WEBVTT NOTE Liberal Internationalism: From the Founding of the Council on Foreign Relations to the Neoconservative Ascendancy 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.960 I noticed that David's talk focused largely 2 00:00:04.960 --> 00:00:09.440 on the First World War, and I think in many ways 3 00:00:09.440 --> 00:00:11.220 the First World War for the United States 4 00:00:11.220 --> 00:00:14.400 as well as for Europe represents an important watershed. 5 00:00:16.560 --> 00:00:19.380 Supposedly the period in which America lost its innocence, 6 00:00:19.380 --> 00:00:22.380 but of course it had been deflowered many times before. 7 00:00:23.280 --> 00:00:26.260 But this is seen somehow as the beginning 8 00:00:26.260 --> 00:00:28.360 of America's commitment to the world. 9 00:00:28.360 --> 00:00:58.360 A commitment, by the way, which in the First World War resulted in the death of about 160,000 Americans, figures that the next speaker, Han Thule, has written about in great detail, it does not result in peace, it results in a punitive treaty and creates even more disorder than it existed before in East Central Europe and in many ways will set the stage for another world war. 10 00:00:58.360 --> 00:01:08.360 But one of the things that interested me is how the United States gets into the war and the long-range consequences. 11 00:01:08.360 --> 00:01:20.360 Usually you are told in books that I studied in college many eons ago that there was an isolationist impulse, 12 00:01:20.360 --> 00:01:29.480 But somehow German aggression was so overwhelming that American resistance to war was broken. 13 00:01:29.480 --> 00:01:36.800 And then a famous movie was made in World War II showing the grim face of Woodrow Wilson 14 00:01:36.800 --> 00:01:41.720 as he brings America into war in the first week of April of 1917. 15 00:01:41.720 --> 00:01:49.100 And this, of course, is done quite reluctantly because the German militarists just won't 16 00:01:49.100 --> 00:01:52.100 and how to stop with their aggressions. 17 00:01:52.100 --> 00:01:56.100 As I studied this in greater and greater depth, 18 00:01:56.100 --> 00:02:00.100 it seems to me that the two sides were probably 19 00:02:00.100 --> 00:02:03.100 roughly equally to blame. 20 00:02:03.100 --> 00:02:07.100 Recent scholarship, like McMean's book, 21 00:02:07.100 --> 00:02:10.100 indicates that Russia probably was a bit more aggressive 22 00:02:10.100 --> 00:02:12.100 than the other powers. 23 00:02:12.100 --> 00:02:16.100 There is a very good German work, which I read by a man 24 00:02:16.100 --> 00:02:18.460 by a man named Konrad Kano called 25 00:02:18.460 --> 00:02:21.220 The Way into the Abyss of the War. 26 00:02:21.220 --> 00:02:24.300 The Way into the Abyss of the War. 27 00:02:24.300 --> 00:02:28.620 And what I noticed is that in this book, 28 00:02:28.620 --> 00:02:29.700 and one that had come out, 29 00:02:29.700 --> 00:02:34.180 which apparently is the piece de resistance, 30 00:02:34.180 --> 00:02:35.940 it's the most important work 31 00:02:35.940 --> 00:02:37.300 that has been published in a long time, 32 00:02:37.300 --> 00:02:40.380 synthetic work on the war by Christopher Clark 33 00:02:40.380 --> 00:02:42.260 called The Sleepwalkers. 34 00:02:42.260 --> 00:02:43.700 And it is one, by the way, 35 00:02:43.700 --> 00:02:46.020 which is being largely ignored in Germany 36 00:02:46.020 --> 00:02:48.380 because the Germans wish to accept full blame 37 00:02:48.380 --> 00:02:51.400 for a war which they were only partially responsible for, 38 00:02:51.400 --> 00:02:53.340 but being a masochistic nation, 39 00:02:53.340 --> 00:02:57.440 they totally reject the arguments of Walker. 40 00:02:57.440 --> 00:03:02.140 And Walker seems to lean toward Cano's position 41 00:03:02.140 --> 00:03:05.180 that the British are much more responsible for the war 42 00:03:05.180 --> 00:03:07.740 than was generally believed, that in fact, 43 00:03:07.740 --> 00:03:11.980 Lord Gray, as a member of a group called the Coefficients, 44 00:03:11.980 --> 00:03:14.060 there from around 1900 on, 45 00:03:14.060 --> 00:03:15.860 are plotting a war against Germany 46 00:03:15.860 --> 00:03:20.020 and together with the Fabians who were not only socialists 47 00:03:20.020 --> 00:03:22.940 but also imperialists and looked upon Germany 48 00:03:22.940 --> 00:03:26.020 as the inevitable political and economic competitor 49 00:03:26.020 --> 00:03:28.740 of England, there's much more than enough blame 50 00:03:28.740 --> 00:03:32.580 to go around, by the way, the Germans behave 51 00:03:32.580 --> 00:03:37.580 with ineptitude, the English are far from innocent, 52 00:03:37.580 --> 00:03:40.480 the Russians perhaps are the ones most responsible 53 00:03:40.480 --> 00:03:44.060 for getting the war going, but the question is 54 00:03:44.060 --> 00:03:49.060 Why are Americans convinced that one side is to blame? 