A World Safe for Commerce: American

Foreign Policy from the Revolution to

the Rise of China Dale C. Copeland
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A WORLD SAFE FOR COMMERCE
PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS
Tanisha M. Fazal, G. John Ikenberry, William C. Wohlforth, and Keren
Yarhi-Milo, Series Editors
For a full list of titles in the series, go to
https://press.princeton.edu/series/princeton-studies-in-international-history-and-
politics
The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It
Backfires, Rochelle Terman
Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections, Sarah Zukerman
Daly
An Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics, Jonathan Kirshner
Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration, Andrew
S. Rosenberg
Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times, Jack L. Snyder
Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation, Vipin Narang
The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II,
Jonathan Haslam
Strategic Instincts: The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International
Politics, Dominic D. P. Johnson
Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War, Jason Lyall
Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy since 1949, M. Taylor Fravel
After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after
Major Wars, New Edition, G. John Ikenberry
Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security,
Michael C. Desch
Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics, Austin Carson
Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict,
Keren Yarhi-Milo
Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century, Seva
Gunitsky
A World Safe for Commerce
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY FROM THE
REVOLUTION TO THE RISE OF CHINA

DALE C. COPELAND

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD
Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press
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Names: Copeland, Dale C., author.
Title: A world safe for commerce : American foreign policy from the revolution to the rise of
China / Dale C. Copeland.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023018406 (print) | LCCN 2023018407 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691172552
(hardback) | ISBN 9780691228488 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Economic policy. | United States— Foreign economic
relations. | United States—Foreign relations—China. | China—Foreign relations—United
States. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Economy | HISTORY / Asia / China
Classification: LCC HC103 .C76 2024 (print) | LCC HC103 (ebook) | DDC 330.973—
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Jacket Credit: Hong Kong and Victoria Peak circa 1855 / Wikimedia Commons
 CONTENTS

Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations for Primary Documents and Source Material xv
Introduction 1
1 Foundations of Dynamic Realist Theory 12
2 Character Type, Feedback Loops, and Systemic Pressures 33
3 The Origins of the War for Colonial Independence 63
4 The United States and the World, 1790–1848 94
5 American Foreign Policy from 1850 to the Spanish-American War
of 1898 142
6 The U.S. Entry into the First World War 189
7 The Second World War and the Origins of the Cold War 232
8 The Crises and Conflicts of the Early Cold War, 1946–56 286
9 Trade Expectations and the Struggles to End the Cold War,
1957–91 319
10 Economic Interdependence and the Future of U.S.-China
Relations 354
Notes 395
References 447
Index 469
 PREFACE

THE TITLE of this book, A World Safe for Commerce, has within it
both light and dark undertones, swirling in tension like the two
halves of the “yin-yang” symbol in Chinese Daoism. On the one
hand, by playing off of Woodrow Wilson’s inspiring statement to
Congress on April 2, 1917, that the United States had to enter the
European war to “make the world safe for democracy,” I wish to
evoke the idea that commerce has been and can still be a force for
peace, and thus a worthy end of any state’s foreign policy. Yet by
shifting the phrase to its commercial equivalent, I want to stress the
dark and calculating side of power politics that the vast majority of
American leaders since the eighteenth century have so effectively
practiced. And this includes that great liberal internationalist,
Woodrow Wilson himself. For more than two and half centuries,
American policy makers have typically conceived of “world” as
meaning not the planet, but their world, the places on the earth that
most determine their interests and concerns. And when they
conceive of keeping that world “safe,” they are almost always
thinking of how to ensure continued access to the goods and
markets that will keep the economy strong and national security
intact. If other powers help to promote and secure the expansion of
this commercial world, great. Peace can prevail. But if others
challenge America’s access to this world, watch out! Conflict and war
may have to be chosen, even when other powers want a peaceful
status quo. This book represents a sustained exploration of this and
other such fundamental tensions, and the trade-offs in policy that go
with them.
 The book represents the third in an unplanned trilogy of books
that seeks to offer a more dynamic view of international politics.
When I was a second-year grad student, a professor of mine made
an offhand comment that Kenneth Waltz’s famous Theory of
International Politics had already shown us how great powers
respond to outside forces (the “systemic” level in Waltz’s language),
and that all interesting work in international relations would now
come from the study of domestic politics and leaders (the “unit”
level). Since I had already taken to heart critiques of Waltz’s book
which underscored, above all, that it provided a far too static picture
of the international system, I remember approaching him after class
and stating that I thought there was still a lot more to be done at
the systemic level. Most important, we needed to show how trends
in systemic-level factors such as relative power and trade
dependence force great powers to alter, often radically, their foreign
policy behaviors. I recall he looked rather bemused, said something
like “Good luck!” and walked off.
At the time, it was commonly believed that systemic or
“neorealist” theories of power politics could only explain broad
recurring patterns in great power relations, and that for any
purchase on the specific behavior of states, one had to “dip down to
the unit level” (to use a popular phrase from those days). I resisted
this view then and have resisted it ever since. Great powers don’t
simply face general and largely fixed systemic factors such as
bipolarity (two large states) and multipolarity (many large states), as
Waltz claimed. They also must deal with their specific relative
positions within those polarities and how those positions are
expected to change over time. They must answer questions such as:
Who is bigger than whom, and by how much? Are we rising or
declining in our level of power and economic dependence compared
to other states in the pecking order? How have past decisions
shaped current trends not just in military power, but also in
economic and technological power? And perhaps most important of
all, what do we expect will happen in the future, independent of
current trends, that might affect our ability to access the materials
and markets we need to sustain our economic power base and thus
our long-term national security?
The first book, The Origins of Major War, focused mostly on how
dynamic trends in a state’s relative military power position caused it
to act either moderately in foreign policy—when it was inferior but
rising in relative power and wished to buy time for future growth—or
aggressively, given beliefs that it was declining from a strong current
position and would be vulnerable to attack or coercion later. The
second book, Economic Interdependence and War, took one step
back in the causal chain. It showed how changes in a great power’s
dependence on trade and financial flows, combined with
expectations of the future commercial environment, could lead those
in power to believe that the state was either rising or declining in
long-term power. If expectations of future trade were positive,
leaders could expect the state to grow in power, and would thus
have more reason for moderate foreign policies. But if expectations
turned sour and leaders came to see that others were either cutting
the state off from trade and investment, or were likely to do in the
future, then they could anticipate decline and be more inclined to
hard-line policies to rectify the situation. In short, both books,
drawing from the preventive war literature, demonstrated that
anticipated decline is a major reason for great powers to turn to
policies that lead to risky crises or war, with the second book also
showing one very important reason for why leaders come to believe
their states are indeed in significant decline.
This book builds on the theoretical arguments of the first two
books, but also adds three new elements to help complete the larger
dynamic argument I am developing. First, drawing from offensive
realism but going beyond it, I argue that in any situation of anarchy
where there is no central authority to protect states from the
threatening actions of others, great powers have an incentive not
only to seize opportunities to expand their territorial-military
positions as a hedge against potential attacks down the road. They
also have an incentive to grab opportunities to expand their
economic power spheres—the realms of trade and commerce they
rely upon for continued growth—to reduce the chances that others
will cut them off from future access to vital goods and markets. The
fact that the United States and China today share this age-old drive
to expand and protect their commercial realms goes a long way to
explaining why in 2013 Beijing created the Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI) to continue its “going out” policies from the 1990s and 2000s,
and why Washington is so keen to ensure that the BRI does not hurt
U.S. trade ties in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Indeed, the reason
underlying China’s expansion outward parallels one of the
foundational drives propelling American expansion after 1790—
namely, the need for a larger sphere that could ensure continued
access to raw materials, investments, and markets.
Yet the United States in its past, as with China over the last forty
years, could not seize opportunities to increase its economic sphere
without also considering the risk that this might upset other major
powers. Smart great powers understand that overly hard-line
behavior can cause a spiral of mistrust and hostility that may lead
other states to reduce trade or even to engage in military actions to
protect their own economic spheres. This is the second way that I
extend past work. I seek to build a dynamic realist theory that
integrates offensive realist insights on the need to expand as a
hedge against the future with defensive realist insights on the need
to worry that one might acquire a reputation for being a state with
an aggressive, even pathological, character. Rational leaders will take
into account both needs simultaneously as they make difficult
decisions about the level of moderation or assertiveness in their
foreign policies. And they will assess these needs in light of the
severity of external changes in power and commerce, shifting to
more hard-line policies either when they have reason to fear deep
decline, or when they are rising but believe that without stronger
policies, they will start to peak and decline in the near future (for the
latter, think of the United States after 1895 and China after 2007).
 The third new element is the book’s analysis of exactly how
rational leaders interested in security go about making assessments
of the other’s character—assessments that, in conjunction with
power trends, shape the way such leaders estimate the level of
future threat arising from the external environment. Since these
leaders are focused on the external environment—the other state’s
character, and whether it is, like their state, rational and security-
seeking, or something else altogether—this is not a “dipping down to
the unit level” to explain why these leaders make the decisions they
do. Rather, it is simply an unpacking of the various forces that shape
the behavior of potential adversaries and that must go into any
rational security-maximizing leader’s evaluation of the other’s future
willingness to trade and to trade at high levels. This leader’s
commercial expectations for the future, in short, come from
somewhere, and in chapter 2 I unpack “the where,” using the
assumption that nothing from within this leader’s state is shaping his
or her expectations. The expectations are shaped only by factors
outside of the state. This assumption preserves the core assertion of
all systemic realist arguments: namely, that rational leaders focused
on national security are driven only by changes in the external
situation the state faces, not by domestic pressures bubbling up
“from below.” So while I later add complexity to my initial barebones
argument, the book also bounds its argument in a way that gives
the theory a strong measure of parsimony, and most importantly,
allows it to be tested against the many theories that do start from
unit-level domestic pressures to explain a state’s behavior.
The empirical focus of the book is on the main cases of American
foreign policy over the last two and a half centuries. These cases,
from the War for Independence to the Cold War, reveal something
important. They show that American policy makers, far from simply
responding to pressures from below or personal impulses, have
regularly operated from a logic that I claim is a universal and
overhanging “force from above” for all great powers, or at least for
those in the post-1660 age of modern globalized commerce.
American leaders, in sum, are not naïve, nor are they all that
different from the leaders of the European and Asian states explored
in my first two books. In fact, they understand the commerce of
power politics better than perhaps any other single group of state
leaders over the last three centuries. Even if they cloak their policies
in the warm and fuzzy language of liberal individualism and freedom,
and occasionally find themselves shaped (and trapped) by this
language, they prove themselves to be, first and foremost, careful
calculators of national security through the lens of economic and
commercial power. And for the most part, the world is a better place
for it.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK has a long history, and there are many people to thank for
their help along the way. I first presented some of my initial and
largely inchoate ideas on economic interdependence and
international conflict back in my last year of graduate school at the
University of Chicago, and I had a chance to return a quarter
century later to present what I hoped was a much improved and
better supported version of those ideas at the University of Chicago’s
Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES).
John Mearsheimer and Charles Lipson were there on both occasions
to offer direct and insightful comments on my overall logic and
evidence. The dynamic realist theory that I present in this book may
ultimately show that offensive realism should be best thought of as
what physicists call a “special case” within a larger theoretical
framework. But it was John’s version of offensive realism that
convinced me that all great powers are forced by their uncertainty
about the future to seek to expand their realms of power—in the
military-territorial sense for John; and in the commercial-economic
sense for me. And it was Charles’s graduate seminar on international
political economy, which opened with Waltz’s seminal book, that
pushed me to consider how the issues of the IPE and security
subfields might be brought together within a single framework.
The rigor of the critiques offered that day at the PIPES seminar
decisively shifted the direction of this book, and for that I want to
also thank Paul Poast and Marc Trachtenberg and the graduate
student participants who were there that day. Around the same time,
I also greatly benefited from a seminar at MIT, where many of the
case studies in the book were discussed. In particular, I wish to
thank Frank Gavin, Ken Oye, Roger Peterson, Barry Posen, Dick
Samuels, and Stephen Van Evera for their great comments on that
day. Also significant to the development of the argument were two
presentations over two years I did at workshops on trade and
conflict at the University of California, Irvine, organized by Michelle
Garfinkel and Stergios Skaperdes of Irvine’s economics department.
Feedback from Michelle and Stergios, as well as from Tommaso
Sonno, helped me see more clearly how economists might go about
formalizing my expectations-based argument. I’ve held off publishing
the formal model that I developed out of those sessions for my next
book. But the exercise itself served to hone the deductive logic
behind my argument. I also want to thank Mike Beckley and Pat
MacDonald for comments on my theoretical argument and the First
World War chapter at the online 2020 APSA convention, Michael
Mastanduno for his astute critique of the final draft, and Chris Carter,
Gary Goertz, Stephan Haggard, and David Waldner for valuable
discussions on the book’s methodological approach.
As the book was nearing completion, I had a chance to present
chapters from the manuscript in three quite distinct venues. The
theory chapters were presented to the Institute for Security and
Conflict Studies seminar on international security at George
Washington University. For suggestions that helped me refine many
aspects of the final argument, I thank Alex Downes, Charlie Glaser,
and Joanna Spear, as well as the attending GWU grad students. At
Haifa University’s workshop on the future of the world order,
sponsored by Israel Science Foundation, I received great feedback
on my chapter on the future of U.S.-China relations from an amazing
group of scholars, including Lars-Erik Cederman, Tom Christensen,
Andrew Hurrell, John Ikenberry, Arie Kacowicz, Deborah Larson, Jack
Snyder, and the workshop’s organizer, Benny Miller. The same
chapter was also presented at a conference on the future of the U.S.
dollar and the global economic order at Credit Suisse Bank in Zurich.
I was surprised and delighted to have John Major, former prime
minister of Britain, as my discussant. Sir John offered trenchant
comments about the practical implications of my trade expectations
logic that significantly shaped the way I think about China’s ability to
use the global system for its advantage.
At the University of Virginia I benefited greatly from a scrub
session on the book and two later discussions organized through the
Miller Center and the program on Democratic Statecraft. Will
Hitchcock, David Leblang, Jeff Legro, Melvyn Leffler, Allen Lynch,
John Owen, Len Schoppa, Todd Sechser, and Mark Schwartz
provided incisive comments on specific chapters. I was also
fortunate to receive feedback from a number of smart graduate
students who directly shaped the book’s ultimate form: Josh
Cheatham, Ghita Chraibi, Justin Gorkowski, James Kwoun, Yuji
Maeda, Sowon Park, Sunggun Park, Angela Ro, John Robinson, Melle
Scholten, Luke Schumacher, and Chen Wang. Six terrific undergrad
students also offered great comments on the overall argument: Sam
Brewbaker, Jenny Glaser, Lily Lin, Adrian Mamaril, Dao Tran, and
Nick Wells. I’m also very grateful to four of my former grad students
who took time away from their own busy academic careers to read
the near-finished manuscript and help me hone the final product:
Kyle Haynes, David Kearn, Mike Poznansky, and Brandon Yoder. And,
of course, I need to thank four anonymous reviewers for their
insightful comments and my wonderful editors at Princeton
University Press: Bridget Flannery-McCoy, who guided the book
through the challenges of the review process and the crafting of the
final product; and Eric Crahan, who first inspired me to write a book
on American foreign policy building on the ideas from my previous
book for Princeton.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my family: V. Natasha Copeland
and my two amazing children Liam and Katya. They kept my spirit
up through the long and winding road that was this book project:
tolerating long hours in my room going through documents when I
could have been playing more soccer, volleyball, or Clue with them;
and helping me relax with Seinfeld, Harry Potter movies, and Beatles
albums when I seemed just a bit too stressed out. Couldn’t have
done it without you!
 ABBREVIATIONS FOR PRIMARY DOCUMENTS AND SOURCE
MATERIAL

