Stephen Wertheim on the Decision for Military Dominance

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy
Responsible Statecraft, the Quincy Institute
Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm ofAmerican Foreign Policy

Archival audio:

President Donald Trump Praises Space Force: 'No Substitute For American Military Might' (NBC, January 17 2019)
Trump signs $738 billion defense spending bill (Global News, December 20 2019)
Trump threatens to 'totally destroy' North Korea in UN speech (Al Jazeera English, September 20 2017)
U.S. airstrike kills Iranian General Qassem Soleimani | Nightline (ABC, January 3, 2020)
How Qassem Soleimani's death changes the U.S.-Iran relationship (CBC News, January 3 2020)
Trump promised no more "endless wars," but his actions risk another Middle East conflict (Democracy Now!, January 3 2020)
The Fall of France (1940), (smaussschmaus, September 24 2013)
Edward R. Murrow: First Night of the Blitz on London (King of the House Inc., June 6 2016)
Harry Hopkins says Hitler can't win without U S 1941 archival footage (PublicDomainFootage, November 9 2019)

Transcript:

October 14, 2020

STEPHEN WERTHEIM: U.S. global supremacy—it's not just the material reality that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. It's also a commitment that the United States needs to undertake this role. More than that, it's an axiom. It is the premise from which a lot of questions about America's role in the world proceed.

***

MARK MANNAH: Welcome to another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I'm your host, Mark Hannah. Today, we're joined by my friend Stephen Wertheim. Stephen is a historian of American foreign policy and is the deputy director of research and policy at the newly formed Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He's also a research scholar over at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University, where he was previously on the faculty. His new book is called Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Stephen, very glad to have you with us.

WERTHEIM: I'm delighted to be here.

HANNAH: The most pressing news is obviously the imminent election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. With all the focus in the news on the pandemic, voters might not be zeroing in so much on what the candidates stand for on foreign policy. I want to spend some time burrowing into that topic. What do these candidates represent, and what is the foreign policy choice that has been presented to voters?

WERTHEIM: Well, I think it's too narrow a choice. First of all, Donald Trump has spoken a lot about ending endless wars. He's done much less to actually end them. In fact, he's put us into a state of war-like hostility with Iran that I fear could turn into an outright war if he were to be reelected.

HANNAH: Oh, interesting. And I want to dig into that, because you wrote a piece in the New York Times in which you wrote that despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists, quote, “Our military dominance must be unquestioned,” even though he might not actually have a strategy for using that military dominance. How do you think that might tie into the prospects for a war with Iran? And how do you see that unfolding?

WERTHEIM: Yeah, what's hard to understand, given all the noise Trump's makes and all the unconventional ways of putting things he has, is that he's quite conventional in saying peace through strength is his operating principle, which means he wants there to be unquestioned U.S. military dominance in the world, which is a position he's taken from the start of his campaign in 2016.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WERTHEIM: I think he subscribes to the fantasy which is very common and very widely shared in the foreign policy establishment, and that is the fantasy that by displaying overwhelming force, U.S. adversaries and rivals will be deterred from doing things the United States doesn't like. That's more or less been the working theory of the case for the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, in that sense Trump is quite conventional. And he's applied that theory to Iran quite directly by framing his assassination of Soleimani in January as an attempt to restore deterrence over Iran, but that itself was a warlike action which very well could have put us into an outright war with Iran and again, still might.

HANNAH: Let's dig into this, because it seems like between what the assassination of Soleimani—that was warlike—it looks like it was Israeli intelligence, potentially American intelligence, that destroyed these nuclear facilities in Iran. That seems like an extraordinarily provocative action. I mean, if Iran hasn't come back and declared war on the United States by now, what makes you think they will? Maybe there's something to this whole maximum pressure strategy. Tell me why I'm wrong.

WERTHEIM: Well, look, it's possible. I'm not going to make prognostications over this particular issue, but Iran has been put in quite a desperate position. And so the question is for how long will it allow itself to undergo a maximum pressure campaign? And also to what extent will U.S. allies and other actors in the world be bolder in trying to resist the U.S. maximum pressure strategy, which, you know, becomes more clearly not aimed at achieving a realistic policy outcome, but seems to be more, at least from where I sit, a matter of vengeance?