55 00:03:49.420 --> 00:03:52.700 It's quite possible that you can talk about the blockade. 56 00:03:53.540 --> 00:03:55.660 It was probably an illegal blockade of the British, 57 00:03:55.660 --> 00:03:57.980 which was causing starvation in Germany. 58 00:03:57.980 --> 00:04:00.180 The fact that Germany was encircled, 59 00:04:00.180 --> 00:04:03.500 that there were alliances made by its enemies, 60 00:04:03.500 --> 00:04:08.060 which was very definitely aimed at destroying their power. 61 00:04:09.260 --> 00:04:13.500 And one could find other evidence that the blame 62 00:04:13.500 --> 00:04:16.700 was sort of equally divided, and in any case, 63 00:04:16.700 --> 00:04:19.460 I think the argument made by Neil Ferguson 64 00:04:19.460 --> 00:04:23.640 and the pity of war is that if England never entered the war, 65 00:04:23.640 --> 00:04:26.960 it would have remained the major power of Europe. 66 00:04:26.960 --> 00:04:29.740 Financially, in terms of its navy, 67 00:04:29.740 --> 00:04:32.220 entering the war, getting involved was disastrous. 68 00:04:32.220 --> 00:04:34.100 The United States, if it never entered the war, 69 00:04:34.100 --> 00:04:36.140 would still be the world's strongest power 70 00:04:36.140 --> 00:04:38.580 at the end of the war, not Germany, not England, 71 00:04:38.580 --> 00:04:43.480 United States, but these are things that are known, 72 00:04:43.480 --> 00:04:48.800 These are things that could have been known during the First World War, much of the evidence 73 00:04:48.800 --> 00:04:55.800 that I see in Cano and other people writing on the war, Ferguson, Walker, this is stuff 74 00:04:56.960 --> 00:05:03.960 that was known already during the war, right after the war. Nonetheless, we get this story 75 00:05:03.960 --> 00:05:09.320 that one side is to blame, the United States is forced into the war, then something else 76 00:05:09.320 --> 00:05:15.000 What else very interesting happens, there is a total suppression of opposition that comes 77 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:24.000 with a committee that is formed by the government or commission under George Creel, April 14, 78 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:29.280 19, April 13, 19, a committee on public information which pretty much controls all sources of 79 00:05:29.280 --> 00:05:32.280 information in the United States. 80 00:05:32.280 --> 00:05:37.040 There are also vigilante committees going around burning down German libraries, threatening 81 00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:39.080 and the Lives of German-Americans and so forth. 82 00:05:39.080 --> 00:05:41.480 This is organized government terrorism. 83 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:45.560 And as I look at the war, it seems to me 84 00:05:45.560 --> 00:05:49.680 that the people who perhaps play a dominant role 85 00:05:49.680 --> 00:05:52.280 in getting this war going or getting the United States 86 00:05:52.280 --> 00:05:56.600 involved in the war will then become key players 87 00:05:56.600 --> 00:06:00.960 or key actors in defining, they become architects 88 00:06:00.960 --> 00:06:04.440 of the American foreign policy that will be pursued 89 00:06:04.440 --> 00:06:06.160 for the next 100 years. 90 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:20.040 And the people who are most involved, we might describe them as the WASP patriciate in the United States, the patrician class in New England, the Middle Atlantic states, and the South. 91 00:06:20.040 --> 00:06:27.040 And it was not just the Democrats who got us involved, the Republicans would have involved us in 1915. 