The closing lines of Joshua P. Howe’s keenly argued April 2023 Diplomatic History article express a potent hope for a new generation of environmental historians of the American Empire. Readers today, Howe asserts, can better “understand the relationships between past and present in a materially re-made twenty-first-century world” by scrutinizing the “tailings of US foreign policy.” He develops this evocative metaphor across the piece to show how examining the intermingled environmental and political consequences of US foreign policy choices, which were often as dangerous as the rivers of debris produced by ore processing, offers fresh insights on the role of American power in the making of the Anthropocene (278). Howe concentrates on the first decade of the Cold War, when US policy choices inflected launch trajectories of the Great Acceleration.[1]
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Article Review 165
Joshua P. Howe. “The Tailings of Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 42:2 (April 2023): 252-278. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhac088
Reviewed by Paul G. Nauert, Eastern Oregon University
23 November 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-165 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
The closing lines of Joshua P. Howe’s keenly argued April 2023 Diplomatic History article express a potent hope for a new generation of environmental historians of the American Empire. Readers today, Howe asserts, can better “understand the relationships between past and present in a materially re-made twenty-first-century world” by scrutinizing the “tailings of US foreign policy.” He develops this evocative metaphor across the piece to show how examining the intermingled environmental and political consequences of US foreign policy choices, which were often as dangerous as the rivers of debris produced by ore processing, offers fresh insights on the role of American power in the making of the Anthropocene (278). Howe concentrates on the first decade of the Cold War, when US policy choices inflected launch trajectories of the Great Acceleration.[1]
Howe sifts the tailings of the US foreign policy from the first Cold War at a grimly relevant moment to the geopolitical history that is currently unfolding. With storm clouds of what some observers have termed a “new Cold War” gathering amid the worsening climate crisis, awareness is surging again of how global resource geography (e.g., lithium deposits) and transnational industrial geography (e.g., semiconductor manufacturing) shape the political geography of great-power competition and the possibilities of decarbonization.[2] Historical scholarship cannot, of course, offer direct answers to deadly challenges facing policymakers in the US and elsewhere today, but Howe’s study underlines the fact that during a past polycrisis, policymakers considered alternative paths and that no specific outcome was predetermined. Howe’s rejection of teleology and emphasis on agency is a welcome historiographic intervention while also offering food for thought during the global polycrisis of today.
Over twenty-seven pages, Howe advances a complex, but compelling, argument that helps to revise narratives of US foreign policy and drivers of global environmental change in the pivotal middle decade of the twentieth century. He contains this planet-scale story by tracing the desires and anxieties ignited among US policy elites by the twenty-fifth element on the periodic table of elements: manganese. His approach does not remain ponderously fixated on manganese as a simplistic commodity history. Like it is used in steel-making, he deploys calibrated amounts of the element across the article to forge an interlocking set of claims regarding trends of intellectual, economic, political, and environmental change.
In his first major set of claims, Howe contends that “that during the early Cold War, US policymakers weaved together geopolitical concerns, domestic political commitments, and narratives about American nature to formulate competing approaches to natural resources that both reflected and supported competing political ideologies” (253). Unraveling tangled interactions of geopolitical and domestic concerns has long been a staple of Cold War historiography, particularly as historians have paid greater attention to questions of identity and partisan politics.[3] Yet, environmental questions have only relatively recently entered the historiographic conversation.[4] This situation, thanks to the work of scholars like Howe, has been rapidly changing.
