Charles King
Among American foreign policy whisperers and assessors of the state of the world, no one had a more checkered reputation than Walt Rostow—academic economist, influential author, adviser to presidents, and, as the U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman once called him bitingly, “America’s Rasputin.” In the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, nearly every strategic move Rostow advocated turned out to be wrong, from escalating the commitment of U.S. combat troops for South Vietnam to rejecting peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Since he continued to defend those positions after most other people had concluded they were mistakes, his name became a byword for a specific kind of Washington virtue: offering terrible advice but at least doing so consistently. “[Zbigniew] Brzezinski aspires to be the Henry Kissinger of this administration,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noted in his diary in May 1978 as the administration of President Jimmy Carter was developing a harder line toward the Soviet Union. “I fear he will end up the Walt Rostow.”
But before Rostow became a punch line, he was a thinker. Despite his policy errors and his diminished status inside the Beltway, his ideas and worldview lodged themselves deep inside the collective unconscious of the American foreign policy establishment—and remain there today, although sometimes in ways that are hard to see at first.
Rostow had come into the White House from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after publishing the must-read foreign policy book of 1960, The Stages of Economic Growth. Around the world, the Soviet Union was peddling a seductive model of development, one built from a one-party dictatorship, state monopolies, and five-year plans. To Rostow, the West desperately needed its own theory for how societies evolve, a coherent set of principles translatable into a practical blueprint. It should be drawn not from airy Marxism, he believed, but from concrete history: the pathway that Western Europe and North America had already trod from the Enlightenment onward. In his book, Rostow offered a framework for how U.S. foreign policy could spur economic and social change abroad, especially in what was then known as the Third World. Countries develop in predictable stages, he argued, from preconditions for growth to economic takeoff, toward the goal of a modern consumer society. The trick was to accumulate the capital, know-how, and—crucially—Western values that would allow takeoff to occur.
Rostow’s book was where many readers first encountered what came to be called “modernization theory.” On Rostow’s reading of the historical evidence, politics, economics, and mentalities came bundled together. Modern economies were impossible without modern minds, which in turn formed the habits of playing by the rules and respecting abstract institutions that were fundamental to democracy. Some of those ideas ran back to early social scientists such as Max Weber and Émile Durkheim and would be elaborated by many of Rostow’s contemporaries, such as the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. But Rostow’s aim was more than academic. Fighting communism in theory was the first step toward countering it in practice. To make that point, he gave his book an unsubtle but memorable subtitle: “A Non-Communist Manifesto.”
After reading The Stages of Economic Growth, an American could come away convinced that global poverty and economic development were challenges on par with the arms race. Rather than thinking of foreign affairs as merely a grand chessboard, Rostow insisted, U.S. policymakers should aim the country’s resources at jump-starting other countries’ internal evolutions—a process that would essentially reverse-engineer the route to success that the United States and other industrialized societies had traversed since the eighteenth century. In the end, most of the assistance programs that were born in Rostow’s era, from the Peace Corps to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), bore his stamp. But in the drive to bring the Third World up to the level of the First, Rostow believed, Americans could take comfort in one deep truth: that ultimately history, common sense, and human nature were on their side. Consumerism would enable social transformations that, sooner or later, would increase the likelihood of global convergence with the values, interests, and preferences of the United States.
For more than half a century, the worldview that Rostow articulated has remained a mainstay of American thought at the intersection of foreign policy and political economy. It still influences foreign aid programs and democracy assistance. It is evident in Americans’ sense of strategic disappointment and bafflement—at the direction of Russia since the end of the Cold War, at the resurgence of right-wing nationalism among European allies, at the renewed appeal of nonalignment among middle powers and poorer countries. The tenets of modernization theory even inform the analysis of domestic politics in the United States. Seven years after the numb bewilderment of election night 2016, American liberals and moderate conservatives still view the phenomenon of Donald Trump as an atavistic throwback to what Rostow called “traditional society”: regional economic backwardness, social stagnation, and, as he put it, “the inaccessibility of modern science, its applications, and its frame of mind.”
More than any other intuition or outlook, modernization theory still has the greatest claim to being a genuine Washington consensus. “U.S. foreign policy is rooted in a belief that the way to lasting peace and prosperity is actually to integrate diplomacy, defense, and development, the three Ds,” the USAID administrator, Samantha Power, said during a trip to Fiji in August. Yet in an age of renewed superpower competition and global realignments, the task for American thinkers and doers is to reimagine what is taken for granted about how societies work internally, how they change, and how—even whether—external actors can influence the process.
