George Washington`s Farewell Address, the Cold

Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
George Washington's Farewell Address, the Cold War, and the Timeless National Interest
Author(s): Edward Pessen and George Washington
Source: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 1-25
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Early
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GEORGE
WASHINGTON'S
FAREWELL
THE
COLD
THE
ADDRESS,
AND
WAR,
TIMELESS
NATIONAL
INTEREST
Edward Pessen
Guided by James Madison's advice, proferred as early as June 1792,
that he direct his planned valedictory to his "only constituents"--the
American people-George Washington fifty-one months later presented
an address to his "Friends and Fellow Citizens," which appeared in
a Philadelphia newspaper, Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser, on
September 19, 1796. What has been called Washington's political testament was quickly reprinted in journals throughout the country and
almost universally described as the "Farewell Address" after George
Hough, publisher of the Courierof New Hampshirein Concord, so labeled
it on October 11, 1796.1 "Elevated to the status of a sacred document" in its own time, Washington's message came to be celebrated
as well over the course of time. Modern scholars have joined politicians, editors, and orators in speaking glowingly of the famous farewell.2
Mr. Pessen is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and the
Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. This article
is a revised version of the presidential address delivered to the Society for Historians
of the Early American Republic at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on July
24, 1986. He wishes to acknowledge his debt to Melvyn P. Leffler, Alfred F. Young,
Ronald W. Pruessen, and Henry Steele Commager for their invaluable critical readings
of an earlier draft of this essay. The author claims responsibility for any errors of
fact and deficiencies of interpretation.
I Victor Hugo Paltsits, ed., Washington's Farewell Address ... (New York 1935),
55, 67, 227, 338.
2 The
quotation is from Arthur A. Markowitz, "Washington's Farewell and the
Historians: A Critical Review," PennsylvaniaMagazine of History and Biography, 94 (Apr.
1970), 173. Markowitz's essay and Burton Ira Kaufman, ed., Washington's Farewell
Address: The View From the 20th Century (Chicago 1969), offer the fullest discussions
JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 7 (Spring 1987). ? 1987 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
2
JOURNAL
OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
And yet, paradoxically, for all the public rhetoric glorifying and paying homage to it, the address or, more precisely, the important foreign
policy principles at the center of the address, have been largely
neglected.
It is not simply that American statesmen have turned their backs
on Washington's warning against enduring alliances and what he called
his additional "sentiments" bearing on our relations with other nations.3 Scholars, too, while of course attentive to Washington's strictures on foreign alliances, have barely glanced at his other foreign
policy sentiments or principles, let alone examined their significance
and implications. Even Felix Gilbert's praiseworthy study, for all its
virtues, treats this matter cursorily.4 Perhaps one reason that
policymakers have been able to abandon Washington's principles with
such ease and so few qualms is precisely that these principles are not
well known and even less well understood.
In this paper, in examining closely the chief foreign policy ideas
of the Farewell Address, I mean to work out in some detail the implications of these ideas, the character of the world order they portray,
the nature of the national interest they present. I shall also consider,
if briefly, the part played by Washington himself in formulating these
principles. One can be brief because this is one of the issues bearing
on the address that has not been neglected.5 The matter is worth considering because if, as was fairly widely believed after Washington's
death, the great man had done little more than add his signature to
a paper written by Alexander Hamilton, the towering standing of the
of the scholarly literature on the theme. See too Paltsits, ed., Washington's Farewell
Address, ch. 4, "The Reactions to the Farewell Address Succeeding Its Publication,"
55-74.
Horace Binney long ago noted that, while the Farewell Address was much
3
praised, its principles were rarely "followed" by American policymakers. See his An
Inquiry Into the Formation of Washington's Farewell Address (Philadelphia 1859), iv.
Ideas of EarlyAmericanForeignPolicy (Princeton
4 Felix Gilbert, To the FarewellAddress.
1961), discusses the address itself only in the brief final chapter.
See Binney, An Inquiry Into the Formation of Washington's Farewell Address, an in5
formed and balanced statement by a well-known political and legal figure that, despite
its incompleteness and the inaccuracy of some of its evidence, is still useful. Based
on fuller information but neither as insightful nor as unbiased as Binney's book is
Paltsits, Washington's Farewell Address, ch. 5, "The Rise of the Controversy Concerning the Authorship of the Farewell Address," 75-94, which bristles at the suggestion
that Washington was not the author of every important idea in the address. Edmund
S. Morgan has recently written that the address "was mainly in the words of Alexander Hamilton, but the policy was Washington's." See The Geniusof GeorgeWashington
(New York 1980), 83.
FAREWELL ADDRESS AND THE COLD WAR
3
message would have significantly shrunk. Certainly Washington's contemporaries thought the matter important.6
I shall glance too at what we know concerning the depth or degree
of conviction with which Washington held to the foreign policy beliefs
he presented in the address. In the judgment of some modern critics,
the address was essentially a partisan document, designed primarily
if not solely to have political effect in Washington's own time.' If its
principles were nothing more than that, it would be surprising indeed
if they could serve as the enduring guide to American foreign policy
that Washington said he believed them to be. Finally, I shall examine
the question, do the foreign policy principles of the Farewell Address
have the enduring validity that Washington claimed for them or have
they been made obsolete, their value, whatever it might once have
been, dissipated by the great changes that have overtaken the United
States and the world since 1796?
Since these are questions of large scope, I entertain no illusions
about being able to answer them in a brief essay. My hope is that
the observations that follow may stimulate further discussion of the
issues in controversy.
After a brief introduction disclosing Washington's decision not to
stand again for the presidency, the Farewell Address covers two large
themes: the need for unity at home or the domestic requirements of
the nation, and the appropriate path it should follow in the international arena. Washington believed the two fronts were interrelated.
Internal unity was a "main pillar" not only of the people's "tranquillity at home" but of their "peace abroad." And a unified nation
would be able to "avoid the necessity of the overgrown military
establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious
6
James Madison suggested that Hamiltonian authorship would not only detract
from the paper's "charm" but would detract too from its reputation for nonpartisan,
patriotic concern for the enduring national interest. John Marshall believed that if
Hamilton were the true author, "respect for the Address" would be diminished. These
and other contemporary statements are cited in Paltsits, ed., Washington's Farewell
Address, 83, 87.
7 Alexander DeConde,
"Washington's Farewell, the French Alliance, and the
Election of 1796," Mississippi ValleyHistorical Review, 43 (Mar. 1957), 641-658; Robert
F. Jones, GeorgeWashington(Boston 1979), 135; Burton Ira Kaufman, "Washington's
Farewell Address: A Statement of Empire," in Kaufman, ed., Washington's Farewell
Address, 169-187; Nathan Schachner, "Washington's Farewell," ibid., 137-150; and
Markowitz, "Washington's Farewell and the Historians," 173-191. In what appears
to have been his thorough reading of the secondary literature, Markowitz observes
that most specialists on the politics of the early national period are drawn to the view
that the Farewell Address was a partisan political document of contemporary relevance.
