Worldmaking (38 page)

After Roosevelt returned from Tehran to reports of growing discord among the Allies, Lippmann wrote in his column that “we must not make the error of thinking that the alternative to ‘isolation' is universal ‘intervention.' A diplomacy which pretended that we were interested in every disputed region everywhere would easily disrupt the alliance.” All nations throughout history have possessed spheres of influence and it was fallacious to believe that the creation of a United Nations—a term first used by FDR in January 1942—might allow something more equitable to take its place. Indeed, stability and peace were often predicated on powerful nations dominating the geographical region in which they resided—repelling predators and ensuring “stability.” Lippmann observed that it was “not only unavoidable but eminently proper that each great power does have a sphere in which its influence and responsibility are primary,” and that One World disciples engage in “the pretense, wholly illusory and dangerously confusing, that every state has an identical influence, interest, power and responsibility everywhere.”
121
Lippmann was concerned that U.S.-Soviet postwar cooperation might founder on the marginal issue of Polish or Czech independence. He began writing a follow-up to
U.S. Foreign Policy
to warn the public of the dark consequences that might flow from well-intentioned miscalculations.

The sequel,
U.S. War Aims
, was published as Allied troops poured onto Normandy's beaches, establishing with considerable bravery, and grave human cost, the second front promised at Tehran. It was a propitious moment for the book to appear, as the Second World War in Europe was clearly entering its endgame. As with
U.S. Foreign Policy
, Lippmann criticized Wilson: “The Wilsonian principles are prejudices formed in the Age of Innocence, in the century of American isolation. Wilson wished America to take its place in a universal society. But he was willing to participate only if the whole world acted as the United States acted when it enjoyed isolationism during the nineteenth century … He supposed that international relations could then be conducted verbally by meetings at Geneva.”
122
Lippmann believed Roosevelt should closely examine Wilson's diplomatic performance during and after the First World War and then do the opposite. Driven forward by abstract Kantian theories, Wilson forgot about the enemy and the fundamental Hobbesian nature of the world. Victorious nation-states, not untested world peacekeeping institutions, should make and keep the peace. People live for “their families and their homes,” Lippmann wrote, “their villages and lands, their countries and their own ways, their altars, their flags, and their hearths—not charters, covenants, blueprints, and generalities.”
123

Lippmann's contempt for the worldviews presented by Wilson and Beard inform the book at every juncture. Instead, Lippmann championed Mahanian causes of realism, alliance-driven diplomacy, and hostility to arbitration:

The argument developed in this book is that we should reverse the Wilsonian principles: that we should seek to conserve the existing political states, rather than to dismember them on the ground of self-determination, and that we should approve, not forbid, should perfect and not dissolve, the regional groupings of national states … We have to reverse the Wilsonian pattern of collective security. We cannot build a universal society from the top downwards. We must build up to it from the existing national states and historic communities.
124

It was vital that America secure something concrete from hard-won victories on the battlefield. “We shall not squander the victory,” Lippmann wrote, “as we did twenty-five years ago, if we hold fast to this simple idea: that the fundamental task of diplomats and public men is to preserve what is being accomplished by the war.”
125
To “preserve” the fruits of war—the final and decisive defeat of militarism in Germany and Japan—Lippmann proposed that international affairs henceforth stem from “a nucleus around which order can be organized.” This nucleus would consist of four centers of power, comprising the “Atlantic Community,” spearheaded by the United States, Britain, and France, the “Russian Orbit,” including a Soviet sphere in Central and Eastern Europe, and two other “constellations”: China and the other forming in “the Hindu and in the Moslem worlds, but that is more distant.”
126
In combination, these four powers would serve a police function. All would possess a vital economic stake in avoiding conflict and maintaining stability both within and outside the “orbits.” Constituent nations were free to join the United Nations, but peace was served best by Lippmann's transnational alliance system, not through countless atomized nation-states arguing their selfish case to an impotent deliberative body.

In dispensing instruction on how best to shape the postwar world, Lippmann was farsighted on some issues but unduly pessimistic on a host of others. Insightfully, Lippmann observed that Germany should be weaned off notions of autarky—or continental Germanism—and encouraged to forge a new economic identity as an exporting nation: “It will be safer for all of Europe, and also for Russia, if Germany becomes dependent upon maritime commerce. The less self-sufficient Germany is, the better for her neighbors whom she has sought to dominate, and for the Atlantic nations which will emerge from this war with the command of the seas.”
127
Channeling Germany's formidable economic potential in this export-led direction made sound geopolitical sense and anticipated the nation's remarkable journey from militarized, authoritarian aggressor to war-averse, export-led superpower. On Japan, conversely, Lippmann's usual perspicacity was hindered by a failure of imagination. He wrote, “The American objective will have been attained if Japan is incapable of recovering the military force to strike again. The reform and reconstruction of Japan are beyond our ken, and we shall be wise to solidify our relations with China by being in these matters her second … we cannot manage a Japanese revolution.”
128
The United States has enjoyed few foreign-affairs successes comparable to its occupation of Japan, which indeed amounted to a revolution of sorts in the nation's polity and external bearing.

