# The American Empire  ## Metadata - Author: [[Amaury de Riencourt]] - Full Title: The American Empire - Category: #books ## Highlights - The fact that Democratic Presidents were singled out as the main culprits by a Democratic-dominated senatorial committee was in itself significant, symbolizing another of those episodic attempts on the part of Congress, without real public support, to curb the growing powers gathering at the White House, regardless of the fact that the President belongs to the same party. This attempt, besides temporarily disrupting the unity of the Democratic party, also exemplifies one of the main themes of The Coming Caesars—the tight relationship between expanding democracy, growing imperialism, and rising Caesarism. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=85)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The growing American empire is not the result of short-term but of long-term historical trends, originating far back in time; and, in turn, the inevitable growth of this empire is bound to enhance the Caesarian stature of the Presidency at the expense of Congress. The historical meaning of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and of the United States Senate’s belated effort to destroy its far-reaching implications can therefore be read in the following sentence, written in The Coming Caesars years before this resolution could be dreamed of: The gradual convergence of historical trends joins ever closer together the unconscious longing for Caesarism and the external emergencies that bring it about.6 ([Location 95](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=95)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The main underlying thesis is that historical development is conditioned by long-term trends rather than a succession of unpredictable accidents and imponderables; and that, therefore, predetermination plays a far greater role than is usually recognized. The implication is that, in the unfolding of contemporary events, the margin of freedom allowed to statesmen is far smaller than is commonly thought. ([Location 106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=106)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Equally implicit in this concept of historical predetermination is the correlative concept that the mainspring of historical motivations is only marginally conscious. Every important historical event can be interpreted in the light of the conscious motivations of its participants; but these will shed only a dim light on the whole historical trend of which this given event is but a small part. ([Location 115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=115)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If this influence of the collective unconscious is taken into account, bright light is shed where hitherto there was only obscurity; apparently senseless events begin to make sense; profound, irresistible historical trends begin to appear in bold relief; intelligent, purposeful forecasting becomes possible and pointless controversies are muted; seemingly intractable problems become solvable and brick walls evaporate without our having to smash our heads against them. ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=119)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The shaping of a collective unconscious, mysterious as it may seem, is nevertheless amenable to analysis: the cultural, linguistic, ethnic, geographical, climatic, and historical elements that go into shaping the collective unconscious of well-defined human societies are all available for analysis; their impact on the collective psychology of a given society can be defined. It is the sum total of all the atavistic traits derived from these elements that conditions a human society’s historical destiny. ([Location 123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=123)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the unconscious bond between men of a common civilization has a life-course of its own: it is born, grows, decays and dies like any organism. This cyclical aspect (which complements, rather than supplants, the linear aspect) allows us to define the present moment in contemporary history as being roughly similar to, or “contemporaneous” with, that which saw, in the second and first centuries BC, the leadership of the entire Classical world shift from the Hellenistic realms to Rome. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=128)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If, instead of restricting our sights to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we look at imperialism as it has manifested itself throughout history since the remote times of Egypt’s great conquering Pharaoh Thutmose III and Babylon’s equally great lawgiver Hammurabi, it becomes plain that economic impulses are only a marginal ingredient in its makeup. Something more is required—a “missionary” spirit, a will-to-power, a sense of universal responsibility, an idealistic longing for a united, lawful and ordered world, a striving toward ecumenism. The basic drive toward empire is a drive toward world empire which is lacking in imperialism of the “colonial” variety; or in a purely national, “racial” imperialism of the German National Socialist variety; or even in pre-war Japanese imperialism, whatever the lip service paid to it in the Tanaka Memorial. The basic drive toward world empire, in turn, springs from idealism, “the ordering of human society through unified dominion and common civilization.”8 This type of imperialism has very little in common with other, ephemeral “colonial” types because, unlike them, it implies a definite stage in the historical evolution of a civilization—the shift from the concept of the sovereign nation-state as the highest form of political organization (with or without its colonial appendages) to that of the worldwide imperium which encompasses all men who share a common culture and embodies their civilization in one universal political structure. ([Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=146)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Understood in this ecumenical sense, imperialism represents a definite stage in a given civilization’s development—the natural goal toward which the evolution of increasingly democratic societies tends. Claudius Rutilius praised the Roman Empire “for having afforded to all peoples the equal protection of common citizenship and of a rational law. This empire would mean the end of all imperialism.”10 The ancient Greeks and the modern Europeans were never able to reach this stage of imperialism and eventually forfeited all their “colonial” empires, prelude to their being themselves absorbed by their ecumenically minded cousins from overseas. It is not only in terms of size that Roman-American imperialism differs from the “colonial” Greco-European variety, but also in terms of intrinsic nature. It emerges out of the Greco-European “colonialist” cocoon and, in its early stages, embodies the predominance of the part over the whole, of one nation over all other nations included in its imperial orbit; but, eventually, it sheds its colonialist mantle and evolves toward a res publica, a true “common wealth” in which all—imperialists and imperialized—have equal rights. ([Location 174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=174)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Quite probably, the choice no longer lies between building or not building an American empire; the choice lies only between doing a good or a bad job of it: that seems to be all the margin of freedom left in the late 1960s. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=209)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Empires come in all sizes, in time as well as space. Some are short-lived, others can last hundreds or thousands of years. Some are truly accidental, others the result of long-term historical developments with their roots deep in the past—and the deeper the roots, the more enduring the empire. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=214)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The roots of all such historical developments are deeply embedded in the human heart and mind—in the emergence of a new personality, a new type of human being produced by a profound change in the cultural environment. Such a new man was the American Puritan—an iron-hard, practical, sober fanatic dedicated to hard work and economic success. ([Location 218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=218)) - Tags: [[blue]] - there could be no parting of the ways so long as two other powerful empires threatened both the British and their American cousins; and, more often than not, the British relied largely on American militias to fight their wars against Spaniards and Frenchmen— ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=238)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Willingly or not, London would have to go to war against the French, if only to satisfy the Americans. Virginians and New Englanders were in the van of the warmongers, and with the assistance of the imperialist lobby in London, American public opinion practically compelled the timid Duke of Newcastle to initiate a state of war with the French. There was peace between France and England in 1755—that is, everywhere except in America. ([Location 249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=249)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it can be asserted that the closing of the West to settlement by the colonists was one of the decisive moves which brought about the American Revolution. The Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, emphasized: “We do strictly forbid, on pain of our displeasure, all our loving subjects from making any purchases or settlements whatever in that region.”14 All the western land claims of the Thirteen Colonies were, de facto, wiped out at one stroke by London’s decision: ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=263)) - Tags: [[blue]] - London began to view the West as one vast reservation for Indians, to be run by an imperial Indian civil service for the ultimate benefit of an expanded fur trade. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=269)) - Tags: [[blue]] - by the Quebec Act of June 22, 1774, the British annexed to the Province of Quebec all the territory north of the Ohio River, thus formally canceling, once and for all, the western claims of four colonies. The Americans promptly expressed their anger, and Thomas Jefferson, in his audacious Summary View of the Rights of British America, vigorously upheld the view that the Government in London had no right to dispose of western land. The colonies already had their own local imperial interests to look after, even though they clashed with Britain’s worldwide imperialism. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=283)) - Tags: [[blue]] - there is no denying that the more or less conscious desire of the London Government to re-establish a balance of power in America by replacing a vanished French threat with an Indian one, was instrumental in triggering the revolt. Sensing the approaching danger, one noble British lord pointed out that “Awe of the French keeps our Colonys dependent upon the Mother Country” and more than one Englishman thought of handing Canada back to the French, for the mere purpose of keeping the American colonists in line. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=288)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In entering the war, the French and the Spaniards had far more in mind than the idealistic purpose of helping the American colonists achieve independence. The French minister at Philadelphia sought covertly to take the West away from the American colonists and give it to Spain. Having witnessed this intriguing piece of double-dealing, one of the main American negotiators, John Jay, soon came to the conclusion that France’s Foreign Minister Vergennes was attempting to partition the West between England and Spain: in fact he was suggesting that Britain keep the whole West north of the Ohio, while Spain would get everything west of a border stretching from the northwest corner of Florida to the mouth of the Cumberland. As Benjamin Franklin stated it indignantly, this proposal indicated a determination “to coop us up within the Allegheny Mountains.”18 After all, why not? Then and there, the forthcoming United States could have remained cooped up between mountain and sea, becoming a peaceful Western Hemisphere “Switzerland,” leaving to others the occupation and settlement of the West. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=309)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rather than agree with France and Spain in keeping the West out of American hands, the British quite naturally decided to overcome their bitterness and favor their “rebellious” American cousins. ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=325)) - Tags: [[blue]] - an irresistible flood of settlers began to inundate the West. This invasion was spontaneous and intensely individualistic, unassisted by state, church, or military protection. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=331)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Those of the original Thirteen States who claimed large slices of the West were persuaded to surrender these claims to the Federal Government: it was then decided to carve out of this western pool sixteen new states, to be eventually admitted on a basis of equality with the original Thirteen—a novel formula for growth which betrayed the instinctive political genius of the American leaders of the day, and which found its historical formulation in the Ordinance of 1787. The venerable theory according to which colonies were founded for the benefit of the mother country, the doctrine according to which they were to remain subordinated, was thrown aside; a new form of expansionism was substituted, one which provided for organic growth, for the birth of new living social cells to be grafted onto the main body politic, of which they became part and parcel. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=332)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 25, 2025 at 11:26 AM - But of what use was it to expand into the West if these new territories and states had no outlet for their trade? Only the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence could provide it. One step toward expansion automatically entailed another; the main goal of American policy during that period became the possession of the two gates controlling the commercial outlets of the entire West and shutting off the Americans from further westward advance—New Orleans and Montreal, the two locks on the two main waterways of the continent, respectively in the hands of the Spaniards and the British. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=341)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When Jefferson heard of the treaty in 1801, he stated without ambiguity: “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans . . . we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation . . .”19 ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=365)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Fortunately for the Americans, France, embroiled in a disastrous expedition to Santo Domingo, found it impossible to take effective possession of New Orleans. Anticipating a resumption of the war against England, Napoleon promptly made up his mind to sell the whole of Louisiana to the United States before the British seized it by force of arms. ([Location 367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=367)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Congress declared war against Great Britain in June 1812. The basic reason for this war was not the multiple vexations inflicted upon American seamen by an England locked in a desperate struggle against its deadly Napoleonic enemy, but the desire of the United States frontiersmen for more land—which could be had only at the expense of the British and the Indians. For reasons of practical necessity, the pioneer farmer of those days was essentially a woodsman, who needed wood for fuel, building and fencing. He could not settle in the treeless plains of the Middle or Far West, refused to move into the prairies of Illinois and fight powerful Indian tribes; he would rather fight the Indians living in the woods of Indiana or the fertile and empty regions of Upper Canada which were in British hands. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=376)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the prospect of easy loot was too much for most Americans who felt that the balance of power favored them: by then, they numbered over seven million, as against a mere five hundred thousand inhabitants in Canada, most of them French. Even so, the United States’ military establishment was in poor shape and no match for the British-Canadian forces, strongly backed by Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=389)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Soon enough, almost all the redskins had been removed to the Far West, and were separated from the settled West by a chain of military posts. In 1835, President Jackson pledged the United States to keep this barrier for all times—but within a bare twenty years, most of it was torn aside and the Indians pushed back further into the wilderness or dwindling reservations. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=412)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By the 1819 Florida Treaty, the United States had formally given up all its claims to Texas— and no sooner had this been done than many American statesmen began to voice their regrets, especially John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. They did not have to worry; by the time Mexico’s President Santa Anna woke up to the fact of Texas’s peaceful occupation, it was too late. The Texas colonists threw off the Mexican yoke and applied for annexation to the United States. ([Location 418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=418)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Ever since the Louisiana Purchase, a number of European statesmen had become alarmed by the sheer size of the United States in both territory and swelling population. Talleyrand, Canning, and Louis Bonaparte were determined to seize every available opportunity to establish, at some time or other, a balance of power in North America—and at this stage, it could only be done by preventing further American expansion in the south and southwest. The temporary independence of the Lone Star Republic whetted their appetites: it was an ideal buffer state between the United States and Mexico, which Lord Aberdeen, the British Foreign Secretary, and the French Premier Guizot attempted to bolster through loans and diplomatic recognition. They both urged Mexico to recognize the independence of Texas, in exchange for a full Franco-British guarantee of Mexico’s frontiers against United States aggression. The Texans would have accepted the scheme, but Mexico would not hear of it. Once again, historical fate played into the hands of the United States. While Mexico stubbornly refused to grant independence to Texas, the United States elected James Polk as President in the midst of a powerful awakening of atavistic imperialism; it was then discovered and proclaimed that it was the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States to expand toward the west and south, that it was justified by the Anglo-Saxon genius for colonization and self-government. ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=423)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Except for Russia, its size dwarfed that of any European nation, however powerful—in fact it was, and still is, larger than the whole of Europe without Russia. Conscious of its enormous size, dynamism, and power, the United States felt that it had a right to look down on the Europeans with mild contempt, and rarely was it expressed with such bluntness as in Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s reply in 1851 to Austrian protests at the American rescue of the Hungarian revolutionist Kossuth: “The power of this republic at the present moment is spread over a region, one of the richest and most fertile of the globe, and of an extent in comparison with which the possessions of the House of Habsburg are but a patch on the earth’s surface.”22 The haughty court circles in Vienna must have been slightly amazed at this arrogance, worthy of the Chinese Emperor Ch’ien Lung. ([Location 448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=448)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The United States had also become vitally interested in Central America because of its new Californian window on the Pacific; land communications across its vast western territories being rather difficult, it was imperative that secure sea communications be established between the east and west coasts; Central America’s narrow waist could offer either an inter-oceanic canal or land for roads and railroads. The main obstacle was the active presence of British interests; ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=461)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The greatest test of all was coming, and when the Civil War broke out, farsighted European statesmen had a last hope of seeing the United States collapse into smaller, more manageable fragments. ([Location 468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=468)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Although many voices were raised in Great Britain for intervention against the North, it was France’s Napoleon III who took the most decisive step in the matter by sending an army to invade and occupy Mexico. Materializing the dream of Talleyrand, Canning, and Aberdeen, Louis Bonaparte was determined to establish, by force of arms if necessary, a balance of power in North America. ([Location 481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=481)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The amazing speed with which the Union built and commissioned its navy (from 42 ships at the beginning of the Civil War to 300 in 1862 and over 650 at the end of the hostilities) paralyzed the will of the British leaders, in spite of the early Confederate victories on land. And Napoleon III was not bold enough to go ahead and recognize the South without the British—although bold enough to actually encourage Texas to secede from the Confederation in order to save something from the approaching collapse of the South and provide a buffer state for his Mexican satellite. ([Location 499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=499)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the United States purchased the enormous territory of Alaska from the Russians, for a little over seven million dollars. This purchase, soon dubbed “Seward’s Folly,” was made by Secretary of State Seward in anticipation of a merger between Canada and the United States, a fusion which was hoped for by many citizens of both countries. Anglophobe Czar Alexander II and his foreign minister Prince Gorchakov sold this immense territory in the hope of stirring up trouble between the two English-speaking Powers. But Britain cunningly granted self-government to the newborn Canadian federation, the very same year that Alaska was purchased. ([Location 530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=530)) - Tags: [[blue]] - with the last battle of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, the Frontier disappeared on the North American continent—but, to this day, its spirit has remained an integral part of the American ethos. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=545)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The passing of the old continental Frontier in 1890, synchronized with a staggering increase in America’s industrialization and economic productivity, became the turning point in the United States’ relations with the rest of the world. This was the era of worldwide European colonization on a grand scale, of a frantic search for new commercial markets and new sources of raw materials. In this fast-changing world, the United States’ foreign policy revolved around two axes. The first was the Monroe Doctrine which excluded European attempts at new colonial ventures in the Western Hemisphere, and left the United States free to dominate it politically and economically. The second axis was American expansion across the Pacific. ([Location 546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=546)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the space of two generations, the western Pacific became included in the American realm, prelude to the whole ocean becoming, in due course, an American mare nostrum. Commodore Perry himself stated the long-term goal of America’s policy in the Pacific when he said: “It is self-evident that the course of coming events will ere long make it necessary for the United States to extend its jurisdiction beyond the limits of the western continent, and I assume the responsibility of urging the expediency of establishing a foothold in this quarter of the globe. . . .”29 The ghostly outline of a new American Frontier across the Pacific was beginning to loom. