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 The Real Washington
Consensus
Modernization Theory and the
Delusions of American Strategy
Charles king

A
mong American foreign policy whisperers and assessors of the
state of the world, no one had a more checkered reputation
than Walt Rostow—academic economist, influential author,
adviser to presidents, and, as the U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman once
called him bitingly, “America’s Rasputin.” In the administrations of Pres-
idents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, nearly every strategic
move Rostow advocated turned out to be wrong, from escalating the
commitment of U.S. combat troops for South Vietnam to rejecting peace
talks with the North Vietnamese. Since he continued to defend those
positions after most other people had concluded they were mistakes,
his name became a byword for a specific kind of Washington virtue:
offering terrible advice but at least doing so consistently. “[Zbigniew]
Brzezinski aspires to be the Henry Kissinger of this administration,”

CHARLES KING is Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown

University and the author of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists
Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.

november / december 2023 87

 Charles King

the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noted in his diary in May 1978 as
the administration of President Jimmy Carter was developing a harder
line toward the Soviet Union. “I fear he will end up the Walt Rostow.”
But before Rostow became a punch line, he was a thinker. Despite
his policy errors and his diminished status inside the Beltway, his ideas
and worldview lodged themselves deep inside the collective unconscious
of the American foreign policy establishment—and remain there today,
although sometimes in ways that are hard to see at first.
Rostow had come into the White House from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology after publishing the must-read foreign policy
book of 1960, The Stages of Economic Growth. Around the world, the
Soviet Union was peddling a seductive model of development, one built
from a one-party dictatorship, state monopolies, and five-year plans. To
Rostow, the West desperately needed its own theory for how societies
evolve, a coherent set of principles translatable into a practical blueprint.
It should be drawn not from airy Marxism, he believed, but from con-
crete history: the pathway that Western Europe and North America
had already trod from the Enlightenment onward. In his book, Rostow
offered a framework for how U.S. foreign policy could spur economic
and social change abroad, especially in what was then known as the Third
World. Countries develop in predictable stages, he argued, from precon-
ditions for growth to economic takeoff, toward the goal of a modern
consumer society. The trick was to accumulate the capital, know-how,
and—crucially—Western values that would allow takeoff to occur.
Rostow’s book was where many readers first encountered what
came to be called “modernization theory.” On Rostow’s reading of the
historical evidence, politics, economics, and mentalities came bundled
together. Modern economies were impossible without modern minds,
which in turn formed the habits of playing by the rules and respect-
ing abstract institutions that were fundamental to democracy. Some
of those ideas ran back to early social scientists such as Max Weber
and Émile Durkheim and would be elaborated by many of Rostow’s
contemporaries, such as the American sociologist Talcott Parsons.
But Rostow’s aim was more than academic. Fighting communism in
theory was the first step toward countering it in practice. To make
that point, he gave his book an unsubtle but memorable subtitle: “A
Non-Communist Manifesto.”
After reading The Stages of Economic Growth, an American could come
away convinced that global poverty and economic development were

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 The Real Washington Consensus

challenges on par with the arms race. Rather than thinking of foreign
affairs as merely a grand chessboard, Rostow insisted, U.S. policymakers
should aim the country’s resources at jump-starting other countries’
internal evolutions—a process that would essentially reverse-engineer
the route to success that the United States and other industrialized
societies had traversed since the eighteenth century. In the end, most of
the assistance programs that were born in Rostow’s era, from the Peace
Corps to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), bore
his stamp. But in the drive to bring the Third World up to the level of
the First, Rostow believed, Americans could take comfort in one deep
truth: that ultimately history, common sense, and human nature were
on their side. Consumerism would enable social transformations that,
sooner or later, would increase the likelihood of global convergence with
the values, interests, and preferences of the United States.
For more than half a century, the worldview that Rostow articu-
lated has remained a mainstay of American thought at the intersec-
tion of foreign policy and political economy. It still influences foreign
aid programs and democracy assistance. It is evident in Americans’
sense of strategic disappointment and bafflement—at the direction of
Russia since the end of the Cold War, at the resurgence of right-wing
nationalism among European allies, at the renewed appeal of non-
alignment among middle powers and poorer countries. The tenets of
modernization theory even inform the analysis of domestic politics in
the United States. Seven years after the numb bewilderment of election
night 2016, American liberals and moderate conservatives still view
the phenomenon of Donald Trump as an atavistic throwback to what
Rostow called “traditional society”: regional economic backwardness,
social stagnation, and, as he put it, “the inaccessibility of modern sci-
ence, its applications, and its frame of mind.”
More than any other intuition or outlook, modernization theory
still has the greatest claim to being a genuine Washington consensus.
“U.S. foreign policy is rooted in a belief that the way to lasting peace
and prosperity is actually to integrate diplomacy, defense, and develop-
ment, the three Ds,” the USAID administrator, Samantha Power, said
during a trip to Fiji in August. Yet in an age of renewed superpower
competition and global realignments, the task for American thinkers
and doers is to reimagine what is taken for granted about how societies
work internally, how they change, and how—even whether—external
actors can influence the process.