Modernization theory was born in an age when the alternatives to democracy and the market were clear. Today, more than at any point since the Cold War, new competitors have their own theories to offer, as well as the resources to realize them: the global loan-sharking of China’s Belt and Road Initiative; the civilizational counterrevolution spearheaded by leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and even the vision of a benevolent tech-bro oligarchy represented by figures such as Elon Musk. Developing a coherent account of how the world really works—and what American foreign policy can do to nudge the country’s own long-term interests into closer alignment with humanity’s—will be one of this decade’s signature intellectual challenges.
RACE TO THE TOP
It is a particular obsession of great powers to build grand theories about how and why the rest of the world is not like them. Americans, of course, have long been concerned with their own country’s providential specialness. It is a theme that runs back—in the way the story is told today—to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Governor John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” sermon of 1630. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, American thinkers were beginning to develop something new: not a paean to American exceptionalism but a general, historically informed account of how societies evolve—one influenced in no small measure by the example they found on their own doorstep.
In the 1840s, the New York lawyer, businessman, and amateur scholar Lewis Henry Morgan traveled the rural back roads of his state and was struck by the social transformation playing out before his eyes. The once powerful Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy—the multicentury alliance among the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples—was fading in the face of white expansion. The greatest Native American alliance to exist on the continent was passing into obscurity, a development that Morgan set about to document in real time.
Over the next several decades, Morgan translated his observations into a monumental study of the Haudenosaunee and then, in 1877, a work he called Ancient Society. His aim was to derive general conclusions from both the changes he had witnessed in his own lifetime and the vast scholarship on ancient Greece and other bygone eras. Simpler forms of association—families and tribes—had over time given way to modern cities and states, Morgan noted. In the process, human societies all seemed to travel through the same waypoints. He named these stages “the savage,” “the barbarous,” and “the civilized.” Each had its own qualities of language, religion, and behavior: how to express abstract ideas of time, say, or whether the weather was produced by capricious gods or discernible patterns of heating and cooling. Moreover, these stages were comparable across cultures: peoples at the same stage of history did things more or less the same way. What his Haudenosaunee neighbors had experienced was not so much displacement or disaster, he concluded, as their own process of slouching toward civilization, a development that had been accelerated, for good and ill, by their encounter with white Americans farther along the same human highway.
Morgan would turn out to have an outsize influence on science and the public understanding of social difference, both in the United States and abroad. Charles Darwin quoted him. Karl Marx jotted down notes on his ideas. The Smithsonian Institution made Ancient Society required reading for its research staff, and his findings would inform government policy on forced Native American assimilation. When the Library of Congress opened its domed Thomas Jefferson Building in 1897, designers were so taken with Morgan’s framework that they literally carved it in stone. The building’s window arches featured keystones in the shape of male heads representing Morgan’s understanding of the principal types of humanity. On the front were civilized Europeans and their diaspora, looking out toward the U.S. Capitol. Barbarous Chinese, Japanese, and Turks wrapped around the sides. Savage Africans and Melanesians were relegated to the back. It was a graphic illustration of the principal stages of human development as white Americans perceived them at the time. (And it is still on display today.)
The task for American thinkers and doers is to reimagine how societies change.
Morgan’s outlook on society was evolutionary. It was perfectly possible for a human community to move from the back of the Library of Congress to the front, as it were, given enough time and effort. No race or culture was stuck in one natural station. That claim, however, set Morgan and his followers apart from another powerful strain of American thought: one that, by the early twentieth century, was quickly becoming the dominant way of analyzing national greatness and decline.
“In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantage a man of good stock brings into the world with him,” wrote the naturalist and philanthropist Madison Grant. A pioneering conservationist, Grant was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and had helped found the Bronx Zoo. But his widest influence came from a sweeping survey of human history, The Passing of the Great Race, which he published in 1916. In the years to come, Grant’s work would become a defining text for a new generation of globally aware citizens and policymakers.
