America’s World: The Rise of the United States and the Long American Century By Gregory Mitrovich, Ph.D. Columbia University Overview Mitrovich Proposal, America’s World 1 Henry Luce feared the world was on the precipice of a new Dark Age. From his vantage point as the famed publisher of Life magazine in New York City, Luce had witnessed one of the most spectacular military campaigns in history: In a mere eighteen months Adolf Hitler’s armies had crushed Poland, conquered France, and forced their vanquished British allies to escape across the English Channel from the port city of Dunkirk, barely evading the pursuing German Panzer divisions. By Spring of 1941 Hitler’s legions were sweeping across Central Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, while his ally Joseph Stalin gleefully looked on from the sidelines. Though Britain would survive the ensuing “Battle of Britain” it remained isolated from the continent and helpless to stop Hitler’s march. In Asia, Germany’s powerful Japanese allies had already launched a devastating invasion of China and much of South East Asia while secretly preparing for total war throughout the Pacific. Only the United States could stop Hitler and his allies from conquering the world. But with the majority of Americans and many of their political leaders believing World War II to be solely a European affair with which the United States must not involve itself, democracy’s future seemed doomed. With the fate of the world at stake, Luce wrote one of the most celebrated and controversial editorials of the 20th century—a call to arms imploring the American people to meet the Nazi challenge and accept the burden of world leadership. The article was entitled “the American Century.” Unlike President Woodrow Wilson, who offered grandiose justifications to gain support for American entry into World War I, Luce did not argue for intervention in order to impose a set of universal principles on the world. Rather, he made a more personal argument, that the United States needed to stop Hitler Mitrovich Proposal, America’s World 2 because the world he threatened was, in fact, already America’s world, and that the war he waged was more than just a European conflict; it was a battle for the survival of the American way of life and America’s vision for the future of the world. More than America’s physical security was at stake. At risk was a global society founded on American ideals that the United States was honor bound to defend. “Once we cease to distract ourselves from the lifeless arguments about isolationism,” Luce argued, “we shall be amazed to discover that that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways—in very human ways.” For its many critics, most notably Professor Andrew Bacevich, “The American Century” was a declaration for unrestricted American internationalism, one which saw the United States abandon its pre-war isolationism and dedicate itself into remaking the world in its image. In his co-edited book, The Short American Century, Bacevich argues that with the end of World War II the United States adopted a foreign-policy platform aimed at democratizing the world and building a liberal-international world economy centered on American power. During the ensuing years the U.S. risked a nuclear holocaust in battling the Soviet Union in a decades-long Cold War, militarily intervened throughout the third world to defeat the threat of Soviet-backed communism, and initiated modernization campaigns designed to turn the less developed nations of the world into American-style liberal democracies. The consequences of these efforts, Mitrovich Proposal, America’s World 3 Bacevich and others critics insist, were devastating to the United States: a costly arms race, the ever-present threat of nuclear war, interventions that took the lives of hundreds of thousands, and modernization plans that many contend have largely failed to meet their objectives, the most emblematic of course being the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the failed “Arab Spring” each of which plunged the Middle East into chaos and damaged America’s reputation abroad. They conclude that it is time for the United States to abandon the hubris of this “short American Century” and focus on more modest policies based on preserving the immediate needs of America’s national security while avoiding ideologically-based interventions. Many of these criticisms are understandable, particularly as Luce declares so unhesitatingly that “It is for America and for America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise—and economic order compatible with freedom and progress—shall or shall not prevail in this century.” However, context matters in assessing Luce’s motivations. The world Luce lived in was a world on the verge of catastrophe, a world where one of the vilest, most destructive and genocidal ideologies had seized power in Germany, waged a war that triumphed over what was left of democratic Europe, and seemed poised to impose its brutal system on the entire world. With Great Britain struggling merely to survive and the only credible challenger to Hitler being a communist Soviet Union that would remain an ally until Germany invaded six months later, it was neither hyperbole nor zealotry for Luce to assert that only the United States could preserve liberal democracy. However, these critics miss a far more critical point: The idea of American Century, its “yearning to reshape the world” as these critics describe it, was never meant Mitrovich Proposal, America’s World 4 to imply the use of military or economic coercion or the creation of a dominant American empire as Bacevich and others have asserted. I argue instead that the world’s fascination with America’s society—i.e., its political and economic philosophies, and the products of its culture—represented the original foundation of American internationalism. European elites fiercely debated whether they should adopt America’s republican form of government and mass consumption, mass production economy while the general public devoured American culture: its art, literature, film, music, with a passion that stunned national elites. This is what Europeans would call, the Americanization of the world. Furthermore, the concept underpinning the American Century, i.e., creating an Americanized world, had been a well-established objective of United States policy for nearly a century before Luce wrote his editorial. America’s efforts to “reshape the world” begins in earnest after the American Civil War when the nation emerged from that devastating conflict, freed from the burden of slavery, and ready to “enlighten” an aristocratic world to the virtues of liberal democracy. The war had barely ended when America’s leading internationalists affirmed that the “Americanization” of the world was their ultimate goal as only then would the world enjoy peace and prosperity. However, European opposition was stiff. “The American idea is strikingly opposed to the European one” wrote the editors of the weekly journal The Nation in 1865, since European society had been “founded on force” and America’s had been “founded on freedom.” “Indeed,” they concluded, “our institutions are an exact inversion of theirs.” As the historian John Lothrop Motley wrote in 1868, “the hope of the world lies in the Americanization of the world.” Mitrovich Proposal, America’s World 5 The campaign these 19th century internationalists launched was breathtaking in its ambition and swift in its impact. By the 1880s the world was locked in debate about the new American vision of the future, and the long term impact of this rising power. In 1878 the former British Prime Minister William Gladstone was among the first to recognize the wake being created by America’s rise. Even with Britain at the peak of its power, Gladstone warned the British people that “America is passing us by as if in a canter” and that it should prepare itself for the day when America becomes “what we are now—head servant in the great household of the world.” Yet these changes were taking place at a time when the United States had little in the way of deployable military power and an economy that was unquestionably a growing but still secondary to the dominant British economy. The government had quickly demobilized America’s Civil War army while the American Navy slipped into irrelevance as no funds were spent upgrading America’s fleets into the new iron-hulled warships that made up the European navies. Thus, Americanization could not occur at the point of a gun or under threat of economic sanction, but by the genuine interest of the European public in the potential benefits of American society. It would be another famous journalist, England’s William T. Stead, who at the turn of the 20th century would best illuminate the impact of Americanization. According to Stead, the global transformation predicted by so many was now at hand. In his classic book The Americanization of the World, the Trend for the 20th Century he explored how region by region the world of the turn of the century was being changed by the spread of America’s social, economic, and political model, and how in response nations had to adopt mass production rather than elite production, expand suffrage beyond rich, white Mitrovich Proposal, America’s World 6 males, and develop art and entertainment aimed for mass audiences rather than primarily the elite.