Decline and Renewal: American World War II Interventionists

In the period between the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on pearl harbor, the tern 'interventionist' referred to those Americans who believe that it was more important for the United States to insure British victory over Germany than it was to keep out of the European war. It applied both to individuals who advocated direct American military involvement and those who hoped to achieve a British victory by aid short of war, which was the official policy of the Roosevelt administration Since the United Sates ultimately entered the war as a result of the Japanese attack it may seem striking that public interest was focused largely on the European war.

The American public's view of foreign relations in the 1930s, as well as actual U.S. foreign policy during that period, reflected an attitude commonly called isolationism. Isolationism meant that the United States would neither join entangling foreign alliances nor intervene in European affairs.

After the outbreak of the war in Europe, the United States move slowly toward a position of aiding the Allies. President Roosevelt Publicly claimed that aid to Britain (and by mid-1941 to China and the Soviet Union) would keep the United State out of the war by enabling Britain to resist Germany.

Numerous proponents of an interventionist policy sought to rouse public support for that policy in the press and on the airwaves. In fact, the period between 1939 and 1941 saw a virtual media war between supporters and critics of intervention. Interventionism was espoused by some of the leading media figures of the period. Among them were Henry R.Luce, editor and publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines; syndicated newspaper columnists Walter Lippmannn and Dorothy Thompson; theologian Reinhold Nieburhr; political commentator Max Lenrenr; and literary figures Herbert Agra, Arcdhibald MacLeish, and Lewis Mumford.

Historians have examined at length the ideas of isolationists, but less analysis has been done on interventionist thinking. Especially noteworthy among the interventionists is the recurrence of themes that transcend the immediate war issue. Interventionists addressed fundamental social questions, including the viability of Western civilization, the role of democracy, and the best political order.

Moral View Of The War

On May 27, 1941, the day he declared an unlimited national emergency, president Roosevelt told his listeners in a radio address: "Today the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom--between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal." The notion that the world was engaged in a dramatic life-and-death struggle between two antithetical social systems--one embodying good, the other evil--was a basic assumption of the interventionists.

The interventionists' quasi-theological view conflicted completely with the dominant American attitude toward war during he 1930s. Influenced by traditional American distaste for European politics and disillusioned by the results of Woodrow Wilson's crusade for democracy during World War I, many argued that rhetoric served to conceal baser economic or territorial interests in the struggle for Europe and in wars generally.

When World War II broke out in Europe in September 1939, the isolationists remained cynical. H.L. Mencken, the notorious satirical journalists, summed up this view in his own inimitable style when he wrote that the war in Europe was "as devoid of moral content as a theorem in algebra or a college yell."

In contrast, the interventionists' moral view of the war rested upon their perception of nazism (often the terms 'nazism' and 'fascism' were used interchangeably) as fundamentally at odds with any civilized society. Herbert Agra, Pulitzer Prize winning author and a leading speaker for the militantly interventionist Fight for Freedom Committee, identified nazism as a "revolution against civilization not in favor of a new form of civilization. It can never create: It can only kill." Fascist civilization in short," Lewis Mimford exclaimed, "is a contradiction in terms."

Many isolationist advocated peace to end the war in Europe. To the interventionists, however, the evil of nazism made a negotiated peace impossible. "As with our Civil War," Lewis Mumford stated unequivocally, "no compromise is admissible with a group of powers whose moral and political principles are…opposed to those accepted everywhere by civilized men."

Nazism was not just thoroughly evil but inherently bellicose and expansionist. "War is the nature of this whole concept of life," exclaimed Dorothy Thompson, the preeminent female media figure or the period. "It was born to make war; it will make war until it is stopped by force; it cannot be conciliated."

Not only was isolationism untenable, but so was a limited war to contain Nazi aggression. Nazism had to be annihilated for civilization to survive. As Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes, the administration's spokesman for interventionism, thundered: "there can be no peace while a Nazi is active in any place, at any time."

National interest as described by the so-called realist school of thought (represented by Hasn J. Morgenthau, George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Robert W. Tucker) has focused on physical entities--raw materials, commerce, geography. Ideology and values have been seen as extraneous to the national interest and usually harmful when allowed to shape foreign policy. The interventionist, of course, saw the matter differently. Ideology could not be divorced form American security, for the two overlapped. The purpose of American involvement in the war was not just to aid other peoples (which it would do) but to save America itself. For the United States could not physically survive in a world that lay even partly under the sway of Nazi doctrine.