november / december 2023 89

 Charles King

Modernization theory was born in an age when the alternatives to

democracy and the market were clear. Today, more than at any point
since the Cold War, new competitors have their own theories to offer,
as well as the resources to realize them: the global loan-sharking of
China’s Belt and Road Initiative; the civilizational counterrevolution
spearheaded by leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Vik-
tor Orban, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and even the vision
of a benevolent tech-bro oligarchy represented by figures such as Elon
Musk. Developing a coherent account of how the world really works—
and what American foreign policy can do to nudge the country’s own
long-term interests into closer alignment with humanity’s—will be one
of this decade’s signature intellectual challenges.

RACE TO THE TOP

It is a particular obsession of great powers to build grand theories
about how and why the rest of the world is not like them. Americans,
of course, have long been concerned with their own country’s provi-
dential specialness. It is a theme that runs back—in the way the story
is told today—to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Governor John
Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” sermon of 1630. But by the middle of
the nineteenth century, American thinkers were beginning to develop
something new: not a paean to American exceptionalism but a general,
historically informed account of how societies evolve—one influenced
in no small measure by the example they found on their own doorstep.
In the 1840s, the New York lawyer, businessman, and amateur scholar
Lewis Henry Morgan traveled the rural back roads of his state and was
struck by the social transformation playing out before his eyes. The once
powerful Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy—the multicentury
alliance among the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and
Tuscarora peoples—was fading in the face of white expansion. The
greatest Native American alliance to exist on the continent was pass-
ing into obscurity, a development that Morgan set about to document
in real time.
Over the next several decades, Morgan translated his observations
into a monumental study of the Haudenosaunee and then, in 1877,
a work he called Ancient Society. His aim was to derive general con-
clusions from both the changes he had witnessed in his own lifetime
and the vast scholarship on ancient Greece and other bygone eras.
Simpler forms of association—families and tribes—had over time

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given way to modern cities and states, Morgan noted. In the process,
human societies all seemed to travel through the same waypoints.
He named these stages “the savage,” “the barbarous,” and “the civi-
lized.” Each had its own qualities of language, religion, and behavior:
how to express abstract ideas of time, say, or whether the weather
was produced by capricious gods or discernible patterns of heating
and cooling. Moreover, these stages were comparable across cultures:
peoples at the same stage of history did things more or less the same
way. What his Haudenosaunee neighbors had
experienced was not so much displacement or
disaster, he concluded, as their own process of The task for
slouching toward civilization, a development American thinkers
that had been accelerated, for good and ill, by
their encounter with white Americans farther
and doers is to
along the same human highway. reimagine how
Morgan would turn out to have an outsize societies change.
influence on science and the public under-
standing of social difference, both in the United States and abroad.
Charles Darwin quoted him. Karl Marx jotted down notes on his ideas.
The Smithsonian Institution made Ancient Society required reading for
its research staff, and his findings would inform government policy on
forced Native American assimilation. When the Library of Congress
opened its domed Thomas Jefferson Building in 1897, designers were
so taken with Morgan’s framework that they literally carved it in stone.
The building’s window arches featured keystones in the shape of male
heads representing Morgan’s understanding of the principal types of
humanity. On the front were civilized Europeans and their diaspora,
looking out toward the U.S. Capitol. Barbarous Chinese, Japanese, and
Turks wrapped around the sides. Savage Africans and Melanesians were
relegated to the back. It was a graphic illustration of the principal stages
of human development as white Americans perceived them at the time.
(And it is still on display today.)
Morgan’s outlook on society was evolutionary. It was perfectly pos-
sible for a human community to move from the back of the Library
of Congress to the front, as it were, given enough time and effort. No
race or culture was stuck in one natural station. That claim, however,
set Morgan and his followers apart from another powerful strain of
American thought: one that, by the early twentieth century, was quickly
becoming the dominant way of analyzing national greatness and decline.

