Originally published August 2007.
Williams’s first book, based upon his dissertation... In fact, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 and The Roots of the Modern American Empire [1969], his seventh book, are the only two of his grounded in extensive archival research. One does not see American-Russian Relations mentioned much in retrospective accounts of this famed historian, the founder of the Wisconsin School of U.S. diplomatic history, which included historians who studied under his guidance, notably, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, as well as those who followed his example; and which, because of its perceived cohesiveness and the lack of alternate explanatory frameworks, many have assumed is more influential than it actually has been. (Moreover, according to any given definition of the Wisconsin school, however open-ended, Lloyd Gardner would not fit--that’s not to criticize his excellent scholarship at all.) Despite its obscurity, the book stands as a masterpiece of historical literature, a micro-history companion of sorts to the meta-history of his influential book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959]. It is also a rare work of history that itself is of historical importance beyond its place in academia.
It is a masterpiece of historical literature because it presents a thesis that will captivate any informed reader--indeed, it will trouble him a little, impelling him to search for competing arguments. Is this perspective really the best one? If the reader asks such a question-- regardless if he eventually answers negatively or dismisses the question entirely--then the book warrants status as a great work of historical narrative writing.
The book possesses an historical significance beyond its contribution to academic debates because its coda was also published the same year as “Second Look at Mr. X” in the socialist Monthly Review magazine, after having been rejected by Foreign Affairs. The article sharply criticized George Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” itself published in Foreign Affairs, July, 1947, and credited to Mr. X. Kennan's now-legendary article gave credence to and provided suggestions for the budding Cold War policies of the time. Thus, at the height of McCarthyism and the Korean war, Williams, the idiosyncratic yet reserved man of the Mid-West who would turn out to be a source of such controversy over the next thirtysome years, made his little-noticed but hardly understated debut on the political-academic scene, in the form of a critique of the Cold War, at a time when critiques of the Cold War most likely ruined one’s career. He was not an elder statesman or veteran historian/ journalist who could easily get away with such a move either. Nor was he an old progressive his detractors could call “isolationist” and then haughtily be on their way. Not surprisingly, the article and book caused the never-minding ire of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later the Kennedy administration’s “court historian,” as Gore Vidal put it, but at the time one of the most ardent “Cold War liberals.” Schlesinger thought he saw right through Williams’s act: all that talk of U.S. political and economic interests looking for foreign markets--surely he was a Communist! Alas, while Schlesinger divined the “cycles” that explained “American” history, Williams tells his readers what real people really did. Indeed, I have found this book to be a laborious read the first time through, as so many persons, places, and institutions seemingly get in the way of a pleasurable bird’s-eye view. By the second reading, though, Williams’s preference for a minutely detailed narrative unimpeded by excessive organization begins to work; the patterns of the narrative continually further reveal and return to the author’s principal line of thought, as if the entire book was an essay you wish you could read in one sitting.
Further into the realm of academia, the book’s historical importance is of another kind altogether. Put most simply, the notion that the Wisconsin school offered the “revisionist” response to an “orthodox” view of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy in general inaccurately describes how serious writers grew to understand U.S. imperialism. As much as the “orthodox” minions would like to believe otherwise, the critics of U.S. foreign policy came first, the defenders later. After all, Walter Lippmann’s The Cold War [1947] made the term, “cold war,” the definitive signifier it would become, and yet it was largely a critique of U.S. policies. While, compared to Williams, Lippmann approached the issue with far more cynicism about the possibility of what Williams called “industrial democracy,” and with little sympathy for socialist ideals, nonetheless he called Kennan’s containment policy a “strategic monstrosity.” Sadly, Lippmann’s skepticism toward Kennan’s recommendations, based as they were on the relatively non-militarist, democratic practices of the U.S., was probably heeded by his elite readers, who thus did what they could to reverse or undermine those very non-militarist, democratic practices, undoubtedly thankful for Lippmann’s unwitting advice. That is, Lippmann's book served as the intellectual equivalent of Senator Arthur Vandenberg's famous quip that Truman had to "scare the hell out" of the U.S. public to win support for Cold War policies. Vandenberg, a moderate Republican of isolationist bent (reflecting the unique political culture of his state, Michigan) only expected to be taken seriously slightly more than Lippmann did.
