This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]

On: 13 November 2014, At: 07:35

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Journal of Strategic Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjss20

A Matter of Choice: Strategy

and Discretion in the Shadow of
World War II
Patrick Porter

University of Reading , UK
Published online: 15 May 2012.

To cite this article: Patrick Porter (2012) A Matter of Choice: Strategy and Discretion
in the Shadow of World War II, Journal of Strategic Studies, 35:3, 317-343, DOI:
10.1080/01402390.2012.667369
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.667369

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed
in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the
views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should
not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

The Journal of Strategic Studies

Vol. 35, No. 3, 317343, June 2012

A Matter of Choice: Strategy and

Discretion in the Shadow of World
War II

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

PATRICK PORTER
University of Reading, UK
ABSTRACT American policy-makers are predisposed towards the idea of a
necessary war of survival, fought with little room for choice. This reflects
a dominant memory of World War II that teaches Americans that they live in a
dangerously small world that imposes conflict. Critics argue that the choice
versus necessity schema is ahistorical and mischievous. This article offers
supporting fire to those critiques. Americas war against the Axis (194145) is a
crucial case through which to test the small world view. Arguments for war in
1941 pose overblown scenarios of the rise of a Eurasian super-threat. In 1941
conflict was discretionary and not strictly necessary in the interests of national
security. The argument for intervention is a closer call that often assumed. This
has implications for Americas choices today.
KEY WORDS: Discretion, Strategy, World War II, Wars of Choice

This article makes three arguments. First, American policy-makers are

predisposed towards the idea of a necessary war of survival, fought
with little room for choice. The language of wars of choice versus
wars of necessity draws force from a dominant memory of World War
II. The war teaches Americans that they live in a dangerously small
world that imposes conflict. Second, as critics argue, the choice versus
necessity schema is ahistorical and mischievous. By selectively denying
the role of discretion, it narrows debate about the quality of strategic
choices. This article agrees, and offers supporting fire to those critiques.
Third, Americas war against the Axis (194145) is a crucial case
through which to test the small world view. A counterfactual
examination of that history demonstrates that the small world
outlook overstates American vulnerability. Arguments for war in
1941 pose overblown scenarios of the rise of a Eurasian super-threat.
Even in the worst case counterfactual scenario, staying out of the war
would not straightforwardly produce a clear and present danger. In
ISSN 0140-2390 Print/ISSN 1743-937X Online/12/030317-27 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.667369

318 Patrick Porter

1941 conflict was discretionary and not strictly necessary in the interests
of national security. Its net strategic effect was mixed. America was
probably wise to enter the war, but the argument for intervention is a
closer call that often assumed. This case remains instructive, because
todays conditions make long-range aggression more difficult rather
than less. We should demote the status of Americas lesser conflicts, and
presume against the claim that a conflict has survival at stake.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Choice and Necessity

Since the 9/11 attacks, many have spoken of wars of necessity and
wars of choice. President George W. Bush argued that the Iraq War
was necessary because America was directly threatened.1 His critics
accuse him of making war as a discrete choice, diverting effort from the
war of necessity against Al-Qaeda.2 Escalating Americas commitment to Afghanistan in 2009, President Barack Obama drew on a
similar logic. This is not a war of choice,3 he declared, insisting We
did not ask for this fight.4 Supporters and critics of Americas wars
draw on a common vocabulary, distinguishing obligatory wars from
voluntary ones. They assume that distant adversaries from Imperial
Japan to Osama bin Laden can indeed force America into a fight. The
perceived lesson of the strategic shock on 9/11 is that the world is a
fragile, shrunken and interconnected whole where war can come
unbidden. For the National Security Strategy, 9/11 was The dark side
of this globalized world.5 Few disagree that the Fortress has no moat
not after the airplane, the submarine, the ballistic missile and as
for the drawbridge, it was blown up on 9/11, erasing the barrier
between over there and over here.6 According to the small
world view, technology from naval aviation to mobile phones has
1
Transcript, Meet the Press, 8 Feb. 2004, 5www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/ns/
meet_the_press/t/transcript-feb-th/4.
2
Jeffrey Record, Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Washington
DC: Potomac 2010), 59; Richard Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of
Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster 2009); John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt, An Unnecessary War, Foreign Policy 134 (2003), 519.
3
Remarks by the President at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, 17 Aug.
2009, 5www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-the-Veterans-of-Foreign-Wars-convention/4.
4
Obamas Address on Afghan War Strategy: Remarks of US President at US Military
Academy, West Point, NY, 1 Dec. 2009, 5www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34231058/ns/
politics-white_house/4.
5
National Security Strategy (Washington DC: The White House May 2010), 1.
6
Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a
Unipolar World (Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute Press 2004), 4.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 319

distance-destroying properties. It compresses time and space to confer
new offensive power on enemies, whose predatory ideologies respect no
borders. This connectivity makes Americas security domain almost
limitless. According to the 9/11 Commission, the American homeland
is the planet.7
The memory of World War II forms the benchmark of necessity.
Bush linked it with the War on Terror. On the 60th anniversary of the
Pearl Harbor attack he told the crew of the USS Enterprise that like
their forbearers, they were commissioned by history to face freedoms
enemies.8 Bush and his officials told a story of unavoidable struggles
against fascists and their heirs. Against totalitarian evil, there was little
room for discretion. Obama is coyer about historical analogising.9 But
World War II forms his benchmark of necessity. Obama contrasted
compelling struggles like World War II and Afghanistan with
dumb wars like Iraq.10 President Bill Clinton likened his duel against
Slobodan Milosevic with that against Hitler, an inevitable conflict
foolishly postponed.11 As interpreted events, the surprise attacks of 9/
11 and at Pearl Harbor on 12/7 1941 teach Americans that predators
must be fought because they are within range. Thus 12/7 established
that new methods of projecting military strength across great distances
meant that the rise of hostile states anywhere in the world could
endanger our security.12 And 9/11 reaffirmed that logic.
This is only the latest re-articulation of a theory of American
vulnerability in a tight-knit world village that has dominated national
security debate for generations.13 Presidents Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt popularised the idea that in the modern world, the
United States lives perpetually under the shadow of war.14 This idea
7

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton 2004), 362.
8
President George W. Bush, Remarks at a Ceremony Commemorating the 60th
Anniversary of Pearl Harbor in Norfolk, Virginia 7 Dec. 1941, Weekly Compilation of
Presidential Documents (henceforth WCPD) 37 (2001), 17623.
9
Bob Woodward, Obamas Wars: The Inside Story (London: Simon & Schuster 2010),
120.
10
Barack Obama, Im not against wars but. . .Column for Hyde Park Herald, 30 Oct.
2002,
5http://web.archive.org/web/20021217033809/www.obamaforillinois.com/
news.shtml4.
11
Timothy Garton Ash, The new Adolf Hitler? Time, 5 April 1999, 41.
12
John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP 2004), 69.
13
Michael H. Hunt, The Ideology of US Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP
1987), 1503.
14
Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to
the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2006), 1856.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

