Present at the Re-Creation - Restoring the Promise of America in the World

Dean Acheson, between 1949 and 1953 the 51st US Secretary of State under President Truman, published in 1969 his book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. This memoir of almost 800 pages, for which he received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for History in 1970, is a vivid account of the enormity of the task the Truman Administration was confronted with after WWII: ‘to create a world out of chaos; ours, to create half a world, a free half, out of the same material without blowing the whole to pieces in the process.’ Acheson was not only present, he played an active role in the creation of the reconstruction of Europe being one of the architects of the Marshall Plan; the creation of the United Nations, the creation of NATO, the creation of the unification of Europe. In short: the creation of a liberal world order in which liberty and the dignity of every human being prevail.

This was the task President Truman, Secretary Acheson and his friend and colleague General Marshall envisioned in that era of the Cold War, also the era of the politics of their nemesis the Republican senator McCarthy, whom Acheson describes as: ‘The gauleiter and leader of the mob.’ And: ‘The Government’s foreign and civil services, universities, and China-studies programs in them took a decade to recover from his sadistic program.’ It was because of this ‘McCarthyism’ that Thomas Mann, at the time living in Los Angeles, wrote in his diary on March 1, 1952: ‘The further development of fascism is becoming increasingly probable in America.’ Well aware of the unavoidable tension between moral purpose and physical power, he approvingly quotes the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: ‘There is always an element of moral ambiguity in historic responsibilities.’ At the very end of his book that so rightly became a classic, Acheson writes: ‘Only slowly did it dawn upon us that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone and that the struggle to replace it would be directed from two bitterly opposed ideologically irreconcilable power centers.’

In his Nexus Lecture, the first public lecture after he left office, Secretary Blinken will reflect on the parallels and differences between the time of his predecessor Acheson and the current time, and on the new task of the re-creation — restoring the promise of America in the world — in our era facing again two bitterly ideologically irreconcilable ideas of power: the democratic liberal world versus the return to authoritarianism.