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By Root 1217 0

rules and restraints. America, for its part, wants complete freedom of action: “Now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do.”6 But this argument misinterprets history and misunderstands the unique place that America occupied in twentieth-century diplomacy. America was the most powerful country in the world when it proposed the creation of the League of Nations to manage international relations after World War I. It was the dominant power at the end of World War II, when it founded the United Nations, created the Bretton Woods system of international economic cooperation, and launched the world’s key international organizations. America had the world at its feet, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium. Instead, they built an international order of alliances and multilateral institutions and helped get the rest of the world back on its feet by pumping out vast amounts of aid and private investment. The centerpiece of this effort, the Marshall Plan, was worth $100 billion in today’s dollars. For most of the twentieth century, in other words, America embraced international cooperation not out of fear and vulnerability but out of confidence and strength.

Central to this approach was the special attention given to diplomacy. Think of what it must have meant for Franklin Roosevelt, at the pinnacle of power, to go halfway across the world to Tehran and Yalta to meet with Churchill and Stalin in 1943 and 1945. Roosevelt was a sick man, paralyzed from the waist down, hauling ten pounds of steel braces on his legs. Traveling for forty hours by sea and air took the life out of him. He did not have to go. He had plenty of deputies—George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower—who could have done the job. Or he could have summoned the other leaders to him. But FDR understood that American power had to be coupled with a generosity of spirit. He insisted that British commanders like Montgomery be given their fair share of glory in the war. He brought China into the UN Security Council, even though it was a poor peasant society, because he believed that it was important to have the largest Asian country properly represented within a world body.

The standard set by Roosevelt and his generation endured. When Secretary of State Marshall devised the plan that bears his name, he insisted that the initiative and control lie with Europeans. For decades thereafter, the United States built dams, funded magazines, and provided technical know-how to other countries. It sent its scholars and students abroad so that people got to know America and Americans. It paid deference to its allies, even when they were in no sense equals. It conducted joint military exercises with small nations, even when they added little to U.S. readiness. For half a century, American presidents and secretaries of state circled the globe and hosted their counterparts in a never-ending cycle of diplomacy.

All these exertions served our interests, of course. They produced a pro-American world that was rich and secure. They laid the foundations for a booming global economy in which others could participate and in which America thrived. But it was an enlightened self-interest that took into account the interests of others. Above all, it reassured countries—through word and deed, style and substance—that America’s mammoth power was not to be feared.

New Rules for a New Age

Some Americans believe that we should not learn from history but just copy it. If only we could find another Truman administration, many liberals and Democrats seem to pine, it would establish a new set of institutions for a new era. But this is nostalgia, not strategy. When Truman, Acheson, and Marshall built the postwar order, the rest of the world was in tatters. People had seen the devastating effects of nationalism, war, and economic protectionism. As a result, there was strong support everywhere, especially in the United States, for a large and generous effort to engage the world, raise it out of poverty, create global institutions,