherein that civilization may be kept alive.” Niebuhr wrote of “the obligations which we owe to the community of nations … as inheritor and custodian of the standards of justice of western civilization.” It was America’s fate, Lippmann argued, to give to “the world of the future that order under law which Rome gave to the ancient world and Britain to the world that is now passing away — that order under law in which alone can freedom prevail.”

Vandenberg once warned that when it came to intervention in world affairs beyond America’s shores, there could be “no middle ground.” It was “either all the way in or all the way out.” There was much truth in this. It was one thing when American foreign policy was limited to defense of the Western hemisphere, which by itself was an assertion of regional hegemony. But once the United States took on the goal of defeating the autocracies and re-establishing the ascendancy of the liberal world order, it was reasonable to ask where American commitments and obligations stopped. In 1943 Roosevelt set as America’s goal “to organize relations among nations” so that the “forces of barbarism can never again break loose.” This was not the United States as offshore balancer of last resort. It was the United States as proactive defender of an international liberal order. As Roosevelt saw it, the events of the interwar years had proved that “if we do not pull the fangs of the predatory animals of this world, they will multiply and grow in strength — and they will be at our throats again once more in a short generation.” Such a view of the world and America’s responsibility seemed likely to involve the United States in not a few foreign conflicts — none of which were likely to be “wars of necessity” in the sense that American security was directly threatened.

American realism itself underwent a critical transformation as a result of World War II. Prior to the fall of France, self-described realists of the day had not believed American security would be threatened even after a German victory on the continent, and many realists continued to believe this right up until the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was only after the fall of France that some realists began to suggest that the United States had a vital interest in preventing the emergence of a hegemon in Eurasia. (Realists later promulgated the myth that the founders shared this view, but they too were guided primarily by belief and ideology: in the early 1790s, Hamilton feared Revolutionary France and favored an outright British victory, whereas Jefferson feared victory by the British monarchy and favored Revolutionary France.) Although rarely commented on, this was an extraordinary redefinition of American vital interests. To insist that no power should gain hegemonic control in Europe or Asia was tantamount to insisting on American global hegemony, since the essential prerequisite to American international primacy was precisely the absence of such a “peer competitor.”

Nor should it be surprising that an American policy aimed at preventing the rise of a plausible challenger to the liberal order might lead to conflicts only tangentially related to that goal — such as preventing a communist takeover of southeast Asia or a hostile takeover of Middle Eastern oil fields. The degree to which American hegemony became baked into the common understanding of America’s “interests” was most notable in Richard Haass’ argument that the first Persian Gulf War was a “war of necessity.” The notion that the United States had a vital interest in the sovereign independence of Kuwait, a one-time Iraqi province, would have struck pre-World War II anti-interventionists as beyond absurd. Only an America that regarded its role as the defender and promoter of a liberal world order could possibly regard the liberation of Kuwait as a matter of “necessity.”

All of which should raise questions about how useful the distinction between “wars of necessity” and “wars of choice” really is, especially for a nation that enjoys the degree of invulnerability that the United States has. It could be argued that no war is ever actually necessary, not even wars of self-defense. Realists such as George Kennan and Neville Chamberlain believed Czechoslovakia was better off not resisting German conquest, after all. The Japanese entertained hopes that the United States might not fight after Pearl Harbor, that the enormity of the task would be too daunting for a flaccid, selfish, unheroic people like the Americans. Given that the United States was not even threatened militarily when it began to take sides against Germany and Japan in the late 1930s, World War II could only be considered a “war of necessity” because the United States chose to take upon itself the defense of a liberal world order.

It is not unusual for people to claim to be acting out of necessity. For one thing, it relieves the otherwise unavoidable moral burden of wielding power. One is forgiven much when one has no choice. Americans prefer to regard themselves as simply reacting to the provocations of others, even when they are at least equal participants in the confrontation. They have been taught that to try to shape the world to make it more accommodating to their physical and ideological needs is “imperialism.” Yet that is what all great powers do when they can, and the United States, perhaps alone among the great powers of history, has done it with the voluntary collaboration of many other nations and peoples. Instead of insisting they had no choice, Americans, with all their flaws, can be relatively proud of the choices they have made.