Disunited Nations

US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right

Sean Byrnes

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175880
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Disunited Nations explores American reactions to hostile world opinion, as voiced in the United Nations by representatives of the Global South from 1970 to 1984. Sean T. Byrnes suggests this challenge had a significant impact on US policy and politics, shaping the rise of the New Right and neoliberal visions of the world economy. Integrating developments in American political and diplomatic history with the international history of decolonization and the "Third World, " Disunited Nations adds to our understanding of major transitions in foreign policy as the US moved away from the expansive internationalist global commitments of the immediate postwar era toward a more nationalist and neoliberal understanding of international affairs.

1

Imposing an American Design

The Global South, the Nixon Administration, and the Initial US Retreat from the Liberal World Order

In November 1945, with the dust of World War II still settling, the political magazine New Republic printed an editorial cartoon that highlighted what, for many, was the central question raised by the end of the conflict. The image was not of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin lording over a map of Eastern Europe, nor of Allied foreign ministers deciding the fate of a defeated Germany. Ignoring such particulars in favor of a more essential issue, the cartoon instead depicted a large, warehouse-like laboratory. Inside, along with a pair of contemplative scientists, were two large objects: one, a giant bomb marked “how to kill everybody,” the other, an equally large question mark labeled “how to live with everybody.”1 The meaning was obvious: in a world with atomic weaponry, a means to avoid future wars had to be found.

More than simply a clever joke about mankind’s intractable problems, the cartoon reveals something quite telling about the trends of American thought after World War II. It was the belief of many that a means “to live with everybody” could be found. Drawing on old strains of American idealism mixed with recently developed confidence in New Deal–style technocratic government and a resurgence in the ideas of Woodrow Wilson, many in the United States believed that the “broad, sunlit uplands” of a US-led “liberal world order” were just around the corner. Americans busied themselves constructing institutions of global governance designed to harmonize a world of sovereign nation-states trading peacefully with each other, all under the watchful eye of the United Nations and the, supposedly benevolent, world opinion it would muster against transgressors. Even as the practical power politics of the emerging Cold War undermined many of their rosiest dreams of the future, Americans continued to believe in their ability to lead, “modernize,” and democratize the “free,” noncommunist portions of the world, eventually exposing the false promises of Soviet-style communism.

By the late 1960s, however, much of this dream had not only faded but also seemed foolishly naive. When Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969, he confronted a dramatically altered world. Decolonization, particularly in Africa, had transformed the political layout of the globe and challenged Western control of international institutions like the United Nations. The economic revival of Europe and Japan threatened US supremacy even within its own alliances. The Vietnam War had transformed the once-appealing prospect of American-style modernization into a horrifying neocolonial nightmare. World opinion no longer seemed so friendly. Indeed, even many Americans appeared to be turning against their country, as evidenced by the spectacular protests and riots that rocked the nation throughout the latter part of the decade. As candidate Nixon put it in a speech to the Bohemian Club in 1967: “Twenty years ago, after our great World War II victory, we were respected throughout the world. Today, hardly a day goes by when our flag is not spit upon, a library burned, an embassy stoned. . . . [I]n fact you don’t even have to leave the United States to find examples. This is a gloomy picture.”2 Gloomy as it was, he continued, this summary did not convey the whole story, believing there was a “much brighter side” as well.3 Now confronting what seemed to be a growing isolationist spirit in the United States, President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger believed that the US international position could be improved without a wholesale retreat. They proposed scaling back the excesses of American commitments instead. The promises of previous presidents had been too great, having staked American credibility on objectives that could not be achieved. This was certainly the case with policy toward the Third World, where Nixon and Kissinger believed the prospects for rapid economic development were much less than people had been led to believe. The United States had to abandon the role of international evangelist and focus instead on behaving more like a “normal” country by maintaining the balance of power with the Soviet Union and protecting its own economic and strategic interests throughout the world.

To many in the Global South, however, the idea that the United States had not already been looking out for its interests seemed quite absurd. In the decades following World War II, politicians and intellectuals from regions as diverse as Central Africa, South Asia, and Latin America had been questioning just that idea. Events during this time set the backdrop for the emergence of US–Third World antagonism in the United Nations as a significant issue in American political life. In them are found the origins of American unpopularity in the Global South, the ideas behind the Nixon administration’s response, and how that response—combined with internal discord in the United States—only accelerated the decline in American esteem. Rather than seeking to win hearts and minds, the president would base US policy in the Third World on pro-US regional powers while maintaining a half-hearted commitment to existing programs for development aid and assistance. Though trying to respond to an electorate exhausted by years of paying any price and bearing any burden, Nixon’s policies ran into strong but incoherent domestic opposition as different groups of Americans challenged those elements with which they most disagreed. The combined effect of the president’s stingy policies and congressional and public unrest helped bolster the emerging global narrative that the United States was interested, not in positive change, but in attempting to maintain an unjust international status quo.

The Liberal World Order and Its Discontents

A growing collection of accomplished scholarship has outlined the parameters of the American vision for the post–World War II world. Reacting to their perceived failure to take advantage of—what Erez Manela has called—the “Wilsonian Moment” after World War I, Americans almost universally desired that the US play an active role in shaping the world after the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945.4 The disastrous collapse of the international order in the 1930s could not be repeated. The global community’s reticence in that decade to confront fascist aggression, its inability to coordinate a coherent response to the Great Depression, and the subsequent global slide into autarky and war were all fresh in the minds of those Americans planning the post–World War II world. So too were the supposed success of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the moderate, democratic alternative to fascist or communist solutions to the problems of the 1930s.