320 Patrick Porter

drew force from the shock of actual long-range military aggression,
and from the Open Door tradition in American strategic discourse
which stressed how Americas national security was implicated not
only in the balance of power abroad but also how the world was
ordered politically and economically. A body of dominant ideas
influenced policymakers towards an expansive concept of Americas
national security interests that went beyond territoriality. After Pearl
Harbor, Roosevelt claimed We cannot measure our safety in terms of
miles on a map.15 National security expanded its meaning from
military readiness to the shrinkage of time and space.16 New maps
presented America as a vulnerable island with an Axis triangular
stranglehold closing in.17 Pearl Harbor entered collective consciousness as a lesson in the reality of constant peril and the penalties of
nave isolation.18 Americas security was implicated almost everywhere, obliging it to project power constantly beyond its neighbourhood.
The small world claim is a hypothesis about the relationship
between space, technology and security. It is not obviously correct.
Historians observe that the overall impact of technology from the
steamship to the aeroplane is often neutral between defence
and offence.19 Globalisation may be partial and reversible.20 Yet
vulnerability in a globalising world has the status of self-evident
objective fact. The growth of Americas relative power has been
accompanied by a strong sense of insecurity. Its leaders routinely
stress its vulnerability.21 And this despite the fact that it is flanked
by oceans, distant from potential major rivals, has unthreatening
neighbours, has a large nuclear arsenal, faces no existential Great
Power threat and is safe from snap invasion. While its dominance is

15
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, 9 Dec. 1941, Public Papers and Addresses of
Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York 19381950), Vol. 10, 5289.
16
Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: the United States since the 1930s (New
Haven, CT: Yale UP 1995), 356, 39, 65.
17
Alan K. Henrikson, The Map as an Idea: The Role of Cartographic Imagery
During the Second World War, The American Cartographer 2/1 (1975), 1953.
18
Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger
(Princeton UP 2006), 1214.
19
Hew Strachan, The British Way in Warfare in David G. Chandler and Ian
Beckett (eds) The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: OUP 1994), 399
416, 406.
20
Michael Veseth, Globaloney: Unveiling the Myths of Globalization (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield 2005).
21
A. Trevor Thrall and Jane K. Kramer (eds), American Foreign Policy and the Politics
of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11 (London: Routledge 2009).

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 321

now under strain, it is still a colossus. It has the worlds largest
GDP. Its defence spending is more than 60 per cent of the ten other
largest budgets.22 Human adversaries cannot hope to attack it
without overwhelming punishment. Why must the most materially
secure state in history fight wars as a matter of necessity?
Necessity is a slippery category. It can be conceived as responsive or
interest-based. Allegedly, where one side attacks another, the attacked
have little choice but to respond with force. Necessity can also be
formulated through a hierarchy of interests, distinguishing vital
interests to defend a vital referent object such as territorial integrity
or institutions, and less compelling lower order interests. Necessary
wars have ends so compelling that they must be fought regardless of
the means available. But if it means an existential war against a firstorder threat, at what point is that reached? Necessity and discretion are
remarkably under-theorised concepts.23 Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779
1869) foreshadowed the issue, distinguishing between defensive wars
against an invader and opportunist, offensive wars of expediency.24
Yet Americas experience blurs the lines of over here and over there.
It has done most of its fighting on a long-range, expeditionary footing
while claiming a defensive purpose. Defenders of the Vietnam War
regard it as necessary.25
Some attempt to resolve the issue by separating traditional interestbased conflicts, such as wars waged for the sake of the states security
from values-based humanitarian interventions.26 Yet this distinction is
muddled. States that wage altruistic wars usually also claim security
motives. The National Security Strategy takes necessity well
beyond self-defence to include humanitarian interventions.27 This leaves necessity unbounded and meaningless.
As critics show, the necessity/choice distinction is suspect.28 A
war of choice is tautological. War is reciprocal and inherently
22

As of 2009, American defence spending made up approximately 45 per cent of the

global total. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2011
(London: Routledge 2011), 477.
23
For an exception, see Colin Gray, Britains National Security: Compulsion and
Discretion, RUSI Journal 153/6 (Dec. 2008), 1218.
24
Antoine-Henri Jomini, Precis de lart de la guerre (Paris 1837, transl. Capt. G.H.
Mendell and Capt. W.P. Craighill 1868), 18, 2935.
25
Michael Lind, Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of Americas Most
Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press 2000).
26
David Chandler, Hollow Hegemony: Theorising the Shift from Interest-based to
Value-based International Policymaking, Millennium 35/3 (2007), 70523, 7212.
27
National Security Strategy (May 2010), 22.
28
Lawrence Freedman, On War and Choice, National Interest 107 (2010), 916;
Fouad Ajami, 9/11 and the good war, Wall Street Journal, 11 Sept. 2009.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

322 Patrick Porter

discretionary, even when others initiate it. The target still chooses
whether and how far to resist. After a formal defeat, communities can
elect to accept the verdict (such as Japan in 1945) or fight on (such as
Iraqi insurgents in 2003). Britons typically remember World War II as a
matter of compulsion. But Britains guarantee to Poland was a choice.
Hitler made offers of diplomatic accommodation in October 1939 and
July 1940. With Germany ascendant, Britain seriously entertained a
negotiated settlement.29 After 9/11, America was not obliged to
reciprocate Osama bin Ladens initiation of war. It could have
classified the assailants as a criminal organisation: 9/11 required interpretation, and it did not have to lead to a War on Terror.30 The
language is also demagogic. To ascribe necessity to a conflict is to
close down debate. During the Iraq War of 2003, choice became a
stick to beat the Iraq War with in domestic politics, to contrast it with
the good war in Afghanistan. Both, however, were chosen. Overall, talk
of choice versus necessity masks a substantive argument about
calculating interests and what is at stake in any given conflict, and
whether it is worth bleeding for.
This article agrees with the critics, and offers supporting fire. It
contributes to critical literature about Americas choices in 1941,31 and
about the role of ideas in strategy.32 The dubious choice/necessity
distinction flows from a deeper error, an assumption the world is so
miniaturised and lethal that it obliterates discretion. To test this view, I
revisit a crucial case on which notions of necessity often rest, Americas
entry into World War II in 1941. That war in collective memory
teaches Americans that they are forever threatened in a global village.
Given Americas enemies unusual degree of power, reach and hostility,
29

Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: The Decisions that Changed the World 19401941
(London: Penguin Books 2008), 1154, 22, 47.
30
Ronald R. Krebs and Jennifer K. Lobasz, Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony,
Coercion and the Road to Iraq, Security Studies 16/3 (2007), 40951, 413.
31
Robert J. Art, The United States, The Balance of Power, and World War II: Was
Spykman Right? Security Studies 14/3 (2005), 365406; John A. Thompson,
Conceptions of National Security and American Entry into World War II, Diplomacy
and Statecraft 16 (2005), 67197; John A. Thompson, The Exaggeration of American
Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition, Diplomatic History 16/1 (1992), 2343;
John Lukacs What if Hitler had Won the Second World War, in David Wallechinsky
(ed.), The Peoples Almanac, 2 (New York: Morrow 1978), 3968; Bruce M. Russett,
No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World
War II (Oxford: Westview Press 1972).
32
Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture and Change in American Grand
Strategy (Princeton: Princeton UP 2006); Nicholas Kitchen, Systemic Pressures and
Domestic Ideas: A Neoclassical Realist Model of Grand Strategy Formation, Review of
International Studies 36/1 (2010), 11743.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 323

it is a crucial test that theories of a war of survival ought to easily pass.
I test it by weighing up counterfactual scenarios, spanning most likely
to worst case. I do so primarily to measure what was at stake in 1941
given the alternatives available. This is an exercise in hindsight but not
in condescension. The possibilities I examine were debated at the time.
The notion that a dangerous shrinking world readily produces a clear
and present danger performs badly on this test.
Why does this issue matter? As literature demonstrates, how leaders
use history influences or legitimises their behaviour.33 Analogical
reasoning can be a genuine diagnostic prism for decision-making, or
can be used instrumentally to legitimise policy. Either way, it has
weighty policy implications. Since 1945, American Presidents deployed
the linked analogies of Munich and Pearl Harbor to justify war,
alliance expansion and increased state power. If America is fragile
because its traditional geopolitical advantages are outmoded, then it
must project power through a global military presence. Allied nations
such as Australia also debate which wars are necessary, and
whether Australias existence was at stake in the Pacific War.34 World
War II attracts debate precisely because it conditions views of national
security.35
Before making the argument, let us anticipate objections to counterfactual methodology. Predicting the past and imagining paths not taken
is speculative. But any argument about causality is counterfactual.36 To
argue whether America was wise to go to war is to make assumptions
about the consequences of taking a different course. Defenders of
intervention make forecasts about the probable consequences of
American non-participation. We cannot easily test them without
engaging on their turf. We can make informed guesses in an
evidence-rich environment in order to estimate the multiple possible
worlds that could have come about, to estimate Americas state of
security had history unfolded differently, drawing on information
about relative potential power and about the possible alternative
responses that might have been available with the time gained by
staying out of the war.
33

Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the
Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton UP 1992).
34
Peter Stanley, Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (Viking:
London 2008), 2506.
35
Pat Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain lost its
Empire and the West lost the World (New York: Random House 2008).
36
Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Orion Publishing Group 1997), 11314; Niall
Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador
1997), 87.

