Tomorrow, the World traces shifting ideas about world order by examining the internal deliberations of geopolitical planners, and thus pinpoints exactly how and when U.S. ideas about foreign policy began to evolve. The details are often surprising, running counter to conventional wisdom about how U.S. foreign policy developed in the postwar period.
A major focus of the book is the period immediately following the fall of France (June 1940), when the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank tried to map out the prospects for the United States if the Nazis dominated Europe. Well before Pearl Harbor, and at a time when the State Department had disbanded its postwar planning committee, CFR sought to define the geopolitical interests of the United States. At first, its members thought that the country might retreat to what they called the “quarter-sphere”—an easily defensible area extending from Canada to the northern portion of Latin America. But they soon worried that the U.S. economy might be locked into the quarter-sphere. If foreign geopolitical blocs dominated the rest of the globe, the United States would be cut off from trade. The quarter-sphere, they feared, would prove “too small an area for a satisfactory American standard of life.”
For a time, therefore, the planners expanded the quarter-sphere to the hemisphere, but this too seemed unsustainably small. It was not self-sufficient, because it needed to export both agricultural goods (from Latin America and the U.S. South) and commercial goods (from the U.S. North). It therefore couldn’t provide a truly independent economic base for competition with Nazi-dominated Europe. Including the Pacific would soak up manufactured exports, and provide valuable sources of jute, rubber, and tin—but it would only exacerbate the need to find export markets for agricultural products. And so the only solution was to bring Britain, a major importer of agricultural goods, into the fold as well. “After months of study,” Wertheim concludes, “the planners had discovered that if German domination of Europe endured, the United States had to dominate almost everywhere else.” Like an overgrown Goldilocks, the United States had tried various economies on for size, and found itself comfortable only in the world system that imperialism had built in the early twentieth century.
It was, as far as foreign policies go, fairly straightforward. Hanson Baldwin, New York Times journalist and member of the CFR, summed it up simply: “world domination by the United States and the British Empire acting in close and continuous collaboration.”
The problem was selling this foreign policy to Americans. It was imperialist, required close alliance with Britain, and asked the public to bear the costs of a globe-straddling military presence. “Given the temper of the American people,” observed one participant in the debates, “it may even prove impossible to organize Anglo-American cooperation . . . except under the more universal auspices of some league or association of powers.”
The real trick was to provide the United States and Britain with a way to police the world while avoiding the appearance of empire-building. The planners had initially been disinterested in creating an international institution—in their minds, the League of Nations had been ineffective because of its fuzzy idealism. But by 1942, when CFR planners began to move into the State Department’s revived postwar planning apparatus, a new sort of international organization was beginning to sound appealing. The solution to their PR problem, the planners realized, was the United Nations.