Howe’s article epitomizes what might be termed eco-revisionism: an emerging historiographic and analytical agenda that integrates the critical study of the American Empire, particularly in the Cold War (building on the values of the first generation of revisionist diplomatic historians, such as William Appleman Williams), with critical analysis of the Anthropocene, particularly the Great Acceleration.[5] By bringing greater attention to “ideas about nature and resources,” especially those mobilizing “American frontier mythology” and ideologies of neo-Malthusianism, Howe expands a growing, interdisciplinary literature that bridges approaches from US foreign policy history, environmental history, and critical Anthropocene studies (253). Howe builds upon the work of scholars such as Megan Black, Douglas Bristol, Neta C. Crawford, Thomas Robertson, and others, who have taken up long-standing proposals to link environmental and diplomatic history.[6] Their scholarship also responds to the call of critical Anthropocene studies researchers, such as Christophe Bonneuil, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Gabrielle Hecht, Jason Hickel, and Kathryn Yusoff, who rightly insist that histories of the Anthropocene must critically center the deeply unequal power structures that have placed the capacity to direct (and profit from) accelerating resource extraction in the hands of a tiny subset of humanity (mostly in the Global North) while pushing the socio-ecological costs of extraction overwhelmingly onto BIPOC, working class, and Global South communities.[7]
Excavating and interpreting alternative visions of American foreign policy regarding resource extraction amid the launching of the Great Acceleration form the core of Howe’s second major set of interventions. The path-breaking work of historians like Megan Black (whose work is an important inspiration and model for Howe) has established a compelling narrative of the origins and ascent of a quest led by American elites to seek expanding hegemony over mineral bases of power. It has been a violent quest, as Black shows, that began with nineteenth-century, settler-colonial genocidal campaigns against Indigenous Americans and, by late twentieth century, reached into the depths of the ocean and aimed with Midasian ambition toward the glittering metals of asteroids.[8]
Howe adds a vital chapter to Black’s epic at a pivotal point. In the opening years of the Great Acceleration and as the Cold War cohered, American elites debated the goals and means of American power in the postwar world. Having attained what David Kennedy termed “hyperpower” by the end of World War II, American elites possessed an unrivaled latitude for geopolitical choice.[9] As they well understood, different choices in directing (or restraining) American power meant different requirements for the material bases of this power. And here’s where Howe’s focus on manganese plays a starring role.
World War II ushered in a host of industrial processes to scale up production of materials that unlocked new possibilities for projecting industrial-military might.[10] However, steel still reigned as a titan over newer deities like aluminum and synthetic fibers. Moreover, diminutive manganese remained a sine qua non of mighty steel. Unfortunately for US foreign policymakers, as Howe points out, close to half of the manganese required by American industry had come from the USSR earlier in the century. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Truman administration escalated geopolitical competition with its erstwhile ally against fascism. By the early 1950s, Soviet Communist manganese was no longer facilitating American capitalist industry. Meanwhile, the Communist victory in mainland China foreclosed another prospective source of manganese exports after 1949. Resource geography was at odds with the political geography of the emerging Cold War world that US foreign policymakers had done much to create. US foreign policy choices that made a hot war more likely were undercutting the material means of waging such a war, as the catastrophe of the Korean War underscored in the early 1950s (258-263).
A hunt for manganese thus fueled and revealed a now-largely forgotten debate about how American political power should be used to secure the material bases of that power. Even if the actors Howe examines shared a common disregard for the environmental and social impacts of resource extraction, they differed significantly regarding the ideas of nature they mobilized to justify divergent recommendations on where, how, and by whom resources should be extracted. Just as important, they differed as to what vision of American power resource extraction should serve. Howe shows that taking these differences seriously matters for historical interpretations of the course of American Empire in the Anthropocene.
Howe begins with the camp that ultimately won: those he calls “resource internationalists,” building upon Black’s analytics of “resource globalism” and “resource ideologies” (254-255).[11] To unpack the worldview of this group, he delves into the massive five-volume report of the President’s Materials Policy Commission (PMPC) published in mid-1952 as Resources for Freedom. While other scholars, like Black and Robertson, have carefully engaged these volumes, Howe locates fresh insights as he explores how the prominent experts who were advising US foreign policymakers talked about (or avoided talking about) the environmental impacts of resource use and deployed a mythopoetic laundering of US history’s march from a genocidal feeding frenzy along the resource frontiers of nineteenth-century North America to a planet-scale extractivist hunger after quantum leaps in American industry in the age of global war.[12] Howe highlights that PMPC writers recognized that the US “had used a greater quantity of material since the First World War than had been used by all the nations of the world over the period of recorded history” (264). A prospective manganese shortage was only one of a parade of atoms and molecules whose shortage—or inconvenient location outside of the “free” world—might mean the arresting of American industry and and the collapse of the necessary (for the report’s authors) struggle by the US against “the threats of force and of a new Dark Age which rise from the Communist nations” (263).[13] Howe reveals how these reports built on neo-Malthusian discourses that were already in wide circulation in the US through books such as Fairfield Osborne’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival, both of which were published in 1948 (265).[14]
Rejecting slowed US economic growth or the need to back down from the ideological-geopolitical struggle with Communism, resource internationalists instead advocated the expansion of a global quest for the minerals that underwrote American might by more tightly binding the “free” world together in networks of liberalized trade to scale up the extraction from environments and the exploitation of populations mostly in the Global South. In Howe’s evocative phrasing, they sought “to use free trade and capital investments to bend a geography defined by geology” (266).