4
JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to
Since the important foreign policy principles in
republican liberty.''8
the message were stated pithily, I think it useful, before attempting
to analyze them, first to recite them in Washington's
own language
and in the order in which he presents them:
Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace
and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and
can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy
of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great Nation, to
give mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a People
always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt
that in the course of time . . . the fruits of such a plan would richly
repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady
adherence to it?
In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that
permanent inveterate antipathies against particular Nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that in place of them
just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation,
which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its
affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty
and its interest. Antipathy in one Nation against another disposes each
more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of
umbrage. . ... The Nation, prompted by ill will and resentment
sometimes impels to War the Government, contrary to the best calculations of policy .
Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of
another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one
side. . . . Real Patriots, who may resist the intriegues of the favourite,
are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes
usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their
interests.
is
SThe Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations
. have with them as little political connection as possible. So far
to
.
as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled, with perfect
good faith. Here let us stop. . . . it must be unwise in us to implicate
8
All excerpts from and paraphrasesof the address are drawn from Paltsits, ed.,
Washington'sFarewellAddress,"Washington's Final Manuscript of the Farewell Addres," 139-159. For ease of readability, abbreviations here have been expanded, interlineations silently included, and punctuation modernized.
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
5
ourselves . . . in the . .. vicissitudes of [Europe's] politics, or in the
ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities.
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue
a differentcourse. . . . Why forego the advantagesof so peculiara situation? . . . Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of
Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, Rivalship, Interest, Humour or Caprice? 'Tis our true policy
to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign
world. . ... Taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable
establishments, on a reasonably defensive posture, we may safely trust
to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended
[not only by religion and morality but] by policy, humanity and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand: neither seeking nor granting exclusive favours or
preferences ....
Justice and humanity impose on every Nation . . .
to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity towards other
Nations ....
These foreign policy principles in the Farewell Address are not
merely a series of ad hoc exhortations pressed by a departing leader
on his people. The result, in Washington's phrase, of "much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation," they represent a carefully
reasoned, intellectually consistent appraisal of the political world of
nations and of the wisest course for a republic to follow in its relations
with other nations, given the nature of the political world. Before
attempting to work out the implications of that appraisal and critically
assessing its worth, let me first touch briefly on Washington's own
role in the formulation of these ideas and the degree of conviction
with which he himself believed in the sentiments uttered in his name.
We have known for some time that the essential foreign policy
ideas in the address were invented neither by Washington nor Hamilton
but rather were the common intellectual currency of the nation's postrevolutionary political leadership. According to Samuel Flagg Bemis,
ideas "common to American statesmen and diplomats of [Washington's]
time"-"the fruit of American diplomatic experience since the Declaration of Independence"-'had
"reinforced Washington's opinions and
even shaped their expression a little." Felix Gilbert's study of the formative influences on the foreign policy ideas in the address led him to
conclude that both "in its terminology and formulations, the section
on foreign policy echoed expressions and thoughts which had dominated
the discussion of foreign affairs" in America since independence,
thoughts that had been uttered by children of the Enlightenment in
JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
France as well as in the United States. More recently Lawrence S.
Kaplan has observed that very few Americans dissented from the address's aversion to alliances and foreign entanglements.9 A tribute to
the pervasiveness and popularity of the foreign policy ideas in the
farewell is the fact that the first inaugural address by Jefferson-the
very man who, according to one theory, Washington and Hamilton
had prepared the address in order to defeat-contained the Washingtonian
call for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,
entangling alliances with none." If in a sense the Farewell Address
spoke for an era, expressing sentiments shared by sometimes bitter
antagonists, its actual phrases articulated most clearly the political mind
of its chief author, George Washington.
On May 15, 1796, Washington sent Hamilton what Victor Hugo
Paltsits, the leading authority on the matter, calls a "first draft" to
guide the treasury secretary in preparing what Washington thought
would be a valedictory better organized and more gracefully written
than one he himself could manage. Hamilton proceeded to create a
"major draft," based on the substantive statements in Washington's
draft. Washington's final message followed very closely the organization and the language in Hamilton's major draft. Yet a close examination of the two makes clear that the president omitted many of
Hamilton's phrases and made significant changes in other of his advisor's words. Felix Gilbert's conclusion is that it was Hamilton who
introduced the strong note of realism in the address, at the expense
of Washington's idealism. The actual changes that Washington made
as he prepared the address for final publication indicate that it was
the president who was the greater realist.
Where Hamilton speaks of no greater error than "to desire, expect, or calculate upon real favors" from other states, Washington
excises the phrase "to desire." Hamilton's " 'tis folly in one nation
to expect disinterested favors from another" is replaced by " 'tis folly
in one nation to look for disinterested favor in another." Desire and
expectation should evidently have no part in a diplomatist's lexicon.
Washington substitutes "policy" for Hamilton's "justice" as one of
the grounds for seeking "harmony, liberal intercourse and commerce
with all nations." The Hamiltonian warning that the "real patriots"
6
Farewell and the
9 Bemis' views are cited in Markowitz,
"Washington's
Historians," 179; Gilbert, To the Farewell Address, 45, 69, 73, 131 (quotation); and
Kaplan, "The Treaties of Paris and Washington, 1778 and 1949: Reflections on Entangling Alliances," in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Diplomacyand Revolution: The Franco-AmericanAlliance of 1778 (Charlottesville 1981), 175.
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
7
who oppose a wrongheaded, because partisan, foreign policy "become
suspected and odious" is changed to the more cautious and realistic
"liable to become suspected and odious"; the misleaders who "usurp
the applause and confidence of the people to betray their interests"
becomes the less accusatory "to surrender their interests." Washington
appears to have weighed each word carefully. Hamilton writes that
just and amicable feelings towards all rather than fixed "rooted antipathies against or passionate attachments for any," should be
"cultivated as a general rule." His language permits exceptions. In
discarding the allusion to a general rule, Washington firms up his position: no exceptions to the policy are permissable. Where Hamilton
assures us that "we may safely trust to occasional alliances for extraordinary emergencies," Washington crosses out "occasional," replacing
it with "temporary," providing yet another example of his comforting precision in usage and his alertness to and unwillingness to abide
any suggestion that we enter into enduring alliances. Other Washingtonian modifications of Hamilton's final draft point to the president's pride,
his refusal to concede that the purity of his motives can ever be in
question, his modesty, and his unblushing love for his people and his
country. But since the latter traits, while charming, are not in question in this discussion, I shall settle for this swift allusion to them.
George Washington was not a political philosopher in the ordinary
meaning of the term, let alone an original political thinker. But as
Jared Sparks long ago pointed out, Washington's private papers disclose
that well before 1796 he had expressed his support of the foreign policy
sentiments recorded in the Farewell Address. Harold W. Bradley has
more recently shown that Washington's letters reveal a man who
believed deeply and passionately in the important principles that he
later published in his valedictory.'0 Washington, the realist-idealist,
wrote that "nations as well as individuals, act for their own benefit,
and not for the benefit of others"--"unless, " that is, "both interests
Gilbert has suggested that
happen to be assimilated . . . ."
