We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm staff writer Sean
Fleetwood. As always, you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on Twitter at FDRLST. Make sure to subscribe wherever
you download your podcasts into the premium version on our website. Today, I'm
joined by Sean Mierski. Shawn as a lawyer in US foreign policy scholar who
has worked on national security issues across multiple US presidential administrations. He currently practices
national security, foreign relations, and appellate law at Arnold and Porter Case Scholar
LP and is also a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
And today he's here to talk to us about his brand new upcoming book,
We May Dominate the World, Ambition, Anxiety, and the at the American
Colossus. Sean Miski, Welcome to the program. Pleasure to be here,
Thank you for having me. Yeah. Absolutely, And so before we kind
of delve into the contents of the book, can you just kind of give
our readers a bit of your background, you know, how you got interested
in foreign policy and then kind of dovetail into what made you want to write
this book. Yeah, So the thing that originally got me, I think,
interested in foreign policy was actually the rise of China became obvious to me
fairly early on. And this is not a particularly original insight, but that
China's rise would be sort of the defining event of the twenty first century,
or at least that there's good money to be placed on that bet. And
so, you know, for a long time I've kind of been interested in
China and East Asian security affairs, and it sort of occurred to me that
the really important question, or at least one of the kind of really important
questions, was whether China was going to rise peacefully or whether it was going
to rise in an aggressive and expansionist way. And the historical record has never
been good that question. Rising powers tend to be aggressive an expansionist, by
which I mean they tend to pick fights with other great powers. They tend
to bully and otherwise metal in the affairs of their neighbors, and in general,
they tend to make a nuisance of themselves as they try and dominate greater
and greater slices at the world. And so, and I don't think China's
really departing, so far from that path, but we're obviously we still got
kind of a ways to go. And so that sort of question is what
originally led me to the book, because I thought it would be interesting to
look at the United States and its own rise to power and to see,
you know, first how much did we buck that particular trend and to the
extent we didn't exactly why you did we act the way we did, because
I've never really heard a good, sort of compelling explanation as to why all
rising powers act this way. And so I thought I would write just a
short article looking at the history of the United States, and then I started
getting into it, and I started digging into the archives, and you know,
eight years later, here we are and ends up being so much more
of a kind of, in my opinion, thrilling but also kind of detailed
and complex story that I had initially anticipated. But yeah, that's the that's
the answer. Yeah. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book was
that the area of foreign policy US forign policy that you delved into gave so
much of the foreign policy discussions we hear today or you know, based on
the post World War two era, you know, the United states that world
Hedgeman were the leading power. But you know, we're talking about discussions like
with Ukraine, and we're still talking about World War Two. But there's so
much US foreign policy that's right for discussion, and specifically you tackle the really
the post Civil War era up until the early World War two years. But
I think a good place to start our discussion if you could describe for audience
the Monroe doctrine and the main principles that that had obviously came before the Civil
War, but I think it's so important in understanding the events that you later
detail later on in the book. Yeah, and so listeners will remember,
of course the Monroe Doctrine from their you know, Apstra classes as the sort
of dusty dogma that you know, barely matters anymore at lease. That's that's
the kind of wishful thinking. But you know, the basic idea was that
in the late eighteen tens early eighteen twenties, Latin America gained its independence from
Portugal in Spain. And this was from the US perspective, this revolutionary see
change in our strategic position, because it meant that instead of being surrounded by
hostile great powers, we were now in a hemisphere where there were a few
outposts left of the European Great Powers, but beyond that we were just surrounded
by neighbors that were, you know, always going to be weaker than us
and would never present a direct security threat. And from the US perspective,
this was great because if the US could just clear the remaining European Great powers
out of the hemisphere and essentially, you know, enforce us dividing line between
the old World and the New, it could guarantee itself permanent security, you
know, by virtue of essentially having two very big moats on either side of
it. And so in eighteen twenty three, in response to the threat of
Europe coming back into recolonize Latin America, President Monroe declares essentially that from here
on out there's going to be the separation. The United States promises not to
meddle in European affairs, and in exchange, however, European Great Powers cannot
recolonize any part of the Western Hemisphere, and in general, they can't try
and take over any of the independent Latin American powers and try and you know,
install authoritarian forms of government. And so, in effect, the Monroe
doctrine ends up as this sort of giant keep out sign in the middle of
the Atlantic Ocean. The problem is that in eighteen twenty three the US has
basically like no power to enforce this, and so over the next few decades
it's you know, very much honored in the breach. It could have been,
I think, much worse than it was, but Great Britain also had
vested interest in not having the other great powers come across the ocean, and
so for the most part we had managed to escape by relatively okay. But
then things kind of go south during the Civil War. Yeah, that was
actually leads into my next question, which is this conflict during the Civil War
years and the years after that involves the US and France and France's intervention in
Mexico, which is something I didn't even know happened before I read the book.