Whereas interventionists saw nazism as the epitome of evil, they viewed Western democracies, including the United States, as good only by comparison. Interventionist regarded Western society to be in a state of decay and they supposed that war might aid in bringing about Western regeneration. Although citing many material defects in Western society, which were quite manifest during the Great Depression, interventionists regarded the underlying problem as spiritual. As Lewis Mumford wrote, "Political and economic disturbances were usually the final symptoms of a collapsing civilization. These vizxible faces are preceded by a much longer period of inner decay." The interventionists held that Western society had been turning away from the spiritual values that had served as its foundation and was now adrift. Without moral purpose, Western society could no longer act effectively.

Lewis Mumford's many writings in the 1920s and 1930s constantly dwelt on the erosion of spiritual propose in Western society. He devoted two books-Men Must Act (1934) and Faith for Living (1940)--and a number of articles exploring the relationship between the spiritual sterility of the West and the advance of nazism. Muford observed in "the passive Barbarian" that modern individuals accepted "life as an alternation of meaningless routine with insignificant sensation." They "eat, drink, marry bear children, and go to their graves in a state that is at best hilarious anesthesia, and at worst anxiety, fear, and envy, for lack of the necessary means to achieve the fashionable minimum of sensation." Similarly, Harold L. Ickes wrote in his diary on July 12, 1941, "We are no longer in the jazz age, but we are in an age when we are more interested in movies and radio and baseball and automobiles than in the fundamental verities of life."

The quick collapse of France in May and June 1940 seemed to illustrate the inability of a conviction less people to put up resistance. In World War I, France had held off the German army for four years, and in 1940 many observers still believed that France possessed the finest army in the world. Yet, after a few weeks of combat, the French army crumbled and the government surrendered. "France has shown us what happens to a people who are too long cynical," Herbert Agar solemnly stated. "The time comes when men will not choose to die in the last ditch for institutions they have been taught to mock.

Lack of belief was seen as especially contrary to the American tradition. The essence of America, interventionists held, was its constant effort to actualize its ideals by undertaking great tasks, from the creation of the Republic to the conquest of the frontier. In recent times, interventionists contend, the United States was no longer following a noble vision, but was exhibiting a narrow-minded selfishness. Americans had abandoned their pursuit of higher goals after World War I, Herbert Agar acidly commented, because they "did not choose to be distracted from the delicious pastime of selling each other as many automobiles and iceboxes as possible."

Lippmann's Affirmation Of Interventionism

Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most famous syndicated columnist of the era, had accepted much of the isolationist position through the 1930s but by 1939 was espousing the interventionist creed. (Lippmann had been an ardent Wilsonian during World War I and its aftermath) America's eroding spiritual vitality was one of Lippmann's special concerns, which he discussed at length in "the American Destiny," an article in the June 5, 1939, issue of Life. In Lippmann's opinion, modern American possessed vastly more wealth and power than every before in its history, but instead of attempting to use those strengths properly, Americans were abdicating their destiny for greatness. "In every field of our activity," Lippmann observed, "we have come to think that there is a surplus to be gotten rid of."

Lippmann singled out New Deal economic policies as an area where this negative attitude was especially evident. Curtailment of production rather than economic growth had been the New Deal policy, Lippmann bitterly complained. The goal of American agricultural policy under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was "to protect old investments against the competition of new enterprise." In regard to the labor, the United States was trying "to let more men work a little by making each man work less."

Lippmann's criticism of new Deal schemes did not mean that he supported the economic policy of conservative Republicans, who, he believed, also lacked dynamic vision. The high-tariff Republicans of the twenties had sought to establish a "Chinese wall of protection" around the United States, perceiving American industry as incapable of competing with the rest of the world. And instead of offering new plans to meet America's economic crisis, Republicans automatically condemned all reform as anarchistic or communistic.

In foreign policy, Lippmann saw the rejection of the League of Nations and the adoption of the isolationist neutrality legislation of the 1930s as efforts to nullify "the fact that America has preponderant power and decisive influence in the affairs of the world." The "total effect" of both American domestic and foreign policy was "that the American people face the world not with their old confidence and courage, but in a mood of withdrawal, denial defeat, and of wishing to escape from their opportunities and their responsibilities."