Looking for other historians who published books on U.S.-Russian relations as early as Williams did, we do find William McNeill’s America, Russia, and Britain: Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941-1946 [1953], a forgotten artifact despite McNeill’s popularity. There is also Thomas Bailey’s America Faces Russia: American-Russian Relations from Early Times to Our Day [1950], which indeed precedes Williams’s book. But in Bailey’s introduction to his book, he acknowledges that he only studied the ideas and actions of Americans, much of it based on information he admits was “one-sided, warped, or completely false.” He emphasizes the pre-1917 period, wanting to avoid potential discord, leaving the pressing diplomatic issues of Second World War and early Cold War years unquestioned, though not without letting the reader know that of course the Russians were to blame. Despite this example, we cannot help but wonder what a thorough review of the historiography of the early Cold War era would turn up. Was the “orthodox” view entirely the product of political leaders and pliant journalists and ideologues? Why then have historians allowed non-academics to define the “orthodox” interpretation of a major facet of U.S. historiography? Are the forces of conservative retrenchment embarrassed that radicals and anti-imperialists delved into their nation’s diplomatic history before they did?
Returning to Williams’s book… What is this captivating, slightly troubling thesis that ideally would be more well-known and debated among historians? The answer lies in one of the chapter titles, “The Birth of Containment.” At first, not such a striking feature. After all, many major historians of U.S. foreign relations harbor the vain hope of being the authority on perhaps the primary problem of Twentieth Century international relations: the rise of the Cold War. Besides the McNeill volume noted above, Thomas Paterson, John Lukacs, John Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn Leffler, Gabriel Kolko, Gaddis Smith, Walter LaFeber, Arnold Offner, Fraser Harbutt, H.W. Brands, and surely a host of others have all written their book on the period--and we’re not including books broader in their subject matter that partially address the period in question, such as Stephen Ambrose’s Rise to Globalism or Thomas McCormick’s America’s Half-Century. And all due respect to Norman E. Saul, who has far surpassed Williams's work, writing four books on U.S.-Russian relations, collectively covering the period, 1763-1941. Williams, though he too wrote sweeping histories of “America,” demurs on the issue of the early Cold War. Because he was writing during or just after the Cold War’s onset, and didn’t have the necessary primary sources, he offers only the essay-like coda, based on the aforementioned Monthly Review article but given the more poetical, and caustic, title, “The Sophistry of Super-Realism.” No, when Williams addresses the “birth of containment,” he’s talking about the immediate post-Bolshevik period, when Woodrow Wilson asserted that Russia’s new Communist government was illegitimate and participated in efforts by Britain, France, Japan, and others to overthrow it. In short, the general policy of, first, hoping for, if not actually working toward, the demise of the U.S.S.R. and, second, thus engaging in as little diplomacy as possible with Russian leaders had been in place since 1917. Only with the end of the Second World War did this already extant “cold” state of relations between the two empires become the central drama of global affairs.
In other words, the changes marking the early years of the Cold War resulted from two competing empires asserting their newly-powerful, yet certainly not equally powerful, positions as the principal victors of the war. The competition between the two empires was forced upon the Soviet Union by Americans, and had never entirely abated despite their co-operation during the Second World War (to the limited extent they actually did co-operate). So far, not especially revelatory. The real crux, though, comes in the way Williams presents this competition rushed into by Americans. The Cold War--a term that at this point, despite Lippmann’s book, Williams never uses--was not some clear-cut new era, dramatically changing the shape of global events. Or, rather, it was so only for Americans gullible enough to believe such self-aggrandizing nonsense. But the Indians didn’t--and helped initiate the Non-Aligned movement. The Vietnamese didn’t--and struggled against the largest aerial-bombing campaign in the history of mankind to assert their independence. The Cubans didn’t--and when Americans refused to see their nationalist revolution for what it was, gamely accepted Russian assistance, essentially saying “fuck you” to the U.S. The Yugoslavs didn’t either, to the benefits of Americans--and declined to join the Eastern bloc, standing up to Stalin. But Americans never figured it out, because they never cared to, except incompletely and fleetingly in the post-Vietnam era. All they cared about were obstacles to their “freedom of action,” a phrase used more often than “open door” at this point in Williams’s oeuvre, as it appears four times in the coda; for Americans never stopped dreaming of remaking the world in their image. And they still haven’t. Though they do admit, disappointed, that the Chinese will probably take over for them soon, if they haven’t already.