So could you talk to our audience a bit about that conflict in how
the outcomes kind of shaped the world affairs and the years to come. Absolutely,
and to be frank, before I started getting into this, I didn't
really know this history either, and I was actually astonished by that fact because
once you sort of stepped back and look at it, you're like, oh
my god, this is so important, you know. But I think when
you're you know, in US history classes in high school and middle school,
the focus understandably is on the Civil War itself and sort of what's going on
domestically right the North and the South there at each other's throats. You learn
all about the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, but there's a lot happening at
the international level as well, and in particular for the European capitals. This
Civil War inside the United States was a phenomenal opportunity for them to basically rever
sort of the tide of their ebbing influence in the Western hemisphere and to sort
of come back in a big way. And you see that in a few
plots here and there, But the one that really stands out is the French
invasion and occupation of Mexico. And so in late eighteen sixty one into early
eighteen sixty two, the French launched this massive expedition into Mexico and within a
few years they essentially conquer almost the entire country. I think at their peak
they're controlling something like seven eighths of Mexican territory, and they import this Austrian
prince to be the new Emperor of Mexico, and so they essentially set up
this kind of puppet state right on the US border. And the remarkable thing
beyond the mere fact that that happened is how violently the United States reacted against
that. Even before the Civil War ended in eighteen sixty four, there was
incredibly serious talk in both the North and the South of actually calling a pause
on the Civil War so that the North and Side can jointly invade Mexico and
kick the French out and then presumably either restart the war or come to some
sort of negotiated settlement. And this seems just like absolutely fantastical from everything we
know about the Civil War, but I think it really sort of emphasizes how
much Americans were ticked off by this happening and how frankly concerned they were.
And so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that three months after
the Civil War does end in the North Winds, the Union has sent fifty
thousand soldiers down to the Rio Grande under General Sheridan, who's at this point
General Grant's right hand man and General Sheridan is basically sending letters to Washington saying
we're ready to invade, just give us the order, and you should give
us the order, and General Grant agrees. I mean, this is the
commander of the Union forces and he's telling the President, you need to invade
Mexico right now to kick the French out. And as I talk about in
the book, it's a really close call that prevents us from not actually going
into Mexico. Instead, we end up launching this massive proxy war against the
French where we're arming Mexican sending kind of COVID expedition across the border, and
eventually the French end up leaving with their tail behind their legs in eighteen sixty
seven. But the whole episode sort of really reinforces for Americans that this threat
from the European powers is not some sort of abstract, you know, thing
that they no longer that they don't need to worry about, and soad it's
a very real concern that they have to constantly be vigilant about. Yeah,
And in the kind of decades ensuing as you cover in the book, with
these various instances in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Panama. It really seems
like almost the unintended consequence of the Monroe doctrine of asserting yourself as kind of
like, you know, the leading power of the Western hemisphere is that you
kind of have to be the policeman in a sense where you have to enforce,
you know, and make sure that these European powers are intervening in these
crises, and that you yourself have to get involved in these crises sometimes to
prevent that. Is that something that you kind of notice throughout your research analyzing
these various events. Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that
you know, I think to the extent Americans know much about this period,
there's a sense that we did not we're not on our best behavior when it
came to our neighbors, and that is you know, understating it considerably,