Washington's strongly expressed opposition to war-his admonition
in the first draft of the address that we should "never unsheath the
sword except in self-defense"--was a clever, seemingacceptance of the
antiwar sentiments of his time, motivated actually by the great man's
10
On Sparks see Paltsits, ed., Washington's Farewell Address, passim, especially
the final section, "Correspondence and Documents"; and Harold W. Bradley, "The
Political Thinking of George Washington, " Journal of SouthernHistory, 11 (Nov. 1945),
469-486.
" Paltsits, ed., Washington's Farewell Address, 169.
8
JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
fears that emotional attachment to France would lead us into a particular war that he opposed.12 This is not a persuasive interpretation
of the motives of a man who told his country that he "devoutly pray[ed]
that we may remain at peace to the end of time." A decade before
he presented the address, Washington had stated as his "first wish"
that war should be forever "banished from the earth," and he shortly
afterwards spoke in praise of a universal language as a project that
might "one day remove many of the causes of hostility from amongst
mankind." These observations appear to justify Bradley's conclusion
that Washington's "antipathy to war ...
appears to have been
this
"his
later
that
country should avoid
anxiety
genuine," explaining
a participation in the quarrels of the Old World."'3
At the conclusion of the Farewell Address, Washington told his
countrymen that the sentiments he presented for their consideration
were motivated by "a solicitude for [their] welfare," were regarded
by him as "all important to the permanency of [their] felicity as a
people," and were "the disinterested warnings of a parting friend who
can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsels." I trust
it is not hero worshiping gush to suggest that Washington spoke those
words sincerely. As president he had shown his determination to respect
not simply his own, but his friends' and colleagues' promises to the
people on a matter of great importance and his readiness to subordinate his own political preferences, if respecting a promise to the people
made it necessary to do so.14 There is good reason therefore to believe
that Washington meant every word he said about the enduring value
of the foreign policy advice he offered the American people.
To the Farewell Address, 135-136.
Bradley, "The Political Thinking of George Washington," 483.
14
I refer to Washington's behavior with regard to the presidential veto.
Washington was no less aware than later was Andrew Jackson that, as written, Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution permitted a president to veto congressional bills
at whim. But, as Washington wrote a constituent, "From motives of respect to the
legislature (and I might add from my interpretation of the Constitution) I gave my
signature to many bills with which my judgment is at variance." Washington
remembered Madison's advice to the Philadelphia convention that the object of the
veto was twofold: to protect the executive from unwarranted attack and to prevent
flagrant injustice. And Washington was doubtless familiar with Hamilton's assurance
in the Federalist No. 73 that the primary aim of the veto was to "enable the executive
to defend himself against congressional encroachment" and its secondary purpose
to protect the people against "improper" laws. The point is that Washington appears
to have taken very seriously promises made by political leaders to the people in matters
of high importance. For the citations and evidence documenting these conclusions
see Edward Pessen, "Flouting the Founders: The Arrogant Veto," The Nation, August
30, 1975, 133-137.
12 Gilbert,
13
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
9
Let me now set forth what it seems to me are the clear implications of Washington's foreign policy principles, the perception they
offer of the world political order and of what constitutes the national
interest, given the nature of that political order.
In an ideal world, all human beings would belong to a single
political order based on their common feelings of species solidarity
or brotherly love. In the actual world, men and women are divided
into separate nations, each of which harbors suspicion of all other states
or nations. These states are governed by leaders who seek to expand
their own and their nations' wealth and power, and have no compunction about resorting to war in order to accomplish their selfish
purposes.
In view of these facts of life, the duty of responsible leaders of
a republic-a state run not in the interests of the few who control
and own most of it but in the interests of the majority of people who
inhabit it-is clear. They must seek to enhance the security of their
own people and try to keep them out of war, the scourge of mankind,
the great evil of international relations. In order to achieve these ends,
republican leaders must pursue a policy of friendly relations with all
other nations. And to enhance the prosperity as well as the security
and peaceful existence of their own people, the leaders of a republic
should pursue friendly trade and commerce with all willing nations.
The true national interest consists then in avoiding war and promoting
prosperity through peaceful commerce, not in territorial aggrandizement and control or domination of foreign lands and resources.
Given the amorality of the great powers of the world, avoiding
war with them requires us not only to eschew provocative behavior
but to try to achieve the internal strength necessary to discourage invasion. Given our fortunate geographical situation, the comforting
weakness of the states adjacent to us, and the happy fact that as a
principled republic we need harbor no design to create an empire of
our own, we needed something substantially less than a swollen military
establishment of the sort that historically was threatening to republican
order. The acquisition of empire is an inappropriate goal of American
foreign policy because creating an empire requires war and dangerously
large military establishments and would engage us too in a career that
is both unworthy and contrary to the national interest. The financial
profit that is available through relations with foreign nations is best
pursued by peaceful commercial means rather than by conquest. Annexing foreign lands or controlling their labor and resources against the
wishes of their own inhabitants, is precisely the kind of traditional
great power behavior that we must firmly cast aside. For, among its
10
JOURNAL
OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
other flaws, it is imperial behavior that offends against justice, the
wealth it taps is illusory in view of the massive costs involved in attaining and controlling it, and by involving us gratuitously and unnecessarily in the possession and therefore the protection of distant
places, it increases the likelihood of war-war caused not by an attack
on the United States but an attack on imperial possessions we would
be better off without.
In view of the actual nature of the world and the nations which
compose it, it would be a misconceived and most dangerous seeming
idealism for a republic's leaders to act as though their responsibility
extended to embrace the interests of nations other than their own.
No matter how lofty their motives, leaders pursuing such a policy would
jeopardize the interests of their own people in serving, even if unwittingly, the interests of the amoral leaders of another people. (Anticipating Palmerston's famous maxim, Washington holds that private
individuals have friends; nations have interests.) Equally dangerous
and misconceived would be a policy designed to accomplish the victory abroad of abstract political ideals or this or that political order.
In a brute international order, threatening above all, but not only,
to small and weak states, digression by leaders from their appropriate
tasks will detract from the likelihood of their accomplishing these tasks.
Some political orders were doubtless more attractive than others but
it was the responsibility of the people of foreign states themselves to
determine how they were to be governed. It was no part of the responsibility of our leaders to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations. Not that the emergence of a seemingly attractive political system
in a state was assurance of its exemplary behavior toward others. As
Thucydides had shown in his account of the Peloponnesian War, that
the Athenian state was relatively liberal in contrast to its Spartan foe
was cold comfort not only to the Lacedaemonians but to the allies
that Athens dominated, as well. An internal order in a foreign state
that some of our leaders might find peculiarly repellant would no more
justify us in singling out such a nation for punitive action than our
own enforcement of slavery on blacks or repressive if temporary servitude on unfortunate whites would justify foreign states that sought
to punish us for these admitted lapses from perfection.
