Liberal Internationalism: From the Founding of the Council on Foreign Relations to the Neoconservative Ascendancy

0:00I noticed that David's talk focused largely on the First World War, and I think in many ways the First World War for the United States as well as for Europe represents an important watershed. Supposedly the period in which America lost its innocence, but of course it had been deflowered many times before. But this is seen somehow as the beginning of America's commitment to the world. 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.

0:58But one of the things that interested me is how the United States gets into the war and the long-range consequences. Usually you are told in books that I studied in college many eons ago that there was an isolationist impulse, But somehow German aggression was so overwhelming that American resistance to war was broken. And then a famous movie was made in World War II showing the grim face of Woodrow Wilson as he brings America into war in the first week of April of 1917. And this, of course, is done quite reluctantly because the German militarists just won't and how to stop with their aggressions.

1:52As I studied this in greater and greater depth, it seems to me that the two sides were probably roughly equally to blame. Recent scholarship, like McMean's book, indicates that Russia probably was a bit more aggressive than the other powers. There is a very good German work, which I read by a man by a man named Konrad Kano called The Way into the Abyss of the War.

2:24And what I noticed is that in this book, and one that had come out, which apparently is the piece de resistance, it's the most important work that has been published in a long time, synthetic work on the war by Christopher Clark called The Sleepwalkers. And it is one, by the way, which is being largely ignored in Germany because the Germans wish to accept full blame for a war which they were only partially responsible for, but being a masochistic nation, they totally reject the arguments of Walker. And Walker seems to lean toward Cano's position that the British are much more responsible for the war than was generally believed, that in fact, Lord Gray, as a member of a group called the Coefficients, there from around 1900 on, are plotting a war against Germany and together with the Fabians who were not only socialists but also imperialists and looked upon Germany as the inevitable political and economic competitor of England, there's much more than enough blame to go around, by the way, the Germans behave

3:32with ineptitude, the English are far from innocent, the Russians perhaps are the ones most responsible for getting the war going, but the question is Why are Americans convinced that one side is to blame? It's quite possible that you can talk about the blockade. It was probably an illegal blockade of the British, which was causing starvation in Germany. The fact that Germany was encircled, that there were alliances made by its enemies, which was very definitely aimed at destroying their power. And one could find other evidence that the blame was sort of equally divided, and in any case, I think the argument made by Neil Ferguson and the pity of war is that if England never entered the war, it would have remained the major power of Europe.

4:26Financially, in terms of its navy, entering the war, getting involved was disastrous. The United States, if it never entered the war, would still be the world's strongest power at the end of the war, not Germany, not England, United States, but these are things that are known, These are things that could have been known during the First World War, much of the evidence that I see in Cano and other people writing on the war, Ferguson, Walker, this is stuff that was known already during the war, right after the war. Nonetheless, we get this story that one side is to blame, the United States is forced into the war, then something else What else very interesting happens, there is a total suppression of opposition that comes with a committee that is formed by the government or commission under George Creel, April 14, 19, April 13, 19, a committee on public information which pretty much controls all sources of information in the United States.

5:32There are also vigilante committees going around burning down German libraries, threatening and the Lives of German-Americans and so forth. This is organized government terrorism. And as I look at the war, it seems to me that the people who perhaps play a dominant role in getting this war going or getting the United States involved in the war will then become key players or key actors in defining, they become architects of the American foreign policy that will be pursued for the next 100 years. 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.

6:20And it was not just the Democrats who got us involved, the Republicans would have involved us in 1915. 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, Mania, although it was obvious it was carrying British arms, and this was known all over the place, and the Germans warned they were carrying British arms, contraband, yet people got on and they won. And this, of course, was used by Wilson not to go to war, but to replace the mild-mannered Christian pacifist William Jennings Bryan with an Anglophile interventionist 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.

7:15I would note that the Democrats were less belligerent than the Republicans. and Publicans. Lodge, who later is saddled with the blame that the United States does not get involved in the League of Nations, which I think was a smart decision. We would have been fighting wars in East Central Europe on behalf of the revisionist powers created at the treaty. But the reality is that Lodge was an interventionist, much more so than 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. 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.

8:10Harvard, and the former president at Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, and then his successor A. Lawrence Lowell. All of them are interventionists and they take disciplinary measures against people who are not on the side of England in the war. Now the reason these people are on the British side is that they are Anglophiles. It is not Not that they believe in global democracy. Most of them are immigration restrictionists. They believe very much in the dominance of their class and of their ethnicity, but they are Anglophiles. They're not Germanophiles because from around 1890 on, there was going to be a growing competition between England and Germany. They managed to show that England have managed to show that England is somehow not the same people ethnically as the Germans and that the freedom-loving Germans all were Anglo-Saxons who went to England.

