69 pages • 2 hours read
Stephen E. Ambrose, Douglas BrinkleyRise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Relationship Between the US President, Congress, and Public Opinion in the Cold War Era
As the United States attained superpower status after 1945, this relationship transformed as well. These complex dynamics also highlight the possibilities—and the limitations—in which the government may act contrary to the election promises or public opinion. Ambrose and Brinkley provide several examples of this relationship throughout the text.
The first major case study was the path toward America’s entry into the Second World War between the late 1930s and December 1941. At this time, the public opinion favored isolationism and neutrality. Many regretted the experience of the First World War and opted to stay out of another European crisis. President Franklin Roosevelt exercised similar caution. As late as 1941, the president pledged to refrain from using boots on the ground to “keep war away from our country and our people” (7). Of course, the indirect participation in this conflict through supplying the Allies through Lend-Lease indicated that the US was not a completely neutral observer. At the same time, the Congress was more assertive in this regard. The US entered this war only after the Japanese strike and the German declaration of war.
The latter part of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s stands in contrast to the American entry into World War II. For example, President Nixon escalated the bombing campaigns against Cambodia and Vietnam rather than pulling out the US troops. Ambrose and Brinkley state that the bombing campaign “boggles the mind,” and by 1970s, “more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam than on all targets in the whole of human history” (203).
As a result, the Congress stepped in and began to check presidential overreach. The authors remind the reader that under the “American Constitution, however, the ultimate power resides not in the White House, but in Congress” (243). The Congress acting in this way matched the public opinion in the US and even abroad where the country’s image also suffered. The US was subject to the biggest domestic antiwar protests in its history, and the social mood was dismal: “Senators, intellectuals, businessmen, and millions of citizens launched a massive attack on some of the fundamental premises of American foreign policy during the Cold War, especially the definition of America’s vital interests and the domino theory” (214).
At the same time, neither the public nor the Congress expressed concern for the implications of American foreign policy during smaller-scale conflicts—from the Korean War to the regime change attempts in Cuba. The authors argue:
From the mid-forties onward Congress legislated for the domestic front while the President acted on the foreign front. The system was mutually satisfactory as long as America was winning. But the absence of victory in Vietnam, the drawn-out nature of the struggle there, caused a change. Congress began to assert its authority (243).
This major change in behavior on the part of the Congress and the public seems to have occurred only when an international crisis affected the US directly—militarily, financially, and with the rising cost of American lives.
This dynamic is related to the growth of government in general. Ambrose and Brinkley provide an in-depth analysis of the development of the military-industrial complex in general, and its intelligence branches, such as the CIA, specifically, during Truman’s time in office. The authors argue that the covert and extra-judicial operations of this intelligence agency were beyond the reach of the president and Congress. Also, American defense spending continued to grow regardless of whether it was justified by external threats. At present, the US continues to exert global reach. Therefore, these important questions are worth considering in a functioning democracy.
The American Policy of Supporting West-Friendly Dictators during the Cold War and Beyond
The issue of backing unsavory leaders and groups is a consistent trajectory in American foreign policy during the Cold War and into the 21st century. This issue is linked to the question of pursuing a pragmatic Realpolitik to meet American interests without engaging in questions of ethics. Yet at the same time, the United States increasingly framed itself as a defender of human rights around the world, starting with the Carter administration.
Ambrose and Brinkley document several cases in which the US backed questionable leaders to achieve its foreign-policy goals. This issue first comes up with the Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek in the context of the Second World War and after 1945. The authors qualify this leader as “corrupt, inefficient, and dictatorial, but he was also friendly to the West” (39). The US maintained close ties with Chiang Kai-shek, then the leader of Taiwan, after the 1949 Communist Revolution in China as a pressure point to be used against that country.