In urging that our leaders act impartially toward all nations,
"whatever our [leaders'] private affections may be,'15 Washington
recognized that the leaders of a republic no less than those of an absolute monarchy are likely to prefer one or another foreign nation or
15 Paltsits, ed.,
Washington's Farewell Address, "Washington's
First Draft,"
170.
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
11
political system or philosophy over others. Such preferences are inevitable among human beings, whatever their rank, whatever the nature
of their government. Monarchs and oligarchs could act with impunity
on such feelings, answerable to no one in committing their people to
unnecessary calamity on the basis of nothing better than their leaders'
whims. But leaders of a republic had no right to indulge their subjective predilections where doing so clearly violated the overriding national interest in peaceful relations with all other nations.
It should be a matter of indifference to our leaders that a foreign
nation has mistreated other nations or peoples-third parties other than
us. For it is necessary to follow the prudent maxims offered in the
Farewell Address precisely because the exploitation of weaker nations
by stronger seems to be a law of international politics. In view of the
universality of such amorality, our proper concern is with how other
nations behave toward us. That they have been up to no good in their
behavior toward others is axiomatic.
We must try to treat them all equally well not because we thought
well of them or because their leaders deserve it but because it is in
our interest to do so. Friendly behavior by us toward all nations and
profitable commercial relations between us are praiseworthy not because
they conform to an abstract ideal of noble international political behavior
but because they strengthen our chances for peace and prosperity in
the world as it is. The seeming idealism that fails to recognize the
world and foreign nations as they actually are gratuitously impairs
our security, threatens the peace, and deprives us of a valuable means
of enhancing our prosperity. It is a true or higher idealism that, in
recognizing the reality of the world of nations, guides us to achieve
greater safety, security, and well-being within that world.
Since men, including the men who will in the future govern our
republic, are fallible, it is likely that whether out of ego, partisanship,
wickedness, stupidity, or any combination of human frailties, they will
from time to time depart from the principles sustaining the national
interest. That is why, according to Washington, true patriotism at
such dangerous moments for the republic will consist of calling attention to and opposing the follies being perpetrated by errant leaders.
Such patriotism is particularly admirable because it will not be free
of risk at a time when, given the power of a nation's leaders to sway
the popular mind, passions are running strong. Critics are indeed likely
at such times to be "suspected and odious." But persevere they should,
fortified by the assurance that the unpopular path they follow is the
truly partriotic one.
These, it seems to me, are the implications of the foreign policy
JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
12
section of the Farewell Address, its underlying conception of the world
political order, and its guide to the appropriate behavior by the
American republic in such a world.
Even those of us who have only the most cursory knowledge of
American diplomatic history since the end of World War II must feel
compelled to agree that, if Washington's foreign policy principles continue to have force, what might be called American Cold War foreign
policy, particularly in its treatment of the Soviet Union, is highly questionable if not grievously wrong.'6 In view of its clear call for good
relations with all nations, regardless of their political and other domestic
institutions or their external behavior toward nations other than us,
it is hard to disagree with Felix Gilbert that the Farewell Address was
a warning "against the danger of letting ideological predilections or
prejudices enter considerations of foreign policy.""7 But certainly our
post-World War II policy and treatment of what our leaders have
regularly called our Soviet "adversary" and our Soviet "enemy," for
all the slight variations that have inevitably characterized this policy
and treatment over a forty-year period, have been consistently
"ideological," however that overworked term be defined.'8
In the era of the Cold War, we have hardly observed "good faith
and justice towards all nations" and certainly we have not cultivated
"peace and harmony" with the Soviet Union or with the other nations our leaders have designated as members of the Soviet camp. We
have instead cultivated precisely what Washington warned against:
"permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations"-those
Others have remarked on the obvious contradiction between Washington's
of
principles and our post-World War II foreign policy. See the televised interview
Channel
David
Susskind
Metromedia,
"The
on
Show,"
Steele
Commager
Henry
5, July 7, 1985, in New York City; and Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington
and the Enlightenment(Garden City N.Y. 1984), 95. One purpose of the discussion
that follows is to go beyond the contradiction between an old set of ideas and our
recent behavior to determine whether the ideas in question are truly outmoded.
17 Gilbert, To the Farewell Address, 123.
18
The record is quite full on public as well as private denunciations of the socalled Soviet enemy by leading American policymakers in the years since 1945. See
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New
York 1972), passim; Daniel Yergin, ShatteredPeace: The Origins of the Cold War and the
National Security State (Boston 1977), 242; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The
Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York 1980), 106; Gaddis, Strategiesof
Containment:A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National SecurityPolicy (New York
Postwar
1982), 122; Michael S. Sherry, Preparingfor the Next War: American Plans for
The
Defense, 1941-45 (New Haven 1977); and Anthony Cave Brown, ed., Dropshot:
United States Plan for War with the Soviet Union in 1957 (New York 1978).
16
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
13
in the Soviet orbit-and "passionate attachment for others"-states
led by anticommunist or anti-Soviet governments. We have exhibited
"towards another the habitual hatred" that in Washington's phrase
would make the nation "a slave to its animosity . .. sufficient to lead
it astray from its duty and its interest." Prompted, as we have been,
by what Washington called "ill will and resentment," we have alas
been "impel[led] to war . . . contrary to [our] best calculations of
policy," as so many Americans and our friends abroad adjudge our
decision to wage war in Vietnam. We have displayed that "excessive
partiality" toward some nations and "excessive dislike" of others conducive to the creation of a political atmosphere in which the "real
patriots" who oppose what they believe to be bad policy have indeed
become "suspected and odious." We have not held out "an equal
and impartial hand" in pursuing commercial policy. In repudiating
"our true policy [of steering] clear of permanent alliances," we have
"entangle[d] our peace and prosperity in the toils" not only of "European ambition" but in the toils of the ambition of anticommunist states
all over the earth. In acting as though it is in our national interest
to prevent the coming to power of what our leaders call Marxist-Leninist
regimes abroad and to resort to military force to do so as well as to
assure that foreign resources we have grown accustomed to having
are not denied us by "unfriendly governments," we have repudiated
Washington's concept of the true national interest. And instead of
avoiding, we have sought assiduously to create the very "overgrown
military establishments" that Washington believed were "particularly
hostile to republican liberty."
The implicit rationale of American leaders in pursuing our foreign
policy is that the circumstances of the post-World War II world, the
misbehavior of the Soviet state, and the pernicious ideology shaping
that misbehavior left us no alternative but to act as we have done.
Or, to put the point in the language of this discussion, modern circumstances have rendered Washington's foreign policy doctrines into the
applicable. For the rest of this paper, I shall
ideas in the Farewell
question, is this indeed so? Are the foreign policyaddress.myself
Address obsolete in today's world?