Lippmann attributed the American paralysis of purpose to an excessive reaction to disappointment and disillusionment. Thrice in the post-World War I ear, he wrote, Americans had tried "to do great things that they had never done before, and three times, on the first attempt, they had been disappointed." Under Woodrow Wilson, the United States attempted to create a just world order. During Coolidge's administration, Americans had come to recognize their "obligation to take a leading part in the reconstruction of the money and the credit and the commerce of the world." Franlin D. Roosevelt's new Deal sought to establish a prosperous and just domestic society. The failure of each of those efforts to achieve its goal "produced the thoroughly disillusioned American of the present day who wants to withdraw within the three-mile limit, wants to bury the gold, and wants to suspend the reforms."

The United States had not been misguided in seeking collective national goals, Lippmann asserted. American failed only because it lacked experience. He urged Americans not to abandon their efforts to pursue difficult, idealistic goals; rather, America should strive harder to attain these goals.

A New Idealism

Lippmann's criticism of the New Deal was not confined to a partisan critique of Republican "normalcy." An even stronger criticism of liberal reform, however, was expressed by Henry Luce. Luce believed that liberal and leftist economic planning would result in a self-contained national economy, which he regarded as a derailment of the American global vision. Since the conquest of the Western frontier, Luce believed, American had lacked a proper calling; American's "vision" had become an "ingrowing one." America's destiny was to find its new frontier beyond its territory limits--spreading its advanced technology, products, and ideals throughout the world. By refusing to look abroad, Americas had sought spurious goals, tampering with the capitalistic free enterprise system with different ill-defined schemes in the ever-illusive hope of achieving prosperity at home. The New Deal was a specious substitute for a global vision that had "failed to make American democracy work successfully on a narrow, materialistic, and nationalistic basis." America's only chance for salvation was to make democracy work "in terms of a vital international economy in terms of an international moral order.

Believing that their society was self-centered, the interventionist looked to war as an event that could inspire new idealism. The violent struggle for survival would force Western society to exert itself fully, expunging its corruption in the process. The Fascist menace, Mumford proclaimed, underscored the decay in Western society that had been advancing undetected for many years. It had "shaken all our complacencies, it has disclosed the weak points in our daily routines, and it has made us conscious of weaknesses that might has been fatal to us if we had not been challenged by an outside power." Dorothy Thompson saw the long-run effect of nazism as being "a hideously painful cauterization process, to burn away the cancerous tissue that eats at the very heart of our society." To Herbert Agar, war was "almost a sign of health…because war means that men are somewhere still willing to resist revolution, still confident enough to try to earn for civilization a second chance."

While modern living had accentuated individual egotism, are would promote the common interest through shared sacrifice and shared danger. It would provide the sense of purpose and meaning lacking in modern society. With the nation's very existence at stake, as well as the lives of individual citizens, modern cynicism would evaporate and the belief in a higher good would return. Since modern warfare required total mobilization of civilians as well as the military, the spiritual qualities engendered by it would affect the whole populace. The stress of war would raise Western society above its spiritual demoralization.

When the interventionists referred to the purifying effects of war, they believed that concrete evidence for such war-inspired revitalization already existed in Grate Britain. Great Britain had undergone a transformation, becoming, the spiritually oriented society they longed for. The British example would pave the way for the moral renewal of the entire Western world. In Great Britain, it was not just the military, but the whole British populace that was exhibiting heroism while the German Luftwaffe was raining terror on civilians. The heroic resistance of the English people, Walter Lippmann exclaimed, "proved that modern society can be redeemed from apathy, the cynicism and the materialism that was destroying it." "England has shown us," Herbert Agar asserted, "that modern man is not doomed to nihilism and defeat."

Speaking in October 1941, Dorothy Thompson stated that when France fell in June 1940, she had gloomily expected nazism to prevail everywhere. It had not appeared possible that Britain could hold out alone against the mighty German war machine. In her last prewar visit to Britain, she had sadly observed the existence of manifest degeneracy. Britain had appeared "like a beautiful museum and summer resort, with slums on the outskirts, in which the people with the greatest tradition since the Romans were living on and using up with terrible rapidity, the inherited capital of their ancestors." After the falloff France, however, a regenerated Britain emerged. Borothy Thompson returned to war-torn Great Britain in the summer of 1941 to witness that transformation firsthand. The visit left her spellbound. "What I saw was so far beyond my expectations, what I saw was so beautiful, so noble, that I shall never doubt again. I have come back reborn, because I have seen a reborn nation."

