Still the American Century

Review of International Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 5, 1999, Pages 271-299

  Cumings, Bruce ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84990017250     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210599002715     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Mindy and Norman Cantor, The American Century (New York: HarperCollins, 1998);
2. Harold Evans, The American Century (New York: Knopf, 1998);
3. Studs Terkel, My American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998);
4. David Traxel. 1898: The Birth of the American Century (New York: Knopf, 1998);
5. Donald W. White, The American Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996);
6. Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
7. John E. Reilly (ed.), American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy 1999 (Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1999), pp. 8, 37.
8. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996);
9. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1989);
10. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, 1984);
11. Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr., Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It (New York, 1993). Historian Donald White may have been first on the fin-de-siècle scene with his 1996 book, but still managed some resoundingly bad timing—the subtitle was ‘The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power’.
12. Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 43.
13. Huntington, ‘The West: Unique, not Universal’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (November/December 1996), pp. 28-46. See idem., The Clash of Civilizations.
14. McCormick, America's Half-Century, pp. 240-241.
15. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, pp. 434-435.
16. Reilly (ed.), American Public Opinion, p. 5.
17. Crossette, ‘The World Expected Peace. It Found a New Brutality’, The New York Times, 24 Jan., 1999.
18. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Lonely Superpower’, Foreign Affairs 78:2 (1999), pp. 39-40.
19. Stanley Hoffman, World Disorders (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 105, 155.
20. Quoted in The New York Times, Nov. 20, 1998, p. A7.
21. W. W. Rostow, The World Economy (University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 52-53.
22. Emma Rothschild, Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age (Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 26-30. The British did not reach the 1929 US rate until 1966, according to data in Rothschild.
23. Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age, pp. 39.
24. Dough Henwood, ‘The Nation Indicators’, The Nation, 19 July, 1999, p. 12.
25. Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (University of Wisconsin Press rev. edn., 1985), p. 56;
26. quoted in Zunz, Why the American Century? (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
27. Zunz, American Century, p. xi.
28. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, trans. Redvers Opie (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), pp. xix, 61-66;
29. see also his often impenetrable tome called Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, abridged edn. (New York, Porcupine Press, 1989), first published in 1934.
30. The New York Times, 10 Feb., 1999, p. C3;
31. Peter F. Drucker, The Frontiers of Management: Where Tomorrow's Decisions are Being Shaped Today (New York: Plume Books reprint, 1999), p. 27.
32. All information in this paragraph from Drucker, The Frontiers of Management: Where Tomorrow's Decisions are Being Shaped Today, pp. 27-28, and.
33. Drucker, ‘Modern Prophets: Schumpter or Keynes’, 1983, reprinted in, pp. 104-115.
34. The New York Times, Sept. 22, 1990.
35. Jean Baudrillard, America (New York, 1989), p. 95.
36. Baudrillard, America, p. 77.
37. Council on Foreign Relations, aide-memoire E-B26, ‘American Far Eastern Policy’, 15 January 1941.
38. cited in Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York, 1977), pp. 129-136.
39. Time has not dimmed the impact of a stunning phone conversation between John J. McCloy and Henry Stimson in May 1945: McCloy remarked that ‘we ought to have our cake and eat it too; that we ought to be free to operate under this regional arrangement in South America, at the same time intervene promptly in Europe…’, to which Stimson replied, ‘I think that it's not asking too much to have our little region over here which never bothered anybody’. I first read this colloquy in Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York, 1968), pp. 470-471.
40. Dean Acheson, ‘An American Attitude Toward Foreign Affairs’, 28 November 1939, in Morning and Noon (Boston, 1965), pp. 267-275;
41. see also Acheson's reflections on the speech, pp. 216-217. I am indebted to Heajeong Lee for bringing this text to my attention.
42. So read a London newspaper headline during the heyday of the empire on which the Samuel Crowther, American Self-Contained (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1933).
43. John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture and Rebellion in California (University of California Press, 1992), pp. 233-235.
44. Weekly Variety, 18 March, 1996, p. 123.
45. Op-Ed Page, The New York Times, 20 March, 1999.
46. Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism (New York: Penguin 1983), p. 13.
47. Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, 1989), p. 72.
48. Acheson's notes to himself in preparation for Congressional testimony in August 1950, in Foreign Relations of the United States (1950), v. 1, pp. 393-395.
49. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 143, 178;
50. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 422-424.
51. Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of the Postwar International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
52. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 33.
53. Michael Mandelbaum, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Work’, Foreign Affairs, 75:1 (1996), pp. 16-32.
54. Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, called humanitarian interventions ‘feel-good foreign policy’. See ‘What Are America's Vital Interests?’, Washington Post, 6 Feb., 1996.
55. Judith Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Nancy Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (HUP 1989), pp. 21-38.
56. On the US role in Northern Ireland see Michael Cox, ‘The War That Came in From the Cold: Clinton and the Irish Question’, World Policy Journal, 16:1, (1999), pp. 59-67.
57. Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958), p. 262.
58. This is documented in William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 91-92, 121-5.
59. Cumings, ‘Global Realm With No Limit, Global Realm With No Name’, Radical History Review (Spring 1993).
60. Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 57-58.
61. Latham, Liberal Moment, p. 143.
62. Kennan's italics, in Latham, p. 147.
63. New York Times, Op-Ed Page, 14 March 1994. Kennan added, ‘Those of my opponents of that day who have survived [read Paul Nitze] would say, I am sure, ‘You see. We were right. The collapse of the Soviet Union amounted to the unconditional surrender we envisaged…. And we paid nothing for it.’ To which I should have to reply: ‘But we did pay a great deal for it. We paid with 40 years of enormous and otherwise unnecessary military expenditure’.
64. US Defense Department numbers, cited in Boston Sunday Globe, 11 Feb., 1999, p. B4.
65. Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, pp. 35-61.
66. William Borden, Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japan's Trade Recovery, 1947-1955 (Madison, 1984), 12-14. Here I also rely on Borden's ‘Military Keynesianism in the Early 1950s’, a paper presented to my International History Workshop (University of Chicago, 14 February 1994).
67. Jean-Claude Derian, America's Struggle for Leadership in Technology, trans. Severen Schaeffer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 5-6, 175, 267.
68. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 106, 135.
69. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. xii-xiii.
70. Quoted in Globalization and its Discontents, p. 98.
71. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 18.
72. Globalization: The Human Consequences, pp. 2-3.
73. The New York Times, ‘How the US Consumer Feels’, 4 Jan., 1999, p. C7.
74. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been most prominent in this regard; he wrote that ‘the prophets of neoliberalism and the high priests of the Deutschmark and monetary stability’ are promoting ‘a sort of universal belief, a new ecumenical gospel’. See Bourdieu, ‘A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism’, New Left Review, no. 227 (January/February 1998), p. 126.
75. Cited from the September 1998 World Press Review, in James Warren, ‘A Rising Chorus of Boos for Uncle Sam’, The Chicago Tribune, 7 Aug., 1998.
76. I document this in Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999);
77. see also Thomas Friedman's Op-Ed column, The New York Times, March 25, 1999;
78. and Friedman, ‘A Manifesto for the Fast World’, The New York Times Magazine, 28 March, 1999.
79. Cumings, ‘The End of the Seventy-Years’ Crisis’, World Policy Journal, 7 (Spring 1991), pp. 195-226.
80. Hoover, Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, pp. 238-239;
81. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Vintage Books, 1996), p. 86.
82. John Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War’, International Security, 15:1 (1990), pp. 5-57.