Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy

by Stephen Wertheim

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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, The United States Of America, United States, International Relations

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2020

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially the behind the scenes story of the United States second founding, not as a republic but as a global empire. I plan to interview the author for a longer piece but suffice to say this is a very intimate look at the impact of WW2 on America's self-conception of its place in the world. Many Americans were concerned that the United States may become an empire of the type that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were attempting to become: fighting monsters and only to become them and all that. Isolationist turned into a byword for selfishness and even cowardice when faced with an imperative to make the world free for liberal economic influence. We now live in the global empire that some U.S. intellectuals sort of piecemeal dreamed themselves into with a bit of prompting from the Japanese air force at Pearl Harbor. Its not clear yet whether this project has run its course but powerful forces are still invested in it.

[Steve Birchmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've got about a third of the way through this and hopefully will finish it next week, but I thought I'd jot down some thoughts while they are still fresh in my mind of what I've learnt so far.

Perhaps because I'm English, what has grabbed my attention most, is British (and by that I mean The British Empire as it was then) influence in the creation of the USA as global policeman. The author doesn't seem to make much of this, just mentions various things that occurred.

Such as a meeting between the newly appointed British Ambassador in 1939, the Marquess of Lothian and American President FDR, where the British Ambassador told the president something along the lines that the British Empire was too weak to be global policeman and the USA should take over the role. FDR was dismissive, but the pitch was made. FDR seemed to think the Royal Navy was far more powerful than it actually was, and the same could be said for American (and British) confidence in the French Army. It seems the fall of France in 1940 stunned the American Government, I was much surprised to learn, as much as the later Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

The US Government and elites considered the possibility that the Nazis may defeat Britain and the USA would be almost alone in a world of totalitarian states, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Mussolini's Italy etc.

The defeat of France had collapsed the entire world view of American elites. The US Government realised it did not have the expertise to deal with the numerous possibilities of how the world may change. So they turned to the Council on Foreign Relations, an offshoot of British Imperial Round Table secret society.

The council on Foreign Relations was well funded by the Rockefeller and Carnagie Foundations. This reminded me of a book I read many years ago, 'A Man Called intrepid' about Bill Stephenson, a Canadian 1st World War fighter pilot and industrialist of whom James Bond author, Ian Fleming wrote: "James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is William Stephenson." Bill Stephenson ran a British spy/intelligence organisation based in the Rockefeller Centre in New York, whose focus was on counter intelligence against Nazi spies and influencing the American public to be pro-British. After the USA entered WWII, Bill Stephenson worked with William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan who lead the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. All pure coincidence I'm sure.

As I wrote the author doesn't seem to make much of these connections, but is rather focused on American political developments in the period.

I was quite interested to learn that 'isolationism' was pretty much a media creation by interests involved in promoting the USA to take a more active and robust role in world affairs and was used an effective slur against those who were reluctant for the USA to take such a course.

I was also quite amazed that some influential American intellectuals genuinely believed, from the turn of the century up until the rise of totalitarian states, that world peace could be achieved by global public opinion's supposed moral abhorrence of war and aggression. It was only when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany etc came along was it realised that public opinion is very easily shaped and led.

A very interesting book I hope to finish some time next week.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy offers a penetrating revisionist account of how the United States came to embrace global military dominance during the Second World War. Breaking with conventional narratives that trace American internationalism to the nation’s liberal and Wilsonian ideals, Wertheim argues that the decisive turn to global supremacy occurred not as a natural extension of American values, but as a strategic elite reorientation in the face of geopolitical collapse in the late 1930s and early 1940s.


Central to Wertheim’s thesis is the contention that U.S. global supremacy was not a reaction to Pearl Harbor per se, but rather a premeditated decision by a narrow set of policymakers, intellectuals, and strategists who, by 1940, had already envisioned a postwar world in which the United States would wield unmatched military power to shape global order. Wertheim’s analysis focuses particularly on the Council on Foreign Relations’ War and Peace Studies and the U.S. State Department’s evolving planning apparatus, showing how these actors constructed a rationale for indefinite military presence overseas—not for defense in the narrow sense, but to preclude any future global threat from arising.


The book is structured around the intellectual and institutional developments that facilitated this transformation. Wertheim traces the transition from a tradition of “armed neutrality”—a conception of security predicated on avoiding entanglement—to the doctrine of perpetual global engagement. He explores how advocates of supremacy supplanted the interwar “internationalists” who had promoted legalistic, moral, or institutionalist visions of global peace. In their place emerged a new consensus centered on realist imperatives, geopolitical containment, and preemptive power projection. Wertheim is especially incisive in analyzing how these strategic shifts were justified ideologically—as a moral obligation to lead the world—despite their pragmatic and coercive underpinnings.


Wertheim’s prose is lucid and compelling, and his research is grounded in an impressive array of archival sources, particularly the records of the Council on Foreign Relations, the State Department, and personal papers of elite policymakers. His intervention sits squarely within a growing historiography that critiques the foundations of American empire, aligning with scholars such as Andrew Bacevich, Daniel Immerwahr, and Perry Anderson, yet offering a unique emphasis on the timing and intentionality of the turn to supremacy.


However, one might question whether Wertheim at times underplays the influence of earlier imperialist tendencies within American foreign policy. While he convincingly dismantles the idea that the U.S. was fated to lead the world after 1945, he gives comparatively less attention to the continuities between pre-1940 interventions in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Philippines, and the later global expansion. Additionally, although the book foregrounds elite planning, it could benefit from deeper engagement with how these strategic visions were sold to the broader public and how they intersected with democratic processes and popular sentiment.


Still, Tomorrow, the World stands as a landmark contribution to U.S. diplomatic and intellectual history. By revealing how global supremacy emerged not from necessity or democratic will but from elite planning in a moment of perceived crisis, Wertheim challenges prevailing assumptions about America’s role in the world. His work not only rewrites the origins of U.S. hegemony but also poses implicit questions about its legitimacy and sustainability in the present.


Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, the World is a rigorous and compelling account that reshapes our understanding of America’s rise to global military preeminence. It is a model of critical international history—analytically sharp, empirically rich, and normatively resonant. As the United States grapples with the legacy of its global role in the 21st century, Wertheim’s analysis provides a vital historical lens through which to interrogate the foundations of American power and the paths not taken.