324 Patrick Porter

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Historical Codes and Todays Debate

On the evening of 9/11, President Bush wrote in his diary The Pearl
Harbor of the twenty-first century took place today.37 This reflected a
widespread recourse to World War II analogies and a resurgent popular
reverence for the Greatest Generation.38 As Pearl Harbor anniversaries show, the war is endlessly recalled as a shock that educated
Americans and left their geopolitical innocence in ruins.39 For
President Bill Clinton, it jolted our nation and forced us into a war
unlike any previous conflict.40 The memory of Vietnam as a tragic,
poorly-chosen mistake was also influential. But after 9/11, World War
II analogies took centre stage.41 Pearl Harbor became a code.42
Ruthless adversaries from afar attacked a sleeping giant and forced
conflict upon it; the attack marked a year zero where history began;
America had little choice but to wage an ambitious war with farreaching political goals; it had attracted this aggression by being
passively insular. A central claim of the evolving Bush Doctrine was
that history proves the imprudence of isolationism, the perilous nature
of the world, and the inevitability of existential war from time to
time.43
The code cumulatively narrowed debate. It portrays conflict not as
an earthly political struggle but as a cosmic drama. By recasting
America as a sleeping victim and the aggressors as simply embodiments
of evil, the code denies diplomatic context. During the Iraq war debate
of 200203, the memory of an inevitable war against the Axis
generated a fatalistic logic about war with Saddam Hussein. Ken
Pollack, an authoritative regional specialist, influentially argued that
just as Britain and France could have averted the horrors of World War
II with a preventative war against Nazi Germany in 1938, The
choices we face are closely akin to those faced in London and Paris in
1938 a potentially costly war now or a far worse war in the near
37

Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 33.
Denise M. Bostdorff, George W. Bushs Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant
Renewal, Quarterly Journal of Speech 89/4 (2003), 293319, 299.
39
Remembering Pearl Harbor, Newsweek, 25 Nov. 1991.
40
Proclamation 6963, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 5 Dec. 1996,
WCPD 32 (1996), 2462.
41
David Hoogland Noon, Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on
Terror and the Uses of Historical Memory, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7/3 (2004),
33964.
42
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 911, Iraq (New York:
W.W. Norton 2010), 414, 7487, 11115.
43
Robert Kaufman, In Defence of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington: UP of Kentucky
2007), 523.
38

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 325

future.44 Compulsion narrows the field of discretion, leaving the state
to decide on the timing of the conflict, a logic common to preventive
wars.45
This argument, however, is a poor guide to the dilemmas of the
time.46 Britain and France had far-flung commitments and limited
resources. Initiating hostilities in 1938 would have met with profound
problems. An early war would have squandered diplomatic support,
vital time, political will and financial strength. Pre-empting rather than
responding to Hitler would have meant initiating war without domestic
consent or international support. It would have sacrificed the
participation of states like Australia, Canada and South Africa who
were not prepared to bleed for Czechoslovakia. Britain needed time as a
vital commodity, to develop its air defence system of extended radar
and effective fighter planes, and to allow for gradual rearmament
without economic dislocation. Anticipatory war would probably have
been denied the vital material support of the United States. American
legislation forbade supplying arms or lending money to belligerents.
The rapid depletion of dollar and gold reserves and balance of
payments crisis was bad enough for Britain as things stood. It would
take Nazi aggression, and victory in the Battle of Britain, to attract
American backing. Acting as aggressor in 1938 would have taken
Britain to the brink of collapse. Preventive war was a problematic
alternative to delay.
The code also does a bad job of explaining how conflicts originate,
with its clear divide between war and peace rather than a continuum of
conflict. Specifically, it erases any sense of the collisions that
precipitated 12/7 and 9/11. Contrary to myths that isolationism led
to Pearl Harbor, America was not dormant before 7 December 1941.
Washington was already in an escalating conflict with Japan over the
question of China. From July 1941, its embargo on raw materials and
oil, and asset freeze, placed a stranglehold on Japan. This presented
Tokyo with the choice between abdicating its imperial ambitions and
challenging American power. Americas war originated not primarily
in a failure of appeasement in Europe, but in a failure of deterrence
and coercion in the Pacific. It is also ahistorical to blame the rise of
44

Ken Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York:
Random House 2002), ivxvi.
45
Matthew J. Flynn, First Strike: Pre-emptive War in Modern History (New York:
Routledge 2008), 5.
46
Richard Overy and Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War (London: Vintage Books
2009), 11921; Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, The Preventive War that Never
Happened: Britain, France, and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s, Security Studies 16/
1 (2007), 3267.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

326 Patrick Porter

Al-Qaeda on American passivity. A driving ideological force in AlQaedas jihad was Americas support of Gulf client regimes loathed
by the Bin Ladenists.47 America did not cause Japanese Imperialism
before 1941, or extreme jihadism before 2001. But both conflicts
were partly the result of its active geopolitical presence.
In its narrow, fundamentalist character, the small world code does
violence to the capacity to think strategically. The story of radical
enemies, foolish isolationists and heroic patriot-defenders is reductionist, presenting a continual struggle of false binary choices, between
appeasement and war. In its absolutes, the code attacks the prudential
essence of strategy, the balancing act and continual adjustment of
mutually contingent ends and means. Its cumulative effect is to lower
the threshold for war, circumscribe debate, and encourage an almost
limitless concept of national interests. And its historical foundations are
weak.
The Stakes in 1941
Why is World War II a crucial case?48 For those who argue that the
shrinkage of the world directly threatens America, the war should be an
easy test for their argument.49 They themselves identify that war as a
prime case of a necessary war. The Axis is the most powerful
combination that America waged war against since 1812 in terms of
military-industrial strength, combat power and reach, and raw
materials and labour controlled. By the time America became a formal
belligerent in December 1941, Hitlers Germany at peak strength
dominated continental Europe and had driven deep into the Soviet
Union. Germany was exploiting this resource base for further war.
From the coastal ports, its U-boat offensive against Atlantic shipping
threatened to strangle Britains lifeline. By the time America fought its
first major engagement at Midway in mid 1942, Germany was
preparing an offensive towards the oilfields of the Caucasus. It would
soon begin a nuclear programme. Italys entry was also stretching
Britain to the limit, while Japan dominated the resources of northern
China and south-east Asia.
We cannot be sure about Axis intentions regarding America. Hitlers
long-term ambitions beyond the European continent were not laid
47

