Essays 7, 8 and 9 comprise a speech delivered by Martin S. Kaplan at the Humanity in Action International Conference in Berlin on June 23, 2017. See the About This Essay page for more information. The annual conference is the concluding program for the 160 HIA Fellows, who are comprised of university students, half from the U.S., and the others from Denmark, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Bosnia and other European countries. 

Part 1 – Prelude to the American Century
Part 3 – Trump and the Future

Part 2 – The American Century

This coming Monday, June 26, 2017 will be the 100^th anniversary of American troops landing in Europe for the first time in history, with 14,000 soldiers disembarking at Ste. Nazaire, France, entering what was then known as The World War. President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 promising not to enter the European war, and hoped to negotiate peace based on his Fourteen Points. Unsuccessful, and hoping to create a new peaceful world order, Wilson led the U.S. into war, and borrowing from H.G. Wells, called it “A War to End All Wars”, reflecting the idealistic, moralistic, almost messianic stream sometimes evident in American history.

To me, America’s entry into the First World War, which decided its outcome, marks the commencement of the American Century.

A decade earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt invited the world to take note of American power and influence. The U.S. economy was already the largest in the world, and the population was greater than that of any other industrialized nation. In spite of that status, foreign affairs had not been a major concern of prior presidents.  Roosevelt took a different course. He negotiated the end of the two-year war between Japan and Russia in 1905, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt then organized the Great White Fleet, consisting of 14 full battleships, which sailed to major ports around the world, making clear to all nations the arrival on the scene of a naval power that could rival even Great Britain’s command of the seas.

The American forces broke the stalemate of the war in Europe, and led to the defeat of Germany and the November 11, 1918 Armistice. While the  assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke in Sarajevo had ignited the fuse of conflict, the Great War was unleashed by the miscalculations, bad judgement and confidence of quick and easy victory by the leaders of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France and Great Britain, all of whom were at fault, as analyzed so well by Christopher Clark in Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in  1914.. The war instead led to the destruction of a stable existing order, with the demise of the Czarist Russian Empire, the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the temporary end to the expansionist goals of Germany, whose Kaiser was exiled, in addition to over 30 million civilian and military deaths and vast destruction. (Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers—How Europe Went to War in 1914)

The Versailles Conference of 1919 was a failure. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, calling for freedom and independence for most peoples, were mostly disregarded by Great Britain, France and Italy, which carved up Europe and the mid-east as they wished. In exchange for giving up many of the Fourteen Points, Wilson succeeded in getting his League of Nations at Versailles, but in the end, the United States did not join it. An ill, declining and petulant Wilson refused to accept modest changes insisted upon by Republican leaders of the U.S. Senate.

Thus, the United States, having become the undisputed world power after the immense losses suffered by all the other major nations in the War, reverted to its traditional isolationism. Despite its vast industrial and agricultural power, financial wealth and large population, the most powerful nation in the world departed the field of international leadership—-perhaps, as we will see, not for the last time.

With the power to be the dominant force in world affairs, the U.S. created a vacuum—the purposeful negation of power and leadership, which helped lead to the ensuing chaos.

The Versailles Treaty’s onerous terms taking lands from Germany and imposing vast war reparations, as if Germany alone caused the war, fueled German nationalism and revenge in the 1930s. The First World War’s destruction of the existing international order was followed by the rise of Communism, Fascism and Nazism, and the Second World War in less than two decades. Great Britain was a spent power, no longer able to enforce Pax Britannica.  Britain and France had  lost many of the next generation’s future leaders. Both nations were too exhausted for more war, and the League of Nations too weak, to resist the aggressive nationalism of Nazi Germany.

Coupled with the crippling depression of the 1930s, the U.S. played no significant role as the world fell apart. Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported the Nationalist rebellion against the Spanish Republic in 1936, Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and by September 1939, all of Europe was aflame, as Germany and Italy attacked all their neighbors, and commenced the Second World War.

Only when the U.S. was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941, more than two years later, did the sleeping American giant awake.

