Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy

Acknowledgments

x Contents chapter 3. Deeds Undone: C. D. Jackson, Liberation, and Adventurism · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 123 chapter 4. The American Sublime: Eisenhower, Deterrence, and Romanticism · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 167 conclusion · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 233 notes · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 251 bibliography · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 299 index · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 315 xi Preface • In all these undertakings the decisive fact will be the spirit, the resolve, the determination with which we bend to the task. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, foreign policy speech in San Francisco, October 8, 1952 T his book examines the worldviews inherent within four major strategic statements in the early Cold War: containment, massive retaliation, deterrence, and liberation. The early Cold War (the period lasting, in my view, from 1946 through the pivotal year of Sputnik , 1957) represents the rise of American world supremacy, the crucible of powerful American ideologies, and the context in which the United States assumed the power to destroy the world with nuclear weapons. It also constitutes the “classical age” of American security strategy, returned to repeatedly in contemporary debates about foreign policy as a source xii Preface of ideas, inspiration, and historical precedent. For all these reasons and more, the period has epochal significance in American and world histories. This book combines the theoretical and conceptual resources of rhetorical studies with those of philosophy, intellectual history, and sociology to show how major strategic ideas in early Cold War expressed divergent worldviews. “Worldview” has become a cliché in some circles, and thus risks vapidity . Worse, it has become an ideological cudgel used by the so-called Religious Right to divide peoples of the world categorically into an “us” versus “them.” Finally, it can connote a false human and cultural anthropology, suggesting that humans and their cultures are essentially ideational. I am aware of all these problems with the term worldview, but have decided to use the concept anyway. When I invoke worldview I do so in its fullest, and perhaps oldest, sense. Weltanschauung is a way of apprehending the world, entailing not only a way of seeing the world, but a way of being in it, and ultimately a distinct way of talking about it. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who is credited with developing the concept, took “worldview ” to represent a full array of ideas, sentiments, and habits rooted in language. “Each language, each culture, in this view, expresses a particular way of seeing and feeling, a distinct perception of the world, together with a certain manner of responding to its challenges. The word Weltanschauung , in its most literal sense, captures perhaps best the compass of divergent ways of encountering the outside from the inside.”1 Indeed, Herder held that to know the world from the “inside” is to know it from within a Lebensform, a form of life inextricable from language.2 Worldviews thus denote far more than ideational rubrics; they are not mere psychological states. Rather, they are embedded in ways of speaking and being. Indeed, once solidified in speech, worldviews can become objects exterior to the self: objects of commitment, discipline, devotion, and aspiration.3 In this way they can become “ethics,” or at least proto-ethics, which motivate action. My argument is that major strategic statements in the early Cold War were motivated at least as much by worldviews (having the character of “objects”) as they were by external exigencies, and that for key political actors these worldviews approached the status of “ethics” for the nation. Thus the worldviews I am concerned with here—stoicism, evangelicalism , adventurism, and romanticism—have distinct ethical aspects. But Preface xiii more than ethics, they are rhetorics. I approach each as a worldview embedded within discrete rhetorical traditions, that is, distinct ways public actors have historically addressed the nation. Each of these worldviews represents a robust way of talking about America in the world. I argue that stoicism, evangelicalism, adventurism, and romanticism, seen as rhetorics, help explain the logical and ethical coherence of security strategies , namely containment, massive retaliation, liberation, and nuclear deterrence respectively. By “coherence” I mean the most basic sense of cohere, “hold together,” not that which is strictly logical, thoroughly rational , or even entirely sane. In approaching strategic discourse this way, I am interested in the ways instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) can be subsumed within value rationality (Wertrationalität), as well as in the implications of multiple value rationalities (Wertrationalitäten) at play in strategic discourse. At the very least, I assume that “strategy” entails more than a mere form of instrumental rationality, but is also a...