82
ARTHUR
SCHLESINGER. JR.
nomic interests around the world. Nor did they attempt to justify ex–
pansion chiefly on economic grounds. Where they were interested in
economic matters it wai because economic advantages won converts to
imperialist policies or enhanced the prestige of the country. . . . The
primary concern of Roosevelt and his fellow-expansionists was power
and prestige and the naval strength that would bring power and
prestige"
(Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power).
Can Professor Williams really not see the difference between the
search for profits and the search £or power? Let me try, once more,
to make the point to him, as simply as possible. Williams argues that,
if the United States had not been a capitalist country, it would not
have engaged in the quest for empire. But let us suppose - all you
graduate students out there - that the United States had never been
a capitalist country. Let us suppose it had begun as a communist coun–
try, with private and corporate profit thereby eliminated as a motive,
like the Soviet Union. Would the United States have been any less
determined to expand across the continent? Would it have been any
less determined
to
exclude extracontinental powers from the hemisphere
through somthing like the Monroe Doctrine? Would it have been any
less interested in dominating Central America or extending its influence
into South America? To put the issue in more contemporary terms,
would a Soviet United States have been any less determined to prevent
a hostile power from another continent from setting up nuclear missile
bases in Cuba? Political and strategic motives have an autonomy of
their own, absolutely regardless of systems of economic ideology or
ownership.
Professor Williams obviously cannot afford to incorporate this
truism into his analysis of imperialism, first, because it would undermine
his theory that capitalism is the source of all evil, and, second, because
it would expose the fact that noncapitalist states had imperialist pro–
pensities. This is why, for example, he must keep representing the mili–
tary as the servants of the capitalists; as he wrote in
The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy,
"The military had not even by 1962 established
themselves in an independent and superior position." Next to General
Westmoreland, no one is more eager to exculpate the generals. But
surely it is precisely because of the independent influence of the military
in both the United States and the Soviet Union that these countries
have pursued their crazy policies of recent years. Was it the American
business community that demanded the escalation of the war in Indo–
china?
I am glad
to
see that Professor Williams at least does not attempt
to justify his persistent effort to distort the meaning of the word "em-