Two adjunct points need to be made about how Williams presents this perspective, one of which fits the common view of the Wisconsin school and its "open door" theory of U.S. imperialism, the other of which does not. First, contrary to the common view of Williams as some sort of neo-isolationist, or at least as a Charles Beard-come-lately, Williams’s critique of U.S. foreign policy often revolves around the nation’s failures in diplomacy, and the need for Americans to be more thoroughly informed, more rigorous and systematic in their understanding of international relations (and we’ll soon see the example Williams gives of the kind of diplomat the U.S. needed more of). Second, despite the radical understanding of U.S.-Russian relations inherent in the notion of containment having begun in 1917 instead of three decades later, Williams gives a slightly different take when he states his main thesis:
“Washington’s response to the Bolshevik revolution only intensified the policy toward Russia that was formulated a generation earlier. A review of American-Russian relations from 1781 to 1917 reveals that the early friendship between the two countries was at first blurred and then destroyed in the heat of a struggle in Northeast Asia. The Bolsheviks did not disrupt that loose and informal entente--it was ruptured along the rights of way of the South Manchurian and Chinese Eastern Railways between 1895 and 1912.”
In other words, the pattern of U.S. hostility to Communist Russia is traceable father back, to pre-Communist Russia, especially the two decades prior. Indeed, Williams goes on to say that U.S.-Soviet co-operation during the Second World War was designed to preserve the status quo of inter-imperial, economic competition that had prevailed before the rise of the Nazi menace in Europe and the culmination of decades of Japanese challenges to the standing order in the Far East. As we would expect from an Open Door interpretation, economic growth impels the U.S. outward in search of new markets, bringing the nation into potential conflicts across the globe, including Manchuria, where, as Williams notes above, Russia and the U.S. (and Japan, Britain, France, Germany, and whichever other imperial power could weasel its way in) fought over economic control of China, over which empire would win the rights to lead China--the nation many agreed would determined the fate of modern, industrialized civilization--out of its supposed disarray and backwardness.
But Williams sells himself short by describing his book’s thesis as such. To follow this logic, the title of the second chapter, “Expansion Constricts a Friendship,” would be the crucial point, not “The Birth of Containment.” Just to elucidate the story as Williams presents it before we offer a compromise… First, Theodore Roosevelt joined Britain in siding too eagerly with the Japanese in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War that of course ended badly for the Russians. Second, the trade treaty between the two nations, dating from 1832, was abrogated in 1912 as a result of a decades-long rise in public scrutiny and outrage over the actions of the Tsarist regime, chatter that both encouraged and was encouraged by the increased competition in Manchuria. Soon thereafter, Russia found itself embroiled in the Great War: first the Tsar, then Kerensky, then the Bolsheviks were militarily unable to sustain their involvement, the few interested U.S. groups unable to formulate a coherent plan to aid either Kerensky or, to a lesser extent, the Bolsheviks. Conservative Americans, meanwhile, encouraged abandonment of the Kerensky government because of its supposed appeasement of the Bolsheviks, then assured themselves that Lenin and Trotsky were mere German agents who thus could not conceivably be thought of as legitimate Russian leaders. So, the Wilson administration and various private interests, all of whom had thought that a military strongman would emerge out of Kerensky’s downfall, not only saw the Bolsheviks pull Russia out of the war but also establish a firmer hold on power. And yet any possibility of co-operation with the Bolsheviks, who indeed expressed willingness to compromise, Wilson and most other U.S. officials dismissed out of hand. No thanks... we’ll support the “whites,” in fact the first of several reactionary monarchies the U.S., great advocate for democracy, would support in the coming Cold War, including those of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Thailand.