I think. But one of the things that sort of surprised me in my
research was oftentimes how reluctant the United States was to be doing much of what
it was doing. And there are tons of exceptions to that, so I'm
generalizing at a very high level, but there is this sort of sense that,
you know, the US was kind of on this crusading imperialist spirit,
where we were sort of clabboring our neighbors, you know, for the fun
of it. And I just don't think that's really consistent with sort of the
records that you know. And it's not just public speeches and things like that,
but a lot of these policymakers, in their letters to their families or
in their diaries are really sort of ringing their hands over what they're kind of
being forced to do, at least in their view. And the basic problem
that the United States is encountering is the problem that was sort of exemplified by
the way France invade Mexico, which is a lot of the United States as
neighbors are at this point incredibly unstable politically in the sense that they have constant
civil wars and revolutions, and economically in the sense that they've ranked up these
absolutely massive debts to European banks and sometimes directly to European states. And this
sort of instability, this weakness creates a problem. Well, it creates a
temptation, frankly, for European powers to intervene, and it makes these neighbors
an easy target for European intervention, and so in the book, I call
it the problem of order. But basically, the US is very concerned that
these vulnerabilities in its neighborhood are not just vulnerabilities for those states, but they're
vulnerabilities for everyone. And so the US basically concludes that in order to safeguard
its own security and to prevent europe great powers from coming into the hemisphere,
it needs to start stabilizing and strengthening its neighbors to the point where they can
at least stand up on their own two feet in a way that makes it
much more difficult for Europe to get involved. The problem is that the US
doesn't really figure out a great way to do it. It starts by trying
to do it indirectly through you know, diplomacy and trade, by lowering tariffs
and the hope that you know, an increase of commerce will increase, you
know, the kind of wealth and prosperity of these societies, and that will
in turn help stabilize them. But for various reasons, that doesn't really work,
and the US eventually starts moving on to kind of more aggressive stabilization measures
than involves sort of tinkering with the internal sovereignties of these nations, and again
it sort of starts out I don't want to say benignly, but it starts
out in else in a much more minor way than where it concludes, which
is, by the eight end of the nineteen tens, the US is occupying
two entire nations parts of three more just I mean, really really invasive sort
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Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Yeah,
and I think one of the ones that you tackle is kind of the
US dynamic with the Philippines, which is you know, we don't necessarily want
to get involved in the Philippines, you know what's our interest there, but
you know the fact that other European powers are eyeing it that if you know,
a Britain or a Germany or whoever controls it, then that's going to
affect us in our national security. You know. I hate to skive around
so much that there's so much in this book to cover, but I was
hoping you could explain how all of these concepts that we've been talking about kind
of tie into the idea of the was about corollary and kind of expand on
how the terms defined in the Monroe Doctrine were further carried out under that.
So the Monroe Doctrine in its original sort of phrasing was purely defensive in the
sense that it stated to Europe that the United States had a security interest in
keeping Latin America independent. It didn't say anything about any responsibilities of the United
States itself would take on, and it didn't, you know, really do
anything other than forbid Europe from doing certain things. And so the Roosevelt Corollary
was declared in late nineteen oh four and first executed in nineteen oh five,
and to set the scene, the Dominican Republic was one of the nations I've
mentioned that you know, was really just sort of falling apart during the eighteen
nineties that had ragged up these enormous debts under this rather fiscally irresponsible dictator.
