Goodbye To The American Century?

In February 1941, Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time and Life magazines, penned an article heralding the “American Century,” a post-war era in which the United States would apply its newfound standing as the “dominant power in the world” to spread “free economic enterprise” and “the abundant life” around the globe. Luce envisioned the United States as “the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas” and “the dynamic leader of world trade,” and saw in this future “possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination.”

The next several decades would prove Luce right, as the United States emerged from World War II as one of two global superpowers and, arguably, the world’s preeminent cultural and economic force. Luce, who was a Republican, intended his broadside to serve as a template for conservative internationalism — in effect, a powerful response to the party’s isolationist, America First wing. But this concept — of America as a friendly goliath, the “Good Samaritan of the entire world,” promoting democracy, capitalism, trade and international order — guided the thinking of most policymakers and politicians across the political spectrum for the better part of a century.

Until now.

Donald Trump’s second presidential victory represents a sharp break, and perhaps a permanent one, with the American Century framework. It’s a framework that rested on four key pillars:

A rules-based economic order that afforded the U.S. free access to vast international markets.

A guarantee of safety and security for its allies, backed up by American military might.

An increasingly liberal immigration system that strengthened America’s economy and complemented military and trade partnerships with the rest of the non-Communist world.

And finally, in Luce’s words, a “picture of an America” that valued — and exported to the rest of the world — “its technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors … developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.”

Though this was the second time Trump won the presidency, the meaning of the 2024 election is different. For one, he won the popular vote — becoming the first Republican to do so in the last 20 years. What’s more, in his most recent electoral bid, Trump and his advisers (including his running mate) made tariffs, rapprochement with foreign dictators, a drawback from NATO and gutting federal agencies core themes of their campaign. Much more so than in 2016, when Trump lacked any demonstrated track record in political office, this campaign was very specific about the world it intended to construct — and nearly 50 percent of voters endorsed that program. This time, the president-elect is quite serious about ending the American Century. In fact, he’s already making moves to tear it down.

Just look at his recent cabinet nominations. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick as director of national intelligence, has defended both Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whom she has met multiple times, and Vladimir Putin’s reasoning for invading Ukraine — hardly an encouraging choice for American allies looking for a guarantee of safety and security. Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, is a diehard supporter of Trump’s aggressive tariff agenda, which would drastically curtail U.S. participation in an international free market. The elevation of former ICE director — and Project 2025 contributor — Tom Homan to the position of “border czar” carries implications for American immigration policy so obvious they hardly require explanation. And as for trusting in expertise, Trump has appointed anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Maybe the turn against the American Century framework is fair. At its worst, it imposed American priorities and interests on weaker countries, often at the barrel of a gun. Voters might very well want to make a reasoned break with the past.

But the American Century framework also underwrote the country’s economic might, political power and security for many decades. What happens if we dismantle it?

Before we can answer that question, we have to examine how the American Century came to be in the first place.

In the years immediately following World War II, the U.S. pursued two interconnected goals: It underwrote Western Europe’s and Asia’s post-war recovery and imposed a rules-based economic order to promote greater stability; and it promised its allies military security against Soviet aggression. Both policies required a robust internationalist outlook.

The United States had already furnished Western European allies with billions of dollars in aid by 1947, but that winter saw some of the most cutting immiseration since the war began. Blizzards and cold snaps ground commerce and industry to a halt and resulted in severe shortages of food and fuel. In England, the weather was brutally punishing — at one point, the gears on Big Ben froze — and the country came within a week of running through its coal supply.

Worried that desperate circumstances would reduce Europe to “a rubble-heap, a channel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate,” in Winston Churchill’s words, the Harry Truman administration convinced Congress to enact the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, after Secretary of State George Marshall. The ERP ultimately dispensed $13.4 billion (roughly $175 billion in today’s dollars) to western and central European allies, helping them rebuild their core infrastructure and economies. Similar aid flowed to Asian allies like Japan.

It wasn’t just a question of altruism. Stable and prosperous allies in Europe and Asia would resist the pull of communist parties and align themselves strategically with Washington, D.C. — not Moscow. They would also generate vast markets in which the U.S. could sell agricultural products, fuel and finished goods, and from which the U.S. could import raw materials. The Marshall Plan thus indirectly strengthened American economic hegemony, but it also did so directly: It required that when recipient nations deployed the funds to rebuild, they buy American when possible. In effect, it functioned as a multi-billion stimulus package for American business, agriculture and manufacturing.

Determined to avoid the ruinous cycles of tariff wars, currency fluctuations and economic rivalries that created profound economic disruption in the 1920s, American policymakers also spearheaded the creation of a rules-based international order to promote a more enduring free trade environment between its allies.