Similarly, Ambrose and Brinkley refer to Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam, as “a low-grade despot” (191). However, Diem received US backing because the Americans needed him in their pursuit of the containment policy in Southeast Asia to challenge North Vietnam and the Viet Cong guerilla fighters. Diem was assassinated in 1963, but even working with his replacement Nguyen Ngọc Tho failed to accomplish the American goals in the region. In 1975, the North Vietnamese won the lengthy war and united the two countries as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The question of backing dictators is linked to broader foreign policy questions, such as regime change and the support for insurgencies. Rise to Globalism documents several examples, such as the 1953 CIA-backed regime change in Iran and the attempts to oust or assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba. The US also openly backed insurgency groups, such as the Latin America Contras that engaged in terrorist acts and operated death squads. The choice to back this group with the goal of countering Communism backfired as the Iran-Contra affair for the Reagan administration. At that time, the president was investigated for using the money from weapons sales to Iran, which it called the state sponsor of terrorism, to fund the Contras.
Overall, the investigation of questionable leaders and groups demonstrates that the positive results, if any, are short-term. The negative consequences, on the other hand, might be much more serious, as the rise of non-state terrorist actors in the 21st century demonstrates.
Racism and 20th-Century American Foreign Policy
Rise of Globalism examines the subject of racism as part of American foreign policy in the 20th century. Anti-Asian racism, specifically, was relevant in the context of World War II and postwar Japan, the repeated threats to strike China with nuclear weapons for non-compliance with American demands, and the mass-scale bombing campaigns of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Yet there also exists a more general implicit trajectory of cultural superiority, neocolonial paternalism, and disregard for other countries’ chosen way of life should it stand in the way of American interests abroad.
A multiracial and multiethnic country, the United States had an extensive history of racism. This history ranged from the colonial-era Transatlantic slave trade and the 19th- and 20th-century Jim Crow laws targeting Black people to the 19th-century Chinese Exclusion Act and the Native American Trail of Tears. Deeply rooted ideological concepts informed these events. For example, the European concept of “white man’s burden” advocated a paternalistic guidance of non-Europeans perceived as less capable and civilized. Even darker concepts like eugenics argued that the differences between the races and ethnicities were biologically determined. Edward Tylor, a 19th-century Oxford professor of anthropology, believed that non-Europeans were intellectually inferior and sought to determine “the relation of the mental condition of savages to that of civilized man” (Honour, Hugh and John Fleming. The Visual Arts: A History (fourth edition), NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995, p. 675).
Americans abolished slavery, and Europeans began decolonization. Yet the implicit sense of one’s own superiority remained. This superiority was evident from the American perception of its way of life as exceptional. For example, President Kennedy believed that the United States was “the last, best hope for mankind” (171) and pursued an aggressive foreign policy. He carried out the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, because that small, multiracial country chose to pursue a different ideology, only to learn that Cubans supported Fidel Castro.
Racism also permeated the American occupation of Japan, led by General MacArthur, after World War II. The victors attempted to mold that country in their image. At the same time, they were ignorant of Japan’s own history and culture:
In numerous such ways, the contradictions of the democratic revolution from above were clear for all to see: while the victors preached democracy, they ruled by fiat; while they espoused equality, they themselves constituted an inviolate privileged caste. Their reformist agenda rested on the assumption that, virtually without exception, Western culture and its values were superior to those of ‘the Orient.’ At the same time, almost every interaction between victor and vanquished was infused with intimations of white supremacism (Dower, John W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, p. 211).
During the Vietnam War, Southeast Asians also faced the neocolonial paternalism of American foreign policy. They were engaged in their own decolonization process from France and opted for a socialist political system. The US perceived this choice as a threat within the context of the Cold War-era domino theory and justified the gradual escalation of the war in Vietnam. As a result, the residents of Vietnam and Cambodia faced bombing campaigns that exceeded those of the Second World War: “The State Department had repeatedly stated that the United States should never allow the Communists to claim that America was fighting a white man’s war against Asians, yet that was exactly what had happened” (205).
These scenarios indicate that the Cold War-era American foreign policy comprised implicit supremacist, neocolonial attitudes from the past. Such outdated attitudes underwent a rebranding and were framed as a struggle of the so-called free world against Communism.
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