From Atlanticism to Realism: the evolution of American Strategic Doctrine in the first half of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This paper explores the intellectual roots of the realist outlook that came to dominate US strategic thinking for much of the Cold War period. One important source was the Atlanticist tradition popularized by the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that argued that US national security had always depended upon the protection of the British fleet and therefore required close collaboration if not an outright alliance with Great Britain and its empire. This outlook tended to be closely associated with (not infrequently racist) Anglo-Saxonist beliefs in the political, cultural, and intellectual superiority of the English-speaking people and the affinity of the Anglosphere nations (effectively Great Britain, its white dominions, and the United States) for each other. From at least the 1930s and perhaps even earlier, these beliefs were cross-fertilized with a darker strain, prominently promoted by such intellectuals as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and various German refugee scholars, including Arnold Wolfers, Hans Morgenthau, and eventually Henry Kissinger. This outlook called for continued American involvement in world affairs, advocating that the United States battle first Hitler’s Germany and later Soviet communism, in part for strategic and self-interested reasons of national security, but also with the objective of serving as a force for good on the international scene. Cold War realists tended to caution against pursuing overly grandiose and ambitious objectives in foreign affairs, to view human nature from a somewhat pessimistic perspective, and to believe that those who chose to engage with the outside world must sometimes be prepared to get their hands dirty and to work with individuals and groups who might be less than attractive. Yet in practice their outlook often had a strong moral component, belying its popular label.