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=556)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The acquisition of the Philippines—and also the fear that Japanese immigration would flood the islands, at a time when Japan itself was becoming a world power in its own right— finally moved McKinley to proclaim the formal annexation of Hawaii. ([Location 598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=598)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As for the Philippines, the American Government soon made it clear that it did not wish to annex them, but would prepare them for full independence; in that sense, the United States promptly shed the “colonialist” mantle which the Europeans wore so proudly and, they hoped, permanently. The reason for this was not so altruistic as it sounds, and was strongly motivated by economic factors. A few years after the American conquest of the Philippines, all its local products, including sugar, were admitted into the United States free of duty, hurting the local sugar producers, especially in Utah and Louisiana whose representatives in Congress became the foremost advocates of independence for the Far Eastern archipelago. American businessmen were disappointed by the lack of commercial and industrial opportunity in the islands; while American naval experts were of the opinion that the Philippines were indefensible in the case of war with Japan—all of which left the United States’ leaders with little incentive to retain such a useless and cumbersome colony. Accordingly, the Philippine Independence Act of 1934 set the archipelago on its road to independence, leaving the United States in charge of its military defense—in which state they were caught by Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion. ([Location 601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=601)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The colonial imperialism of the turn of the century was a superficial, ephemeral phenomenon. It was not part of the United States’ historical destiny to ape the European Powers, and America’s voluntary abandonment of the Philippines, long before the process of “decolonization” became worldwide, is symbolic of this reality. The true character of the United States’ inevitable imperialism was to reveal itself later. ([Location 610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=610)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All these displays of military power were prompted by American impatience at the lack of self-governing talent in the American tropics, not by colonial ambitions. On the basis of historical analytical comparisons, it has already been made clear elsewhere that the United States’ coming imperialism was to be of the “Roman” and not the “Greek” type, to which, by reasons of geography and psychological disposition, the European Powers were restricted. Roman-type imperialism, in contrast to the Greek, is not of the “colonial” variety; it does not want to hold foreign nations in bondage for the benefit of the home country— in spite of temporary fits of economic imperialism. It is essentially ecumenical, in the political sense, and arises when a whole civilization and way of life are, or feel, threatened; it has definite idealistic undertones, is basically democratic (in contrast to the more aristocratic colonial type, as exemplified by the British Empire), and looks forward to the eventual attainment of equality among all its citizens, conquerors and conquered alike . . . by which time it has ceased being an empire and has become a “common wealth,” a true res publica. More than anything else, it is fundamentally reluctant, is compelled to step into power vacuums when it feels that its “way of life” is menaced. ([Location 647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=647)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Not all citizens of the “parvenu powers” were blind to the irresistible trend of the times—and none was quite as farsighted as Walter Hines Page who had been appointed United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s soon after Woodrow Wilson became President. In an astonishingly prophetic letter, dated October 25, 1913, almost a year before the outbreak of World War I, he wrote from London to the President: The future of the world belongs to us. A man needs to live here, with two economic eyes in his head, a very little time to become very sure of this. Everybody will see it presently. These English are spending their capital, and it is their capital that continues to give them their vast power. Now what are we going to do with the leadership of the world presently when it clearly falls into our hands? . . . The great economic tide of the century flows our way. We shall have the big world questions to decide presently. Then we shall need world policies . . . We are in the international game—not in its Old World intrigues and burdens and sorrows and melancholy, but in the inevitable way to leadership and to cheerful mastery in the future; and everybody knows that we are in it but us. It is sheer blind habit that causes us to continue to try to think of ourselves as aloof.42 The American mastery in the future was not to be as cheerful as Walter Page thought—but, as he knew intuitively, it was preordained; and, across the Channel, there were few farsighted men such as Goluchowski who could see it. ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=673)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By far the largest and most powerful, the pace-setting British Empire was a conglomerate of self-ruled dominions, outright colonies on every continent, and, set apart with a special status of its own, India, the brightest gem in Great Britain’s imperial crown. Primus inter pares, the British Empire was, in fact, the only true global empire girding the world, global by virtue of the monetary lordship of the pound sterling and the unique trading position of the City of London, and global because the British Navy ruled all the waves of the oceans and enforced a worldwide Pax Britannica; Britain was all at once the banker and the policeman of the world, and a quarter of the human race was included within the borders of its empire. The only area on this planet where British hegemony was not in effect was the Continent—Europe, and its Russian extension. Even the Western Hemisphere, which the United States had come to dominate toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, depended on the British fleet for its security from external aggression. Without the Royal Navy to enforce it, the Monroe Doctrine was a dead letter. ([Location 691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=691)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Out of this basic conflict between an aging empire and a young, vigorous and ruthless would-be empire on the Continent, arose the great two-phase (1914–18, 1939–45) European civil war that was to destroy all Powers on the Continent as well as Britain’s worldwide empire; and by stripping them all of their overseas possessions and impoverishing them, reduce them all to the rank of second- and third-class Powers—when it did not destroy them altogether. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires vanished into naught; once-powerful Germany, the only aspirant to Continental hegemony, was amputated of all its conquests and some of its richest provinces, and what was left was split into two hostile states; the whole Continent was cut in half, each half becoming a more or less thinly disguised protectorate of non-European Superpowers; and the British Empire became a ghost: the policeman of the world lost its truncheon, and the banker, its capital. Unconsciously, the world began looking for imperial heirs to the global throne vacated by the Europeans. ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=715)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A year after the outbreak of the war, the economies of the United States, France, and Britain had become so intermingled that any brutal severance between them would have been disastrous for all concerned. But the intermingling, of course, was all to the advantage of the United States which, from being a debtor nation at the beginning of the hostilities, promptly became a creditor nation as foreign investors liquidated their securities in Wall Street and floated huge American loans. Europe’s holdings of American securities totaled roughly five billion dollars in 1914—a figure so large that Wall Street financiers trembled at the idea of having to repurchase such an enormous quantity of stocks and bonds; but this was underestimating their enormous financial power, and the repurchase was made with the greatest of ease. Simultaneously, American money on loan began to pour into Europe: on the eve of the United States’ entrance into the war in 1917, the Americans had already loaned one and a half billion dollars to the Allies, as against a mere twenty-seven million dollars to the Central Powers. When, three years later, the dust began to settle on the Continent, the United States had spent a grand total of twenty-five billion dollars for its participation in the war, in addition to lending over ten billion dollars to its European associates and repurchasing some five billion dollars’ worth of European investments in America—an extraordinary financial feat, accomplished in less than five years. As an American financial writer put it a few years later: “To us it was an astounding self-revelation.” ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=732)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In his memoirs, James Gerard, American ambassador in Berlin at the time, shows quite clearly how vital Britain’s defense was for the United States; and how it was Britain’s own intervention in the war to preserve the traditional balance of power that, in turn, drew the United States into the European conflict in order to save Britain from defeat. After Kaiser Wilhelm, who had hoped in 1914 that Britain would remain aloof from the affairs of the Continent, had remarked despondently that the “British change the whole situation—an obstinate nation. They will keep up the war,” Gerard himself remarked: “It was the entry of Great Britain into the war . . . which saved the world from the harsh domination of the conquest-hungry Prussians and therefore saved as well the two Americas and their protecting doctrine of President Monroe.”45 Gerard’s theme was to become a recurrent one throughout the twentieth century—that Britain was America’s advance bastion across the Atlantic, that it should never be allowed to fall, but that it should be militarily assisted only when on the very brink of disaster and at the end of its tether. ([Location 755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=755)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is in this power of absorption, in this power of organic digestion which no European nation possesses, that the United States’ capacity for growth and development resides—in fact, in its superb political and social metabolism. ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=771)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In London, Gerard’s counterpart, United States Ambassador Walter Hines Page, summed up in another of his remarkable letters to President Wilson his own view of the interaction between the Allies’ plight and the fate of the United States. Dated March 5, 1917, it states: The inquiries which I have made here about financial conditions disclose an international situation which is most alarming to the financial and industrial outlook of the United States . . . There is . . . a pressing danger that the Franco-American and Anglo-American exchange will be greatly disturbed; the inevitable consequence will be that orders by all the Allied Governments will be reduced to the lowest possible amount and that trans-Atlantic trade will practically come to an end. The result of such a stoppage will be a panic in the United States . . . The financial and commercial result will be almost as bad for the United States as for Europe. We shall soon reach this condition unless we take quick action to prevent it . . . It is not improbable that the only way of maintaining our present preeminent trade position and averting a panic is by declaring war on Germany [author’s emphasis].48 In other words, it had become clear that an Allied defeat would have been a disaster for the United States, already committed financially and economically to an Allied victory. Having committed itself that far, it now found itself compelled to go all the way and join the war against the Central Powers in order to save its substantial investment in the solvency of the Allies. ([Location 773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=773)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Of the fact that American intervention made all the difference between victory and defeat for France and Britain, there is hardly any doubt. After the United States declared war on Germany, Field Marshal Hindenburg, the worried Commander-in-chief of the German army, asked rhetorically: “Would she [America] appear in time to snatch the victor’s laurels from our brow?”49 She did, and on the fact that this intervention decisively altered the preordained course of the war, we have the vital testimony of both Erich Ludendorff, Quartermaster General of the German army, and France’s Marshal Foch, Commander-in-chief of the Allied armies. Expatiating at length on the amazement and alarm of the German High Command at the speed with which huge numbers of American troops were shipped over to Europe, Ludendorff stated without ambiguity: “Thereby, America became the decisive factor.”50 Marshal Foch was no less emphatic in his testimony as to the decisive nature of this intervention from overseas: he repeatedly emphasized in his memoirs that both the French and the British were exhausted, and fought on mostly in the hope of prompt and massive American support, stressing time and again that American manpower was required “immediately.”51 In fact, the decisiveness of this assistance was such that Germany’s first peace feelers were communicated to President Wilson through the Swiss Government, in the vain hope of making him an arbiter between the Allies and the Central Powers, rather than a co-belligerent of the Allies. ([Location 810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=810)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the collection of the war debts proved to be a major problem, mixed up as it was with a multitude of interconnected debts between all the Allies, and with the ticklish problem of reparations owed by the Germans to the Allies. Inter-Allied bitterness mounted rapidly as the outraged Europeans accused “[U]ncle [S]hylock” across the ocean of a lack of generosity. Since most of the money borrowed had been spent in the United States, the Allies felt that it was part of that country’s contribution to the common war; they complained that since Germany felt unable to meet its payments for reparations, her victims should not be held accountable for American loans; they also stated that the American tariff policy made it impossible for the European nations to pay back their debts through increased trade. The disastrously prohibitive Fordney–McCumber tariff of 1922 established the highest rates in American history and made it difficult for European goods to compete in the United States. Needless to say, European nations retaliated in kind, hurting American exports and putting a crimp on world trade. But this was not enough yet. In 1930, the Hawley–Smoot Tariff Act raised rates all down the line, compelling twenty-five countries to establish retaliatory tariffs and depressing American trade still further. Soon enough, the Great Depression took over and swept the world. ([Location 861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=861)) - Tags: [[blue]] - His thesis: in the age of the revolt of the masses, to which the United States had already become fully adapted, Europe had to find a new formula for survival.54 Counting its blessings, Romier then emphasized that Europe had preserved its creative genius; how to keep on preserving it while entering an age of mass civilization, was the problem he attempted to solve. The United States of Europe, as suggested by many Germans? He rejected it for reasons which have kept their validity half a century later: Europe cannot give up its fragmentation because, in denying its historical background, every one of its component nations would deny its own consciousness and would destroy its own vitality.55 He believed that international initiative still belonged to the old (i.e., European) nations because the vast spaces of the new nations, offshoots of the Old World (United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil), precluded their becoming vitally interested in the rest of the world: they had no political life worthy of the name because they did not need politics—whereas Europe did, precisely because of the relative smallness of its nation-states, the multiplicity of its international boundaries and frictions, and its complex social conflicts. But if Europe persisted in its economic Balkanization, it would prove unable to catch up with America. Having stated that it would prove impossible to overcome Europe’s political fragmentation into many separate nation-states, he saw some hope in a subtle form of economic unification around international trusts and cartels. He added that European individualism was already condemned by history in favor of America’s emphasis on social collective well-being. He ended by stating that it was too early yet to decide whether Europe or America would remain master of the world. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=881)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the most enlightened and prophetic reply came from Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakia’s Premier, who said without mincing words: “The only issue for us today is this: either we work to form a sort of union between European states and nations, as much from the moral point of view as from the economic and political . . . or else we shall always be living in danger of difficulties, conflicts and perpetual crisis, ending in wars and catastrophes in which European culture will be submerged.”58 ([Location 906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=906)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Herriot endorsed the Briand Memorandum, stressing that this European organization “should destroy neither the national nor the international framework.” In other words, Europe could probably form a loose federation, along with economic unity, but no more.59 Any hope of matching the tight concentration of power in a federal government modeled after that of the United States, should be discarded. ([Location 910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=910)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With typically perverse Schadenfreude, Hitler even confessed to Sumner Welles in 1940: “I believe that German might is such as to make the triumph of Germany inevitable but, if not, we will all go down together [author’s italics]— whether that be for better or for worse.” ([Location 923](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=923)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it was a German thinker, Max Weber, who had seen the real trend of the times. Writing as early as November 1918, he foresaw the rise of America to world supremacy to be “as inevitable as that of Rome in the ancient world after the Punic War”—because Europe could never become an organic unit.62 ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=925)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Germany’s precarious recovery was shattered by the Great Depression, making the rise to power of extremists inevitable. Germany’s “insolvency” had never extended to its tight-knit Reichswehr; the spirit of Prussianism was now throwing off the mask it wore in the 1920s, and the splendid military instrument was at hand, to be used by the National Socialists as a hard nucleus around which to build a new war machine, backed by a powerful industrial establishment. ([Location 963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=963)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If we add that the Great Depression itself was largely the doing of the United States, it becomes clear that American policy in the interwar period was the decisive element in the world picture. Having become a creditor on international account rather than a debtor, the United States should have lowered its tariffs rather than raised them. Its surplus of exports over imports, which used to pay the interest on loans from Europe, persisted and had to be paid for by transfers of European gold to the United States—or private American loans to Europe. Rather than correct this fundamental imbalance, the United States had repeatedly raised its tariffs. Debts went into default, American exports fell sharply, accelerating the onsetting Depression. And so it went on, in chain-reaction fashion, until the whole world’s economic structure disintegrated into self-sufficient economic units geared to the war policies of the German and Japanese extremists which the Great Depression had helped raise to supreme power in their respective lands. ([Location 970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=970)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In late 1936, isolationist sentiment in the United States had reached its zenith; had it remained there, a new balance of power would have been gradually established throughout the world as a result of American inaction; and its erstwhile pupils and imitators, Germany and Japan, now in the totalitarian grip of their fanatical grands simplificateurs, would have established their empires, counterbalancing the growing might of Soviet Russia between them. But from this zenith, isolationist sentiment began to recede. And when, early in 1937, Washington displayed a greater interest in propping up France and Britain—to the extent of promising them ample supplies but not to the extent of actively participating in an eventual conflict—the inevitable result was bound to be a new round of European warfare in which, eventually, all Europeans would lose. ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1014)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Staunch isolationism on the part of the United States would have paralyzed the will of Britain and France to fight Germany; German hegemony in western Europe would have been achieved without firing a shot through a succession of “Munich” piecemeal surrenders; the temporary results of the First World War and the Versailles Treaty would have been undone without bloodshed. Alternatively, a straight alliance between America and the European democracies, backed by massive rearmament, would most likely have deterred German aggression altogether; there is plenty of evidence that the German General Staff, alarmed at the recklessness of Hitler’s foreign policy, would then have had the courage to strike him down. ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1020)) - Tags: [[blue]] - On May 17, quite alarmed at the disasters inflicted upon the Anglo-French armies, he asked a startled Lord Lothian, British Ambassador in Washington, to convey to London his “desire to see His Majesty’s Government place the fleet in the shelter of American ports.”76 The possible defeat and invasion of Britain were viewed in Washington as an unexpected catastrophe which could only be mitigated if and when the Royal Navy withdrew from European waters to come under American control. When, a few weeks later, the Royal Navy was ordered to destroy the French warships which had sought refuge in African harbors, it was not so much out of fear that the Germans might get control of them but as a spectacular undertaking designed to convince American public opinion that Britain meant business and intended to prosecute the war to the end—rather than surrender its own fleet to the United States and make peace with Germany. ([Location 1051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1051)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For all practical purposes, Britain became America’s advance bastion off the hostile shores of the Continent in June 1940. Having become de facto an American protectorate implied that the whole British Empire and Commonwealth came under the protective umbrella of the United States—and nowhere more so than in the Far East and Southeast Asia where the Japanese, pleasantly surprised by the dramatic events in distant Europe, were anxious to exploit the unparalleled weakening of European Powers to their own advantage. ([Location 1092](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1092)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the most important item remained the matter of the United States’ assistance to Britain’s war effort—the types of weapons to be produced, the financing of this assistance on an enormous scale, and so forth. Britain was displaying plenty of evidence that it could hold out militarily, if assisted from overseas; and no military bases on either side of the ocean were as valuable as Great Britain itself. Its preservation became the main object of American policy in the Atlantic; but from now on, the relationship between Washington and London became that of a suzerain and his vassal. In every respect, London had to bow to Washington’s inflexible will. Painful as it was to British pride, the Americans decided to impose weapons of American design, in spite of the hardships this switch inflicted on the British armed forces. But beggars cannot be choosers; Britain was virtually out of dollars by the end of 1940, although it still owned substantial investments in the United States, which its Government was not inclined to liquidate. On the other hand, the Americans were determined to avoid loaning money to the British, after the painful defaulting on their First World War loans. Here again, the Americans were implacable: the British were earnestly requested to state frankly their financial position: “Only if the British emptied their pockets, only if they gave the United States Government a complete statement of their resources, both in America and elsewhere, would the Congress and the people of the United States offer effective aid.”86 Rather harsh, considering the fact that the British were locked in a life-and-death struggle, to a great extent on the United States’ behalf; but realistic. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau put it bluntly: “It gets down to the question of Mr. Churchill putting himself in Mr. Roosevelt’s hands with complete confidence. Then it is up to Mr. Roosevelt to say what he will do.” Prime Minister Churchill surrendered and sent to President Roosevelt a detailed account of Britain’s precarious position and dismal prospects. Concluding, he stated bitterly that he thought “it would be wrong if . . . Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets so that after victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should be stripped to the bone.”87 But, as a result of this full disclosure, and with lightning speed, Franklin Roosevelt came up with his historic “Lend-Lease” decision. Having put itself entirely in the hands of the American leaders, Britain was saved in extremis. ([Location 1113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1113)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When, on the morning of December 7, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they unlocked a Pandora’s box for all concerned. Hundreds of years from now, when latter-day historians attempt to sift the evidence, they will see in Pearl Harbor a most fateful event—not because it precipitated the whole American nation into war across both the Pacific and the Atlantic (Hitler obliged by declaring war against the United States four days later), nor because it led straight to the destruction of the Japanese Empire and of the Third Reich, but because it released the bottled-up potential of America’s protective imperialism on a global scale— a reluctant imperialism, this time, and therefore that much more effective and durable, an imperialism without talk of “Manifest Destiny,” of superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and of its right to rule the world and its “inferior” people—an ecumenical imperialism dedicated to the preservation of a “way of life.” Pearl Harbor opened a new and dramatic era in American history, whose dynamic trend did not come to an end when the Second World War was concluded, but went straight into the Cold War and beyond, and is still proceeding relentlessly, decades later. ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1166)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is worth pondering for a while the deeper reasons for the United States’ remarkable success in a scientific field in which most of the outstanding brains were actually European. The fact that most of the leading European physicists (Germany’s Albert Einstein, Italy’s Enrico Fermi, Denmark’s Niels Bohr, Holland’s Samuel Goudsmit, Austria’s Victor Weisskopf, Hungary’s Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, and countless others) were irresistibly drawn into the vortex of America’s scientific and military power structure, is no more accidental than the fact that the few noteworthy physicists who remained in German-occupied Europe should have successfully struggled against, or escaped from, German power— ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1201)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When, in the autumn of 1933, Albert Einstein left Berlin forever and transferred himself to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, Paul Langevin, one of the leading French scientists, is reported to have prophesied: “It’s as important an event as would be the transfer of the Vatican from Rome to the New World. The Pope of physics has moved and the United States will now become the center of natural sciences.”94 The prophecy turned out to be deadly accurate. ([Location 1212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1212)) - Tags: [[blue]] - History knows few such dramatic ironies as Einstein, who had been hounded out of the Third Reich, actually pressuring the American Government into developing a nuclear weapon which, under other political circumstances, might have been developed in Europe by European brains and for the benefit of Europe’s predominance in the world. ([Location 1223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1223)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Only the United States had the means and foresight to harbor all the refugee scientists from Europe—going to the lengths of seeking them out and offering them top positions, even when they showed no signs of wanting to become refugees. ([Location 1246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1246)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the main spur to frantic work on what was becoming the “Manhattan Project” was the overcoming of the Germans’ presumed lead: “We were told day in and day out that it was our duty to catch up with the Germans,” recalled a scientist later.97 This, of course, soothed the uneasy consciences of many leading physicists. Nor was this atmosphere of frantic urgency in any way disturbed by the vital message, emanating from Houtermans and transmitted in 1941 by Professor Reiche, who had just escaped from Germany, to the effect “that the German physicists had hitherto not been working at the production of the bomb and would continue to try, for as long as possible, to divert the minds of the German military authorities from such a possibility.”98 The news was promptly conveyed from Princeton to Washington by another immigrant physicist, Rudolf Ladenburg, but never reached the scientists engaged in the Manhattan Project, by now wrapped in all the cloaks of military security and secrecy, under the overlordship of the Military Policy Committee. ([Location 1251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1251)) - Tags: [[blue]] - with the rapid advance of Allied troops across German territory, a large booty of German scientists actually fell into the hands of the Americans (Otto Hahn, Nobel prizewinner Max von Laue, and eventually Werner Heisenberg himself), some to be flown back immediately to the United States (Werner von Braun and his team of rocket experts who, twelve years later, launched the first successful American space satellite). Needless to add, the Russians were not idle either, and kidnapped all the German scientists they could lay their hands on. ([Location 1269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1269)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When Douglas MacArthur established his headquarters in Australia as American proconsul in the Southwest Pacific, he confronted a grave situation, made worse still by the Australians’ plans for defense; panic-stricken, they had decided to abandon three-quarters of their continent and erect a last-ditch line of defense along the Darling River from Brisbane to Adelaide. At the other end of the world, their British cousins, hard-pressed themselves, could be of no assistance to their Commonwealth partners. Only the United States could be relied upon; only the United States ruled the waves of the South Pacific, no longer Britannia. From that fateful period in Australia’s history dates its increasing reliance upon America and its gradual inclusion in the American sphere of influence. MacArthur’s leadership, in itself, was instrumental in promoting this gradual shift of allegiance. With great courage and foresight, he rejected the Australian plan of defense and substituted one which set up its first line of defense a thousand miles to the north of the continent, along New Guinea’s jungle-covered Owen Stanley range where almost impenetrable mountains could stop any large-scale Japanese penetration. In his Reminiscences, MacArthur stated that “this decision gave the Australians an exhilarating lift, and they prepared to support me with almost fanatical zeal.”102 ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1302)) - Tags: [[blue]] - MacArthur explains that “Australia’s contribution throughout the war was of paramount importance. Less than a hundred thousand tons arrived from the United States during the critical final quarter of 1942.” But, he continues, “Our ground and air forces in the Southwest Pacific Area were vastly more self-sufficient than those of any other theater of operation. Local produce and materials furnished 65 to 70 percent of the resources needed by them for the second half of 1942. To the adjacent South Pacific theater, I shipped a greater tonnage of supplies than the United States delivered to my own area. In general effect, therefore, the Southwest Pacific, far from being a drain on the United States, was self-sufficient.”103 Indeed, it was as if an autonomous, self-supporting portion of the United States itself had been detached and towed across the Pacific, to remain anchored in its southwest corner as bastion and staging area for a northward thrust against the Japanese Empire. A hundred and fifty years of British occupation and settlement of a virgin continent, built up into a completely Westernized and Anglicized replica of the mother country, became irretrievably included in the United States’ coming empire in the Pacific, as an increment to American, and no longer British, power. ([Location 1313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1313)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Washington did not forget that Europe came first in its order of priorities—first because it was geographically closer to America’s center of gravity, first because it was the Old World from which most Americans’ ancestors had come and where millions of near-relatives still dwelt, and first also because it was the only other area in the world that could match in population figures, in human skills, and in industrial potential the United States itself. Americans took the eventual defeat of Japan as a matter of course; and, in a sense, so did the clear-sighted but despondent Japanese themselves who knew that, given enough time, America could crush them; not so the defeat of Germany whose huge and restless realm, at the height of its extension, included four hundred million human beings and stretched all the way from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus, from the North Pole to the Sahara. Adolf Hitler’s domain seemed to be… ([Location 1324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1324)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Anthony Eden.106 Looking at Washington’s policy toward France, he stated further: So far as I have been able to piece together the various indications I have received, I would say that they [the United States Government] did not wish to see a strong central administration for the French Empire built up in Algiers. They would have preferred if possible to deal separately with each part of the French Empire. They dislike the growth of an independent spirit in any French administration anywhere and consider that any French authority with whom they deal should comply without question to their demands.107 The seeds of the French challenge to American leadership in the 1960s were sowed at that time. Looking toward the future, Eden uttered these fateful words, which must have haunted him when he became Prime Minister a decade later: In dealing with European problems of the future we are likely to have to work more closely with France even than with the United States, and while we should naturally concert our French policy so far as we can with Washington, there are limits beyond which we ought not to allow our policy to be governed by theirs.108 Anthony Eden applied this principle to the letter at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956; the end result was disaster. Winston Churchill, who was half American, felt a kinship with the United States which made it easier for him to comply wholeheartedly with President Roosevelt’s wishes. That this was not always to the taste of his British colleagues is made glaringly evident in Anthony Eden’s memoirs. An entry in his diary dated September 10, 1943, states bluntly: Roosevelt has had his way again and agreed to Moscow for the Foreign Secretaries’ conference with alacrity. His determination not to agree to a London meeting for any purpose, which he says is for electoral reasons, is almost insulting considering the number of times we have been to Washington. I am most anxious for good relations with U.S. but I don’t like subservience to them and I am sure that this only lays up trouble for us in the future. We are giving the impression, which they are only too ready by nature to endorse, that militarily all the achievements are theirs . . .109 ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1349)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle relates that Churchill shouted at him: “Here is something you should know: whenever we have to choose between Europe and the high seas, we shall always choose the high seas. Whenever I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.”112 Quite clearly, and over the objections of some of his colleagues in the Cabinet, Churchill deliberately turned his back on the Continent and chose a “partnership” with the United States which amounted to a thinly veiled “satellization”; it was all in the logic of his wartime leadership. Eventually, de Gaulle left for Washington to plead his case and attempt to sell it to Roosevelt. As one historian described it two decades later: . . . de Gaulle had the American standpoint explained to him in Washington by Roosevelt himself. What it amounted to was that the postwar world would be ruled by a quadrumvirate composed of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and China, with a parliament of smaller countries—the future United Nations—acting as a chorus and giving a democratic look to the directorate of the “big four.” Among the latter Washington then counted on having China on its side, so that the U.S.S.R. would be isolated and outmatched. For the rest, there would be American bases throughout the world, some of them on French soil. The coming peace would be an American peace, and the world would enter the American Century—all in the name of democracy, of course.113 That Roosevelt, for all his beliefs in democracy, was in fact an unconscious imperialist, there is hardly any doubt; as de Gaulle stated it, “Comme cela est humain, l’idéalisme y habille la volonté de puissance [How human it is that idealism cloaks the will-to-power].”114 In Roosevelt the striving for Caesarian authority within the United States was combined with a truly imperial view of America’s destiny in the twentieth century. And from that historic interview dates Charles de Gaulle’s unshakable determination to fight the hegemony of the new Romans of the modern world. ([Location 1375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1375)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The founding of the United Nations was partly designed to irretrievably embroil the Americans in world affairs and make it impossible for them to withdraw into a neo-isolationism at the last minute. For the same reason, the first United Nations Conference was to take place, with every participating nation’s blessing, on United States soil. But over and beyond that, it quickly became plain that the endemic isolationism would only be put to sleep to the extent that the United States could dominate whatever international body it joined: the Americans would only join it wholeheartedly if they could make it their own. In the case of the emerging United Nations, indirect control of the enormous bloc of Latin American votes was bound to give the United States a predominant influence which the forthcoming Communist bloc could not effectively challenge. ([Location 1415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1415)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it is rather strange that the Americans should have thought that the United Nations was the answer to the world’s problems. They had distrusted the League of Nations, their own brainchild, to the point of refusing to join it; they had seen it founder in the 1920s and collapse in the 1930s. The reasons for this failure had become common knowledge; yet the United States chose to believe that all would be right with the world now that the League of Nations’ legitimate child was born, even though it retained most of its parent’s defective features—as if this newborn baby could take care of the multitude of troubles springing from the war, just at the time when the hot war was turning into a cold one. This outlook was neatly summed up by Secretary of State Cordell Hull after the 1943 Moscow Conference and the decision to set up the United Nations: “. . . there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests.” ([Location 1432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1432)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The War Department, faced with a disastrous weakening of America’s various armies of occupation, ordered a slowdown of demobilization, reaping for its pains the anger of a great part of America’s public opinion and a wave of near-mutinies in American garrisons abroad (Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Manilla, Yokohama). By the summer of 1946, the United States’ armed forces had melted from a peak strength of twelve million to hardly more than two million. Not even the official breakout of the Cold War and the Berlin Blockade of 1948 could halt this shrinking process, which brought the American army down to a low of 600,000 men on the eve of the Korean War. ([Location 1449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1449)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Lend-Lease came to an end a few days after the end of the hostilities with Japan; the abruptness with which Washington, instinctively hostile to the new Labour Government in London, terminated Lend-Lease to Britain and effectively pulled the rug from under its feet, brought out in bold relief the precariousness of the United Kingdom’s situation in spite of the fact that it was nominally one of the victorious “Big Three” Powers. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1455)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That Soviet Russia had no intention of abiding by the agreements concluded at Teheran, Dumbarton Oaks, and Yalta had become painfully obvious to Washington insiders before the war was even over, although largely ignored by American public opinion. Shortly before his death, President Roosevelt had told James Byrnes that “he had grave misgivings about the future.”123 But it was too late now to undo the damage. Into the power vacuum created by Roosevelt’s lack of foresight the Russians poured all their remaining military and political strength. ([Location 1466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1466)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Wherever a vacuum occurred between retreating European power and advancing communism, the United States was bound by historical compulsion to step in. The tale of the immediate postwar era is the tale of this gradual, involuntary, and reluctant involvement leading to the Korean War and the Great Debate which marks a watershed in the history of the United States—and consequently, in the history of the modern world. ([Location 1484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1484)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was utterly naive to think that Europe’s position in the world could collapse without awakening and setting loose vast anti-Western (and not merely anti-European) forces—most of them, and the most effective, under Communist auspices; but also many that were not, such as the flare-up of Arab nationalism and Islamic fanaticism. What were presumed to be “nationalist” revolts in the non-Western world had nothing to do with nationalism in the strict etymological sense; these were, broadly speaking, anti-Western revolts, rebellions against the disruptive impact of Western Civilization. Non-Western people were struggling to take advantage of the collapse of European colonialism in order to achieve two incompatible results: modernize themselves as fast as possible in order to acquire the sinews of modern industrial power—and revive their dying civilizations, submerged by the triumph of industrialization and of the Western culture of which it was an essential component. Whether Marxism-Leninism came into play in the process depended on local cultural elements rather than on the degree of their hostility to the West. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1487)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In order to prosecute the war against implacable enemies, the Anglo-Americans often thought it convenient to assist and subsidize what they believed to be the most effective underground movements—which were almost invariably Communist-led. From Italy and Yugoslavia to Malaya and Vietnam, the Westerners themselves sowed the seeds of potential trouble by building up their future enemies in order to shorten the struggle against the Germans and Japanese; the result of this shortsighted policy became plain in Greece sooner than it did anywhere else. ([Location 1504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1504)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Moscow’s open challenge to the West had at last been understood by American public opinion; the United Nations’ impotence had also become quickly evident. And Winston Churchill, in speech after speech, warned that only a tight alliance between the British Commonwealth and the United States, binding all English-speaking nations together, could stop the otherwise inevitable progress of international communism, bolstered by Russian imperialism. ([Location 1528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1528)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the idea of a policy of containment began to take shape in Washington. The Russians’ complete takeover of Eastern and Central Europe, the gradual disintegration of Western Europe’s economic and social structures, considerably aggravated by the witheringly cold winter of 1946–47, everything conspired to strike the American leaders’ imagination with the imminent danger of a wholesale collapse of the Old World into the wide-open arms of Soviet Russia. ([Location 1531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1531)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Britain’s Foreign Secretary confidentially informed Washington that Britain would have to drop the Greek and Turkish burden on March 31, being unable to extend them aid of any kind beyond that date. Could the United States step in and take over? March 1947 saw the beginning of that transfer of imperial power and responsibilities from the disintegrating British Empire to the United States, which is still going on, a generation later. ([Location 1539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1539)) - Tags: [[blue]] - On March 12, President Truman addressed a joint session of Congress; later, he was to define the plan he put forth as “the turning point in America’s foreign policy which now declared that wherever aggression, direct or indirect, threatened the peace, the security of the United States was involved.”125 This became known as the Truman Doctrine, the foundation stone on which the United States’ reluctant imperialism was going to be erected. The key word in the statement is “indirect.” Direct aggression is easy to define, and although it might not always justify the open intervention of the United States, it could be partly warranted if Soviet Russia were to attack a weaker neighbor, or openly back an aggressor. Indirect aggression, however, is another matter, a matter of interpretation involving the forcible intrusion of American power in any number of local civil wars against the side that is aided and abetted by the bigger Communist Power—or Powers, since Red China has struck out on her own. More than anything else, indirect aggression and the struggle against it became the main catalyst of America’s preordained imperialism. ([Location 1542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1542)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the situation in Western Europe had become dramatic during the drastic winter of 1947. All the loans and forms of aid extended by the United States since the war had been unable to prevent the gradual dislocation of the Continent’s economy. Secretary of State Marshall, in his historic speech at Harvard on June 5, 1947, stated flatly that Europe could not pay the cost of feeding and housing its inhabitants, and would not be able to do so for years to come. Aid and charity were not enough; Europe had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and given the means to do so; what had been done since the war had been a mere palliative; what was now required was a cure—the Marshall Plan. ([Location 1565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1565)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Impressed by this technical prowess at a time when the success of the Marshall Plan was becoming obvious, and intimidated by the demonstration of Western solidarity implied in the recent signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, Soviet Russia began a slow retreat behind its Iron Curtain and responded, in turn, to every Western consolidation move by a countermove of its own. ([Location 1601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1601)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American armed forces had been withdrawn from Korea two years before, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had repeatedly stated that the United States would be unwilling to defend South Korea if it came under attack from the north. Not only was this statement an open invitation to Communist invasion, besides being an inaccurate forecast of America’s instinctive reaction if such an invasion were to take place; it also truly reflected Washington’s policy which was focused on an even greater distrust of its own allies and satellites than of its open, avowed foes. South Korea’s four divisions were no army but a mere constabulary force with light weapons, lacking in artillery and tanks, without a navy or an air force—this extreme weakness being necessary, according to State Department spokesmen, to prevent the South Koreans from invading the Communist-controlled north. It is highly likely that had South Korea been granted an army to match that of North Korea, no Communist aggression would have taken place at all; and in view of the part played by the Korean War in reshaping America’s foreign policy all over the world, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that weakness invites aggression, which in turn evokes unnecessary violence and over-response on the part of the heretofore weak. As MacArthur pointed out in his Reminiscences, referring to the Korean situation: “Now was the time to recognize what the history of the world has taught from the beginning of time: that timidity breeds conflict, and courage often prevents it.” ([Location 1633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1633)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Korean War became the main catalyst of American military involvement in the Far East and Southeast Asia. Not only that; it prompted the Americans to become more deeply involved all over the world, wherever they saw, rightly or wrongly, a threat of Communist penetration or subversion. Japan was allowed to rearm under American supervision and a peace treaty was signed with it in September 1951, which, besides consecrating the total loss of its former empire, also included the transfer to American control, under a United Nations trusteeship formula, of its strategically valuable island possessions in the Pacific, notably the vast archipelagos of Micronesia; and retention by the American military of the Ryukyus. In quick order, a number of mutual defense treaties were arranged in 1951 between the United States and most island nations in the Far East and Southeast Asia—with Japan and the Philippines, and more especially the ANZUS pact with Australia and New Zealand, excluding Britain, now forever unable to come to the assistance of her Commonwealth partners on the other side of the globe. This established a virtual American protectorate over the whole chain of islands running from Hokkaido in northern Japan down to New Zealand’s South Island. Everywhere, whenever needed, United States armed forces, stationed in countless military bases, were ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. ([Location 1655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1655)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Everyone seemed oblivious of the fact that no country in the world was strong enough to drag the United States into a conflict against its will; that, in fact, it was the United States itself that was in full control of the destinies of those numerous nations that were tied to it by mutual treaties. In the last resort, Washington could always do as it pleased. By looking at the world scene through the wrong end of the telescope, the isolationists doomed their last offensive from the start; by making short shrift of the immense weight of the historical past which was inexorably dragging the United States forward on the road to empire, they displayed a remarkable misunderstanding of the contemporary evidence. ([Location 1676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1676)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Defeated on Capitol Hill, the isolationists continued the Great Debate in speeches and in the press. Not all were blind to the imperial overtones of America’s multiplying involvements in the affairs of all and sundry. But they could no longer find a way out of their fast-accumulating commitments. America’s top soldiers, Eisenhower and MacArthur, saw no other choice but armed resistance to Communist expansion in Europe and Asia. ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1687)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the chief advantage lies in binding to the Pentagon satellite military establishments in Latin America, the Far East, and Europe; and by doing this, not only strengthening American influence with the military of a given country, but eventually giving Washington the potential use of much less costly troops for service outside their own borders—the very effective South Koreans in Vietnam, for instance. Already in 1957, it was estimated that, whereas it cost a yearly average of seven thousand dollars to keep an American soldier overseas, it cost the Americans a mere hundred and twenty-five dollars to keep a Nationalist Chinese soldier on Taiwan during the same span of time.134 ([Location 1742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1742)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the same thing happened after the Korean War when the Eisenhower Administration put forth the Dulles doctrine of “massive retaliation.” But how could this doctrine cope with the multidimensional “wars of national liberation” sponsored by the Communists throughout the world, in which economic sabotage, social upheavals, civil wars, political subversion, and guerilla warfare substitute for outright military aggression? It could not; and the United States’ next Administration adopted, in the early 1960s, the far more costly, complicated, and politically significant “flexible response” policy. ([Location 1757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1757)) - Tags: [[blue]] - No country in the world has been less militaristic; none has been more reluctant to prepare for war ever since the Continental Congress stated in 1787: “Standing armies in time of Peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people and generally converted into a destructive engine for establishing despotism.” ([Location 1772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1772)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Given its present military establishment and the revolutionary temper of a large part of the world’s population, the United States is sure to have at least one war, of the brush-fire variety, permanently on hand. Parkinson’s Law decrees that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” An extension of this law to the military world decrees that wars will always be produced in time to justify the existence of any military establishment. ([Location 1778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1778)) - Tags: [[blue]] - a correct reading of the trends of world history could have shown quite conclusively the historical inevitability of the sudden development of the Pentagon’s power. The mutual destruction of Europe’s Powers combined with the rise of Soviet Russia’s military might to supremacy in Eurasia’s heartland, the disintegration of the British Empire and the collapse of Europe’s far-flung colonial empires in Asia and Africa, left a global vacuum that had to be filled by the only Western Power available to do so. ([Location 1782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1782)) - Tags: [[blue]] - unlike World War I, the Second World War had vastly increased the prestige of the military in American society. As early as 1947, in the very midst of the virtual evaporation of the American army, the New York Times’ military expert Hanson Baldwin had expressed a certain alarm at “the militarization of our government and of the American state of mind.”138 This timely warning, sounded three years before war broke out in Korea, could not alter the historical trend, which had been strongly confirmed by the events of the World War and the proconsular role played by America’s military leaders—from General MacArthur’s virtual assumption of the Japanese Emperor’s authority in reshaping Japanese society in depth, to General Clay’s proconsulate in Germany where he was not only carrying out Washington’s policy but shaping it when, on his own initiative, he halted the dismantling of industrial plants earmarked for Soviet Russia, took a hand in the formation of political parties and elections against Washington’s advice, committed the United States beyond recall to the maintenance of the West’s position in Berlin after the Russians had destroyed the four-power government of Germany. In contrast, General Pershing, of World War I fame, was only the commander of an American expeditionary force under the overall command of a French marshal and with no proconsular role. ([Location 1788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1788)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added April 5, 2025 at 4:11 PM - not only has the Pentagon become, by far, the biggest and therefore most influential contractor; not only have the boards of directors of innumerable American companies engaged in defense work been hospitable in the extreme to retired generals and admirals; a large segment of this industry has come under military supervision through the increasing enforcement of its security regulations in countless plants working for the Defense Department, subjecting millions of workers to security clearance. This is not all. A great deal of the technological superiority enjoyed by American industry springs from the government-sponsored secret research carried out in many universities. In spite of the reluctance, and sometimes outright anger, of some scholars and students, it is only by participating in classified research that they can hope to remain on top of vital technological developments. In a sense, both the industrial and the academic worlds have been “satellized” by the Pentagon. ([Location 1825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1825)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the Pentagon, at the Korean War peak in 1952–53, absorbed 13.4 percent of GNP, whereas from 1965 to 1967, during the much larger buildup for the Vietnam War, it had risen from 7.5 percent to only 9.5 percent. If anything, the relative economic and financial burden has decreased from the Korean to the Vietnam War. ([Location 1835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1835)) - Tags: [[blue]] - military spending now has a vital importance for the entire economic structure. In September 1967, the Labor Department Bureau of Labor Statistics reckoned that the buildup of the war in Vietnam had created a million additional jobs in the United States and that additional increases in military spending unrelated to the Vietnam War had created an additional two million. ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1837)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Charles Wilson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, stated the case quite well when he claimed that “one of the serious things about this defense business is that so many Americans are getting a vested interest in it; properties, business, jobs, employment, votes, opportunities for promotion and advancement, bigger salaries for scientists and all that.”141 In other words, the very momentum of the machinery itself tends toward imperialism as a justification for its continued existence. ([Location 1844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1844)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If the military has acquired such predominance in American life in our times, it is partly due to the deleterious effects of pre-war isolationism. John J. McCloy pointed out: “The isolationism of the 1920–40 period had produced a vacuum of political objectives. The State Department did not have, indeed it was not encouraged to have, any political aims in the world. More thinking along political lines was being done and being asserted in the Munitions Building—this was before the era of the Pentagon—than in the old State Building.”143 From this deficiency of political objectives the State Department never really recovered. ([Location 1856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1856)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the process of its development, the CIA has adopted most of the techniques of its main, and most successful, antagonist—Soviet Russia’s own secret services which make maximum use of journalistic, commercial, and diplomatic cover. ([Location 1931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1931)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since it is difficult to fight an opponent without using his own best weapons, the Americans were quickly driven to duplicate, to a certain extent, the Soviet apparatus. ([Location 1940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1940)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Often enough, the CIA assists enemies of the United States’ allies, and by doing it secretly, avoids antagonizing those allies while keeping all its options open for the future and undercutting Communist influence. Thousands of students fighting colonial regimes in Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa and Southwest Africa, and many others, were and are subsidized secretly. ([Location 1969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=1969)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While all this may sound fanciful as far as the factual development of events is concerned, it represents in schematic form the actual thought process of the leading Egyptians during the months preceding the lightning war between Israel and the Arabs in 1967. In other words, the mere threat, real or imaginary, of CIA underground action in the Middle East, and the actualization of the military coup in Greece, were enough to influence the overheated imagination of the Egyptian leaders in Cairo. ([Location 2013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2013)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It might have been more peaceful and quiescent if this missionary spirit had not found a worthy antagonist in the Communist spirit with its own missionary outlook. The end result is not a willing but a reluctant imperialism because it is essentially a by-product of the clash between two contending missionary spirits attempting to fill power vacuums. ([Location 2032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2032)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As a highly industrialized continent, Western Europe could well do economically without most of its former colonies and spheres of influence throughout the world. Two areas, however, are geopolitically vital to Europe, to the extent that the Continent aims at military and economic independence from the United States: North Africa, which covers its Mediterranean underbelly, and the Middle East where the Suez Canal gives it a direct maritime link with the Orient, and whence springs oil, the vital fuel that is the lifeblood of its vast industries—in other words, the entire Arab world, from Casablanca to the Persian Gulf. ([Location 2060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2060)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Deprived at home of many of the natural resources that bless the huge territory of the United States, they partly made up for this deficiency by exerting a great deal of control over this non-European piece of valuable real estate. Without it, Europe was bound to sink lower still in the scale of international power, fall even more decisively into the sphere of America’s military protection, and be, economically, thrown at the mercy of American handouts. ([Location 2068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2068)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As the White Paper of February 1947 made clear, the British were determined to unload as much of their global responsibilities as they could; and since the American lap was not available, they shifted the problem of Palestine onto the shoulders of the United Nations the same month. ([Location 2090](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2090)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The collapse of Europe’s power and influence in the Middle East began in 1951 when Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh abruptly nationalized the extensive Anglo-Iranian oil properties, including Abadan’s giant refinery. Those were the days when two-thirds of its production filled nine-tenths of Britain’s oil requirements. Negotiations leading nowhere, Britain’s Labour Government, behaving out of necessity in true old imperial fashion, spoke of taking “severe measures.” When Mossadegh ordered British technicians out of Abadan because their presence there had become “redundant,” British Prime Minister Attlee sent an urgent message to President Truman, warning him that either the British stayed, using military force if necessary, or the entire Western position in the Moslem world would be in danger. Harry Truman vetoed the use of force. A few hours later, the Iranian army took over Abadan and expelled the British. As Newsweek editors put it, “This new sort of Dunkirk sent sweeping across Britain a stinging sense of national humiliation—plus a tendency to blame the United States for failing to support military intervention.”161 ([Location 2105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2105)) - Tags: [[blue]] - during Mossadegh’s tenure and even after, it seems clear that Washington was eager to substitute for the departing British rather than express its solidarity with them— ([Location 2118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2118)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While the final settlement did not follow the lines of a complete American takeover of the former Anglo-Iranian oil empire, it gave American interests a solid participation in an international consortium: 40 percent divided between Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of California, Socony Mobil, and the Texas Company—leaving the former Anglo-Iranian with another 40 percent. Thus, the Mossadegh episode ended in a clear-cut American victory, giving American economic interests a substantial position in an area that had hitherto been an exclusive British preserve. ([Location 2126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2126)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was the United States Secretary of State who slammed the door in his face without consulting his European partner. And it was France and Britain who were vulnerable through their financial stakes in the Universal Suez Maritime Company—which Nasser promptly nationalized in retaliation for the rebuke administered by the United States against which he was powerless because the Americans had no economic or financial stake in the country. ([Location 2166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2166)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What made the situation infinitely more dramatic than at Abadan in the days of Mossadegh, was that British and the rest of Western Europe’s oil reserves on hand totaled hardly more than a month’s supply. As Eden summarized the situation “The continuing supply of fuel, which was a vital source of power in the economy of Britain, was now subject to Colonel Nasser’s whim.”167 Indeed, in 1955, half of the 140 million tons of oil produced in the Middle East came through the Canal, and another 40 came through the pipelines streaking the territories of other Arab states—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Western Europe’s enormous industrial machinery could come to a grinding halt at the mere command of a small Middle Eastern chief of state! If this could be allowed to happen, Europe had indeed fallen low on the scale of international power. ([Location 2177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2177)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A military action might, in fact, have proved quite unnecessary; the mere credible threat of one would have probably been enough. And, time and again, when the Europeans attempted to intimidate Nasser with the prospect of military intervention in order to avoid one, some official or other in Washington quickly proclaimed the United States’ determination to find a peaceful solution—determination which almost invariably leads to armed conflict. ([Location 2200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2200)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Unencumbered by Great Britain’s moral qualms and desire to remain on good terms with the United States, the French had taken a practical view of the matter by sending arms and supplies to Israel, while working discreetly with the British on the buildup of an Anglo-French military expedition to the Middle East. ([Location 2217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2217)) - Tags: [[blue]] - On the real historical level, the Suez crisis had finally become a crisis between the United States and the leading Western Europeans. For the last time, European nations attempted to behave as big Powers in their own right, and demonstrate in action their independence of the United States. The British and the French attacked Egypt and occupied Suez, not for the hypocritical reason put forth at the time—that they were intervening to separate Israelis and Egyptians and bring peace to the area—nor merely for the more obvious reason that they wanted to re-establish their military and economic influence in the Arab world, but mainly to retrieve their former independence from America, which was fast slipping. True enough, the British wanted to regain control of the vital hinge between three continents through which flowed most of the oil that was the lifeblood of Europe’s industrial complex. The French wanted to strike an indirect blow against the elusive Algerian guerillas they could not pin down in Algeria itself. Both wanted to restore their vanishing prestige in the Arab world. But more than anything, and quite unconsciously, they now wanted to prove to Washington that they had not yet become anyone’s vassals. ([Location 2233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2233)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As Anthony Eden stated it later, “It was not Soviet Russia, or any Arab state, but the Government of the United States which took the lead in the Assembly against Israel, France, and Britain.” ([Location 2251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2251)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There could be no doubt as to the issue. Condemned in the Assembly by 64 votes to 5, humiliated by the United States’ sharp rebuke, Britain and France agreed to a ceasefire on November 6, followed shortly after by Israel. When, in the interim, the British and the French urged the Security Council to debate the unfolding Hungarian tragedy, “the United States representative was reluctant and voiced his suspicion that we were urging the Hungarian situation in order to divert attention from Suez”177—which was exactly Britain’s and France’s intention. But the United States Government would not be diverted from its primary purpose: to break the will of its European allies: “The United States Government appeared in no hurry to move. Their attitude provided a damaging contrast to the alacrity they were showing in arraigning the French and ourselves.”178 Being temporarily allied with Soviet Russia did not bother the authorities in Washington—even the fact that, encouraged by the United States Government’s attitude, Soviet agents were busy whipping up Egyptian crowds in Port Said and increasing their activities in the rest of Egypt, while Soviet military supplies were pouring into the country. ([Location 2261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2261)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Never again could any European Power or combination of Powers challenge the paramount authority of Washington. In no part of the world would they be allowed to have more than moral influence—except at the specific request of the United States, when it was found convenient to maintain British military presence in Singapore and the Persian Gulf, for instance. The venerable Entente Cordiale between Britain and France collapsed, now that Britain had been reduced, as Harold Macmillan had feared, to being a “new Netherlands” under American protectorate. Ultimately, French rule was doomed in Algeria, and in the agonizing process of attempting to cope with the Algerian rebellion, Charles de Gaulle came to power, to implement a new anti-American policy—a predictable dividend at the end of the road to Suez. ([Location 2300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2300)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The last European troops had scarcely left Port Said forever when, on January 5, 1957, the President proclaimed the Eisenhower Doctrine—a bold declaration of virtual American protectorate over the whole area—a modern “Monroe Doctrine” for the Middle East. More specifically, it stated that “military assistance should be extended to any countries that sought such help” and, further, that such assistance could well “include the employment of armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any country controlled by International Communism.”187 Here was the United States further committed, by Presidential fiat, to eventual military action in a part of the world that had been left, until now, to the tender care of the Europeans. President Eisenhower did admit that it entailed new military risks, but did not see how these new commitments could be avoided. ([Location 2319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2319)) - Tags: [[blue]] - At the tail end of the road to Suez, Great Britain has become merely Britain, an impoverished and powerless offshore island at the mercy of the United States. And the United States finds itself alone, without even the semblance of a European ally to help it police the world east of Suez. ([Location 2374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2374)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The psychological consequences of the Suez Crisis were far-reaching in Britain. France took its political defeat with an amount of cynical philosophy; it was one more defeat on the long road of its shrinking world power, taking its due place between Dienbienphu and the final loss of Algeria. Britain was not accustomed to ringing defeat, nor to being publicly spanked by her elder daughter. Without any outside prompting, London had gracefully relinquished its hold over the various components of the British Empire and had withdrawn, and was still withdrawing, with great dignity. But the Suez Crisis was a traumatic experience—not only because it was a stinging defeat but because, as many Britons admitted at the time, it became a moral crisis of the first order. No such qualms tormented the French to whom international morality means little, and to whom the Suez adventure appealed in part precisely because it was morally indefensible; it tickled their cynicism pleasantly and they sighed with regret only because it had failed. To the British, it was an extreme emotional shock, and that shock produced in the British soul a quick and startling metamorphosis. ([Location 2376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2376)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Summing up the grave implications, a Scottish Nationalist wrote in the Spectator: “It was primarily the British Empire that made and kept us British. Now that it has gone, the word British is almost devoid of meaning.”189 With the Empire gone and grave economic difficulties ahead, the rise of regional nationalism is all but inevitable. Just as it would be unthinkable, today, that the states of