From 'Manifest Destiny' to Vietnam

When political decisions are out of the hands of the public, popular ideas about how those decisions are made are likely to be astoundingly wrong. That so many Americans still believe that this country's military presence in Vietnam was the consequence only of accidents, miscalculations, and basically benign intentions is the most striking recent example.

Such popular misconceptions are strengthened by the mass media's failure to place contemporary events in a larger historical context. While the forms of American expansionism have changed over the past 200 years, and several major shifts in the ideology surrounding U.S. imperialism have occurred, it is possible to trace this history of change systematically.

Each era of expansionism has had its own popular slogan--from "Manifest Destiny" to "Open Door" to Henry Kissinger's "Stable Structure of Peace." The aim of foreign policy nevertheless remains the same--the establishment of what John Adams in 1774 called "an independent empire."

During the 20th century, Americans have resisted calling themselves imperialists because of the nonterritorial nature of most U.S. economic and political expansionist plans. "Empires" are thought to be systems of colonies such as those of Britain and France. The United States is supposedly interested only in the diffusion of political democracy and free enterprise, its economic counterpart.

But the history of 19th century U.S. expansion is precisely a history of territorial takeover beginning with a revolution which, if anything, diminished the prospects for self-determination among non-white oppressed groups in North America.

To dispell the mythology of the revolution is necessary to destroy at least one popular image of U.S. expansionism: the picture of the United States, the first liberated colonial territory, likewise spreading liberation through its intervention in the struggles of other states. American colonists had not been the lackeys of British entrepreneurs. They were mercantile partners rebelling against fetters on their independent economic development, a future which many colonists anticipated would include taking over the West.

The chief limits upon early 19th century expansionism were economic; not until the 1840s could the United Stated be considered industrial. Inevitably, the construction of direct economic links between North and West with new developments in railroads and communication disrupted the delicate balance between the industrial North and the agrarian South and West which had held the early Union together.

Once the North had won the Civil War, the direction of future expansion, both in the West and overseas, was set. Markets, outlets for investment and, secondarily, sources of raw materials were what the North wanted, not slave labor territories to support a landed upper class.

The great problem arose once the United States reached the Pacific, and the territory that it had been her "manifest destiny" to occupy had been taken. Half of the 25-year period between the end of reconstruction and the Spanish-American War were years of depression. Workers employed in railroad construction were being laid off. With the completion of the national railroad system and the industrialization of agriculture, both heavy industrialists and large commercial farmers were looking anxiously for markets. The traditional outlet of westward expansion appeared closed.

Eastern capitalists had looked to China as a possible overseas outlet for profitable investment and commodities since the 1840s. Under Secretary of State William H. Seward, the United States purchased Alaska and annexed the Midway Islands as stepping stones to Asia in 1867.

But few were active proponents of a military empire. The costs of a worldwide standing army were prohibitive. Nor was it clear that such a burden of funds and responsibility was necessary.

Historians have rightly insisted that U.S. expansionist efforts cannot be explained along the lines of a strict cost-benefit analysis of businessmen's profits. Social conditions in the late 19th century just as domestic unrest today established the context within which expansion might be pursued.

But historians have also underestimated the economic foundations of foreign policy. The United States did not trip unwillingly into the arena of world power in the 1890s. Given the country's economic needs, the reorganization of the national economy into a system of finance capitalism, and the extent of social chaos deepened by the calamitous depression of 1893, the form and extent of U.S. intervention in Cuba and in the Far East in the late 1890s are understandable.

U.S. economic policy hastened Cuba's drive for independence. As European beet sugar production drove the price of Cuban sugar down, Americans stepped in where plantation owners were selling out cheaply. An increase in the U.S. sugar tariff in 1895 accelerated the rate of plantation workers' layoffs, heating up the Cubans' resentment of Spain to the point where revolution was inevitable.

U.S. economic groups with no interests in Cuba naturally opposed this country's intervention in 1898. But U.S. participation served not only to mollify a public frightened by the growing pains of capitalism--labor violence, the concentration of ownership, urbanization, the dissolution of "rural values," and the swelling number of non-English speaking immigrants--it also bolstered moderate and conservative elements among the revolutionaries, preventing Cuba from falling into the hands of militant nationalists. Limited intervention became a legitimate foreign policy instrument.

Many felt, as did the fiery William Jennings Bryan, that to annex foreign territory in the Far East would be a profitless burden and pose the threat of cheap labor to already disconted American workers. But in1897, Germany took over kiaochow and Theodore Roosevelt began to push the strategy finally adopted-- Philippine annexation-- to protect U.S. interests in the area.

The solution to the Far East dilemma emerged in the form of the "Open Door" strategy, a plan to protect prospective U.S. commercial expansion while renouncing any intention of formally occupying Chinese territory. Through a series of notes to England, France, Germany and Russia, Secretary of State John Hay proposed in 1899 that no power discriminate against the others in trade within each country's own sphere of influence. Hay's request seemed so minimal and the balance of power so uncertain that no country dared provoke a war upon itself by refusing to comply.

