Walter Lippmann — Empire as “The American Destiny”

1. 1. Lippmann argued that Americans should accept the reality of US empire and prepare for the role their power compels them to play.
2. 2. Lippmann's realism was not nonideological but deeply shaped by contemporary ideologies of empire.
3. 3. Lippmann saw the world crisis of the 1930s as a fundamentally imperial crisis between new totalitarian empires and established liberal empires.
4. 4. In 1938, Lippmann declared that America's manifest destiny was to become the successor of Rome and Britain as the giver of peace.
5. 5. Historian Charles Beard contested Lippmann's imperial vision, arguing that the American people were anti-imperial by tradition and that Lippmann's 'American Destiny' was a dangerous brew of Roman grandeur and British philanthropy.
6. 6. Lippmann argued for the racist internment of Japanese Americans in February 1942, invoking US imperial governance as a precedent.
7. 7. Lippmann simultaneously embraced anti-imperial war aims in 1942, arguing that the West should renounce the white man's burden and identify with the freedom of Eastern peoples.
8. 8. In US Foreign Policy (1943), Lippmann defined foreign policy as balancing commitments with power, arguing that US commitments spanned nearly half the globe.
9. 9. Lippmann denied US imperialism in US War Aims (1944), claiming that Americans were organically antipathetic to empire and that the Open Door policy was a benevolent expression of the American way of life.
10. 10. Lippmann's concept of the Cold War, developed in his 1947 critique of George Kennan, framed the rivalry as post-European imperial competition between America and Russia.
11. 11. Lippmann saw non-Western societies as backward and inferior, arguing that Asia's masses had known little of freedom and that US foreign policy should reflect this cultural distance.
12. 12. Lippmann's realism was a civilizational project rooted in ideological commitments to global hierarchies of American empire, not a nonideological approach.