Global Democracy

The spiritual regeneration of the West, interventionists believed, would lead to concrete reforms. Interventionists spoke about a reconstructed domestic society, but they stressed even more an improved international order. They saw the destructiveness of was bringing about the end of the non-state and leading to greater integration of countries. Though interventionists perceived this integration process as inevitable, they had unshakable faith that human will could shape the form of a further unified global order. Whereas the Nazis sought to unify the world on the basis of tyranny, it was also possible for the world order to be democratic in form. Seeing the fate of the world to be literally in their hands, the interventionists became absorbed in plans for the establishment of world democracy.

One of the these plans was put forth in The city of Man: A declaration of World Democracy, which was issued under thirteen names, including those of Herbert Agar, Lewis Mumford, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The future world order proposed would not be a league of sovereign countries as the League of nations had been; rather, the central government of the world would be the sole sovereign power. To enforce its laws there would be a "federal force ready to strike at anarchy and felony."

The City of Man addressed the interventionists' concern about the lack of social cohesion. It emphasized the need for a democratic government to be predicated on exclusive truth. Democracy would be "no longer the conflicting concourse of uncontrolled individual impulses, but a harmony subordinated to a plan; no longer a depressive atomism, but a purposive organism." It would become a definite blueprint for society, not merely a decision-making process in which any temporary majority could enact its own program. The City of Man revealed an authoritarian streak that was evident to a lesser degree in other schemes for global improvement produced by the interventionists. Although the work constantly referred to the value of the individual person, it defined freedom in a way that would allot its realization only through the pursuit and attainment of a collective purpose. Democracy would become the civil religion, and other belief systems would have to be brought into conformity with it. Academics, moreover, would face stringent governmental control in the order being envisaged. The state would make sure that "freedom of learning" was not "being used as a cover for evil-doing of the 'historic relativism' and the 'healthy skepticism' that have made our generations lose their way." Ironically, the new democracy that The City of Man conceived did not mean majority rule, which is often send as the essence of democracy. Democracy was "a higher law than the will of a single and momentary majority." The City of Man proposed the creation of "boards of experts" to draw up a "law of permanence" that would serve as the guideline for the state.

Streit's Unified World

The most detailed plan for a unified world, subscribed to by the interventionists, was put forth by Clarence K. Streit in Union Now. Streit had developed his world government design while a reporter for The New York Times covering the activities of the League of Nations at Geneva between 1929 and 1939. In Geneva, streit had observed the evident flaws of the League and had come to the conclusion that its fundamental weakness had been its failure to eliminate national sovereignty. Only a true world state, he believed, could maintain world state, he believed, could maintain world peace.

Although Streit's plan first appeared in Union Now in March 1939, the war helped to give in popularity. Fortune, Life, and Reader's Digest offered articles on Streit's proposal. To Current History proclaimed it "the outstanding book of 1939." A new organization, the Federal Union, arose publicize Union Now, and it achieved wide memberships. In 1941, Streit wrote a sequel entitled Union Now with Britain that, in addition to restating much of the original material, argued for a union of the Untied States and Great Britain at the end of the war.

Streit proposed the establishment of a sovereign world government. Although eliminating national sovereignty, Streit's proposed constitution allowed countries partial control over their internal affairs. In advocating a federal system, Streit was consciously copying the United States Constitution. Under his plan the governments of countries would be analogous to the state governments within the United States. Equal in importance to the abolition of national sovereignty was the democratic basis of the new world order.

He did not expect or intend a world-wide government to arise all at once. Rather, Streit proposed to begin with a union of the existing democratic states that would ultimately evolve into a government for all mankind by allowing other countries to join. Only democracies--that is, those countries, that had internal majority rule and allowed the free expression of ideas--would be eligible for admission. The economic and political success of the union, Streit held, would encourage other countries to adopt democratic practices and apply for membership.

Streit developed his plan for world government in great detail. Like the provisions of the Constitution of the United States, there would be three branches of government: legislative, executive, judicial. The legislative branch would consist of two divisions: one based on population solely and the other allowing for representation by country with somewhat greater representation from the more populous countries. The executive branch would consist of five members handed by a premier elected annually.

Although he had developed his union scheme before the start of the war, Streit later placed heavy emphasis on its value as a war measure. He contended that the very existence of the union and the potential power it cold generate would induce Hitler to sue for peace. Should Hitler continue the war, Streit emphasized, the union's centralized command would be far superior to an alliance in prosecuting war.