Howe then reveals that resource internationalists were not the only vision of American power and sources of its mineral strength on offer at the outset of the Cold War. In doing so, he proves how concerns about growing resource needs did not inevitably lead all American elites to a resource internationalist vision. Drawing upon original finds from the Nevada State Historical Society archives, he recovers forgotten foreign policy proposals by George Wilson Malone, one of the Silver State’s US senators from the late 1940s to late 1950s (268-273). Howe’s use of Malone’s papers underscores the potential in archives that lie beyond well-trod research sites like the reading rooms in College Park for foreign policy historians. Placing the little-known papers of Malone in Nevada in dialogue with the more widely known Resources for Freedom series allows Howe to develop an original, engaging analysis of the possible paths of American power at the dawn of the Great Acceleration.
Malone inveighed against resource internationalism, fearing open-ended geostrategic commitments beyond the Western Hemisphere. For him, questions of minerals were as important as military ones. If armies stationed in Europe created geostrategic risks, then a dependence on mineral imports like manganese entailed critical vulnerabilities for all of American industry. In contrast to the mineral neo-Malthusianism of the resource internationalists, Malone believed that the US, especially the West, still held the wealth needed to sustain postwar American abundance. For him, the mineral frontier (as Black puts it) remained open from the Rockies to the Pacific. Malone dubbed his view a “Sagebrush Philosophy” (269-273). Howe uses the term “providential isolationism” (268). It was no accident, as Howe notes, that Malone anointed himself a prophet of providential isolationism. Nevada boasted the largest manganese mine in the US. Keeping tariffs high on non-American manganese—whether extracted in the “free” world nor not—would have boosted profits for Nevadan mining concerns. Nor was Malone an isolationist in his industrial policy vision. Malone fantasized about a transnational economic empire that would weld together industry from East Asia to Latin America to the US East Coast, and would be centered (unsurprisingly) on the mineral munificence of the US West (270-273).
Although Malone, a former boxer with a pugnacious personality, might have won in the ring against Secretary of State Dean Acheson (his archenemy and resource internationalist par excellence), the Silver State senator’s providential isolationism did not prevail against the Truman foreign policy establishment (270). After the PMPC members largely got their way, the expanded global US pursuit of manganese opened countless ecological-epidemiological Pandora’s boxes across the world in places that had little say in the counsels of American foreign policy. “For more than half a century,” Howe laments, “manganese mines in Malaya, Indonesia, Africa, and Brazil have fed blast furnaces in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Gulf Coast, making manganese toxicologically relevant where it was until recently geologically foreign” (276). While making these claims, Howe is also careful to emphasize that providential isolationists were no proto-environmentalists. Had Malone’s vision won, manganese tailings might have instead poisoned the sagebrush landscapes that inspired the name of his political philosophy—although the role of American global power in the postwar world might have looked quite different (268).
Any good work of scholarship raises new questions in the process of answering other questions. This is particularly true for an article like Howe’s, which successfully develops a multilayered story that spans atoms and empires. I suggest two areas for further investigation for future scholars. First, the battlelines between the resource internationalists and the providential isolationists are clearly drawn and archivally supported. However, I am eager to know more about the direct battles between the two camps. Did figures like Malone have any allies among PMPC advisors? Did the Atlantic-centric bowtie bandits of Acheson’s State Department pay any mind to the cowboy-hat clad, Pacific-facing aspirants to the helm of American Empire? One might think that they would do so after the massive expansion of federally funded infrastructure in the West during the war that fertilized the Sunbelt’s ascent, trends which have been well-documented by historians over the past decade.[15] More on their clashes could further illuminate alternatives that Howe surfaces.
