This is the second post in a series that contains my summary of/thoughts about Henry Kissinger’s book “World Order“.  The purpose of the book is to convey the conceptions of World Order that different civilizations have developed over the course of their history.  In this post I’ll be considering the American view of World Order.

The American Religion

The American view of World Order is almost religious in nature, with three core tenets of the faith.

1. All humans have natural, negative rights that it is the purpose of government to protect
2. Democracy is the best form of government and the one that all people would choose if they were allowed to
3. America must protect and spread these values for the benefit of all humanity

John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon (“A Model of Christian Charity”) to the Massachusetts Bay Colony sets the tone for succeeding generations with the idea that America would be an example to the entire world:

…when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘may the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

Thomas Jefferson considered America an “empire for liberty“, whose conquests were to be philosophical rather than territorial and whose purpose is “to act for all mankind“. The relentless American expansion to the Pacific was invested with divine purpose to spread freedom across the land. The annexation of Texas and California from Mexico was a defensive measure against the foes of liberty. When Spanish Cuba rebelled against colonial rule, President McKinley intervened via the 1898 Spanish-American war, resulting in the independence of Cuba and the US acquisition of Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippians. His justification was the US had acted unselfishly for humanity’s sake rather than expansionist ambition. The first US president to grapple with America’s Great Power status was President Teddy Roosevelt, and he saw the country’s duty, nay, calling was to provide a counterbalance in the international system and to act as the world’s police force, restraining the ambitions of evil men through threat of military action. He was also the first to assert the American right to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations for humanitarian reasons.

President Woodrow Wilson brought the American sense of moral absolutism into the international system, and every President since (excluding President Trump) has followed the same basic reasoning. The core of this reasoning is to secure world peace through the promotion of Democracy, open diplomacy, and the cultivation of shared rules and standards. When he intervened in WW I, he did so stating that the goal was not to preserve the European balance of power, but that:

Our object now…is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles…The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.

Wilson further asserted that it was the scheming of autocracies that caused conflicts, and free peoples would naturally pursue peace rather than war:

Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions.

Not only was Democracy the best form of government, it was the sole guarantee for permanent peace. So it was that Wilson refused to consider armistice negotiations with Imperial Germany until the Kaiser had abdicated and a representative government had replaced him.

American Ambivalence

This sense of “religious calling” is paired with a deep ambivalence towards the nation’s role as a Great Power. Three times the United States took decisive action to shore up the international order against terminal threats (WW I, WW II, and the Cold War), three times it succeeded in preserving the Westphalian Order and the balance of power, three times it abjured territorial demands in the peace process, and three times it sought to use that victory to build a new order that would remove its need for future action.

The proposed solutions, the League of Nations and the United Nations, show that the idea of collective security is unworkable when applied globally. The two best examples of “collective action”, the Korean War and the Persian Gulf War, illustrate this point when it is understood that the “collective action” began only after the United States had made it clear it would take unilateral action by performing troop deployments before approval and that the nations of the United Nations provided ex post facto moral blessing for this unilateral action in order to gain some influence on its implementation.

And so, while the United States pushes for a World Order that would lessen the need for it’s own intervention, it has both a mistrust of that Order and a even deeper reluctance to move towards a imperial/hegemonic system that it can trust.