On potential sources of conflict with Moscow, Lippmann appeared blithe. He downgraded the significance of ideology and focused instead on the positive aspect of geographical remoteness. “The two strongest states in the world will be as widely separated as it is possible to be,” Lippmann wrote. “The core of the Soviet power is at the Urals in the deep interior of the Eurasian continent; the American power is in the Mississippi Valley in the heart of the island continent of North America. Not since the unity of the ancient world was disrupted has there been so good a prospect of a settled peace.”
129
Here, Lippmann was guilty of viewing events through a nineteenth-century paradigm, failing to anticipate that a divided Europe would become a source of considerable friction between Moscow and Washington, and that liberalism-capitalism and Marxism-Leninism represented not just antagonistic ideologies in theory but also proactive rationales for intervening across the world to steer “progress” in the right direction.

The important thing to note is that Lippmann's realism was a theory. It assumed permanent trends in the structure of world affairs. It held that the “true statesman” balances resources and commitments, and eschews reckless adventurism, in pursuing policies that redound to the nation's advantage. It was a social scientific insight. But Stalin was not motivated simply by material concerns. Soviet foreign policy required a wider ideological purpose; it was bound tightly into the nation's raison d'être. In a pugnacious speech delivered at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1946, Stalin observed that the First and Second World Wars had broken out “as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.” He pondered whether such wars were avoidable in the future but concluded that only the universal victory of Marxism-Leninism made this possible: “Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development.”
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Stalin's reading of Marx and Lenin blinded him to the reality that conflict between liberal-capitalist states was not inevitable. Under American leadership the West cohered rapidly and effectively in opposing the spread of communism. But in holding that Stalin's rationality outweighed his ideological convictions, Lippmann similarly misread the taproots of Soviet foreign policy.

Lippmann was also unduly optimistic about Stalin's capacity to evolve in a more humane direction, writing that “since we became allies in war, the Soviet Union has been committing itself more and more definitively to a foreign policy based on democratic, and not totalitarian, principles … The fact is that Marshal Stalin has now repeatedly affirmed the democratic principle in respect to his dealings with his neighbors within the Russian Orbit.”
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Thinking the best of Stalin was forgivable to someone less informed; the despot had been presented to the American public in a flattering light—as “Uncle Joe”—due to the pressing concern of defeating Hitler. As someone with privileged political access and a wealth of published information, however, Lippmann might have known better.

Lippmann's purpose in writing the book was to elevate the importance of a close working relationship with the “Russian Orbit” and steer Americans away from their habitual tendency to view their place in the world through a moralistic lens. But
U.S. War Aims
failed to achieve the desired impact. Some people liked it, certainly. Within the Roosevelt administration, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes described the book as “an outstanding piece of work … novel and extremely interesting.”
132
John Foster Dulles, then a foreign affairs adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, complimented Lippmann on performing “a most able and constructive job,” particularly in identifying the limitations of the proposed United Nations.
133
Like
U.S. Foreign Policy
, it appeared on the bestseller list and was serialized in
Reader's Digest
.

But hostility outweighed praise. Henry Luce, the publisher of
Life
magazine, considered serializing the book, then declined after reading the galleys. Luce viewed Lippmann's book as “too anti-Russian” for describing the Soviet Union (accurately) as a “totalitarian state,” even though Lippmann was crystal clear in detailing the diplomatic benefits of a close working relationship between the orbits.
134
A former colleague at
The World
, John L. Balderston, complained to Lippmann that the book's underlying pessimism left him with a “feeling of despair.” Lippmann defended his portrait of the postwar world as both accurate and reasonably optimistic:

There's a great deal of confusion among our friends who think that war, which is a destructive process, can create the brave new world. The brave new world, in my view, can be created only if and when the threat of great war had disappeared for two or three generations. In other words, I think we shall get a peace as conclusive as that which followed the Napoleonic Wars and a century as free from great wars as was the Nineteenth. That's a devil of a lot when you think about it.
135

The “friend” who had detailed a path to creating “a brave new world” from the ashes of war was Sumner Welles, FDR's undersecretary of state and an architect of his Good Neighbor Policy. In 1944, Welles published
The Time for Decision
, which restated Woodrow Wilson's ambitions in calling for the creation of a much-strengthened League of Nations. The book was driven by the idealism that Lippmann's book set out to denigrate, and it captured the public's mood of optimism much more successfully. The book sold a million copies and garnered critical plaudits from across the spectrum of opinion. Welles also reviewed
U.S. War Aims
critically. As Lippmann recalled, “Sumner Welles reviewed the book and opposed it because he said it was old-fashioned belief in the balance of power … all of which we had to get away from in one word—the United Nations.”
136
In 1944, foreign policy appeared to be running away from Lippmann's modest spheres-driven realism, as he well realized: “The whole trend of our policy went in the other direction. The first theory was that we were going to unite everybody, including the Russians, in one world, and all were going to think alike. When that broke down, then we were going to unite everybody
but
the Russians in one world … The book came out as Roosevelt was in his last phase, and Truman, of course, never read a book.”
137

As Lippmann had cautioned in
Public Opinion
and
The Phantom Public
, the “outsider” American population, “served” by weak political leadership, was driving the nation toward needless confrontation with the one power with which America should remain on reasonably good terms. Worst of all was the notion that the United Nations should assume the essential role of arbiter. Lippmann complained later that “I can't help feeling that Welles's book did enormous damage in diverting the American people from an understanding of the historical realities … I might have accomplished more by a running criticism of him than I did by my own book.”
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Lippmann's plans had been frustrated by a population swayed by the Wilsonian sophistry of Sumner Welles and Wendell Willkie. If only, he lamented, “the public, and particularly the idealistic public, were not so stubbornly naïve.”
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