The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power (review)

By the end of 1945 Germany and Japan, erstwhile economic rivals of the United States, were smoldering ruins of nations, their industrial cities annihilated by U.S. bombs and airplanes. Two older European empires, France and Great Britain, were in clear decline—their economies devastated by the war, their colonial hold increasingly shaky, and, in the case of the French, their people demoralized by the memory of supine acquiescence to Nazi occupation. Around the world, areas that had recently been under certain political or economic control were now devoid of power.

In vivid contrast to the rest of the industrialized world, the United States went physically unscathed by World War II. But that was only the beginning. Wartime cooperation between the federal government and big American businesses had created the biggest and most efficient system of high finance, industrial planning, and mass production ever seen in human history. The necessities of war had fostered tremendous scientific achievement in the United States, most obviously symbolized by the atomic bomb, but also realized in the form of thousands of innovations in more mundane mechanical, chemical, and industrial fields. And the experience of global war and total victory had purged many Americans of their lingering beliefs in isolationism and anti-imperialism, making it possible for politicians eager to lead an American empire to be elected and reelected.

In such circumstances, even a nation led by ascetic monks might well have been tempted to launch a lucrative imperial project, and the United States was not in 1945 a nation led by ascetic monks. Elites in U.S. government and business, especially those businesses that stood to profit from attaining new overseas markets and resources, had long pushed to project U.S. power abroad, but they had been traditionally constrained by the relative self-sufficiency of the U.S. economy, the presence of other powerful empires, and a political opposition to formal international expansion that had been rejuvenated by the disaster at Versailles. World War II had destroyed these rival empires, and it had discredited isolationism. In their quest to dominate U.S. foreign policy, the expansionists of the Democratic party and corporate America were now effectively unopposed. Their empire was going to happen.

The question that remained, however, was what kind of empire it would be. Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's vice president during most of the war and the spokesman for the American internationalist left, hoped to see the United States sponsor a "Century for the Common Man," a United Nations-style international campaign to foster economic and political development throughout the destroyed and impoverished world. However, as Donald White shows in The American Century, Wallace's vision of "a TVA on the Danube, another on the Ganges, another on the Ob, and another on the Parana" was easily defeated by the more self-interested formula of Henry Luce. His conception of an American empire was one of enlightened U.S. self-interest, whereby American businesses and officials would, for their own purposes, introduce capitalism, democracy, and popular culture to the defeated and suppressed peoples of the world. Yes, this would enrich and empower the United States; more important, the American century would mean progress and material benefits for all subjects of the empire. What was good for America, Luce and other American imperialists genuinely believed, would be good for the world.

White's purpose is to describe how Americans conceived this "world role." How did the wide range of American journalists, diplomats, intellectuals, movie producers, and other elites concerned with the global role of the United States define this new empire, this new relationship the United States would have with the rest of the world? White introduces his account by surveying the colonial and European antecedents of American empire, including...