Maine or California would want to secede from the Union—since the United States’ imperial expansion is in full swing—it is quite possible that, sometime in the future, a majority of the populations of both Scotland and Wales will opt out of Britain altogether and divorce the English as peacefully as the Norwegians divorced the Swedes at the turn of the century. This disintegration of British unity, and consequently power, would ultimately leave its fragments with little choice except some form of incorporation in a larger entity. ([Location 2403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2403)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The remarkable structure of the British Commonwealth, as distinct from the Empire, was born out of the trials and tribulations of the American Revolution. The loss of the greater part of their American possessions taught the British a bitter lesson which they were not likely to forget. And since they were in a position to send out waves of emigrants to populate largely empty overseas territories, they had many opportunities to start all over again and make a better job of it—eventually to grant them all the freedoms that had been denied their American cousins. So it was that the British Commonwealth of Nations grew organically into a worldwide federal republic whose federal links became increasingly tenuous until they consisted of hardly more than a symbolic allegiance to a common Crown and an emotional attachment to the mother country which behaved with such tolerant understanding. ([Location 2411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2411)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In analyzing the evolving structure of this new English-speaking planetary system, one thing becomes evident: if there is any member of the British Commonwealth that, by rights, should have been long ago incorporated in the United States, it is Canada. Gigantic in geographical size, relatively small in population (one tenth that of its neighbor to the south), Canada shares a five-thousand-mile border, mostly artificial and arbitrary, with the United States. This border is a historical accident, not a geographic reality. Indeed, the United States almost seized Canada by force during the 1812 War but met the determined resistance of the Canadians and, in particular, the French Canadians who had become reconciled to London’s tolerant rule and dreaded the all-absorbing domination of the Americans. Mindful of the sermons drummed into them by their clergy to the effect that “the best way to remain French is to stay British,” they also recalled the fate of Louisiana and the swift disappearance of its French character. ([Location 2425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2425)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Canada grew slowly in the shadow of its giant southern neighbor; but it grew in physical size only, not in spirit. It was never able to develop “Canadianism” into a definite personality with its own identity. There is no Canadian individuality, nothing that gives it its own specificity: “Canadians are generally indistinguishable from the Americans, and the surest way of telling the two apart is to make the observation to a Canadian,”190 said a wit. True enough, many Canadians still attempt to maintain, or rather to develop, a distinct national identity which can never emerge, for the simple reason that Canada is not one country but at least three—French Canada, centered on Quebec, the old British Canada founded by the United Empire Loyalists who turned their backs on the American Revolution and migrated to Ontario, and the new, modern Canada of the prairies where immigrants from all over Europe—Poles, Italians, Ukrainians, Germans—care not one whit for the ancestral quarrels between British and French Canadians. To these three major components can be added such disconnected fragments as British Columbia, cut off from the rest of the country by the Rocky Mountains and entirely focused on the Pacific, and the Maritime Provinces, equally cut off from the rest of English-speaking Canada by French-speaking Quebec. And all of them live, with different degrees of apprehension, in the shadow of the United States’ overpowering influence in all walks of life. ([Location 2432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2432)) - Tags: [[blue]] - French Canada is undergoing simultaneously an economic and a social revolution which is leading it away from the rest of the federation. The Quebec issue is now forcing the rest of the country to decide whether it wants to become a nation or whether it is going to break up. But how can it become a cohesive nation when one of its main components, French-speaking Quebec, feels that it is itself a nation—and is fast becoming one in sentiment? The French Canadians’ situation is much like India’s Moslems who became a nation in the early 1940s before the foundation of the state of Pakistan, which merely institutionalized what had already become a fact. ([Location 2454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2454)) - Tags: [[blue]] - More than anywhere else, it is in matters of military defense that Canada has become almost completely integrated in the American structure. In case of nuclear conflict with Soviet Russia, for instance, Canada would have to act as a shield covering the United States from the polar regions of Siberia—a shield which Washington rather than Ottawa would have to control. Canada’s military orientation which used to be focused on Britain in an east–west direction is now entirely north–south—with control virtually vested south of its border, in Washington’s Pentagon. Canadian defense can only be a hemispheric defense, especially in a nuclear age. The Canadian Air Force, long a stepchild of Britain’s Royal Air Force, is now completely Americanized in terms of weapons and procedure, and has fallen into the integrated structure of the hemispheric North American Defense Command (NORAD), which was established in 1958. ([Location 2477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2477)) - Tags: [[blue]] - hard-headed Canadian economists reply that all talk of economic independence is pointless, that a full integration of Canadian and American economies is desirable, that the Canadian public should not be taxed for “the privilege of having a national identity,”196 and that they see no harm in an eventual political union as the ultimate consequence of an economic one. But, so far, recent surveys indicate that two Canadians out of three favor economic union with the United States—while the proportion is almost exactly reversed when it comes to political union. That one would inevitably follow the other is evident. ([Location 2524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2524)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If this strain were eventually to lead to a breakaway by the enormous province of Quebec, Canada’s Balkanization would inevitably follow. Completely cut off from the rest of the country, the Atlantic portion—the Maritime Provinces—would have little choice except seek admission into the United States. When Newfoundland, Canada’s newest province, had to make up its mind about its political future after the Second World War, it was clear that “if Newfoundlanders had been given a free choice, 85 percent would have voted to join the United States.”197 But they were not given a free choice and eventually merged with Canada; it still remains, however, that a great many Newfoundlanders show more kinship with the United States than with the Canadian mainland, “and the island’s Prime Minister Joey Smallwood himself points to the traditional gravitation southward that has made Boston ‘Newfoundland’s biggest city.’”198 If the gravitational pull of New England on Newfoundland is enormous, it is just as great on the other Maritime Provinces—Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. As one Canadian remarked, “There’s another kind of separatism in Canada. I found it during my ten years in the Maritimes: down there, they all want to join Boston . . . The only difference, as I see it, between Quebec’s separatists and the Maritimes’ is that in Quebec they have a different language.”199 Ties with New England are immensely strong, including the presence of millions of Canadian immigrants in Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. A survey revealed in 1964 that almost 40 percent of the Maritimers favored political union with the United States—the highest proportion in Canada at that time.200 A breakaway by Quebec would inevitably throw them into the United States. In what would be left of a truncated Canada, the three provinces in the central prairies would be next to feel the irresistible pull of southward gravity. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba are, in many ways, the most Americanized of all Canadian provinces; their populations are more heterogeneous, springing originally from many parts of Europe; their common border with the United States is completely artificial and splits in two a huge region that geography had made one. Their citizens resent having to pay federal taxes to finance social welfare programs in the poorer Maritime Provinces and schools in hostile Quebec. Residents of Winnipeg go the theater in Minneapolis and Chicago, not Toronto or Montreal. For all that, secessionist sentiment is not as strong in the 1960s as it was in the 1930s, for plain economic reasons. But if the Canadian federation broke up, the probability is that “it would really come down to an economic evaluation of where we would get a better deal: in Ontario or in the States.”201 As for British Columbia on the Pacific coast, it has never displayed much enthusiasm for Canada as an entity and, except for Quebec, has been demanding a greater degree of… ([Location 2534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2534)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The impetus to colonize Australia sprang from the loss of the American colonies, hitherto a convenient outlet for its convicts. That Australia was, at first, largely a collection of penal settlements has been overstressed to the detriment of the large number of freemen who emigrated “down under.” What is clear, however, is the historical link between the American Revolution and the founding of Australia, which replaced Virginia and Maryland as the destination of shiploads of convicts. ([Location 2613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2613)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was World War II that tore Australia forever away from Britain and British protection: when Japan attacked in the South Pacific, only the United States could and did come to Australia’s assistance. Britain, hard-pressed by Germany at the other end of the world, could do nothing. Australia’s Prime Minister Curtin stated bluntly at the time: “Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”215 From then on, in the words of an Australian, “we pay perpetual appreciation to the U.S. for taking up the fight with us when times were very dark in this part of the world, and when little sympathy was extended from our traditional source of origin.” ([Location 2687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2687)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Geopolitical developments have increased the centrifugal tendencies inherent in the structure of the British Commonwealth, to the point where its British phase has almost passed out, and its American phase is beginning. ([Location 2705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2705)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With all the compelling reasons for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—the “white” dominions—to throw in their lot with the United States, to enter the Union as so many new states, there is one visible obstacle, and a major one. They would then be open to a vast influx of American Negroes. To take a simple example, Australia, which has spent most of its historical life defending its “whiteness,” would have to accept the spontaneous immigration of one and a half million Negroes if it were to have roughly the same proportion of Negroes and whites that exists in the United States; Canada would have to take in over two million. This is one aspect of the situation that makes a formal amalgamation of these countries with the United States improbable in the short run. ([Location 2734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2734)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The historical trend of our time decrees that the United States, whether it likes it or not, is becoming heir to the deceased British Empire and Commonwealth—that at the present stage of history, it is unthinkable that the Balkanization of the world engendered by the liquidation of this global empire should last forever. Its official metamorphosis into a “Commonwealth” only barely disguises the fact that its center of gravity has been steadily shifting from London to Washington; the bifocal ellipse of the first half of this century is becoming a circle with its center in the United States. For all practical purposes, the “British” Commonwealth is dead—and transfigured into an American one. ([Location 2757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2757)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In an increasingly Balkanized world, America is inheriting, willingly or unwillingly, the remnants of all the collapsed empires of the past century and a half. Indirectly, the United States inherited most of the former Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere, object of the unilateral Monroe Doctrine. A large slice of it was appropriated outright at the conclusion of the Mexican War and nicely rounded off the metropolitan territory of the Union; small bits and pieces were secured in Central America for the purpose of building the Panama Canal—but without formally abolishing local sovereignty; others were retained in the Caribbean after the Spanish-American War; and over the rest of the “banana republics,” imperialismo yanqui established a loose but effective economic dominion. More recently, the collapse of the venerable Ottoman Empire opened the way for the Balkanization not only of the Balkans proper, but of the entire Middle East: with the elimination of the temporary European heirs who had carved it and parceled it out among themselves, the United States finds itself alone in defending it against the encroachments of Russian imperialism; and finds itself, more or less consciously, in the process of using the newborn state of Israel, a Western implantation in an Oriental environment, as an instrument by which to compel the most troublesome Arab states to accept its benevolent protectorate. Lately, the disintegration or forcible liquidation of most of Europe’s other colonial empires is also adding to America’s imperial burden. The French, Dutch, and Belgian empires, so recently transformed into new and often artificial nations, have required the United States’ intervention on more than one occasion—Indonesia in discreet fashion; the former Belgian Congo, more openly during its times of troubles in the 1960s; and the former French Indochina, in terms of a full-fledged war in the second half of the 1960s. One way or another, the perennial threat of Communist takeovers, real or imagined, has compelled Washington to take a hand in the running of these nations’ affairs. But it is probably the inheritance of Japan’s Far Eastern empire that has become the most burdensome—not that the United States was actually reluctant to take it over, since it had no choice in the matter. Washington was never willing to accept what the Japanese euphemistically called the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” regardless of the fact that, like so many former empires, it was a geographical and economic necessity in an area where nationalism can only develop on the local level. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, it would have to take over the task that Japanese imperialism was not allowed to accomplish. ([Location 2764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2764)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the early 1850s, as noted in chapter I, expansionist Americans had all but decided that their continent had been “finished up” and, with their backs still turned on Europe, the Pacific and Asia beckoned the rising power of the young American nation. Matthew Perry was convinced that “American expansion was inevitable and equivalent to the progress of mankind.” ([Location 2792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2792)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Japan’s increasing power and population explosion prompted Tokyo to try and break down the obstacles so as to free Japanese emigration to Australia, Canada, and the United States; but in vain. Racial discrimination in the “white” areas around the Pacific increased rapidly; and for all their growing might as a nation, the Japanese, as well as the Chinese, had the strange feeling that they were looked down upon as second-class human beings who should remain on their side of the Pacific and not intrude in the white man’s domains. In 1920, a distinguished member of the Japanese Diet spoke for most Japanese when he said: “America appears to think she is divinely appointed to rule the world with a big stick! What is the purpose of her colossal Navy if it is not to make her power supreme in every part of the Pacific? American statesmen . . . preach the doctrine of racial equality and equal opportunity and yet refuse to admit educated Japanese immigrants to American citizenship.”223 ([Location 2827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2827)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What is striking in the interwar period is that American interest in the Far East never flagged; as mentioned previously, isolationism applied to Europe, never to the Pacific area. Secretary of State Henry Stimson took a firm line against Japan in the Manchurian affair and went on to say, in October 1932, that the United States was “naturally destined for a leader in the promotion of peace throughout the world.”226 ([Location 2862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2862)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In Roosevelt’s mind, the Pacific was, or should indeed be, under a virtual American protectorate, and European interference with United States policy in the Far East would not be tolerated. ([Location 2876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2876)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Warnings as to the consequences were not lacking, and prophetic voices were heard pointing out that if the equilibrium which was being sought in the Far East by the Asians themselves was to be disrupted by American interference, only Soviet Russia and the Chinese Communists would benefit. Pertinently, John V. A. MacMurray, former chief of the Far Eastern division at the State Department, pointed out that, whereas Japan’s empire was bound to be geographically circumscribed and limited to the Far East and Southeast Asia, “the triumph of Communism in China would stimulate anew the revolutionary forces in every country.” ([Location 2885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2885)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Japan formally strengthened its links with Germany and Italy. Taking this effect for a cause, the American Government decided to simplify the global picture by assuming that “. . . there is at present going on in the world one war, in two theaters.”233 The convenient thesis of a single world conflict in which Japan, Germany, and Italy formed a cohesive team is not confirmed by a postwar examination of the record; on the contrary, it shows conclusively that their real ties were far weaker than assumed at the time. A quarter of a century later, the same psychological urge to oversimplify led the American authorities to continue talking in terms of an “international Communist bloc” long after the bloc had broken up, of a Sino-Soviet imperialism years after it became obvious that Chinese and Russians had become bitter enemies. ([Location 2903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2903)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The economic screws were tightened further, and assistance to the Chinese Kuomintang was stepped up. On July 26, 1941, Roosevelt launched total economic warfare. All Japanese assets in the United States were frozen; the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies followed suit; and Japan’s foreign trade came to an almost complete standstill. “As one Japanese expressed it, his country felt like a fish in a pond from which the water was being gradually drained away.”234 The encirclement, aimed at reducing Japan through its extreme economic vulnerability to the state of a small oriental power, was complete. Only war could break it. ([Location 2911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2911)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1942 and 1943, public opinion polls found that twice as many Americans pointed to Japan rather than Germany as their major enemy. Obviously, most American leaders gave very little thought to the ultimate disposal of the broken pieces of the Japanese Empire, feeling that everything would fall into place by itself, giving no thought to the perennial fact that a power vacuum always has to be filled and that this filling process is bound to bring into conflict antagonistic expansionary forces—in this instance, Communist ideology and American power. ([Location 2924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2924)) - Tags: [[blue]] - According to Douglas MacArthur, “After the Borneo campaign, I had planned to proceed with the Australian troops to Java and to retake the Netherlands East Indies. Then, as in New Guinea, restoration of the Dutch government would have brought the return of orderly administration and law. But for reasons which I have never been able to discover, the proposed movement was summarily vetoed by Washington . . . This reversal soon bore fruit in the chaos that ensued in that portion of Indonesia; it was a grave error and was the result of political meddling in what was essentially a military matter.”237 But it was not political “meddling” and it was not “essentially a military matter.” It was a conscious and deliberate American policy aimed at stripping European colonial Powers of their colonial empires in Southeast Asia, regardless of the chaos and power vacuums thus opened; and often, all they had to do was to let the already defeated Japanese complete their own work of anti-European destruction. Washington’s attitude toward the French in Indochina was similarly motivated. ([Location 2937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=2937)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In order to understand the bitterness of the struggle during these ten years, it is essential to realize that the Americans had already become involved in the problem—involved in the sense that President Roosevelt had made it clear as early as 1942 that he was opposed to a re-establishment of French domination in Indochina after the war, and in the sense that a tacit agreement between the United States and China’s Kuomintang regime provided for a thinly disguised Chinese protectorate over North Vietnam.243 When the Japanese abolished French rule at the tail end of the war, the Americans found themselves suddenly deprived of their main source of information and immediately sought to replace it. The best one available was the Communist Vietminh network, with which the OSS immediately linked up, committing the same error as the British in Greece and Malaya. Providing the Vietnamese Communists with a considerable amount of weapons and supplies, associating with them in their guerilla warfare against the Japanese, the Americans naively thought that they had recruited genuine allies in the war. In fact, the Vietminh played its own game with consummate skill, preparing its takeover of the country in the anticipation that Japanese rule would, in any case, come to a quick end. Again, it is worth recalling that, in their hour of defeat, the Japanese in Indochina, as elsewhere in the former European colonies in Asia, decided to hand over their weapons to Asian nationalists and not to their Western victors: in so doing, they gave meaning to their unsuccessful war against the West, and made sure that European domination could never be re-established on the Asian mainland; their East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had collapsed; so be it. At least, their struggle to chase the white man out of Asia might still end in an Asian, if not Japanese, victory. ([Location 3023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3023)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The belief that American-style democracy must spread around the world, by missionary persuasion if possible, by force if necessary, is far more ancient than the relatively recent appearance of international Communism. One is reminded of a famous conversation between Walter Hines Page, the farsighted American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the time of the difficulties with Mexico in 1913, and Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary: GREY: Suppose you have to intervene, what then? PAGE: Make ’em vote and live by their decision. GREY: But suppose they will not so live? PAGE: We’ll go in again and make ’em vote again. GREY: And keep this up two hundred years? PAGE: Yes. The United States will be here two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space of time till they learn to vote and rule themselves.245 This missionary urge to compel aliens to abide by a democratic process which may be quite unsuitable to their national temper can only result in the involuntary buildup of an empire; in this context, the Communist urge to convert aliens to Marxism-Leninism is only the mirror-image of America’s far more ancient democratic spirit; and the clash between their contending imperialism, preordained generations ago, has become the main political leitmotiv of our times. ([Location 3106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3106)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the