CDJD The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921, ed.

E. David Cronon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1963).
CIA At Cold War’s End: U.S. Intelligence on the Soviet Union
(CWE) and Eastern Europe, 1989–1991, ed. Benjamin B. Fischer
(Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1999).
CIA (HT) CIA Cold War Records: The CIA under Harry Truman, ed.
Michael Warner (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence
Agency, 1994).
CR Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3
vols, ed. Warren F. Kimball (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
CWIHP Cold War in International History Project. Washington, DC.
CWIHPB Cold War in International History Project Bulletin, Issues
1–11 (Washington, DC, 1992–1998).
DAPS Containment: Documents on American Policy and
Strategy, eds. Thomas Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
DDEL Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
DS Dimitrov and Stalin 1934–1943: Letters from the Soviet
Archives, ed. Alexander Dallin and F. I. Firsov (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
DSB Department of State Bulletin (Washington, DC, various
years).
 ED The Eisenhower Diaries, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (New York:
Norton, 1981).
FCY Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce Yearbook
(Washington, DC, various years).
FD The Forrestal Diaries, eds. Walter Millis and E. S. Duffield
(New York: Viking, 1951).
FDRL Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
FP Federalist Papers.
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, DC:
U.S. GPO, various years).
FTP For the President, Personal and Secret: Correspondence
between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt, ed.
Orville H. Bullitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
GOC The Governance of China: Xi Jinping Speeches, 4 vols.
Beijing: Foreign Language Press.
HD Edward House Diaries, Yale University Library.
HSTL Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.
IAFP Ideas and American Foreign Policy: A Reader, ed. Andrew
Bacevich. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
IPCH Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 2 vols., ed. Charles
Seymour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926).
JFKL John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
JFKL John F. Kennedy Library, National Security Files.
NSF
KR Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott
(New York: Little, Brown, 1972).
KR: LT Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and
ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).
KT The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with
Beijing and Moscow, ed. William Burr (New York: New
Press, 1998).
LC Library of Congress.
LLWP The Life and Letter of Walter H. Page, 3 vols., ed. Burton
Hendrick (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1926).
LTT The Letters and Times of the Tylers, 2 vols., ed. Lyon G.
Tyler (New York: De Capo, 1970).
LWES Life of William, Earl of Shelburne, ed. Lord Fitzmaurice, 2
vols., 2nd rev. ed. (London: MacMillan, 1912).
MH Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War
in Europe, eds. Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton,
and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2010).
MJQA Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis
Adams. 12 vols. (New York: Lippincott, 1875).
MP Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, 11 vols.
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, various
dates).
MPWW The Message and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 2 vols., ed.
Albert Shaw (New York: Review of Reviews Co., 1924).
NA United States National Archives.
NPD Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845–1849, ed. Allan
Nevins (New York: Longmans, Green, 1952).
NSA National Security Archive, The Berlin Crisis, 1958–1962
(BC) (Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, 1991, microfiche).
NSA National Security Archive, The Soviet Estimate: U.S.
(SE) Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947–1991 (Alexandria, VA:
Chadwyck-Healey, 1995, microfiche).
NYT New York Times, various years.
PD The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845–
1849 (Chicago: McClurg, 1910).
PTBF The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Ralph
Ketcham (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
PV The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1946–
1949, ed. John Morton Blum (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
 1973).
PWW The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 68 vols., ed. Arthur S.
Link (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, various
years).
TJW Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (Library
of America).
TP The Tiananmen Papers, eds. Andrew J. Nathan and Perry
Link (New York: Public Affairs).
UECW Understanding the End of the Cold War: The
Reagan/Gorbachev Years, briefing book prepared by the
National Security Archive for an oral history conference,
Brown University, 7–10 May, 1998.
WWLL Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, 8 vols., ed. Ray
Stannard Baker (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran,
1935).
WR Wilson and Revolutions, 1913–1921, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982).
WSA The Writings of Samuel Adams, 3 vols., ed. Harry Alonzo
Cushing (New York: G. P. Putnam’s).
YCY Department of Commerce Statistics, various years.
 Introduction