Though interventionist support for a more integrated world order might seem to diminish the United States' sovereignty, the interventionists were, at the same time, ardent American nationalists, this seeming paradox can be explained by two factors. First the type of world order the interventionists envisaged, such as Streit's Union Now, was simply the United States writ large. The interventionists believed that the rest of the world would become a replica of the United States. Second, the totally integrated world state was an ideal to be realized in the distant future. Union Now, for instance, would initially consist of only a few democratic states-Great Britain, the British Commonwealth--of which the United States would be the preponderant power. Moreover, the interventionists believed that American power was essential to the transformation of the world. The City of Man, for example, envisioned a period of American "world-trusteeship that would pave the way for the world state.

The American Century

The interventionist sometimes evoked a form of American dominance in the world that would not diminish it sown authority but would eliminate the sovereignty of other countries. The most publicized account of American world leadership was Henry R. Luce's article "the American Century," which appeared in the Life issue of February 17, 1941. A cardinal tent of Luce's thought was that the ideals of peace, freedom, and justice could not continue to exist in the United States unless they spread throughout the world. And to Luce those ideals were an integral part of capitalism. Since there was "not the slightest chance of anything faintly resembling a free economic system prevailing in this country if it prevails nowhere else," it was imperative for the United States to lay the basis for a global capitalist system. To create the proper milieu for global capitalism would require that America police the world. America would have to become "the principal guarantor of freedom of the seas" and the "dynamic leader of world trade." Luce envisioned Americans doing for amore than just guaranteeing open markets; in fact, the freemarketeer Luce advocated polices that were more welfares than the New Deal he so bitterly scorned. Luce wanted America to "send out though the world its technical and artistic skills" and feed the world's hungry, with little apparent concern for profit. The United States would, in short, become the "Good Samaritan of the entire world."

The United States would have to spread its ideas globally. Without that action, Luce believed, the rest of the program would not be able to function. The ideals that Luce conceived to be "especially American" and appropriate for export were "a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of cooperation." In addition, America would spread "the great principles of Western civilization--above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity." Considerable criticism of "the American Century" came from liberals and leftists who perceived it as advocating American imperialism. The journalist Max Lerner, who edited the Nation from 1936 to 1938 and who identified himself as a "democratic collectivist," sought to counter Luce's "new imoperium" with a proposal for a "People's Century." Whereas Luce envision a modified capitalist America fostering a modified global capitalism, Lerner, "We must see the American role in the world not as the power-house of a national finance capitalism but as the powerhouse of world-wide industrial productivity under democratic controls." Nevertheless, Lerner envisioned American domination of the globe. Claming to offer to the peoples of the world "equality in international community," Lerner's concept of equality did not mean that each country would play an equal role in shaping world politics, or would even have predominant control over its own destiny. The future world order would have to "combine democratic dignity with firmness." As the leader of the world, the Untied States would "have to use an iron hand, both in the war an in the years immediately following it' to create and sustain the new global order.

Reinhold Neibuhr was also critical of the capitalist orientation of Luce's The American century," viewing it as an effort to "use the international situation to escape necessary reform at home." Since Nieburhr's image among scholars later became that of a pessimist and a realist, it might seem odd that he expressed characteristically interventionist ideals in the late thirties and early interventionist ideals in the late thirties and early forties. At most, Niebuhr occasionally cautioned other interventionists against excessive optimism. "It is ideal to imagine," Niebuhr asserted, "that the war will automatically wipe out all past evils and allow us to build a new and lovely world." Yet, he simultaneously contended that victory over Hitler could not be achieved unless some of western society's weaknesses were purged in the process. The very survival of the West would show that "we have learned how to correct at least some of our weaknesses. It will be possible then to build upon that achievement." Despite Niebuhr's scolding of Luce for "spiritual imperialism," he still ardently supported American global leadership, only warning Americans not to "accept this fate glibly and above all we must cry out against reveling in it."

Estrangement From Society

Though the interventionists' belief that war would lead to social regeneration may strike many today as naïve and even offensive, such thinking was commonplace until recently. Moreover, the interventionist Zeal for a confrontation between light and darkness may be explained by the concrete historical context of the late 1930s. The carnage of World War I had caused many in the West, especially in the educated and intellectual classes, to question traditional certitudes: patriotism, heroism, and morality. And the Great Depression of the 1930s not only brought mass poverty, but undermined the secular values of American's business civilization--hard work, social mobility, and material acquisition.