Expanding the franchise to Black Americans had become “an unending wail for rights” leading to a “rule of the average” in U.S. politics, Grant argued. In contrast to Morgan’s claims, biological races were immutable, he felt, a fact evident from the massive experiment in social reform and nation-building he had witnessed in his own lifetime: Reconstruction and the reassertion of white power in the Jim Crow era. “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church . . . [do] not transform a negro into a white man,” he wrote. Even worse, Grant warned, the literal body politic of the United States was now being threatened by race defilement, especially given the influx of new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe since the 1890s. “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew,” Grant stated plainly near the beginning of his book.
Some people found these claims ghastly and nonsensical. The Columbia University professor Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, was so outraged that he gave The Passing of the Great Race negative reviews in two different periodicals. In a famous public debate in Chicago, W. E. B. Du Bois made a laughingstock of a younger associate of Grant’s, Lothrop Stoddard. But the worldview Grant espoused—the deep reality of inherited race, the ranking of world communities by their racial station, the struggle for survival among incompatible racial types—would reshape American thought and practice. The American eugenics movement sprang from the ideas Grant promoted. The Johnson-Reed Act, a racially preferential immigration policy passed by Congress in 1924, came about in part because of his lobbying. It would remain largely in place for the next four decades.
A THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Walt Rostow was born the same year The Passing of the Great Race appeared. His father, Victor Rostowsky, had been the publisher of an underground socialist newspaper in Odessa, which was then a Russian imperial port. Like other Russian Jewish activists at the time, he escaped the tsarist police by sailing, steerage class, for New York, shortening the family name along the way.
He made sure his three sons were unmistakably American. Walt was named for the poet Walt Whitman, and his two brothers for the socialist Eugene Debs and the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The household sparkled with ideas and debate. Grand speculations about human nature, the tides of history, and the possibilities of government were traded across the dinner table. Not long after enrolling as an undergraduate at Yale at the age of 15, Rostow had already come around to the concerns that would drive his professional life. “I would work on two problems,” he later remembered. “One was economic history and the other was Karl Marx.”
In ways that might be less apparent today, both interests were infused with scholarly ambition as well as practical urgency. Rostow had grown up in a country that had ready-made answers to the great problems in the social sciences. They were confidently on display in school curricula, in natural history museums, and in the everyday hierarchies of segregated water fountains, streetcars, and movie theaters—the visible world justified by widely accepted theories of racial civilization and timeless barbarism.
But Rostow’s own lifetime had seen these truths begin to crumble. The rise of the Nazis had shown the real-world consequences of a country’s remaking its government according to a warped theory of history. The American eugenics movement began to ebb. American children, schooled since the 1890s to recite the pledge of allegiance by stretching out the right arm toward the flag, a gesture known as the Bellamy salute, were quietly instructed to place hands on hearts instead.
In 1936, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford allowed Rostow to witness another country’s response to the rise of fascism. He also began to research a case study that he felt contained the keys to social change: an analysis of how the first modernizer, Great Britain, had wrenched itself from an agricultural economy into an industrial one without succumbing to dictatorship.
After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Yale, Rostow joined the war effort as a bombing analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, a job that would later have a profound, and horrific, impact on his approach to Vietnam. By 1950, back in academia as a member of the economics department at MIT, he began to sense that good theory might hold the secret to dismantling bad practice. He had “earlier promised to produce an alternative to Marxism as a theory of modern history,” he wrote the American politician and diplomat Adlai Stevenson in 1958 while on leave at Cambridge University, “and I have used my sabbatical to make my bid.” He had begun to sketch out his own account of social evolution, rooted in economics but drawing on a particular reading of American and world history—leaping over Grant, in a way, and reaching back toward Morgan. The result was The Stages of Economic Growth.
On the first page, Rostow pleaded for the modesty of his own theory while also announcing it as a new, universal take on social and economic development. The concept at the core of his book—the stages through which societies pass in moving from traditional society to modernity—was both “arbitrary and limited” and “in no absolute sense, a correct way,” he wrote. Yet in all the societies he had surveyed, from the nineteenth-century vanguard of industrialization such as Great Britain and France, to later modernizers such as Japan and Russia, to countries straining to catch up, such as Turkey and China, there was a “uniformity” in the pathway to development that sprang up from the historical data. In short, countries move from traditional society to “maturity” through a combination of cultural change, technological innovation, and elite choice—the realization that a growth-oriented economy and public welfare are the principal goals of governance.