THE WORLD has changed. Over the past decade, we have witnessed a
distinct shift toward a renewed competition between the great
powers. The green light that China seems to have given to Russia’s
brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and its subsequent
saber-rattling over Taiwan six months later only served to reinforce
concerns that have been building within the American foreign policy
community since at least 2010. Just how intense this great power
competition will become is uncertain. But what seems clear is that
the optimism of the 1990s—when pundits and politicians alike saw
growing economic interdependence and a rules-based international
order as fostering long-term prosperity and peace between the
United States, China, and Russia—is gone. In its place is talk of new
cold wars and even military conflict. A rising China now seems
willing to flex its muscles not just in its region but around the globe.
Leaders in Beijing have not only challenged the U.S. navy for
dominance in the South China Sea and the Pacific but also have
signaled that they intend to extend China’s economic and political
influence not just to Eurasia and Africa, but to an area Americans
have always considered their backyard: Latin America. Russia, with a
GDP the size of Italy, may have been reduced to the status of a
middle power within the larger Sino-American competition. Yet its
leaders’ very resentment of this fact, combined with Russia’s vast
energy resources and the willingness to take military actions against
neighbors—Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022—
make Russia a continued threat to the global economic and political
system. Even if Russian leaders cannot contribute to this system,
they can undermine it, thereby interfering with the plans of both the
United States and China as they struggle for more influence and
control around the world.
Russia’s continued ability to play the role of spoiler, however,
should not distract us from a larger geopolitical fact: it is the bipolar
struggle between the United States and China that is the new Great
Game of the twenty-first century. Because both sides have nuclear
weapons, we can expect leaders in Washington and Beijing to be
inherently reluctant to engage in behavior that might raise the risk of
actual war. And we can be thankful that at least one key lesson
came out of the Cold War: that neither side can afford to push the
system to anything that looks remotely like the Cuban Missile Crisis
of 1962. This is the good news.
Yet as this book shows, there is also bad, or at least concerning,
news. Great powers need continued economic prosperity to support
their militaries and to ensure that they can maintain stability at
home in the face of other states’ possible efforts to subvert it. They
thus have an ongoing drive to expand their economic and
commercial power spheres beyond their borders, and to support
these spheres with strong navies and offensive power-projection
capability. The American ongoing military presence in the Middle
East and the Indo-Pacific regions since World War II and China’s
growing naval support for its Belt and Road Initiative are only two
obvious examples from recent history. This means that even in the
nuclear age, great powers will struggle to improve their
geoeconomic positions around the world. They will worry that their
adversaries might decide to cut them off from access to vital raw
materials, investments, and markets (“RIM”). In short, commercial
struggles for prosperity and position remain an essential element of
great power grand strategy, and these struggles can end up leading
to crises that increase the probability of devastating war between
the powers.
To see the inherent dangers, we need only remember that the
Second World War in the Pacific came directly out of the tightening
of an economic noose around Japan beginning in the early 1930s
and ending with a total allied embargo on oil exports to Japan in
1941. Chinese leaders are very much aware that the scenario of
1941, even more than that of 1914, is the one to avoid. Yet like
Japanese leaders after 1880, they also know that China must work
hard to extend its commercial presence, even at the risk of a spiral
of hostility, if it is to sustain the growth that has made it the stable
and secure superpower that it is today. This tension between
needing to expand one’s economic sphere of influence and wanting
to avoid an escalatory spiral that might restrict access to vital goods
and markets is baked into the DNA of modern great power politics.
It is a tension, as we will see, that the United States has faced
repeatedly since the founding of the American republic.
When it comes to explaining how competitions over commerce
affect the likely behavior of great powers, there are two big
questions that need to be examined in depth. What exactly is the
role that commerce plays in driving states either toward more
accommodating soft-line actions or toward more assertive hard-line
postures, including the initiation of military containment and war
against adversaries? And how significant is this role compared to the
many other causes of cooperation and conflict that scholars have
identified? This book seeks to answer these questions through a
study of American foreign policy from the eighteenth century to
contemporary U.S.-China relations. Yet this is not simply a book that
explores the fascinating changes in American behavior toward the
outside world since 1750 and then applies historical lessons to
twenty-first century geopolitics. More than that, it represents a test
of the relative explanatory power of the key theories of international
relations (IR) for one very important country over time and across
highly varied circumstances. These theories can be divided into two
main groups: “realist” theories that focus on how threats external to
a state will force almost any type of leader or elite group toward
similar policies; and “liberal” theories that emphasize how forces
internal to a state shape and constrain its behavior independent of
the effects of the external factors. It is clear to nearly all IR scholars
that the United States, due to its strong liberal democratic
foundations, poses a hard case for any realist theory, including the
one offered here. We just expect American leaders to “think
differently” about global affairs, and to be guided more by a sense of
moral values, domestic pressures, and ideological ends than by
traditional European notions of Realpolitik. So as that great
philosopher (and sometime singer) Frank Sinatra might have said, if
realist theory can make it here, it should be able to make it
anywhere.
This book has three specific goals. The first is the building of a
better, more dynamic realist theory of international relations, one
that can resolve some of the problems with the two main versions of
systemic realism in the field—namely, offensive realism and
defensive realism. Systemic realists start with the common
assumption that in anarchy, with no central authority to protect
them, great powers will be primarily driven by factors that transcend
domestic issues: factors such as differentials in relative power and
uncertainty about the economic and military threats that other states
pose, now and into the future. Yet offensive and defensive realists
remain divided over the role of such systemic forces. By bringing
together the insights of both forms of realism, the book establishes a
stronger foundation for thinking about how states grapple with
trade-offs presented by their external situations. Great powers do
worry about building power positions that can handle problems that
may arise in the future, as offensive realists stress. But they are also
concerned that being overly assertive in the pursuit of this position
can lead them into undesired spirals of hostility and conflict, as
defensive realists emphasize.
By fusing these insights and then extending them into the realm
of commercial geopolitics, this book goes beyond the limitations of
current realist theory. It reveals the importance of two crucial
variables to the decision-making process of any great power: the
intensity of a state’s drive to extend and protect its economic power
sphere to ensure a base-line level of access to key raw materials,
investments, and markets; and leader expectations about how
willing adversaries are to allow the state future access to areas of
trade and finance beyond its immediate power sphere. Modern
realist theories tend to focus primarily on the military and territorial
aspects of the great power security competition, downplaying the
economic. These former aspects are important, to be sure. But by
tying drives for commercial spheres of influence to expectations of
trade beyond those spheres, I show that the overall trade
environment and the way leaders anticipate changes in that
environment regularly play an even more fundamental role in driving
the foreign policies of great powers.
The second main goal of the book is to show that this new more
dynamic and commercial approach to systemic realism can more
than hold its own with the very case that has always proved
problematic for realism: the United States and its foreign policies
over the last two and a half centuries. Contemporary realists often
buy into the liberal premise that America is exceptional, that it is
founded in an ideology that rejected “Old World” aristocratic power
politics in favor of the liberal pursuit of individual happiness, and that
this outlook often leads the United States to act in ways that are
contrary to realist predictions. Such realists are inclined to accept
traditional arguments that the perceived need to spread democracy
or protect liberal institutions abroad have been driving forces for why
American leaders moved to a more globalist strategy after 1916 and
why Washington continues to promote “liberal hegemony” long after
the end of the Cold War. This starting assumption can lead offensive
and defensive realists to give too much away to domestic-level
explanations for American foreign policy behavior. To be sure, U.S.
leaders and officials have at times sought to extend American
liberalism’s reach when they could do so at low cost or when having
liberal states in one’s sphere was seen as essential to countering the
extension of an opponent’s sphere, as during the Cold War. And at
certain points in U.S. history, as I show, bottom-up domestic
pressures within a pluralist American state did indeed play important
roles in shaping policy. This book’s empirical chapters demonstrate,
however, that the importance of commercial and power-political
factors on American foreign policy behavior over the last two and a
half centuries has been significantly underplayed, at least by political
scientists if not always by neo-Marxist revisionist historians. From
the formation of the republic to the current era, U.S. leaders,
concerned about long-term national security, have been driven by a
combination of commercial factors and relative power trends that
have often overshadowed the ideological and domestic determinants
of foreign policy. Americans, it turns out, are extremely smart and
savvy realists, precisely because they have intuitively understood
from the get-go the importance of dynamically fusing offensive and
defensive realist insights with commercial power politics.
In the testing of its dynamic realist approach, this book does
something unusual. Almost every book of historically based political
science tries to set its theory against “competing arguments” in
order to show that the causal factors posited by other theories are
less useful in explaining the empirical cases of conflict and war than
the pet theory of the book in question. This leads to endless cycles
of debate as to which scholar’s factors were most critical to the
understanding of controversial cases. My method is different. By
recognizing that almost every case involves numerous key causal
factors, I seek to identify the causal role that these factors are
playing in a particular case, such as Woodrow Wilson’s decision to
enter World War I or Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s
policies that helped establish the post–World War II global order.
Specifically, I ask questions such as: To what extent was a factor
propelling the leader to act, rather than acting as a facilitating factor
for that action, or perhaps as a constraining factor that forced the
postponement of the action? Was the factor merely accelerating the
leader’s timetable for action or perhaps only reinforcing the original
decision by giving added reasons to act, rather than being the factor
that propelled the leader to act in the first place? As I discuss in
chapter 2, by analyzing the various roles different causal factors play
within any particular “bundle” of factors leading to an important
event in world history, we can provide nuanced understandings of
history while at the same time isolating “what was really driving the
event” as opposed to simply helping bring it on or change the
manner in which it occurred.
This book examines almost all the cases of American foreign
policy history after 1760 where there was a significant shift toward
conflict or away from conflict with other states. Although this makes
for a longer book, covering so many cases avoids biasing the
research toward events that support one’s theory, while helping
scholars and practitioners understand the full scope of causal forces
that are at work across time and for very different sets of both
domestic and international conditions. There are cases that do not
work for my theory, such as the 1835–42 disputes with Britain over
Canada, the inward turn from 1865 to 1885, and important aspects
of America’s twenty-five-year involvement in Vietnam. Finding such
problematic cases is a good thing. Since no theory in social science
can (or should try to) explain everything, such negative cases serve
to highlight—for both theorists and policy makers—the conditions
under which a theory likely will and will not be useful.
This caveat notwithstanding, the broad sweep of cases covered in
this book reveals an important pattern. From the get-go, American
leaders were very concerned about maintaining and enhancing a
core economic power sphere that would ensure access to key
trading partners, initially in the neighborhood and then around the
world. When these leaders were confident about future commerce
and believed that trade was helping to build a strong and growing
base of economic power, they were inclined to maintain peaceful
relations with European and Asian great powers, even when
ideological and domestic variables were pushing for conflict. When,
however, their expectations of future trade turned sour and they saw
others trying to restrict American access to the vital goods and
markets needed for economic growth, these leaders almost
invariably turned nasty—and for national security reasons, not for
fear of the loss of elite power and wealth as left-leaning revisionist
scholars typically argue. American decision-makers knew that
without a forceful response to the other states’ policies, the long-
term security of the nation would be put at risk. A weakened
economy at home would have reduced the nation’s ability to protect
its interests and might even leave the homeland vulnerable to attack
or outside efforts to subvert the social order. Commercial ties,
therefore, proved critical in pushing American leaders either toward
peace or toward war, depending on whether their expectations of
the future were optimistic or pessimistic and whether American and
foreign diplomacy was seen as able to overcome mistrust and foster
positive expectations into the future.
The empirical chapters begin with the War for Colonial
Independence by adding a commercial explanation of the origins of
the war to the ideological and domestic-political ones of traditional
historiography. I seek to answer a puzzle that historians often ignore
or downplay: why were the British North American colonies from
1763 to 1773 so reluctant to begin a war with the mother country,
Britain, and yet why did they ultimately, and as a cohesive group,
choose to undertake such a risky move? I argue that the war for
independence was initiated not only to defend the concept of
personal liberty—a taken-for-granted notion since Britain’s Glorious
Revolution of 1688—but to safeguard American commercial and
economic growth in the face of London’s determined efforts to
restrict the rise of an increasingly vibrant British North America. The
continuation of the liberties and society that the colonists had come
to value were seen as intimately tied to the continued development
of trade; without the latter, the local power structures that protected
the former would decline over the long term.
The subsequent conflicts of the young republic were also driven
by fears for long-term commercial access and the economic growth
needed to protect the unique American republican experiment. The
War of 1812 may have been about the safeguarding of
republicanism in a general sense, as some historians suggest. But it
was not a war chosen to protect the power of certain parties or to
give western and southern “war hawks” more land for territorial
expansion. Rather, President Madison reluctantly moved to war as a
response to British policies that had shut U.S. products out of the
European continent, policies that would have hurt the nation’s
viability as a republic into the future. Similarly, President Polk did not
initiate the war against Mexico in 1846 to extend slavery westward
or to make his Democratic Party more popular, but to preempt an
expected British move to acquire California and then use its ports to
dominate the burgeoning trade with China and the Far East. If he
could not secure this future trade, the nation itself would be more
vulnerable to the economic and political predations of European
powers.
By the late nineteenth century, the United States had become
what it was not in 1812 or 1846—namely, a real player in the great
power game. But its position was still vulnerable, albeit in a different
way. To continue its industrial growth and to protect its increasing
overseas trade—the growth of which was set in motion by the
policies of the 1840s—U.S. leaders had come to see the importance
of securing the American commercial position in the Caribbean and
the Far East against the increasingly expansionistic powers of Britain
and Germany. When a humanitarian crisis arose in Cuba after 1896,
President McKinley was initially reluctant to act. By early 1898,
however, with China being carved up by the European powers and a
Central American canal needed to complete Alfred Thayer Mahan’s
vision of the United States as a secure naval and commercial power,
McKinley shifted gears. He became convinced that a war with Spain
over Cuba would kill two birds with one stone: it would not only
solve the humanitarian crisis but would allow the taking of Spanish
territories needed to counter British and German commercial
expansionism in the Far East and the Caribbean.
Perhaps the most surprising case of the book is the 1917 U.S.
intervention into World War I. Almost every historian of this
intervention suggests that Woodrow Wilson was reluctant to enter
the war but felt forced to do so in order to have a say at the peace
table and to help to reshape the world according to his liberal
ideological vision—a vision that included promoting democracy and
collective security as alternatives to traditional balance of power
politics. The truth is much more complex and interesting. Wilson did
harbor thoughts from his first days in office that the world would be
a better place if it had more liberal democracies, especially ones
trading freely with each other. But he also understood that global
politics was about trade-offs. And if he had to choose between
spreading democracy and protecting U.S. trade access, the latter
would have to come first. It was only later in the war, with an allied
victory on the horizon, that Wilson gave free rein to his more
idealistic fantasy of remaking the world in the American image. Up
until that point, his primary goal was to protect America’s economic
power position in the western hemisphere and in Asia from threats
of great power encroachment.
This broader objective was in place from his first month in office
in March 1913 and it continually shaped his willingness to contain
civil conflicts in Central America and the Caribbean prior to and
during the European war. Wilson’s liberal mindset shaped his
perception of which states were seen as the greatest threats to U.S.
commerce through the Panama Canal and in the Far East: namely,
the great rising neo-mercantilist nations of Germany and Japan.
Spreading liberal democracy was at best an occasional means to his
larger geopolitical ends. That the nation’s commercial security was
foremost in his mind is shown by his great concern in mid to late
1916 that Britain had perhaps become the greatest threat to U.S.
trade in the western hemisphere. Germany’s shift to unrestricted
submarine warfare and its encouraging of a Mexican attack on the
United States in early 1917 made it clear that war to ensure a
British-French victory would be necessary. But when he told
Congress on April 2 that the world must be made “safe for
democracy,” his main goal remained Germany’s defeat and the denial
of its penetration into the western hemisphere, not the more
expansive objective of consolidating global democracy that would
show itself at Versailles two years later. Until the end of 1917, for
example, he worked hard to pull Austria-Hungary out of the war by
promising Vienna that it could keep its oppressive multiethnic
empire. As in the War of 1812, a war whose parallels Wilson keenly
understood, ensuring trade access and U.S. economic security
proved to be the primary motivating reason for war.
I have covered the decision-making of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
that led to the U.S. entry into the Second World War in a previous
book, so I only briefly discuss those decisions as part of a larger
consideration of the U.S. turn to “globalism” after 1940. I show that
Roosevelt’s concerns for Hitler’s Germany after 1935 initially
resembled Woodrow Wilson’s regarding Germany from 1913 to 1917.
He worried that if Hitler were ever able to defeat the other European
great powers, Germany could then directly threaten the strong U.S.
commercial and geopolitical position in the western hemisphere. But
after France’s defeat in June 1940, FDR realized he had to go much
further than Wilson. He saw that the increasingly complex U.S.
economy needed access to Eurasia and Southeast Asia, and that if
Germany proved able to eliminate its adversaries in continental
Europe, it posed a direct threat to America’s long-term power
position. He thus adopted a strategy of holding Germany to Europe
and North Africa as he consolidated a “Grand Area” that would
contain German growth in the short term and hopefully lead to an
eventual American victory over Nazism in the long term. Once Hitler
attacked the Soviet Union in late June 1941, however, FDR
immediately saw that he needed to supply Stalin with the military
equipment and resources he needed to stop Germany from
controlling Eurasia. He feared that Japan would take advantage of
Hitler’s action and go north, splitting Russian forces in two and
allowing Germany to win control of the Eurasian heartland, giving it
an impenetrable base for future expansion of its closed economic
sphere. He thus cut Japan off from access to oil and raw materials,
forcing it to launch a war south rather than going north, and saving
Stalin from a two-front war. The strategy worked, and by mid-1943,
German forces were in retreat. Yet the larger strategy for a Grand
Area of trade and bases led by the United States was kept in place.
By late 1943, the United States was already preparing for the
coming struggle over economic and military power spheres with a
victorious Russia—a struggle that would see America emerge in a
dominant position by 1945.
For most realist and liberal scholars, the ensuing Cold War
between the United States and the Soviet Union, with its numerous
crises and war scares, seems to be the kind of conflict that cannot
be explained by commercial factors. After all, with little trade
between the two superpowers after 1945, we should expect
commerce to drop out as a potentially important cause of either
conflict or cooperation. But to think in this way is to think only in
terms of snapshots of trade at any point in time. I show that
expectations of future trade were critical in many of the key Cold
War crises, and in the start of the Cold War itself. In 1945, both
sides sought to stabilize the peace through commercial means that
would maintain the high level of cooperation they had realized
during the war. But extraneous factors, particularly the economic
chaos in Europe after the war, made it impossible for either side to
believe that trade and financial flows between their spheres could be
maintained. The ideological divide made things worse, since the
Americans worried that states in western Europe that fell to
Communism would quickly join the closed economic realm of the
Soviet Union. With each side fearing that the other was trying to
improve its economic position at its own expense, a Cold War
struggle for economic power spheres in Europe and Asia became
inevitable.
For the next four decades, the ups and downs of American-Soviet
relations had much to do with perceptions of threats to commerce
and with perceptions that trade expectations could be improved by
diplomatic negotiations and détente. While many of the key
superpower standoffs of the 1950s and 1960s were shaped by trade
expectations, two in particular were not: the Berlin Crisis of 1948
and the Korean War of 1950–53. Here, I briefly explore the
noncommercial forces behind these conflicts. I also consider the
case of Vietnam, 1948 to 1965, which partly works for my argument
and partly does not. From 1948 through the 1950s, the Truman and
Eisenhower administrations saw Vietnam as critical to helping Japan
rebuild economically and play its key role in the U.S.-led alliance
structure. By the early 1960s, however, with Japan’s economy having
rebounded, a more purely geopolitical fear—the fear of falling
dominos—took over and led to the disastrous U.S. policy from 1963
to 1972. I then turn to the economic diplomacy of efforts to reduce
superpower tensions after 1955. On two main occasions, in 1971–73
and in 1987–90, Americans held out the carrot of future trade deals
to help secure the agreements that initially moderated the intensity
of the Cold War and then ended it for good. I also show, perhaps
surprisingly, that there was an opportunity for a commerce-based
détente in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when presidents
Eisenhower and Kennedy seriously contemplated offering the
prospect of increased trade in return for promises of more moderate
Soviet behavior in the Cold War, including in the now-decolonizing
Global South (the “Third World”). Unfortunately, the conditions for a
peace deal in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not yet in place—
in particular, neither side yet had a secure nuclear second-strike to
deter attacks on the homeland. Once they were in place,
expectations of future trade shaped by astute diplomacy could play a
key role in the eventual ending of the Cold War.
The final chapter fulfills the third goal of the book—namely, to use
the theoretical and historical insights of the first ten chapters to
analyze the implications of different scenarios for the future stability
of U.S.-China relations. Notwithstanding Russia’s continued ability to
disrupt the system, at least on its own immediate periphery, in larger
grand strategic terms it is the geopolitical competition between the
United States and the new Chinese superpower that matters. No one
can predict whether China will keep growing or will peak in relative
power before overtaking the United States, nor can one predict the
nature of the Chinese state and its goals in another ten or twenty
years. But we can use well-developed international relations theories
such as the dynamic realist theory of this book to predict how and
why the United States will likely respond to the different scenarios
that could arise, depending on combinations of these power and
domestic regime-type variables. If U.S. leaders and officials can
properly understand what these scenarios entail, and how they can
best deal with the dangers and opportunities in each, we may be
able to avoid the mistakes of the past that have led to unnecessary
wars and the devastation of societies.
To conclude this introduction, let me suggest that different
audiences will want to read this book in different ways. I have
designed the chapters so the general reader interested mostly in the
historical cases can read just the introductory chapter and parts of
chapter 1 and then jump to the historical analyses of chapters 3 to 9
and the evaluation of the future of U.S.-China relations in chapter
10. Scholars of international relations and political science will want
to examine the full explication of the theory of this book in chapters
1 and 2. Chapter 1 sets down the foundations of the dynamic realist
theory of the book. It accepts the offensive realist insight that great
powers are driven to expand their spheres of influence to hedge
against future problems. Yet I show that this insight is even more
relevant to economic and commercial spheres than to the military
and territorial ones typically stressed by offensive realists.
Chapter 2 extends the initial analysis by bringing in defensive
realist insights on the character type of the adversary as well as on
the security dilemma and the related reality of feedback loops
between hard-line behavior and spirals of hostility and commercial
restrictions. Rational security-driven leaders will understand that
they must calibrate the severity of their policies based on variations
in character type. They will also know that they will have to balance
their desires to expand their nations’ economic power spheres with
the risks of provoking increasing restrictions on their global trade.
Chapter 2 also lays out the alternative method of “doing” historical
case analysis, one which focuses on identifying the causal roles of
the different factors involved in a case, rather than trying to
disconfirm competing explanations for specific cases. It thus
provides a way to help both international relations scholars and
historians avoid talking at cross-purposes, and to see the value of
debating not whether specific factors were important to explaining
changes in state behavior over time but rather how such factors
were operating in the cases—whether they were propelling leaders
to act as opposed to, say, facilitating, constraining, or accelerating
their actions. If done properly, this approach to history can help
decision-makers understand the conditions under which certain
policies will lead to a stable peace or to destabilizing conflicts. And,
of course, we can all hope that as the subtlety of their
understanding grows over time, better policies will emerge.
 1
Foundations of Dynamic Realist
Theory