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 Charles King

“In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privi-

lege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantage a man of
good stock brings into the world with him,” wrote the naturalist and
philanthropist Madison Grant. A pioneering conservationist, Grant
was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and had helped found the Bronx
Zoo. But his widest influence came from a sweeping survey of human
history, The Passing of the Great Race, which he published in 1916. In the
years to come, Grant’s work would become a defining text for a new
generation of globally aware citizens and policymakers.
Expanding the franchise to Black Americans had become “an
unending wail for rights” leading to a “rule of the average” in U.S.
politics, Grant argued. In contrast to Morgan’s claims, biological
races were immutable, he felt, a fact evident from the massive exper-
iment in social reform and nation-building he had witnessed in his
own lifetime: Reconstruction and the reassertion of white power in
the Jim Crow era. “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking
English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church
. . . [do] not transform a negro into a white man,” he wrote. Even
worse, Grant warned, the literal body politic of the United States was
now being threatened by race defilement, especially given the influx
of new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe since the 1890s.
“The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the
cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between
a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of
the three European races and a Jew is a Jew,” Grant stated plainly
near the beginning of his book.
Some people found these claims ghastly and nonsensical. The
Columbia University professor Franz Boas, the founder of American
anthropology, was so outraged that he gave The Passing of the Great
Race negative reviews in two different periodicals. In a famous public
debate in Chicago, W. E. B. Du Bois made a laughingstock of a younger
associate of Grant’s, Lothrop Stoddard. But the worldview Grant
espoused—the deep reality of inherited race, the ranking of world
communities by their racial station, the struggle for survival among
incompatible racial types—would reshape American thought and prac-
tice. The American eugenics movement sprang from the ideas Grant
promoted. The Johnson-Reed Act, a racially preferential immigration
policy passed by Congress in 1924, came about in part because of his
lobbying. It would remain largely in place for the next four decades.

92 foreign affairs
 Charles King

A THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Walt Rostow was born the same year The Passing of the Great Race
appeared. His father, Victor Rostowsky, had been the publisher of an
underground socialist newspaper in Odessa, which was then a Rus-
sian imperial port. Like other Russian Jewish activists at the time,
he escaped the tsarist police by sailing, steerage class, for New York,
shortening the family name along the way.
He made sure his three sons were unmistakably American. Walt was
named for the poet Walt Whitman, and his two brothers for the socialist
Eugene Debs and the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The household
sparkled with ideas and debate. Grand speculations about human nature,
the tides of history, and the possibilities of government were traded across
the dinner table. Not long after enrolling as an undergraduate at Yale
at the age of 15, Rostow had already come around to the concerns that
would drive his professional life. “I would work on two problems,” he later
remembered. “One was economic history and the other was Karl Marx.”
In ways that might be less apparent today, both interests were infused
with scholarly ambition as well as practical urgency. Rostow had grown
up in a country that had ready-made answers to the great problems in
the social sciences. They were confidently on display in school curricula,
in natural history museums, and in the everyday hierarchies of segregated
water fountains, streetcars, and movie theaters—the visible world justified
by widely accepted theories of racial civilization and timeless barbarism.
But Rostow’s own lifetime had seen these truths begin to crumble.
The rise of the Nazis had shown the real-world consequences of a coun-
try’s remaking its government according to a warped theory of history.
The American eugenics movement began to ebb. American children,
schooled since the 1890s to recite the pledge of allegiance by stretching
out the right arm toward the flag, a gesture known as the Bellamy salute,
were quietly instructed to place hands on hearts instead.
In 1936, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford allowed Rostow to witness
another country’s response to the rise of fascism. He also began to
research a case study that he felt contained the keys to social change:
an analysis of how the first modernizer, Great Britain, had wrenched
itself from an agricultural economy into an industrial one without
succumbing to dictatorship.
After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Yale, Rostow joined the war
effort as a bombing analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, a job
that would later have a profound, and horrific, impact on his approach

