Robert A. Divine - Perpetual war for perpetual peace

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NUMBER FIVE
Foreign Relations and the Presidency
H. W. Brands, General Editor

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Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

ROBERT A. DIVINE

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FOR DARLENE

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In the spring of 1998, Prof. H. W. Brands of Texas A&M University asked me if I would give a series of lectures on his campus in the fall as part of the Program in Foreign Relations and the Presidency offered under the auspices of the Center for Presidential Studies. I quickly accepted this gracious request from a former student and decided that America's involvement in the wars of the twentieth century would be an appropriate topic. The reflections that follow, with the exception of the epilogue on Kosovo that was written later, originated as lectures at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, in early November, 1998.

In preparing these lectures, I relied heavily on more than forty years of teaching diplomatic history at the University of Texas. In a sense, they reflect a distillation of the ideas and concepts that I offered to undergraduates who took my course in twentieth-century American diplomatic history. I am deeply indebted to my fellow diplomatic historians whose work and ideas helped shape my own view of the history of American foreign policy. The notes in each essay refer only to the sources for quotations; a full listing of the many scholars on whose work I have relied would be far too long to include.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Bill Brands, who made this venture possible. He proved to be a generous host during my visit to his campus, and he encouraged me to transform the lectures into this book. I view him not only as a former student but also as a colleague and a friend.

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Perpetual War
for Perpetual Peace

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Americans like to think of themselves as a peace-loving people and the United States as a peaceful nation. Yet just a glance at our history reveals America's long involvement in war from colonial times to the presentfrom our role in British imperial struggles of the eighteenth century down to the recent Cold War with the Soviet Union.

There has not been a single American generation that did not take part in a war. We capped our colonial experience with the French and Indian War, a nine-year struggle to oust the French from North America. We gained our independence from England only after fighting for seven years in the Revolutionary War. In the nineteenth century, the nation was involved in a bloody conflict every few decadesbeginning with the frustrating War of 1812, which ended in a stalemate; the 1846 war with Mexico, which fulfilled America's manifest destiny; the bloody Civil War, which featured American fighting American; and ending with the 1898 war with Spain, a one-sided contest that marked America's emergence as a world power.

In the twentieth century, war has played an equally important role in our history. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson led America into the Great War that had begun in Europe in 1914 in a self-proclaimed attempt to make the world safe for democracy. Its

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failure to achieve that idealistic goal was made evident by the outbreak of World War II just over twenty years later, culminating in America's entry after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even though the United States emerged from that conflict as by far the most powerful nation on earth, instead of enjoying an era of peace, it quickly plunged into the Cold War. While the fear of nuclear devastation made engaging in hostilities with the Soviet Union unthinkable, America kept getting involved in limited wars designed to halt communist expansion, most notably in Korea, which like the War of 1812 ended in stalemate, and Vietnam, the first war we lost. Finally, the end of the Cold War by 1990 was quickly followed by America's swift if ambiguous victory over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.

The record speaks for itself: war has been an integral part of our history. Much as we profess the desire for a tranquil and peaceful world, we have resorted to arms again and again, engaging in what Harry Elmer Barnes aptly described as perpetual war for perpetual peace.

I admit that there is some risk in borrowing the title of a book by a controversial scholar who was a leading revisionist on both world wars a historian who believed that the United States engaged in interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Barnes's curious combination of broad learning and polemical writing led one observer to label him Half Savanarola and half Diderot. It is interesting to note that Barnes himself credits the phrase perpetual war for perpetual peace to another controversial yet distinguished historian: Charles A. Beard. According to Barnes, Beard used the phrase in their last conversation in 1947 to sum up twentieth-century American foreign policy. Both Beard and Barnes damaged their reputations by accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt of leading American into World War II by deceitful and underhanded means. While I disagree with this charge, I still find that their analysis of American involvement in foreign wars has merit. In refuting isolationism, orthodox historians have too often embraced, in Barnes's words, militarism, the crusading spirit, and war hysteria. Now that