reality of the situation was that a Communist Vietnamese conquest of Indochina would have set up a strong and viable state, whose only likely aim, from then on, would have been to block the extension of Red China’s influence in Southeast Asia by resisting the imposition of a Chinese protectorate. ([Location 3136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3136)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One of the most outspoken, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, stated emphatically in 1967 that even former colonial countries “may very well prefer a permanent American military presence” in order to ward off the threat of communism.262 ([Location 3292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3292)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Chinese communism is endowed with a global vision; in this vision, the new version of communism, as reshaped by Mao Tse-tung and as expressed by his Defense Minister Lin Piao in September 1965 (shortly after the buildup of a huge American army in Vietnam started in earnest), claims that “revolutionary power” resides in the worldwide countryside and not in the worldwide cities; peasants rather than urban and industrial proletariats are destined to be the vanguard of the worldwide revolution.267 In this new political scheme of things, North America and Western Europe (with the potential addition of Japan and Soviet Russia) are the world’s cities, whereas Asia, Africa, and Latin America are the world’s “countryside.” Revolutionary wars throughout the underdeveloped lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would become part of a global strategy aimed at encircling the hated “cities,” primarily the geographical areas of the despised civilization of the West. Active revolutionary struggle is no longer the prerogative of the industrial proletariats working through crippling strikes and urban revolts such as Petrograd’s October Revolution, but of armed guerillas in the wild countryside—in jungles, rain forests, swamps, inaccessible mountains and deserts. ([Location 3324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3324)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The United States’ imperial control over Japan is multidimensional, but a great deal of it is due to the economic leverage provided by Japan’s inherent poverty in natural resources—depending, as it does, on imports for 96 percent of its iron ore, 99 percent of its petroleum, 75 percent of its zinc, 85 percent of its copper, and so on. Japan’s sources of raw materials around the Pacific, whether in its former “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” or in the Western Hemisphere, are now all included in the United States’ Pacific empire; Japanese access to these sources of raw materials is entirely dependent on American goodwill and its naval control of the world’s largest ocean. ([Location 3353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3353)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Roughly one third of Japan’s total foreign trade is conducted with the United States, while another third is conducted with countries included in the United States’ de facto empire: Japan has become an economic, as well as strategic, captive of America. ([Location 3359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3359)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Balkanized remnants of the great Spanish and Portuguese empires, none of the states of Latin America appear to have yet found a social and political equilibrium; they have not yet been able to condense into coherent political units, that is, well-defined, homogeneous nations. It is not, as in Asia, the problem of adapting old and alien civilizations to the Western-oriented modern age, of tearing out immeasurably old roots and destroying venerable symbols. Latin America is part and parcel of Western Civilization, even if it is of the Iberian-Catholic variety whose peculiar form of Roman Catholicism has shielded it from both Reformation and Enlightenment; of its old Indian civilizations nothing is left but a few atavistic customs still prevailing among some of the more remote and scattered of the Indian populations. ([Location 3419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3419)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This is nowhere more apparent than in the establishments of higher learning south of the Rio Grande; it is essentially in the universities that the major centers of anti-United States feelings are located. Rather than the labor unions and the urban proletariats, it is the intellectual elites that give vocal expression to the widespread antagonism toward the northern giant. ([Location 3440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3440)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the best students often choose to emigrate to the United States or to Europe. It is estimated that at least half of the best students in medicine and engineering leave Latin America each year; this professional emasculation deprives most Latin American nations of essential leadership and stabilizing elements. ([Location 3446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3446)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In its present state of Balkanization, Latin America can have neither political nor economic weight. Nor can the endemic political and social instability of its member nations create the climate of confidence and feeling of security required for rapid economic development. ([Location 3465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3465)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By and large, Latin Americans are far more individualistic than North Americans (which does not imply that they are more individualized). They lack a strong social consciousness but have a far greater feeling for family solidarity and loyalty. Families in Latin America hold together inwardly as nowhere else in Western countries; inevitably, this strong sense of clannishness inhibits social consciousness, for which it is a substitute. Lack of social cooperation thwarts the development of homogeneous nations and therefore decreases their ability to deal with such a colossus as the United States from a position of national strength. ([Location 3475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3475)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If consciousness is focused on the individual and the clannish family rather than society as a whole, relations between races are the exclusive prerogative of the individual and never become a social, and therefore racial, problem as such. Racial consciousness (in the United States and wherever it exists) derives from a cohesive society’s collective psychology and strong sense of social solidarity which establishes group-distances between well-defined racial clusters. ([Location 3483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3483)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Before the First World War, Britain and Continental Europe had a very large stake in the area; but two World Wars shattered this economic predominance and delivered the main economic sinews of Latin America to its North American neighbor. Having become the world’s greatest creditors, the North Americans were in a position to buy out many European concerns and start many more on their own; and in some areas, such as Central America, this process had already been under way before World War I; ([Location 3503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3503)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In imitation of the United States, the presidential rather than the parliamentary form of government was adopted throughout Latin America. As in the United States, what matters politically is the man who rules rather than the assembly which is supposed to control and check—but, unlike its northern counterpart, rarely does either in Latin America. Being primarily individualists with only a rudimentary social consciousness, Latin Americans have no gift for local government: they are not truly citizens but individual nationalists who have great verbal but no factual respect for law and legality. Inevitably, there are few legal or social checks on the potential tyranny of the executive power which, ultimately, tends to be dictatorial. By and large, Latin American masses, like masses everywhere, favor personal rule, even tyranny or demagogic dictatorship “à la Perón.” It is usually the wealthy oligarchies that resist personal rule, unless it is their tool, in which case (increasingly rare nowadays) the ruler is likely to be a mere reactionary puppet. Arbitrary power is the result, backed by constitutional provisos enabling the chief executive to decree states of emergency and suspend constitutional rights whenever he feels so inclined. ([Location 3535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3535)) - Tags: [[blue]] - perhaps the major difference between the North American and the Latin American political temper in practice is that, whereas the road to political power in the United States usually lies through financial success, the easiest road to financial success in Latin America lies even more frequently through political power. Unless he is already endowed with considerable private means, the Latin American official who does not take advantage of his position to feather his nest is a rare bird indeed. ([Location 3544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3544)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Latin American psychology, largely inherited from Spain (except in Brazil) but profoundly influenced at times by various strains of Indian temper, has no built-in balance between violent passion and complete indifference or outright apathy. Latin Americans swing rapidly from one to another, making political stability difficult to achieve for any length of time; they are too impulsive for normal democratic processes and have no gift for parliamentary debate, making it appear that political stability is incompatible with political freedom in the North American sense of the word. ([Location 3591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3591)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This incompatibility between stability and liberty has generated Latin America’s contribution to the roster of political systems in the nineteenth century: military dictatorship. ([Location 3596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3596)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The third revolution, the Cuban one, is far more significant and pregnant with far greater potential for trouble. This one represents a direct threat and a challenge, not only to the security of the United States whose southern coastline lies barely ninety miles from Cuban shores, but to the social structure of the whole of Latin America. Its peasant-based type of revolutionary action focuses on outright guerilla warfare throughout the hemisphere. As in China, and unlike Soviet Russia, the social landscape of Latin America makes for a far more fertile soil for Castroites than it ever did for Perónismo—just as China’s social and cultural landscape favored Maoism at the expense of the more orthodox form of communism imported from Moscow. Perón operated out of a highly sophisticated nation with the highest overall standard of living in Latin America and a hardly disguised contempt for other, poorer and more backward Latins. His urban revolutionary appeal was slight in those areas with greatest revolutionary potential: the Indian-populated Andes, northeast Brazil, Central America, Guyana and the Caribbean— those very areas that were immediately canvassed by Castroites with their bearded bohemianism and guerilla warfare apparatus, so different from Perón’s well-tailored, almost elegant, brand of social reform. ([Location 3662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3662)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A great deal of ink has been spilt over the nature and degree of Fidel Castro’s involvement with communism. The involvement is real but does not and never did imply any kind of subordination to Moscow or Peking. It is a brand-new form of Communist action, adapted to the Latin temper, a tropical, wordy, exuberant, romantic communism, completely sui generis. ([Location 3671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3671)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The real situation was that Cuba had fallen into the hands of genuine, uncompromising revolutionaries, dedicated men who were determined to overthrow the entire social order and worked at it with fanatical zeal. Growing American hostility and the threat of actual American military intervention on the old pattern, added to the economic chaos introduced by the complete socialization of Cuba’s economy, brought about Castro’s uneasy military and economic alliance with Soviet Russia. Without Russia’s economic assistance, the whole Cuban revolution would have come to a dismal end; as for the military alliance, it provided Cuba with a useful leverage to offset the United States’ crushing superiority—which leverage was brutally snatched from Castro’s hands when Moscow, intimidated by Washington’s determination, withdrew its missiles in the fall of 1962. ([Location 3692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3692)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Cuba’s Dirección General de Inteligencia was set up in the 1960s to become the fountainhead of armed subversion throughout the Western Hemisphere, organizing and supporting thousands of armed guerillas in a half-dozen countries in the late 1960s. In Venezuela, Peru, and Guatemala, thousands of regular soldiers began chasing a few hundred guerillas and terrorists; in Colombia, the indigenous guerilla warfare which had, hitherto, been plain banditry, was being gradually “politicized” by Castroite agents. A small handful of guerillas settled themselves in Bolivia, hundreds of miles southeast of La Paz, to make life miserable for the Bolivian army; and hundreds of Castroite terrorists began to roam the jungles of Guatemala. ([Location 3713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3713)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What was significant about this meeting were not the endless squabbles and petty quarrels between delegates, but the general atmosphere and the conclusions hammered out at Cuba’s dictation—the complete rejection of “satellization” by Peking as well as Moscow; the clear statement that a “third road to revolution” was valid, not only for Latin America, but for the whole world; the major slogan, uttered again and again, “the duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution”; the complete absence of any portrait of Marx or Lenin while a huge portrait of Simón Bolívar dominated the proceedings; the forceful rejection of theoretical dogmatism and philosophical hairsplitting, which is one thing the Russians and the Chinese share a taste for; the emphasis on concrete situations and violent action; an even more specific condemnation of Peking’s communism as being “dogmatic, sectarian, and unsuited to Latin America.”292 Quite clearly, a revolutionary movement was developing in Latin America, masterminded in Cuba, which owed no allegiance to either Moscow or Peking. And perhaps the most significant, as well as ironical, symbol of the true position of Castroism is the fact that Che Guevara’s death went unlamented in Moscow, while stirring up such a feeling in Franco’s Spain that the main Falangist newspaper in Madrid deplored his death openly and compared him with Simón Bolívar and José Martí who, a century and a half ago, wrenched Latin America forever from the tyranny of Spanish rule.293 Thus, by this odd fusion of political extremes, there was “fascist” Spain deploring the death of the United States’ most bitter Communist enemy in Latin America—while Moscow contemplated it almost with relief! ([Location 3740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3740)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The truth of the matter is that Castroism is not communism at all but a reincarnation of what was, at one time, its worst enemy—anarchism. The hidden similarities between Castroism and anarchism are no accident; the plain fact is that, of all possible revolutionary types of action, anarchism is the one most suited to the individualistic and undisciplined Latin temper; nor should it be forgotten that Cuba remained under Spanish rule and influence until the very end of the nineteenth century, far longer than any continental Latin American nation, and as such provided a natural springboard for the penetration of Spanish-type anarchism in the Western Hemisphere. ([Location 3754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3754)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The difference between the two movements cannot be more pungently expressed than by stating that, whereas the anarchist wants to be, the Communist wants to do. Both Latins and anarchists want, above all, to strike an attitude, to safeguard the individual’s dignity against real or alleged offenders; they are not determined “doers” or silent “builders”; they are actors. Life is a grand stage and the acting is more important than the play. In anarchism the revolutionary Latin finds a highly congenial movement, one which is not burdened with Marxist philosophy or… ([Location 3761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3761)) - Tags: [[blue]] - whereas Marxism-Leninism basically apes the materialism of the so-called capitalist societies and wants a fairer distribution of material goods, the anarchist is essentially ascetic; while he thirsts for total freedom, he also thirsts for the leisure of the simple rural life and for the retrieval of an individual dignity lost in the soulless machinery of an increasingly complex industrial society. The strict discipline of the Communists and their Jesuitical habit of subordinating moral principles to political expediency repel the anarchist. ([Location 3778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3778)) - Tags: [[blue]] - They have hated the enterprising and successful gringos for generations—out of wounded pride, but also out of an instinctive desire to find a scapegoat on which to blame their own shortcomings. Often arrogant, willing to destroy rather than to build, they are likely to find in guerilla warfare just the kind of natural outlet for what is, essentially, a retrograde impulse. And indeed, anarchism, as compared with Marxism-Leninism, is fundamentally retrograde, looking back to the legendary Siglo de Oro of the remote past, rather than forward to the highly technological and organized future. ([Location 3797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3797)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In short, the quarrel between Castroism and Soviet-style communism is mainly a replay of the quarrel between the Communists and anarchists of an earlier generation—a precious indication that, in spite of temporary reconciliations and alliances of convenience, the chasm between them is so great as to be unbridgeable. ([Location 3819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3819)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Che Guevara, the “anarchist tramp” who had mysteriously faded away from Cuba in 1965 in order to organize guerilla warfare all over Latin America, wrote that “given suitable operating terrain, land hunger, enemy injustices, etc., a hard core of thirty to fifty men is, in my opinion, enough to initiate armed revolution in any Latin American country.”299 He then added: “One does not necessarily have to wait for a revolutionary situation to arise; it can be created . . . In the underdeveloped countries of the Americas, rural areas are the best battlefields for revolution.”300 ([Location 3836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3836)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There is abroad, in contemporary Western society (on both sides of the Atlantic), a profound sickness of the soul, a spirit of revolt against the neat and pat life of suburbia, against middle-class ideals and mores. This disease is spreading fast among the younger, postwar generation who have never been exposed to the actual dangers of regular warfare, nor to the idealism that sustained their elders in armed combat between 1940 and 1945. The unbridled use of drugs and narcotics is only one aspect of this permutation which, in fact, aims at the overthrow of Western society’s foundations. These internal émigrés of violent disposition who seek complete release from the fetters of an increasingly organized society, and who seek some lost self-identity, are likely to turn to guerilla warfare for a purpose—which will be ready and waiting for them in remote jungles and mountains where they will find a welcome release from the routinism of civilized life. ([Location 3847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3847)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the latest instance, President Lyndon Johnson did not hesitate to “send the marines” into the Dominican Republic in 1965, thus taking it upon himself to intervene unilaterally and in full violation of Articles 15 and 17 of the Organization of American States to which the United States had solemnly committed itself at Bogotá in 1948. The probability that the rebel (Constitutionalist) forces were about to defeat the forces of the existing government, possibly facing the United States with the threat of a new Cuba, left Washington little choice but to break its pledge and re-establish, by force of arms, a government subservient to its authority. The OAS meekly followed suit and, belatedly, legitimized this high-handed intervention. ([Location 3873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3873)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Cuba’s “continental strategy” visualizes an increasingly coordinated network of widely scattered guerilla operations, acting on the assumption that most Latin American societies are rotten to the core and are likely to collapse under the attacks of armed groups; that North Americans are bound to intervene militarily, thus increasing the anti-gringo feelings of the local populations; and that, eventually, the pressure of public opinion in the United States will compel Washington to abandon Latin American oligarchies to their sad fate. ([Location 3894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3894)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If we look back at the turn of the century, when the United States was first beginning to flex its imperial muscles, it is quite clear that the main obstacle to imperial expansion was the fear of having to absorb too many non-white people as eventual citizens—since the whole ethos of the American nation was opposed to colonial extension in the sense of keeping alien populations in indefinite subjugation for the benefit of the mother country. There had been enough trouble with the American Negroes after the Civil War to give the anti-imperialists plenty of ammunition. ([Location 3929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3929)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rather than respect for democratic tradition, it was racial prejudice that stood in the way of the acquisition of a much larger empire than actually came into Washington’s possession. ([Location 3933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3933)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the future development of the American empire depends, not only on the United States’ ability and willingness to absorb large colored populations from other lands and grow organically, rather than colonially, but also on the ability of its society to resolve its only major social problem—the integration of its own Negro population. ([Location 3938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3938)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As a general rule, racial conflict acquires dangerous political overtones only when the dominant racial group manifests a high degree of social cohesion and consciousness (as in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and South Africa) and strives successfully for democratic equality within the group—whereas, as we have seen in the case of Latin America, where social conscience is weak and strong family ties prevail over social solidarity, no racial problem exists as such, since there can be no conflict between extremely weak or even nonexistent social organisms; there is hardly any group-consciousness, and it is all a matter for the individual and his family to settle for themselves. In the first type of society, which concerns us now, collision between the drive for democratic equality and the existence of different compact racial groups becomes inevitable. ([Location 3941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3941)) - Tags: [[blue]] - White leaders in the United States have failed, quite naturally, to advocate boldly the only long-term solution to the problem: total miscegenation. This solution has been rejected in both theory and practice for generations; it is now further removed from actualization than ever, in spite of a marginal amount of blending: the races are being increasingly polarized and are moving full speed away from each other. ([Location 3947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3947)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the increasing mechanization of agriculture and the steady disappearance of the small, uneconomical farm, drove millions of other Negroes who might have remained in the southern countryside to the North and West, changing the whole racial landscape of the United States. Migrating from the legally segregated society of the South to the de facto segregated society of the North, these millions of Negroes began to carve out huge ghettos for themselves in every large city in the country; but, in the process of migrating, they also underwent a psychological and social mutation, from illiterate, isolated, and easily intimidated sharecroppers of the rural South to members of huge angry and volatile masses of Negroes compressed in the great urban slums. Thrown together by the thousands