As noted above, though, when we enter into the period of Russia’s upheaval, we’re only at chapter 3. To put ourselves in a compromise-position between Williams’s unnecessarily-limited view of his own findings and our emphasis on his radical view on the origins of containment, let’s review the broad historical progression delineated in this book. We have three stages representing varying degrees of hostility towards the Russians. Around the turn of the century, and especially because of the anti-Russian chauvinism of T. Roosevelt, a decided turn toward an “Anglo-Saxon” camaraderie and shared global purpose took place, greatly alleviating the anti-British sentiment that was still strong in the U.S. of the late Nineteenth Century. Then, with the Bolshevik Revolution, the ideological difference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union intensified the distrust between the two nations, with most of the ensuing conflict as far as the diplomats were concerned taking the form of U.S. demands that the new Soviet government honor debts held by the Tsarist and Kerensky governments, and provide compensation for property nationalized by the Bolsheviks. Finally, in the lead-up to and during the Second World War comes what can only be called arrogant if not childish behavior on the part of U.S. leaders. The operative phrase here, “freedom of action,” describes the unwillingness of Franklin Roosevelt and his officials to address most of the pressing, potentially divisive issues among the "big three" of the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Britain in open, frank discussions: at times, a blatant refusal to engage in serious diplomacy.
While, in reading Williams’s book, one perhaps sympathizes with Wilson, who received conflicting reports coming out of Russia and either way was preoccupied with an array of issues during the war among which the Russian revolution and its implications for the eastern front were not central (even if, in retrospect, one cannot but think they should have been). F. Roosevelt, on the other hand, seems like an amateur, a rank hypocrite, a shameless opportunist. Roosevelt's, and Truman’s, relations with the U.S.S.R., alternately (or simultaneously) apathetic and brusque, were symptomatic of the increasing global pretensions of U.S. leaders; both factors created difficulties with Britain as well, unsettling though not reversing the long-term development of the U.S.-British rapprochement. One major difference between the British and the Americans (an example of Roosevelt, amateur) came with the landmark agreement between Stalin and Winston Churchill to divide East Europe into respective spheres of influence. Roosevelt was not involved because he declined to talk in such detail. In other words, “freedom of action” reared its sleepy head again. Stalin and Churchill also had to accept Roosevelt’s demand that the “big three” designate China as a fourth member of their special club, for the purpose of post-war “police” work (thus showing us Roosevelt, shameless opportunist): an obvious ploy for greater influence for Americans, since all involved assumed that the Nationalists allied with the U.S. would control China after Japan’s defeat. The Soviet Union, in both Greece and China, honored its commitment not to support the national Communist movements in question, paving the way for the U.S. to “lose” China in 1949. [The British, more selective because more reasonable and more limited in their choices, did not "lose" either Greece or Malaysia.] And of course (here comes Roosevelt, rank hypocrite) the U.S. also managed to “lose” the Russians' request for a loan; apparently, someone thought that was clever or sly. Once the U.S. rejected the plan for post-war reconstruction aid to be granted through the United Nations, thus allowing for the Marshall Plan, Stalin probably was wishing he had staked out a stronger position in Germany. After all, most historians agree that economic aid was the U.S.’s principal, if not only, enticement with which to extract compromises from Stalin on the German and Polish issues. Alas, the containment policy entailed no positive efforts to get the Soviet Union to change its policies, as would become clear in Hungary, 1956. Yet, oddly enough, positive efforts by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, despite the ghastly, amoral policies of the former and the confused, amoral policies of the latter, accomplished more than other U.S. administrations in terms of getting rid of the distrust and lack of communication between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and opening up the internal policies of the latter to greater scrutiny.
Another George Kennan besides the famous (cold-)warrior is a central figure in American-Russian Relations. This lauded explorer first traveled to Siberia in the Eighteen-Sixties and thereafter drew large crowds for his lectures on Russia. He became a critic of the Tsarist government after a tour of the nation’s notorious Siberian prisons in the Eighteen-Eighties. Kennan’s lectures and writings on the subject, including Siberia and the Exile System, only attracted more attention, and were also smuggled into Russia, helping to inspire the Tsar’s domestic opponents. When Century magazine, which had funded Kennan’s studies of the prison system, gave Russian officials a chance to respond, Kennan’s response to the response only upped the ante, denying that the long-standing cordial relations between the two nations had been of any substance and broaching another troubling issue for U.S.-Russian relations: the Russian persecution of Jews. Kennan was soon leading the way in the advocacy for repeal of the extradition treaty between the two nations passed in 1893. In short, the first G. Kennan and other critics of the Tsar’s internal policies proved to be on the vanguard of a wider anti-Russia shift.