Offering a creditable answer to this question requires, among other
things, a fair knowledge of, if not expertise in, the history of the twentieth century. While I can lay no claim to expertise, my recent work
in preparing for publication a book length study of our Cold War
foreign policy and its domestic consequences has prompted me to dip
into the literature on recent events in much greater depth than I ever
anticipated I would when I was earlier pondering the significance of
14
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OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Skidmore, John Jacob Astor, Philip
Hone, and Frances Wright.
For what it is worth, Washington himself appears to have believed
that his foreign policy sentiments had timeless force. He said that he
regarded them as "all important to the permanencyof [the] felicity"
of the American people.19 Since it can be presumed that Washington
was quite aware that time would bring change to our country as to
other countries, it seems reasonably clear therefore that he thought
his observations had enduring relevance, come what may. His principles would promote the national interest both in his own time, when
we were small and weak, and at that "no distant period," when we
would be "a great nation."20
Not that Washington had any illusions concerning the adherence
of his successors to his fundamental beliefs. He "dare[d] not hope"
his sentiments would "make the strong and lasting impression [he]
could wish" and thus prevent the nation he loved so well from "running the [dismal] course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations." But these were doubts not about the wisdom of the course
he had charted but doubts rather about the capacity of later generations and their leaders to deviate from the forlorn patterns of international behavior followed by other states and hew instead to the path
conducive to our enduring peace and happiness.
Branding the foreign policy themes of the address "Isolationism!"
some critics have charged that the policy may have served us well
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but is inadequate to the
needs and interests of the great nation that we subsequently became.
"While the nation changed in size and in power, the catchwords of
"elevated by generations of politicians to the
isolation"'-ostensibly
on the special destiny of America" -"did
of
revelations
plane
mystic
not [change], and isolationism inevitably became little more than congeries of slogans appealing to the emotions and to nostalgia rather
than a rational response to the nation's [new] needs," charges one
historian. Another cautions that the isolationists who repair to the
Farewell Address as a standard "fail . . . to note the peculiar context
of the times in which Washington issued his solemn warning." Since
in our own time "jet planes, long-range bombers, submarines, atom
and hydrogen bombs, radio and ideologies can penetrate the most formidable barrier," since the Atlantic "is neither frontier nor barrier
'19 Paltsits, ed.,
20
Ibid., 153.
Washington's Farewell Address, 142. The italics are mine.
FAREWELL ADDRESS AND THE COLD WAR
15
any more," and since "the outposts of the nation have moved to farflung places whose very names were unknown to Americans in
Washington's day," Nathan Schachner thinks it "highly probable that
[Washington] would have been the first to disavow the interpretations
which have since been placed upon his doctrine of 'entangling
alliances.' "21 Schachner appears to mean that Washington, were he
alive at mid-twentieth century, would disavow not merely the "interpretations" that have been placed on his warnings but the continued
relevance of the warnings themselves. Perhaps he would. Yet
Washington's clearly expressed words to the contrary suggest that he
would have stuck to his guns. The real question, however, is not
whether a resurrected Washington would today think this or that but
whether it is in the nation's interest today as yesterday, as Washington
thought it would be, to continue to be guided by his recommendations concerning our behavior toward other nations.
The school of thought that classifies the Farewell Address as a partisan document concerned only with contemporary political issues by
indirection dismisses it as a serious guide to the future international
behavior of the United States. A partisan political document that, in
the words of Alexander DeConde, is merely cloaked in "phrases of
universal or timeless application" and whose "pronouncements studded
with timeless patriotic appeals" serve merely to rationalize its selfish
immediate purposes, cannot be taken seriously as an enduring
diplomatic standard.22 The problem with this critique is that, even
if its interpretation of Washington's motives had merit, it would not
necessarily signify that the address was thereby lacking in wisdom.
That a public pronouncement is uttered for partisan reasons does not
rule out the possibility that it nevertheless possesses intrinsic merit
as well as timeless applicability. Certainly the possibility cannot be
discounted out of hand. A brilliant and enduring treatise, such as The
Federalistpapers, remains brilliant and enduring, notwithstanding the
clearly partisan objectives of its authors. Men up to no good are capable
of saying wise things of lasting value. The road to heaven is sometimes
paved with dubious intentions.
A better because more direct test of Washington's principles than
21 Lawrence S. Kaplan, "NATO and the Language of Isolationism,"South
Atlantic
Quarterly,57 (Spring 1958), 205; Nathan Schachner, "Washington's Farewell," 149.
See Bemis, "Washington's Farewell Address," for the argument that Washington
sought not isolation but independence.
22 DeConde, "Washington's Farewell, the French Alliance, and the Election of
1796," 650.
16
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OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
subjecting the arguments of some of his critics to logical analysis is
to examine the historical trends of this century and to consider how
well Washington's maxims might have served us had we chosen to
abide by them. That such a discussion can not be performed perfectly
does not mean that it cannot be performed usefully. What is certain
in the discussion that follows is that it will be performed something
this side of exhaustively.
We have indeed become, as Washington hoped we would, a country
with a "population, riches & resources, [which] when combined with
its peculiarly happy & remote situation from the other quarters of the
globe, [make it possible for us] to bid defiance, in a just cause, to
any ea[r]thly power whatsoever."'23 And the outside world has changed
perhaps even more drastically than have we. Washington believed that
his principles would continue to apply, despite the transformation in
us and in the world around us, because he expected--certainly he
hoped-that we would continue to be a republic led by honorable men.
Such leaders would understand that their first duty was to promote
the interest of all the people in preserving peace and in enhancing
our prosperity through hard work, scientific progress, and commerce
with all willing nations. Expanding our wealth and resources through
wars of conquest waged by a powerful military machine would be as
contrary to the national interest in our maturity as they had been in
our youth, as unjust, as destructive, as certain to leave bitterness in
their wake and ultimately to be hurtful to us later as they would have
been earlier. (Nations that commit great atrocities, Washington's fellow
Virginian George Mason had said at the Philadelphia Convention,
will suffer great calamities.) War has if anything become even less
permissable because far more horrible than Washington's generation
in its worst nightmare ever dreamed it would be. The means of destruction have become more powerful, the wall between military personnel
and noncombatants has crumbled, the carnage has grown vastly more
devastating.
In view of the continued weakness of our neighboring states to
the north and south, we remain as secure against invasion by land
as we ever were. If a destructive attack on the United States from
air and sea is now conceivable, it may be so not because technological
developments made it unavoidable but because, as the eminent scientist Philip Morrison has recently observed, the policies chosen by
American leaders made it possible, not only during the Cold War but
23
Paltsits, ed., Washington's Farewell Address, 170.
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
17
during the generation preceding.24 American creation, use, and subsequent buildup of nuclear weapons openly aimed at one state have triggered a response by that state that makes us more vulnerable to destruction than ever before in our history. If we stand on the edge of the
abyss,25 it is not because advances in weaponry required it to be so
but because, in renouncing the principles of the Farewell Address,
our leaders over the past generation gratuitously assured that it be so.