Chapter by chapter, Rostow described in detail the five stages of growth he had gleaned from history: traditional society, preconditions for takeoff, takeoff, the drive to maturity, maturity, and high mass-consumption. His prose was that of a system builder and an optimist, and in both ways, there was no escaping the gravitational pull of Marx—which was also, in a way, the pull of Lewis Henry Morgan, from the concept of developmental stages to the view that all of history leads inexorably toward countries that happen to be the wealthiest and most powerful today. Marx had built “a system full of flaws,” as Rostow put it, “but full also of legitimate partial insights, a great formal contribution to social science.”
Modernization theory was not so much wrong as self-limiting.
Yet as he saw it, his Marxist contemporaries, by contrast, were playing pantomime, advocating grotesque policies that flowed from their own wishful thinking about history and human nature. “Gentlemen, I have very important news,” Rostow would declare dramatically to his White House staff in 1967, announcing the assassination of Che Guevara. “They finally got the SOB. The last of the romantic guerrillas.” Lenin, Guevara, Ho Chi Minh—each had consistently chosen the wrong course when the right one was blindingly apparent. “It is they,” Rostow concluded, referring to political leaders in former colonial states, “who, having helped achieve independence, under the banners of human freedom, appealing to those values in the West which they share, must now accept a large part of the responsibility for making those values come to life, in terms of their own societies and cultures, as they complete the preconditions and launch themselves into self-sustained growth.”
History knew its business. The grand sweep of social and economic change was a single journey of liberation and improvement, one that any country or culture might choose to join. All politicians had to do was get out of the way. It was a truth that Rostow believed applied equally well to his own country. One of the ancillary aims of The Stages of Economic Growth was to introduce Americans to their own history—not Plymouth Rock and Washington crossing the Delaware, but the great arc of the human past, in which the United States had simply followed the well-worn path of other modernizing societies.
The difference in Rostow’s own day, however, was the rapidity with which other countries were doing the same thing. The principal problem for the future was how to ensure peace in a coming age of what he called “the diffusion of power.” If current trends followed the past as he understood it, the coming world would contain many more countries that had become full adults. “It is fairly safe to predict that, by 2000 or 2010 . . . India and China . . . will be, in our sense, mature powers.” The idea of a bipolar world was already an illusion by the time he sat down to write, Rostow believed. No countries were mere spectators in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It would become an even dimmer fantasy, he predicted, in decades to come.
Once he went into government—in the Kennedy White House, then the State Department, then as Johnson’s national security adviser—Rostow was an engine of memos, slogans, and proposals. “Walt can write faster than I can read,” Kennedy once said, apparently not as a compliment. Rostow’s career rested on the accidental coming together of intellect and experience: in political economy and, during World War II, in bomb targeting. His opinions on both would shape an entire era in U.S. foreign policy, from the creation of a federal infrastructure for overseas development assistance to the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
After leaving government in 1969, he spent the next several decades totting up the good calls and the bad ones—the former his, he believed, the latter those of defeatists who failed to understand the mechanics of history. The Vietnam War had been a victory for the United States and a benefit to the world, he argued. It had successfully staved off communism long enough for capitalism to take off across much of Asia. As time went on, the only person who seemed to be convinced by that line of reasoning was Rostow himself. Like Morgan, Grant, and even the Marxists he battled throughout his career, Rostow had succumbed to the occupational hazard of embracing big history. The long run only comes into view when you ignore the nearer miseries.
WHAT ROSTOW GOT RIGHT
The fate of modernization theory tracked that of its greatest popularizer. By the 1970s, the objections from social scientists had become legion. Rostow was at best naive, ignorant of the ways in which the world of the late twentieth century, replete with structural disadvantages that kept poor countries poor, was not that of the nineteenth. At worst, he was an imperialist manqué, justifying interventions, military and otherwise, by former colonizers in the internal affairs of newly independent states. And to judge from the actions of high-consumption societies, Western values seemed the last thing the West really believed in. For someone who worked closely with Kennedy, it took a leap of the imagination to believe that the dominance of “family and clan connections,” as he put it, was exclusive to traditional societies. It took an even greater leap to see saturation bombing in Vietnam as a historical necessity.