What emerged was a “New Deal for the world,” a rational, democratic, and technocratic vision of global governance designed to harmonize international relations and avoid another round of economic dislocation and war.5 This new world order was to be based on the establishment of several international institutions to coordinate responses to security, political, legal, and economic issues. The first three areas of concern would be handled by the United Nations, while the fourth was to be managed by a new set of international economic institutions—what later became known as the “Bretton Woods system.”

The outline for the UN organization was drawn up during a series of meetings between the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China—the most important of these being the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which established a draft plan for the organization, and the larger, fifty-nation United Nations Conference on International Organization, held in San Francisco during the spring of 1945. The plan for the United Nations was a direct reflection of the lessons Americans believed they had learned in the interwar years, both from the failure of the League of Nations and the perceived successes of the New Deal. The United Nations mirrored President Wilson’s plan for the old league in both structure and idealistic rhetorical trappings. The institutional centerpiece was to be the General Assembly, designed as a “Parliament of Man,” with each member state represented and granted a single vote, regardless of size, power, or influence. It was this body that was intended to mobilize “world opinion,” the force on which Wilson had placed so much of his hopes for isolating and halting aggressor nations. The plan also included the Economic and Social Council, an international civil service organized into the UN Secretariat, and the International Court of Justice, or the World Court, meant to adjudicate matters of international law.

In addition to embodying a resuscitated Wilsonian dream, the United Nations also bore the marks of the more pragmatic spirit of the New Deal: progressive in impulse but willing to compromise with perceived realities. This pragmatism was most clearly reflected in the UN Security Council, the body entrusted with enforcing collective security. Unlike the General Assembly, which can only recommend action to member states, resolutions issued by the Security Council are considered binding. Thus, in order to ensure that the leading powers of 1945 would both agree to join the United Nations and be willing to enforce its resolutions in the future, the architects of the Security Council abandoned the egalitarian spirit of the General Assembly in favor of a weighted-vote structure. In the Security Council, therefore, resolutions would pass by a majority vote, but only if all five “permanent members” voted in the affirmative or at least abstained. A negative vote by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, or China would kill any resolution. Thus, the Security Council—and, by extension, the whole United Nations—had one foot in a utopian future, where nations worked collectively to enforce security, and another in a more sordid past and present, where military and economic might shaped world affairs.6

A similar mix of idealism and hardnosed accommodation of the existing distribution of power and wealth also marked the international economic institutions that emerged after the war. The Bretton Woods system took its name from the location of the 1944 UN Monetary and Financial Conference, held at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The goal of the conference was to establish a plan for the regulation of international economic affairs in the hope of avoiding a repeat of the 1930s, when the pressures of the Great Depression undermined efforts to coordinate the global economy and triggered a worldwide retreat into isolationist policies.

The program that emerged looked “to reconcile a commitment to liberal multilateralism with new interventionist economic practices that had become influential across the world during the 1930s” and were central to the New Deal.7 Thus, Bretton Woods hewed a line between an unregulated international currency market, which would hinder each national government’s ability to intervene in its own economy, and a return to the restrictive, growth-limiting capital controls of the 1930s. The meeting called for the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to oversee a new exchange-rate system pegged to the US dollar, which would in turn have a fixed relationship to gold at thirty-six dollars per ounce. This permitted an easier exchange of currency—providing growth-spurring liquidity for capital markets—while offering gold-backed stability for the international money supply—allowing governments to adjust the value of their currencies as local demands required.

It also, and not accidentally, embedded the United States at the center of the global economy and ensured the superpower a preeminent role in IMF decision making. More akin to the Security Council than the General Assembly, voting at the IMF was based on a nation’s economic power, granting the United States the most influence by a considerable margin. A similar principle held at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, today part of what is called the “World Bank”), intended to help finance the reconstruction of areas devastated by the war. Voting there was also determined by a member’s economic power, again leaving the United States with a preeminent role. Thus, while these two institutions were idealistically designed to harmonize the world economy and allow for global economic growth, they also, more pragmatically, reflected the existing distribution of economic power.8

For these reasons, scholars have tended to see the Bretton Woods conference as almost entirely dominated by the creative tension between the lead American representative, Harry Dexter White, and his British counterpart, John Maynard Keynes. Though partly in attendance, the developing world had no more purpose in New Hampshire than, as White dismissively said of Cuba’s delegation, “to bring cigars.”9 Yet as the historian Eric Helleiner has demonstrated, the Global South, with its interest in economic development, played a much more important role in the conference than generally acknowledged. While many of the states of what would become known as the Third World were still under European control and absent from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From Delhi to Dallas
• 1. Imposing an American Design: The Global South, the Nixon Administration, and the Initial US Retreat from the Liberal World Order
• 2. Losing an Ideological Empire: The China Vote and Fears of American Decline
• 3. Breaking the Unholy Alliance: The Oil Embargo, the NIEO, and Kissinger’s Battle against the Third World
• 4. Nobody’s Punching Bag: Kissinger, the “Moynihan Effect,” and the Popularity of “Giving Them Hell at the UN”
• 5. Joining the Jackals: The United Nations, “World Order,” and the Failure of Carter’s Demarche to the Third World
• 6. A Reagan Revolution for the World: The United States, the Third World, and the United Nations after 1981
• Conclusion: “Losing after You’ve Won”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index