Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020

AMERICA WAS HENCEFORTH

TO REPRESENT FREEDOM AND

POWER—NOT IN A SINGLE REGION

BUT THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

This second world war of the twentieth cen tury, Marshall understood, was

going to be immense and immensely destructive. But if vast in scope, it would

be limited in duration. The sun would set; the war would end. Today no such

expectation exists. Marshall’s successors have come to view armed conflict as

an open-ended proposition. The alarming turn in U.S.–Iranian relations is

another reminder that war has become normal for the United States.

The address at West Point was not some frothy stump speech by a hack

politician. Marshall was a deliberate man who chose his words care fully.

His intent was to make a specific point: the United States was fighting not

to restore peace—a word notably absent from his remarks—nor merely to

eliminate an isolated threat. The overarching American aim was preemi-

nence, both ideological and military: as a consequence of the ongoing

war, America was henceforth to represent freedom and power—not in any

particular region or hemisphere but throughout the world. Here, conveyed

with crisp military candor, was an authoritative reframing of the nation’s

strategic ambitions.*

Marshall’s statement captured the essence of what was to remain Amer-

ica’s purpose for decades to come, until the presidential election of 2016

signaled its rejection. That year an eminently qualified candidate who em-

bodied a notably bellicose variant of the Marshall tradition lost to an op-

ponent who openly mocked that tradition while possessing no qualifica-

tions for high office whatsoever.

Determined to treat Donald Trump as an unfortunate but correctable aber-

ration, the foreign- policy establishment remains intent on salvaging the tradition

that Marshall inaugurated back in 1942. The effort is misguided and will likely

prove futile. For anyone concerned about American statecraft in recent years,

the more pressing questions are these: first, whether an establishment deeply

imbued with Marshall’s maxim can even acknowledge the magnitude of the

repudiation it sustained at the hands of Trump and those who voted him into

office (a repudiation that is not lessened by Trump’s failure to meet his promises

to those voters); and second, whether this establishment can muster the imagi-

nation to devise an alternative tradition better suited to existing

conditions while commanding the support of the American

people. On neither score does the outlook appear promising.

General Marshall delivered his remarks at West Point in a singular

context. Marshall gingerly referred to a “nationwide debate” that was compli-

cating his efforts to raise what he called “a great citizen-army.” The debate was

the controversy over whether the United States should intervene in the ongo-

ing European war. To proponents of intervention, the issue at hand during the

period of 1939 to 1941 was the need to confront the evil of Nazism. Oppo-

nents of intervention argued in the terms of a quite different question:

whether or not to resume an expansionist project dating from the founding of

the Republic. This dispute and its apparent resolution, misunderstood and

misconstrued at the time, have been sources of confusion ever since.

Even today, most Americans are only dimly aware of the scope—one might

even say the grandeur—of our expansionist project, which stands alongside

racial oppression as an abiding theme of the American story. As far back as

the 1780s, the Northwest Ordinances, which created the mechanism to incor-

porate the present-day Midwest into the Union, had made it clear that the

United States had no intention of confining its reach to the territory encom-

passed within the boundaries of the original thirteen states. And while

nineteenth-century presidents did not adhere to a consistent grand plan, they

did pursue a de facto strategy of opportunistic expansion. Although the

United States encountered resistance during the course of this remarkable as-

cent, virtually all of it was defeated. With the notable exception of the failed

* Although Marshall was speaking that day to a fairly small group, his words eventually

reached millions. Each segment of the film series Why We Fight, the masterpiece of

propaganda that Frank Capra created under the auspices of the War Department, dis-

plays a quotation from Marshall’s West Point speech.