GPT

[Rebecca Crunden]

❧ audiobook review

Very excited for this one!

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about how America gained the ambition to attain and maintain what Wertheim at various points refer to as “armed supremacy over the rest of the world,” “armed primacy,” or “hegemony.” What does Wertheim means by primary? “Primacy holds that the superior coercive power of the United States is required to underwrite a decent world order. It assumes that in order to prevent the international realm from descending into chaos or despotism, a benign hegemon must act as the world’s ordering agent. It further deems the United States to be the sole entity fit for the part.”

What are the implications of this view of American primacy? “Primacy has concrete implications for U.S. policy across the globe. First, it directs the United States to acquire and retain military power superior to any other nation or prospective combination of nations. This objective in turn creates a U.S. interest in accessing and mobilizing the economic foundations of military power, namely the centers of industrial production and sources of vital raw materials. Second, a fortress America, armed to the hilt but guarding America alone, is not enough. Primacy requires stationing U.S. forces in regions important to the global balance of power, or at least entering into commitments to secure such regions in the event of attack. Third, primacy entails a willingness to use force routinely if preferably on a modest scale. Its adherents may aspire to achieve ‘peace through strength’ in a general way, but they expect aggressors to arise and the United States to police them.”

The essential argument of the book is that the originary promise of America – one that arguably goes back to the very founding of the country by pilgrims fleeing the terrible, sanguinary politics of Europe during the thirty years war and the English civil war – was a of “New World free of power politics,” which “seemed to preclude playing, let alone dominating, power politics in the Old World. Only a rupture, a qualitative break, would change this state of affairs.” What vision of internationalism emerged from that engagement? “To them internationalism meant seeking to eliminate war and power politics, often by promoting international law and organization. The League of Nations, established by forty-two states after World War I, was a product of their efforts.”

Despite Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy, at this stage, as Wertheim himself says, “the American public [still] abhorred participation in extrahemispheric wars.” Wertheim says the ruptures failed to come in 1898 or during WWI – but in fact, there was a ratcheting up of the size of America’s standing army after each of these engagements. When we do finally get to WWII, which clearly did represent a major rupture, Werrtheim makes another distinction that runs somewhat counter to the mythologies of that war. Conventional historiography argues that the decisive event that convinced Americans to embrace a muscular international role was Pearl Harbor. But he instead argues that it was more about the shock of the rapid fall of France. (“Eighteen months before Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor sent the United States into the war, it was another staggering event— the Nazi invasion and conquest of France in May and June of 1940— that caused U.S. officials and intellectuals to rethink the nature of international politics and America’s place in it…. Even before Pearl Harbor, then, U.S. officials and intellectuals planned not only to enter the war but also to achieve global dominance long afterward.... The German conquest of France convinced U.S. foreign policy elites not only to enter the war, as historians have shown, but also to supplant Great Britain as the premier world power afterward…. Out of the death of internationalism as contemporaries had known it, and the faltering of British hegemony, U.S. global supremacy was born.”) The decision to go for supremacy didn’t spring whole from the minds of these strategists, however, but rather emerged gradually over the first few years of the war.

The central historiographical claim of the book that runs counter to a lot of conventional thinking about this era is that the rejection of the binary of internationalism versus isolationism. Indeed, one way to read Tomorrow, the World is as a polemical intellectual history about how isolationism became a term of reproach in American politics. The dominant story that American interventionists like to tell goes something like this: “For the first century-plus of the Republic, America basically kept to itself, splendidly separated from the rest of the world by great oceans, and focused on taming the huge continent of North America. However, global integration and interdependence made maintaining such separation forever impossible. During WWI under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, America finally woke up to its growing power and responsibility in the world and intervened to try to make the world safe for democracy. Unfortunately, after WWI, with Woodrow Wilson laid low, Americans retreated back into isolationism, shunning engagement with the awful politics unfolding in the old world, naïve in the faith that our oceanic separations would keep us safe forever. That complacency was shattered forever on December 7, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which America stepped up to the plate to win the War in both Europe and the Pacific. Convinced not to make the same mistake a second time, the United States established a rules-based international order, rooted in the United States and the Bretton Woods institutions, which together have under U.S. leadership has kept the peace between great powers and driven the spread of global prosperity.” Wertheim says that this narrative, particularly the argument about what caused the shift away from so-called isolationism “reads events backward.” He says, “It implies that certain prominent Americans, the internationalists, favored U.S. global supremacy all along, needing only to sweep the rest out of the way. They did not. In the main, self-identified internationalists before World War II sought to make peaceful exchange supplant the reign of force in global affairs. Standing for reason and rules against force and whim, they worked to obviate the need for military supremacy by the United States or any other power. Only during the war did internationalism come to be associated with military supremacy, whose architects devised the new, pejorative term isolationism and redefined internationalism against it. For the same reason, it makes no sense to characterize a group of Americans as advocates of isolationism. Essentially no one thought of him- or herself as such.” Isolationism, as such, is in Wertheim's reading a myth.

The villain of your book, more or less, is Walter Lippmann, and the heroes are those who pushed back on the project of global hegemony promoted by Lippmann, such as progressive historian Charles Beard (p. 35).

Now, one of the peculiarities about the American drive for global supremacy was they we encased that ambition within a series of multilateral member-state institutions like the United Nations that liberal internationalists have long celebrated as marking the difference between American and previous empires’ hegemony. Wertheim argues that the idea of such a world organization was revived in 1942 and 1943 not to restrain U.S. power but rather as a vehicle for realizing U.S. hegemony. And you account of this is that American planners “figured that by gaining the participation of other states they could convince the American public that U.S. leadership would be inclusive, rule-bound, and worthy of support. Harnessing the resonance of prior efforts to end power politics in the name of internationalism, they fashioned the United Nations as an instrument to implement power politics by the United States.”

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bit of a delay getting this review out. I wrote this up months ago but it was long enough a review that I wanted it properly published. The first two places I sent it too strung me along forever but after all that it finally found a home. Read my whole review here:
https://globalsecurityreview.com/the-...

[Will Fuqua · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, if ploddingly written, account of how the U.S. decided to become a super power. However, the conclusion has aged quite poorly over the last couple of years.

[Paul Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S. foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for U.S. military domination of the globe?