Second, as someone who has worked with draft materials informing the final PMPC report at the Truman Library, I agreed with Howe’s claims made on the basis of the public-facing reports. I also believe that greater discussion of what Science and Technology Studies scholars call “techno-optimism” would strengthen Howe’s analysis of the ideologies of the PMPC writers.[16] In my reading, PMPC authors engaged a sort of ideological bait-and-switch in which techno-optimist assumptions were central. As Howe highlights, they endorsed neo-Malthusian panic over the risks of resource exhaustion to justify expanding global pursuit of minerals. In turn, they justified the expansion of resource extraction despite the global risks of resource exhaustion by contending that an open-ended struggle against world Communism was morally necessary since (in a rhetorical move typical of early Cold Warriors) they cast it as a Manichaean sequel to the war against “the now dead Nazi tyranny.”[17] This logic posited a seemingly impossible choice, however: refuse to fight a world-historical evil or exhaust the material bases of modernity in the process of fighting it. The way out that they proposed was not a renovated conservationism. They instead advocated faith in something far more uncertain than the new manganese mother lodes promised by the Sagebrush Philosophers. Deploying again a mythopoetic reading of American history, the PMPC writers declared:
In developing America our forebears consumed resources extravagantly, but we are certainly better off in materials supply than they were…. If then… we can provide our posterity with a better return of goods and services for their labor than we get for ours, we need not feel compelled to restrain specific consumptions of materials to make theirs even larger—any more than our New England forebears needed to conserve bayberries for candles to light a generation that lives by kilowatts…. Technological changes and new resource discoveries may alter a situation completely. It may not be wise to refrain from using zinc today if our grand-children will not know what to do with it tomorrow.[18]
They proposed, in other words, accelerating resource consumption and submitting to a blind faith that acceleration would yield technological revolutions that would in turn obviate the need for minerals like zinc. Historians cannot know the future, but we know that the PMPC evangelists of techno-optimism helped to unleash the Great Acceleration. All of us on Earth are their grandchildren, and their triumphalist profligacy did not liberate us (or US foreign policy) from zinc, manganese, or other materials whose expanded extraction they enabled.[19] Meanwhile, the ideological tailings of the PMPC persist alongside the material tailings. Their techno-optimism is echoed by the rhetoric of those who today claim that the US and other rich societies can keep burning fossil fuels by assuming that largely unproven direct-air carbon capture technology can be scaled up effectively later in this century.[20]
We sweat in a warming world that mid-century resource internationalists did much to bring to a boil.[21] Scholarship like Howe’s proves that some of this trajectory was challenged (whatever the mixed motives of the challengers) in the critical moments of its launch. By excavating alternative visions like Malone’s, Howe helps to counter teleological reflexives that threaten to creep into narratives of the American Empire in the making of the Great Acceleration. Even if few of the choices that were considered by mid-century American foreign policymakers would satisfy many of the contemporary criteria of environmental justice, a signal contribution of this article and the emerging eco-revisionist school is its examination of archival evidence showing that other paths were possible as well as why these paths were abandoned. Such evidence adds to the ledger of American responsibility in the Anthropocene, but also restores an emphasis on choice and contingency in interpretations of the entangled origins of the Cold War and the Great Acceleration. The tailings of the first Cold War contain many more insights for historians to uncover—and, for the would-be Cold Warriors of today, many lessons to consider.
Paul G. Nauert is an assistant professor of history at Eastern Oregon University. His research interests include global environmental history, the history of US foreign relations, the American Empire in transnational/transimperial perspective, environmental and climate justice studies, military history, Pacific world history, Asian American history, twentieth-century US history, Cold War studies, and transnational history of the age of world wars. In addition to other professional memberships, he is a co-founder and co-organizer of Queer@EH, a network of fellow Queer-identifying scholars in environmental history and the environmental humanities. You can learn more about his work at www.paulnauert.com.
[1] The Anthropocene is a proposed epoch of measurable human impacts on Earth’s geology at a global scale. For debates on when the Anthropocene began and alternative proposed names of the epoch to emphasize different causes of rising anthropogenic environmental impact, see Franciszek Chwałczyk, “Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names—Considering the Urbanocene Proposition,” Sustainability 12:11 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114458; and David Biello, “Did the Anthropocene Begin in 1950 or 50,000 Years Ago?”, Scientific American, 2 April 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-the-anthropocene-begin-in-1950-or-50-000-years-ago/). The Great Acceleration, named in reference to social theorist Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “Great Transformation,” is a key chapter of the Anthropocene, regardless of start date chosen. The Great Acceleration is the skyrocketing of global resource use and emissions that started soon after 1945 with ongoing climate effects (J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014)).
