My Amazon Review of Stephen Wertheim's "Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy"

 

The Fall of France Shock

 

Columbia University historian and co-founder of the noninterventionist Quincy Institute offers up a conspiracy theory of how a small group of intellectuals centered around the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1940’s became the vanguard of American hegemony in the years to come. The elite view was highlighted by Henry Luce’s famous “American Century” article in Life Magazine in February 1941. To me there is some truth in what Wertheim writes, but history is far more complicated than the theory he lays out.

 

He argues that it was not Pearl Harbor that turned the tide against isolationism, but rather the fall of France in May 1940. Although France’s fall did not move public opinion all that much, it certainly moved elite opinion. But why did it move elite opinion? My answer is that it was an enormous geopolitical shock that would have worked its way through policy in any event, elite opinion or not. Why?

 

Simply put, the correlation forces drove policy far more than a few intellectuals. The fall of France meant that the balance of power in Europe was broken and Germany ruled supreme. England was up against the wall and the wily Stalin understood the geopolitical underpinnings of his pact with Hitler were rendered moot. Stalin’s hope of Western Europe bleeding white in a manner similar to World War I was shattered and instead of the Soviets being able to pick up the pieces of a shattered Europe, his country would soon become Hitler’s prey.

 

In America the isolationists/noninterventionists believed that the European balance of power would be preserved obviating the need to intervene. The collapse of France shattered that illusion. Thus, the noninterventionist idea of hemispheric defense looked kind of lame in the face of a Nazi dominated Europe. Simply put by not acting the United States would be on the strategic defensive, a hardly desirable outcome.

 

After the war, the United States stood astride the world like no other power ever before. But contrary to what Wertheim argues, instead of pressing its military advantage, the U.S. demobilizes and remains that way until the Korean War. It was Soviet expansionism in Europe and China that forces the United States into becoming a global hegemon, albeit an enlightened one.

 

I wish Wertheim would have cited Walter Russell Meade’s “American Providence” which discusses the four strands of American foreign policy. In that book Meade outlined the conflict between the Wilsonian internationalists and the Jeffersonian isolationists on the eve of World War II. That argument was settled initially by the Jacksonians revenge against the Pearl Harbor attack and later the Hamiltonian internationalists seized the economic prizes that were available in the postwar world.

 

In a word, Wertheim overstates his case, and the book could have used a better editor. It is a slog at too many points.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Fall of France Shock (amazon.com)