in the black ghettos, the American Negroes became more conscious of their racial unity and the frightening power which this new feeling of kinship, uniting millions of underprivileged colored people, gave them. ([Location 3952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3952)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rise of free and independent African states had a profound impact on the American Negro by restoring his pride in his négritude and confirming the possibility open to him of separate development; henceforth, he would be different from the white man, but not inferior. Before World War II, Africa made a powerful contribution to Negro self-contempt; now, suddenly, it contributed as much to his self-pride. African independence gave him an international leverage, or at least the illusion of one, which he had never suspected. It gave him the courage to challenge the white man and demand his fair share, or what he thinks is his fair share, of the national pie. As a Harlem resident, referring to the American Negro, put it: “More and more, the black man here is moving toward an African frame of mind.”307 ([Location 3981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=3981)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the rare American Negroes who have attempted to establish their racial kinship and have gone to Africa for the purpose, have quickly come to realize the size of the cultural and psychological gap which separates them from most Africans. The American Negro in Africa usually feels more American than any white American. The African returns the compliment and usually has a poor opinion of the American Negro with his psychological complexes derived from a background of ancestral slavery and social inferiority—which he is not equipped to understand since his African environment, even under the loose supervision of European colonial rulers, was always culturally and socially Negroid. ([Location 4029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4029)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Furthermore, most black Africans still live socially in a tribal environment, and their nationalism is essentially tribal, and remains largely indifferent to “racial” problems in a social context to which they were never exposed. It is only with the new urban, detribalized Africans of the large modern cities mushrooming all over Africa that the American Negro will be able to communicate and establish some kind of link based on the racial issue. ([Location 4034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4034)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Afrikaners are a remarkably dour, bigoted, unimaginative, and stubborn lot, who are quite prepared to flout world public opinion and follow their own way, regardless of criticism. Most leading Afrikaners belong to the secret Broederbond association and are determined to apply kragdadigheid (“unyielding strength”) to the solution of their racial problem. ([Location 4107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4107)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Applying systematically their policy of apartheid, the leading South Africans are determined to force the Negro majority into a number of autonomous Bantustans scattered throughout South Africa’s territory, states reserved exclusively for Negroes and where whites will not be allowed to reside or own property—just as the Bantus will have no right to reside permanently in white areas. A steadily tightening legislation attempts to decrease white reliance on black labor while technological improvements and automation are partly substituting for Negro employment in white-owned industries. In other words, the leaders of South Africa, moving against a worldwide trend, are systematically retribalizing their Africans, rooting them back in the soil, stripping them of all possibility of receiving a modern education by encouraging them to remain faithful to their native dialects and encouraging, in Bantu areas, the authority of the traditional chiefs. ([Location 4116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4116)) - Tags: [[blue]] - South Africa, however ruthless its Afrikaner leadership, is an unstable society in which the white minority lives dangerously. As Chief Albert Luthuli claimed, “For Africans, the promotion of the Bantu Self-Government Act [establishing the Bantustans] is the end of a long road of subjection and tyranny. For the whites, it is the abandonment of any pretence of the rule of law, the beginning of the long-drawn-out, agonising end.” ([Location 4157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4157)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But all this is unlikely. The reverse is more probable. Precisely because of its own racial problem, the United States is more likely to indulge in the oldest ritual in the world, the search for an external scapegoat: by sacrificing on the altar of world public opinion South Africa’s white leadership, the United States’ white leaders may hope to placate their own angry Negro minority at home. Black magic and the celebration of “scapegoatism” are not dead yet. On a more mundane, down-to-earth level it is clear that, in years to come, nothing is as likely to win the sympathy of African and American Negroes, as well as that of assorted Asian and Arab public opinions, not to mention liberal and left-wing radical opinion in all Western countries, than the destruction of South Africa’s white establishment’s policy and power—destruction which, alone in the world, the United States would have the power to carry out, in the guise of a humanitarian crusade. ([Location 4186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4186)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the process it has decisively assisted the destruction of Europe’s “colonial” rule and influence, gradually cutting off the Old World’s extensive power relationships with Africa and Asia; at Suez, in 1956, it crushed just as decisively France and Britain’s last attempt to “go it alone” and restore Europe’s power position in the Middle East; it is reorienting the Commonwealth’s scattered “white” dominions into becoming American outposts and detached elements of the United States’ strategic power; it is being led to interfere with increasing vigor in the internal affairs of Latin American nations as they are likely to be increasingly threatened by revolution and gnawed at by guerilla warfare; it is building up a de facto empire in the Far East; and already, it has become the warden of the Congolese heart of Africa, prelude to the eventual development of an Afro-American empire which is barely visible over the future’s horizon. ([Location 4284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4284)) - Tags: [[blue]] - of all areas of the world, Western Europe is the one most vital area from the standpoint of America’s own safety, one that can never be allowed to fall into hostile hands. Combined with Soviet Russia’s might, it could easily challenge the global power of the United States. Included in the United States’ orbit, on the other hand, it would give Washington true mastery of the world—an unchallengeable mastery against which any other combination on earth would be powerless. ([Location 4302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4302)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Reluctant to face facts and sacrifice their petty nationalisms for the sake of a greater and more significant nationalism on a Continental scale, they sought refuge in the wholly negative policy of retrieving their outdated parochialisms and undermining the entire concept of Europe’s political unification. It is easy to blame one or several statesmen for this state of affairs; but it is more fruitful to realize that if they have their negative way, as they do, it is mostly because Europeans have a profound aversion to sacrificing their national identities on the altar of Continental unification. ([Location 4314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4314)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Europe’s greatest contribution to modern politics is not the exaltation of nationalism as such, but the concept of the nation-state: to each well defined nation must correspond an independent and sovereign state in a precisely delimited territory. It is in the name of the nation-state ideal that Germany and Italy forged their belated unity in the nineteenth century; and it is in the name of the same ideal that such multinational entities as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were smashed into small, unstable, and mutually hostile nation-states in central and eastern Europe. As other empires crumbled throughout the world, the same Balkanization took place, with increasingly disastrous and eventually ridiculous results, until the world’s map began to look like an incomprehensible crazy-quilt in which such microscopic states as Honduras and Lesotho are presumed to have the same sovereign rights as the United States or Soviet Russia. The small, weak, and artificial newborn nation-state is ideal fodder for expansive imperialism; and there is every prospect that the absurd extension of this principle will inevitably give way to other modes of political organization. In many cases, it is not even applicable: most articulate Arabs feel part of one Arab nation split up among many states, but all their efforts to gather into one state are doomed by geography and their individualistic temper. India is, basically, a conglomerate of many different nations gathered, through the temporary intrusion of British imperialism, into one federal state. ([Location 4322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4322)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While thriving in many ex-colonial areas, the nation-state is probably on its way out of Europe, its birthplace—but not because of any looming European unity. True enough, the European Common Market has slightly dented the hitherto unrestricted sovereignty of its member states—but only on economic grounds; the eventual entry of Britain, however painful and long delayed, is certain to restrict further the Common Market’s unifying role to a strictly economic one—if it is still in existence by then. The European nation-state is on the way out, mostly because it has become too small, both militarily and economically. Not only that; Europe itself—that is, Western Europe, since any hope of unification with Eastern Europe is largely chimerical—is already, in many respects, too small by comparison with the Superpowers. Even politically united, Western Europe would be at the strategic mercy of the United States; even united, the Continent would control neither the seas around it nor the air above it; it has lost control of its African underbelly, of the Suez Canal which connects it with East Africa and Asia, of the Mediterranean which is in the hands of the American Sixth Fleet; unlike the United States and Soviet Russia, it does not possess in the ground all its required sources of fuel and raw materials. Just as important, European nations have proved, since World War II came to an end, that they have not even had the will to fight for their own survival;… ([Location 4333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4333)) - Tags: [[blue]] - De Gaulle’s postwar dream was to preserve the illusion of France as a great Power by playing off Communist East against English-speaking West, with himself in the middle as the spokesman of Continental Europe. This policy experienced an early collapse. The alliance with Moscow did not prevent de Gaulle’s exclusion from the ill-fated Yalta Conference, and did not prevent Stalin from adopting a contemptuous and even hostile attitude toward his only Continental ally, or from countering French policy in Germany all along the line: and at the July 1946 Council of Foreign Ministers, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov stated plainly Soviet Russia’s support for a politically unified Germany and opposition to the political separation of the Rhineland. ([Location 4372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4372)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Panic spread quickly throughout Western Europe when Soviet Russia displayed its ruthless imperialism, crushed what was left of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe, and blockaded Berlin. France’s bourgeois nationalists suddenly woke up to the startling realization that a large number of Soviet armored divisions were only hours away from their borders, ready to join with a powerful French Communist movement already inside the gates. The presumed great power of their country disappeared like a puff of smoke; far from being an arbiter between East and West, France discovered that she was rushing to join the ranks of those who took shelter under the United States’ nuclear umbrella. ([Location 4384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4384)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Not only old atavistic instincts, not only special ties with the United States and the Commonwealth, but five years of war had effectively reoriented Britain away from Europe, toward the high seas and the world beyond. Terribly weakened economically, almost bankrupt, Britain believed that its only hope to retain World Power status was to keep out of Europe and strengthen the ties binding her to the worldwide English-speaking community. British insularity proved, in the end, far tougher than French nationalism. ([Location 4403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4403)) - Tags: [[blue]] - French leaders and politicians had reached the conclusion that nothing short of Europe’s unification could shake France loose from its economic inertia and vitalize its ossified bureaucracy and outdated social structures, along with creeping parliamentary paralysis at the top. Britain obstinately barred the way and adamantly refused to join in building a united Europe. ([Location 4408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4408)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Winston Churchill had suggested, in the late 1940s and out of power, the gradual setting up of some form of “United States of Europe”; but, when he returned to power, he did strictly nothing to implement it. ([Location 4410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4410)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nevertheless, as a modern disciple of Machiavelli, skilled in the art of exploiting the inevitable, de Gaulle soon made up his mind that decolonization was inevitable; and he was able to rise to power out of the wreckage of the Fourth Republic in 1958, determined to remain in the Élysée Palace for as long as he chose to. ([Location 4445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4445)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is, rather, de Gaulle’s policy that is “carried away by flights of fancy,” since he can raise nothing but the flimsiest barriers against the growing ascendancy of American influence throughout the world. At times, indeed, Charles de Gaulle behaves like an unconscious harbinger of American imperialism by deliberately weakening all the Western elements that could conceivably stand up to this American hegemony—attempting to disrupt Canada so that its broken pieces would inevitably fall into the United States, weakening Britain so as to drive it further into America’s arms, fighting European unity and therefore weakening the resistance of a small Balkanized Continent. ([Location 4465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4465)) - Tags: [[blue]] - At this meeting, without consulting any of their other partners, the British and American leaders decided to establish a NATO multilateral nuclear force, adding the usual polite but meaningless formula—“in the closest consultation with other NATO allies.” In mid-January, however, de Gaulle refused to go along and announced that France would build its own nuclear weaponry in order to preserve its military independence. ([Location 4477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4477)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it was already well known that twenty years before, when he was British Minister Resident in Algiers during World War II, Harold Macmillan had stated his belief that “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”330 Macmillan, the wily, self-styled “Greek,” was determined to beat the other European “Greeks” in the race to become the prime adviser to the Roman-Americans. ([Location 4487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4487)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With mixed humility and cunning, the British paid their respects to an unexpected Continental success but fully intended to get in on the venture and wrest control of it from the arrogant hands of Charles de Gaulle; this they could hope to achieve by preserving their vital financial position in world trade, their extensive connections with the Commonwealth and, more important, their “special relationship” with the United States. In other words, by becoming the vital hinge between the Continental Six and the outside world, they could influence both in turn to their own advantage by playing diplomatically one against the other. ([Location 4497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4497)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To a great extent, large and distant as it is, there is no doubt that America is bound to adopt some elements of the British attitude toward any attempt at European unification of a strictly “Continental” variety, that is, a European union from which Britain would be excluded. Charles de Gaulle’s attitude can only reinforce the United States’ suspicion that a Europe politically organized without Britain and the United States would be a Europe organized against them. This is the whole reason for America’s enthusiasm about Britain joining the Common Market—once inside the gates, Britain would be America’s broker and would keep the door open for her. ([Location 4517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4517)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Quite apart from the fact that it is today the greatest Superpower, the United States enjoys a comparatively superb political metabolism which only a few others, and much smaller countries, can enjoy. It is in terms of the molecular structure of their respective social organisms that the United States and Europe’s nation-states should be compared; and, apart from the racial problem which is the only seriously disruptive element in American society, the comparison, in terms of social efficiency and power-breeding, is all to the advantage of the United States. ([Location 4543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4543)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Without referring to European nation-states such as Italy and Germany that were not even united until the second half of the nineteenth century, we can select France as a perfect instance of poor political metabolism, of endemic instability. When the United States achieved its independence and adopted the Constitution under which Americans still live today, France was still in the age of its ancien régime—absolute monarchy; overthrown in 1789, it gave way to a chronic instability which has been France’s trademark ever since: the great Revolution itself, ending in the Directoire and Consulate, followed by Napoleon’s First Empire, the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, overthrown by the 1830 revolution in favor of Louis-Philippe’s “bourgeois” monarchy, in turn overthrown in 1848 by the advent of the Second Republic, which gave way three years later to Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire, which crumbled in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. We then have to record the advent of the Third Republic—a seventy-years-duration miracle, which came to an end in the military debacle of 1940. After a remarkable display of disunity and inner squabbling among themselves during the war, the French then set up the Fourth Republic after World War II, and saw it disintegrate in 1958, to be replaced by Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic—the last one, to date. Quite clearly, this turbulent history shows that France has not yet found its true political balance and cannot present itself to the world as an organized, disciplined, purposeful nation determined to control its independent destiny. How then can it pretend to challenge, for any length of time, other nations that are not only much larger, wealthier, and more powerful, but also politically and socially far more stable? ([Location 4547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4547)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The West European Communist parties may no longer be subservient to Moscow as they were in Stalin’s days; they still remain ideologically linked with Soviet Russia and are prepared to work and risk for the sake of Russia’s national and imperial strategic interests—all the while believing that they are working for world revolution. It is essentially a religious-like feeling of brotherhood within the embrace of a faith blindly adopted which links all West European Communist parties to their Mecca in Moscow. Their power of disruption is immense, their discipline fearsome; Communists in France and Italy never miss voting with almost religious obedience whereas their opponents, who believe in freedom and democracy, often have a poor voting record. ([Location 4567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4567)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Britain is no longer ruled by its MPs but by a strong, discrete caste of sophisticated bureaucrats whose citadel is Whitehall and against whose entrenched and enduring power elected representatives can hardly do anything. Power is steadily passing into the hands of the permanent officials, out of those of Parliament—and into the hands of the Prime Minister, out of those of the Cabinet. Nothing has done more to enhance this bureaucratic power than the vast nationalization of private business and industry carried out by the Labour governments—to the point where over 40 percent of Britain’s total investments is owned by public authorities. And what is true of Britain, as a relatively new feature in its history, has long been true of France whose talkative députés have never had much share of real power since Napoleon established a permanent bureaucracy of mandarins. ([Location 4607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4607)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America’s imperial burden is becoming increasingly heavy and the only way its innumerable commitments can be met is for the imperial body to grow up organically, cell by cell, to the size required to shoulder this increasingly weighty load—in other words, by organic union with Western Europe, Canada and Australia. ([Location 4652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4652)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Europe’s historical greatness sprang in ages past from the stimulating rivalries between its component states and nations; America’s own greatness, on the contrary, sprang from its relentless striving toward union, even at the cost of a major Civil War. Of what European statesman could it be said, as Alexander Stephens said of Abraham Lincoln, that “The Union with him, in sentiment, rose to the sublimity of religious mysticism”?337 The principle of unity is incarnate in the American body politic, and it is only under American leadership that such overall unification of the West can take place—West European unity being included in it as one of its components. And only then can Marshal Lin Piao’s “world cities” roll back the revolutionary threat flung at Western Civilization from the depths of the “world countryside.” This unification can come by stealth, as it has for two decades of crisis and international emergencies; or it can come openly through free debate and the conscious will to evolve toward a North Atlantic Confederation. In any case, the two continents bordering the North Atlantic are already being integrated in more ways than one. Probably the most dramatic in the 1960s is the economic way of integration. ([Location 4679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4679)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Throughout the nineteenth century, European capital had poured into North America, as it did into every other continent—fresh capital that, along with America’s own native capital, built railroads and industrial plants and developed the United States. Two World Wars have decisively reversed the flow, and the two decades following the end of World War II have witnessed the most extraordinary outflow of American capital and business know-how which is threatening to submerge most of the non-Communist world. In fact, the economic expansion of America’s giant corporations is in the process of leading to their virtual control of the free world’s key industries. ([Location 4694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4694)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American business in Europe has an additional, and highly important, advantage: unlike most of its European competitors, it thinks “European,” not local or national; it is mentally geared to tap the whole European market, not merely that of France, Britain, Germany, or Italy. Thinking in terms of a single continental market, with a sales network covering the whole continent and straddling dozens of nation-states, with a uniform accounting system, the American subsidiary is in truth more typically “European” than any European firm rooted in one single country. ([Location 4759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4759)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the emergence of the Common Market has benefited primarily the European subsidiaries of American corporations, because only the Americans were mentally geared to take advantage of it. ([Location 4787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4787)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The political impact of this rapid expansion can be far-reaching. Quite obviously, although