THE THEORETICAL WORK of this book is animated by two puzzles. First,

what explains why American foreign policy often shifts dramatically
from peaceful engagement with other states to assertive or even
aggressive policies designed to achieve policy goals through either
threats to use force or the actual initiation of war? In the 1761 to
1776 period, this was a switch from seeking cooperation with Great
Britain to a war for independence. In 1795 to 1812, we saw a move
from economic engagement to the U.S. initiation of war against
British Canada. In the 1824 to 1846 period, the United States moved
from the avoidance of conflict to a near-war with Britain and an
actual war with Mexico. After turning inward to deal with slavery, this
pattern was again repeated from 1865 to 1898, with a largely
isolationist America ultimately shifting to a program of intense naval
buildup, war with Spain, and the creation of an overseas empire by
force.
In the early twentieth century, it might seem that the United
States was again seeking to avoid military adventures outside of its
immediate sphere of influence on the continent of North America. Yet
from 1898 to 1928, the country’s leaders felt compelled to intervene
militarily over twenty-five times in the Caribbean and Central America
to, among other things, build and protect a Panama Canal, formalize
the hold on Hawaii, and develop a naval base in its Philippine colony,
and of course to enter World War I to help defeat Germany before it
was too late. By the mid-1930s, isolationist sentiment was in the
ascendant, and individuals such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
did see major overseas threats emerging, were having a hard time
creating the naval power and alliance structures needed to counter
them. Yet from 1940–41 on, the United States embarked on a
deliberate policy of military power projection designed to deter or
fight any great power that might seek to control Eurasia. This policy
turned into a forty-five-year Cold War struggle over the Eurasian
“periphery” and the western hemisphere that almost led to
thermonuclear war on more than one occasion. The end of the Cold
War seemed to provide a permanent respite from this historical
pattern of peaceful engagement and subsequent conflict—indeed, a
possible “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama’s popular phrase
went.1 Yet today we are seeing the United States and China
apparently moving closer and closer to a new cold war, despite calls
by leaders and officials on both sides for measured calm and a
sustaining of economic engagement.
This book will help to explain these ups and downs of American
foreign policy beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing
until the present era. Yet there is a second, more theoretical, puzzle
lurking in the background here: Why do there seem to be so few
theories of international relations that purport to explain more than a
few specific events or time periods in American foreign policy history?
It is perhaps understandable that theories about bureaucratic
politics or the impact on state behavior of new technologies such as
nuclear weapons and strategic missiles are only really applied to the
period after 1941, given that prior to that time the U.S. leaders
minimized the size of even military bureaucracies, and the nation was
not yet vulnerable to quick and devastating attacks from the
homelands of other great powers. Yet those theories specifying more
general causal variables such as relative power, social conflict, and
the role of democratic institutions are almost never applied across the
full spectrum of American foreign policies cases from 1750 to the
present era. To be sure, John Mearsheimer does briefly note that
American expansion in the western hemisphere in the nineteenth
century is consistent with his argument that states seek regional
hegemony. But he offers no documentary evidence to support his
argument.2 We also have left-of-center “revisionist” interpretations of
United States history that presume that pressures caused by
capitalism—the needs firms have for profitable markets, cheap raw
materials, and places to invest surplus capital—have been driving
forces behind important shifts in U.S. policy, including the building of
a colonial empire after 1898 and the countering of communism after
1918.3 But these interpretations, aside from assuming capitalist elite
greed rather than national security as the core propelling motive,
focus mostly on the period after 1888, presumably because this was
the time when the United States was indeed beginning to exhaust its
potential for continental expansion and a modern navy and overseas
trade were seen as essential to continued economic growth.4 The
pre-1888 period is largely ignored or treated separately from the
twentieth century.
Historians, of course, have written textbooks providing survey
narratives of American foreign policy history from the time of the War
for Colonial Independence.5 But such textbooks do not set out to test
alternative theories of international relations, let alone provide new
ones to challenge the accepted views. And there are numerous books
that lay out the different ways U.S. leaders over time have
conceptualized the problems of American foreign policy and the best
strategies for dealing with them, perhaps most influentially Walter
Russell Mead’s description of the Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian,
Jacksonian, and Wilsonian schools of thought and Henry Nau’s
separation of American foreign policy traditions by whether they have
conservative or liberal orientations and by their level of
“internationalism.”6 Yet such books are interesting more as typologies
that describe alternative forms of policy and the particular leaders
that use them than as theories that explain and predict when leaders
will shift their behavior from soft-line to hard-line policies and even
initiate costly wars.
 Perhaps most surprising is the fact that scholars with potentially
generalizable arguments—in particular, realists who focus on relative
power and liberals who emphasize the nature of democratic
institutions and ideological mindsets—do not seek to use their
theories across the sweep of American foreign policy history from the
eighteenth century to the present day. For realists, this is due to the
perception that in the American case, realism only works as expected
for certain time periods, primarily the periods of intense great power
rivalry such as during the two world wars and the Cold War.7 But I
have found no good explanation for why liberals almost invariably
pick only certain time periods for empirical analysis and do not test
their theories of institutions and ideological drives across at least a
representative sample of events from 1750 onward.8 One obvious
constraining factor, aside from simple limits on a scholar’s time, is
that American political culture did undergo significant shifts over time
—from early minimal-state government and the North-South divide
over slavery to significant urbanization after 1870 to the modern
welfare state and the “conservative” backlash against it in the late
twentieth century. So, while liberal scholars are more than willing to
point out the “exceptional” nature of the American state and its
emphasis on individualism, opportunity for advancement, and
equality before the law,9 the significant shifts in the way these
baseline values have been manifested over time seem to have made
it necessary for liberals to pick narrow time periods for the testing of
specific causal arguments.10
This book thus sets out to do something that has not yet been
successfully done and that perhaps for many scholars should not
even be attempted: namely, to lay out a general theory of great
power behavior that can be applied across the full range of events in
American foreign policy history since the struggle to establish the
republic.11 This theory offers a new way to think about systemic
realist explanations of great power politics, one that integrates the
strengths of both offensive and defensive variants of systemic realism
while using a dynamic understanding of the commercial realm—
specifically, leaders’ expectations for the future trade and investment
environment and their fears that their own present behavior may
cause this environment to turn against them—to overcome some of
systemic realism’s current limitations.12
In this chapter, I focus on the core foundational logic of my
argument. The stress is on the offensive realist side of my logic,
specifically the way fears of the future drive great powers to seek to
expand their economic power spheres as hedges against later
problems, and the way falling expectations of the future commercial
environment can cause leaders to shift to more hard-line policies to
avert a decline in power. Chapter 2 shows how one can extend the
insights of defensive realism—in particular, the importance of an
adversary’s character type and the fear states have of causing a spiral
of mistrust and hostility—into the realm of great power commerce
and leader expectations of the future trading environment. The
integration of these insights with those of chapter 1 derived from
offensive realism leads to a quite different approach to great power
politics, one that shows how states grapple with the tension
presented by needing to reduce simultaneously the risk of spirals of
misunderstanding and the risk of not doing enough to build the
nation’s power sphere. A decision-making logic based on trade-offs
helps us predict when states will stay with more cooperative
strategies and when they will start to lean toward more aggressive
policies, including the initiation of crisis and war. Chapter 2 will also
provide a discussion of the alternative methodology I use to examine
the value of “competing theories” against the broad sweep of two
and a half centuries of American and global history covered in the
empirical chapters.