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America’s Rasputin: Rostow testifying in the U.S. Senate, 1962

to Vietnam. By 1950, back in academia as a member of the economics

department at MIT, he began to sense that good theory might hold the
secret to dismantling bad practice. He had “earlier promised to produce
an alternative to Marxism as a theory of modern history,” he wrote
the American politician and diplomat Adlai Stevenson in 1958 while
on leave at Cambridge University, “and I have used my sabbatical to
make my bid.” He had begun to sketch out his own account of social
evolution, rooted in economics but drawing on a particular reading of
American and world history—leaping over Grant, in a way, and reach-
ing back toward Morgan. The result was The Stages of Economic Growth.
On the first page, Rostow pleaded for the modesty of his own theory
while also announcing it as a new, universal take on social and economic
development. The concept at the core of his book—the stages through
which societies pass in moving from traditional society to moder-
nity—was both “arbitrary and limited” and “in no absolute sense, a
B E T T M A N N / G E T T Y I M AG ES

correct way,” he wrote. Yet in all the societies he had surveyed, from the
nineteenth-century vanguard of industrialization such as Great Britain
and France, to later modernizers such as Japan and Russia, to countries
straining to catch up, such as Turkey and China, there was a “unifor-
mity” in the pathway to development that sprang up from the historical
data. In short, countries move from traditional society to “maturity”

november / december 2023 95

 Charles King

through a combination of cultural change, technological innovation,

and elite choice—the realization that a growth-oriented economy and
public welfare are the principal goals of governance.
Chapter by chapter, Rostow described in detail the five stages of growth
he had gleaned from history: traditional society, preconditions for takeoff,
takeoff, the drive to maturity, maturity, and high mass-consumption. His
prose was that of a system builder and an optimist, and in both ways,
there was no escaping the gravitational pull of Marx—which was also, in
a way, the pull of Lewis Henry Morgan, from
the concept of developmental stages to the
Modernization view that all of history leads inexorably toward
theory was not so countries that happen to be the wealthiest and
most powerful today. Marx had built “a system
much wrong as full of flaws,” as Rostow put it, “but full also of
self-limiting. legitimate partial insights, a great formal con-
tribution to social science.”
Yet as he saw it, his Marxist contemporaries, by contrast, were playing
pantomime, advocating grotesque policies that flowed from their own
wishful thinking about history and human nature. “Gentlemen, I have
very important news,” Rostow would declare dramatically to his White
House staff in 1967, announcing the assassination of Che Guevara.
“They finally got the SOB. The last of the romantic guerrillas.” Lenin,
Guevara, Ho Chi Minh—each had consistently chosen the wrong
course when the right one was blindingly apparent. “It is they,” Rostow
concluded, referring to political leaders in former colonial states, “who,
having helped achieve independence, under the banners of human free-
dom, appealing to those values in the West which they share, must now
accept a large part of the responsibility for making those values come
to life, in terms of their own societies and cultures, as they complete
the preconditions and launch themselves into self-sustained growth.”
History knew its business. The grand sweep of social and economic
change was a single journey of liberation and improvement, one that any
country or culture might choose to join. All politicians had to do was
get out of the way. It was a truth that Rostow believed applied equally
well to his own country. One of the ancillary aims of The Stages of Eco-
nomic Growth was to introduce Americans to their own history—not
Plymouth Rock and Washington crossing the Delaware, but the great
arc of the human past, in which the United States had simply followed
the well-worn path of other modernizing societies.