The dictator ends up being assassinated at the end of the decade, and the
country plunges into just years and years of civil war, and the Europe's Great
Powers are getting increasingly unhappy about the situation. And this all essentially comes to
head at the end of nineteen oh four, where several great Powers approach the
State Department and say, either you you know, put the do something about
the situation, or we will. And what Roosevelt realizes is that at this
point Latin American states almost their only at least a lot of them at least
almost their only source of revenue is from customs on trade, so basically taxing
traders comes into and out of ports. There's no income taxes, there's nothing
like that, so it's all basically just taxing trade, which means that if
you want to, if you're owed money and you want to forcibly take that
money, what you do is you seize the custom houses of these nations and
you basically administer them, and you cut you cut yourself a share of the
profits coming in until you're dead is satisfied, and Roosevelt realizes if he doesn't
prevent you know, europe great powers from acting, what is eventually going to
happen is they're going to come in, They're going to seize these custom houses,
and they're going to establish themselves permanently in the Dominican Republic. And for
obvious reasons, this is not something that the US wants to do. And
so Roosevelt declares what ends up being known as the Roosevelt corollary, which is
that in cases where you either have what he refers to as chronic wrongdoing,
which is nations that are just affirmatively, you know, ignoring their obligations under
international law and really aggravating the European powers in a way that might lead them
to come in, or in cases where essentially there's anarchy in the state has
just collapsed, the United States has this obligation to be an international policeman,
where it basically has the obligation to sort of come in and restore order in
order to prevent the European powers from coming out. And the reasoning is,
you know, at least to Roosevelt's mind, fairly obvious and indisputable, which
is, look, somebody's going to do this. It's either going to be
us or it's going to be the European powers. And we don't want to
be the European power, so it has to be us. And and that
of course is compelling in its own way, but it leads to this sort
of slide into more and more interventionism in a way that I think even Theodore
Roosevelt would have been very surprised by. Yeah, and then we get into
the Taft administration where we have this concept of you know, dollar diplomacy.
Could you talk about, you know, what is dollar diplomacy and how the
Taft administration kind of used it to shape US foreign policy in Latin America.
Sure, so, as I mentioned, so Theodore Roosevelt, he ends up
using his quarrel only once in the Dominican Republic itself. And then, you
know, a month or two after he gives this address, he approaches the
Dominican president and says, would you like American forces to take over the custom
houses and administer them on your behalf. And the Dominican president is thrilled.
He's actually been kind of pushing annexation from last year. I mean, he
really wants much more US involvement. And so when when rose Will asks in
this, this is not exactly shot in the dark, and so the United
States ends up taking over and administering the Dominican custom houses. And the basic
deal is that the US forces, you know, protect the custom houses.
They can collect the revenue, and a percentage of the revenue I think it's
a little over fifty percent goes to the European creditors and the other creditors of
the Dominican Republic, and the remaining percentage goes to the Dominican government for its
sort of internal expenses. And the idea behind these custom houses or this what's
called a customs receivership is that number one, a lot of these civil wars
and revolutions in these countries are being fought over the custom houses in the sense
that that's where all the money is and that's where all the loot is.
And so the idea is, if you just set up US marines in front
of them, the revolutionaries and rebels won't be able to get to them,
and that'll dry up revolution and rebellion, and so it'll stabilize these countries just
by taking the biggest treasure house off the table. The other dynamic is that
Americans early, so the rose of all administration things, are going to be
much less corrupt administrators of these custom houses, and they'll be much better at
doing it kind of bureaucratically, and so as a result, will just collect
more revenue and this will create more prosperity, which intern will create more peace,
which intern will create more prosperity. And so there's this kind of hope
that there's going to be this mutually reinforcing stabilizing cycle, and it kind of
seems to work at first in the Dominican Republic. So this customs receivership goes
into effect in nineteen o five, and from about that year to nineteen eleven,
the Dominican Republic actually is doing relatively well compared to its recent history.
