The Myth of the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Fallout of Competing Internationalisms in the American Century

Common wisdom has long accepted Arthur Vandenberg’s claim that US politics “stopped at the water’s edge” in the Cold War. But passing familiarity with partisan combat in middle decades of the twentieth century suggests otherwise, whether we’re talking about foreign aid, the UN, NATO, trade, or immigration—not to mention the global crusade against communism. Clearly, postwar American internationalism was far more brittle and contested than it seemed to be. Yet the fact that these extraordinary commitments only collapsed after nearly 80 years of sustained investment requires explanation. That, in turn, requires reinspecting the core assumptions of America’s “rise to globalism.” Scholars largely presume that postwar internationalism was an ineluctable consequence of national interest. What’s more, they insist that it was an elite project built by realist “wise men” and their savvy allies who scared voters away from democratic scrutiny of foreign policy. Yet postwar foreign policy was constantly buffeted by mass politics at every juncture from the founding of the UN to the creation of the Marshall Plan and NATO to the uneven trajectory of war in Korea. They provided much of the red meat on which anticommunists crusaded. What’s more, international commitments reshaped domestic policies from labor relations, housing, welfare, and veterans’ benefits to public planning and economic development.

This paper will explore the limitations of the “wise men” thesis to reveal the vulnerability of consensus at “the water’s edge” by analyzing a vast trove of qualitative and quantitative evidence on public opinion and mass politics. It will reveal how the internationalization of activist government transformed domestic politics and issue frameworks. It turns out there was no “water’s edge” guarded by a bipartisan group of “wise men”; there was only a shifting salient of constituencies whose interests had to be carefully recast for the American Century.