The birth of Pax Americana was perhaps its highest point. Sixty years ago, on the deck of the USS Missouri, anchored in the Bay of Tokyo, General Douglas MacArthur presided over Japan’s surrender and spoke the following words in the quivering tones of a classical actor: “It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that on this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past - a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfilment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice.”
This marked the beginning of a remarkable transformation, for MacArthur, a conservative Republican and devout Christian, looked down from a great height on the Japanese, whom, in terms of civilisation, he likened to a boy of 12, and actually wanted to grace the conquered nation with a democracy. If the society that emerged from this experiment was flawed, and less democratic than might have been hoped, partly through the machinations of the Americans themselves, this was nonetheless one of the most benign and successful military occupations in human history.
The same could be said for the allied occupation of West Germany, followed by the Marshall Plan that helped a moribund Europe get back on to its feet, partly to resist the lure of communism, whose siren song rang sweetly in the ruined cities, and partly to create a healthy appetite for American consumer goods. It was, all things considered (Stalinism, for example), good to nestle under the wings of the American eagle. The ideals of Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower echoed those of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that the world would surely follow the US example - “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government”.
It is common for Europeans and others to snigger knowingly when American politicians talk this kind of language. Given the many instances of official hypocrisy, double standards and sheer bloody-mindedness of much US foreign policy, this is not surprising, yet it is short-sighted too. For many Americans, including a good number of their political leaders, really do believe in promoting freedom. That is the way they see themselves, how they define themselves as a nation, just as the Dutch pride themselves on their tolerance, or the French on their finesse - all doubtful propositions with a basis in truth. Henry Kissinger often expressed his profound irritation with this type of idealism, which only hindered his more stringent essays in realpolitik.
But then, he was born in Germany. Another dissenting voice was that of George Kennan, who had little time for do-goodery in steering the foreign policy of a serious superpower.
There were other high points, rhetorically at least, after MacArthur’s speech on the USS Missouri. John F. Kennedy’s solidarity with the Berliners, for example, in 1963: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” Ronald Reagan’s plea to Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”, bore a faint, yet unmissable echo of Kennedy’s words.
But Pax Americana was marked by great lows too, especially when it came to direct military action. The Berlin airlift, when US and British pilots risked their lives day and night from June 1948 until May 1949 to bring food to West Berlin’s citizens under siege, was a heroic success. But the Korean war, sparked by a North Korean invasion just one year later, cost millions of lives and only ended in a fragile truce. The Vietnam war began with fine words about freedom and ended in a bloody debacle. And when it came to supporting Latin American dictatorships, US policy-makers barely even bothered to muster the fine words.
Pax Americana cannot be understood without going back to the foundation of the American republic. One of the main differences between the US and all European nations bar one is the fact that it emerged from a revolution. Only France has this in common with the US. Which is why France, like the US, likes to see itself as the repository of universal values. If one’s national institutions are indeed the models of universal values and aspirations, it is only logical that one would wish to see them replicated all over the world. French republicans saw themselves as citizens of a civilisation, whereas Germans only had a culture. This had some positive results. Jews, for example, were accepted as equal citizens of the French republic, whereas they would have been excluded from the kind of state favoured by anti-revolutionary monarchists, whose ideal was cultural, religious, even racial, and thus far from universal.
Napoleon Bonaparte used the French revolutionary ideal of national destiny as his justification for conquering much of Europe. The Netherlands, the German princely states, Spain, Italy, all had to become part of the universal civilisation of France - military glory as a civilising mission. This, too, had some positive effects: effective administration, a uniform code of law, Jewish liberation from their ghettos. But Napoleon’s universalist wars also provoked a strong nativist reaction. Germans, in particular, developed a romantic longing for the ties of blood and soil, which inspired beautiful poetry and sinister politics. Revolutionary wars, even in the name of decent ideas, are rarely persuasive to people who feel the sting of defeat.
The US war with Germany and Japan was not a revolutionary war. The first blows were struck by America’s adversaries. Self-defence, not the promotion of liberty, was Roosevelt’s primary aim. In fact, unlike Napoleonic France, the US hardly ever went to war with revolution in mind. Thomas Jefferson, a Francophile champion of the Enlightenment, expanded the US in 1803, but did so by purchasing the Louisiana Territories from Napoleon, who needed cash to fight the British. The expansion towards the west, the wars with native American tribes and Mexico were brutal and self-interested but not exactly revolutionary. The closest thing to a war fought, ostensibly, for idealistic purposes, to liberate people from oppression, was the Spanish-American war in 1898. But chasing the Spanish from the Philippines, Cuba or Puerto Rico was not an exercise in democratic nation-building, but an uneven contest between an upstart, expansionist power and a decrepit old empire.