As Rostow’s early critics argued, modernization theory seemed less science than folk theory—one society’s quaint attempt to make sense of all the others. Political economy was not a time machine, his detractors pointed out. In examining inequalities of national income and power in the global system, wealthier countries were not simply staring back at earlier versions of themselves. All societies lived in the here and now, with their own internal and external obstacles to growth. Development required smart policies—in trade, finance, and governance—not just a set of inputs to kick poorer countries into modernity. There was no reason even to believe that modernity itself was just one thing, the variety that came with a Renaissance, a Reformation, and an Industrial Revolution. Rostow had taken a slice of history and derived universal laws from it. His was a kinder form of the historical determinism of a Morgan or a Grant perhaps, but no less blinkered and time-bound.
His critics notwithstanding, Rostow, who died in 2003, could look at the later decades of his life as a kind of quiet vindication. If socialism had offered the most dynamic program for political and economic change in Rostow’s childhood—as it had been for his father, bent over his printing press in Odessa—that role now came to be occupied by modernization. In South Korea, in Turkey, and even in China, political elites came to use precisely that term, sometimes in direct translation into local languages. “We must run while they walk,” Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere had said in the 1960s of his own country’s postcolonial development according to socialist principles. But as the decades wore on, as the message of nationalization, autarky, and single-party systems faded, what remained was the idea of a country racing headlong into modernity, catching up with the rest of the developed world.
Rostow in July 1967Yoichi Okamoto / LBJ Library
When Marxist economies and communist states finally collapsed in eastern Europe and Eurasia, the array of policies adopted in response by the United States and its European allies seemed to crib Rostow. Advisers, bankers, investors, and consultants descended on countries that were busy cementing market economies and opening to external trade and investment. Democracy assistance programs provided funds and know-how. Election monitors and democracy watchers reported on practices that they classified as either progress toward freedom or democratic backsliding, as if each country could be assigned to a specific stage of political development. The expectations were clear. Demand for choice in consumer goods would fuel demand for choice in elected officials. Globalization would shift local identities. Democracy at home would buttress peaceful behavior abroad.
For all Rostow’s insistence on the stepwise development of human societies, however, his version of modernization did not end with global peace, prosperity, and millennial happiness. The place he stopped was with the diffusion of power. The United States would have to plan for a time when the advantages of modernity, as he saw them, were no longer confined to the western appendage of Eurasia and a few of its former colonies. A world in which lots of societies were “mature”—filled with consumer goods and an expectation of progress, brimming with national and individual ambition—was very different from the one he knew in 1960, but it might be glimpsed on the horizon. In that sense, modernization theory was not so much the culmination of American exceptionalism as a warning against it. Prepare for the future, Rostow cautioned, by imagining how the United States would behave, in its foreign policy and in its own self-understanding, in a world where it was not particularly special at all.
In that respect at least, Rostow was broadly right. A national economy that strives for growth, a political system that assumes some kind of mass participation, and a society that expects welfare and progress have all become far closer to human universals than they were a half century ago. But from this point forward, all bets are off. There is no reason to expect that economic behavior, political institutions, and social values will always be bundled and unidirectional. Since 1981, the World Values Survey, a cluster of cross-national surveys, has arrayed societies along two dimensions of self-reported values: “traditional” versus “secular-rational” values, meaning the balance among things such as religiosity, respect for authority, secularism, and individuality; and “survival” versus “self-expression” values, meaning the balance among security, distrust of outsiders, liberty, and personal happiness. As the survey data have shown, none of these things is fixed. Even in high-modern societies, the sum of values and behaviors is more like a kaleidoscope than a way station along a predetermined developmental path.
Similar lessons apply to Rostow’s major area of concern, economic development. In the last quarter century, global progress has been remarkable, if uneven. Even accounting for the effects of climate change, by the middle of this century, human well-being—less poverty, lower child and maternal mortality, and more primary education—is likely to be at a level that would have astonished Rostow’s generation. The World Bank’s World Development Report is today more likely to focus on sovereign debt, data management, and technology as the most pressing issues in promoting human welfare, rather than health, water, sanitation, and absolute poverty. But as the economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have argued, “speculating on a grand scale” does not help explain where specific policies have succeeded or failed, much less whether external aid is, in general, good or bad. Except in the broadest possible sense—Rostow’s metrics of higher income and more investment—countries do not move through discrete stages. Instead, the challenge is to know what works in specific contexts—the textured environment of hard incentives and existing habits—and to build in an ability to pivot when a solution does not pan out.
