Worldmaking Read online

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  For Emma, Benedict, and Anna

  There is a spirit that rules us … that we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.

  —WOODROW WILSON

  All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.

  —DAVID HUME

  Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of an engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of a statesman.

  —HANS J. MORGENTHAU

  History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.

  —PAUL WOLFOWITZ

  INTRODUCTION

  In September 1949, a WB-29 took off from Okinawa, Japan, and flew north toward the Kamchatka peninsula, which hangs from northeastern Russia like a mastiff’s tail. The bomber had been refitted to conduct surveillance and carried filters to detect anomalies in the atmosphere. As the plane flirted with Soviet airspace, radiation was detected at unnaturally high levels. Navy scientists at sea level confirmed that radioactive sludge was also present in the rainwater. There was only one plausible explanation: the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb.

  It fell to David Lilienthal, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, to inform the president. Truman found the news so surprising—surely it was too soon for Moscow to have tested an atomic device—that he scarcely lent it credence. He asked Lilienthal if he was sure that the radiation stemmed from a nuclear weapon and not a reactor malfunction. When Truman finally accepted Lilienthal’s word that the atomic source was weaponized, the president was confronted with a major decision: whether to respond by ordering the development of the hydrogen bomb, a fusion rather than a fission device with a destructive potential that was theoretically boundless.

  Winston Churchill captured the H-bomb’s epochal nature in observing that the device was as far from the A-bomb as the “atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow.”1 Whether to proceed was not simply a military decision; it was a philosophical one too. To facilitate a robust decision-making process, Truman established a three-man committee to present him with a majority recommendation, composed of Lilienthal, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Johnson was certain to recommend its development and Lilienthal was opposed. So Acheson would likely have the deciding vote. The secretary asked his two best strategic thinkers, George Kennan, the director of the Policy Planning Staff (PPS), and his deputy, Paul Nitze, to advise on whether America’s military future should be thermonuclear.

  Reclusive and deliberative, Kennan set about his task in the usual way. He retreated to his office with books on history, philosophy, and literature and settled down to think and to write. Addressing a question of vast moral and strategic dimensions, confronting hypothetical worst-case scenarios that included the end of human life on earth, Kennan soon found himself physically and emotionally exhausted. His wife, Annelise, had recently given birth to their third child, and after completing his first draft Kennan joked to Acheson that he “was tempted, day before yesterday, to go into the baby’s room and say: ‘Go on, get up. You’re going to work today. I’ll get in the crib.’”2 He crafted a seventy-nine-page paper, rich in history and philosophy, which counseled against building this fearsome weapon. A fusion device was morally repugnant and the whole idea of honing an “atomic strategy” was diabolical—leading as it could to a war in which everyone loses—so an international organization, in this unique instance, offered the best way forward. Kennan sought to display this through the elegance of his prose and breadth of literary allusion, including a quotation from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

  And appetite, an universal wolf,

  So doubly seconded with will and power,

  Must make perforce an universal prey,

  And last eat up himself.3

  Where a war with conventional weapons offered the possibility of conventional outcomes—“the possibility of surrender and submission”—Kennan believed that “weapons of mass destruction do not have this quality. They reach backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes … They imply the admission that man not only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy.” Summing up, Kennan quoted St. Paul, “We know in part and we prophesy in part,” before appealing to American values to guide the decision-making process: “In such a time there is only one thing a nation can do which can have any really solid and dependable value: and that is to see that the initial lines of its policy are as close as possible to the principles dictated by its traditions and its nature.”4

  Paul Nitze’s operating style was very different. He was a former Wall Street banker adept in mathematics and deductive logic, a bureaucratic infighter who knew when to reach for the jugular, a Harvard postgraduate with a sophisticated understanding of international economic affairs. These qualities—his facility with quantitative analysis in particular—led Kennan to ask permission from Acheson in 1947 to add Nitze to his Policy Planning Staff. Acheson declined, observing that Kennan should be looking to hire a “deep thinker,” not a “Wall Street operator”—a typically pointed Achesonian put-down.5 But Acheson formed a more positive view of Nitze in the intervening years. In mid-1949, Kennan decided to take a leave of absence from State, asking Acheson if he could appoint Nitze as his deputy with a view to his succeeding him after his departure. This time the secretary of state said yes, and with real enthusiasm. Nitze was implacably anti-Soviet and did not share Kennan’s view that agreement might be reached with Moscow over German reunification. Nitze was also a firm believer in maintaining the strongest possible military, that peace was primarily secured through strength. Nitze’s approach was data driven and scientifically oriented. Kennan and Nitze’s responses to the H-bomb dilemma revealed different worldviews and priorities.