[2] See, for example, Cullen Hendrix, “How to Avoid a New Cold War Over Critical Minerals,” Foreign Policy, 22 November 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/22/critical-minerals-resources-us-china-competition-cold-war-supply-chains/; and Zaheer Allam, Simon Elias Bibri, and Samantha A. Sharpe, “The Rising Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War: Energy Transition, Climate Justice, Global Inequality, and Supply Chain Disruption,” Resources 11:99 (2022): 1-17, https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9276/11/11/99.
[3] See, for example, Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
[4] For a key collection that showcases the range of the scholarship approaching the Cold War through an environmental history lens, see J.R. McNeill and Corrina R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also authors and works cited below in footnote 6.
[5] William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th anniversary edition (1959; repr., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009).
[6] Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Douglas Bristol, “Environmental Impact of German U-Boats in the Gulf of Mexico during World War II” (paper presented at the Society for Military History, San Diego, CA, 24 March 2023, manuscript shared by author with me on 12 April 2023); Neta C. Crawford, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022); Joshua P. Howe, “America and the World in the Anthropocene,” in The Cambridge History of America and the World, Vol. 3, 1900-1945, eds. David C. Engerman, Max Paul Friedman, and Melani McAlister (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 731-753; Thomas Robertson, “‘This Is the American Earth’: American Empire, the Cold War, and American Environmentalism,” Diplomatic History 32:4 (September 2008): 561-584; and Paul G. Nauert, “Climate Crucible: American Choices in Germany, Japan, and the Making of the Great Acceleration, 1939-1953” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2023). For a key call to integrate environmental history and US foreign relations history, see Kurk Dorsey and Mark Lytle, eds., “New Directions in Diplomatic and Environmental History,” Diplomatic History 32:4 (September 2008): 517-638, to which Howe positions himself in explicit response.
[7] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017); Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33:1 (2018): 109-141; Jason Hickel, “Quantifying National Responsibility for Climate Breakdown: An Equality-Based Attribution Approach for Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Excess of the Planetary Boundary,” The Lancet Planetary Health 4:9 (September 2020): 399-404; and Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
[8] Black, The Global Interior.
[9] David M. Kennedy, “The Origins and Uses of American Hyperpower,” in The Short American Century: A Postmortem, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 15-37.
[10] Timo Vuorisalo, Simo Laakkonen, and Richard P. Tucker, eds., The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World, (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017); and Thomas Robertson et al., eds., Nature at War: American Environments and World War II (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[11] For more on Black’s analytics taken up by Howe, see “Interior’s Exterior: The State, Mining Companies, and Resource Ideologies in the Point Four Program,” Diplomatic History 40:1 (January 2016); and The Global Interior.
[12] Howe builds upon analysis by Black in The Global Interior and by Robertson in The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
[13] Howe cites PMPC, Resources for Freedom, Vol. I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 1.
[14] Fairfield Osborne, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948); and William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1948).
[15] See, for example, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Mark Brilliant and David M. Kennedy, eds., World War II and the West It Wrought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).
[16] For the techno-optimist analytic applied to interpretation of political debates regarding the climate crisis with attention to longer histories of technology and science communication, see Sofia Ribeiro and Viriato Soromenho-Marques, “The Techno-Optimists of Climate Change: Science Communication or Technowashing?”, Societies 12:2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12020064.
[17] Resources for Freedom, Vol. 1, 1.
[18] Resources for Freedom, Vol. 1, 21.
[19] For a recent report from a prominent US think tank that centers anxieties over global mineral access (including manganese) in “the new Cold War” that echoes geostrategic anxieties and rhetorical moves of the Cold Warriors of the Truman era examined by Howe, see James J. Carafano, , Michael Pillsbury, Jeff M. Smith, and Andrew J. Harding, eds., Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 28 March 2023), https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/SR270_0.pdf.
[20] James Temple, “Carbon Removal Hype Is Becoming A Dangerous Distraction,” MIT Technology Review, 8 July 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/1027908/carbon-removal-hype-is-a-dangerous-distraction-climate-change/.
[21] Ajit Niranjan, “‘Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived,’ Says UN Chief As July Set To Be Hottest Month on Tecord,” The Guardian, 27 July 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/27/scientists-july-world-hottest-month-record-climate-temperatures.