The crucial, timely appearance of another uproar in the U.S. over another pogrom in Russia in 1903 illustrated and confirmed this instrumental position of the earlier Kennan. It was one of a variety of developments that pushed T. Roosevelt and others toward their support of Japan in its surprise aggression against Russia in January, 1904. Williams states plainly the seeming non-logic of this move: “At no time a serious competitor in the markets of either China or Manchuria, Russia was nevertheless designated the principal enemy. In turn, this attitude led Washington to back its two leading competitors [Britain and Japan] against a power that Roosevelt himself considered ‘inefficient’ and one he thought Japan ‘would probably whip’ on the sea.”
As with his rebukes against a certain lack of decorum and pragmatism in its diplomacy, Williams’s view of the U.S. on display here conflicts with stereotypes of the Wisconsin School perpetuated by its detractors. First, say the reactionary defenders of “American” might, the U.S. has not pursued consistent imperialist policies, or at least did not until the rise of the Cold War (and then of course only out of necessity, to meet the Communist peril). Well… read this book and Williams provides a great deal of evidence for, and insight into, the haphazard, vacillating foreign policies of the U.S., especially in the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, not only does American-Russia Relations fit within the definition of traditional diplomatic history, but Williams also finds Americans to be dearly in need of the cold-hearted realpolitik we expect from calculating imperial leaders. Second, the serious academic critics of the Wisconsin School discount the notion that the perceived need for economic expansion drove the decisions of U.S. leaders. And, again, Williams states clearly that anti-Russian chauvinism pushed Americans into alliance with the two other leading exporters of goods to Manchuria--Britain and Japan--against Russia, the nation which despite its geographical proximity, lagged behind in both its internal industrial development and its economic presence overland, into Manchuria and China, not to mention overseas.
But as much as Williams provides evidence for the reversals and missteps of U.S. foreign policy, and at times even a healthy amount of dissent, such as that of Ambassador to Korea Horace N. Allen, who desired closer ties with Russia in order to thwart Japanese expansion, he also delineates the eventual dominant trend: anti-Russian to the point of absurdity; allowing admiration for, and respectful challenges to, Britain’s empire and the political and legal heritage Americans and Britons shared to overwhelm practical concerns; economic leaders looking to expand the scope of their marketplace toward global proportions; and vague belief in the inevitability of conflict, of the martial proclivities of man, and of the ensuing rise and fall of imperial powers (in this last regard, Williams points to the extraordinary influence of Brooks Adams, as codified in his 1895 book The Law of Civilization and Decay). The end-result--given, as we noted in the first part of this essay, that Williams puts his second chapter, which covers the crucial fin-de-siècle period, at the center of his thesis, the crucial end-result of several end-results throughout the book--came with the Russo-Japanese entente of 1912. In their weakened position after the Japanese war, Russian leaders sought to work with the U.S.; appropriately, one would think, given that Japan in its new prominent position in East Asia was challenging the notion of an “open door” as much if not more so than the Russians or the other European powers ever had. To no avail, as the U.S. continued its anti-Russian policies. Thus, the same year the desperate Russians sued for peace with the Japanese, the Americans unilaterally pulled out of the 1832 trade treaty.
Given his criticisms of Mr. X--“George Frost Kennan,” as he exists in this book so as to differentiate between the two--Williams probably felt a little avenged, and a little amused, by the lesser position of “Frost” in the larger narrative of U.S.-Russian relations. Perhaps if “Frost” had done more to thaw the icy relations between the two empires, he would have been of greater historical significance. But, alas, he spent the rest of his life trying to assert--pathetically, we have to say--that U.S. leaders took his recommendations too far. Even though his reservations about a “get tough” approach were on display in the Foreign Affairs article--contradictions even a cursory review of the article makes clear--we still have to say, “Too little, too late.” While Kennan would always say his moderation showed his correct, complex view of the situation, we say that Williams had to point out the contradictory nature of Kennan’s observations, and the role such a two-faced message would play in the context of the long history of strained U.S.-Russian relations. In short, it encouraged the Cold War, discouraged peace. Williams especially points to the following from Kennan’s article:
“‘[The U.S.] has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.’”
In response, Williams says: “Kennan’s choice of words further dramatizes his resort to force. Had he anticipated ‘a result to be expected,’ Kennan would have used the phrase ‘will eventually.’ Instead, he wrote ‘must eventually,’ an expression of obligation under ‘physical or logical necessity.’ Men do not surrender to the dictates of logic, as Kennan himself admits.”
