Like The Dictator’s Handbook, We May Dominate the World stands out for me because it offers a couple of new frameworks for understanding state action and reasoning about its consequences. However, those new frameworks are not trumpeted as the core insight of the work. They have to be teased out of commentary here and there, buried in a sea of names and dates for US interventions across the Americas.
Concept one: Regional Hegemony through the Monroe Doctrine.
The concept of regional hegemony is not one I was familiar with. I understand a regional hegemon to be a state whose near abroad security threats are so limited that it doesn’t need to spend any substantial lear attention or material resources defending its borders, leaving it free to focus on other matters, like economic development and more distant entanglements. This is a fascinating concept, and one that I think has interesting implications not only for the US in the 19th century, but also for understanding the behavior of Russia & the USSR (and, thereby, the Cold War), and of post-Cold-War China.
The Monroe Doctrine was a US foreign policy position first clearly articulated and implemented by James Monroe, the 5th US president. The doctrine’s thesis is that the US is the only great power which may hold sway in the Americas — the legacy European great powers should get out and stay out. The US will consider any material great power intervention in the Americas a direct threat. I think of the Monroe Doctrine as a stronger, more universal declaration of independence. The US was a colony of a European great power; they fought and won independence. That earns the right to bar the colonial European great powers from their sphere of influence.
There’s also an element of shared liberty and values here — this is an ongoing but strained thread through the listed US interventions in the 19th century. The European powers are ancient monarchies, the US is a new republic. The European powers are colonial overlords, the US is a liberated colony. There’s an inflection that the US is standing up for its sibling states across the Americas, shielding them from the threat of European domination, and guaranteeing independent popular governance. (None of this erases the US’s extensive history of colonialism, or the colonial & racist dynamics of a European-offshoot power dominating the Americas. Nor does it erase the extensive limits to US “democracy”. But those are a stories for another time.)
Clearly these two things seem to go together well. It’s much easier to be a regional hegemon if other great powers keep their colonial sticky fingers out of your sphere of influence. Just think about how many fewer security distractions the US would have to think about if it were surrounded by stable, independent, productive states like Canada? But that’s not actually how the history of the Americas went in the 19th & early 20th centuries, because “stable” and “independent” could not always be used to describe other states in the Americas, and those two values were often in conflict.
Introducing: the Rosevelt Corollary.
Here’s the problem. The Munroe Doctrine is not self-enforcing. The US can tell other great powers to stay out of the Americas. But the Americas have so many valuable resources to exploit and so many non-white people to make into client states! And the other great powers have ships. With guns! They have gunships. So the Americas are just crying out for colonization. When you think about it (like a colonizer). So sometimes other great powers try to meddle. Just a little. Just some light resource extraction. As a treat.
And what’s the US going to do about that? There are two options: intervene, and don’t intervene. Really, it’s a spectrum of response from complete non-intervention, to strongly-worded letters, to economic support (“dollar diplomacy”), to staging detachments of marines near US embassies & businesses and saying “Gosh, it really would be a tragedy if anyone fired guns near these marines because if a US marine were injured, we’d really have to intervene. Probably with all of those marines.”, to having US gunboats float ominously nearby practicing maneuvers which look a lot like repelling European fleets, to directly invading and overthrowing governments, to annexing the Kingdom of Hawai’i. All totally normal non-colonial behavior supporting the rights of other American states to self-determination.
And that’s the problem. If the US doesn’t intervene, nothing’s stopping the Kaiser from waiting for American states to have a little instability and then doing a little light annexing. And if that instability was also caused by some predatory European loans in the first place, well, then this colonial resource extraction is really just legal debt collection, isn’t it? So the US has to intervene. Ideally before the European gunboats get their teeth into some juicy new dependencies. That’s the Rosevelt Corollary: if another American state looks a little wobbly, the US should intervene to “help” (in the colonial paternalistic sense) because better to have “help” from the US than domination from a colonial great power.
But when the US does intervene, it’s creating new and different problems. Any intervention starts you down the road of having vassals & protectorates & client states. The more you intervene to prop up a client state, the less independent it is. And the more you historically have intervened in a state, the less practice it’s had with the institutions and practices of democratic self-governance. It’s very hard to go into a state, fight little a war to kick out the Spanish, and then leave that state to stable independent self-governance. The more you intervene, the less stable it is, so the more it’s at risk of colonial domination, so the more you should intervene to stabilize it, so the less independent it is. It’s not a great cycle.
And this is basically what the US has been doing since reconstruction. From Venezuela at the dawn of the 20th century to Iraq at the dawn of the 21st, nothing has changed. The US has a habit of seeing an unstable state and thinking to itself “We must protect this unstable state from collapse and dominion by someone else!”, and then occupying/ruling that state for long enough to just absolutely erode the practices & institutions necessary for stable government and the security apparatus necessary for stability. Then the US leaves (or “leaves”) and suddenly there’s even more instability and revolutions and coups and warlords and strongmen and who knows what else. And every single time, the US is like shocked Pikachu, whomst could have predicted this?
If you think this is a vicious cycle, here’s another component of it. Remember regional hegemony? Well, as a regional hegemon, the US doesn’t really need to attend to its local security situation. (Though this is less and less true as military technology shrinks certain sorts of distances.) This leaves the US with lots of surplus security resources and attention that it can spend just sort of popping in to do little a “nation building” here and there. There’s a cycle of failure in the structure of US interventions and in the US ability to intervene.
If you’ve really been paying attention, you might want to point out a few major exceptions: Germany, the Marshall Plan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan’s Post-War Economic Miracle. What makes these interventions different? I do not know, and this book doesn’t talk about them at all, because it ends at the beginning of WWII. I think the difference is that these are US interventions in / conquest of states which were pretty stable beforehand. I think that those states had more robust institutions & practices of stable governance to begin with, so the US intervention wasn’t enough to wreck them. However, Europe, Japan, and South Korea are all more or less still US protectorates. Europe seems to be peaking its head out from under the US military umbrella, but none of those implied conflicts are anywhere near resolution. And this is very much me just freelancing rather than describing observations in this book.