92 00:06:27.040 --> 00:06:35.040 They were, Teddy Roosevelt and other Republicans weren't happy that we did not get involved in the war much earlier after the sinking of Lusitania, 93 00:06:35.040 --> 00:06:42.040 Mania, although it was obvious it was carrying British arms, and this was known all over 94 00:06:42.040 --> 00:06:46.160 the place, and the Germans warned they were carrying British arms, contraband, yet people 95 00:06:46.160 --> 00:06:51.800 got on and they won. And this, of course, was used by Wilson not to go to war, but to 96 00:06:51.800 --> 00:06:58.800 replace the mild-mannered Christian pacifist William Jennings Bryan with an Anglophile interventionist 97 00:06:58.800 --> 00:07:15.800 With an Anglophile interventionist, Robert Lansing, the ambassador to England, Walter Hines Page, told the British in 1914 that the Americans would try to get into the war as soon as they could. 98 00:07:15.800 --> 00:07:20.800 I would note that the Democrats were less belligerent than the Republicans. 99 00:07:20.800 --> 00:07:25.800 and Publicans. Lodge, who later is saddled with the blame that the United States does 100 00:07:25.800 --> 00:07:31.040 not get involved in the League of Nations, which I think was a smart decision. We would 101 00:07:31.040 --> 00:07:37.000 have been fighting wars in East Central Europe on behalf of the revisionist powers created 102 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:44.000 at the treaty. But the reality is that Lodge was an interventionist, much more so than 103 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:54.000 Much more so than Wilson. So was Charles Evan Hughes. So was Elihu Root, who was the founder of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1919. 104 00:07:54.000 --> 00:08:10.000 And so were a number of other patricians, most perhaps most significant, most prominently, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia, who manages to kick out Charles Beard. 105 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:21.000 Harvard, and the former president at Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, and then his successor A. 106 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:27.040 Lawrence Lowell. All of them are interventionists and they take disciplinary measures against 107 00:08:27.040 --> 00:08:31.600 people who are not on the side of England in the war. 108 00:08:31.600 --> 00:08:36.800 Now the reason these people are on the British side is that they are Anglophiles. It is not 109 00:08:36.800 --> 00:08:43.800 Not that they believe in global democracy. Most of them are immigration restrictionists. 110 00:08:44.880 --> 00:08:50.000 They believe very much in the dominance of their class and of their ethnicity, but they 111 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:55.480 are Anglophiles. They're not Germanophiles because from around 1890 on, there was going 112 00:08:55.480 --> 00:09:02.480 to be a growing competition between England and Germany. They managed to show that England 113 00:09:02.480 --> 00:09:07.480 have managed to show that England is somehow not the same people ethnically as the Germans 114 00:09:07.480 --> 00:09:12.480 and that the freedom-loving Germans all were Anglo-Saxons who went to England. 115 00:09:12.480 --> 00:09:17.480 And in fact, it was not in the forest of Germania, but the forest of England 116 00:09:17.480 --> 00:09:22.480 that freedom develops. And the Germans sort of get pushed out of this narrative of freedom, 117 00:09:22.480 --> 00:09:27.480 the cradle of liberty. And there's a newer narrative 118 00:09:27.480 --> 00:09:31.040 around the English, in which the Germans are seen as enemies. 119 00:09:31.040 --> 00:09:33.840 There's also something which has been called 120 00:09:33.840 --> 00:09:36.240 the Imperial School of History. 121 00:09:36.240 --> 00:09:38.360 And when I was many years ago at Yale, 122 00:09:38.360 --> 00:09:41.560 I was a member of the Charles MacLean Andrews Society. 123 00:09:41.560 --> 00:09:44.240 Little did I know that he was a warmonger 124 00:09:44.240 --> 00:09:47.720 on the side of England, and that much of his history 125 00:09:47.720 --> 00:09:50.320 was an attempt to show the unity 126 00:09:50.320 --> 00:09:52.760 of the United States and England. 127 00:09:52.760 --> 00:09:54.580 And it was largely tendentious history. 