9:12And in fact, it was not in the forest of Germania, but the forest of England that freedom develops. And the Germans sort of get pushed out of this narrative of freedom, the cradle of liberty. And there's a newer narrative around the English, in which the Germans are seen as enemies. There's also something which has been called the Imperial School of History. And when I was many years ago at Yale, I was a member of the Charles MacLean Andrews Society. Little did I know that he was a warmonger on the side of England, and that much of his history was an attempt to show the unity of the United States and England. And it was largely tendentious history. The same thing was true about George Lewis Beer at Harvard, also involved in the Imperial School, and they try to show that the American Revolution was a mistake, that the United States is really part of England or something like this, and we should always be united

10:14because we are the English people. This has come back more recently, if you noticed, in the stuff about the Anglo sphere that the and Neoconservatives have been floating around, although the Anglosphere has now been replaced by the Israelophersphere or something in recent years. But it's pretty much the same notion. Once the war is over, the same people who were instrumental in getting us involved, the St. Patricians, found the Council on Foreign Relations in 1919. And this has remained a force and American liberal internationalism ever since, right? I mean, they put out important magazines in foreign relations. They're very much in favor of American entanglement in the rest of the world.

11:01They believe in the kind of democratic idealism that my good friend, Tom DeLorenzo, mocked so mercilessly in his speech. These are all positions that they've consistently taken over the years. 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. They say that we burnt our fingers once in World War I, we're not going to get involved a second time.

11:52So there is not necessarily a continuity between the actors in World War I or the social class involved in World War I and the people who want to get involved in World War II. We know that Alice Roosevelt Longworth came from, her father was a strong pro-British interventionist who wanted to go to war in 1915. in 1915. She's an isolationist. So there is no direct continuity. There were organizations of Anglophiles who wanted to get involved, but you typically find people like Walter Lipman, who had also been an interventionist in World War I, but you don't find the same kinds of patricians involved in World War II. There also is an interesting correlation and a correlation that I find between people who are immigration restrictionists and people who want to make the world safe for democracy or fight a crusade for democracy. Most of the membership of the Immigration Restriction League after World War I, people like A. Lawrence Lowell, Lodge, were active interventionists in the war. They were among the strongest

13:04interventionists and there is a kind of correlation. They were Anglophiles. But in order to get involved to justify their involvement in the war, they have to use this language of democracy. Now why do they use this language of democracy? Well, if you look at who wants to get into the war in World War I, most of the people who want to get into the war are not going to be on the left. They're typically on the right. This is an observation Jean-Luc Hodge made a long time ago. It's absolutely true. The people on the left are the anarchist, Russian, Jewish, Marxist, they don't want to get involved in war. Then you get the Irish worker, you know, they're of anything on the side of Germany. So in order to justify the war, you have to give it a progressive character, right? And you get some progressives involved. This is Murray Rothbard, an excellent article on the world who want to subgressive crusade. So you have to get these progressive people and show it's a progressive war for

14:05For democracy against autocracy, what you have to sort of turn it around and show that it is a proper progressive cause to get involved in the war on the side of England against Germany. And much of this will come from people who really don't give a rap about these things, but you know, this is, if you want to be on the side of England, you have to depict the allied side as the progressive side. Now, this was typically being done in Europe, because if you look at how people line up, typically the conservatives line up on the side of Germany and Austria, the more progressives in Spain and Italy and other places line up on the allied side. The same thing is true in Scandinavia. So this is not true in the United States. When I say the ruling class is pro-British, the other people are pro-German or neutral. So what you have to do here is give it a progressive twist so it becomes

15:01was a war for global democracy or a war that will make the world safe for democracy. What happens is the same slogans and the same concepts will be taken over in time by other groups, most recently by the neoconservatives. Not that they are members of the immigration restriction league, not that they are waspatricians, but the same cliches or the same slogans that that were used by Wasp patricians who wanted to intervene in World War I on the side of England will be given double and triple duty later. And they sort of, they create the language and the conceptual world of American foreign policy. And they create magazines, they create institutes, they create departments of foreign relations, which will continue this legacy of Bringing Democracy to the Rest of the World.

16:00Now, I know that there are other deeper routes, sort of going back to Lincoln, going back to someone to push them back to the founding of New England by the Puritans, the refounding of England by the Puritans. But I would argue that if I'm looking for a decisive reason that things are going to turn this way, even if Lincoln and others are gonna be invoked later, it is definitely American intervention in World War I, and the kinds of arguments and slogans that will be constructed to justify that intervention. Thank you very much.