In school text book mythology, the United States was full of revoltingly backward creatures called isolationists at the time of World War I and right up through December 1941, after which the rational adult internationalists took command (or we’d all be speaking German and suffering through the rigged elections of fascistic yahoos, unlike this evening).

In fact, the term “isolationist” wasn’t cooked up until the mid-1930s and then only as a misleading insult to be applied to people who wished for the U.S. government to engage with the world in any number of ways from treaties to trade that didn’t include militarism. Anti-isolationism was and is a means of ridiculously pretending that “doing something” means waging war, supporting NATO, and promoting the “responsibility to protect,” while anything else means “doing nothing.”

There were distinctions in the 1920s between those who favoured the League of Nations and World Court and those who didn’t. But neither group favoured coating the planet with U.S. military bases, or extending even the most vicious conception of the Monroe Doctrine to the other hemisphere, or replacing the League of Nations with an institution that would falsely appear to establish global governance while actually facilitating U.S. domination. Pre-1940 internationalists were, in fact, imperfect U.S. nationalists. They, as Wertheim writes, “had the capacity to see the United States as a potential aggressor requiring restraint.” Some, indeed, didn’t need the word “potential” there.

What changed? There was the rise of fascism and communism. There was the notion that the League of Nations had failed. There was the serious failure of disarmament efforts. There was the belief that whatever came out of WWII would be dramatically different. In September 1939, the Council on Foreign Relations began making plans to shape the post-war (yet permawar) world. The Roosevelt White House into 1940 was planning for a post-war world that held a balance of power with the Nazis. Ideas of disarmament, at least for others, were still very much a part of the thinking. “Weapons dealer to the world” was not a title that it was ever suggested that the United States strive for.

Wertheim sees a turning point in the German conquest of France. Change came swiftly in May-June, 1940. Congress funded the creation of the world’s biggest navy and instituted a draft. Contrary to popular mythology, and propaganda pushed by President Roosevelt, nobody feared a Nazi invasion of the Americas. Nor was the United States dragged kicking and screaming into its moral responsibility to wage global permawar by the atrocious domestic policies of the Nazis or any mission to rescue potential victims from Nazi genocide. Rather, U.S. foreign policy elites feared the impact on global trade and relations of a world containing a Nazi power. Roosevelt began talking about a world in which the United States dominated only one hemisphere as imprisonment.

The United States needed to dominate the globe in order to exist in the sort of global order it wanted. And the only global order it wanted was one it dominated. Did U.S. planners become aware of this need as they watched events in Europe? Or did they become aware of its possibility as they watched the U.S. government build weapons and the U.S. president acquire new imperial bases? Probably some of each. Wertheim is right to call our attention to the fact that U.S. officials didn’t talk about militarily dominating the whole globe prior to 1940, but was there ever a time they talked about dominating anything less than what they had the weapons and troops to handle? Certainly the voices had not all been monolithic, and there was always an anti-imperialist tradition, but did it ever give much back to those it had dispossessed until after WWII when airplanes and radios developed a new sort of empire (and some colonies were made states but others more or less liberated)?

The U.S. government and its advisers didn’t just discover that they could rule the world and that they needed to rule the world, but also that -- in the words of General George V. Strong, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division -- Germany had demonstrated the “tremendous advantage of the offence over the defence.” The proper defensive war was an aggressive war, and an acceptable goal of that was what Henry Luce called living space and Hitler called Lebensraum. U.S. elites came to believe that only through war could they engage in proper trade and relations. One can treat this as a rational observation based on the growth of fascism, although some of the same people making the observation had fascistic tendencies, the problem with Germany seems to have existed for them only once it had invaded other nations that were not Russia, and there is little doubt that had the United States lived sustainably, locally, egalitarianly, contentedly, and with respect for all humanity, it could not have observed a need for permawar in the world around it -- much less gone on observing it for 75 years.

In early 1941, a U.S. political scientist named Harold Vinacke asked, “When the United States has its thousands of airplanes, its mass army, properly mechanized, and its two-ocean navy, what are they to be used for?” Officials have been asking the same right up through Madeline Albright and Donald Trump, with the answer generally being found to be as self-evident as other patriotic “truths.” By summertime 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had announced the future organization of the world in the Atlantic Charter.

If hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, there remained some virtue in U.S. society and its conception of foreign policy at the time of WWII, because a major focus of post-war planners was how to sell global domination to the U.S. public (and incidentally the world, and perhaps most importantly themselves) as being something other than what it was. The answer, of course, was the United Nations (along with the World Bank, etc.). Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles described the design of the United Nations thus: “what we required was a sop for the smaller states: some organization in which they could be represented and made to feel themselves participants.” In Roosevelt’s words before the creation of the U.N., all nations but four, in a future global organization, would merely “blow off steam.”

Roosevelt also proposed that the existence of such a phony organization would allow it to declare war instead of the U.S. Congress, meaning that a U.S. president would be able to launch wars at will -- something like what we’ve seen for the past 75 years with NATO occasionally having filled in for a malfunctioning United Nations.

Roosevelt believed that the United States signed up for global policeman when it defeated Hitler. Neither Roosevelt nor Wertheim mentions that the Soviet Union did 80% of defeating Hitler, after having done about 0% of creating him.

But surely the job of world cop can be resigned, no matter how one got into it. The question now is how. The financial and bureaucratic and media and campaign-corruption interests all work against dismantling the permawar military, just as does the ideology of anti-“isolationism.” But it certainly cannot hurt to be aware of the dishonesty in the ideology and of the fact that it was not always with us.

[Andrew Canfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

An examination of how the United States came to be the indispensable arbiter of world order is undertaken by Columbia historian Stephen Wertheim in Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.

The book-whose title admittedly sounds like a James Bond movie-focuses heavily on the period immediately before, during, after the Second World War. To hear the author tell it, the lack of a national security establishment prior to the war stemmed from a widely held view that it was not the job of the United States to play world’s policeman. The experience of World War One was held out as an aberration, a rare departure from following a public opinion which held that America should remain militarily disengaged from European wars. Prior to entering the fray in 1917 and 1941, Wertheim makes it sound as if most Americans viewed the violent goings-on in Europe through more of a Napoleonic era than twentieth century lens.

Wertheim maintains a neutral tone while writing about Charles Lindbergh and his America First committee, attempting to present the facts and put the country's noninterventionist tendencies in a balanced light and appropriate context.