The Taproot of Great Power Politics

What drives great powers to compete and sometimes go to war with
each other when they seem to have good self-interested reasons to
avoid such conflicts? International relations scholars are divided into
two large camps on this question, camps that often go by the names
“realist” and “liberal.” The realist camp should perhaps be called the
externalist camp, since its adherents tend to believe that it is factors
and forces outside the state that will drive it into military struggles.13
A state is pushed into assertive or aggressive behavior by its
situation, not by its internal make-up.14 Great powers exist within an
anarchic system, meaning there is no central authority above them to
keep the peace. They thus worry constantly about other great powers
building up their geopolitical and geoeconomic power positions to do
them harm, either by direct invasion of their territories or by actions
to subvert the social cohesion and way of life of the society.
Uncertainty about how much relative power other states will build up
or acquire, and what they intend to do with it down the road, will
play a fundamental role in shaping their present strategic plans and
policy behaviors. Different types of realists will disagree on to what
extent variations in power versus variations in adversaries’ character
type and intentions determine the level of hostility or moderation in a
great power system (see chapter 2). But they agree that the policies
of the great powers will be shaped more by their understanding of
the external (or “systemic”) pressures of forces beyond the state than
by “bottom-up” pressures arising from within the state. For any state
Y whose policies a realist seeks to explain, it will thus be things such
as changes in Y’s relative power, trends in its trade dependence, and
anticipated shifts in adversary X’s regime type, rather than domestic
factors within Y, that will fundamentally determine its behavior.15
The liberal camp adopts a very different starting point, one that
might best be called internalist.16 For this camp, it is not a state’s
objective situation that pushes them into more hard-line postures or
the initiation of wars, but rather forces from within, such as
inherently aggressive leaders or factions, the inability of certain
political structures to resolve domestic conflict, and the restrictions
placed on inter-state bargaining by social groups and political parties
that have ideological or self-interested reasons for conflict and war.17
The systemic factors stressed by realists may still hang over state
leaders as they interact with their adversaries, but they operate more
as constraints on leader goals arising from below than as forces that
propel leaders into action, as realists would contend. In short, the
“preferences” of states as they come to any inter-state relationship
are a function of the previous domestic battles that have played out
within the states, and not a matter of their power situations or their
worries about the future intentions of adversaries.
The approach of this book is decidedly externalist. As this and the
next chapter show, it is possible to build a causally powerful theory at
the systemic level that can explain a great deal of the changes in any
particular great power’s behavior over time without having to dip
down to the domestic (or “unit”) level of that state. Unfortunately,
because the realists that focus on external factors remain divided
amongst themselves between offensive and defensive realist versions
of systemic realism, they have made systemic approaches appear as
if they can explain only a small percentage of what goes on in
international politics.18
It is the premise of this book that the limited explanatory power of
contemporary systemic realist theory is not inherent to the theory but
a function of the divide between offensive and defensive realists and
their unwillingness to recognize the insights of the other side.
Offensive realists have made an important contribution to the field by
emphasizing that the fear of the future intentions of other powers
leads states to struggle for power now as a hedge against what
might come later. This insight is theoretically ignored in defensive
realist writings. Yet offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer
wrongly argue that uncertainty about the future forces great power
leaders to assume “worst case” about the other’s intentions to ensure
they aren’t taken by surprise down the road.19 This leaves offensive
realism as a theory that can only explain the more hard-line and
conflictual aspects of international politics, not why great powers
regularly cooperate with each other over long periods of time without
the “intense security competition” that offensive realists expect.20
Defensive realists stress something that is downplayed or ignored by
offensive realism—namely, the existence of a “security dilemma”
between great powers. Security dilemmas exist when the efforts by
state Y to improve Y’s security tend to hurt state X’s perception of its
security. State X’s efforts to respond to Y’s original measures will then
likely cause state Y to worry about X’s power and intentions, leading
to a spiral of hostility and mistrust that can undermine both sides’
objective security over time, either by causing actual wars or by
leading to overspending on the military and the undermining of both
states’ economic viability.21
Defensive realism thus provides a useful check on the pessimism
of the offensive realist approach to great power politics. If the leaders
of state Y know ahead of time that overly aggressive actions will lead
to arms races, counterbalancing alliances, and hard-line actions by
state X and other states that now view Y as a threat, then these
leaders have a self-interested reason to be more moderate in their
policies. In short, the avoidance of undesired spiraling will become a
major foreign policy objective of rational security-driven states.
Defensive realist insights can thus help us explain why the United
States and China had relatively cooperative relations between 1985
and 2010. Both sides were worried (and still are worried) about
creating a spiral of hostility that might lead to war.
Yet defensive realists miss the core insight of offensive realism:
that uncertainty about the future intentions of adversaries tends to
push leaders to develop their states’ power positions now as
insurance against what might come later. Defensive realists have no
explanation for why great powers do indeed constantly seem to
struggle for power in world history—or at least no explanation that
does not require positing an initial (erroneous) belief in the other
state’s non-security-driven character that then sets the security-
dilemma spiral in motion. Offensive realism, on the other hand, can
argue convincingly that essentially all great powers are forced to be
at least partly revisionist in their foreign policies for fear of the future.
This will hold even in the best-case scenario when two great powers
only seek security and each knows that the other is also a security
seeker, since both sides must worry that the other might change and
become driven by non-security motives such as greed and glory
down the road.22 Because defensive realism focuses on uncertainty
about the present character and intentions of other states, it misses
the offensive realist point that it is uncertainty about the future
character and intentions of others that drives actors to compete for
better power positions in the near and medium terms.23
In the next chapter, I offer a more detailed analysis of how any
security-seeking state Y will come to make estimates of the future
character and intentions of its potential great power opponents, and
how they grapple with the trade-off between trying to build power for
future security and seeking to minimize the likelihood of a security-
dilemma spiral to war. For now, however, I will focus on the offensive
realist insight that uncertainty about the future will drive state
behavior in the present.24 There is, in other words, something we
might call the offensive realist baseline in great power politics. Every
great power has at least some desire to revise the system in its favor.
None, not even the strongest, can afford just to sit back to enjoy its
current power.25 Leaders of each state will therefore seek to take
advantage of opportunities to improve the power position of the state
when they can do so at low cost and when the risks of an
uncontrolled spiral of hostility are minimal. Perhaps the most
definitive example of this is Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s much
maligned “softie” of the late 1930s who trusted Adolf Hitler not to go
beyond the concessions on Czechoslovakia given to Germany in
September 1938.26 Chamberlain may have taken a soft line in 1938,
but in 1919–20 he enthusiastically supported a League of Nations
mandate system that extended Britain’s empire into the Mid-East and
parts of Africa formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire and
Germany. If even a Chamberlain, amidst a new peace, is willing to
grab new territory that falls into the British lap at little short-term
cost, then how much more inclined to revisionist behavior will most
world leaders be in the face of uncertainty about the future?
Offensive realism has an undeniably important insight here—that
future uncertainty can drive current competitive behavior—and this
insight must be incorporated into any properly specified systemic
theory of international relations.
A key problem with offensive realism, even before we consider the
issue of undesired spiraling (chapter 2), is that its adherents have
been focused almost exclusively on the military and territorial aspects
of the drive for expansion. They have placed little or no emphasis on
the economic and commercial determinants of expansion. To be sure,
John Mearsheimer mentions “latent power” as a foundation for
military power in his important book, The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics (2001). And his concept of latent power does include a state’s
relative GDP and such things as population size and fertile territory.
But his focus is solely on what might be called a great power’s “core”
latent power—that is, its economic and demographic power within
the confines of its own homeland. The economic power a state can
build up through the creation of commercial connections with the
outside world is ignored. In fact, in a later book, The Liberal Delusion
(2018), he goes so far as to say that trade plays little role in the
shaping of great power politics because, when push comes to shove,
leaders of great powers will put military questions above economic
and commercial questions. The reasons why a Mearsheimer and
other offensive realists such as Sebastian Rosato discount the role of
commerce in world history are not hard to figure out. Offensive
realists believe great powers will avoid trade, at least with other great
powers’ spheres of influence, out of both a fear of increasing their
vulnerability to cut-off from vital goods and a worry that other states
will get relatively more out of the trading relationship than they do
(the “relative gains” concern).27 This means, from the offensive realist
standpoint, that trade between great powers will typically be quite
low and thus not terribly important to their decision-making relative
to more purely military and territorial matters. Hence, for
Mearsheimer, Rosato, and other offensive realists, states will struggle
over territory and military power projection in order to position
themselves for any wars to come in the future.
Another random document with
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rhetorician’s habits and to his unbridled love for fine speeches, he
assumes that it was Maecenas who proposed to Augustus to establish
them, and he takes advantage of the opportunity to make him speak
at great length.[382] The discourse of Maecenas contains, in truth,
what we may call the general theory of the empire. This interesting
sketch, which was realized later, aids us greatly in understanding
that part which we have still to examine of the inscription of Ancyra.
We should always bear it in mind in order to apprehend thoroughly
the spirit of the institutions of Augustus, the motive of his
liberalities, the hidden meaning of the facts he mentions, and above
all the character of his relations with the different classes of citizens.
Let us begin by studying the relations of Augustus with his
soldiers. “About ... thousand Romans,”[383] says he, “bore arms under
me. I established in colonies, or sent back to their municipia after
their term of service, rather more than three hundred thousand. I
gave land, or money to buy it, to all of them.” On two different
occasions, after the wars against Sextus Pompey, and against Antony,
Augustus was at the head of about fifty legions; he had only twenty-
five when he died. But this number, reduced as it was, still weighed
intolerably upon the finances of the empire. The immense increase of
expenditure that the creation of great standing armies threw upon
the treasury prevented Augustus for a long time, notwithstanding the
prosperity of his reign, from having what we should now call a
budget in equilibrium. Four times he was obliged to aid the public
treasury from his private fortune, and he reckons the amounts that
he presented to the state at one hundred and fifty million sesterces
(£1,200,000). He had much trouble to remedy these financial
difficulties, of which the expenses of the army were the principal
cause. This gave him the idea of creating a sort of military pension
fund, and of appealing, in order to fill it, to the generosity of the
allied kings and cities, and of the richest Roman citizens; and in
order to stimulate others by his own example, he gave one hundred
and seventy million sesterces (£1,360,000) at one time. But these
voluntary gifts being insufficient it was necessary to impose new
taxes, and to fill the treasury of the army with the proceeds of a tax of
a twentieth on inheritances and a hundredth on sales. Yet it seems
that, notwithstanding these efforts, pensions were ill paid, since this
was one of the grievances that the legions of Pannonia alleged in
their revolt against Tiberius. It is certain that the army of Augustus
was one of the greatest anxieties of his administration. His own
legions gave him as much trouble as those of the enemy. He had to
do with soldiers who felt that they were the masters, and who for ten
years had been corrupted by flattery and promises. On the eve of
battle they were very exacting because they knew how much they
were required; after victory they became unmanageable from the
pride with which it inspired them. In order to satisfy them, it would
have been necessary to expropriate all the inhabitants of Italy in a
body. Octavius had consented to this at first, after Philippi; but later,
when his policy changed, when he understood that he could not
found a stable government if he drew on himself the hatred of the
Italians, he resolved to pay the proprietors handsomely for the lands
that he gave his veterans. “I reimbursed the municipia,” he says, “in
money, the value of the lands that I gave to my soldiers in my fourth
consulship, and later under the consulship of M. Crassus and Cn.
Lentulus. I paid six hundred million sesterces (£4,800,000) for the
lands situated in Italy, and two hundred and sixty million sesterces
(£2,080,000) for those situated in the provinces. Of all those who
have established colonies of soldiers in the provinces and in Italy, I
am, up to now, the first and only one who has acted thus.” He was
right in boasting of it. It was not at all the habit of the generals of
that time to pay for what they took, and he himself had given another
example for a long time. When, a little later, he dared to resist the
demands of his veterans, he had to maintain terrible struggles in
which his life was more than once in danger. In every way, his
demeanour towards his soldiers at that time is one of the things that
do him most honour. He owed everything to them, and he had none
of the qualities which were necessary to master them, neither the
abilities of Caesar nor the defects of Antony; and yet he dared to