Signatories to the Bretton Woods system, established in 1944, agreed to peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar, which was in turn convertible to gold. This development stabilized international trade, which benefited all U.S. allies, but it also effectively made the U.S. dollar the central currency of global trade and finance, which in turn underwrote the high-growth and low-inflation cycle behind post-war America’s prosperity. By exporting dollars, the U.S. essentially exchanged printed paper for goods and services from other countries, lending it an economic advantage. The system also sustained demand for U.S. dollars, which allowed the U.S. to print and circulate dollars globally without fear of currency devaluation.

Bretton Woods also established institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which helped ensure exchange rate and balance of payments stability, and the World Bank, which helped underwrite further reconstruction and economic development in Europe and Japan.

What was good for America’s allies was often very good for America. Loans from the IMF and World Bank regularly came with stipulations that recipient nations use U.S. contractors, goods and services, creating export opportunities for American businesses. More broadly, by converting Europe and Japan into prosperous and reliable trading partners, the post-war system created thriving markets for American exports.

Prosperity required more than redevelopment and economic stability; it demanded peace. Hence, the other side of the coin was America’s role in safeguarding its allies against Soviet, and later Communist Chinese, aggression. The establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954, which bound each member state to rise to the defense of the others in the event of an attack, helped create a Cold War stalemate between the U.S. and Soviet Union (and later, China). They also bolted member states more tightly into America’s orbit and ensured that the U.S. would enjoy a preeminent position in trade and financial policymaking.

There was always a darker side to the brand of enlightened leadership that Luce had in mind when he envisioned “America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice.”

To enforce its allies’ security, the U.S. maintained hundreds of military bases, which at any time housed hundreds of thousands of active service members around the globe. Even today, America still operates 750 bases outside of the country, often to the resentment of local communities. Pax Americana comes with the promise of protection but requires that our allies accept living under the thumb of the U.S. military.

In the pursuit of stable markets and trading partners, the U.S. often did whatever it took. In 1947, President Harry Truman secured $400 million in economic and military aid for Greece and Turkey, helping both countries resist communist insurgencies. That was a reasonably good look.

It was a bad look when, the following year, Truman used the CIA to help ensure that centrist parties would defeat Communist parties in Italian elections. And it was a really bad look when, in 1954, U.S. intelligence agencies helped topple the elected government of Guatemala because it planned to confiscate and redistribute land — some of which was owned by the powerful and politically connected American corporation, the United Fruit Company.

Beginning in the 1960s, left-leaning scholars like historian William Appleman Williams argued that America’s foreign policy was driven by a ruthless demand for new markets and trading partners. The American Century, in their view, was never about Luce’s call for the “mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind.” It was always about the money. The critics weren’t wrong, entirely, even if they exaggerated the point. Just as often as not, the American Century framework drove policymakers to make common cause with theocrats in Saudi Arabia (oil) or autocrats in Nicaragua (coffee, cotton) when American economic interests demanded it.

Even more benign features of the American Century framework sat poorly with some allies. With American consumer goods now flooding European markets, some French critics in the 1950s lamented the “coca-colonization” they had inadvertently agreed to.

But in its highest and basest forms, there was little denying that the postwar framework, which promoted enthusiastic engagement with the world, greatly benefited the United States.

While not originally part of the post-war framework, a liberalized immigration regime was the natural extension of America’s enlightened — and sometimes unenlightened — internationalism. It wasn’t just the free flow of goods and capital that helped make the United States an economic and political powerhouse. It was the free flow of people.

While the 19th and early 20th centuries saw a massive influx of new immigrants from Europe and Asia, the door largely swung shut in 1924, when Congress limited the annual number of immigrants, particularly those emigrating from outside northern European countries.

In 1966 Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, legislation that opened the door again. The new law favored newcomers with specialized skills and education or existing family relationships with American citizens or residents, and substituted the old national origins standard — which simply allotted certain countries a set number of immigrants, heavily favoring immigrants from Northern Europe — with annual hemispheric limits: 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western hemisphere, a breakdown that reflected lingering bias toward Europe. (Congress eliminated this provision in 1978 and replaced it with a simple, annual cap on global immigration.) Critically, the bill exempted from these caps all immigrants with immediate family members in the United States.

The bill’s champions anticipated that most of its beneficiaries would hail from Europe. But the story played itself out differently. As Europe’s economy finally emerged from the ashes of World War II, fewer residents of Ireland, Italy or Germany moved to the United States, while those residing in the Soviet Bloc found it all but impossible to try. But tens of thousands of educated professionals — lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists — from Asia and Central America did avail themselves of new opportunities in the United States and established roots in the country legally. So did tens of thousands of refugees from Cuba, Vietnam and other repressive regimes.

By 1972, the Association of American Medical Colleges found that 46 percent of all licensed physicians were foreign-born, with large numbers emigrating from India, the Philippines, Korea, Iran, Thailand, Pakistan and China. Because the law exempted many categories of family members from the hemispheric caps, these new citizens were soon able to bring their relatives to join them.