Interlude featuring archival audio

WERTHEIM: You asked about the foreign policy choice in this election. I wish we had a choice in which a candidate said, “Yeah, look, we really do not have an interest in the political outcomes of the Middle East that warrant—forget about going to war with Iraq.” Why are we involved in, by one official account, seven wars in the greater Middle East? What could possibly justify that? What does the United States get out of that? I think the United States should essentially withdraw militarily from that region. And that means not just reducing entities with unnecessary adversaries like Iran, but also having less unconditional support for U.S. partners in the region like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. That configuration, I don't think, serves as well. And my concern in this election is that we don't have candidates who are clearly putting that point of view on the table. In full disclosure, I worked in a voluntary capacity as an adviser for the Bernie Sanders campaign this year. I think the Sanders foreign policy was something that offered a significant alternative. And we'll see if Joe Biden is able to understand where his party is much different from where a lot of foreign policy leaders in Washington are.

HANNAH: And that gets at something a lot of pundits have pointed out, which is that these topics don't really break the top ten topics that are of most concern to ordinary voters. So in some ways, this foreign policy class or the people who are making decisions—in a way that might be untethered to public opinion—are responsible for those decisions and all their bad outcomes. But don't you think to some extent the American voters who don't prioritize these topics are also complicit?

WERTHEIM: Not really. In a complex democracy, there's a whole lot of political issues one would like to be an expert in, but one can't possibly be an expert. You know, no one's coming to me for advice about health care, and that's a good thing. I'm not an expert.

HANNAH: OK, I get it. I get it. This isn't a direct democracy. It's a representative form of government. But it also relies on the consent of the governed, and people didn't vote for Bernie Sanders as much as they voted for Joe Biden. So do you think that is in an authentic expression of desire for the policy proposals Joe Biden offers?

WERTHEIM: I think we have work to do. I don't think anybody thinks the Democratic primary contest this time came down to foreign policy. So, you're right that the bottom line was foreign policy did not feature very prominently. Now, here's the paradox. In a sense, the American people are not wrong to think that what happens in Montenegro is not of such great consequence to their lives and the future of this country that they should drop what they're doing and spend a lot of time understanding the complexity of Montenegrin politics and history. In a sense, the public is rationally ignorant because the United States is quite strong and secure behind oceans and behind the largest nuclear deterrent in the world. We have a paradox that the foreign policy class, in my view, has gone off course. Forget about even the policies. They haven't even provided a robust set of alternatives that could be debated for the American people to have a serious weighing of tradeoffs and express their views at the ballot box. I do think, though, we are making progress. And one reason is the incredible need of the American people at home. Even if you are rationally ignorant about foreign affairs, you have to ask, “Why does a quarter of a trillion dollars go to the Defense Department every year as a matter of course when we have so many other fish to fry?”

HANNAH: So, Stephen, you mentioned, or seem to suggest, there isn't much of a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the issue of foreign policy. Even though Donald Trump talks about ending endless wars, he's still very much committed to American military dominance. There's something Donald Trump has also done, which is to have withdrawn the U.S. from a large number of international treaties. Paris Climate Agreement comes to mind, as does the U.N. Human Rights Council, U.N. Arms Trade Treaty, and the list goes on. And I would say this is not a policy necessarily shared by Joe Biden.

WERTHEIM: I think there is a significant difference between Biden and Trump on foreign policy. I don't want to suggest there isn't. I think when it comes to military affairs, we deserve a wider choice. Now, of course, when you narrow it down to two candidates in any election, that's often the case on any issue. There's a big difference between Biden and Trump, and to take the Iran issue we were discussing, I think there's a big party split now specifically over the issue of Iran. So, a Biden Administration will not find it easy to deal with Iran given what's happened, but will, think, pursue the course of diplomacy the Obama administration was embarked on and that Trump has done his best and then some to undo. That alone is a very significant difference. And we could look at China and some other issues as well.