Tomorrow, The World does try to dispel the narrative that America had been an isolationist country prior to the fall of France and the attack on Pearl Harbor. It instead presents the American people as largely supportive of continental and hemispheric expansion (the conquests of Mexico, Cuba, and Native Americans held out as a trio of examples) but much more queasy about expanding the Monroe Doctrine to Europe and Asia. Wertheim makes a point of using the term “non-interventionist” instead of isolationist, deriding the latter term as a poor descriptor which only comprised a small percentage of the post-eighteenth century U.S. population. Senator Arthur Vandenberg preferred “insulationist” as a descriptor, while “continentalist'' was another suggested moniker to counter the disparaging term isolationist. These stemmed from a perception that isolation was employed to smear people who, militarily aside, did not might peaceful intercourse taking place around the globe.

Internationalism coming to define itself in opposition to isolationism is a major premise of the book. Wertheim details how this came to be during the war against Germany and Japan, and his take is that this black and white way of viewing things resulted in stifling a true debate over the nature and extent of America’s role in the wider world. The morphing of “aggressive defense” into what ended up playing out on the battlefields of north Africa and Europe--and continued onward into the posture of ultranational military organization in the twenty-first century-makes for a key part of what the book analyzes.

The roles played by often overlooked men like James T. Shotwell and Quincy Wright fill the book’s pages, while more widely known nongovernmental individuals like Walter Lippmann also played a part in shaping public opinion in the postwar world. The latter coined the term “Workshop of and Arsenal of the Free Nations” to describe America’s stance toward her allies prior to World War Two, a phrase later condensed into Franklin Roosevelt’s more succinct and pithy “Arsenal of Democracy.”

Organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Committee to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP) are also examined in the context of how the post-World War Two world order was crafted.

In many respects, Tomorrow, the World provides readers with a unique take on America’s foreign policy evolution. The pre-December 1941 timeframe was presented as a time when U.S. policymakers considered, for a time at least, ceding continental Europe to the Nazis. England and the U.S. would maintain their influence in the Atlantic sphere; apparently Italy and Japan were both weighed as possible allies in this system before the Pact of Steel and prior to December 7th, 1941, respectively. This possibility, put forward around the time of the Atlantic Charter, is a fact not often mentioned in the present day.

Originally, the plans on the table were for a type of quarter hemisphere economic and security system, but as the German menace grew this idea was abandoned for a “grand area” sphere incorporating a plethora of non-Nazi states. From here, the evolution in thinking continued; these plans were subsequently abandoned in favor of an aggressive rollback when England stood strong and Japan dragged America into the fight. These plans, which seem unconventional given the general manner in which U.S. participation is discussed, make Tomorrow, The World, a work of nonfiction free of the traditional mold in which such foreign policy books are written.

Plans in 1940 and throughout most of 1941, many which were put together by the aforementioned foreign policy organizations that largely existed outside of the federal government ecosystem, envisioned a sort of cold war playing out. This would not be against the Soviet Union, however, but against Germany and its satellites.

Prior to the summer of 1941, the Soviet Union was said to have played little to no role in American foreign policy calculations. Its successful beat down of Germany and rise to power as an alternative model to America’s capitalist system was, according to Wertheim, entirely unexpected by the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Tomorrow, the World has a cynical take on the United Nation's creation. Contemporary quotes are put forward to make it look like the organization was crafted as a way of giving the appearance of allowing smaller states a voice while, in reality, it would function as a way to maintain U.S. global supremacy.

The book also presents the small, insular group of analysts and academics who began crafting the postwar world even before U.S. entry into the Second World War as largely wary of public opinion. Their seeming acknowledgement that, even after Pearl Harbor, most Americans were not necessarily on board with their country taking on globe-spanning commitments, meant a degree of manipulation of this opinion was rendered necessary.

Wertheim is clearly a skeptic when it comes to the international power currently wielded by the United States. He subtly criticizes those who take it for granted that other nations would uncritically welcome the growth of American-style capitalism and political systems on their shores.

Judging from his presentation and commentary in the book, Wertheim would certainly not identify himself with a modern day neoconservative, interventionist impulse. At times he seems to play down the growth of totalitarian states and the possible threat they could pose to world order, instead focusing on criticism of assumptions made by America’s foreign policy establishment.

And yet readers will not have to agree with each of his opinions (only stated openly toward the end) in order to appreciate the close foreign policy analysis provided in the book’s pages. He does discuss some interesting aspects of history and provides and unorthodox interpretation along the way.

It is difficult to read Tomorrow, The World and not learn a good deal about the lead up to America gaining the role of armed arbiter of world order.

-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado

[Matthew Petti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I'm co-workers with the author.

A few months ago, another journalist and I were explaining U.S. foreign policy to a political staffer friend of ours. U.S. strategy is to prevent any other country from becoming the most powerful state in its own region, because multiple regional powers could link up to challenge American power in Eurasia.

"They never talk about this stuff," the staffer said.

"They did, right at the end of World War II, and then never talked about it openly again," the other journalist said.

Wertheim's book is a record of those conversations. He looks at the debates American elites had — quite openly — about whether America should become a global empire. American elites started out with a starry-eyed view that America could, by its example, convince Europe and Asia to transcend power politics. But when Nazi Germany conquered France, elites decided that America had to take over as much of the world as it could in order to avoid being left behind by history.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Wertheim has written a very good overview on the origins of “American exceptionalism” as an organizing principle for US policy in the 20th and 21st century. Surprisingly, this notion of “exceptionalism” did not arise organically because of WW2 (something almost all people have been taught in both high school and undergraduate history courses), but was a conscious effort of the foreign policy elite in what eventually became the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR).

It’s hard to tell if the thesis is entirely the whole picture or if it’s a kind of “spurious causality”. Just because people wrote about something previously, then they act on it within the policy world doesn’t necessarily mean there was an active committee or group guiding that thing into fruition. That being said, when looking at the works citations in the text, Wertheim mostly cites authoritative biographies, monographs or private institutional, personal, or academic collections so I take this work much more seriously ex-facie vis-a-vis texts which have citations full of articles from “The Economist” or some other shallower news magazine (there are unfortunately a decent number of texts in the political science/international relations genre that do exactly this).

