Singhproposition that a substratum of properly capitalist economic relations organ-
ically yielded a democratic harvest would be the farmer’s almanac of a rising
generation of modernization theorists. But the reality on the ground—in a
world where the main provenance of self-determination was defined by the
bloody rearguard defense of colonial prerogatives on the part of the United
States’ most important allies and industrial partners—was bitter, and far
less susceptible to universalizing nostrums. Straight-talking U.S. policy
makers, particularly those at the center of the military apparatus, knew it.
The following year, for example, George Kennan, author of the
“containment” doctrine, a protégé of Forrestal, and the single most
influential strategic foreign policy thinker of the moment, offered a
strikingly candid version of the task at hand, in a classified memo that
consciously punctured the universalist ambit of the Truman Doctrine:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population.
This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of
Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.
Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which
will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to
our security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and
day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on
our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can
afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. (emphasis added)When thinking about nations and peoples, particularly those outside
of Europe, Kennan again foregrounded a logic of investment and risk
management, and he advised restraint and limitation of liability, espe-
cially with respect to “the peoples of Asia... [who] are going to go ahead,
whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual
interrelationships in their own way.” Kennan warned that the coming