make head against them, and succeeded in obtaining the mastery. It
is very remarkable that, although he had gained his power solely by
war, he was able to maintain the predominance of the civil element
in the government that he founded. If the empire, in which there was
no longer any other element of strength and life than the army, did
not become from that period a military monarchy, it is assuredly
owing to his firmness.
Nothing is more simple than the relations of Augustus with the
people. The information that the Ancyra inscription furnishes upon
this subject is quite in accord with the discourse of Maecenas: he fed
them and amused them. Here, to begin with, is the exact account of
the sums he expended to feed them: “I reckoned to the Roman
people three hundred sesterces (£2 8s.) a head according to my
father’s testament, and four hundred sesterces (£3 4s.) in my own
name, out of the spoils of the war during my fifth consulship.
Another time, in my tenth consulship, I gave a gratuity of four
hundred sesterces to each citizen, from my private fortune. During
my eleventh consulship I made twelve distributions of corn at my
own cost. When I was invested for the twelfth time with the
tribunitian power, I again gave four hundred sesterces a head to the
people. All these distributions were made to no fewer than two
hundred and fifty thousand persons. Invested for the eighteenth time
with the tribunitian power, and consul for the twelfth, I gave sixty
denarii (£1 10s. 4d.) a head to three hundred and twenty thousand
inhabitants of Rome. During my fourth consulship I had one
thousand sesterces (£8) for each of my soldiers, previously deducted
from the spoil, and distributed in the colonies formed by them.
About one hundred and twenty thousand colonists received their
share in the distribution that followed my triumph. Consul for the
thirteenth time, I gave sixty denarii to each of those who then
received distributions of corn; there were rather more than two
hundred thousand.” After these truly startling liberalities Augustus
mentions the public games he gave to the people, and although the
text has several lacunae here, we may suppose that it did not cost
him less to amuse the people than to feed them. “I gave shows of
gladiators[384] ... times in my own name, and five times in the names
of my children or grandchildren. In these different fêtes about ten
thousand men fought. Twice in my own name, and three times in the
names of my son and grandson, I had combats of wrestlers whom I
had brought from all countries. I celebrated public games four times
in my own name, and twenty-three times in place of magistrates who
were absent or could not support the expense of these games.... I
showed twenty-six times in my own name, or in the names of my
sons and grandsons, African wild beast hunts, in the circus, on the
Forum, or in the amphitheatres, and about three thousand five
hundred of these beasts were killed. I gave the people the spectacle of
a naval combat, beyond the Tiber, where the wood of the Caesars
now is. I had a canal dug there one thousand eight hundred feet long
by one thousand two hundred feet broad. There thirty ships armed
with rams, triremes, biremes, and a large number of smaller vessels
fought together. These vessels contained, besides their rowers, a
crew of three thousand men.” Here, as it seems to me, is a curious
and official commentary on the famous expression of Juvenal,
panem et circenses. We see clearly that it was not a sally of the poet,
but a veritable principle of policy happily invented by Augustus that
his successors preserved as a tradition of government.
The relations of Augustus with the senate, we can well understand,
were more difficult and complicated. Even after Pharsalia and
Philippi it was still a great name that it was necessary to treat with
consideration. Depressed as it was, the old aristocracy still caused
some fear, and seemed to deserve some regard. This is well seen by
the care that Augustus takes in his testament never to speak of the
senate but with respect. Its name comes up at every turn with a sort
of affectation. We should say indeed, if we trusted to appearances,
that the senate was then the master, and that the prince was
contented to execute its decrees. This is what Augustus wished to be
believed. He passed all his life in dissembling his authority or
lamenting about it. From his royal dwelling on the Palatine he wrote
the most pathetic letters to the senate asking to be relieved of the
burden of public affairs, and he never appeared to have a greater
aversion for power than at the moment when he was concentrating
all powers in his own hands. It is not extraordinary that we find these
methods again in his testament: they had succeeded too well with his
contemporaries for him not to be tempted to make use of them with
posterity. Accordingly he continues to play the same comedy of
moderation and disinterestedness. He affects, for instance, to insist
as much upon the honours that he refused as upon those that he
accepted. “During the consulship of M. Marcellus and L. Arruntius,”
he says, “when the senate and people asked me to accept an absolute
authority,[385] I did not accept it. But I did not refuse to undertake the
supervision of supplies in a great famine, and by the expenditure that
I made I delivered the people from their fears and dangers. When, in
return, they offered me the consulship annually or for life, I refused
it.” This is not the only time that he dwells on his own moderation.
More than once again he refers to dignities or presents that he would
not accept. But here, indeed, is something that passes all bounds; “In
my sixth and seventh consulship, after having suppressed the civil
wars, when the common voice of all the citizens offered me the
supreme power, I restored the government of the republic to the
senate and people. As a recompense for this action I received the title
of Augustus by a decree of the senate, my door was encircled with
laurels and surmounted by a civic crown, and a golden shield was
placed in the Julian curia with an inscription recording that this
honour was awarded me as a mark of respect to my virtue, clemency,
justice, and piety. From this moment, although I was above the rest
in dignity in the offices with which I was invested, I never claimed
more power than I allowed to my colleagues.” This curious passage
shows how inscriptions may deceive if we trust them blindly. Would
it not seem that we should be right in concluding that in the year of
Rome 726, the republic had been re-established by the generosity of
Augustus? Now it was exactly at this period that the absolute power
of the emperor was delivered from all fear of attack from without
and, being quietly accepted by everybody, was finally established.
Dio himself, the official Dio, who is so ready to take the word of the
emperor, cannot accept this falsehood of Augustus; he ventures to
show that he is not deceived, and has no difficulty in proving that
this government, under whatever name it is disguised, was at bottom
a monarchy; he might have added that there was never a more
absolute monarchy. A single man constituted himself the heir of all
the magistrates of the republic, and united all their powers in
himself. He ignored the people whom he no longer consulted; he is
the master of the senate, which he chooses and forms at will; at once
consul and pontif, he regulates actions and beliefs; invested with the
tribunitian power, he is inviolable and sacred, that is to say, that the
least word let fall against him becomes a sacrilege; as censor, under
the title of praefect of morals, he can control the conduct of private
persons, and interfere, when he likes, in the most private affairs of
life.[386] Everything is subordinated to him, private as well as public
life, and his authority can penetrate everywhere from the senate to
the most humble and obscure hearths. Add to this that the
boundaries of his empire are those of the civilized world; barbarism
begins where slavery ends, and there is not even the sad resource of
exile against this despotism. Yet it is the man who possesses this
appalling power, whom nothing in his immense empire escapes, and
from whose empire it is impossible to escape, it is he who has just
told us with a bare-faced assurance that he refused to accept absolute
power!
 It must be acknowledged that this absolute power, which he veiled
with so much precaution, sought also by every possible means to
reconcile men to itself. All the compensations which might make a
people forget its liberty were given to the Romans by Augustus with a
free hand. I do not speak only of that material prosperity which made
the number of citizens increase by nearly a million in his reign;[387]
nor even of the repose and security which, at the close of the civil
war, was the most imperious need of the whole world, but also of
that incomparable splendour with which he adorned Rome. This was
a sure means of pleasing the people. Caesar knew this well, and had
expended one hundred million sesterces (£800,000) at one time,
simply in buying the ground on which his Forum was to stand.
Augustus did still more. The Ancyra inscription contains a list of the
public buildings he constructed, but it is so long that it is impossible
to quote it all. He mentions fifteen temples, several porticoes, a
theatre, a senate house, a Forum, a basilica, aqueducts, public roads,
etc.; in truth Rome was entirely reconstructed by him. We may say
that no public building was passed over by him, and that he restored
all those that he did not rebuild. He completed Pompey’s theatre and
the Forum of Caesar, and rebuilt the Capitol; in a single year he
repaired eighty-two temples that were falling into ruin. He did not
expend so many millions without a purpose, and all this profusion in
such a careful ruler covered a profound political design. He wished to
dazzle the people, to intoxicate them with luxury and magnificence in
order to divert them from the intrusive memories of the past. That
Rome of marble that he built was intended to make them forget the
Rome of brick.
This was not the only compensation that Augustus offered to the
people; he made them nobler amends, and thus sought to
legitimatize his power. If he demanded the sacrifice of their liberty
he took care to gratify their national pride in every way. No man
compelled the respect of foreign nations for Rome more than he; no
man gave her more reason for pride in the ascendency she enjoyed
among her neighbours. The latter part of the inscription is filled with
the gratifying recital of the marks of respect that the remotest
countries of the world paid to Rome under his reign. He was eager to
direct their attention towards this external glory, lest they should fix
it with some regret on what was taking place at home. Those citizens
whom the aspect of the deserted Forum and the obedient senate
depressed, he pointed to the Roman armies penetrating among the
Pannonians and the Arabs, to the Roman fleets navigating the Rhine
and the Danube, to the kings of the Britons, the Suevi, and the
Marcomanni, refugees at Rome, imploring the support of the legions,
to the Medes and Parthians, those terrible enemies of Rome, who
asked of her a king, to the most distant nations, the least known and
the best protected by their distance and their obscurity, moved by
this great name that reaches them for the first time and soliciting the
Roman alliance. “Ambassadors came to me from India, from kings
who had never yet sent to any Roman general. The Bastarnae, the
Scythians, and the Sarmatians who dwell on this side the Tanaïs, and
beyond that river, the kings of the Albanians, the Hiberi and the
Medes sent ambassadors to me asking our friendship.” It was very
difficult for the most discontented to hold out against so much
grandeur. But his greatest master-stroke was that he extended this
consideration for the glory of Rome even to the past. He honoured all
who had laboured for her at all times, says Suetonius,[388] almost as
much as the gods; and to show that none was excluded from this
veneration, he raised again the statue of Pompey, at the base of
which Caesar had fallen, and set it up in a public place. This generous
conduct was also a wise policy. By claiming a share in the glories of
the past, he disarmed, by anticipation, those men who might be
tempted to use them against him, and, at the same time, gave a
species of sanction to his authority by attaching it in some sort to
these old memories. Whatever difference might distinguish the
government that he founded from that of the republic, both agreed
on one point: they sought the greatness of Rome. Augustus tried to
reconcile the past with the present on this common ground. He also
had adorned Rome, defended her frontiers, extended her empire,
and made her name respected. He had continued and completed that
work on which they had laboured for seven centuries. He might,
then, call himself the continuator and heir of all those who had set
their hand to it; of Cato, Paulus Emilius, and Scipio, and rank
himself among them. He did not fail to do so when he built the
Forum that bore his name; we know from Suetonius that, under
those porticoes raised by him and filled with the records of his
actions, he ranged all the great men of the republic in triumphal
costume. This was the highest point of his political skill, for by
connecting them with his glory he received in turn a share of theirs,
and thus turned to his own advantage the greatness of the political
order which he had overturned.
These compensations that Augustus offered to the Romans in
exchange for their liberty seem to have satisfied them. Every one
quickly got accustomed to the new government, and it may be said
that Augustus reigned without opposition. The plots which more
than once threatened his life were the crimes of a few isolated
malcontents, of young thoughtless fellows whom he had disgraced,
or of vulgar and ambitious men who desired his position; they were
not the work of political parties. Can it even be said that there were
any political parties at this moment? Those of Sextus Pompey and
Antony had not survived the death of their chiefs; and, since Philippi,
there were scarcely any republicans. From that moment all wise men
adopted the maxim “that the vast body of the empire could not stand
upright and stable without some one to direct it.” A few obstinate
men alone, who were not yet converted, wrote violent declamations
in the schools under the name of Erutus and Cicero, or allowed
themselves to speak freely in those polite gatherings which were the
salons of that time: in conviviis rodunt, in circulis vellicant. But
those were unimportant exceptions which disappeared in the midst
of the universal admiration and respect. During more than fifty years
the senate, the knights, and the people used all their ingenuity to find
new honours for him who had given Rome internal peace, and who
maintained her grandeur so vigorously abroad. Augustus has been
careful to recall all this homage in the inscription we are studying,
not in a fit of puerile vanity, but to represent that agreement of all
orders in the state which seemed to legitimatize his authority. This
idea is shown especially in the last lines of the inscription, where he
recalls that circumstance of his life which was most dear to him,
because in it the agreement of all citizens had most strikingly
appeared: “While I was consul for the thirteenth time, the senate, the
order of knights, and all the people gave me the name of Father of
our Country, and desired that this should be inscribed in the
vestibule of my house, in the curia, and in my Forum, below the
quadrigae which had been placed there in my honour by a decree of
the senate. When I wrote these things I was in my seventy-sixth
year.” It was not without reason that he reserved this detail for the
end. This title of Father of his Country, by which he was saluted in
the name of all the citizens by Messala, the old friend of Brutus,
seemed to be the legal consecration of a power acquired by illegal
means and a sort of amnesty that Rome accorded to the past. We can
well understand that Augustus, even when dying, dwelt with
satisfaction on a recollection which seemed like an absolution, and
that he was anxious to terminate in this fashion his review of his
political life.