The cold war was not revolutionary either, but a holding operation, a struggle for influence and containment. Far from fighting for the “blessings of self-government”, the US happily supported dictatorships, as long as they were anti-communist. People were sometimes encouraged to revolt against communist regimes, in Hungary for example, only to be left in the lurch when they tried it. It was really only when the cold war enemies began to lose their bite, and a hot war with China or the Soviet Union became unlikely, that another high point of Pax Americana was reached: the democratic revolutions in east and south-east Asia, specifically in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.
This was less a matter of forceful American idealism, however, than local pressure in what used to be called US client states. Reagan was far from happy with the revolt against Ferdinand Marcos, and it took some time for US officials to warm to the democratic aspirations of the South Koreans too. But something fundamental changed in the course of the 1980s. Once the Americans decided to back democracy instead of oppression in the name of anti-communism, the democrats benefited and the gap between US idealism and national self-interest narrowed.
Many ideas went into the attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, by no means all idealistic. The common habit of quoting everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to justify it no doubt sometimes masked more selfish aims. But the ideological conviction that the US, through sheer force of arms, can somehow effect a democratic transformation in the Middle East, is not just a cynical lie. It may be foolish or naive, but is no less sincere for all that. The fact that the cradle of neo-conservatism was in the Trotskyist hothouse of New York in the 1960s is not surprising: one revolutionary spirit merged seamlessly with another. In the radical views of many a neo-con you can still detect the faint traces that link Lincoln and Jefferson with Trotsky, Wilson and Reagan. Without understanding the revolutionary impulse that lies under the surface of American idealism, you cannot understand American politics.
Eastern European intellectuals were quicker to spot this than their western colleagues. Moreover, in memory of staunch US anti-communism, which stood in contrast to the more accommodating attitudes in western Europe, respectable former dissidents such as Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel have been more supportive of George W. Bush’s revolutionary enterprise. Aside from the Middle East, the fiercest opposition to the US, not just its policies but much of what it stands for, comes from western Europeans, precisely the ones who benefited most from the perhaps domineering but still relatively benign embrace of Pax Americana. Why?
For one thing, the threat from a common enemy during the cold war helped to put old anti-American attitudes on hold. The common disdain, especially on the right, for American civilisation - its vulgar materialism, its rootless cosmopolitanism, its shallow optimism, its lack of the tragic sense - emerged once again when the common enemy disappeared. But this time the cultural disdain was taken up by the left, perhaps more than the right, a reflection of the new leftist preoccupation with “identity” and “culture”.
There is another, more compelling reason for the European aversion to US assertiveness. After two world wars, Europeans had lost faith in the use of military power to influence world events. The dream of imperialism swiftly collapsed. And since nationalism was blamed for the 20th-century European catastrophes, belief in the nation state as a forceful actor was also lost. The US, meanwhile, continued to behave like a 19th-century power, proud to expand its influence, with armed force if necessary. This influence is promoted in the name of freedom. Although Americans don’t like to think of themselves as imperialists, their domination of the globe still reminds Europeans, apart from a few British intellectuals, enough of a past they would prefer to forget.
Conservatives in the US, but in Europe too, sometimes claim that this reveals a new European nihilism, a loss of faith in its own values. Europeans wallow in supine decadence, while Americans guard the last frontier of western civilisation. But this is too simple, for Europeans have not lost their sense of moral superiority. On the contrary, the elites believe that the European Union, built on a basis of compromise, diplomacy, weak national sovereignty and material seduction, is a better model for the world than US power. Many European citizens, prodded by populists on the right and the left, are starting to disagree and look back longingly to the lost comforts of strong nationhood. But these sentiments, which may be a necessary corrective to excessive Euro-idealism, are no more pro-US than those of the most ardent Europeanists.
Another reason why many Europeans resent US power is their habit of dependency on it. The utopian dream of world peace modelled on the European Union, a Pax Europeana, as it were, could only thrive under the protection of Pax Americana. In much European behaviour there is an element of the eternal adolescent kicking the father on whom he depends. But building up Europe as a rival superpower would mean a truly United States of Europe, which few people really want, and would in any case be rather impractical with more than 20 nation states.
The splitting of America along cultural and religious lines has thrown the US into a kind of crisis of identity. But the end of the cold war, and the disillusions with the postwar European dream, have left Europe in an even worse crisis. This is something Islamist revolutionaries are doing their best to exploit. Splitting the western world into mutually hostile camps is the goal of all those who hate what Spinoza, Voltaire and Locke, but also Lincoln and Jefferson, built. If George W. Bush walked into a trap by starting a war that only confirmed the dangerous belief that the west is at war with Islam, Europeans who wish to sever the alliance with America risk walking into a trap that is no less fraught with danger. For Pax Americana is our pax too; with all its flaws and bloody history, it is still the only one we have got.