  Nitze first sought to comprehend the science of nuclear fusion. On consecutive days he met with J. Robert Oppenheimer (later a friend to Kennan) and Edward Teller, the first a skeptic of the wisdom of developing thermonuclear weapons, the second a strong proponent. Having played a key role in fathering the atomic bomb—a role that he viewed as justifiable in those wartime circumstances—Oppenheimer wanted to play no part in siring a more terrible progeny. His personal view was that the United States should refuse to develop the weapon on moral grounds and hope that the Soviet Union would follow its example. But he understood that Nitze was unlikely to be swayed by wishful thinking and instead sought to convince him that the science of the hydrogen bomb was actually science fiction. While it was technically possible to construct and detonate a hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer observed, moving such a necessarily massive device was another thing entirely. He told Nitze that a plane could not carry the cumbersome weapon—rather, it would require an oxcart. This meant the
fusion bomb was tactically impotent. “All in all,” Nitze recalled, “[Oppenheimer] concluded the world would be much better off if no one had such weapons.”6 Nitze found his performance unconvincing, writing later that “we had no scruple … in ignoring those of his recommendations which seemed to be based on political rather than scientific considerations.”7 Oppenheimer misrepresented the science as he feared the unleashing of a great evil.

  Edward Teller was more successful with his sales pitch, mainly because he believed in the necessity of the product. Nitze said, “Teller had a clear and powerful mind and could make his ideas understandable even to one who was not a professional physicist. He went to the blackboard and showed me two different approaches to solving the problem.”8 Warming to the subject, and to his interlocutor, Nitze ended up talking physics with Teller for more than two hours. By the end of their conversation, Nitze was convinced that the fusion bomb was feasible and that Oppenheimer’s warnings about its immobility were unfounded. Nitze surmised, correctly, that Oppenheimer’s politics had clouded his advice. Teller was focused and compelling in argument, and he had no moral qualms about the enterprise at hand. A Jewish Hungarian émigré, Teller despised the Soviet Union and the pernicious ideology that sustained it. There should be no question of America restraining itself in competition with such a regime. Of course, politics had also shaped Teller’s advice, and he continued moving rightward through the remainder of his career. In 1954, for example, Teller testified before Congress that Oppenheimer’s pacific leanings made him a “security risk.”9

  While Kennan remained isolated in his office, identifying the appropriate Shakespeare quotation to support his cause, Nitze joined the Atomic Working Group within the State Department. To skeptics of the hydrogen bomb, concerned that money spent on its development would be siphoned from the service budgets, Nitze suggested ways to sweeten the pill, such as connecting the development of thermonuclear weapons with a larger strategic review, designed to redress and fund conventional military deficiencies. When Nitze received a draft of Kennan’s paper, he scribbled dissenting notes on the margin: “no!,” “Misreading of what we are about,” “prohibition.” In his formal response to Kennan, Nitze observed that declining to develop a fusion weapon, and thus allowing the Soviets to gain a tactical advantage, would be foolish and reckless.10 Nitze advised that the United States develop the hydrogen bomb with all due haste. Moral qualms were otiose if the antagonist did not share them. Stalin’s Soviet Union was no place to vest an act of faith.

  Acheson admired the professional manner in which Nitze set about his task and was convinced by his recommendations. Nitze had figured the science, taken soundings, prepared the bureaucracy, placated critics, and decisively rebutted Kennan. Acheson, conversely, had nothing but scorn for Kennan’s methods and advice. His approach—which did not extend beyond deployment of his principal weapon: his prose—had fallen flat. The secretary of state remembered Kennan telling him that it was preferable for Americans to “perish rather than be party to a course so evil as producing that weapon.” Acheson snapped in response, “If that is your view you ought to resign from the foreign service and go out and preach your Quaker gospel, but don’t do it within the department.”11 President Truman’s decision was now a formality.

  But this did not even come down to a majority vote. In a meeting on January 31, 1950, Truman asked Acheson, Lilienthal, and Johnson just one question: “Can the Russians do it?” When the trio came back with a unanimous yes, the president replied, “In that case we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.” According to one despondent opponent of the fusion bomb, it was “like saying no to a steamroller.”12 But subsequent events appeared to vindicate Nitze and Truman’s belief that the decision could not have been otherwise. The day after the president’s announcement was cheered on the floor of the House of Representatives, Truman was informed that Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was in fact a Soviet spy. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, noted that the revelations “would very much reinforce the hands of the president on the strength of [his H-bomb] decision [and] it will make a good many men who are in the same profession as Fuchs very careful of what they say publicly.” After learning of Fuchs’s espionage, Lilienthal wrote in his diary: “The roof fell in today … It is a world catastrophe, and a sad day for the human race.”13

