518
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR,
liance with defense industry; but this serves primarily as a means of
defending their political flanks in Congress; it rarely provides them with
their motives and program.
2
Often the policies they urge - as in the
later stages of the Indochina war - have been opposed by preponderant
forces in the business community.
If
all this is so, it suggests that imperialism is not rooted in a par–
ticular economic structure or system of ownership; and history confirms
that this is indeed the fact. Every great power, whatever its ideology,
has its warrior caste and thereby contains strong inner pressures toward
the domination of weaker states. Let us look again at the Soviet Union.
If
what the Soviet Union has done in Czechoslovakia was not imperial–
ism, then the term has no meaning; if it was imperialism, then we must
dismiss the notion of imperialism as something uniquely rooted in cap–
italism. The probability is that the Soviet warrior caste, operating in the
same way as the Amercan warrior caste, both operating much as Schum–
peter described the warriors of ancient Rome, has successfully molded the
policy of its country to its own purposes.
The question remains why scholars like Professor Williams and his
school refuse to acknowledge the power of strategic and political motives
or the role of the warrior class. Some New Left historians, like David
Horowitz, for example (if he can be called an historian), are presumably
reluctant to embrace a theory of imperialism which would implicate
tlte
Soviet Union. But Professor Williams, for whom Soviet motives look
good only in comparison with what he seems to regard as the even worse
motives of the United States, hardly falls into that category.
In his case, his theory of American imperialism evidently performs
a political function. As he explains in a long, personal and not unap–
pealing preface to his book, his hope is to establish the "relevance of
history." The overseas-markets thesis thus hands him history as a weap–
on to wield against the marketplace.
It
enables him to argue that the
United States can cure itself of the imperial psychosis
only
by abolish–
ing capitalism. Hence the need to prove that imperialism is economic in
its nature and derives from capitalism - and hence the unconscious
rejection of all evidence showing other motives and bases for expansion
and dominion.
Now Professor Williams may be right or wrong in espousing his
brand of communitarian socialism. But this is a program to be con-
2 See, for example, the recent study by Perry McCoy Smith entitled
Thl
Air Force Plans tor Peace,
1943-1945 (Johns Hopkins Press). This shows
that it was the Air Force itself, not the aircraft industry, that initiated the
drive for the expansion of production faciliti es after the war.
