The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

"Yes. I mentioned that the mood of the historical profession was changing profoundly just as Perkins was producing his book. Contemporary commentators became preoccupied by what was called the crisis of capitalism and its various expressions, such as urban decay. The Vietnam War divided the nation and generated unprecedented hostility towards military adventures, which were seen as expressions of imperialism. The American dream seemed to be fading. It was then that William Appleman Williams published his famous book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy , which appeared in 1959. Of course, he had other books to his name, but this one serves to symbolise the transformation in historical studies that took place at that time. Perkins conceived of the US as a benevolent but misguided imperial power; Williams took his inspiration from the Progressives and the materialist interpretation of history that Pratt had rejected in 1936. Williams believed that the causes of imperial expansion could be related to the evolution and contradictions of the capitalist system. Imperialism wasn’t a matter of benevolence, coincidence, or psychic crisis, as other writers had claimed. For Williams, the story was one of capitalist crises that created acute difficulties at home through falling living standards, limited opportunities, and unemployment. It was the search for solutions to these domestic problems that led to imperial expansion overseas. This approach gave Williams a comprehensive view of American history . He went back to the era of mercantilism, advanced with the Progressives to the war of 1898, and continued into his own times with a reassessment of the Cold War. 1898 wasn’t the end of the story: it was the beginning. “The American dream seemed to be fading” Curiously, Williams wasn’t very interested in the formal empire that the US had created, and I’ve often wondered why. His main concern was with the informal expansion of the US through what he called the ‘open door’. He used this term to refer to the strategies adopted to enter the territory of a sovereign state and effectively make it subservient to US interests without formally colonising it. In doing so, he initiated a theme of research which has continued to today and has produced a range of studies on the US presence in the Caribbean, Central America, and of course in Latin America, as well as in Asia. Williams himself has been much discussed, and there is still much that could be said. I shall mention here his view of the Cold War, which Platt could not have written about and Perkins bypassed. Williams produced an analysis that became enduringly controversial. The conventional view held that the Cold War was caused by Russian expansionism. Not so, said Williams. The Cold War was as much, if not more, the result of US expansionism, which was driven by fundamental economic forces that had assumed a new form after 1945. That, crudely put, was his argument. Predictably, it was an argument that sparked all sorts of criticism. It is said to be mechanistic and monocausal. It minimises political, ideological, and geopolitical arguments, and diminishes the importance of individual action. There’s a whole industry devoted to proving and disproving his analysis. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a really great case of an outstanding book which, as far as I know, never won any major prizes. It was off centre. It was out of the mainstream. Williams himself was investigated by the IRS and the House Un-American Activities Committee. What a dread duo to have knocking at your door—and for writing the ‘wrong sort of history’ too! But none of that matters for historians. Williams’s book is certainly the most influential study of US imperialism written in the 20th century. Like it or not, it’s one of the classics of the field. No, I don’t think so, at least not in that sense. To understand the reaction to his work, you have to go back to the McCarthy era, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. To be an American patriot was to be ‘on side’ in the battle against the Soviet Union. The feelings of the time explain much of the hardening of attitudes ‘for’ and ‘against.’ Since then, Williams has taken his place as a major historian. And as we will see in a moment, he inspired a whole group of other scholars whose careers are now, like mine, coming to an end. Time modulates and moderates all things."

"The reason it’s well worth reading, half a century after it was written, is that the messianic view of the world it critiques is one of the elements of 20th century liberalism. Stretching back to Woodrow Wilson, people who believe in a strong state have been tempted by the idea of spreading the American way throughout the world. It’s not enough for the government to improve American society; they want to remake the world in our image. Liberals generally embrace this Wilsonian vision. Indeed, Obama is a good Wilsonian. Williams’s book remains important because it shows that foreign interventionism and free trade is deeply embedded in liberal history. Williams critiques American foreign policy as a foreign policy of good intentions. Liberals want to improve the world beyond our borders and broaden the rights of people overseas. The imperial temptation is something that liberals succumb to as much as conservatives. It challenged the Cold War mentality. Williams was one of the first to challenge the premise that the expansion of American power is by definition the expansion of freedom. He pointed to the fact that we intervene in all sorts of countries in support of tyranny. It’s one of those books whose importance was magnified by the events that came after it, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . During the Vietnam War, as people became more aware of the fallacies of American foreign policy, they turned back to Williams for an explanation."