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.We managed to piece together an international system and then failed torecognize our authorship of it when we awoke to our new responsibilitiesÞöthough, as I have argued, we are still only partially awake.This is whyone argument rarely heard through all the debates that have occurred,especially in the 1990s, over the usefulness of institutions like the UN,IMF, and World Bank is that these institutions are American-made, andtherefore we have an obligation to take ownership of them.It also explains why the greatest fear of our allies has always beenAmerican withdrawal, not expansionism.Wilson s commitment to theLeague of Nations was a specific response to these fears; the implicitpledge of an institutionalized American involvement in Europe was hismain leverage in forging the peace treaty at Versailles.But it is noteworthythat Wilson s failure to secure America s entry into the League left himopen to the same kind of charges made against George W.Bush today:that his strident moralism was unmatched by commitment and was thususeless.As a piqued David Lloyd George wrote afterward,  The Ameri-cans appeared to assume responsibility for the sole guardianship of theTen Commandments and for the Sermon on the Mount; yet when it cameThe American Temptation 89to a practical question of assistance and responsibility, they absolutelyrefused to accept it. ³u This was the deficiency that FDR and Truman triedto correct, but the Europeans weren t taking any chances.After WorldWar II as well, the British and Europeans also sought to lock the UnitedStates into their affairs through NATO, and it was only an American com-mitment that prevented more draconian treatment of Germany.³vEven our greatest internationalist presidents have sometimes deceivedthemselvesÞöor perhaps believed their own pressÞöabout the real depth ofAmerican commitment.It is a little-known fact that the Pentagon, builthurriedly in 1942 after Pearl Harbor, was designed with floors to bear 150pounds per square inch rather than the standard 75 pounds so that afterthe war it could be used as warehouse space.FDR s War Departmentassumed it would probably shrink back to its small size, because Americawould not need to project power worldwide once the war was won.³w FDR,who never fully escaped right-wing accusations that he had deviouslyorchestrated America s entry into World War II, was certainly not going totell his generals to plan for postwar empire.In the early days of NATO, theTruman administration pined for a self-contained European security pactthat would allow the Americans to deemphasize or even unwind NATO,provoking Lord Ismay s famous comment that the point was to  keep theAmericans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Even George C.Marshall, the revered World War II chief of staff and secretary of state ofthe early Cold War, doubted the wisdom of that most iconic of Americanforeign policy successesÞöhis own Marshall Plan.In a talk with Paul Nitze,then a State Department aide, in the spring of 1947, Marshall worried toothat America was overreaching in its bid to resurrect the economies ofEurope, saying,  It s just not the sort of thing we do, according to Nitze srecollection.³x The Marshall Plan s first administrator, Paul Hoffman,declared dismissively,  The idea is to get Europe on its feet and off ourbacks. ³y As the war ended, most Americans simply ignored Vice PresidentHenry Wallace s 1942 call for a global New Deal.Americans after the war,wrote historian Robert Divine,  yearned for a magic formula which wouldpermit them to live in peace without constant involvement abroad. t pThe seemingly existential threat of communism during the Cold Warended that soap-bubble hope.But our uneasiness about the international90 At War with Ourselvesinstitutions we fathered resumed in the post Cold War period [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]