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 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.  

“It is the bipolar struggle between the United States and China that is the new Great Game of the twenty-first century.”

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 geo-economic 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. 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. 

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.

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.

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 allowing 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. 

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 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. 

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