  * * *

  Nitze and Kennan’s disagreement over the so-called Super bomb is fascinating on multiple levels. For one thing, Kennan’s case against the H-bomb did not stem from a cold appraisal of Soviet capabilities and intentions; rather, it was moral, instinctive, and emotional. In an obvious way, Kennan—usually identified as a foreign policy “realist,” someone who believes that all states seek to maximize power and advantage in an anarchic world system—was dispensing unrealistic advice.14 No nation in modern history had ever declined to develop a more lethal weapons system. When technology and resources permitted, the English developed the longbow in the twelfth century; the Swedish developed the howitzer in the seventeenth; the Germans developed the V1 and V2 rocket-propelled missiles—thankfully, at a late stage in the Second World War. For a man so steeped in history, Kennan’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb was curiously unhistorical. It was based on the Wilsonesque hypothesis that declining to develop a fusion bomb and vesting faith in an international organization would persuade the Soviet Union to do the same, principally by the moral quality of American restraint. It was an original proposition, to be sure, and the laws of history would have been altered had the experiment succeeded, for genies like these are not easily returned to lamps.

  But Kennan’s recommendation was highly risky, as we now know. Three months before Truman’s January decision, Stalin had ordered the development of a Soviet H-bomb. The United States tested its first fusion device in 1952, and the Soviet Union did so just a year later—which again was far ahead of American expectations. Had Kennan’s voice carried, Moscow alone might have possessed thermonuclear weapons—a very real “missile gap” with potentially dire consequences. The physicist (and later dissident) Andrei Sakharov, who led the development of the Soviet Union’s H-bomb, later suggested that his political masters would not have been impressed by American restraint: “Any American steps to suspend or permanently cancel the development of a thermonuclear weapon would have been judged as either a sly, deceptive move, or the manifestation of stupidity and weakness. In both cases the reaction would have been unambiguous—not to get caught in the trap and to take immediate advantage of the stupidity of the enemy.”15

  Kennan’s advice was well-intentioned but dangerous; Nitze’s, less clouded by emotion, counseling what could be construed, counterintuitively, as a “safer” course of action. Kennan viewed a thermonuclear world as intolerable; the United States should play no part in its creation. His advice was shaped by adherence to an absolute moral principle, a perspective with which one can easily sympathize given the nature of the weapon. But Nitze confronted a hard reality and was more attentive than Kennan—in this rare instance—to the lessons of history.

  Yet there is more to it than that. The debate over the hydrogen bomb also suggests that U.S. foreign policy is often best understood as intellectual history.16 Divergent philosophies, disciplinary preferences, religious sensibilities, and life experiences indelibly shape the structure and quality of the advice that foreign policymakers dispense. Kennan’s civilizational pessimism, religiosity, and wide reading in moral philosophy; the horror evoked by visiting his beloved Hamburg in 1949—“The immensity of its ruin overwhelmed me”—and his conviction that the hydrogen bomb posed an existential threat—all these sources combined to shape a policy recommendation that departed from his usual skepticism about the ability of Wilsonian supranational institutions to achieve meaningful results.17 It was an artful and emotional response.

  Nitze was not as well-read or as contemplative as Kennan. But he understood that September 1949—the month that Mao Zedong secured victo
ry in the Chinese Civil War and just a few months after the Soviet Union ended its blockade of Berlin—was no time to attempt a bold play conditioned by notions of pure morality. Nitze excised emotion from his thought process because he believed the circumstances demanded it. Kennan and Nitze both intellectualized the dilemma—Kennan pondered ethics; Nitze, science and the strategic balance—and arrived at opposite conclusions. Each believed his recommendation stood the better chance of saving the world.

  The stakes are not always so high, nor the personalities so colorful and dramatically intertwined, but a basic principle holds true throughout American history: its foreign policy is difficult to understand without an ideational frame. There are multiple divides that can shape decision making: realism versus idealism; ethics versus technics; emotionality versus instrumental rationality; theory versus intuition; pragmatism versus monism.18 The debate between Kennan and Nitze involved all these categories to varying degrees. Binaries like these can be helpful because they capture elemental forces that sometimes prove irresistible within policymaking. But I am mindful that they can also sometimes mislead, for to paraphrase Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, people are “large” and “contain multitudes.”

  This book is an intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy. It focuses on ideas, their authors, and the context in which ideas were formed and examines their traction and consequences. My purpose is to identify, explain, and critique the disputatious ideas that have informed the making of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the nineteenth century—the moment when America truly announced itself as a great power with its resounding military victory against Spain. I do so through an interlinked narrative history of nine intellectuals—Alfred Thayer Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Barack Obama—whose ideas and disagreements about America’s role in the world take the story of U.S. foreign relations from the Civil War (in which Mahan served) to the present. While each chapter focuses primarily on an individual, the broad approach is dialogic rather than biographical. Each figure was consciously engaged in a process of worldmaking, formulating strategies that sought to deploy the nation’s vast military and economic power—or indeed its retraction through a domestic reorientation—to “make” a world in which America is best positioned to thrive.19