American Merchants in the Globe

choi

Paul Kennedy, Trading Places; For the first time in more than a century, there is a global trade war that America may not win. Wall Street Journal, Feb 8, 2024 at page A13
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ing-places-f7045ef9
(book review on Dale C Copeland, A World Safe for Commerce; American foreign policy from the Revolution to the rise of China. Princeton University Press, Feb 6, 2024)

Note:
(a) The phrase "trading places" means switching places.
(b)
(i) Bretton Woods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods
(can refer to a village in New Hampshire, the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, and Bretton Woods system)
(ii) Bretton Woods system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
("Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still being fought, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference."/ section 2 Design of the financial system, section 2.2 Fixed exchange rates + section 2.3 Formal regimes: "The Bretton Woods Conference led to the establishment of the IMF and the IBRD (now the World Bank)")

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Long before the U.S. completed its own continental expansion, its traders were pushing out across the Pacific in search of new markets and sources of supply. In the ports of mid-19th-century Hong Kong, many trading vessels could be found flying the flag of the fast-expanding American republic. It didn’t matter to these American merchants that they were sheltering in, and trading from, a recently established British colony, for it was a commonplace for them to engage in commerce throughout the British Empire. It was the age of total free trade.

As Dale Copeland details in “A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy From the Revolution to the Rise of China,” American traders were quite happy to take advantage of the way British colonial acquisitions in Asia and Africa were opening up trade for all. Under such circumstances, these merchants had no need of support from Washington. Nor in those early post-Revolution decades would the U.S. government have had the interest or capacity to push commercial expansion abroad.

How different the world would be by the end of the 19th century, when a much more powerful U.S. and a much more confident McKinley administration asserted American trading interests around the world, against all comers. Mr. Copeland, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, reminds us that in 1899 Secretary of State John Hay demanded an “open door” to the vast Chinese market, and American newspapers bayed their approval. Hawaii was annexed and the Philippines taken over, a piece of Samoa was picked up for a naval base, Spain was tossed out of Cuba, the Caribbean became a sort of American lake, and the Alaskan border was rounded off—to Canada’s protests. To ensure the protection of these national interests abroad, a powerful U.S. Navy was swiftly constructed.

The economic justification for an assertive America took on a much bigger dimension in the 20th century, as the U.S. abandoned its policy of isolation and very forcibly intervened in World War I, then later entered both the Pacific and European theaters of World War II. The main drivers behind these dramatic policy shifts were Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and the arguments both presidents gave for the new approach were focused on national security.

The blatant aggressions of the kaiser’s Germany during World War I, and Tojo’s Japan and Hitler’s Third Reich during World War II, Americans were told, posed existential threats to the U.S. and needed to be defeated. But behind that logic, Mr. Copeland argues, was a further objective: a world safe for commerce. Indeed, at one stage the author insists that “Wilson’s obsession with protecting America’s economic power sphere must be placed side by side with his idealism” about democracy and collective security. A benign and open global trading system, in which American traders, above all, would prosper, simply would not exist if Britain fell or if Japan took control of East Asia.

It was also for this basic commercial reason that, as World War II came to an end, an assertive U.S. government insisted upon new international structures, such as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (subsequently the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund. These new world bodies, created at the important Allied conference at Bretton Woods in 1944, had the noble aim of ensuring that the global economy would avoid ever again slipping into a Great Depression; but that, in its turn, would help American businesses and American jobs. For the same reason, when Cold War enemies threatened this American-made order, they, too, had to be firmly resisted. All of the Free World would gain from this robust protection, it was argued, even if it was privately assumed that American companies would gain most of all.

And so they did, for a good half-century after World War II. Many readers of this paper will recall the astonishing success of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s “The American Challenge” (1967), as France and other foreign nations appeared to be wilting under the outward, unbeatable surge of U.S. commercial competitiveness.

There is therefore a historical irony that comes in Mr. Copeland’s important final chapter, for the story here, as he puts it, is of “the great geopolitical struggle” of the 21st century “between a seemingly declining United States wanting to maintain a semblance of preeminence and a rising China seeking to establish itself as a dominant, if not the dominant, state in its region and perhaps the world.” Here, for the first time in more than a century, there exists another nation with a GDP almost as large as America’s, a nation that sells far more to the U.S. than it purchases, a nation that seems impervious to American pressure. All this suggests to Mr. Copeland that there is a trade war in which America seems to be losing, not winning. “A World Safe for Commerce” thus ends with the author’s recommendations for robust policies to preserve America’s world order, which may be another reason for paying attention to this work.

While the great bulk of the book is a fine historical analysis of America’s foreign-trade policies, from the pre-Independence years until the Cold War, Mr. Copeland’s study is, essentially, a work for fellow political scientists who specialize in international-relations theory. Parts of the book will prove tough reading for a general audience; many readers may not be able to appreciate, for instance, Mr. Copeland’s propositions about dynamic realist theory. For those of us not in that intellectual milieu, the nicely written middle chapters will have to suffice. Overall, “A World Safe for Commerce” is an important work.

Mr. Kennedy is a professor of history at Yale and the author of, among other works, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”