Peter L. Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al
Qaeda (New York: Simon & Schuster 2011), 1821.
48
On the war, see Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World
War Two (Cambridge: CUP 2005).
49
See Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and World 1968), 248.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 327

down in programmatic form. Neither can we know whether acquiring
dominance would have sated or increased Germanys ambitions. Some
argue that war in Europe would turn a fatigued Germany to economic
rather than military expansion.50 Others argue that Hitlers strategy
was global.51 For the sake of argument, a worst case scenario should
be considered, where Nazi Germany and its allies threatened America
because of three interlocking developments: new military technology of
power projection; hegemony in Europe that would have overturned the
multi-polar European balance of power which had once presented an
obstacle to any would-be aggressor; and the hyper-aggressive intentions
of the Fascist states, driven by visions of ceaseless war. On this view,
war against the Axis was necessary because it initiated the conflict and
because the security interests at stake were so compelling that no other
response was conceivable. There are several overlapping arguments: the
direct threat version, the encirclement/strangulation version, and the
garrison state version. A triumphant Axis unfettered by a traditional
balance of power and unimpeded by distance could wage war directly,
encircle and strangle America from ocean bases or regional states, or
force it to regiment its society beyond recognition.
For the small world view to be convincing, a clear and present
danger should be apparent in this easy test. One way to test this is
through an appraisal of most likely and worst-case counterfactual
scenarios, measuring the extent to which American security was
endangered. The dominant claim of defenders of American intervention
is a counterfactual claim, that it was necessary in order to save the
world from Fascism and itself from existential danger. Counterfactual
appraisal is the only way to estimate the potential consequences of the
options that faced decision-makers.
Americas Choices
The simplest argument in favour of a war of necessity is that America
was attacked by one state unilaterally and subject to a declaration of
war by another. But it was not the case that Imperial Japan forced a
passive United States into war at Pearl Harbor. As already shown, far
from standing remote from world politics, Washington was in an
escalating conflict with Japan that predated the shooting war. Before it
was formally at war with Germany, President Franklin Roosevelt
deliberately courted conflict through an undeclared war in the Atlantic.
He duplicitously misrepresented the Greer incident as the sign of a
50

Lukacs What if Hitler.

See Randall L. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitlers Strategy of
World Conquest (New York: Columbia UP 1998).
51

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

328 Patrick Porter

rattlesnake poised to strike52 to justify rearmament and widening
Americas defence perimeter.
Even after war began, America as an offshore power had discretion
to choose where, when, who and how to fight. It could have confined its
role to armourer, financier and supplier to the Soviet Union and Britain,
being the arsenal of democracy and the guardian of the oceans.53 It
could have limited its military commitment to a Pacific First strategy,
rather than investing blood and treasure in multiple fronts, a proposal
that was formally made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and which had
support from large segments of public opinion.54 Instead of aligning
fully with the Soviet Union to defeat Germany at the expense of
expanding Moscows empire, it could have chosen a dual strategy of
both defeating Nazi Germany and containing the Soviet Union, running
the risk of a new BerlinMoscow settlement. It could do so through a
bait and bleed strategy, shifting its allegiances between one and the
other to balance and weaken both parties. Or it could insert AngloAmerican ground forces into Eastern Europe to check the advance of
the Red Army.55 There were many possible wars within the war.
Measuring the Axis Threat
To what extent could Axis victory have constituted a threat, a combination of intentions and capabilities so deadly that no other response
was conceivable? Arguments for American participation in the war
typically are made on a counterfactual basis.56 Germany, it is argued,
could have conquered the Soviet Union, enabling it to prepare a truly
hegemonic war against the North American continent.57 A Nazidominated Eurasia would unite Germanys science with Russias
manpower and pivotal geopolitical position.58 Armed with nuclear
weapons, this would pose a strategic nightmare.59 Alternatively, had
52

John M. Schuessler, The Deception Dividend: FDRs Undeclared War, International

Security 34/4 (2010), 13365.
53
David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance: A Study in
Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill: University of N. Carolina Press 1981), 288.
54
Mark. A. Stoler, The Pacific First Alternative in American World War II Strategy,
International History Review 2/3 (1980), 43252, 434, 4367.
55
See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: OUP 1982), 413.
56
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the
Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: CUP 2005), 95161.
57
Schweller, Deadly Imbalances, 2.
58
Eduard Mark, From Roosevelt to Truman Roundtable, 10 Sept. 2007, 334,
5www.h-net.org/*diplo/roundtables/PDF/FromRoosevelttoTruman-Roundtable.
pdf4.
59
Gabriel Schoenfeld, Buchanan as Historian, Commentary (1999), 548, 57.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 329

Germany avoided attacking the Soviet Union and Japan avoided a
Pacific war, both instead could have linked up in the Middle East,
creating a world-dominant, German-Russian alliance with its maritime
flanks secured by Italy and Japan.60
Each of these scenarios breaches a protocol of counterfactual
methodology. They are not plausible world but miracle world scenarios.61 They are not minimal rewrites of history based on small and
credible alterations such as Hitler dying in World War One, but
ambitious multi-step rewrites that beg fundamental causal questions.
To reinvent the past so that Germany avoids Operation Barbarossa
and aligns permanently with Moscow, or opts for a Middle Eastern
strategy of seizing oilfields and control of the Suez Canal, it would be
necessary to argue how and why it would have made such a different
choice. A clash against the Soviet Union was inscribed into the logic of
Nazi ideology, ontology and military planning. To imagine a Berlin
Moscow partnership, we would have to justify re-imagining not only
Hitlers ambitions but Nazisms long-standing and central vision of
conquering Lebensraum and its interlocking parts of European
dominance, eastern expansion and racial war against a Judeo-Bolshevik
enemy.62 Nazism without a commitment to a war in the East would be
like Switzerland without mountains. The effect of such counterfactuals
is to conjure not contingent possibilities but fictitious implausibilities.
Likewise, the counterfactual of absolute Axis mastery of Eurasia is
ambitious. The actual events of the war preceding Americas formal
entry throw doubt on that eventuality. Britain and Russia were
surviving as centers of resistance.63 Germany had already met
stalemate on two fronts and its limitations were becoming visible.
Repelled by Britain in 1940, Hitlers forces in the East had passed their
culminating point. They were struck by the Russian winter and failed to
take Moscow, were already being outproduced in aircraft by the Soviet
Union, and the defenders began their counter-attack in early December
1941. Even in the event of a German capture of Moscow, the Soviet
Union still had a deep interior industrial base. In the Atlantic war, by
mid 1941 Germanys submarine effort to strangle British shipping

60

David Fromkin, Triumph of the Dictators and John Keegan, How Hitler Could
Have Won the War, in Robert Cowley (ed.), What If? Military Historians Imagine
what Might have Been (New York: Pan Macmillan 1999), 3089, 295311.
61
See Richard Ned Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International
Relations (Princeton: Princeton UP 2010), 445, 54.
62
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (London: Yale UP 2008),
90.
63
Russett, No Clear and Present Danger, 29.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

