MorefieldAnd yet the norm against noticing prevents foreign policy analysis
from even acknowledging—let alone grappling with—the relationship
between race and imperialism that has characterized U.S. international
relations from the country’s earliest days. This regime of politely un-
seeing—of deflecting—connections between U.S. foreign policy, race
hierarchy, and colonial administration was clearly not in effect when
Foreign Affairs was released under its original name: the Journal of Race
Development. This began to change, however, in the 1920s. Among
other contributing factors, World War I, the rise of anti-colonial rev-
olutions, and the emergence of liberal internationalism as a popular
ideology helped convince foreign policy experts in the United States
and Europe to adopt a policy language oriented toward “development”
rather than imperialism or racial difference. Mainstream international
relations scholarship today remains committed to a narrative in which
the discipline itself and U.S. foreign policy has always been and remains
race blind, concerned solely with the relationship between sovereign
states who cooperate, deter, or compete with one another in a global
system in which the United States is simply, like Caesar, the “first citi-
zen” (Ikenberry) or “the luckiest great power in modern history” (Walt).
For liberals, this involves a studied erasure of the imperial origins of
twentieth-century internationalism in the League of Nations’ Mandate
system and the complicity of Woodrow Wilson in preserving, as Adom
Getachew puts it, “white supremacy on a global scale.” For realists, it
requires both forgetting the anti-Enlightenment origins of postwar re-
alist thought and reinserting the “security dilemma” back into history so
that, with the help of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, the world
can—as Slavoj Žižek says—“become what it always was.”
International relations experts will acknowledge U.S. violence and
overreach when necessary, but routinely read the illiberalism of U.S. for-
eign policy as an exception that is not at all representative, in Anne Marie