Indeed, they surrender at the point of a gun. In other words, Kennan was crying over spilt milk when he subsequently complained that, beginning with the infamous N.S.C.-68 paper written by Paul Nitze in 1950, U.S. leaders sought all-encompassing, military solutions to the problems of the Cold War. To the leaders of a nation that had once openly called for the overthrow of the U.S.S.R., Kennan had given a rationale to return to such a drastic approach after the Rooseveltian interregnum of begrudging co-operation. Kennan either had a limited understanding of U.S. history, or hoped to change what he perceived as policies that were too kind to the Soviet Union. In other words, we’re left wondering if Kennan’s later observation that the Russians acted more like a traditional “great power” than the U.S. did is synonymous with his complaint about the militarized, universalized Cold War policy, and if so why Kennan thought U.S. leaders, given the awesome powers and singular advantageous position they had attained from the war, would honor diplomatic niceties that limited their “freedom of action” or closed the “open door” of globalized capital.
In stark contrast to F. Kennan, the hero of Williams’s narrative is Raymond Robins. This labor organizer, and political activist, a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential comeback bid but usually a Democrat, was the principal reason Lenin and Trotsky considered co-operation with the U.S. to be feasible at all. Robins, who went to Russia officially as a representative of the Red Cross Commission to Russia, did not have an ideological predilection toward Communism; unlike Jack Reed, the U.S. Communist who traveled to Russia and wrote the famous Ten Days That Shook the World, an account of the Bolshevik revolution, and later became the subject of Warren Beatty’s film Reds (1981). Robins fervently devoted himself to peace between the two nations, regardless of which faction had control, and did so for its own sake; as such, he serves as Williams’s ideal diplomat. Williams begins the book with a quote from Robins (thus also beginning Williams’s quixotic tendency to open books, and chapters within books, with a surfeit of quotes, in some cases more than a page of them). The line, “The only answer for the desire for a better human life is a better human life,” captures well the humble, matter-of-fact nature of Robin’s efforts, and Williams’s own life-long effort to nudge Americans away from “empire as a way of life.”
Robins’ complicated role in the narrative first manifests itself as part of the agitation for abrogation of the 1832 treaty. Besides and at times interrelated with the pogroms, Russian persecution of political radicals, especially its efforts to force other nations to send exiles back to Russia, also inflamed popular opinion against the Tsarist government. (As hinted above, in the title of George Kennan's book, the exiles often ended up in Siberia.) Robins successfully defended Christian Rudewitz, a Russian revolutionary, against the threat of extradition in 1908, in part because he was able to exploit his contact with T. Roosevelt, whom he had first met in 1903. Yet Robins ended up supporting negotiations with the Bolsheviks not because of his personal history as a reformer, but because of his involvement in various efforts by private economic interests, including the famed House of Morgan, to increase U.S. investment in the Russian economy in spite of the void trade treaty. The Red Cross Commission arose out of concern on the part the financier Henry P. Davison and the railroad magnate William Boyce Thompson, both associated with Morgan, over the stability of the Kerensky government. Robins got a spot because T. Roosevelt, who Davison had wanted to lead the commission, declined the offer, recommending Robins in his place. Thus, “big stick” Roosevelt was responsible for the rise of the man who would for more than two decades serve as the greatest advocate for recognition of the U.S.S.R. In Russia, Robins gained the trust of first Kerensky and later the Bolsheviks, and amid of the chaos of 1917 led Red Cross efforts to supply food, clothing, and medicine to the ailing Russian people. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Robert Lansing thought that even the opinions expressed by the disorganized and conservative Root Mission sent by President Woodrow Wilson to Russia--named after its leader, former Secretary of State Elihu Root--were too kind and optimistic toward Kerensky, and never hoped for anything other than a reactionary dictator to take control of the West’s troubled Eastern ally. Robins, a consummate realist who realized that the Bolsheviks had greater influence than Kerensky’s government--in his efforts to procure grain, he found himself impelled to work with the Bolsheviks while Kerensky still held power--nonetheless was given important political tasks by Kerensky, advocated that Russia stay in the war against Germany, and participated in anti-Bolshevik propaganda and political action. Woodrow Wilson, though, ignored the fragility of Kerensky’s rule in the months leading up to the November Bolshevik Revolution. He, Lansing, and others at the State Department, as well as the British and the French, had little faith in Kerensky and, moreover, never considered any option other than complete rejection of the very idea of a Bolshevik government, a government born out of workers’ councils and genuine sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people at war. And thus, “The Birth of Containment.” And the first time F. Kennan is quoted:
“The decision ‘to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the mellowing of Soviet Power’ was not reached in 1945 or 1947 – it was an established policy as of January 31, 1918.”
