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state like the Soviet Union. Would a communist United States have
been any less passionate to expand across the continent? Would it have
been any happier to allow Great Britain, Germany, Russia to occupy
strategic points in the western hemisphere or the surrounding oceans?
Would it have refrained from dominating and exploiting the weaker
states of Latin America? Would a communist United States not have
reacted against the installation of nuclear missiles lin Cuba by an anti–
communist power from across the seas? Would a communist United
States not
be
just as determined as a capitalist United States to take
the measures it deemed necessary to protect its national security?
George Lichtheim wrote recently, "No one is ever going
to
claim
tha t the United States got involved in Vietnam because it wanted the
area's markets. The motivation was plainly political and strategic." He
underestimated the infatuations of American scholars; for this is what
Professor Williams and his disciples apparently do claim. Everything
from the War of Independence and the Civil War to the Second World
War and the war in Indochina is to be accounted for by this same obses–
sion. One looks forward in due course to the Williams school's explana–
tion of the latest manifestation of the American expansionist impulse–
that is, the efforts of the men on Apollo 11 and 12 to stake out the
American title, I guess, to those splendid new markets on the moon.
Still the phenomenon of American expansion exists; and, if the ex–
pansionist drive was not produced by capitalism's demand for overseas
markets, what did produce it? I have suggested in general terms that
it was produced by politicians and strategists, by men concerned a good
deal less with the profits of producers and exporters than with the power
and glory of the nation. Let us pursue this point a little further; for the
really illumi:1ating question, as Bert Hoselitz writes in his introduction
to a recent edition of Schumpeter's "The Sociology of Imperialism," is
not, what is imperialism? but, who are the imperialists? This is the ques–
tion Schumpeter himself seeks to answer; and his answer, in my judg–
ment, tells us far more about American imperialism than any form of the
economic interpretation.
Schumpeter's argument was that imperialism existed long before
capitalism and had nothing to do with capitalism; if anything, he
thought, the rationalistic and prudential spirit of capitalism would mili–
tate against imperialism. The drive for empire through the ages, he said,
arose essentially from the power within societies of a warrior class. There
would always be rational pretexts for military action - national secu–
rity, trade, investments, markets - but the essential urge for domination
came from the sheer momentum of the military machine in motion.
"Created by wars that required it," he wrote of the military establish-