330 Patrick Porter

supplies was doing serious damage but falling short of Admiral
Doenitzs estimate of 600,000 tonnes per month.64 It would climb
again, and Britains survival relied in part on American assistance. But
survival may not have required more than a limited American role,
providing material support and naval protection.
What if the Axis defeated the Soviet Union and subdued Britain?
Would this have created an unfavourable imbalance of power
intolerable to America? It would have been far from straightforward
for the victorious Axis coalition to hold together and translate its power
into sufficient capacity to threaten America. Even with common
enemies, a shared ideology and formal alliance, the Axis powers at war
distrusted each other too much to coordinate militarily.65 Potential
divisions within the Triple Alliance and resistance in occupied
territories meant that If Hitler wins, his troubles may only be
beginning.66
Even if the Axis successfully overcame such problems, America
remained a difficult target. It was a large landmass, not a small island.
Invading and conquering from across two oceans was still difficult even
after the inception of new technology. America had a strong protective
curtain in its navy. Its surface fleet joined also by Britains while it
remained on the board dwarfed Germanys.67 The Battle of Britain in
1940 was a marker for this argument. Hitlers inability to subdue
let alone conquer Britain, a closer and smaller island state, suggested
that successfully attacking or transporting an invasion force across the
Atlantic Ocean was a demanding logistical feat. America from its bases
had interception reach to disrupt or deny any aggressor. Provided it
maintained a sufficient coastal defence, it enjoyed a forbidding home
advantage through shorter supply lines, the ability to shift its naval
forces rapidly between oceans through the interior line of the Panama
Canal, and the ability to apply its weight over a smaller distance. Far
from conferring a decisive edge to the aggressor, new military
instruments cut both ways. America could use it to widen rather than
narrow its defended space.
64

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making & Breaking of The Nazi
Economy (Penguin: London 2006), 398400.
65
Mark Stoler, Allies in War: Britain and America against the Axis Powers 19401945
(London: Hodder Arnold 2007), 45.
66
Hanson Baldwin, Defence of the Western World (London: Hutchinson 1941), 45.
67
In 1940, Germanys surface fleet had 2 armoured ships, 4 battleships, 68 cruisers, 2
aircraft carriers in production, 50 destroyers and torpedo-boats, compared to
Americas 15 battleships, 6 aircraft carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, 19 light cruisers, 163
destroyers. The Statesmans Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States
of the World for the Year 1941 (London: Macmillan 1941), 511, 970.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 331

Even if the Axis were able to apply a superior volume of force, it
would have faced a hard task. Because of the constraints imposed by
geography and competing demands on resources, states applying
superior material power historically do not necessarily prevail over
distant weaker states, let alone potential industrial-military giants like
America. Smaller states with sufficient strength and the advantages of
fighting at shorter range with greater determination can offer strong
resistance.68 Consider the body-blows Japan inflicted at sea and on land
against Russia in 190405, despite the fact that Russia enjoyed a
greater economic weight by a factor of three to one, or Britains
difficulties in wresting back the Falklands in 1982 from an Argentina
economically weaker by a factor of six to one. In the case of a
hypothetical Axis-America clash, the Axis would be striking not
vulnerable contiguous or neighbouring states, but from long range
against a highly motivated defender, able to mobilise and concentrate
its continental resources sufficiently to offset the visitors, while world
empire would split the Axis attention and resources.
Time as well as distance is a critical factor in estimating Americas
security. What Hitlers precise plans were regarding the United States
remain ambiguous and disputed. It is unresolved whether his strategy
was schematic or loose and opportunistic. Germany planned probably
for an eventual war with America, and this drove its Z-Plan, the
construction of a great blue-water fleet of 25 battleships, 8 aircraft
carriers, 50 cruisers and 150 destroyers.69 The shift in priority from
land to naval and air forces this entailed would have required a
significant lead-time, possibly as much as eight years from the special
directive in January 1939. If America was his ultimate target, making
any transition from continental to world domination and switching
capabilities towards long-range seapower would take time. Going by
the stage-by-stage programme (or Stufenplan) that some historians
perceive in Hitlers unpublished Zweites Buch in 1928,70 Germany
would create a continental heartland, expand overseas and with Britain
as a junior partner fight a culminating war against America. Doing this
would first require eliminating Britain and the Soviet Union from the
war, the seizure of Atlantic naval bases and colonies in West Africa for
outposts and raw materials, and the development of economic autarky.
68
Andrew Davies, History shows need for rethink on China tactics, The Australian,
23 Oct. 2010.
69
Gerhard Weinberg, Germanys Declaration of War on the United States: A New
Look, in Gerhard Weinberg, World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II
(Hanover: UP of New England 1981), 7596, 89.
70
Milan Hauner, Did Hitler Want a World Dominion? Journal of Contemporary
History 13/1 (1978), 1532, 245.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

332 Patrick Porter

Even if this whole process worked out ideally, it would have taken
several years at least or, according to Hitler, decades. Hitler believed
that the final clash between Europeans and Americans would occur
after his lifetime.71 Hitler tried to postpone a war with America,
instructing his naval forces to show restraint and trying to eliminate
Britain from the war, because he feared a premature war against
that flanking giant before he had completed and consolidated his other
gains.72
Time would enable America to harness its under-utilised productive
capacity and prepare its defences. In the actual war, America generated
vastly superior industrial power than the Axis combined. Already in
1937, its relative war potential measured in terms of output of capital
goods was 41.7 per cent, against a combined potential of 20.4 per cent
for Germany, Italy and Japan. Where Germany doubled its industrial
capacity, Americas increased 25-fold.73 By 194344, America had
become a production miracle, producing at a rate of a ship a day and
an aircraft every five minutes. Even Germanys wild card, its
submarine offensive, would eventually be blunted by Americas
industrial power. In the Battle of the Atlantic, Americas ship-building
output outpaced German U-boat sinkings from August 1942 in almost
every month. As war raged elsewhere, its industry was unmolested. The
war was not a deterministic matter of a resource imbalance playing
itself out. But so long as they performed competently in combat, the
Allies could purchase time so that their quantitative superiority could
prevail over Germanys qualitative edge. And as Holger Herwig
observes, even a Nazi triumph in the East would have afforded
America time to develop atomic weapons. It already had the advanced
bases and the B-29 delivery system.74 Even if the Axis conquered Russia
as well as continental and Pacific Asia, subdued Britain and maintained
a post-war concert of power, America would not have been forced to
stand passively on the sidelines.

71
Hitlers Table Talk 194144: His Private Conversations (London: Weidenfeld 1953),
26.
72
Saul Friedlander, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States 19391941
(London: Chatto & Windus 1967), 31011.
73
On industrial mobilisation, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:
Economic Change and Military Conflict from 15002000 (New York: Random House
1988), 42831.
74
Holger Herwig, Hitler wins in the East but still Loses World War II, in Philip E.
Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Unmaking the West: What-If
Scenarios that Re-write World History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
2006), 32362, 3478.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 333

Thus if America had not become a belligerent, it would have been
given a significant breathing space. America could have use this time to
internally balance against the rising Axis threat, increasing military
spending and developing its industrial capacity. And as Robert Art
demonstrates, it could also have pursued greater economic selfsufficiency.75 America was a net exporter of oil and agricultural
products, and had deep reserves of oil and coal. Imports and exports
formed only a small share of its GDP. Holding back from full-scale war
and mobilisation would have produced an austere and less prosperous
existence. But it could insure itself against strangulation.
It is also likely that confronted with continued Axis expansion,
America would have developed increasing political will for preparation
and rearmament. Before formally going to war, most Americans
surveyed in opinion polls opposed formal involvement. But over 1940
41, increasing majorities disliked the Nazi regime, favoured compulsory military service and aid to the Allies, regarded Hitler as a threat,
and believed America should risk war to aid Britain. Asked in June
1940 if hypothetically Germany did conquer Europe, 88 per cent
wanted America to arm to the teeth against 8 per cent who thought
co-existence was possible.76 Thus while Pearl Harbor generated
support for unlimited formal participation, even without being
attacked Americans were demonstrably able to identify threats and
support preparatory measures to counter them. Over time America had
the means and the motivation to become a formidable opponent
without entering the war as a fighting power.
The Consequences of Intervention
The net strategic effect of entering the war was not to replace a Fascist
super-threat with a benign environment, but to replace one set of
totalitarian adversaries with another. Americas entry into the war was
a permissive (though not sufficient) cause of the Cold War with the
Soviet Union between 1947 and 1989. The widening American frontier,
enfolding the German, Japanese, and British buffer zones, collided
with the widening Soviet perimeter.77 Americas expanding horizons as
a superpower led to a pervasive sense of threatened outer defences in
Asia, continental Europe, and South America, as it redefined its security

75

Art, Was Spykman Right?, 3812.

Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion,
and the War against Nazi Germany (Oxford: OUP 2001), 1930, 24.
77
Walter Lippmann, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown
1943), 145.
76

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

334 Patrick Porter

interests globally. Perversely, the war helped generate a protracted
security struggle that it was supposed to prevent.
As a price of eliminating the Axis, the creation of a new bipolar
world brought a grave threat closer to home, the prospect of nuclear
war. For the first time, America could be devastated in minutes by
weapons which it could not defend against effectively. Despite a
deterrence system in a supposedly stable bipolar contest, there were
still a series of high-stakes near misses where fear, misperception, false
alarms or system errors nearly resulted in nuclear war. In 1962, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff pressed the Kennedy administration to attack
Cuba, not knowing that Soviet combat forces possessed nuclear-tipped
missiles and were authorised to use them, and a Soviet submarine
commander who believed the war had started had to be dissuaded by
fellow officers not to fire a nuclear torpedo.78 At other moments, the
moon, a flock of geese or exercises were mistaken for imminent
attacks.79 The Cold War involved divisive peripheral wars in Korea and
Vietnam and the diversion of productive investment into expensive
arms races. This mixed balance sheet makes it hard to accept
triumphalist readings of the war as an unambiguous security gain. We
are left with a difficult set of close calls.
Equally, had America stayed out, a different cold war is conceivable,
a protracted security struggle between America and one or more Axis
adversaries, with similar problems of nuclear confrontation, proxy
wars and domestic political effects. If entering the war helped to
produce a bipolar struggle with the Soviet Union, staying out of the
conflict risked the prospect of a graver, more multi-polar cold war
against one or more of the Axis powers. With its research on atomic
bombs and long-range missiles, a consolidated Third Reich would have
been more technologically advanced, and perhaps more aggressive,
than the Soviet Union.80 In such a conflict, America may also have
been denied what it had in the actual Cold War, supporting client states
such as West Germany, Turkey, Japan or South Korea that helped
counter Soviet power.
The most nuanced argument for intervention relates to the long-term,
internal effects of staying out, namely that avoiding war would have
prolonged the fear of war and destroyed Americas way of life. An
Axis-dominated Eurasia may have induced America to turn itself
through precautionary militarism into a garrison state, through some
78

Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the
Brink of Nuclear War (London: Arrow 2009), 58, 247, 303, 317.
79
Norman Friedman, The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2000), 207.
80
Michael Lind, Minority of One, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 3 Oct. 1999, 3.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 335

combination of heightened state control, a large permanent standing
army, conscription, high taxation and curtailed civil liberties.81 It could
not easily survive as an isolated democracy, because its institutions and
freedom depend on a hospitable world order. Preparing over a long
term against a growing Axis threat would have destroyed Americas
political soul. Americas entry, it is argued, avoided or mitigated the
problem, enabling it to stand down after the war, and civil society to
flourish. The strengthening of the state was constrained by a residual
anti-statist civil society.82
It is ironic that defenders of intervention raise the danger of a
garrison state. Historically, the act of going to war can also
compromise political liberty by reasserting state authority, militarising
society and heightening general fear. Intervention resulted in the
erosion of republican values and institutions to an extent. Extending
American involvement in World War II resulted in unprecedented levels
of state surveillance and coercion, from the internment of JapaneseAmericans to secret wiretapping. The campaign to increase Americas
involvement led J. Edgar Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt to monitor
and discredit foreign policy critics, and to the empowerment of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Whereas in 1941 the FBI employed
1,596 agents with a budget of $14,743,300, by 1945 it had 4,370
agents and a budget of $44,197,146,83 an expansion that was justified as countering subversion from Axis fifth columnists. Even if
America avoided becoming an illiberal garrison state in the Cold War
as observers feared it might, that struggle still had the less severe though
serious effect of creating an internally intrusive national security
state.84 Americas emergence as a superpower with an expanding
military presence elevated defence and the arms industry to unprecedented prominence in public life. While less authoritarian than
repressive totalitarian states, the state made impressive inroads into
constitutional liberties, through corporate blacklists, the interception of
private communications, and watch lists.
Would staying out and internal balancing in the long-term against
the Axis threat have resulted in illiberal effects to a comparable extent
81

Aaron Friedburg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas Anti-Statism and its
Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton UP 2000), 568.
82
Michael Lind, The American Way of Strategy: US Foreign Policy and the American
Way of Life (Oxford: OUP 2006), 1314, 95110.
83
Douglas M. Charles, J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists: FBI Political
Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 19391945 (Columbus: The
Ohio State UP 2007), 412, 174.
84
Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National
Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1978), 1945.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

336 Patrick Porter

to what actually happened in the Cold War? There is no certain way to
test this in terms of scale. The most confident conclusion we can reach
is that intervention and non-intervention would probably both have a
qualitatively similar effect, namely a prolonged state of insecurity
against a competitor, whether Axis or Soviet-communist, with statestrengthening effects that compromised liberalism. In 193941, it was
not a choice between a secure and open society that had entered the war
and an imperilled garrison state that had stayed out. It was a choice
between the cost of entering war and becoming a fearful global power,
versus the cost of staying on the sidelines and remaining a fearful
hemispheric power. This issue is irresolvable and marks the limits of the
value of counterfactuals. But this ambiguity suggests that the issue is
murkier than a black-and-white memory of a necessary good war
makes out.
A Close Call
If Americas war was discretionary, a prudential approach can guide us
in asking if it was worth it. Prudence is practical wisdom that weighs
the consequences of competing political choices and recognises the
contradictory tendencies in any political situation.85 It is the capacity to
deliberate carefully between means and ends in a dynamic field, balance
competing interests, weigh up costs and benefits, act effectively within
the limits of power and in the face of unexpected contingencies, with an
eye to the dangers of self-defeating behaviour. If its essence is careful
deliberation, sensitivity to context and humility about limits, it is
antithetical to the necessity versus choice mindset with its narrow
ideological absolutism and overdetermined historical analogies. It is the
foundation of effective strategic thinking, the dialectical orchestration
of ends, ways and means at proportionate cost.
Was intervention in World War II wise? As we have seen, the war
was probably not a survival struggle for America, and did not
straightforwardly make Americans secure. However, if it cannot be
justified as an unavoidable war with unambiguous results, it can still be
justified prudentially. On balance, the long-term effect of fighting the
war was probably better than what could have resulted from nonintervention. A worst-case counterfactual in which America faced an
ascendant and unified Axis that had overwhelmed Britain, Europe, the
Soviet Union, the Middle East and even China may have been farfetched. Nevertheless, if an improbable result is grave enough and if it
85

Robert Harriman, Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (University Park:

Penn State UP 2003).