II.

I should like to give, in a few words, the impression that the

analysis of this remarkable inscription makes upon me as to its
author.
The whole political life of Augustus is contained in two official
documents which, by singular good fortune, have both come down to
us; I mean the preamble of the edict of proscription that Octavius
signed, and, according to all appearance, drew up himself, which
Appian has preserved; and the inscription found on the walls of the
temple of Ancyra. The former shows us what Octavius was at twenty,
fresh from the hands of the rhetoricians and philosophers, with all
the genuine instincts of his nature; the latter, what he became after
fifty-six years of uncontrolled and unlimited power; it is sufficient to
compare them in order to discover the road he had traversed, and
the changes that the knowledge of men and the practice of public
affairs had wrought in him.
The possession of power had made him better, a thing which is not
usual, and after him Roman history only gives us examples of princes
depraved by power. From the battle of Philippi to that of Actium, or
rather to the moment when he seems formally to ask pardon of the
world by abolishing all the acts of the triumvirate, we feel that he is
striving to become better, and we can almost follow the steps of his
progress. I do not think that we could find another example of so
strong an effort at self-conquest, and so complete a success in
overcoming one’s natural disposition. He was naturally a coward,
and hid himself in his tent in his first battle. I know not how he did
it, but he succeeded in acquiring courage; he became inured to war in
fighting against Sextus Pompey, and even courageous in the
expedition against the Dalmatians, in which he was twice wounded.
He was cynical and debauched, and the orgies of his youth, as related
by Suetonius, do not yield to Antony’s; yet he corrected himself at the
very moment that he became absolute master, that is just when his
passions would have met with the fewest obstacles. He was naturally
cruel, and coldly cruel, a disposition which does not often change;
and yet, after having begun by assassinating his benefactors, he
ended by sparing those who attempted his assassination, and the
philosopher Seneca could call the same man a clement prince[389]
whom his best friend, Maecenas, had once called a common
executioner. Certainly the man who signed the edict of proscription
hardly seems to be the same as the man who wrote the testament,
and it is indeed matter for wonder that a man who began as he did
was able to change so completely, and to assume a virtuous
character, or the appearance of one, in the place of all the vices that
were natural to him.
Nevertheless we should find it difficult to love him, whatever
justice we are bound to do him. We may be wrong after all; for
reason tells us that we ought to appreciate people more for the
qualities they acquire by thus triumphing over themselves than for
those they have by nature, without taking any trouble. And yet, I
hardly know why, it is only the latter that please us; the former lack a
certain charm that nature alone gives and which wins our hearts. The
effort is too apparent in them, and behind the effort some personal
interest; for we always suspect that a man has taken so much pains
only because there was some advantage to be gained. This sort of
acquired goodness, in which reason has a greater share than nature,
attracts no one, because it appears to be the product of a calculating
mind, and it is this feeling that causes all the virtues of Augustus to
leave us unmoved, and to seem at the most but the results of a
profound sagacity. They want a touch of nature and simplicity in
order to affect us. These are qualities that this stiff and formal
personage never knew, although according to Suetonius he gladly
assumed an appearance of plain manners and good-nature in his
familiar intercourse. But one is not a good fellow simply through
wishing to be it, and his private letters, of which we have a few
fragments, show that his pleasantries lacked ease, and that his
simplicity was the result of effort. Do we not know, besides, from
Suetonius himself, that he wrote down what he meant to say to his
friends, in order to leave nothing to chance, and that he even
occasionally wrote down his conversations with Livia beforehand?
[390]

But, after all, that which spoils Augustus in our opinion is that he
stands so near Caesar; the contrast between them is complete.
Caesar, not to speak of what was really great and brilliant in his
nature, attracts us at once by his frankness. His ambition may
displease us, but he had at least the merit of not hiding it. I do not
know why M. Mommsen exerts himself in his Roman History to
prove that Caesar did not care for the diadem, and that Antony, when
he offered it, had not consulted him. I prefer to hold to the common
opinion which, I think, does not do him wrong. He wished to be king,
and to bear the title as well as to exercise the power. He never made
pretence of waiting to be asked to accept honours that he
passionately desired, as Augustus did. He was not the man to make
us believe that he only retained the supreme authority with
reluctance, and would not have dared to tell us, at the very moment
that he was drawing all powers into his hands, that he had restored
the government of the republic to the people and senate. We know,
on the contrary, that after Pharsalia he said frankly that “the
republic” was a phrase without meaning, and that Sulla was a fool to
have abdicated the dictatorship. In everything, even in questions of
literature and grammar, he was a bold innovator, and he did not
display a hypocritical respect for the past at the very time that he was
destroying what had come down from it. This frankness is more to
our taste than the false appearance of veneration that Augustus
lavished on the senate after reducing it to impotence; and whatever
admiration Suetonius may express for him, when he shows him to
us, obsequiously saluting each senator by name, before the sittings
commenced, I am not sure that I do not prefer the disrespectful
behaviour of Caesar to this comedy, Caesar who at last went so far as
not to rise when the senate visited him. Both appeared weary of
power, but it never came into any one’s mind to think that Augustus
was speaking the truth when he asked so earnestly to be restored to
private life. The distaste of Caesar was deeper and more sincere. That
sovereign power, that he had sought after for more than twenty years
with an indefatigable persistence, through so many perils, and by
means of dark intrigues the remembrance of which must have made
him blush, did not answer to his expectations, and appeared
unsatisfying to him though he had so eagerly desired it. He knew that
he was detested by the men whose esteem he most desired; he was
constrained to make use of men whom he despised, and whose
excesses dishonoured his victory; the higher he rose, the more
unpleasing did human nature appear to him, and the more clearly
did he see the base greed and cowardly treachery of those who
intrigued at his feet. He came at last, through disgust, to have no
interest in life; it seemed to him to be no longer worth the trouble of
preserving and defending. It is, therefore, the same man who said,
even at the period when Cicero delivered the pro Marcello: “I have
lived long enough for nature or for glory;” who later, when he was
pressed to take precautions against his assassins, answered in a tone
of despondency: “I would rather die at once than live in fear;” who
might well have said with Corneille:
“I desired the empire and I have attained to it;
But I knew not what it was that I desired:
In its possession I have found, instead of delights,
Appalling cares, continual alarms,
A thousand secret enemies, death at every turn,
No pleasure without alloy, and never repose.”

