514
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for them–
selves the domination of the world." In short, Amer}ca had to meet the
competition. Lodge put the case for American empire succinctly in his
Forum
piece: "The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future
expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth....
As one of the great nations of the world, the United States must not
fall out of the line of march."
Raisons d'etat,
not reasons of the market, have created the Amer–
ican thrust for empire. The Caribbean used to be regarded as the classic
case of "dollar diplomacy." But, as D. G. Munro showed conclusively
in
Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900-1921,
it
was the State Department which took the initiative in persuading a
reluctant business and banking community to go into the Caribbean;
and the State Department's object was not to make money for bankers
but to diminish European influence in the area. Hans Morgenthau has
accurately summed up the scholarly findings: "Economic determinism
as a guide to the understanding of American foreign policy was discredit–
ed long ago by case studies that showed the extent to which the so–
called dollar diplomacy of the turn of the century, seemingly a typical
example of a foreign policy doing the bidding of economic interests, was
a political policy using economic interests for the political purposes of
the state rather than the other way around."
There is an easy way to test Professor Williams's proposition that
American foreign policy has been determined by the needs of American
capitalism for overseas markets. Let us take a hint from Max Weber's
suggestion in his discussion of imperialism that we "make the mental
experiment of assuming the individual polities to be somehow 'state–
socialist' communities, that is, associations supplying a maximum amount
of their needs through a collective economy." The problem, Weber wrote,
"would hardly cha:lge fundamentally... . All political associations of such
a collective economy would seek to buy as cheaply as possible indispens–
able goods not produced in their own territory.... It is probable that
force would be used where it would lead easily to favorable conditions
of exchange. . . . One cannot see why the strong state-socialist commu–
nities should disdain to squeeze tribute out of the weaker communities
for their own partners, where they could do so." The record of the
Soviet Union in dominating, exploiting and looting weaker communist
states abundantly confirms Weber's analysis.
Professor Williams's argument is that,
~f
only the United States had
not been a capitalist society, it would not have engaged in the quest for
empire. Following Weber, let us suppose for a moment that the United
States never had a marketplace, that it had always been a communist