For educated individuals, the certitudes of yesteryear had ceased. While the educated groped for new world-view and integrating principles to provided psychic sustenance, by the early 1940s their faith in these new views had been shaken. Radicals once enamored with the Soviet Union as a workers' paradise had become disillusioned with Stalin's purges of the Soviet Communist Party in 1937-1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939. The situation for liberal New Dealers was little better. The severe economic recession of 1937-1938 had gravely tarnished the New Deal's image. Republican gains in the congressional elections of 1938 showed that public support for the New Deal was waning. There would be no more sweeping reforms as new Dealers would have liked. Yet, if the new Deal was stymied, there was little hope for a return to a pre-New Deal America. (Most contemporary conservatives viewed the New Deal as Revolutionary). In view of the public's acceptance of most New Deal reforms, there seemed little likelihood that free market capitalism and its concomitant individualist ethic would be reestablished.

To many individuals of divergent political and social outlooks, it seemed Western American society, like other Western democracies, had stagnated. The existing social and political milieu did not encourage a reversal of that condition. The individual who became interventionlist sought to energize their society, and they saw in war an ultimately beneficent instrument of renewal for society.

Though the interventionists conjured up an eschatological war that would bring about worldwide social changes, ironically they advocated only minimal American military involvement. Until the spring of 1941, articulate interventionists supported the Roosevelt administration's aid-short-of-war measures and did not call for direct American military involvement in the war. By maintaining Britain in the war, interventionists held that the captive peoples of Europe would rise up and overthrow their Nazi rulers. Walter Lippmann continued to hold this view into the fall of 1941 and even came to advocate a reduction in the United Sates Army (which was then being expanded), alleging that it distracted from the all-important effort of providing the Allies with war materiel.

During the spring of 1941, however, many interventionists began to call for actual American military involvement in the war. With the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, the United States had reached the limits of the aid-short-of-war position. And the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 seemed to offer the perfect opportunity for an allied victory if the United States entered the conflict, and, conversely, the dire prospect of German world supremacy if the Soviet Union fell. Still, the interventionists stopped short of advocating the use of American troops, holding that the American military commitments could be confirmed to its Air force and Navy. Nazi Germany, argued Herbert Agar, could be defeated with "relatively small destruction of [American] life."

Although the interventionists' faith in limited war might seem Pollyannaish or in sincere, such a view was common to military strategists of the era, who sought to avert the carnage of World War I. British prewar strategy relied primarily on a naval blockade. And in 1940 and 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill publicly proclaimed that British strategic bombing alone--by destroying German morale and settling off revolts by the captive peoples--would b sufficient to defeat Germany.

The ideas of the interventionists were not just a short-term phenomenon. Rather, the vision of America as a dynamic, progressive, globalistic power prevailed in American public power prevailed in American public doctrine during World War II and into the era of the Cold War. Such thinking sharply conflicts with the dominant liberal view of today, though liberals still view positively American involvement in the war.

Although the interventionists were estranged from their society, they were fervently patriotic, insisting that America was not living up to its ideals. In the late 1960s, positive identification with American and Western values began to crumble. Media and academic elites came to reject the premise of American moral supremacy and took an adversarial role toward their culture. America and West in general were deemed responsible for the basic ills of the world: Imperialism, racism, sexism, militarism, and the desecration of the environment. It was not just the existing surface features, but the very nature of American and Western society that was perceived as evil. It was a far deeper estrangement than experienced by the interventionists.

Neoconservatives Today

While no longer dominant, the ideas expressed by the interventionists are not without their adherents to offer the closest approximation. Neconservatives have shown concern about social disunity in America and the loss of collective belief (though they do celebrate many of the material and social changes in America since 1945, as can be seen by their contributions to a Commentary symposium on the subject). More significantly, they portray the Soviet Union in much the same way that the interventionist depicted Nazi Germany -not as a national rival but as an ideological enemy: the adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union is seen as an ideological war of global proportions. Like the interventionists, the neoconservatives exalt democracy, which they seek to export throughout the world. Furthermore, like the interventionists, neoconservatives believe that limited war is possible and reject the view held by most liberals that strongly opposing the Soviets must lead to global war.

Ironic as this may seem, it is the current antinuclear war pacifists of the Left who most closely share, though in a negative sense, the interventionists' sense of the apocalypse. Many liberals believe that nuclear war will either destroy humanity, or that fear of this catastrophe will force the nations of the world to join together in a world government that will establish a reign of peace. Modern-day liberals believe that disarmament will help to bring about the age of human happiness that interventionists thought would be produced by war against Nazism.