A new history explains how and why, as it prepared to enter World
War II, the United States decided to lead the postwar world.
For most of its
history, the United States avoided making political and military
commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics.
Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s
armed superpower—and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World,
Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to the crucible of
World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl
Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s
new foreign policy came to believe that the United States ought to
achieve primacy in international affairs forevermore.
Scholars have
struggled to explain the decision to pursue global supremacy. Some
deny that American elites made a willing choice, casting the United
States as a reluctant power that sloughed off “isolationism” only
after all potential competitors lay in ruins. Others contend that the
United States had always coveted global dominance and realized its
ambition at the first opportunity. Both views are wrong. As late as
1940, the small coterie of officials and experts who composed the
U.S. foreign policy class either wanted British preeminence in global
affairs to continue or hoped that no power would dominate. The war,
however, swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that
the United States should extend its form of law and order across the
globe and back it at gunpoint. Wertheim argues that no one favored
“isolationism”—a term introduced by advocates of armed
supremacy in order to turn their own cause into the definition of a
new “internationalism.”
We now live,
Wertheim warns, in the world that these men created. A sophisticated
and impassioned narrative that questions the wisdom of U.S.
supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path
that brought us to today’s global entanglements and endless wars.