That being said, taking Wertheim’s narrative on face value, much of his narrative is substantiated with direct correspondence between the principals involved, which makes the connection between the true history and the narrative more direct. Wertheim shows that prior to, and during, the early phases of WW2, the US foreign policy brain-trust had carefully thought through what the world may look like in a wide range of scenarios dependent on the outcomes of the conflict. What they concluded was that the likely outcome (from the vantage of 1939-1940) was a “peace in name only” between a United States, and Nazi Germany, and that if this was going to be the end-state, the US should “shore up it’s neighborhood” to ensure it had enough resources to thrive and ultimately prevail in such a peace, were it ever to flare up into an actual war.

Much of the reasoning espoused by Wertheim, attributed to these individuals, seemed to hail from the geo-economic rationale of Halford Mackinder, where geographies are analyzed to guide possible outcomes and likely “orderings” of powers dependent on which place in space those powers occupied within the wider context of the whole geography. From this standpoint, the men (and some women) of the CFR concluded that it was to the US’ interests to “secure” the America’s for itself, primarily to ensure “fair trade”, and thus, nurture it’s internal economy by securing open export markets (effectively mercantilism). Eventually, the planners expanded this (which initially started as the “quarter hemisphere plan” and didn’t include the center/southern parts of South America), to include large swaths of the Asia-Pacific and parts of the Eurasia n landmass under the nominal dominion of the ailing British Empire.

It is this “blood-bond” which formed what Wertheim refers to as an “Anglo-Saxon alliance” (or the compact between the British Empire and the United States) that informs the trajectory of this idea to formally consolidate those various geographies under the name of the “Grand Area”, or the Anglo-Saxon slice of the world, and eventually would mutate into the United Nations system (with some grundig additions suggested/forced by FDR in his final year in life, his so-called “Four Policemen” idea, which were part of a wider set of “Four” themed polices/ideas, including his “Four Freedoms”). Though that trajectory was not following the contours of altruism or “enlightened internationalism”, but pure self-interests. Specifically, it was the contours that led to the least-resistance for the British Empire, or that which seemed to ensure the survival of the Empire, something the US officially were publically not in favor of during this time, but who’s positions US elites would plie to whenever brought up during private negotiations.

Prior to 1941, this “Grand Area” was envisioned as forming a unified camp to resist, what policy analyst presumed, would be the Nazi-consolidated world order (and even theorized prior to Operation Barborrsa as a German-Soviet world-order). Interestingly, for a time, the Anglo-American policy cognoscenti toyed with the idea of including Japan within this “Grand Area” (with it’s consent or not), but that was changed after the US entered the war as a direct beligent. Further, the plans were again changed once the Soviet Union entered the war. From therein, the USSR was considered a contributing member to the new “Grand Area”, which increasingly was viewed as the next world-order with imminent defeat of the Axis in the war.

I won’t give away the entire book, but it is very interesting. Most interesting are the dialogue/discussions that included Walter Lippmann and how the father of marketing/advertising would inform the communications of the Allied powers and the selling of these ideas to the public, and the campaign to induce the US citizenry to adopt “internationalism”. In fact, much of the morphing of what Wertheim refers to as the Anglo-Saxon hegemony to the United Nations system (a system that was considered by its founders, including FDR as a mere-front to mask the naked power politics of the Security Council, and it’s two prime members, The British and the United States) was done at the behest of the early “scientific” pollsters who found naked hegemony was not supported by a wide swath of the population (for various reasons, not merely because of their innate beneficence).

This book is relevant and timely, especially post AUKUS, which seems to become the second-coming of the Anglo-Saxon axis. Much of what we now see as the reemergence of geo-economic strategy with respect to the competition with China (and Russia) can be elucidated by this work. It’s strange (or sad) to see that history does indeed rhyme in this case. Recommended

[Julian Mccrann · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting topic but I have one important question - why does the book downplay what happened in the aftermath of World War I?

I would suggest the true "Birth" of US Global Supremscy is correctly pinpointed in the early 1920s in the aftermath of World War I with the Dawes Plan.

The Dawes Plan was signed in August 1924 (not long after the death of Lenin) and essentially resulted in the main belligerents in World War I all agreeing to be in debt to WALL STREET (ie - the USA).

Once the US had the likes of Germany, France, the UK & Italy hooked on Wall Street debt the last 97 years make perfect sense do they not.

The Dawes Plan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes...

Surely the "Birth" of the US Global Supremacy is hooking up broken and battered Europe to the Wall Street bankers and their "heroin" of debt under the Dawes Plan - given that I would put the "Birth" of US Global Supremacy squarely in August 1924.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important work and an interesting contribution to our understanding of U.S. global power since WWII. SW argues that the foreign policy elite in the US between 1940 and 1941 responded to a series of events in Europe (especially the surprisingly rapid fall of France) with a variety of plans to ensure that the U.S. would play the leading role, if not the dominant role, in the international system after the war, particularly by having military power that ensured a multi-continental reach and maintained several balances of power in different region of the world. They also sought to ensure U.S. control of international institutions, showing a harder realist core underneath the seemingly liberal premises of the UN, Bretton Woods, and other key institutions of the era. One of SW's more interesting points is that he shows that these thinkers/leaders didn't really think there would be a literal invasion threat from a Nazi dominated Europe, nor did they think the US absolutely needed access to the global economy (although I'm a little doubtful there). Rather, he shows the importance of identity: these elite figures believed that the US simply cannot fulfill its mission as a nation that acts as a model for liberty in the world, and possibly expands that liberty, if the Nazis and Japanese dominated the Eurasian landmass. He doesn't discuss the garrison state argument much (the idea that the US could not survive as a democracy if it had to remain on a permanent wartime footing to balance against the totalitarian powers), which I think is an oversight, but overall he shows that identity/values were crucial in getting the US into WWII, sort of just the belief that the US has to do something because it's the US. I think this is actually a good thing, but that's moot to the actual history here.

SW's most important intervention is to show how interventionists constructed a usable but distorted past by conjuring up the idea that the US had always been "isolationist" and that this entailed turning its back on the world, becoming insular, and ultimately undermining U.S. security. In fact, SW shows that the term isolationism didn't really come about until the interwar period, and it was developed by interventionist experts to try to shape the terms of debate and delegitimized their opponents. Thus, he concludes, the US had a stultified debate in which more restraint-oriented people could be dismissed as cranks, barbarians, callous, or what have you. Of course, anyone who has studied USFP history before WWII knows that the US has been involved all over the place through diplomatic, cultural, economic, and other contacts; we just didn't sign formal treaties of alliance, join European wars, or join a whole lot of international institutions. Describing this history as isolationist is a vast oversimplification, and SW does a great service to teachers and scholars by showing the roots of the word and how it distorts a longstanding and legitimate tradition of thought about the U.S. role in the world.