During the early twentieth century, well before the advent of the
Soviet state, the United States many times flouted Washington's advice that we cultivate peaceful relations with all nations, particularly
in Central and Latin America, but also in China and the Philippine
Islands. We did so not because as a great, large, wealthy, and powerful nation we had to do so. A nation so fortunately endowed as we
need not resort to force or the threat of force to maintain or improve
on whatever prosperity it enjoys through the peaceable means advocated
by Washington. We did so because our leaders elected to have us act
as a Great Power; that is, to use our strength as do imperial powers-to
compel weaker states and peoples to give us what our leaders wanted,
whether resources, cheap labor, naval bases and fueling stations, or
most favored nation commercial and financial opportunities.
It is not at all apparent that this path we chose has redounded
to the advantage of the American people. What is apparent is that
our policies, marked as they were by attitudes of racial superiority
as well as imperial arrogance, provoked bitter anti-American feelings
in their wake. Far from adding to our security, our new status as a
Great Pacific Power only made more likely war between us and the
two dominant nations of that region, as was shown first in 1941 and
again a decade later. In view, too, of the violence our behavior did
24
Morrison, a group leader at the Los Alamos Laboratory at the time of the
Manhattan Project, has recently written that the United States, "the most powerful
of modern nations, has been following a terribly erroneous strategic course, indeed,
a course that looks suicidal ... ." Since, because of the weakness of Canada and
Mexico, we are unique among "every power in the history of the world" in being
secure from attack by land, "the only way the survival of the American people and
their state could be put at risk is by intercontinental strategic warfare, and that is
[precisely] the kind of warfare promoted, developed, pioneered, and given enormous
tax dollars by the U.S. government, especially the Air Force, since . . . 1914." Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, 41 (Dec. 1985), 27.
25 The minute hand on the
"doomsday clock" kept by the nation's leading nuclear
scientists has been moved to three minutes before midnight-the
midnight of nuclear
holocaust. See ibid., 41 (Aug. 1985), 2. Nor has the minute hand been moved in
subsequent issues of the Bulletin up to the present.
18
JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
to our noblest American traditions, the dissension it provoked within
the nation, and the uneven material benefits of such adventures and
the encouragement they gave to a highly dangerous pattern of American
international behavior responsive above all to the presumed interests
of one tiny segment of American society-the business community or,
narrower still, particular corporations within the business communitythere is much to be said for the conclusion that our early twentieth
century renunciation of Washington's foreign policy principles only
confirms the wisdom of those principles.
Like other states pursuing amoral policies abroad, the United States
and its leaders invoked lofty justifications for our imperial performance,
justifications that if they were unlikely to satisfy skeptics abroad, might
at least mollify nationalistic public opinion at home. Abetted by racist,
jingoistic, and acquiescent publicists and scholars, our statesmen proclaimed that our intentions were honorable, motivated by sentiments
of Christian uplift and our awareness of the obligations attendant on
racial and cultural superiority, and that our actions were congruent
with the dictates of biological and social science.26 From the vantage
point of the late twentieth century, these rationalizations earlier in
the twentieth century are intellectually deficient as well as hypocritical,
providing the barest fig leaf of covering for our amoral international
behavior.
New justifications have of course been offered for our international
behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Christian dogooding, racial and cultural noblesse oblige, and social Darwinism are
all out of fashion in a world populated largely by dark-skinned nonChristians engaged in revolt against the old empires controlled by the
western world and against the doctrines upholding the rightness of
those empires. The new catchwords are anticommunism and anti-
26
David F. Healy, The United States in Cuba, 1898-1902. Generals, Politicians, and
the Searchfor Policy (Madison 1963); David H. Burton, TheodoreRoosevelt: ConfidentImperialist (Philadelphia 1968); Dana G. Munro, Interventionand Dollar Diplomacy in the
Caribbean, 1900-1921 (Princeton 1964); E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the
United States: The GreatDebate, 1890-1920 (Philadelphia 1970); Barbara Tuchman, The
Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York 1966); Paul
A. Varg, The Making of a Myth: The United States and China, 1897-1912 (East Lansing
1968); George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy: 1900-1950 (Chicago 1951); Richard
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in AmericanThought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia 1945); Robert
L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York 1968;
rep. Chicago 1985); and Rubin F. Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence
of Racial Assumptionson AmericanForeignPolicy, 1893-1946 (Columbia, S.C. 1972). Critics
of our imperial policy there, of course, were. But they were defeated.
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
19
Marxism-Leninism, democracy and freedom. This is not to say that
because earlier rhetoric glorifying unlovely policy turns out to have
been almost palpably unworthy rhetoric, that the foreign policy and
the rhetoric justifying that policy in our own time are similarly unlovely
and unworthy. Critical evaluation, not reasoning from analogy, is required in order to do justice to our more recent international
performance.
The catalogue of American anti-Soviet actions-alliances,
arms
buildups, plans for preemptive military strikes, foreign interventions,
covert actions, undeclared wars against alleged Soviet satellitesdepartures all from Washington's principles, have been justified by
our leaders as behavior made necessary by the unprecedentedly
dangerous actions of the Soviet state and by the pernicious MarxistLeninist doctrines that we say underlie Soviet behavior. This of course
is not the occasion for a detailed investigation of the Cold War. Yet
even a swift but critical glance at our policy and the reasons we offer
for it raises disquieting questions about both, questions that suggest
the wisdom and the continuing relevance of the Farewell Address in
the era of Bolshevism and of international movements and uprisings
that may have been inspired, at least in part, by Bolshevism.
While our leaders have many times expressed their aversion to
Soviet domestic practices and institutions, they profess to have found
it necessary to put in place our Cold War policies above all because
of external actions taken by the Soviet Union in the years immediately following the end of World War II. In appraising American responses
to Soviet postwar behavior (or misbehavior), the question to be kept
in mind is not whether or not one or another of the Soviet actions
was blameworthy. That Soviet leaders invariably sought to justify their
domination of Eastern Europe or the pressure they put on Iran and
Turkey in the Middle East in the lofty platitudes of Marxist internationalism does not reduce by one iota the amorality and the great power
self-centeredness of their policies. The real questions about the Soviet
postwar actions that President Harry S. Truman and his successors
cited as reason for our Cold War policies is whether these Soviet actions threatened the peace and security of the United States and made
the U.S.S.R. the adversary or even the enemy of the United States,
thus requiring us to respond as we did. Let me try briefly to answer
these questions.