These fine lines please me less, I admit, put into the mouth of
Augustus. This cautious politician, so cold, so self-possessed, does
not seem to me to have really known that noble sadness that reveals
the man in the hero, that melancholy of a heart ill at ease,
notwithstanding its successes, and disgusted with power through the
very exercise of power. Whatever admiration I may feel for that fine
scene in which Augustus proposes to abdicate the empire, I cannot
avoid being a little vexed with Corneille that he took so seriously and
depicted so gravely that solemn piece of acting which deceived
nobody in Rome, and when I wish to render my pleasure complete in
reading the tragedy of Cinna, I am always tempted to replace the
character of Augustus by that of Caesar.
I add, in conclusion, that all these insincere affectations of
Augustus were not only defects of character, but also political errors
which left most unfortunate effects on the government that he had
created. It was precisely the uncertainty that the interested
falsehoods of Augustus had thrown upon the real nature and limits
of the power of the earlier Caesars that rendered their tyranny
insupportable. When a government boldly states its principles we
know how to behave towards it; but what course is to be followed,
what language held when the forms of liberty are united with the
reality of despotism, when absolute power hides under republican
fictions? In the midst of this obscurity every course has danger and
threatens ruin. Men are ruined by independence, they may also be
ruined by servility; for, if he who refuses anything to the emperor is
an open enemy who regrets the republic, may not he who eagerly
grants everything be a secret enemy, who wishes to show that the
republic no longer exists? In studying Tacitus we find the statesmen
of this terrible period moving at random among these wilfully
accumulated uncertainties, stumbling at every step over unseen
dangers, liable to displease if they are silent or if they speak, if they
flatter or if they resist, continually asking themselves with dread how
they can satisfy this ambiguous and ill-defined authority whose
limits escape them. This want of sincerity in the institutions of
Augustus may be said to have been the torment of several
generations. All the evil came because Augustus thought more of the
present than of the future. He was an able man, full of resources in
escaping from embarrassing and difficult situations; he was not in
reality a great politician, for it seems that his view seldom extended
beyond the difficulties of the moment. Placed face to face with a
people who bore the kingship uneasily, and who were not fit for
anything else, he invented this sort of disguised kingship, and
allowed all the forms of the old government to exist by its side
without endeavouring to conform them to it. But if he was not so
great a politician as it has been pretended, it must be admitted that
he was an excellent administrator; that part of his work deserves all
the praise that has been lavished on it. By co-ordinating all the wise
observances and useful regulations that the republic had created, by
putting in force lost traditions, by himself creating new institutions
for the administration of Rome, the service of the legions, the
handling of the finances and the government of the provinces, he
organized the empire and thus rendered it capable of resisting
external enemies and internal causes of dissolution. If,
notwithstanding a detestable political system, the general lowering of
character, and the vices of the governors and the governed, the
empire still had a time of prosperity and lasted three centuries, it
owed it to the powerful organization it had received from Augustus.
This was the really vital part of his work. It is important enough to
justify the testimony that he bears to himself in that haughty phrase
of the Ancyran inscription: “I made new laws. I restored to honour
the examples of our forefathers which were disappearing from our
manners, and I have myself left examples worthy of being imitated
by our descendants.”

III.

It was no doubt about the middle of the reign, when he who was
the absolute master of the republic was pretending to restore the
government to the people and senate, that Cicero’s letters appeared.
The exact date of their publication is unknown; but everything tends
to the belief that it should be placed in the years that followed the
battle of Actium. The power of Augustus, become more popular since
it had become more moderate, felt itself strong enough to allow some
liberty of writing. It was mistrustful before that time because it was
not sufficiently consolidated; it became so again later when it
perceived that public favour was passing from it. This reign, which
began by proscribing men, ended by burning books. Cicero’s
correspondence could only have been published in the interval that
separates these periods.
No one has told us what impression it produced on those who read
it for the first time; but it may be fearlessly asserted that it was a very
lively impression. The civil wars had only just ended, up till that time
men were only occupied with present ills; in those misfortunes no
man’s mind was sufficiently free to think of the past, but in the first
period of tranquillity which that troubled generation knew, it
hastened to throw a glance backward. Whether it sought to account
for the events that had happened or wished to enjoy that bitter
pleasure which is found, according to the poet, in the recollections of
former sufferings, it retraced the sad years it had just traversed, and
wished to go back to the very beginning of that struggle whose end it
had seen. Nothing could satisfy their curiosity better than Cicero’s
letters, and it cannot therefore be doubtful that everybody at that
time eagerly read them.
I do not think that this reading did any harm to the government of
Augustus. Perhaps the reputation of some important personages of
the new government suffered a little from it. To have their republican
professions of faith disinterred was unpleasant for men who boasted
of being the private friends of the prince. I suppose that the
malicious must have diverted themselves with those letters in which
Pollio swears to be the eternal enemy of tyrants and in which Plancus
harshly attributes the misfortunes of the republic to the treason of
Octavius, who himself was not to be spared; and these lively
recollections of a time when he held out his hand to Caesar’s
assassins and called Cicero his father, were not favourable to him. All
this provided subjects of conversation for the malcontents during
several weeks. But upon the whole, the mischief was small, and these
railleries did not endanger the security of the great empire. What was
most to be feared for it was that imagination, always favourable to
the past, should freely attribute to the republic those qualities with
which it is so easy to adorn institutions that no longer exist. Now,
Cicero’s letters were much more suited to destroy these illusions than
to encourage them. The picture they present of the intrigues, the
disorders, and the scandals of that time did not permit men to regret
it. The men whom Tacitus depicts to us as worn out with struggles
and eager for repose, found in it nothing that could attract them, and
the bad use that men like Curio, Caelius, and Dolabella had made of
liberty, rendered them less sensitive to the sorrow of having lost it.
The memory of him who wrote these letters gained most by their
publication. It was very common at that time to speak ill of Cicero.
Notwithstanding the manner in which the court historians narrated
the meeting at Bologna and the honourable part they attempted to
give Octavius in the proscriptions,[391] they were none the less
unpleasant recollections for him. His victims were calumniated in
order to diminish his faults. This is what Asinius Pollio wished to do,
when he said, in his speech for Lamia, that Cicero died like a coward.
[392]
Those whose devotedness did not go so far, and who had not
enough courage to insult him, took care at least to say nothing of
him. It has been remarked that none of the great poets of this time
speak of him, and we know from Plutarch that at the Palatine it was
necessary to read his works in secret. Silence therefore fell, as far as
it was indeed possible, around Cicero’s great glory; but the
publication of his letters recalled him to the memory of everybody.
When once they had been read, this intellectual and gentle figure, so
amiable, so human and so attractive even in its weaknesses, could
not again be forgotten.
To the interest that the personality of Cicero gives to his letters, a
still more vivid interest is added for us. We have seen, in what I have
just written, how much our time resembles that of which these letters
speak to us. It had no solid faith any more than our own, and its sad
experiences of revolutions had disgusted it with everything while
inuring it to everything. The men of that time knew, just as we do,
that discontent with the present and that uncertainty of the morrow
which do not allow us to enjoy tranquillity or repose. In them we see
ourselves; the sorrows of the men of those times are partly our own,
and we have suffered the same ills of which they complained. We,
like them, live in one of those transitional periods, the most
mournful of history, in which the traditions of the past have
disappeared and the future is not yet clearly defined, and know not
on what to set our affections, and we can well understand that they
might have said with the ancient Hesiod: “Would that I had died
sooner or been born later!” This is what gives Cicero’s letters so lively
though mournful an interest for us; this is what first attracted me
towards them; this is what, perhaps, will give us some pleasure in
spending a short time in the society of the persons they depict, who,
in spite of the lapse of years, seem almost to be our contemporaries.
 INDEX

Abeken, 23
Acidinus, 105
Actium, 302, 367, 382
Aegean, 350
Aegina, 102
Aesopus, son of, 101
Africa, 65, 75, 160, 200, 270, 286, 297, 318
Agendicum, 255
Agrippa, 106
Alba, 117, 226
Alesia, 186, 252, 255
Alexander, 228
Alexandria, 118
Alps, 76, 252, seq.
Ambrose, Saint, 103
America, 231
Amphiaraüs, 71, 190
Ampius, T., 267
Ancyra, 362 and note, 369, 381
Angora, 362
Antium, 12, 346, 347
Antonius, orator, 42
Antony, 13, 20, 45, 70, 72 seq., 76, 81, 100, 104, 105, 158, 177, 197,
266, 276, 306, 331, 333, 335, 336, 339, 340, 345, 347, 350, 353,
356, 357, 360, 365, 370, 380
Apollonia, 362
Appian, 325, 342, 345, 381
Appius Claudius, 89, 285, 305, 314
Apuleius, 169, 350
Apulia, 186, 206
Arabia, 368
Arcae, 239
Archimedes, 287
Argiletum, 86
Ariobarzanes, 120, 314
Ariovistus, 252, 253, 255, 344
Aristophanes, 28
Aristotle, 108, 307
Arpinum, 4, 12, 61, 131, 216, 239
Arrius, 12
Asia, 49, 75, 85, 115, 120, 129, 230, 238, 267, 294, 297, 318, 319, 350
Atella, 120
Athens, 105, 107, 110, 126, 127, 133, 139, 296, 304, 305, 326, 349,
350
Atticus, 4, 10, 12, 13, 26, 53, 79, 85 seq., 89 note, 92, 95, 96, 98, 101,
106, 108, 111, 113;
his correspondence with Cicero, 123;
sources of his wealth, 127 seq.;
attacks Sicyon, 130;
returns to Rome, 132;
his character, 134 seq.;
 his services to Cicero, 141 seq.;
his conduct in public affairs, 147 seq.;
his hatred of Caesar, 152;
194, 218 seq., 224, 236, 262, 305, 310, 314, 317, 323, 332, 355, 360
Augustus. See Octavius
Aulus Gellius, 110, 112
Aventine, 86
Axius, 87, 227 note

Baiae, 168, 172, 175, 208

Balbus, 135, 141, 188, 195, 222, 234, 247, 261
Basilus, 192
Bibulus, 70, 105, 155, 221, 333
Blasius, 323
Bologna, 356, 365, 390
Bossuet, 147, 279
Britain, 65, 232, 234, 240, 245, 249, 250 and note, 251
Brittany, 15
Brundusium, 73, 94, 97, 152, 187 seq., 210, 257, 258, 260, 304, 319
Bruttius, 106
Brutus, 21, 22, 58, 70 seq., 75, 77, 88, 102, 107, 136, 140, 151, 152, 154
seq., 158, 159, 176, 192, 243, 266, 287, 293;
his family, 305;
his character, 307;
his statue, 309 note;
his oratory, 310;
his usury, 312 seq.;
joins Pompey at Pharsalia, 317;
submits to Caesar, 318;
close intimacy with Cicero, 320;
his treatise On Virtue, 324;
 Governor of Cisalpine Gaul, 326;
becomes head of conspiracy against Caesar, 338;
his conduct after Caesar’s death, 340 seq.;
retires to Greece, 348 seq.;
disagreement with Cicero, 350, 359, 360
Brutus, Decimus, 74, 75, 176, 192, 243, 323
Bussy, 17

Caecilia Metella, 101

Caecilius, 87, 130
Caecina, 267, 268
Caelius, 3, 4, 100;
his family and education, 160 seq.;
his relations with Clodia, 166 seq.;
orator and statesman, 177 seq.;
joins Caesar, 187;
goes to Spain, 190;
praetor, 197;
opposes Trebonius, 203 seq.;
leaves Rome, 205;
his death, 206, 264, 306, 359, 389
Caerellia, 90, 91
Caesar, 4, 14, 21, 22, 33, 36, 40, 49 seq., 59, 61, 63, 68, 69, 71, 80, 85,
87, 102, 119, 127, 135, 151, 152, 154, 165, 171, 179, 183, 185 seq., 191
seq.;
Cicero his political ally during the Gallic war, his friend after
Pharsalia, 209;
contrasted with Pompey, 225 seq.;
sets out for Gaul, 229;
his army, 242 seq.;
his victories, 252;
resumes intercourse with Cicero, 260;
his clemency, 263;
his cruelty, 265;