I do have a few critiques of this book. First, SW is a little slippery on the meaning of terms like "domination" and "supremacy." I'm not sure what he's describing is unambiguously a blueprint for those things. The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, for instance, seems like a much clearer definition of domination/supremacy as defined by preventing the rise of any peer challenger and enabling a truly global reach for U.S. power. What these planners seemed to want was an active United States that would play the leading role in maintaining a balance of power, preventing rivals from dominating key areas of the world, and ensuring that the US wasn't shut out of a Nazi-dominated world. I don't think SW ever really proves that these guys were sort of proto-neocon imperialists, and I think viewing their ideas as a quest for supremacy shows SW's foreign policy views (very restraint-oriented) leaking into his scholarship.

Second, Wertheim needed to integrate this compelling story with the early Cold War story. The U.S. decision to act as the fulcrum of the international system was really more of a process, and that process or series of decisions was intimately linked to the rise of Soviet power and its challenge to key areas of the world, like the Middle East or Western/Central Europe. Of course, SW shows that the FP elite were thinking about an active, interventionist global role before the Cold War took shape, but th COld War was clearly the crucial factor that solidified an active U.S. global role, overseas presence, permanent nat sec state, etc. I don't think SW succeeds in showing that these thinkers were central to that postwar process, as he doesn't discuss the postwar, early CW phase very much. So this book offers a nice challenge to the more established historiography, but I ultimately don't think he succeeds.

Still, this is an important and well-researched book that challenges many semi-myths about the U.S. global role and shows the percolating of ideas about an expansive U.S. global role in the FP establishment well before the U.S. even entered the war. In a way, this book is a lot like my own (The Regime Change Consensus) in that it shows how advocates of one ideas (RC in Iraq) crowded out and delegitimized other ways of dealing with a problem to make their way seem natural and obvious, with important consequences for actual foreign policy. Highly recommended for scholars and teachers of U.S. foreign policy/diplomatic history.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice concise book about how the idea of American global military power became so strongly linked with the idea of internationalism (previously rooted in trade and diplomacy) and the development of the paradigm of interventionism vs isolationism in the early years of WWII. Also an interesting look at American foreign policy planning before the US got into the war and was preparing for a cold war with a continental Nazi Germany

[Himadri Bose · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book examines when and why the United States decided “to become the supreme political and military power holding itself responsible for enforcing world order?”. Wertheim seeks to study the origins of the U.S. will to lead the world. This book labels U.S. global leadership for what it was: a choice. It locates and explains that decision in history by posing the historical question of why the United States opted to install itself as the world’s armed superpower.
Wertheim informs that the decision arose from the response of “American officials and intellectuals” to the fall of France in the early summer of 1940 and the consequent prospect that Adolf Hitler’s Germany would hold sway over most of the developed world outside North America. This prospect led “the U.S. foreign policy elite as a group” to conclude that “the superior coercive power of the United States is required to underwrite a decent world”. Without glossing over the way “the United States brutally extended its dominion across North America”, he points out that before World War II, the nation “pursued capitalist growth and fancied itself exceptional while shunning political and military entanglements in Europe and Asia.” Americans were confident that they “could generally conduct commerce without imposing its terms by force.” Moreover, this geopolitical stance was strongly buttressed ideologically by the belief that participation in power politics was incompatible with republican liberty, and the related contrast between the Old World and the New. As economic growth elevated the nation’s standing, Americans, as private citizens and government officials, promoted an ‘internationalism’ involving the peaceful resolution of disputes and the development of international law. In its aspiration to supersede power politics, Wertheim sees Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations as expressive of this approach. He posits that the commitment to global “armed dominance” required a “rupture” in how Americans conceived their nation’s role. Before World War II, he argues, “the United States pursued capitalist growth and fancied itself exceptionally while shunning political and military entanglements in Europe and Asia”. ‘Isolationism’ had never been the goal of U.S. policy and is a bogey term invented in the 1930s by advocates of greater involvement in overseas conflicts. ‘Internationalism’ was also redefined to mean participation in collective security. In contrast, earlier, the term had referred to attempts to supersede power politics with a system based on international law and public opinion.
The core of this book is an analytical narrative of the evolving thinking of the ‘experts’ involved in the War and Peace Studies project set up by the Council on Foreign Relations in collaboration with the State Department after the outbreak of the European war in 1939. After the fall of France, the various groups of the Project began producing reports defining the extent of the world that the United States could hope to defend successfully. At first, this was conceived as a ‘quarter-sphere’ centred on North America. Still, as Britain’s continued resistance led to an assumption of Anglo-American cooperation, this expanded to include the British Commonwealth and Empire, east Asia, and the entire Western Hemisphere. A memorandum in October 1940 called for an “integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States within the non-German world”. By December 1940, Wertheim concludes, not only had the conception of America’s world role been transformed, but “internationalism” meant “less the realization of world harmony than the projection of world power by the United States”. In 1941, as U.S. collaboration with Britain’s war effort increased, the planners envisaged “an Americo-British” world order. The realization that this Project lacked appeal to the American public, Wertheim argues, led to the commitment to a more inclusive peacekeeping organization despite the disenchantment of many with the League of Nations. This ‘instrumental internationalism,’ however, was designed to legitimate the exercise of U.S. power rather than to subordinate it to international law and multilateral procedures. Wertheim argues that until the late 1930s, ‘internationalism’ continued to signify belief in measures to promote the peaceful settlement of interstate disputes rather than the assumption of overseas diplomatic and military commitments. There was continuity, Wertheim concedes, in the goal of “ordering the world along liberal, American lines,” but he insists that the conviction “that peaceful forms of engagement required hegemonic force behind them” was both novel and transformative.
The book is an original, carefully researched examination of the thinking of foreign policy elites and their effect in American history on rewiring American foreign policy. It is a powerful account that insists that scholars revisit their understandings of the U.S. rise to global dominance”, above all, by showing that it was “a choice – or rather, a constellation of choices” rather than a policy dictated by the requirements of self-defence or an accidental happening.
Overall, it is a very well-researched book that richly deserves to be read by geopolitically inclined scholars and thinkers.