128 00:09:54.580 --> 00:10:00.380 The same thing was true about George Lewis Beer at Harvard, also involved in the Imperial 129 00:10:00.380 --> 00:10:07.300 School, and they try to show that the American Revolution was a mistake, that the United 130 00:10:07.300 --> 00:10:14.300 States is really part of England or something like this, and we should always be united 131 00:10:14.300 --> 00:10:16.120 because we are the English people. 132 00:10:16.120 --> 00:10:21.580 This has come back more recently, if you noticed, in the stuff about the Anglo sphere that the 133 00:10:21.580 --> 00:10:24.180 and Neoconservatives have been floating around, 134 00:10:24.180 --> 00:10:26.620 although the Anglosphere has now been replaced 135 00:10:26.620 --> 00:10:31.620 by the Israelophersphere or something in recent years. 136 00:10:32.220 --> 00:10:34.900 But it's pretty much the same notion. 137 00:10:34.900 --> 00:10:38.300 Once the war is over, the same people 138 00:10:38.300 --> 00:10:40.580 who were instrumental in getting us involved, 139 00:10:40.580 --> 00:10:43.780 the St. Patricians, found the Council 140 00:10:43.780 --> 00:10:46.700 on Foreign Relations in 1919. 141 00:10:46.700 --> 00:10:49.000 And this has remained a force 142 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:52.720 and American liberal internationalism ever since, right? 143 00:10:52.720 --> 00:10:54.920 I mean, they put out important magazines 144 00:10:54.920 --> 00:10:57.160 in foreign relations. 145 00:10:57.160 --> 00:11:00.680 They're very much in favor of American entanglement 146 00:11:00.680 --> 00:11:01.760 in the rest of the world. 147 00:11:01.760 --> 00:11:04.760 They believe in the kind of democratic idealism 148 00:11:05.680 --> 00:11:08.520 that my good friend, Tom DeLorenzo, 149 00:11:08.520 --> 00:11:11.200 mocked so mercilessly in his speech. 150 00:11:12.160 --> 00:11:15.080 These are all positions that they've consistently taken 151 00:11:15.080 --> 00:11:16.100 over the years. 152 00:11:16.100 --> 00:11:46.100 There is one important difference, however, and I would note this, perhaps, as my final observation, that in time these people are going to be replaced, that by the late 30s, many of these patricians who favored American involvement in World War I, and people who were not so patrician but were part of that class, such as Herbert Hoover, the Taft family, become isolationist. 153 00:11:46.100 --> 00:11:52.100 They say that we burnt our fingers once in World War I, we're not going to get involved a second time. 154 00:11:52.100 --> 00:12:03.100 So there is not necessarily a continuity between the actors in World War I or the social class involved in World War I 155 00:12:03.100 --> 00:12:07.100 and the people who want to get involved in World War II. 156 00:12:07.100 --> 00:12:15.100 We know that Alice Roosevelt Longworth came from, her father was a strong pro-British interventionist who wanted to go to war in 1915. 157 00:12:15.100 --> 00:12:22.100 in 1915. She's an isolationist. So there is no direct continuity. There were organizations 158 00:12:24.320 --> 00:12:28.500 of Anglophiles who wanted to get involved, but you typically find people like Walter 159 00:12:28.500 --> 00:12:34.140 Lipman, who had also been an interventionist in World War I, but you don't find the same 160 00:12:34.140 --> 00:12:41.140 kinds of patricians involved in World War II. There also is an interesting correlation 161 00:12:41.140 --> 00:12:46.180 and a correlation that I find between people who are immigration restrictionists and people 162 00:12:46.180 --> 00:12:51.540 who want to make the world safe for democracy or fight a crusade for democracy. Most of 163 00:12:51.540 --> 00:12:58.380 the membership of the Immigration Restriction League after World War I, people like A. Lawrence 164 00:12:58.380 --> 00:13:04.340 Lowell, Lodge, were active interventionists in the war. They were among the strongest 165 00:13:04.340 --> 00:13:11.040 interventionists and there is a kind of correlation. They were Anglophiles. But in order to get 166 00:13:11.040 --> 00:13:17.760 involved to justify their involvement in the war, they have to use this language of democracy. 