When it comes to nonmilitary forms of engagement, that's another big difference between them. I should say, in discussing the candidates I'm speaking only in a personal capacity, but it's beyond me why President Trump would think it makes sense for the United States, for example, to pull out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic and also blame China. These are the entities and institutions through which we need to create more cooperation to really take on threats like pandemic disease. And I would add climate change to that where, again, there's a tremendous split between the parties. So in short, what Trump is doing is relying on hard power to be his approach to foreign policy, not really engaging in ways that could be productive and create positive sum outcomes for the world, and that's really troubling. In a way, it gives the lie to what has been the argument of foreign policy elites for a number of decades that what's essential to get meaningful engagement in the world is U.S. military supremacy. You have to have U.S. military supremacy, they argue, in order to have the possibility of engagement at all. And what has Trump done? He has tried to shut down forms of engagement that might be useful, not a very studious practitioner of diplomacy, while stripping everything down to hard power alone. So now we really face a choice. Is it really the case that hard power is truly the premise for engagement? I'd like to see the United States do less militarily but be more proactive on, for example, countering climate change, pandemic disease, and other kinds of threats, planetary and transnational, that really do threaten the American people where they live and work more than the threat from any other nation-state.

HANNAH: I want to ask you as a historian what lessons we can take from history. There is a lot of talk right now in Washington about a new Cold War with China. What lessons from history can we take to inform how this new generation of policymakers should engage with China?

WERTHEIM: There's an argument that the United States should try to contain the rise of China because it's not a liberal state or just because only the United States can be number one, and so we can allow a rival. And that argument ultimately derives from what I talk about in my book—the United States has decided it has to be number one in order for there to be decent engagement in the world, trade on liberal terms, international law that functions—at least to some extent—and basic kinds of cooperation. Now, that argument had some real merit to it, not that it didn't have problems in the middle of the twentieth century.

HANNAH: You know, this reminds me a lot of the advice I got from my mother when I was a child, which is to not build yourself up by putting others down. And it sounds to me like you're accusing the United States of building itself up and putting others down, specifically China. Is that what you're saying—essentially, we don't need to be doing that?

WERTHEIM: That's part of it. And we should also look at why we want to be number one, and what we really want to be number one in. So, I want to be number one in the United States’ being a wonderful place to live, raise a family, and have a community. I want to be out there tackling the challenges we face in the twenty-first century, like climate change, and if we're going to get into a sustained military competition with China on the kind of model of what we did with the Soviet Union, I don't see how we're going to, on the one hand, try to contain Chinese power and then, on the other hand, make a bid to cooperate with China, which we will have to do because China is the number one emitter of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change in the world. And by the way, we need to be working together to provide green technology at a low cost or free to developing countries. So, we have to prioritize.

HANNAH: OK, it is now time for a round of extraneous and miscellaneous questions for which we expect spontaneous answers. Steven Wertheim, what is the one book about America and the world—that is not your own book you've just published—that you'd require both presidential candidates to read?

WERTHEIM: I'm going to go with Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire, which is a history of U.S. foreign policy in the pre-Civil War period where southerners were really at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, and they wanted to use American power to expand slavery in the United States and externally.

HANNAH: Next question. This is a question about history, and you're a historian. So, I want you to get this right. The worst foreign policy decision the U.S. has made over the past hundred years?

WERTHEIM: I'm going to say the Iraq war of 2003, a blunder, something caused by carelessness. And I think the Iraq war fits that description very well—a war with no good justification. Going in the first place is what creates all of those problems downstream. And fundamentally, it's a war the United States had no business waging, and it still haunts me. Something that I think is worth further consideration as a country for us is how so many people could have been convinced this was the right thing to do at that time.

HANNAH: Great. What's one piece of professional advice you wish you'd received when you were starting out?

WERTHEIM: I definitely could use somebody saying that your career isn't going to go smoothly and isn't going to be what you planned. And that's if you're doing it right. If it's going too smoothly and too easily, maybe you're not challenging yourself.