[Kenneth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a kind of critique of American foreign policy through a deconstruction of it's origins. The theory is that American "internationalism" is a cloak for American supremacy and was arrived at through a kind of dishonest non-debate against a myth of isolationism and an attempt to conceal from the voters the imperial character of the post-WW2 international system though the fiction of the UN. This was false debate was articulated by a narrow and self interested US policy elite who had their own financial and careerist interests in American dominance. There is also the typical left critique of these people as being capitalist white supremacists but the frequency with which these charges are levied these days makes them largely irrelevant. They are in there because this is an academic work and that's what it takes to get published. He posits that there were other alternatives than US armed dominance of the post-war world but these were never taken seriously largely through the dishonesty and narrow mindedness of the elite at the time.

While parts of this book are interesting, specifically the evolution of US strategic thinking from the mid thirties, through the fall of France, to the onset of the Barbarossa and finally Pearl Harbor. This is interesting and by the time of Pearl Harbor most of what American planners had in mind was fully formed by the shock of the fall of France. The inside history is interesting but I think a lot of the counter-arguments about what might have been are intellectually weak. The reason his more neo-liberal and pacifistic world order did not come to pass was not merely that the debate was dishonest but that the events of the post World War I era more or less obliterated the assumptions of human nature, the power of sanctions and of world public opinion to restrain totalitarian states. The weakness of the arguments in light of events is what doomed them, not the fact that some conspriacy of elites denied them a hearing. They had been heard, from 1919 onward and the world had a front row seat from 1932 onward to see how they worked and the answer was, not well.

[Greg Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book on the rise of US expectation of global supremacy—not in the wake of World War II, or even in the wake of Pearl Harbor, but formed during the panic following France's fall to the Nazis.

Suddenly facing the prospect of the British Empire being bombed out of existence, the US reconsidered how much of the world was necessary to guarantee prosperity. The Western Hemisphere started to look rather meager compared to a Nazi-controlled Europe, and they settled on a larger "Grand Area" that covered most of the world outside of Europe and the Soviet Union. And after Germany invaded the USSR and Britain proved more hardy and resilient than expected, their plans expanded even further.

The book itself is fascinating on this turn, including placing a larger emphasis on the fall of France compared to most histories of the US involvement in WWII. With how it's cited today, you'd think Pearl Harbor was the impetus for increased US militarization, but it was actually formed before that in late 1940 and 1941. The book also goes into how, even with all the material basis that you'd think would point to US supremacy, policy elites had to be both talked into it by each other, and convinced that the American public would buy such a scheme. So previous internationalism that didn't involve military projection was renamed to "isolationism" and a new, more muscular internationalism took its place: US power projection, somewhat mediated and morally justified through a United Nations that was run by Great Powers but gave a voice to other nations.

Only downside is the book's based on a dissertation, and it shows: large chapters of original reportage, but not always the best organized and lacking much of a narrative or ideological through line. Not really the first book I'd pick up on the topic, but very interesting if you're really into the period.

(The book itself also contains some pretty small print, the first book I've ever read where it was kind of grating, and hardly necessary when the main text minus footnotes is only 180 pages. Not the author's fault at all and I'm not considering it in the rating. But maybe stick to the kindle version?)

[Ted Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up until World War II, US grand strategy rested upon the premise that America would avoid foreign entanglements outside the Western Hemisphere. And to the extent that America would use military force, the goals were limited and aimed at preventing a hegemonic power from rising in Eurasia. So why did the United States undergo profound changes in its strategic culture? How did the country that historically viewed international relations through commercial exchange shift to pursuing armed military primacy? What historical legacies helped inform US decisions to intervene in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

This account examines how World War II brought profound changes to American grand strategy. Stephen Wertheim chronicles how foreign policy wonks, academics, and other public intellectuals crafted a new strategy. He examines how they crafted the phrase "isolationism" to slander and belittle those who were more cautious about armed intervention. These elites did not conspire to change American foreign policy, but they advantageously responded to the rise of Hitler, the fall of France, and Pearl Harbor.

The American foreign policy establishment now favored the pursuit of American hegemony. Seeing that Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Japan, Italy, and China would all be weak after the conclusion of the war, the United States was well-positioned to pursue its own vision of American-centered world order. Countries could comply with US norms and preferences or face armed intervention. Using outlets like the United Nations, the US could couch its behavior as "internationalist" to its domestic population and towards foreign audiences.

[Michael Enright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is interesting little book is centered on a novel thesis: that the historical and polemical discussion about isolationism hides the true nature of the any of the debates leading up to World War II by fundamentally mischaracterizing the isolationist perspective. Because the nature of the interwar debates is obscured, an honest explanation about how the US decided on a policy of global supremacy is also completely misunderstood.

This book serves to clarify some of the issues involved. It gives a completely detailed account of how the country moved from accepting a role of being the dominant power in the western hemisphere to imagining a world split between two powers (involving a cold war between the US and Germany), to envisioning a world dominated by the USA. In many ways this was pushed by a events totally outside our control. Most importantly, the fall of France lead people to be concerned that if we simply kept to our "quarter-sphere" we would be limited to that sphere perpetually. Only a fight to control as much of Asia could give us the resources to later conquer a German Europe.

I enjoyed this book. I also found it quite informative. I will say that a lot of the interest and excitement comes from the provocative framing of the situation. Once that is understood the rest become somewhat irrelevant details. Nevertheless, it is a solid book that I listened to within a few weeks.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, and I think I did learn a lot about the "inside game" of US planning for the aftermath of World War II both before and after the US entered the war, and particularly the rapid change in the views of US policy elites after the fall of France shocked them into realizing that Germany might win if the US stayed uninvolved. Furthermore, I hadn't realized that, for a time, US planning was based on the assumption of a "cold war" with a Nazi-ruled Europe, on the assumption that Britain could be kept free but continental Europe could not be retaken.

However, it seemed very odd to me that the author insisted that there were no "real" isolationists in the US because the opponents of US military involvement in Europe still believed in trade and, essentially, were not isolationist in the sense of the Tokugawa Shogunate's complete ban on interaction with the outside world. I became more concerned when I noted that he discussed the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh's anti-war activism in an almost entirely positive light, while failing to acknowledge their anti-Semitic and pro-fascist connections. Combining this with the fact that he is a founding member of the Quincy Institute, which seems to be a pro-Putin organization, I have to admit that I am fairly suspicious of his motivations and the possible bias in his writing.

