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.

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.

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 re-making 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. 

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.

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 multi-ethnic 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.

His primary goal was to protect America’s economic power position in the western hemisphere and in Asia from threats of great power encroachment.

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 to control the Eurasian heartland and 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.

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 stand-offs 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 non-commercial 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. 

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. 

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.

Excerpted from A World Safe for Commerce published by Princeton University Press ©2024