HANNAH: A role model for the work you do?

WERTHEIM: Oh, my God. I don't know. So, if I had gone into comedy writing, it probably would have been Larry David.

HANNAH: He can still be your muse, though. He can still be an inspiration on another level.

WERTHEIM: I'm trying to find some Davidian influences in my current work, and boy, it's pretty hard to make that connection. So, I don't know. I don't really have a role model.

HANNAH: OK, and what is a publication you read every day?

WERTHEIM: I have to say Responsible Statecraft, which is an excellent go-to place for foreign policy reporting and analysis and happens to be put out by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. But I do, in fact, read it every day, which I can't say about many publications these days.

HANNAH: Now I want to really dive into your book Tomorrow, the World, which is out in just two weeks. Let's start with a simple and broad question. Your subtitle includes the phrase “U.S. Global Supremacy.” What do you mean by that?

WERTHEIM: U.S. global supremacy, for me, is not just the material reality that the United States is the most powerful country in the world by a number of measures—first and foremost, military measures. But for me, it's more than that. It's also an idea. It's also a commitment, widely shared by the foreign policy-making class in the United States, that the United States needs to undertake this role. And more than that, it's an axiom. It is the premise from which a lot of questions about America's role in the world proceed. So we assume, given that the United States must maintain political and military supremacy on a global scale, what then should the United States do?

HANNAH: But you're talking about supremacy as a bad thing. I mean, any fan of a sports team has no problem chanting, “We are number one.” What is what is wrong with wanting your country to be number one when it comes to military might, strong economy, and all these things? What's wrong with being supreme?

WERTHEIM: The issue I have with global supremacy is that it really should emerge from the interests of the United States, the interests of the American people, and the safety and well-being of the American people. So as a historian, I'm interested in explaining why at a certain point in time, the American foreign policy-making class, having previously not pursued global supremacy, certainly not in a military sense, suddenly decided this is what the United States should be. And I'm interested down to the present day and why that argument has continued to persuade people, even as we've lost sight of the original rationale and I think is now, just in our own time, starting to be questioned because of both the vital needs of the American people at home and the record of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.

HANNAH: You're a historian. What I was taken by is something you write, which is that instead of asking what took so long to summon the willingness to lead, it poses the properly historical question of why the United States opted to install itself as the world's superpower at all, because, as you just mentioned, this is a relatively newfangled notion. Right? Can you talk us through a little bit about America's role in the world and its posture toward the rest of the world earlier on in its history and what our founding fathers suggested about how America should conduct itself in the world?

WERTHEIM: Yeah. I make the argument—which I think will be controversial among historians as well as others—that for most of American history, the United States did not pursue global political military supremacy. It's really hard to find an example of a founder of the United States or even a significant policymaker coming into the turn of the twentieth century who says clearly that's what the United States is about, whereas it's very easy to find American leaders and intellectuals after 1945 saying that is what the United States should be doing in the world. If you go back to the founding generation, George Washington's golden rule was to avoid entangling alliances with other powers, especially in Europe and Asia, but not just that. Washington and the founding generation were not just leery of U.S. participation in the system of power politics in Europe and Asia. They also advocated a kind of internationalism, the promotion of liberal intercourse with other nations and a system of rules, which Washington also talks about after he talks about avoiding permanent alliances with any part of the foreign world. Now, I don't want to overstate the case here. The United States was born as part of an empire and then pursued what Thomas Jefferson called the building of an empire of or for liberty in its new world domain. And so the United States has a record, as many historians have shown, of constantly expanding its realm. For the first one hundred years, that expansion mainly took place within the North American continent and came at a severe price for indigenous peoples and also displaced other European powers from the continent. The United States has had a formal colonial empire marked most explicitly by the war 1898, where it took the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The United States has a record of military expansion and intervention throughout its history. But the argument made by several generations of Americans before World War Two was that it was one thing to build in the new world, a realm in which the United States was dominant and played by a different set of rules than the European powers. And indeed, the United States wanted to get the European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. But it would be quite another thing for the United States to get involved in the European system of power politics and alliances. And that is what changes quite dramatically, in my view, in the early years of World War Two.

