The ''American Century" -The US Lebensraum

within the bounds of the United States, domination of vast new foreign markets offered untold potential, profits and, above all, power.

The "Amerkan Century" -The US Lebensraum In early 1941, some ten months before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, and a well-connected member of the East Coast elite, wrote an editorial in the February 17 issue of Life entitled, "The American Century:' In his essay, Luce d.escribed the emerging consensus of the US East Coast establishment around the·CFR. "Tyrannies:' Luce wrote, «may require a large amount of living space; but Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny." He made an open call for Americans to embrace a new role as the dominant power in the world, a world in which the United States had not yet entered the war. He wrote, "the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."4

Luce was reflecting the emerging view of the internationallyoriented US business and banking establishment around Morgan and Rockefeller. They needed unfettered access to global resources and markets after the war, and they saw the golden chance to get it while all contending powers had been devastated by war.

The American banking and industrial giants needed room, or what some called a Grand Area. The Economic & Financial Group of the CFR War & Peace Studies made a survey of world trade in the late 1930's. They proposed linking the Western Hemisphere with the Pacific into a US-dominated bloc, which was premised on what they called «military and economic supremacy for the United States."s The bloc included what was then, still, the British Empire. Their Grand Area was to encompass most of the planet, outside the sphere of the Soviet Union which, to their irritation, remained closed to American capital penetration.

Founding CFR member and one of the leaders of the CFR War & Peace Study group, Isaiah Bowman, known as "America's Geopolitician" during the Second World War, had another term for the Grand Area. Bowman called it, in reference to Hitler's geographical term for the economic justification of German expansion, "an American economic Lebensraum."6 The term was later dropped for obvious reasons, and the more neutral-sounding American Century was used instead to describe the emerging vision of post-war US imperialism.

As Bowman and others of the CFR State Department study group saw it, the champions of the new American economic geography would define themselves as the selfless advocates of freedom for colonial peoples and as the enemy of imperialism. They would cham"pion world peace through multinational control. Since late days of World War I, when Bowman had worked on The Inquiry, a top-secret strategy group of President Woodrow Wilson, Bowman had been occupied with how to clothe American imperial ambitions in liberal and benevolent garb.

As Bowman and other CFR planers envisioned it, the American domination of the world after 1945 would be accomplished via a new organization, the United Nations, including the new Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as well as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Bowman's CFR group had drafted the basic outline for President Roosevelt of what would become the United Nations Organization. Under the banner of "free trade" and the opening of closed markets around the world, US big business would advance their agenda, forcing open new untapped markets for cheap raw materials as well as new outlets for selling American manufactures after the war.

The group drafted more than 600 policy papers for the State Department and President Roosevelt, covering every conceivable part of the planet, from Continents to the smallest islands. It was all based on a presumed US victory in a war which Washington was not even officially fighting.

For the CFR and the forward-looking members of the US policymaking establishment, after World War II, global power would no