Many more immigrants than expected emigrated to the United States, creating a much more diverse population. In the first decade of the bill’s enactment, an average of 100,000 legal immigrants above the cap relocated to the U.S.; by 1980 the annual number soared to 730,000. Fifty years after the bill’s passage, foreign-born immigrants comprised roughly 13 percent of the total population, approaching the all-time high of 14.7 percent in 1910. Another 20 percent were born in the United States but had at least one foreign-born parent, bringing the proportion of first and second-generation Americans to historic heights.

Unlike earlier waves, 90 percent of new Americans after 1965 hailed from outside Europe — from countries like Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, Korea, Cuba, Taiwan, India and the Dominican Republic.

Immigration reform in the 1960s flooded the country with educated professionals, but in later decades, it also facilitated the arrival of millions of unskilled workers who arrived under family reunification provisions of the new law. In addition, many millions more arrived illegally and were not documented.

Both waves of immigration boosted the American economic hegemony. Presidents from both parties knew it. When Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush debated each other during the 1980 Republican primary, both agreed in clear terms that immigration was a distinguishing feature of American strength.

Setting aside the millions of legal immigrants who have made their homes in the U.S., according to Cornell University’s ILR Worker Institute, today, undocumented persons make up 25 percent of the agricultural workforce, 17 percent of all construction workers and 19 percent of maintenance workers. Alongside documented immigrants, they helped the country withstand birthrate and demographic decline, a phenomenon that threatens economic growth, the future of entitlement programs and, more generally, national security.

To appreciate what this means for the U.S. economy: A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that Trump’s proposed deportation program would shrink GDP by up to 7 percent by 2028, drive up unemployment rates and increase inflation. Whether voters like it or not, robust immigration was a key pillar of the American Century.

A final pillar of the American Century framework might be broadly characterized as expertise — or, more precisely, a veneration of expertise.

Looking back on the early post-war years, the columnist Robert J. Samuelson recalled that “you were constantly treated to the marvels of the time. At school, you were vaccinated against polio. … At home, you watched television. Every so often, you looked up into the sky and saw the white vapor trails of a new jet. … There was an endless array of new gadgets and machines. No problem seemed to be beyond solution. … You took prosperity for granted, and so, increasingly, did other Americans.”

When Jonas Salk, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, developed the polio vaccine in 1955, it set off a wave of relief and pride. A crippling and often deadly disease that struck 58,000 children just three years earlier would be all but eradicated by the close of the decade. Americans celebrated the vaccine’s announcement by closing businesses and schools and ringing church bells.

The polio vaccine represented the broader faith in scientists, social scientists and other subject matter experts to solve hard problems. The tight partnership between the federal government and universities in these years cemented the place that experts would occupy more broadly in driving the Pax Americana. By the late 1960s American universities devoted $3 billion annually to research and development, roughly 70 percent of which was financed by the federal government.

Presidents from Truman through Barack Obama — Democrats and Republicans alike — staffed the government with professionally trained scientists, economists and other academics, and the revolving door between elite universities and government swung quickly and constantly.

Much as Luce anticipated “these skills, this training, this leadership is needed,” American voters in the post-war era venerated scientific and technological expertise and broadly welcomed it in government.

It’s not at all clear that Donald Trump can, or even intends to, make good on campaign promises to deport millions of immigrants, slap punitive tariffs on America’s allies or gut the professional ranks of the civil service — including doctors and researchers at NIH and the FDA, economists at the Treasury Department, demographers at the Census Bureau and policy professionals at the Departments of Education and Energy.

More clear is that his vice president wants to cut off aid to Ukraine and kneecap NATO. In his first term, the president-elect gestured at sharply reducing American miliary presence abroad, suggesting a possible redeployment that leaves allies more vulnerable to Russian and Chinese aggression. Furthermore, the appointment of cabinet officials with absolutely zero subject matter expertise, such as RFK Jr., and the promise to clean house of the bureaucratic state, augur at a future when experts are booted from the seat of government.

Whether Trump can or will pursue his agenda remains to be seen. But it’s also beside the point. It’s what nearly 50 percent of voters just endorsed — steps that would both dismantle and repudiate the American Century framework.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. At its worst, that framework resembled what scholars refer to as “imperialism by invitation.” It could be brutal and coercive, and in recent years, its rewards eluded millions of working-class communities and their residents.

But the American Century framework has defined the nation’s trajectory for well over 80 years. For good or bad, it undeniably made the United States a very prosperous and powerful country. It’s what bound allies into strategic, security and economic relationships with the U.S., ensured our continued access to trading partners and lent the country favored status across a broad spectrum of international organizations. We’ve become accustomed to the benefits it delivers, without understanding how quickly those benefits could disappear.

A very reasonable question for voters who now reject that framework is: What’s next?