Where Imperium Stumbled

Perry Anderson’s long essay on U.S. foreign policy invites words of rounded praise: all-encompassing, incisive, comprehensive, and erudite (in several languages). It is also marked, as other commentators on his work have noted, by the use of obscure words which will annoy or impress, depending on the reader.1 Apart from some irritation with this stylistic tic, I am in general agreement with Anderson’s overall gloss on the American imperium as well as his summary of the views of its policy elite. We disagree on some particulars. One is minor but still worth correcting, I think: Anderson calls Korea Japan’s oldest conquest. Strictly speaking, the Ryukyu Islands were the oldest conquest (formally annexed in 1879) and Taiwan (1895) came next. The Japanese ruled Korea as a Protectorate following the Russo-Japanese war (1905), and after crushing local resistance, annexed the country in 1910. More importantly, I am puzzled by his characterization of George F. Kennan as among the fiercest and most militaristic of cold warriors. Kennan was all over the place in his views and one can stack up footnotes as numerous as Anderson’s that give a very different sense of the man and his politics. For example, during the Korean War he opposed United Nations (UN) forces crossing the 38th parallel going north and urged U.S. acceptance of China’s entry, as a Communist country, into the UN. He was contemptuous of the opposition, confiding to his diary: “I hope that some day history will record this as an instance of the damage done to the conduct of our foreign policy by the irresponsible and bigoted interference of the China lobby and its friends in Congress.” The point, Kennan insisted, was that seating China in the UN would not change anything. “The significant reality was created when the Chinese Communists overran the mainland of China.” Ongoing opposition to China would only mean that the UN “would not be universal” but instead “an alliance against Russia.”

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