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August 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 5
The Balance Of Power
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
The catch in all of this is that the lid was coming off Pandora’s box anyway. At the close of the nineteenth century the United States and the world at large were changing in such a way that America was going to be involved in power politics no matter what it did in the Caribbean or in Asia. From Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay to the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947—which can be taken as the more or less formal beginning of the Cold War—was just a half century, and that half century had seen a profound shift in the whole international power structure. When President Truman pledged this country to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he was taking a step that was logically connected with what the McKinley administration did in 1898, but it was a step that almost certainly would have been forced upon us even if the McKinley administration had behaved differently.
Thus an excellent book to read in connection with Mr. Beisner’s work is Louis J. Halle’s The Cold War as History . Mr. Halle here undertakes to examine the Cold War from a detached viewpoint, discussing it precisely as a historian might do a century afterward. The book is written as if the Cold War were something we had already lived through, an affair that had not only a beginning but an end. The end, to be sure, has unfortunately not yet arrived, and yet Mr. Halle believes that it is in sight; or, at least, that the time of greatest danger has already passed. It is nice to find someone so hopeful; meanwhile, The Cold War as History does shed a good deal of light on the eventful half-century between McKinley and Truman, and it is worth reading even by those who may not share Mr. Halle’s optimism.
What Mr. Halle begins with is the assertion that by the end of the nineteenth century “the foundations of the long-standing world order on which American detachment depended were crumbling.” America had been able to be detached because of the long stability of the balance of power in Europe. In terms of power, Europe until then was the whole world, and its balance of power was a world balance. America could remain happily isolated as long as that balance existed.
In other words, says Mr. Halle, our detachment from international power politics rested on the great Pax Britannica, because the European balance of power had been maintained largely by British naval supremacy. But as the iSgo’s ended, that supremacy was beginning to come to an end; Germany, Japan, and the United States itself were becoming strong naval powers, as a result of which Europe’s balance was no longer in equilibrium. The British navy was no longer omnipotent, and so the New World was no longer strategically detached. Now America found