An energized America, under the decisive leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, became the economic engine supporting the immense war efforts of the Soviet Union and Great Britain, commencing with FDR’s Lend-Lease Program , and in 1942 the U.S. finally joined in fighting the war in Europe, while also fighting Japan in the Pacific.  Roosevelt returned the mantle of global leadership to the United States, building on the goals of his Uncle Theodore Roosevelt and of his mentor Wilson, leading the Big Three with Stalin and Churchill to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945. Like Wilson, FDR sought to create an international structure to prevent future wars.

On January 6, 1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt addressed Congress in an effort to move the nation away from a foreign policy of neutrality. He insisted that people in all nations of the world should share in the Americans entitlement to Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. FDR thus returned to the idealistic, moralistic and humanitarian goals and belief system present in much of American thinking, earlier expressed by WIlson.

The United States took the lead in creating the new post-war  international order: the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1945), and the United Nations (1945), organized six months after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, whose commitment to creating a stronger successor to the League of Nations was completed by President Harry Truman.

The victorious and resurgent Soviet Union, having suffered staggering losses in the war, saw no need to continue cooperation with the U.S. and Britain, and took control of every nation that it had liberated from Germany, creating the Eastern Bloc of Stalinist regimes. Winston Churchill spoke in 1946 of the Soviet Union building an Iron Curtain across Europe, as the Cold War began.

The United States was far and away the wealthiest and most powerful nation, with over 40% of the total world economic output in the 1940s and ‘50s. Truman, with the support of both political parties, then launched the Marshall Plan (1947) to rebuild the economies and nations of desperately war-torn and virtually bankrupt Europe, including defeated Germany. Truman and his advisors were steeped in history, and took the opposite approach from that of Britain and France at Versailles, and American leadership succeeded in strengthening the European economies and countering the strong Communist parties in France and Italy. United States goals were as much geo-political in intent as well as humanitarian.

Germany was divided into four zones—American, British, French and Soviet, with Berlin, located in the middle of the Soviet zone, subdivided into four sections. The Soviet Union tried to take over all of Berlin by starting a blockade so that no food supplies could reach the Western sections. Truman countered with the Berlin Airlift, providing all the supplies Berlin needed for almost a year until the blockade was lifted. In 1949 the Soviet Union organized their sector as East Germany, and in the same year the U.S. and Western Europe organized NATO, as the linchpin of European unity with the goal of preventing Soviet aggression, which many considered highly possible.

Truman’s assertive foreign policy also succeeded in preventing Iran, Greece and Turkey from falling under the control of the Soviet Union. U.S. efforts to support the Nationalist government of China, however, failed and in 1949, Communist forces won control of that nation. The next year, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. Truman immediately turned to the United Nations, and the U.S. obtained Security Council approval for a United Nations military response. General Douglas MacArthur, who had been Allied Commander in the Pacific in the Second World War, became commander, and he conceived and directed brilliant military actions that forced the North Korean forces far back into their country within a year, almost to the border with China, against the advice of others.

His misjudgment led to the Chinese Army pouring across the Yalu River and pushing the Allies back almost to the original border between the two Koreas. MacArthur, and others. urged the use of nuclear weapons and an invasion of China, but Truman and other cooler heads prevailed, and an armistice was reached. That is an example of how one arrogant leader, MacArthur, literally a loose cannon, if he had his way, could have led to war and disaster.

Not too many years later, Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, urged use of nuclear weapons against Communist China in the dispute over the Quemoy and Matsu Islands, but that was squashed promptly by President Dwight Eisenhower.

We must wonder (and worry) what President Donald Trump would decide under similar circumstances.

Seeing Soviet and Chinese Communism as a monolithic force seeking to conquer the world, the U.S. determined to counter it everywhere. That led under subsequent presidents to unjustified actions, overthrowing legitimate governments that the U.S. believed might lean toward communism—-in Iran, the former Belgian Congo, Guatemala and Chile. The U.S. also supported repressive undemocratic governments in many nations, simply because they were anti-Communist.

Fearing the spread of Communism throughout South East Asia, the U.S. was determined to defend South Vietnam from being conquered by North Vietnam, and basically took over the war in the mid-1960s. Later the U.S. expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos, with disastrous consequences for all nations involved, certainly including the United States, where fervent opposition and protests ripped the nation apart.