167 00:13:17.760 --> 00:13:22.600 Now why do they use this language of democracy? Well, if you look at who wants to get into 168 00:13:22.600 --> 00:13:28.040 the war in World War I, most of the people who want to get into the war are not going 169 00:13:28.040 --> 00:13:32.520 to be on the left. They're typically on the right. This is an observation Jean-Luc Hodge 170 00:13:32.520 --> 00:13:38.120 made a long time ago. It's absolutely true. The people on the left are the anarchist, 171 00:13:38.120 --> 00:13:43.400 Russian, Jewish, Marxist, they don't want to get involved in war. Then you get the Irish 172 00:13:43.400 --> 00:13:49.420 worker, you know, they're of anything on the side of Germany. So in order to justify 173 00:13:49.420 --> 00:13:55.880 the war, you have to give it a progressive character, right? And you get some progressives 174 00:13:55.880 --> 00:14:00.400 involved. This is Murray Rothbard, an excellent article on the world who want to subgressive 175 00:14:00.400 --> 00:14:05.940 crusade. So you have to get these progressive people and show it's a progressive war for 176 00:14:05.940 --> 00:14:11.580 For democracy against autocracy, what you have to sort of turn it around and show that 177 00:14:11.580 --> 00:14:15.660 it is a proper progressive cause to get involved in the war on the side of England against 178 00:14:15.660 --> 00:14:20.740 Germany. And much of this will come from people who really don't give a rap about these things, 179 00:14:20.740 --> 00:14:24.740 but you know, this is, if you want to be on the side of England, you have to depict the 180 00:14:24.740 --> 00:14:31.420 allied side as the progressive side. Now, this was typically being done in Europe, because 181 00:14:31.420 --> 00:14:35.720 if you look at how people line up, typically the conservatives line up on the side of 182 00:14:35.720 --> 00:14:41.400 Germany and Austria, the more progressives in Spain and Italy and other places line up 183 00:14:41.400 --> 00:14:47.200 on the allied side. The same thing is true in Scandinavia. So this is not true in the 184 00:14:47.200 --> 00:14:54.200 United States. When I say the ruling class is pro-British, the other people are pro-German 185 00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:01.640 or neutral. So what you have to do here is give it a progressive twist so it becomes 186 00:15:01.640 --> 00:15:08.640 was a war for global democracy or a war that will make the world safe for democracy. 187 00:15:08.960 --> 00:15:15.960 What happens is the same slogans and the same concepts will be taken over in time by other 188 00:15:16.160 --> 00:15:23.160 groups, most recently by the neoconservatives. Not that they are members of the immigration 189 00:15:23.400 --> 00:15:30.400 restriction league, not that they are waspatricians, but the same cliches or the same slogans that 190 00:15:31.640 --> 00:15:36.800 that were used by Wasp patricians who wanted to intervene in World War I on the side of 191 00:15:36.800 --> 00:15:43.800 England will be given double and triple duty later. And they sort of, they create the language 192 00:15:44.320 --> 00:15:50.560 and the conceptual world of American foreign policy. And they create magazines, they create 193 00:15:50.560 --> 00:15:57.160 institutes, they create departments of foreign relations, which will continue this legacy 194 00:15:57.160 --> 00:16:00.200 of Bringing Democracy to the Rest of the World. 195 00:16:00.200 --> 00:16:03.080 Now, I know that there are other deeper routes, 196 00:16:03.080 --> 00:16:04.520 sort of going back to Lincoln, 197 00:16:04.520 --> 00:16:07.360 going back to someone to push them back 198 00:16:07.360 --> 00:16:10.720 to the founding of New England by the Puritans, 199 00:16:10.720 --> 00:16:13.840 the refounding of England by the Puritans. 200 00:16:13.840 --> 00:16:17.960 But I would argue that if I'm looking for a decisive reason 201 00:16:17.960 --> 00:16:21.240 that things are going to turn this way, 202 00:16:21.240 --> 00:16:24.600 even if Lincoln and others are gonna be invoked later, 203 00:16:24.600 --> 00:16:26.720 it is definitely American intervention 204 00:16:26.720 --> 00:16:31.220 in World War I, and the kinds of arguments and slogans 205 00:16:31.220 --> 00:16:34.260 that will be constructed to justify that intervention. 206 00:16:35.100 --> 00:16:37.100 Thank you very much.