Looking at the World: Forging the ‘Heavy Industry’ Imagining U.S. Globalism in the World Crisis of the 1930s

John Ikenberry

Director

Reimaging World Order

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.  He is also Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for International Security Studies. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-19, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014 Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, Ikenberry was ranked in the top 10 in scholars who have produced the best work in the field of IR in the past 20 years, and ranked in the top 8 in scholars who have produced the most interesting work in the past 5 years.



Professor Ikenberry is the author of eight books, mostly recently A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (Yale 2020), and  Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (Princeton, 2011). His book, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001), won the 2002 Schroeder-Jervis Award presented by the American Political Science Association for the best book in international history and politics. A collection of his essays, entitled Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: American Power and International Order (Policy) appeared in 2006. Ikenberry is also co-author of Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the 21^st Century (Princeton 2009), which explores the Wilsonian legacy in contemporary American foreign policy. Ikenberry has also the editor or co-editor of fourteen books, including America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Cornell, 2002), The End of the West? Crisis and Change in Atlantic Order (Cornell 2008) and Unipolarity and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, 2011).  Ikenberry has authored 130 journal articles, essays, and book chapters.



Professor Ikenberry is the co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security, and he is the co-author, along with Anne-Marie Slaughter, of the final report, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law.  Among his many activities, Professor Ikenberry served as a member of the Policy Planning Staff in 1991-92, as a member of an advisory group at the State Department in 2003-04, and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on U.S.-European relations, the so-called Kissinger-Summers commission. He is also a reviewer of books on political and legal affairs for Foreign Affairs.

David Ekbladh

Professor of History

Tufts University

https://as.tufts.edu/history/people/faculty/david-ekbladh

My interests are wide and varied but I gravitate toward broad global themes and how they straddle the domestic and international. I see the history of the United States not as separate or exceptional but something firmly connected to the stream of world events. Nevertheless, culture, politics, and society within the United States interact with and refract the global. This is reflected in my research. My first book, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, (Princeton University Press, 2010) looks at the place of development ideas in American foreign relations during the twentieth century. Modernization was defined in the Depression as liberals sought proof that they could master the forces of modernity. Compelling models emerging from the New Deal were trussed for worldwide use. These approaches, newly labeled "modernization," became a consensus view internationally. At home modernization became an American mission, an imperative appealing to constituencies across society. Strategically, it found a central role U.S.-led "nation building" programs in critical parts of the "Third World." In the 1960s and 1970s, modernization was brought to crisis by its intimate connection to the war in Vietnam, growing criticism of the Western modernity that was assumed to be its goal, and an environmental critique that highlighted ecological and human costs. This discredited modernization in many quarters. Nevertheless, modernization's influence continues to echo in institutions and approaches that remain in the skeletal structure of the international community today.



My current book project, Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s reflects a growing interest in the interwar crisis. It focuses on a period where political upheaval facilitated the rise of "totalitarian" states. These were believed to have changed the nature of international life. Americans came to the conclusion that to remain secure at home they had to actively promote policies they believed would assure global stability. This demanded the assumption of vast—and potentially limitless—commitments that defined a new type of American globalism.



However, much of the thinking legitimating this view emerged from a transnational discourse contending with a collapsing world order. Because of dramatic changes in mass media and advocacy, these broader views quickly diffused down from international activists and institutions to very local and immediate segments of American society. They led a profound revision of American perceptions, politics, and institutions that remain foundations for our present day understanding of the U.S. role in the world.



Professional experiences have given me insight into the array of actors and ideas that move world affairs. For several years I worked with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic foundation, on international affairs and conflict prevention issues. I spent some time with an UN-affiliated educational program in New York and Costa Rica. Other opportunities led me to Japan where I contributed to educational programs of the Tokyo Foundation.