East Germany could not keep up with the progress in the West, and built the Berlin Wall in 1961, dividing the city, in order to prevent people from leaving the country. Two years later President John Kennedy spoke at the Wall and reassured Western Europe of the American commitment with the moving statement “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Gradually, from Khrushchev’s admission of Stalin’s despotism to Gorbachev’s attempts at liberalization, the failing Communist economic system and the tyrannical Soviet system began to fall apart. President Ronald Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, and famously demanded: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Both Kennedy and Reagan were reflecting the geo-political hostility to the Soviet Union but also the American ideals of freedom and democracy. The final death knell came two years later as East and West Germans destroyed the hated Wall and soon West and East Germany reunited, becoming perhaps the most important democracy in Europe.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire was brought home to me in 1991 when I bought peaked caps of Soviet generals and admirals from Turkish sellers at the Brandenburg Gate. I remember thinking of T.S. Eliot’s line: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” (The Hollow Men, 1925).  It did not take a war to bring down the Soviet Empire and the Communist system. The economic and tyrannical system was destroyed from within. Other nations should take note.

The United States does not always live up to the hype of so many politicians, left and right, of the U.S. being an “Exceptional Nation”, with supposedly fair treatment of all, clean elections, protection of human rights, and a perfect capitalist system. Nevertheless, the U.S. lectures other nations on their practices, oblivious to its own failings in implementing the strong American belief system of democracy and human rights.

On balance however, the major theme of American leaders in the 20th century has been to seek peace, demonstrated by  Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and also President Jimmy Carter with the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, and several presidents seeking peace between Israel and the Palestinians and elsewhere in the world. President Richard Nixon’s leadership led to détente with the Soviet Union and the opening of peaceful relations with Communist China, and  several presidents have taken action to prevent aggression or take action to end conflicts, as President Bill Clinton did in the former Yugoslavia. But all too frequently, the U.S. has interfered too much in other nation’s affairs, making the situation worse. American interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have been disastrous. At the same time, taking a back seat in Rwanda and Syria has been a failed policy as well.

On social issues, the United States was the only so-called civilized nation that required a major war to end slavery, and it was a hundred more years before laws were adopted to insure the rights of African-Americans. And unlike virtually every Western nation, the U.S. still has very inadequate social welfare and health systems, which were first initiated by Chancellor Bismarck in Germany in 1889. Economic inequality in America continues to plague our nation, a threat to social cohesion. Full equality in treatment of African Americans is still not the norm, racism is a major issue in the U.S., and the Civil Rights movement still has a great deal to accomplish. But in certain other social matters, the U.S. has been in the forefront: women were granted full suffrage in 1920, eight years before Great Britain, and 25 years before France. The gay rights movement became powerful in the U.S. at the same time as in many other Western Nations, with full gay marital rights within the last few years.

Human rights are deeply ingrained in American law and philosophy, and every recent U.S. administration has forcefully encouraged other nations to improve their records in human rights issues, though quite modestly with dictatorial regimes that are pro-American.

 I define the American Century as being announced by Theodore Roosevelt, and brought to realization by Woodrow Wilson in entering the First World War. The American giant then slumbered, mostly in disregard of what was happening abroad, until attacked at Pearl Harbor. But since that time the United States has been the dominant force in the world, not only in international diplomacy and military actions, but also in economic power, cultural impact, and certainly in the stated commitment to human rights and democracy as values to be encouraged, strengthened, and perhaps even enforced, although certainly not perfectly implemented back home in the United States.

The United States has been in a position to be the dominant power of the world from the time it entered the First World War in 1917. Only since entering the Second World War in 1941, however, has the United States exercised that power and fulfilled the responsibility of leadership. The failure to do just that during the inter-war years constitutes the negative exercise of power; the United States had vast strengths and the potential to be the dominant world leader, but it was absent. I regard this as the purposeful negation of power and leadership. Isolationism in the interwar years created a vacuum, which led to the Second World War.

Thus, the question now is: Will the United States leave the field of leadership again and create a vacuum to be filled by others? George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And this takes us to Donald Trump and the populism engulfing Western Democracies.