[Matthew Shinker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so glad a family member recommended this book! While Stephen Wertheim's wording was a little academic for me, the explanations of the United States' position in global politics, post WWII, now makes a lot more sense to me.

Peter Zeihan's books did a great job of explaining our great fortunes as a young nation post-Bretton Woods America. This book focuses on the great inflection point which occurred on Dec 7th, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and brought America out of our isolationist slumber. The pendulum swung, the genie came out of the bottle and the rest is history.

This book is a great examination of the birth of US Global Supremacy. The title seems ominous and negative, but the facts as presented in this book don't seem so bad to me. Throughout human history certain empires, imperial forces or SuperPowers emerged and instilled their brand of order on the world - or great swathes of it. Those periods have been considered times of tremendous growth, development and prosperity. Makes me wonder if that's the case today?

[Rob Osiol · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book supposes that before WW2 America had an essentially good foreign policy tradition of "internationalism" that was corrupted by circumstances into globe bestriding empire. The book plays rhetorical slight of hand with talk of "liberal intercourse" between countries and hand waves all of the obvious facts that the aspirational reading of American foreign policy pre-1945 is wrong. While naive in earlier American history it then takes a fairly radical view of the structures of empire that came out of the war.

With all that said this book is very well researched and serves better as a history of early think tank culture and the foreign policy blob. Most of the action involves correspondences and research papers which while not actually driving policy provide the intellectual excuses used for empire. To that end this book just drops in characters like the Dulles brothers and Whitney Shepardson as bloodless policy wonks instead of examining their private careers or their eventual duties leading the CIA/OSS as motivations in shaping the discourse.

[David Mccracken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and to the point. Great insight into the US foreign policy establishment in early days of WWII, especially just after the fall of France, and the very sudden embrace of US world dominance.

Highlights the extent folks initially envisioned a potential long-term Cold War against Nazi Germany, with almost no focus on the USSR or Japan. The successful resistance of the British in the air battle changed the terms to focus more on total victory, well before Pearl Harbor.

The book also covers a parallel story about how the largely fake battle between "interventionism" and "isolationism" (the isolation side was always a caricature) hid the real goal, which was to push anything outside of US hegemony beyond the terms of reasonable debate in the post-war period. This is a good read and convincing, but not as fascinating as the timeline of US foreign policy folks choosing to be a superpower.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s an interesting thesis, but I did not really find myself very convinced by any of his arguments for it. An nice history of the development of US foreign policy in the interwar, but I found the argument (basically that we have lost sight of what “internationalist” fp means in favor of an artificial interventionist/isolationist dichotomy) to be not the most convincing. His basic claim is that the fp deep state weapon used the term isolationist and now we can’t conceive of any other fp. My main gripe is that in my view he interprets every decision by anyone pro intervention in the lead up to wwii as cynical, racist, and conniving and gives little credence to the legitimate changes to the ways people thought about foreign policy and conflict due to wwii itself. This said, I think it’s def still worth a read for the story he tells, even if I am not convinced by the conclusion he draws from it.

[Scott Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Audiobook) This work reads like an academic text, looking at how the US managed to evolve from a relatively isolationist nation into a practical global hegemon. The main timeframe of emphasis is the late 1930s/early 1940s as the US entered into World War II and exercised its political and economic might to support the Allies and taking on a greater role in global affairs. While it was mainly dealing with World War II, this also saw that US actions dictated global actions. This work analyzes much of the interactions between US governmental agencies as well as some of their international counterparts.

An okay read. It may not make that part of history any more exciting, but it is an interesting take on US foreign policy and its impact in the present day.

[Boyd Cothran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fine and thought provoking book. He argues that between 1939 and 1941, American policy planners and political leaders choose to embrace global supremacy through armed military interventions. Wertheim rejects the notion that isolationism dominated American foreign policy prior to WWII. Rather, he argues that isolationism emerged as the proponents of US global supremacy's bete noire because it served as a convenient foil to their arguments for the United States to embrace its role as a global police force. In his narrative, the fall of France places a particularly important role in pushing America towards its post-war international policy. Financial concerns, highlighted by the US Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations' deliberations, also played an important role.

[Tim Mullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading in an era when advocating for a more measured American foreign policy can malign oneself on a scale of hopelessly naive to appeasing dictators in the eyes of the foreign policy establishment. Wertheim does an excellent job of deconstructing the myth of isolationism, and he explains how NGOs came to dominate foreign policy construction in Washington. This book is consciously narrow in tracing the intellectual development of American primacy, so may not be the book to offer a broad overview of the development of American Hegemony. Easy to read, I wish he touched more on the opinion of American military planners, but Wertheim crafted a cornerstone reading necessary for understanding how this current geopolitical era came to be.

[John Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ultimately, this is a book that offers a new lense through which to view US global supremacy. I agree with the premise and appreciate the precision with which he pursues the precise moment that the US went from seeking to help the world, to try and control it through force.

Near the end, when viewing the destruction in Vietnam, two of the main thinkers lament “The problem with the American people is they do not recognize the difference between imperialism and interventionism.”

I just wish it was more engaging throughout. Part of me feels I could have read a short summary, and then enjoyed the conclusion (which is excellent)

[Erik D'Amato · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent effort to explain the origins of America's post-WWII drive for global hegemony that nevertheless is an example of the difficulty in trying to make a book relevant to both academic and general readers. Wertheim also seems to over-index the importance of think-tankers in the final stages of the U.S.'s metamorphosis from regional power to global giant, not doubt in part because he's a think-tanker himself. Finally, the paperback was almost unreadable due to the smallest body type I've ever seen in a book this side of one of those gift shop mini-books.

[Elan Kluger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I need a rating system. This book succeeds on its own terms: it shows that there were other models of understanding post World War II world order and that the US as hegemon only came about after the Nazis made short work of the western front. This points to the contingent nature of postwar world order. That it could have been otherwise.

So, in that sense, it is a model of the engagé history. But you have to ask—is that all a book is for? This seems more a data point than a book. 5/5 on its own terms, 2/5 as a book qua book.