America’s giant corporations are often euphemistically dubbed “multinational,” they remain, in fact, subservient to the Government of the United States. And an American company’s foreign affiliate can presumably get its parent company into trouble if, even with the consent of the host government, it sells prohibited goods to a Communist country that is not in good standing with Washington; quite likely, the parent company can then be prosecuted for violation of the United States Trading with the Enemy Act. Needless to say, the parent company will use its unlimited authority over its foreign affiliates to make them comply with the wishes of the Government—of the United States Government, that is. ([Location 4810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4810)) - Tags: [[blue]] - However international it may appear, an American-controlled “multinational” corporation is driven to organize itself on two distinct levels: 1) increasing strategic centralization in matters of overall planning and global policy, which is carried out in the United States; 2) increasing tactical decentralization of all other functions, giving foreign subsidiaries and the host governments the illusion of greater independence than they actually possess. ([Location 4832](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4832)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The basic problem is that, in the late 1960s, the United States Government was spending abroad, on foreign aid, tourism, and military deployment, at twice the rate at which the private sector was generating additional surpluses. However, the point has already been reached where European prosperity itself is at stake, inasmuch as American investments in the Old World’s industries have now become a vital component of Europe’s economic expansion. If American investments were totally cut off for any length of time, European industry would stagnate and fall back further in terms of technological and managerial competitiveness; on the other hand, it would eventually be counterproductive for the United States, in the sense of aggravating rather than solving its balance of payments problem. ([Location 4852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4852)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Key to the rapid development of American economic power in all its aspects is its single-minded emphasis on research and development—“R & D.” Being usually the pioneers in both peace and war technologies, Americans are always exploring new technological territory, always solving problems that no one has ever had to face before. Unlike their more tradition-bound and static European cousins, they conceive life in dynamic terms; they live in the stream of time as fish in a swirling river—where Europeans would like to believe that this swirling river is only a placid lake. Being pioneers in research in most fields of human endeavor, they are bound to be leaders in most key technologies. ([Location 4868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4868)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All told, the United States spends ten times the per capita figure and four times the total of what the whole of Europe spends on R & D. ([Location 4878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4878)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All told, the patent gap costs Europe half a billion dollars a year, and European industries are increasingly functioning under foreign licensing agreements— already halfway to becoming American subsidiaries; “Some evidence of the effectiveness of the greater American research and development effort is provided by statistics of patents and payments for technical know-how, licensing fees and so forth. American receipts from Western Europe exceeded payments by a ratio of 5 to 1.” ([Location 4906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4906)) - American experts and specialists of all kinds move back and forth freely between the universities, government, and business—whereas, in caste-conscious Europe, these are closed circles. One of the results is that, while 40 percent of the United States’ large and extremely numerous universities offer graduate courses in business management, European companies and universities refuse to treat business as a legitimate academic science. ([Location 4934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4934)) - the time span between technological breakthroughs and their commercial applications narrows constantly: 79 years were required to bring forth the commercial applications of the fluorescent lamp; 33 years for the vacuum tube; 5 years for radar; 3 years for transistors; and 2 years for solar batteries. Very recently, in the case of integrated circuitry, commercial application has taken place almost simultaneously with development. This bottleneck between development and commercial application, which is fast disappearing altogether in America, still looms as large as ever in Europe. ([Location 4937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4937)) - Not only are national markets far too small in Europe; nationalism still intrudes into technological research at the highest level, and duplication of efforts is standard in many European research undertakings. The recurrent woes of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) are typical; it has become almost impossible to coordinate multitudes of strictly national projects. Early in 1967, the French and the Germans were working on fast-reactor projects along parallel lines, without in the least coordinating their efforts, even though they both belong to the Common Market. ([Location 4941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4941)) - It is obvious that one of the main pillars of R & D in the United States is government expenditures; figures make it quite clear; and nothing like the immense amounts devoted by the Pentagon and NASA exists in Europe where the endemic lack of funds, and governmental economy drives, undermine most European efforts to remain in the technological race with the two Superpowers. ([Location 4961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4961)) - To make matters worse, a brand-new problem arose after the Second World War: the so-called brain drain. As a general rule, the brain drain afflicts the whole world to the extent that most of the talented engineers, scientists, physicians, and teachers abandon poor countries in favor of rich ones. All the trained personnel and intellectual elite, whose skills are desperately required in their homelands, migrate to Western Europe and the United States—some because they find no ready employment for their talents in their misruled countries, some because they cannot resist the lure of better salaries, greater research facilities, and a more stimulating life in highly industrialized countries. This movement takes place on two distinct geographical levels: at the lower level, Western Europe pumps its former colonial empires of local talent; a 1966 report of the United Nations’ Special Fund gives the following typical instances: Togo sends more physicians and professors to France than France sends to Togo; there are more specialists of all kinds from the Commonwealth working in Britain than there are British specialists working in the rest of the Commonwealth.370 At the highest level, however, the brain drain ultimately operates for the benefit of the United States, which is the end of the migration line—and at that end, only the most talented are to be found, the rest remaining in Western Europe. ([Location 4989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=4989)) - In the 1960s, for instance, an average year saw 3 percent of Western Europe’s new graduates in science and 9 percent in engineering leave for the United States. ([Location 5011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5011)) - for once, British technology had a definite edge on its American counterpart in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy only made matters worse, and the brain drain more damaging. What irritated the British further was that, while American salaries average three times those of the British, in this particular case Westinghouse was alleged to have offered five times the British rate for scientists experienced in fast-breeder reactor systems. Quite obviously, Westinghouse found it more convenient and cheaper to lure the scientists away than buy the licenses “on a proper commercial basis,” as the British Government would have it. ([Location 5023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5023)) - This process works through natural osmosis and cannot be reversed in free societies. But the dramatic results are there: the suction effect exercised by the United States on foreign talent amounts to a form of intellectual emasculation of the rest of the world and, in effect, to an intellectual imperialism that is far more effective than all the old-fashioned, more conventional forms of imperialism. Not only is America’s mental productivity increased; that of its allies and satellites is weakened by the same amount. ([Location 5057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5057)) - in the late 1940s the situation was quite different. Great as was the national wealth of the United States at the end of World War II, this tremendous extension of American economic power abroad could never have taken place if the dollar had not become the chief reserve currency, with the British pound sterling (in which 40 percent of the world’s trade was still conducted) playing distinctly second fiddle. Since the collapse of the gold standard in the early 1930s, it was a foregone conclusion that some other form of reserve medium for the world’s currencies would have to be created—either one or two main reserve currencies, or a new artificial unit. The collapse of the gold standard simultaneously removed the severe, and at times brutal, discipline imposed on the world’s commercial transactions—brutal discipline from which no nation, however powerful, could escape. This collapse meant that, if and when the United States found itself compelled to play the part of provider to, and policeman of, the world, the American Government could impose the dollar as the chief reserve currency—with obvious political implications, inasmuch as the United States itself could create at will, within limitations set by domestic inflationary considerations and external balance of payments problems, the currency with which to pay for its vast acquisitions. ([Location 5069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5069)) - a spontaneous development, strongly assisted by the active policy of the United States and the existence of a dangerous shortage of dollars abroad, relegated gold to a subordinate position and set up the dollar as the main component of international reserves. The main reason for this, of course, was that Washington adamantly refused to revalue the price of gold; alone of all the world commodities, gold has been maintained artificially at the price fixed in the early 1930s. Thus relegated to a subordinate position, it became increasingly inadequate to finance an enormously expanding international trade—hence, the crucial role of reserve currencies; and, in turn, the crucial importance of the United States’ power to control and regulate world trade through its control of the main reserve currency; had the price of gold been adequately raised, the importance of reserve currencies would have been far less, and the control of the United States over the world’s monetary flow would have been considerably weaker. In the long run, it always boils down to a matter of control, that is of sheer, unadorned power—quite justified nowadays on strictly technical grounds since it is evident that gold does not provide the flexibility required by modern economic structures. ([Location 5080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5080)) - Lacking the severe disciplinary effect of the former gold standard, the present gold exchange standard has enabled the United States to create for itself the large funds that have been flooding the world and given them virtual control of important segments of the world’s industries. The simple fact that most foreign countries were compelled, by Washington’s political leverage, to keep a substantial part of their credit balances in dollars, enabled the United States to finance its vast economic expansion with the savings of their creditors rather than with their own: and so, while Europe’s central banks accumulated the dollars that poured in and earned a modest return on the money, American subsidiaries earned a 10 percent return on their investments in Europe. The additional fact that it enabled American banks to create dollars in foreign countries not only allowed American corporations to buy up huge slices of these countries’ industries but also compelled their governments to fight the inflationary pressures that flowed inevitably from this additional creation of unwanted dollars. ([Location 5101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5101)) - At every turn, in the late 1960s, the irresistible force which is American worldwide expansion encounters the same immovable obstacle—which is de Gaulle. Here again, it is in order to destroy America’s ultimate control of the world’s international monetary machinery that France set out on its gold-accumulating course—gold being a completely neutral, nonpolitical entity to which even the most powerful country in the world has to bow, unless it can destroy its role as the ultimate reserve unit. It is on political grounds alone that France decided to challenge America’s economic and financial hegemony by striking at its Achilles heel—the half-empty Fort Knox. ([Location 5130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5130)) - This perfectly logical development would, in effect, create de facto an economico-technological Atlantic community whose next logical step would be a political institutionalization of this community—politics being usually the camp followers of economics and technology, rather than the other way around. ([Location 5163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5163)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Charles de Gaulle has one nightmare—an understanding, amounting to a tacit alliance, between the United States and Soviet Russia. At one of his press conferences, in the fall of 1966, he expressed himself quite forcefully on the subject, insisting that the world cannot be allowed to fall under the spell of “two Superpowers who alone have the weapons to destroy every other country.” But he acknowledged the shadowy existence of this double hegemony by adding that this “spell had to be broken. We have broken it. We are breaking it, as far as we are concerned, with the only means at our disposal.”385 By mixing his tenses in one single paragraph, de Gaulle shows that he is not sure whether this understanding between the Superpowers belongs to the past, the present, or the future. It is, in fact, a nebulous, imprecise convergence of worldwide interests in an increasingly chaotic world, made more chaotic still by the rivalry between the Superpowers themselves. But many straws in the wind appear to indicate the inevitability of this coming-together and the steady approach of the Russo-American Condominium—the concrete, inescapable manifestation of de Gaulle’s nightmare. ([Location 5181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5181)) - Tags: [[blue]] - These straws in the wind came to join other such straws—such as the Soviet–United States draft treaty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. During the Geneva talks, the world saw the astonishing spectacle of the two Superpowers aligned against the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, in defense of their joint predominance. They were both jointly pelted with objections and blamed for wanting to deprive other nations of nuclear weaponry while preserving their freedom to keep and add to their own stockpiles; ([Location 5207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5207)) - Tags: [[blue]] - in spite of their disagreement over details, the United States and Soviet Russia stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of their joint nuclear predominance. When the United States and Soviet Russia submitted identical drafts of a nuclear nonproliferation treaty to the Geneva Disarmament Conference on August 24, 1967, the whole world was put on notice that, in a limited way and at the highest technological level, and in spite of sulking on the part of the French and the Chinese, the world as a whole was slowly but irresistibly sliding under the overall protectorate of the Great Condominium. ([Location 5218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5218)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Fundamentally, Russian policy throughout the century was to prevent any tight alliance between the two English-speaking Powers, fearing a domination of the world by “the ambitious projects and political egotism of the Anglo-Saxon race,” explained the Russian envoy to Washington during the Civil War.389 And basically, the Americans saw in Russia a new nation like their own, standing apart from the “decrepit” Europeans. ([Location 5241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5241)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was only after the conclusion of World War II that tension, for the first time, rose to a high pitch between the two nations, now promoted to the exclusive rank of Superpowers. In that new position, the United States was merely inheriting Britain’s traditional geopolitical role—temporarily forsaken during the two World Wars because of the more deadly German challenge. The old British–Russian rivalry was metamorphosed into an American–Soviet struggle, considerably enlarged to include the entire world and the whole gamut of ideological conflicts. ([Location 5253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5253)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Almost a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “There are at present two great nations in the world, which started from different points but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”392 Since the distant days when this prophecy was uttered, many events have taken place in the world; many empires have come and gone; Russia underwent the ordeal of wars, invasions, and revolution; the United States was almost torn apart by the Civil War, went into isolationism, and suffered a catastrophic economic collapse in the 1930s. Yet this prophecy rings truer today than ever. ([Location 5257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5257)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Reporting from Soviet Russia in 1929, Dorothy Thompson was struck by the fact that “Russia has respect for only one other country and believes she can learn from only one other nation: the United States. For Europe Russia has only contempt. Europe she regards as a continent in decadence, which must in the course of time fall completely under the domination of the United States, if the European proletariat does not seize power—and so come under the influence of Russia. Europe she regards as already beaten in the struggle for world power . . . When they look ahead to the ultimate Armageddon—and Russian communists are accustomed to looking ahead many decades, being, in this respect, superior to the leaders of most countries—they foresee that the final struggle is to be not between England and Russia, but between the United States and Russia.”394 ([Location 5279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5279)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Many foreigners have been struck by this Russo-American convergence, by the profound desire of the Russians to become the Americans of the twenty-first century. For instance, Cubans in the 1960s, describing the Russian advisers who were pouring into their home island, were reminded of Americans of earlier times, “a little coarse, clods of earth.” And they were struck by the fact that “They’re desperate to catch up with the United States and become the Americans of the future: they admire Hemingway more than they admire Fidel.”399 ([Location 5305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5305)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The weaknesses of the world’s second Superpower spring from both its internal and its external circumstances; both of them are equally instrumental in influencing Moscow to seek a rapprochement with Washington. On the home front, it is clear that the Soviet leaders had not waited for the latest economic appraisals of America’s economic superiority to begin overhauling their own creaky system. Reconstruction of wartime devastation and the maintenance of a huge defense apparatus had compelled the Russian authorities to starve the consumer into drab austerity all through the 1950s. Nevertheless, this wholly socialized economy grew by leaps and bounds; but as it grew, so did the inefficient bureaucratic controls, slowly paralyzing economic progress in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The annual rate of increase in investments dropped 50 percent from 1959 to 1964, while the economic rate of growth dwindled from 6 percent in the 1950s to 2.5 percent in 1962 and 1963. Alarmed, the Soviet leaders promptly decided to scrap many of the controls, decentralize their industrial operations, and restore the profit motive at the center of every industrial and agricultural undertaking: profit rather than total output would become the new yardstick of Soviet economic success. ([Location 5309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5309)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was in 1965 that the new system was launched under the inspiration of Yevsei Liberman, professor of economics at Kharkov University. It was suddenly rediscovered that the idea of profitable undertakings, incentives for workers, and relative independence for enterprises had been Lenin’s all along—or so Pravda would have us believe, defending the Soviet system’s profound reforms against accusations that it was indirectly returning to capitalism.400 Regardless of doctrinaire interpretations, the fact is that up to 1968, the new planning methods had been extended to over six thousand enterprises, mostly large industrial plants, accounting for 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s total industrial output.401 Following the “principles of Lenin,” each “reformed” factory is now presumed to work profitably, fully paying for all its expenditures and showing a profit, most of which can be plowed back into the enterprise itself rather than providing for an enormous centralizing bureaucracy in Moscow. Most of the bottlenecks of the Khrushchev era disappeared, along with the unrealistically high quotas set in Moscow. Profits in the “reformed” industrial plants rose 24 percent in 1966, as against only 8 percent for the entire Soviet industry. In 1967, total industrial output was up 10 percent, as against a planned increase of hardly more than 7 percent.402 Labor productivity went up as production costs went down. ([Location 5318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5318)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since World War II, communism has spread far and wide throughout the world, both as ideology and as power structure; and as it spread, it assumed many strange shapes and colors; it soon began to emancipate itself from Russian tutelage, digested anew by the non-Russian people who absorbed it, and made into new ideologies such as Titoism, Maoism, and Castroism, with probably more to come. Eventually, it even turned viciously against its Russian co-religionists; it is probable that nothing helped more to force the Russians to become conscious that they were one with their Czarist past than the virulence with which Red China attacked them—and attacked them not only on “revisionist” grounds, but on national grounds as well. ([Location 5374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5374)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For true Russian believers in Marxism-Leninism, the shattering of communism’s international unity in the 1960s is a dismal tale which destroys all the ecumenical pretensions of their faith and cannot help but throw them back upon themselves, thus reinforcing their own Russianness at the expense of their internationalist outlook. ([Location 5411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5411)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The articulations of the profound splits within the Communist world (as distinct from superficial and temporary ones) follow very precisely the geopolitical lines of cleavage separating the world’s great cultures from one another; doctrinal quarrels are merely intellectual rationalizations of profound impulses—so it was when both Christianity and Islam started breaking up into their different components on geographical, linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and economic grounds, masquerading as theological differences. ([Location 5429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5429)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Russians are white men, too, and that ethnological fact will always limit their influence on the vast non-white populations of the world. ([Location 5448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5448)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Perhaps the most striking aspect of this situation is that the Soviet leadership is no longer interested in the expansion of communism per se but only in its own worldwide power contest with the United States. One proof is the immense amount of military and economic aid extended to Arab states, all of which, with the possible exception of Syria, do not even tolerate a Communist party in their midst. The progress of Marxism-Leninism in the Arab world is almost nil; but the Arabs tend, atavistically, to be anti-Western: hence, it is more profitable for the Soviet leaders to forget about the staunch anticommunism of the Arabs and develop their nuisance value to the West. ([Location 5460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U238CVO&location=5460)) - Tags: [[blue]]