The Open Door notes symbolized the non-inverventionest impulse of modern U.S. foreign policy--the establishment of relations among the major industrial powers of insure, under American leadership, the maximum guarantee of future investment opportunities in underdeveloped areas at the least possible cost to the capitalist powers.

American foreign policy from 1905 to the present day has been geared toward maintaining U.S. leadership in the partnership of industrial nations through a series of treaties, international legal agreements and institutionalized economic arrangements. Pioneered by Woodrow Wilson and Bryan, his secretary of state, this policy was neither anti-expansionist nor anti-imperialist in any real sense.

By 1929, it did seem that the new world order was complete. Despite incursions into such countries as Haiti, Nicaragua, and, almost, into Mexico, a series of international conferences in the 1920s appeared to have kept even truly prospective threats such as Japan in line. The Depression drastically intensified governments' awareness of the economic imperatives of foreign policy, producing the struggle which led to World War II and eventually to the current structure of international capitalism.

In the 1930s, the United States finally faced a struggle over foreign outlets for investments which earlier arrangements with other countries, particularly with Japan and Germany, could no longer resolve. Consumer good purchases dropped 19 per cent between 1929 and 1933, but it was the 71 per cent drop in non-residential fixed investment that left the economy with an impossible contradiction: Underdeveloped areas abroad were the likely targets for idle capital, but no markets existed for whatever consumer goods could be produced.

Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to incorporate the expansion of foreign markets into his plans for recovery. A trade agreement program was developed to improve the American position in foreign markets relative to the other powers. The Export-Import Bank was created for loans to foreign countries which usually had to purchase U.S. goods only. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was authorized to help the foreign operations of domestic corporations.

Nothing worked. Although some sectors of U.S. business with interests in Germany saw National Socialism as the means to establish economic rationalization and stability in central Europe, Hitler's threat to America's main allies in trade, Britain and France, was too great to stand. America finally entered the war in 1941 after squeezing as many concessions as possible from Great Britain in return for land-lease aid.

World War II consequently sparked America's recovery, leaving behind a legacy which has shaped the contours of U.S. foreign policy since then. First, a stronger system of institutional relationships was immediately deemed necessary to prevent the recurrence of such costly conflict among industrial powers.

Second, the advantages of a large military establishment for economic planning became clear. Not only would the government underwrite military-related research and proved long-term contracts necessary for economic stability, but the product--a well-armed military-- could protect foreign sources of raw materials for America as well as U.S. foreign investments.

Third, the United States concluded that, as profitable as this country might find independent arrangements with the nationalist governments of underdeveloped countries, America could not support anti-colonial revolt: anti-imperialist victories in the Third World would dangerously strengthen the European left.

Finally, and most important, the outbreak of World War II transformed the United States into a net importer of raw materials. Given, as Galbraith has established, the need of large corporations in non-competitive markets for long-term planning to insure stability, raw materials are likely to be a firm's prime source of concern--especially in "strategic metals" and oil-related industries.

American domination of South Vietnam, which continues now, is the outgrowth of these conditions. Major U.S. multinational investor-- particularly those associated with the Rockefeller-Chase Manhattan-Standard Oil circle-- have taken over or dominate regional trade associations, supra-national companies or allegedly neutral international development agencies which promote capitalist investment by resolving intra-capitalist conflicts, preparing feasability studies, and urging local ruling classes to provide incentives for investment.

Ultimately, this is the great contradiction: As American capitalism's genuine need for foreign resources grows, the cost of containing revolutions abroad multiplies. Not only must a complex network of relations with other industrial powers (including the USSR) be maintained, but the United States must confront its ultimate inability to offer any program of social reform as adequate as socialism to meet the desperate material and social needs of Third World nations.

To survive, the "independent empire" has relied increasingly on a war of industrial nations against the revolutionary aspirations of the "underdeveloped" countries. Vietnam's refusal to submit to American control may mark a turning point in the history of freedom as irrevocable as Britain's loss two centuries ago.

Few would seriously argue that most foreign policy decisions could be fully explained through cut-and-dried analyses of business profits. Still, the actual role of economic motives in foreign policy formulation has been a major point of debate among U.S. historians. Following are arguments for and against emphasizing economics factors in the explanations of U.S. imperialism:

FOR

1. Importance of foreign trade and investment in strategic industried with control over most domestic capital.

2. Ties between major corporations, international development agencies, and government planners.

3. Cumulative effects of investment and trade based on overseas production.

4. Importance of protecting raw materials sources and outlets for foreign investment in large firms long-term planning.

5. Struggles between regional economics elites always mirrored in debates over strategies in international affairs.

AGAINST

1. Primary importance of national security and political motives.

2. Relative unimportance of foreign trade and investment for national economic performance.

3. Imperialism's harm to real U.S. interests: truly free countries would provide better markets for goods and services.

4. Businessmen's opposition to certain cases of foreign intervention.