Who is of a mind to do so can extract from the historical record
a substantial litany of statements, public and private, by American
political and military leaders, proclaiming the Soviet Union the enemy
of the United States and the Cold War a real war. Daniel Yergin,
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author of a book on the origins of the Cold War that is widely admired for its learning, detachment, and good sense, concludes that
by as early as summer 1946 American "policymakers" and "senior
officials" were "virtually unanimous" in saying that "the United States
was, in effect, at war with the Soviet Union, and should therefore
adopt perspectives and policies appropriate to war." And we did indeed adopt such perspectives and policies, not excluding plans for bringing down the Soviet system and destroying every possible Russian
military and civilian target.27
The Truman and subsequent administrations might insist that "the
cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the [United
States and the] free world is at stake," and that the Soviet Union
is our enemy, yet their exhortations did not make it so.28
The enemy of the United States is a nation with which we are
at war. In the federal case bearing most directly on the issue (United
Statesv. Greathouse),
Justice Stephen Field ruled that "the term 'enemies,'
as used in the [Constitution], according to its settled meaning, at the
time the Constitution was adopted, applies only to the subjects of a
foreign power in a state of open hostility with us." The section on
"definitions" in the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 as amended
states that "the word 'enemy,' as used herein, shall be deemed to
mean . . [any subject, group of subjects, or] the government of any
nation with which the United States is at war ... ."29 A foreign nation may become our enemy if we engage in war with or against it,
for whatever reasons good or bad. But a foreign nation can not be
made our enemy because our leaders detest its principles, its internal
arrangements, or its foreign policy.
The Cold War may be a kind of war, it may be like war in a
number of respects. Yet it is not war. Calling it a real war has no
more force in law than does calling a nation with which we are at
peace the enemy. True, the tensions and hostility generated by the
Cold War led to the outbreak of real or shooting war, if undeclared
27 Yergin, ShatteredPeace, 242, 229. See too Gaddis, The United Statesand the Origins
the
Cold War; Herken, The Winning Weapon, 329, 106, 287; Gaddis, Strategies of
of
Containment, 122; Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Containment:
Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York 1978); Sherry, Preparing for the Next War; and Brown, Dropshot.
28
Herken, The Winning Weapon, 329.
29 United States CodeAnnotated, Title 50, "War and National Defense," Appendix,
section 2; Charles Warren, "What Is Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy?" Yale
Law Journal, 27 (Jan. 1918), 331-347 (Field quotation, 333, 334). Warren, a famous
constitutional historian, concluded that a foreign nation could become our enemy
only by waging war against the United States.
FAREWELL ADDRESS AND THE COLD WAR
21
war, in Vietnam and war that was not called by its rightful name
in Korea. But inspired American interpretations of the causes of these
wars notwithstanding, we did not fight the Russians in Southeast Asia.
That Dean Acheson said the Soviet Union was the "real enemy" in
Korea suggests only that they were not the actual enemy except in
the ideology of an insistent Cold Warrior, in this case one of flexible
and changing ideas concerning the American defense perimeter in the
Far East.30
The complex postwar events that in Poland and Eastern Europe,
Greece, Germany, France and Italy, Turkey and Iran, and the halls
of the new United Nations Organization by 1947 led to the outbreak
of Cold War have of course been scrutinized in a vast and ever growing literature. Orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist scholars have
produced a body of work the complexity of which approximates that
in the events it seeks to describe and explain. Alas, a brief essay cannot begin to do justice to the density of the issues and the abundance
of germane data and insight bearing on these issues. And yet, for all
its richness and diversity, the evidence does I think permit the drawing of several succinct conclusions concerning the themes I am addressing in this paper.
American leaders cited Soviet postwar behavior in these arenas
as justification for responding to it as we did. Ostensibly, Soviet actions constituted a threat to American and world peace and security
and betrayed a Soviet design to control or conquer the entire world,
a design no less frightening for being camouflaged. The American
charges have several disconcerting features. They depended to a very
large extent on unpersuasive because undocumented predictions of
Soviet intentions, based on nothing better than our partial readings
of theoretical Communist and Marxist literature. We resorted to what
might be called political mind reading of Soviet leaders because their
actual external behavior, when detached from the sinister ultimate intentions we insisted on attaching to it, did not convincingly sustain
our somber evaluations of it. And when the discrete elements of Soviet
postwar foreign performance and our responses to it are examined
in detail, it becomes clear that in a striking number of instances,
American leaders do not appear to have believed their own charges
against the Soviets! We said one thing in public-the kind of thing
that would enhance a massive arms buildup, military alliances, hatred
and fear of Soviet communism. We said another thing in private-the
30 Gaddis, Strategiesof Containment, 122. See too Bruce Cumings,
The Origins of
the Korean War: Liberationand theEmergenceof SeparateRegimes, 1945-1947 (Princeton 1981).
22
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OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
kind of thing indicating not only that our public rhetoric was essentially propaganda designed, in Senator Arthur Vandenberg's famous
words, "to scare the hell out of" the American people, but that our
leaders knew it was propaganda. Lacking a good case, they fabricated
a better case. Finding the facts insufficient to justify our unprecedented,
hugely expensive, and terribly dangerous reaction to them, they resorted
to ingenious if not fantastical analyses of what the facts supposedly
betokened and foreshadowed. That our policy and the justifications
for it may not stand up well to critical scrutiny is no doubt less impressive to its architects than the fact that it has played remarkably
well with acquiescent legislators, media, and a public taught to believe
that Soviet communism is the root of nearly all evil.
A swift survey of the great post-World War II international controversies and the modern literature bearing on them raises perplexing questions about the validity and in some cases even the seriousness
of American Cold War interpretations of these controversies. President Truman and other American leaders denounced Soviet violations
of Yalta, publicly interpreting Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe as
evidence, in the president's words, that "the Russians [are] planning
world conquest.'"31 It is not simply that the facts speak less clearly.
Truman, as Melvyn P. Leffler has recently shown, had reason to know
that the Soviet interpretation of Yalta "was not unreasonable" and
was dictated not by messianic ideological imperatives but by traditional security interests not unknown to the tsars and sympathetically
understood even by our own joint chiefs of staff.32 I find fascinating
the number of influential Americans, anti-Soviet all, some of them
architects of our Cold War policy, who argued privately that Soviet
postwar actions signified not a vaulting ambition to sweep across
Western Europe, let alone the world, but an understandable concern
never again to suffer the kind of invasion from the West, abetted by
their Balkan and Eastern European neighbors, that had recently
devastated their country and taken twenty million Soviet lives.33
31
Yergin, ShatteredPeace, 223, 243, 179, 302, 242, 480, 269, 270, 68; Robert
H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York 1980),
80; Lloyd C. Gardner et al., The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham, Mass. 1970), 24.
