PA 'RTIS AN REV lEW
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tells us that he finds it "extremely difficult" even to conceive of cases
where national leaders "could fairly be said to be acting on a strategic
motive." This argument that strategic motives are almost always deriva–
tive from economic motives is hardly astonishing to any of Professor
Williams's readers. What is astonishing is that, after making this argu–
ment, he then has the intellectual incoherence to write in the next
paragraph, "I think I have offered more than enough to refute Schle–
singer's assertion that I reduce American imperialism (or foreign policy
in general) to economic motives." Does not Professor Williams ever read
his own prose?
Whatever his protestations, Professor Williams does of oourse re–
duce American foreign policy to economic motives in every concrete
instance. His reference to page 32 of
The Roots of the Modern Amer–
ican Empire,
which he cites in his rejoinder as proof that he under–
stands the autonomy of political motives, proves in fact his unswerving
belief in the dependence of the political on the economic motive. He
writes, "Blaine and Harrison did not want power for its own sake... .
They sought it
in
order to act upon a broad policy of overseas economic
expansion that they considered necessary and desirable for the entire
political economy as well as for specific interests within it." He mentions
a chapter on "The Imperialism of Idealism" in
The Tragedy of Amer–
ican Diplomacy
but neglects to mention that most of the chapter is
devoted to- guess what? - foreign markets and that "idealism" is de–
fined as a creed promoted by the need to expand American capitalism.
Thus Williams writes of a diplomatic document of the period: "That
document establishes once and for all the connection between, and the
convergence of, the drive for overseas economic expansion and the urge
to reform other societies....
It
likewise removes any doubt about wheth–
er or not American leaders were conscious of the relationship."
He can even, incredibly, write of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry
Cabot Lodge that "economics was . . . at the center of their thinking
about foreign policy." This is manifest nonsense, and no one would have
been more insulted by it than Roosevelt himself. He did not believe in
the free market at home (this was his great argument with Wilson
in
1912), nor is there evidence that he cared about the expansion of the
American marketplace abroad except as it might be a means toward the
increase of the power of the national state. Howard K. Beale, whom
even the New Left can hardly dismiss as a conservative historian, has
written the most comprehensive and careful account of Theodore Roose–
velt and foreign affairs. As he correctly puts it, "The Roosevelt-Lodge
expansionists who took the American people into an imperialist strug–
gle for world power were not primarily concerned with American eco-