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 337

can be met at acceptable cost, it is not necessarily imprudent actively to
diminish the already-remote risks.
In hindsight, comparing the actual outcome with plausible counterfactual alternatives leaves an uncomfortable choice, between an Axis
either supreme or merely dominant in Eurasia, and what the war
actually wrought, an expanded Soviet Union. Putting it crudely, it is the
choice between a nuclear Stalin and a nuclear Hitler, and the actual
Cold War or a probable cold war against some combination of Berlin,
Rome and Tokyo. If it was effectively a choice of cold wars, at least
America did not have to endure the actual Cold War alone. While the
war brought a powerful enemy closer, vital military-industrial regions
remained in Americas orbit. By creating a favourable balance of power
in key regions, America did not have to entrust its security entirely to
the efficient performance of its military. Its intervention in the global
conflict precluded or at least downgraded any danger of having its
hemispheric security tested by conventional means of invasion and
occupation. America did not have to go to the trouble of overhauling its
economy to become self-sufficient. Though state power increased with
illiberal effects, America did not devolve into a hyper-militarised
garrison state.
Though a nuclear confrontation with either Stalin or Hitler would be
dangerous, different doctrines of war meant that Nazi Germany would
probably have been more dangerous than the Soviet Union. Hitlers
conception of war was more predatory than Stalins. Stalin was
calculating and brutal but risk-averse, making a negotiated co-existence
and limited competition more possible. A logic of ceaseless war,
however, was etched into Nazism. It was central to the creation of a
Germanic master race. Stalin regarded revolutionary wars as defensive
and reactive, preferring that imperialist states fight one another.86 Coexistence was never guaranteed against a Soviet superpower, as the
history of nuclear near misses shows, but the odds were probably
better than co-existence with a Nazi superpower. Overall, Americas
war of 194145 shaped a tolerable though still unsatisfactory
environment against possible conditions that could have been worse.
It deserves a tentative thumbs up.
This has implications for today. The need to keep Eurasia divided
and prevent the accumulation of industrial power by a conquering state
was the basis for undertaking conflict in 1917, 1941 and in the long
cold war of 194789.87 But as we have seen, it was already difficult
86

Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia (London:
Penguin 2005), 443.
87
Geoffrey R. Sloan, Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, 18901987 (New
York: St Martins 1988), 11316.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

338 Patrick Porter

enough in mid-century to translate that kind of dominance into a direct
military threat to America, making the issue a non-obvious matter of
discretion. Further developments make a direct threat posed by a
distant power imbalance more remote. Americas relative military
advantage is greater now than in 1941. Its margin of maritime
supremacy alone is the equivalent of a 13-navy standard.88 Technological innovations since 1945, such as intercontinental missiles and
nuclear weapons proliferation, clearly have a shrinking effect in terms
of the projection of sheer offensive power, but strategically they also
have a widening effect, making it very difficult to translate violence into
military expansion against well-defended states.89 Nuclear weapons
make the conquest of any state prohibitively expensive. Defending
states with secure second-strike ability to retaliate can devastate
aggressors even with only a few punitive strikes.90 Nuclear weapons
may not deter limited wars or all-out nuclear exchange, and accident or
misperception can take states to the brink of catastrophe. But they
constrain the capacity of aggressors to expand.
Other innovations such as ballistic and cruise missiles, satellites and
information technology confer on defending states a pre-targeting and
long-range strike capability, enabling them to inflict severe damage on
expeditionary forces operating from forward bases.91 This does not
automatically defeat arguments for going to war or guarantee that
states will not attempt expansion. But it raises the threshold for a war
of survival.
If even Americas most powerful historical opponents atypically
powerful and hostile revisionist states with their aggregate force
represented a substantial and long-term but not a straightforwardly
direct threat except in ways that would be highly costly, if even they
could not affordably attack or strangle America, then this has major
implications. How dangerous are potential enemies that do not
command anywhere near the same resources, capabilities or ambitions?
Relatively weaker forces would pose far less threat, whether terrorists,
88
Robert O. Work, Strategy for the Long Haul: The US Navy, Charting a Course for
Tomorrows Fleet (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 2008), 8, 10.
89
As Layne argues, The Peace of Illusions, 278.
90
Steven Van Evera A Farewell to Geopolitics, in Melvyn Leffler and Jeffrey Legro
(eds), To Lead the World: US Grand Strategy after the Bush Doctrine (Oxford: OUP
2008), 1136, 1214; Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press and Harvey M. Sapolsky, Come
Home America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation, International
Security 21/4 (1997), 548, 14.
91
Andrew Krepinevich, Barry Watts and Robert Work, Meeting the Anti-Access and
Area-Denial Challenge (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments 2003), ii, 3.

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 339

Iran or a rising China, even in coalition. While it is obviously wise to
counter the danger of serial, mass-casualty terrorist attacks, a decade
from 9/11 the Al-Qaeda network has mustered nothing like the
lethality of the Axis, has seen its capacity for even minor attacks
steadily erode, has had its vital operating space in Western nations
that made 9/11 possible curtailed,92 leaving it small, lethal,
disjointed and miserable.93

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Conclusion
Americans and their allies can restore coherence to their statecraft if
they abandon binary reductionism and rediscover a more reflective way
to argue about war. The debate is improved if it proceeds on a
prudential basis that recognises the conflicted, contradictory and
contingent nature of any political situation. There is nothing inherently
implausible in the notion of an existential threat. The original 13
colonies reasonably feared other hostile powers dividing-and-ruling in
North America, threatening to encircle or strangle the weak newborn
state in a balkanised continent. But by 1945 America had overwhelmed
native peoples, become a bi-coastal state, had manoeuvred the
European empires from its landmass, had a powerful two-ocean navy,
was a nuclear superpower and an economic and military giant with
unprecedented reach. It became difficult to threaten America without
inviting unthinkable costs. America remains a difficult target so long as
it retains the capability to defend its hemisphere. The threshold for a
war of survival, then, should be high. To be sure, Americas physical
defensibility is hardly a guarantee against other processes that could
generate threats, such as spirals of insecurity. The fear of potential
peer competitors or irregular enemies can generate insecurity by
leading to mistrust and escalation, exhausting peripheral wars, or other
kinds of self-defeating behaviour. But that is all the more reason to
assess threats from a historically proportionate perspective and
recognise the complexity of what was at stake in Americas most
mythologised war. Taking a measured view of that past will help
decision-makers to be prudent in the future.
Acknowledgements
For their advice I am grateful to Stephen Biddle, Hew Strachan,
Kenneth Payne, Daniel Trombly, Huw Bennett, Chris Tripodi,
92
Marc Sageman, Confronting Al Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan
and Beyond, Testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee, 7 Oct. 2009, 18.
93
Glenn L. Carle, Overstating our fears, Washington Post, 13 July 2008.

340 Patrick Porter

Jonathan Golub, Nick Stargardt, Colin Dueck and participants in the
Reading University research seminar.
Note on Contributor

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Dr Patrick Porter is Reader in Strategic Studies at the University of

Reading. He is a contributing editor to the online ejournal Infinity. His
research interests are strategic and geopolitical thought, the history of
American and British grand strategy, and he is the author of Military
Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (Columbia University
Press and Hurst 2009).

Bibliography
Ajami, Fouad, 9/11 and the good war, Wall Street Journal, 11 Sept. 2009.
Art, Robert J., The United States, The Balance of Power, and World War II: Was Spykman Right?
Security Studies 14/3 (2005), 365406.
Baldwin, Hanson, Defence of the Western World (London: Hutchinson 1941).
Bergen, Peter L., The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda (New
York: Simon & Schuster 2011).
Bostdorff, Denise M., George W. Bushs Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal,
Quarterly Journal of Speech 89/4 (2003), 293319.
Buchanan, Pat, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain lost its Empire and the
West lost the World (New York: Random House 2008).
Carle, Glenn L., Overstating our fears, Washington Post, 13 July 2008.
Casey, Steven, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War
against Nazi Germany (Oxford: OUP 2001).
Chandler, David, Hollow Hegemony: Theorising the Shift from Interest-based to Value-based
International Policymaking, Millennium 35/3 (2007), 70523.
Charles, Douglas M., J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance
and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 19391945 (Columbus: The Ohio State UP
2007).
Davies, Andrew, History shows need for rethink on China tactics, The Australian, 23 Oct. 2010.
Dobbs, Michael, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of
Nuclear War (London: Arrow 2009).
Dower, John W., Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 911, Iraq (New York: W.W.
Norton 2010).
Dueck, Colin, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture and Change in American Grand Strategy
(Princeton UP 2006).
Ferguson, Niall (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador 1997).
Flynn, Matthew J., First Strike: Pre-emptive War in Modern History (New York: Routledge 2008),
Freedman, Lawrence, On War and Choice, National Interest 107 (2010), 916.
Friedburg, Aaron, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas Anti-Statism and its Cold War
Grand Strategy (Princeton UP 2000).
Friedlander, Saul, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States 19391941 (London: Chatto
& Windus 1967).
Friedman, Norman, The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press 2000).