Modernization theory was not so much wrong as self-limiting. To the degree that Americans look on Hungary, India, Russia, Turkey, or even the United States with a sense of disappointment—at the weakening of democracy, at the deepening of old social fissures such as ethnicity or religion, at the ineffable sense that things are going backward—it is because of the staying power of the worldview Rostow popularized. But as Rostow himself warned, the essence of strategy was straining to imagine beyond the horizon. In fact, when he reflected on his own contributions in his memoirs in 1972, his assessment was rather surprising. One of his goals, he wrote, had been to chart the inadequacies of life in an era of high mass consumption. The goal of human life was not to make and acquire more stuff, he felt, even though an economist might use that as a shorthand. It was “the adventure of seeing what man can and will do when the pressure of scarcity is substantially lifted from him.”
There was no reason to believe that the early modernizers had any advantage in this regard, or to expect that they would also be in the vanguard of finding ever newer frontiers to breach. “Babies, boredom, three-day weekends,” the steady “increase in real income”—his worry was that, in fully modern societies, all these things would one day soon lose their charm. In knowing more about how the stages of growth played out in different settings, Americans might at last be able to see more clearly how diverse societies “have, in different ways, organized themselves for growth without suppressing the possibility of human freedom.” At the core of Rostow’s thinking was a set of humanistic commitments that contrasted wildly with the cruelty of his policy advice—the source of the most famous quip about him, that he was “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” a phrase attributed to the writer and government official Townsend Hoopes (although no evidence seems to exist that anyone ever said it).
Rostow knew that once a country becomes modern, things can still go terribly wrong. “Billions of human beings must live in the world, if we preserve it,” he wrote in the final paragraphs of The Stages of Economic Growth. “They have the right to live their time in civilized settings, marked by a degree of respect for their uniqueness and their dignity.”
THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS
The challenges of Rostow’s era have their analogs today. He was worried about nuclear annihilation, which might be a stand-in for climate change. He was concerned about the allure of the alternative model offered by Marxism, which might well be compared to the role played by today’s populist and nationalist reactions to neoliberalism. The essentials of U.S. strategy—counter China and Russia, deter attacks on the homeland, build resilience, and cooperate on climate change, food insecurity, and communicable diseases—are different from the ambitions that Rostow had in mind. Yet he would have understood the American desire to believe that capitalism, democracy, and a pro-American foreign policy are endpoints of the same process of social development. In The Stages of Economic Growth, what he thought he had provided his fellow Americans was a way of unbundling those expectations.
For all its asterisks and misinterpretations, modernization theory was a contribution to thinking about what is universal in human development and how foreign policy might prepare for a coming age in which the benefits of modernity are more open to all. It was also a recognition that how one thinks about the world determines how one acts in it.
“The United States will work pragmatically with any partner willing to join us in constructive problem-solving, reinforcing and building new ties based on shared interests,” the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy declared. But pragmatism is what states call a theory they would rather not talk about, and it comes at a cost. In the absence of some broad understanding of what drives social and political change, the United States will continue to lurch from one crisis to the next, overburdened as a great power yet underemployed as a leader—one that may be in relative decline but that still has the awesome power to define global priorities, mobilize coalitions, and serve as the closest thing the world has to a planetary voice for cooperation, justice, and human survival.
All these roles depend on the United States’ own pathway through modernity, where the forces of change are no different from those at work in other countries. Immigration and shifting demographics will alter the public assessment of vital interests abroad. Income inequality will fuel new waves of populism. Affective polarization—the sense among voters and their leaders that the other side is not merely wrong but malicious—will present problems for the peaceful transition of power and the respect for national institutions, especially in what has effectively become a federation of one-party states. An electoral system blatantly corrupt by the standards of other established democracies, awash in private money and with weak mechanisms of internal reform, will embolden authoritarians who promise to destroy it all in one cleansing fire.
Being explicit about the way the world works is not an academic luxury. It is a way not just of forecasting the future but also of hedging against it—a tool for contingency-proofing, to the degree possible, a great power’s global vision against the domestic developments that could bring everything crashing down. Rostow believed history had demonstrated that every society can get to a specific point of human development, irrespective of language or culture. But he had no illusions that things ended there, not even for the pioneers of high consumption such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Once modernity became the taken-for-granted way of organizing the globe, once scarcity had been lessened and minds opened, further stages of development—hopeful ones as well as disasters—lay ahead. Modernization theory offered no comfort about what these stages might be. Surveillance capitalism, weaponized interdependence, the rise of artificial intelligence? Now, Rostow might have said, you take it from here.
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