Bruce Fein: The Myths That Made an Empire
[Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and The Lichfield Group. This essay is adapted from American Empire: Before the Fall, published by Campaign for Liberty.]
From the late 1940s to the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents interceded everywhere in the world in an effort to contain or to defeat the USSR. No country was too small for the United States to believe its alignment with the Soviet Union would be pivotal to American safety, freedom, or prosperity. For the first time, America began to devise a foreign policy for every nation on earth, be it Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, or Fiji. And this attitude prevailed when no one would have dared an offensive war against the United States—at the height of its power, the Soviet Union flinched in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Two unassailable orthodoxies drove this hyper-interventionism. First was the belief that the national security of the United States was dependent upon the vitality of democracy in foreign lands. Second was the notion that a global military presence, with its ability to ensure international stability and access to resources, was indispensable to economic growth. Both orthodoxies are patent nonsense, yet both continue to dominate American thinking.
Harry Truman gave voice to the first during a speech before Congress on March 12, 1947, when he proclaimed the doctrine that now bears his name. His address sought to win approval of $400 million in economic and military aid to Turkey and Greece, two countries that the executive branch viewed as being endangered by Communist takeovers.
Truman incited alarm by claiming that leftist coups in those countries would allow totalitarianism and despair to sweep through Europe and imperil the globe: “The free people of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this Nation.” Thus a prime objective of American foreign policy must be “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion,” and the U.S. must ever “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
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From the late 1940s to the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents interceded everywhere in the world in an effort to contain or to defeat the USSR. No country was too small for the United States to believe its alignment with the Soviet Union would be pivotal to American safety, freedom, or prosperity. For the first time, America began to devise a foreign policy for every nation on earth, be it Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, or Fiji. And this attitude prevailed when no one would have dared an offensive war against the United States—at the height of its power, the Soviet Union flinched in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Two unassailable orthodoxies drove this hyper-interventionism. First was the belief that the national security of the United States was dependent upon the vitality of democracy in foreign lands. Second was the notion that a global military presence, with its ability to ensure international stability and access to resources, was indispensable to economic growth. Both orthodoxies are patent nonsense, yet both continue to dominate American thinking.
Harry Truman gave voice to the first during a speech before Congress on March 12, 1947, when he proclaimed the doctrine that now bears his name. His address sought to win approval of $400 million in economic and military aid to Turkey and Greece, two countries that the executive branch viewed as being endangered by Communist takeovers.
Truman incited alarm by claiming that leftist coups in those countries would allow totalitarianism and despair to sweep through Europe and imperil the globe: “The free people of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this Nation.” Thus a prime objective of American foreign policy must be “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion,” and the U.S. must ever “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”