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 341

Fromkin, David, Triumph of the Dictators, in Robert Cowley (ed.), What If? Military Historians
Imagine what might have been (New York: Pan Macmillan 1999), 3089.
Gaddis, John Lewis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: OUP 1982).
Gaddis, John Lewis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP 2004).
Gholz, Eugene, Daryl G. Press and Harvey M. Sapolsky, Come Home America: The Strategy of
Restraint in the Face of Temptation, International Security 21/4 (1997), 548.
Gray, Colin, Britains National Security: Compulsion and Discretion, RUSI Journal 153/6 (Dec.
2008), 1218.
Haass, Richard, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York:
Simon & Schuster 2009).
Harriman, Robert, Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP 2003).
Hauner, Milan, Did Hitler Want a World Dominion? Journal of Contemporary History 13/1
(1978), 1532.
Henrikson, Alan K., The Map as an Idea: The Role of Cartographic Imagery During the Second
World War, The American Cartographer 2/1 (1975), 1953.
Herwig, Holger, Hitler wins in the East but still Loses World War II in Philip E. Tetlock, Richard
Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Unmaking the West: What-If Scenarios that Re-write
World History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2006), 32362.
Hitlers Table Talk 194144: His Private Conversations (London: Weidenfeld 1953).
Hobsbawm, Eric, On History (London: Orion Publishing Group 1997).
Hunt, Michael H., The Ideology of US Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1987).
Jomini, Antoine-Henri, Precis de lart de la guerre (Paris 1837, transl. Capt. G.H. Mendell and
Capt. W.P. Craighill 1868).
Kaufman, Robert, In Defence of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington: UP of Kentucky 2007).
Keegan, John, How Hitler Could Have Won the War, in Robert Cowley (ed.), What If? Military
Historians Imagine what Might have Been (New York: Pan Macmillan 1999), 295311.
Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict
from 15002000 (New York: Random House 1988).
Kershaw, Ian, Fateful Choices: The Decisions that Changed the World 19401941 (London:
Penguin Books 2008).
Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (London: Yale UP 2008).
Khong, Yuen Foong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam
Decisions of 1965 (Princeton UP 1992).
Kitchen, Nicholas, Systemic Pressures and Domestic Ideas: A Neoclassical Realist Model of
Grand Strategy Formation, Review of International Studies 36/1 (2010), 11743.
Krauthammer, Charles, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World
(Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute Press 2004)
Krebs, Ronald R. and Jennifer K. Lobasz, Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion and
the Road to Iraq, Security Studies 16/3 (2007), 40951.
Krepinevich, Andrew, Barry Watts and Robert Work, Meeting the Anti-Access and Area-Denial
Challenge (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 2003).
Kuklick, Bruce, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton UP
2006).
Layne, Christopher, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2006).
Lebow, Richard Ned, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton UP
2010).
Lind, Michael, Minority of One, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 3 Oct. 1999.
Lind, Michael, The American Way of Strategy: US Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life
(Oxford: OUP 2006).

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

342 Patrick Porter

Lippmann, Walter, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown 1943).
Lukacs, John, What if Hitler Had Won the Second World War, in David Wallechinsky (ed.), The
Peoples Almanac, 2 (New York: Morrow 1978), 3968.
Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen Walt, An Unnecessary War, Foreign Policy 134 (2003), 519.
National Security Strategy (Washington DC: The White House May 2010).
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States (New York: Norton 2004).
Noon, David Hoogland, Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror and the
Uses of Historical Memory, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7/3 (2004), 33964.
Overy, Richard, The Dictators: Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia (London: Penguin 2005).
Overy, Richard and Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War (London: Vintage Books 2009).
Pollack, Ken, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House
2002),
Record, Jeffrey, Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Washington DC:
Potomac 2010).
Reynolds, David, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance: A Study in Competitive Cooperation (Chapel Hill: University of N. Carolina Press 1981).
Ripsman, Norrin M. and Jack S. Levy, The Preventive War that Never Happened: Britain, France,
and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s, Security Studies 16/1 (2007), 3267.
Rosenfeld, Gavriel D., The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of
Nazism (Cambridge: CUP 2005).
Russett, Bruce M., No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into
World War II (Oxford: Westview Press 1972).
Sageman, Marc, Confronting Al Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond,
Testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee, 7 Oct. 2009.
Saunders, Elizabeth N. Transformative Choices: Leaders and the Origins of Intervention
Strategy, International Security 34/2 (2009), 11961.
Schoenfeld, Gabriel, Buchanan as Historian, Commentary (1999), 548.
Schuessler, John M., The Deception Dividend: FDRs Undeclared War, International Security 34/
4 (2010), 13365.
Schweller, Randall L., Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitlers Strategy of World Conquest
(New York: Columbia UP 1998).
Sherry, Michael., In the Shadow of War: the United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale
UP 1995).
Sloan, Geoffrey R., Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, 18901987 (New York: St
Martins 1988).
Stanley, Peter, Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (Viking: London
2008).
The Statesmans Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World for the
Year 1941 (London: Macmillan 1941).
Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World
1968).
Stoler, Mark A., The Pacific First Alternative in American World War II Strategy,
International History Review 2/3 (1980), 43252.
Stoler, Mark. A., Allies in War: Britain and America against the Axis Powers 19401945 (London:
Hodder Arnold 2007).
Strachan, Hew, The British Way in Warfare, in David G. Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds), The
Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: OUP 1994), 399416.
Thompson, John A., The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,
Diplomatic History 16/1 (1992), 2343.
Thompson, John A., Conceptions of National Security and American Entry into World War II,
Diplomacy and Statecraft 16 (2005), 67197.

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 07:35 13 November 2014

Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II 343

Thrall, A. Trevor and Jane K. Kramer (eds), American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear:
Threat Inflation since 9/11 (London: Routledge 2009).
Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction: The Making & Breaking of The Nazi Economy
(London: Penguin 2006).
Van Evera, Steven, A Farewell to Geopolitics, in Melvyn Leffler and Jeffrey Legro (eds), To Lead
the World: US Grand Strategy after the Bush Doctrine (Oxford: OUP 2008), 1136.
Veseth, Michael, Globaloney: Unveiling the Myths of Globalization (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield 2005).
Weinberg, Gerhard, Germanys Declaration of War on the United States: A New Look, in
Gerhard Weinberg, World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II (Hanover: UP of
New England 1981), 7596.
Weinberg, Gerhard L., A World at Arms: A Global History of World War Two (Cambridge: CUP
2005).
Woodward, Bob, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002).
Woodward, Bob, Obamas Wars: The Inside Story (London: Simon & Schuster 2010).
Work, Robert O., Strategy for the Long Haul: The US Navy, Charting a Course for Tomorrows
Fleet (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 2008).
Yergin, Daniel, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1978).