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The difference in Rostow’s own day, however, was the rapidity with
which other countries were doing the same thing. The principal prob-
lem for the future was how to ensure peace in a coming age of what he
called “the diffusion of power.” If current trends followed the past as he
understood it, the coming world would contain many more countries
that had become full adults. “It is fairly safe to predict that, by 2000 or
2010 . . . India and China . . . will be, in our sense, mature powers.” The
idea of a bipolar world was already an illusion by the time he sat down
to write, Rostow believed. No countries were mere spectators in the
competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It would
become an even dimmer fantasy, he predicted, in decades to come.
Once he went into government—in the Kennedy White House, then
the State Department, then as Johnson’s national security adviser—
Rostow was an engine of memos, slogans, and proposals. “Walt can
write faster than I can read,” Kennedy once said, apparently not as a
compliment. Rostow’s career rested on the accidental coming together
of intellect and experience: in political economy and, during World
War II, in bomb targeting. His opinions on both would shape an entire
era in U.S. foreign policy, from the creation of a federal infrastructure for
overseas development assistance to the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
After leaving government in 1969, he spent the next several decades
totting up the good calls and the bad ones—the former his, he believed,
the latter those of defeatists who failed to understand the mechanics
of history. The Vietnam War had been a victory for the United States
and a benefit to the world, he argued. It had successfully staved off
communism long enough for capitalism to take off across much of Asia.
As time went on, the only person who seemed to be convinced by that
line of reasoning was Rostow himself. Like Morgan, Grant, and even
the Marxists he battled throughout his career, Rostow had succumbed
to the occupational hazard of embracing big history. The long run only
comes into view when you ignore the nearer miseries.

WHAT ROSTOW GOT RIGHT

The fate of modernization theory tracked that of its greatest popular-
izer. By the 1970s, the objections from social scientists had become
legion. Rostow was at best naive, ignorant of the ways in which the
world of the late twentieth century, replete with structural disadvan-
tages that kept poor countries poor, was not that of the nineteenth. At
worst, he was an imperialist manqué, justifying interventions, military

november / december 2023 97

 Charles King

and otherwise, by former colonizers in the internal affairs of newly

independent states. And to judge from the actions of high-consumption
societies, Western values seemed the last thing the West really believed
in. For someone who worked closely with Kennedy, it took a leap of
the imagination to believe that the dominance of “family and clan
connections,” as he put it, was exclusive to traditional societies. It
took an even greater leap to see saturation bombing in Vietnam as a
historical necessity.
As Rostow’s early critics argued, modernization theory seemed
less science than folk theory—one society’s quaint attempt to make
sense of all the others. Political economy was not a time machine, his
detractors pointed out. In examining inequalities of national income
and power in the global system, wealthier countries were not simply
staring back at earlier versions of themselves. All societies lived in
the here and now, with their own internal and external obstacles to
growth. Development required smart policies—in trade, finance, and
governance—not just a set of inputs to kick poorer countries into
modernity. There was no reason even to believe that modernity itself
was just one thing, the variety that came with a Renaissance, a Ref-
ormation, and an Industrial Revolution. Rostow had taken a slice of
history and derived universal laws from it. His was a kinder form of
the historical determinism of a Morgan or a Grant perhaps, but no
less blinkered and time-bound.
His critics notwithstanding, Rostow, who died in 2003, could look
at the later decades of his life as a kind of quiet vindication. If social-
ism had offered the most dynamic program for political and economic
change in Rostow’s childhood—as it had been for his father, bent over
his printing press in Odessa—that role now came to be occupied by
modernization. In South Korea, in Turkey, and even in China, political
elites came to use precisely that term, sometimes in direct translation
into local languages. “We must run while they walk,” Tanzanian Presi-
dent Julius Nyerere had said in the 1960s of his own country’s postco-
lonial development according to socialist principles. But as the decades
wore on, as the message of nationalization, autarky, and single-party
systems faded, what remained was the idea of a country racing headlong
into modernity, catching up with the rest of the developed world.
When Marxist economies and communist states finally collapsed in
eastern Europe and Eurasia, the array of policies adopted in response
by the United States and its European allies seemed to crib Rostow.