HANNAH: Would you call the United States an empire right now?

WERTHEIM: You know, sure. I don't think it gets you very far to call the United States an empire, because what most people take that to mean is a formal colonial empire in which the United States formally and officially rules subordinate territories, and people in those territories from a metropole. That’s what the United States rejected. At least, it rejected being on the colonized end of the stick, though the United States then became a colonial power. But that's not centrally what I'm trying to explain. What I'm trying to explain is what, today, usually goes by the euphemism of U.S. global leadership—in other words, a commitment to having a globe-spanning military and a set of responsibilities to basically be the armed underwriter of law and order across the globe. I think that's what is distinctive about the project the United States began to embark on in World War Two and is continuing to, I would say, double down on after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we have it to this day. So I think what we have to explain is something a little bit more specific than a turn to empire.

HANNAH: One of the main arguments of your book is that American arms supremacy was, in fact, a choice. It wasn't an inevitability. It wasn't necessarily natural to American foreign policy or America's identity. And so I want to ask you: who made this choice? Earlier you mentioned a foreign policy class as though that's a thing. But were there specific people in the 1940s or at a certain juncture before then that consciously decided we are going to choose to run this thing we call the world? We're going to run the world? We're going to dominate other countries?

WERTHEIM: Yes. There weren't any masterminds, but I think there was, as you say, a deliberate and worked out choice that would have been very hard—was hard—for anyone to foresee as of the outbreak of World War Two in Europe. At that point, hardly anyone advocated that the United States should get directly involved in World War two, much less take it upon itself to become the supreme military power after that war. And yet a year later, that's what a range of officials, semi-officials, and intellectuals of the United States were starting to plan and to advocate. That's my starting point.

HANNAH: When you did the research for this book, what did you find? What were those pivotal moments?

WERTHEIM: A pivotal moment was the fall of France in 1940, which was a truly shocking moment that nobody really expected, including many of Hitler's own generals, when Hitler ordered the invasion. The French army was the strongest in Europe, and the Maginot Line was very effective, but not against a force that could go around the Maginot Line, which the Verimark ended up doing. That changed the balance of power for the United States, and for the United States, it created a new question that foreign policy elites hadn't really confronted before, which was: are we willing to live in a world where Europe could potentially come under the rule of a totalitarian power?

Interlude featuring archival audio

WERTHEIM: For a short period of time, this created a specter that really hostile powers—in fact, totalitarian powers—could dominate Europe and Asia. What did that mean for the United States? Did the United States want to live in a world in which that was the case? And then we got a tremendous debate across American society about how the United States should respond to the state of affairs. Should it, in short, guard the Western Hemisphere, as one reading of the Monroe Doctrine might have it do? Against that emerged a set of policy elites, and this is the dominant view that does indeed get into the Roosevelt Administration after Pearl Harbor. The United States needed to do more than that. It wasn't enough to live hunkered down in a world where the worst powers could potentially run roughshod over Eurasia. And so, they effectively decide that the United States needs to undertake a long term program of political military supremacy, not just to make sure Europe and Asia don't go under, but to make sure something similar like this doesn't happen in the future at the price potentially of endless wars.

HANNAH: Stephen, I want to congratulate you on the launch of your book Tomorrow, The World, The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Thank you, Stephen, for coming on None of the Above. It's always good to see you.

WERTHEIM: You, too. My pleasure. Thank you.

HANNAH: You can follow Stephen's work at the Quincey Institute website and on Twitter @stephenwertheim. He is prolific and frequently retweeted. His book is available on October 27 from Harvard University Press.

Again, this is Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special shout out to our None of the Above team who make this all possible. Thank you to our producer Caroline Gray, our editor Luke Taylor, and our sound engineer Zubin Hensler. EGF’s summer research assistant Keenan Ashbrook also helped on this episode. If you enjoyed what you heard, subscribe to us on Google Play, on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. See you next time.

(END.)

More Episodes