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Full download A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China Dale C. Copeland file pdf all chapter on 2024
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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
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
SPANISCH-MAURISCHE FAYENCEN.
FRANZÖSISCHE FAYENCEN.
DEUTSCHES STEINZEUG.