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 Charles King

Advisers, bankers, investors, and consultants descended on countries

that were busy cementing market economies and opening to external
trade and investment. Democracy assistance programs provided funds
and know-how. Election monitors and democracy watchers reported on
practices that they classified as either progress toward freedom or dem-
ocratic backsliding, as if each country could be assigned to a specific
stage of political development. The expectations were clear. Demand
for choice in consumer goods would fuel demand for choice in elected
officials. Globalization would shift local identities. Democracy at home
would buttress peaceful behavior abroad.
For all Rostow’s insistence on the stepwise development of human
societies, however, his version of modernization did not end with global
peace, prosperity, and millennial happiness. The place he stopped was
with the diffusion of power. The United States would have to plan for a
time when the advantages of modernity, as he saw them, were no longer
confined to the western appendage of Eurasia and a few of its for-
mer colonies. A world in which lots of societies were “mature”—filled
with consumer goods and an expectation of progress, brimming with
national and individual ambition—was very different from the one he
knew in 1960, but it might be glimpsed on the horizon. In that sense,
modernization theory was not so much the culmination of American
exceptionalism as a warning against it. Prepare for the future, Rostow
cautioned, by imagining how the United States would behave, in its
foreign policy and in its own self-understanding, in a world where it
was not particularly special at all.
In that respect at least, Rostow was broadly right. A national econ-
omy that strives for growth, a political system that assumes some kind
of mass participation, and a society that expects welfare and progress
have all become far closer to human universals than they were a half
century ago. But from this point forward, all bets are off. There is no
reason to expect that economic behavior, political institutions, and social
values will always be bundled and unidirectional. Since 1981, the World
Values Survey, a cluster of cross-national surveys, has arrayed societ-
ies along two dimensions of self-reported values: “traditional” versus
“secular-rational” values, meaning the balance among things such as
religiosity, respect for authority, secularism, and individuality; and “sur-
vival” versus “self-expression” values, meaning the balance among secu-
rity, distrust of outsiders, liberty, and personal happiness. As the survey
data have shown, none of these things is fixed. Even in high-modern

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societies, the sum of values and behaviors is more like a kaleidoscope

than a way station along a predetermined developmental path.
Similar lessons apply to Rostow’s major area of concern, eco-
nomic development. In the last quarter century, global progress has
been remarkable, if uneven. Even accounting for the effects of cli-
mate change, by the middle of this century, human well-being—less
poverty, lower child and maternal mortality, and more primary edu-
cation—is likely to be at a level that would have astonished Ros-
tow’s generation. The World Bank’s World
Development Report is today more likely to
focus on sovereign debt, data management, Pragmatism is
and technology as the most pressing issues in what states call
promoting human welfare, rather than health,
water, sanitation, and absolute poverty. But as
a theory they
the economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther would rather not
Duflo have argued, “speculating on a grand talk about.
scale” does not help explain where specific
policies have succeeded or failed, much less whether external aid is,
in general, good or bad. Except in the broadest possible sense—Ros-
tow’s metrics of higher income and more investment—countries do
not move through discrete stages. Instead, the challenge is to know
what works in specific contexts—the textured environment of hard
incentives and existing habits—and to build in an ability to pivot when
a solution does not pan out.
Modernization theory was not so much wrong as self-limiting. To
the degree that Americans look on Hungary, India, Russia, Turkey,
or even the United States with a sense of disappointment—at the
weakening of democracy, at the deepening of old social fissures such
as ethnicity or religion, at the ineffable sense that things are going
backward—it is because of the staying power of the worldview Rostow
popularized. But as Rostow himself warned, the essence of strategy was
straining to imagine beyond the horizon. In fact, when he reflected
on his own contributions in his memoirs in 1972, his assessment was
rather surprising. One of his goals, he wrote, had been to chart the
inadequacies of life in an era of high mass consumption. The goal of
human life was not to make and acquire more stuff, he felt, even though
an economist might use that as a shorthand. It was “the adventure of
seeing what man can and will do when the pressure of scarcity is sub-
stantially lifted from him.”

