World War II and the Dawn of the American Century

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 cleared up any ambivalence or equivocation among Americans: they would retrench rather than lead. “Isolationism” is so problematic a term as to be analytically useless, but if there was ever an era when the United States was truly isolationist, it was the 1930s.^[2832] Franklin D.

Roosevelt began his presidency by pulling back from America’s various international commitments. In establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and in announcing the Good Neighbor policy of non-intervention in the Western Hemisphere, both in his first year in office in 1933, he signaled that he would focus on solving the economic crisis at home. But as a new and wider world crisis gathered pace toward the end of the decade, he moved to position the United States at the helm of international security. In doing so, Roosevelt would realize Wilson's vision of an American-led world order.

Separate wars erupted in East Asia in 1937 and Europe in 1939, but World War II only became a truly global conflict in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Until then, a European war and an East Asian war—in themselves bloody but routine matters in modern international relations—remained, for the most part, independent of one another. But the German and Japanese offensives of 1941 integrated these regional conflicts and fused them together in a single, interconnected whole.

Not coincidentally, 1941 also marked the final stage of America's rise to globalism. Geopolitically, of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor paved the way for American intervention in the war, in Europe as well as Asia. But just as importantly, it was in 1941 that Americans began to unveil a series of ideological blueprints for a permanent world order that would follow the momentary world war.

In January of that year, before the United States was a full belligerent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed that Americans would fight to protect “Four Freedoms” the world over: freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear. Several months later, in August, Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, a document that promised to safeguard liberal principles such as national selfdetermination, democracy, and free trade. Both the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter were general but definite markers for a postwar liberal order founded on the projection of US power.

Neither of these plans struck Roosevelt as necessarily imperialistic. “There are many kinds of Americans,” he remarked at a White House dinner in 1942, “but as a people, as a country, we're opposed to imperialism—we can't stomach it.”^[2833] Or as he declared in the wake of Japan's invasion of China in 1937, “We as a nation have no plans of conquest; we harbor no imperial designs. War will be avoided by all honorable means. To keep the peace is a fundamental policy of the United States; to live and let live in the spirit of the good neighbor is our earnest desire.”^[2834] Accordingly, over Churchill's protests, Roosevelt made certain that the first three of the Atlantic Charter's eight points had a strongly anti-colonial thrust to them.^[2835] As he explained to his advisers, “I can't believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a colonial policy.”^[2836]

Roosevelt believed that the nation he led was not an empire because, like many of his fellow Americans, he had a particularly narrow conception of empire as the indefinite control of foreign territories, and the subjugation of its peoples, by force. Imperialism was colonialism, and aside from a temporary aberration in the Philippines Americans did not possess colonies—and even there, the United States had improved the Filipinos' lives and formally promised them imminent independence. Thus even when it came to the Philippines, one of the few nations that was part of a formal American empire, Roosevelt denied that the United States was in fact an empire.

“Our Nation covets no territory,” he declared in a 1934 message to Congress promising to support Filipino independence, and “desires to hold no people against their will.”^[2837] That Roosevelt referred to a nation against whom the United States had waged a brutal war of imperial dominance only three decades before, and was in fact still the occupying power, perfectly captured a broader American ambivalence about empire and imperialism.

The year 1941 also witnessed the unveiling of another articulation of America’s emerging role as the world’s dominant state. In February, the publishing baron Henry Luce proclaimed the dawn of “the American century,” an era in which Americans would lead the world into an era of enduring peace and prosperity. For his part, Luce was more candid than Roosevelt about the realities of power that undergirded an emerging American imperium. Though he never used the terms “empire” or “imperialism” in his famous essay “The American Century,” Luce outlined a clear vision of an American imperium. What the world endured in the winter of1941, he wrote, was violent anarchy, and the only cure for anarchy was order. Because the United States was the only enlightened power capable of imposing such order, Americans must be willing “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”^[2838]

What Roosevelt denied even as he was building it, and what Luce embraced and promoted, was the beginning of an era in which the United States became an empire the likes of which had never been witnessed before. This American imperium, which Roosevelt and his successors constructed during and immediately after World War II, was built on foundations established by the Open Door in the late nineteenth century and Wilsonianism in the early twentieth. Under American leadership, several international organizations were established to regulate a stable world system: politically, the United Nations would try to enforce global norms; economically, the Bretton Woods monetary system (which came to an end in 1971), the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization) would ensure the stability of global capitalism.

All were established in a three-year period between 1944 and 1947, and all were established first and foremost by American leadership of an international coalition of like-minded countries. This was in every sense a “New Deal for the world.” Just as Roosevelt’s domestic agenda for relief, recovery, and reform was a response to the problems of laissez-faire economics that were thought to have led to the Depression, the establishment of international organizations was an attempt to bring order to geopolitical anarchy.^[2839] By binding itself to a wide range of rules-based international organizations, this strategy required the United States to limit its own power to some extent.^[2840] Yet, with the exception of the United Nations, the least effective and least coercive of these organizations, Americans remained the dominant actors in a system they had created in their own image. This system of “embedded liberalism,” as the political scientist John Gerard Ruggie called it, enabled market forces to flourish alongside domestic social-welfare regimes—but only under the watchful eye of the United States and its regulatory oversight of a liberal international system.^[2841]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

World War II and the Dawn of the American Century

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