32
Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early
Cold War," InternationalSecurity, 11 (Summer 1986), 88-123; Diane Shaver Clemens,
Yalta (New York 1970); and Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians: The
Yalta Conference(Garden City, N.Y. 1949), 295-303.
the proponents of this view were Henry L. Stimson, John Foster Dulles,
33 Among
Admiral William D. Leahy, Bernard Baruch, General Lucius Clay, Robert Murphy,
and the authors of a secret postwar Navy intelligence report. See Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest:A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy
FAREWELL ADDRESS AND THE COLD WAR
23
In postwar Greece, where alleged Communist "aggression" in that
nation's civil war served as American justification for launching the
Truman Doctrine, Stalin in fact did not lift a finger to assist the Greek
Communists and other Greek radicals and revolutionists in their insurgency against what our own people there conceded was a corrupt
and brutal right-wing government.34 Truman said he had no doubt
that Russia intended an invasion of Turkey and the seizure of the
Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. The joint chiefs, however,
conceded the defensive nature of the Soviet policy on Turkey and the
leading American scholarly authority on the matter notes that "even
hard-line United States officials . . . acknowledged that the Soviets
had not made formal demands" on Turkey, "had acted with restraint,
and had invited further discussion."35 Similarly, Soviet postwar behavior
in Iran and with regard to a number of German issues--reparations,
the eastern border, demilitarization, the division of the country into
Allied occupation zones, and the status of Berlin once those zones ceased
to operate-has been adjudged far more defensible by American scholars
as well as by such American officials as Charles E. Bohlen, Philip
E. Mosely, and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall than by those
ultimately making American policy.36
Fortunately for the peace of the world, the Communist parties of
France and Italy failed to win power in the elections of 1946 and
1947-for President Truman had said that such electoral success would
constitute indirect Soviet aggression justifying American armed intervention. The president's enormity anticipates Henry Kissinger's observation, a quarter of a century later, that we could not permit a country
to go communist because of the "irresponsibility of its people" at the
polls. On another crucial matter, the alleged vast Soviet postwar arms
(New York 1951), 154; Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 202,
134, 137; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, V, 252-255, cited in Vilnis Sipols,
The Road to Great Victory:Soviet Diplomacy 1941-1945 (Moscow 1984), 260; Ronald W.
Pruessen, John FosterDulles: The Road to Power (New York 1982); Herken, The Winning
Weapon, 138, 206, 277; Yergin, ShatteredPeace, 213; and Walter LaFeber, America,
Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1980 (New York 1980).
in Greece,1943-1949 (New York 1982);
34 LawrenceS. Wittner, AmericanIntervention
John O. Iatrides, Revolt in Athens: The Greek Communist "Second Round, " 1944-1945
(Princeton 1972).
35 Melvyn P. Leffler, "Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Cold War: The United
States, Turkey, and NATO, 1945-1952," Journal of AmericanHistory,71 (Mar. 1985),
809, 813.
36 Yergin, Shattered
Peace, 189, 330-331, 366-367, 373; Philip E. Mosely, The
Kremlin and World Politics (New York 1960), 169, cited in Sipols, The Road to Great
Victory,191; Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements," 106, 115-116.
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buildup that signified their supposed intention to overrun Western
Europe, in Daniel Yergin's phrase, influential Americans "spoke of
a huge Red Army" at the very time that "U.S. officials possessed
extremely accurate estimates of Soviet military manpower--estimates
much lower than those publicly bruited about." Actually, in 1948 the
United States and England had more men under arms than did the
Soviets, as well as superiority in the air and at sea, while we alone
possessed atomic bombs."3
As for the notion that Soviet rejection of the American Baruch
Plan of June 1946 constitutes yet one more example of their disturbing perverseness and obstinacy, in this instance in turning aside a supposedly unselfish offer to bring under international control and eventually to eliminate atomic weapons, persons cognizant of the facts know
this to be a false notion. Gregg Herken's important recent book, The
Winning Weapon, offers detailed evidence on the Baruch Plan's fatal
flaws. Among these were its onesidedness and our awareness of its
onesidedness, American unwillingness to compromise, the many
devastating criticisms of the plan made by American scientists (as well
as by Dean Acheson, David Lilienthal, Admiral Chester Nimitz, George
F. Kennan, and Walter Lippmann, among others), Baruch's own expectation that it would be rejected, and the unacceptability of the plan
to any self-respecting nation. Herken concludes that the Baruch Plan
"did not differ in substance from an ultimatum the United States might
have given Russia to forswear nuclear weapons or be destroyed.'"38
Proclaiming, as our leaders did, their reliance on atomic bombs as
the great equalizer to the alleged Soviet superiority in manpower as
well as the great deterrent to a Soviet sweep across Europe, it is hard
to avoid the conclusion that our proposal for regulating and ultimately doing away with the new weapon is better understood as propaganda than as a serious basis for negotiation.
Then there was the American assertion that Marxist-Leninist doctrine and "the nature of the Soviet system" themselves constituted
a "grave" and unacceptable "threat to the security of the United
States." Nothing better illustrates the fatuousness and unseriousness
of this view than the argument American postwar strategic planners
37 Yergin, ShatteredPeace, 227-233; LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War,
50-51; Leffler, "Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Cold War," 811.
The Winning Weapon, 185, 171 (quotation), 152, 160-161, 163-164,
38 Herken,
157, 167, 176, 178, 264-265. Also useful are Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed:
The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York 1975); and P.M. S. Blackett, Fear,
War, and the Bomb (New York 1949), a devastating critique of early American policy
by a British Nobel laureate.
FAREWELL
ADDRESS
AND THE COLD WAR
25
offered in justification for it: "For a hundred years, victory in the
class struggle of the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie has been identified
as the means by which communism would dominate the world.""39
As a leading modern student of evolving Soviet theory and practice
persuasively argues, their practice varies and is usually intensely
pragmatic precisely because, shrewd opportunists that their leaders are,
they interpret Marxist and Leninist doctrine flexibly.40 In any case,
whatever puzzling forms this alleged Soviet threat took, our own postwar
military thinkers conceded that a planned war against the United States
was not one of them.4'
This brief excursion into the international events that led to the
Cold War suggests the weakness of the argument that the Soviet state
and its unavoidably heightened influence in a postwar world that its
own military success helped shape left the United States no alternative
but to forsake the principles in the Farewell Address. What many influential westerners agree were the Soviet Union's essentially pragmatic
postwar actions offer so sorry an excuse for our Cold War responses
to these actions that one is drawn inescapably to the conclusion that
our leaders decided to wage Cold War for reasons other than those
they publicly professed. American policymakers appear to have been
motivated largely by the kind of ideological animus that Washington
warned should have no place in the formulation of public policy. Subordinating to their own personal biases what continues to be the national interest in good relations with all states no matter how governed
or how unlovely their treatment of nations other than us, our leaders
imposed on the nation a foreign policy that, in the phrase of Eleanor
Roosevelt, has "carried us time and again to the edge of disaster.'"42
It does a disservice to the strength and flexibility of the American
political and economic order to insist that it cannot survive in a world
in flux. For all their braying about the glories of our system, the actions of our recent leaders betray their lack of confidence in our ability to compete successfully in an unfamiliar world. They have abandoned the Farewell Address not because it lacks enduring wisdom but
because they lacked the capacity to appreciate its enduring wisdom.
39 Brown, Dropshot, 42, 73.
Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience:Politics and History Since 1917
(New York 1985).
41 See the "Resume of the World Situation" by the U.S. Policy Planning Staff,
November 1947, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947 (8 vols., Washington 1973),
I, 770-777.
The Free World Colossus:A Critiqueof AmericanForeign
42 Cited in David Horowitz,
Policy in the Cold War (New York 1965), 293.
40