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 Charles King

There was no reason to believe that the early modernizers had any
advantage in this regard, or to expect that they would also be in the van-
guard of finding ever newer frontiers to breach. “Babies, boredom, three-
day weekends,” the steady “increase in real income”—his worry was that,
in fully modern societies, all these things would one day soon lose their
charm. In knowing more about how the stages of growth played out in
different settings, Americans might at last be able to see more clearly
how diverse societies “have, in different ways, organized themselves for
growth without suppressing the possibility of human freedom.” At the
core of Rostow’s thinking was a set of humanistic commitments that
contrasted wildly with the cruelty of his policy advice—the source of the
most famous quip about him, that he was “a sheep in wolf ’s clothing,”
a phrase attributed to the writer and government official Townsend
Hoopes (although no evidence seems to exist that anyone ever said it).
Rostow knew that once a country becomes modern, things can still
go terribly wrong. “Billions of human beings must live in the world, if
we preserve it,” he wrote in the final paragraphs of The Stages of Economic
Growth. “They have the right to live their time in civilized settings,
marked by a degree of respect for their uniqueness and their dignity.”

THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS

The challenges of Rostow’s era have their analogs today. He was wor-
ried about nuclear annihilation, which might be a stand-in for climate
change. He was concerned about the allure of the alternative model
offered by Marxism, which might well be compared to the role played
by today’s populist and nationalist reactions to neoliberalism. The essen-
tials of U.S. strategy—counter China and Russia, deter attacks on the
homeland, build resilience, and cooperate on climate change, food inse-
curity, and communicable diseases—are different from the ambitions
that Rostow had in mind. Yet he would have understood the American
desire to believe that capitalism, democracy, and a pro-American for-
eign policy are endpoints of the same process of social development.
In The Stages of Economic Growth, what he thought he had provided his
fellow Americans was a way of unbundling those expectations.
For all its asterisks and misinterpretations, modernization theory was
a contribution to thinking about what is universal in human develop-
ment and how foreign policy might prepare for a coming age in which
the benefits of modernity are more open to all. It was also a recognition
that how one thinks about the world determines how one acts in it.

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 The Real Washington Consensus

“The United States will work pragmatically with any partner willing
to join us in constructive problem-solving, reinforcing and building new
ties based on shared interests,” the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy
declared. But pragmatism is what states call a theory they would rather
not talk about, and it comes at a cost. In the absence of some broad
understanding of what drives social and political change, the United
States will continue to lurch from one crisis to the next, overburdened
as a great power yet underemployed as a leader—one that may be in
relative decline but that still has the awesome power to define global
priorities, mobilize coalitions, and serve as the closest thing the world
has to a planetary voice for cooperation, justice, and human survival.
All these roles depend on the United States’ own pathway through
modernity, where the forces of change are no different from those at
work in other countries. Immigration and shifting demographics will
alter the public assessment of vital interests abroad. Income inequality
will fuel new waves of populism. Affective polarization—the sense
among voters and their leaders that the other side is not merely wrong
but malicious—will present problems for the peaceful transition of
power and the respect for national institutions, especially in what
has effectively become a federation of one-party states. An electoral
system blatantly corrupt by the standards of other established democ-
racies, awash in private money and with weak mechanisms of internal
reform, will embolden authoritarians who promise to destroy it all
in one cleansing fire.
Being explicit about the way the world works is not an academic
luxury. It is a way not just of forecasting the future but also of hedg-
ing against it—a tool for contingency-proofing, to the degree possible,
a great power’s global vision against the domestic developments that
could bring everything crashing down. Rostow believed history had
demonstrated that every society can get to a specific point of human
development, irrespective of language or culture. But he had no illusions
that things ended there, not even for the pioneers of high consumption
such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Once
modernity became the taken-for-granted way of organizing the globe,
once scarcity had been lessened and minds opened, further stages of
development—hopeful ones as well as disasters—lay ahead. Modern-
ization theory offered no comfort about what these stages might be.
Surveillance capitalism, weaponized interdependence, the rise of artifi-
cial intelligence? Now, Rostow might have said, you take it from here.

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