Robins continued his work, in league with Alexander Gumberg, a Russian-American who had come to Russia as a businessman but instead became a crucial link between Americans and the Bolsheviks. Robins got both Thompson and Colonel William Judson, an army engineer who had served as the U.S. observer of the Russo-Japanese War and come to Russia as part of the Root Mission and stayed on beyond its closure, to support working with the Bolsheviks; both men had originally been wary of any sort of co-operation with the revolutionary government, and Thompson had not wanted Robins to come on the Red Cross mission at all. Effective Bolshevik control, and the relative eagerness of Lenin and Trotsky to work with the U.S. compared to the other Western powers, convinced them Robins was on the right path. Essentially, they hoped that, even if the Bolsheviks agreed to an armistice with Germany, they would do so in such a way as to limit German gains on the Eastern front; also, the two nations would work together to limit any possible advances the Japanese would make amid the upheaval. Wilson and Lansing, though, rewarded them with formal rebukes. The Bolshevik government, even with a firm grip on the reins of power, did not win any respect, was still unacceptable to them; indeed, Williams makes certain to point out that Wilson, Lansing, and others who turned instead to vigorous support of “white” factions knew that Lenin and Trotsky were not German agents. They looked upon the Bolsheviks with scorn and condescension, displaying an attitude that clashed with the lofty rhetoric of Wilson’s “fourteen points” speech given in January, 1918. The ultimately-unsuccessful intervention instigating the Russian Civil War, and the Cold War, had both begun.
On the subject of Wilson, anyone who has studied his rhetorically rigorous but in practice slipshod attempt at neutrality in the Great War, revolving as it did around the issue of the shipping rights of neutral nations, will comprehend at least one more overarching theme of this book: the U.S., as it progressed from its infancy as a player on the global, inter-imperial stage to its position as a emerging “great power” in the early twentieth century, also progressed from a position at variance with Britain’s control of the seas, especially in the Napoleonic era, and as such sympathetic to Russia’s similar concerns, to a position in league with Britain’s naval policies, a junior partner unwilling to challenge its elder's superiority in order to avoid war. Thus came U.S. intervention on the side of Britain and France, tragically giving the two largest empires the leverage necessary to force the harsh peace of Versailles upon their young German competitor. British predominance looms in the background throughout the book, a large and steady presence persistently limiting what its imperial competitors were able to do. From the 1832 trade treaty between the U.S. and Russia, wherein Russia avoided the issue of neutral shipping rights so as to avoid offending Britain, to the period spanning the end of the Sino-Japanese War and the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, wherein Britain firmly yet quietly pushed the U.S. toward support of Japan for the sake of greater leverage in its wider array of conflicts with Russia, the British always discouraged U.S.-Russian co-operation.
As noted above, the differences that developed between the U.S. and the British during and after the Second World War never threatened the general accord between the two nations. And yet, undoubtedly, it represented the U.S. taking over Britain’s former position as the imperial hegemon, able to goad its lesser allies into taking the “right” actions. One thing to note, though: no matter how much rhetoric Americans spew out about “free trade,” the U.S. has never been as ideologically committed to the breaking down of trade barriers as the British were: the Open Door was a door open for Americans. The U.S. disappointed Britain with its protectionist policies in the Philippines, just as a century later it upsets nations relying on the export of agricultural goods with the ridiculous subsidization of its industrialized farms. After all, the same House of Morgan, whose financial support of Britain during the Great War was crucial in pushing the U.S. toward war in 1917, also indirectly gave rise to the failed peacemaking work of Robins and others in revolutionary Russia. The U.S. would have none of the latter. Only a fool would believe that the Open Door policy grew out of a sincere desire to create an inter-connected world of sovereign nation-states freely trading with each other in a rowdy but fair game of economic and financial competition, overwhelming cultural differences, or the “conspicuous consumption” Thorstein Veblen studied, or the ego of individual leaders. Some of Williams’s critics took him to be just such a fool. Perhaps they never read his books closely.