A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, by Dale C. Copeland (Princeton University Press, 504 pp., $38)
Since 2015, foreign trade has moved to the forefront of domestic debates about America’s role in the world. This is widely attributed to America fundamentally reassessing its relationship with China over the past decade. But it also reflects an underlying consistency in U.S. foreign policy that goes back to the American Revolution.
That’s the argument a new book makes about the underappreciated role of securing access to global markets in U.S. foreign policy. In A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, Dale C. Copeland, professor of international affairs at the University of Virginia, suggests that a fuller understanding of events ranging from the War of Independence to America’s entry into World War II would help us appreciate how far major powers will go to secure and expand their access to foreign markets. This factor, Copeland holds, often structures foreign policy more significantly than national security motivations, ideological convictions, and domestic political concerns.
This is a bold claim. Copeland, however, grounds his thesis in careful attention to documentation and a concerted effort to correct misperceptions of U.S. foreign policy history.
Take, for example, the American Revolution. “[T]he war for independence,” Copeland writes, “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.”
As well as challenging popular narratives about pivotal moments in American history, Copeland lays 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.” This endeavor raises questions about the adequacy of international relations (IR) theories that assign commercial and trade issues relatively minor weight in comprehending geopolitical developments. But Copeland also seeks to develop his own IR theory—what he calls “dynamic realism.” He summarizes it as follows:
[States] will lean to more soft-line policies when their expectations for future trade and investment are strong, when they expect that continued trade will increase their long-term economic power, and when there are few opportunities to expand their economic power spheres without increasing the risk of spiraling. They will lean to more hard-line policies when their expectations for future trade and investment are negative, when they believe that current or likely restrictions in trade will cause a decline in long-term economic and thus military power, and when the risks of spiraling are overridden by the risks of decline in their long-term power positions.
Copeland applies this theory to our present circumstances, in which America faces geopolitical competition from China and Russia, and where faith in “economic interdependence and a rules-based international order as fostering long-term prosperity and peace” has collapsed. He situates his view with respect to other realist IR theories and liberal IR theory. He then applies his model to foreign policy during the American Revolution and the antebellum republic as well as America’s entry into World War I, the decisions leading to war with the Axis powers in 1941, choices in the early Cold War, efforts to end the Cold War between 1957 and 1991, and America’s wrestling with modern China.
Each chapter highlights not only the role played by trade expectations in shaping U.S. foreign policy but also the behavior of states like late-eighteenth-century Britain and mid-twentieth-century Imperial Japan. When trade expectations are generally positive, Copeland contends, states believe that they are growing in power and are thus less inclined to act aggressively. Conversely, if trade expectations turn negative, states will worry that they have entered a period of decline. This motivates states, Copeland maintains, to take on more foreign policy risks that, if mishandled, increase the chances of war.
Three other concepts frame Copeland’s dynamic realism theory. One is that great powers “have an incentive to grab opportunities to expand their economic power spheres . . . to reduce the chances that others will cut them off from future access to vital goods and markets.” A second postulate is that states must consider how their efforts to grow their trade spheres might alienate rival powers and produce “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.” Copeland assembles ample evidence to support these two arguments.
Less convincing is his third hypothesis: that the commercial expectations of “rational leaders” of states are shaped by “nothing from within this leader’s state” nor “by domestic pressures bubbling up ‘from below.’” Ascribing relative unimportance to domestic pressures is a standard feature of systematic IR realist claims. But in this instance, it surely underestimates the extent to which domestic forces have pushed U.S. trade policy—and thus aspects of foreign policy—in liberalizing or protectionist directions.
Copeland demonstrates considerable continuity in the way that trade imperatives have molded U.S. foreign policy for over 200 years. Yet, as illustrated in Douglas A. Irwin’s Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (2017), many of the twists and turns in U.S. trade policy cannot be understood without grasping how specific industries and regions of the country (and their congressional representatives) have successful lobbied for or against tariffs.
Even presidents have experienced difficulties in resisting such demands. It’s hard to understand, for example, President Joe Biden’s transformation from vocal defender of deeper trade relations with China to an ostensibly more skeptical stance without understanding the Democratic Party’s need to win back blue-collar voters, who, rightly or wrongly, consider themselves net losers from America’s trade relationship with China.
That said, Copeland shows that many American policymakers have resisted bottom-up domestic pressures and adopted an approach to trade that, in their view, advanced America’s national security interests. A good example is President George Washington’s refusal to impose sanctions on Britain in the 1790s despite immense pressures to do so from Jeffersonian Republicans. Instead, Washington ratified the Jay Treaty in August 1795 in the face of mass and often violent protests. The treaty produced ten years of peaceful trade between America and Britain, albeit at the cost of tense relations with revolutionary France, the harassment of American ships by French men-of-war, and eventually the “Quasi-War” fought out by the American and French navies between 1798–1800.
In this case, American policymakers’ strategic judgments were influenced by trade expectations and assessments of the relative strengths of other states. How are similar calculations likely to affect America’s present-day face-off with China?
Here Copeland treads cautiously. He stresses that one factor complicating Sino-U.S. relations is an element that characterizes all great-power politics: that “it is very hard to know for sure the adversary’s true current power and motives, let alone what it will be like ten or fifteen years from now.” In China’s case, its cultural specificities arguably deepen this problem of knowledge and uncertainty.
Americans can certainly make informed guesses about why Chinese president Xi Jinping has departed significantly from the foreign and economic policies broadly pursued by his predecessors going back to Deng Xiaoping. But it is difficult, Copeland underscores, to know whether Beijing believes that China’s trade and commercial position has begun to decline, or if Beijing thinks that America no longer possesses the means and will to constrain Chinese expansionism. Even if the truth lies somewhere in between, one might add, what matters is that we really don’t know.
What we do know, thanks to Copeland’s book, is that, far from being a poor cousin to ideological goals or national security objectives, the drive of states for access to and dominance of international markets is pivotal to understanding their behavior. That includes the dynamics shaping present U.S.–China relations. Calculations by great powers about future trade don’t explain everything about their foreign policies. Discounting their significance, however, would be a serious error.
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