Customs revenue sore, so that even though the Dominican government's only receiving less than
half of the actual revenues coming in through the custom houses, it's still getting
more money than it used to before when it was receiving a one hundred percent
of the revenues, and so things seem to be going relatively well. There's
a lot less revolution, there's a lot less rebellion, each of them is
less anemic than there is more anemic last And so by the time the Taft
administration comes into nineteen o nine, they've concluded, Aha, this is the
silver bullet. We just need to force all these other countries into this same
sort of customs receivership. And so the Taft administration kind of takes that insight
and more broadly takes the insight that financial stability is the kind of foundation for
political stability and tries to enforce that across the region. And it does own
a much more systematic and much less at Hogway than Roosevelt ever did. And
I think that's where things start to go really really wrong. For one thing,
it turns out that these custom houses are not, these customs receiverships are
not the silver bullet. It just turns out that the Dominican president at the
time was actually just a very competent ruler, relatively speaking, and that a
large part of the reason things worked out was because he was doing a relatively
good job at kind of keeping a firm handle on everything. But the one
thing that the one thing that Taft also does is and this is another key
part of Dollar diplomacy, is he basically tries to refinance all the European debts
in the region through American banks. And the idea is, basically, let's
say you have a nation like Honduras, who at the beginning of the Taft
administration owes something like one hundred and twenty million dollars in debt to European bankers
on annual revenues of something like three million. Right, it's just not even
conceivable that the Hunters will ever be able to repay this. And what Americans
do, or with the State Department's kind of active encouragement, as they sort
of come in and they try and mop up these loans, refinance them,
consolidate them, cut them down to size, and do it through American banks.
The idea being you remove europe stake from the region. As a result,
you won't need to worry about Europeans intervening anymore. And so this whole
kind of program of these customs receiverships, this flushing of europe loans out of
the region. All this ends up becoming known as Dollar diplomacy, but it
doesn't really work. By the end of the Taft administration, the region's kind
of more unstable than ever. The Dominican Republican nineteen eleven, the competent leader
that I mentioned earlier gets assassinated, and the country just you know, drops
into civil war. By the end of by I think is summer in nineteen
twelve, the Dominican Republic has essentially now racked up so much debt as a
result of like the one year of civil war that it's basically right back to
where it started at nineteen oh five. And so the main lesson that both
the Taft administration and especially the Wilson administration take away from this is we're just
not going hard enough. If we only take control of more of these nations
internal affairs, will be able to finally solve the problems that have been sort
of be doubling us. Yeah. I think in the book you write something
to the effect of Latin America you breathe a sigh of relief when the Wilson
administration came to power, and then you know, the common you know notion
among you know at least I was taught in school was that, you know,
Woodrow Wilson was an isolationist. But you write, as you write in
the book, that's not necessarily the case because you kind of expand upon what
happened during the Wilson administration with regards to Latin America. Yeah, so Woodrow
Wilson is the first Democratic president elected since eighteen ninety two, and so it's
been a long time, twenty years since the White House has seen a Democrat,
and Republicans by this point have our reputation as being the more more kind
of imperialistic party. The anti imperialists, as they're kind of call themselves,
are predominantly Democrats and sort of you know, involved as the Democratic Party.
A large part of that is frankly, just racism. That racism correlated strongly
with anti imperialism, because the sort of understanding was the more you get involved
in the quote unquote tropics, you know, the more that this kind of
creates racial problems. And so Southerners in particular tend to be very sort of
isolationist at least in terms of their principles. Might be the wrong word,
but at least in certain in terms of their inclination, and so when Woodrow
Wilson gets elected, there's this like palpable sense that things are going to change.
And that's true not only because of who Democrats are. It's also true
because he himself, while he's running his campaign, makes clear that he's opposed
to all these interventions. He appoints William Jennings Brian of Cross of Gold fame
as his Secretary of State, and Brian is probably the periods you know,
anti imperialist Parxlans. This is his issue. He's always cared about this,
and those expectations are not only not born out, but are just so so
far from the mark that it really is incredible because the Wilson administration ends up
being the high peak the culmination of American interventionism. And there's a few different
reasons for that. Part of it is that Wilson comes in and he is
so convinced that he knows what he's doing, and that the problem up until
this point has been bad intentions on the part of his predecessors that he essentially
says, well, everything's going to turn out fine if I do more or
less the same thing as my predecessors, because I'm going to be doing it
for a good reason, whereas they obviously were doing it for corrupt reasons.
And the problem is that that is just not true. And so when he
does the same thing, he gets the same results, only he's i think,
unable to admit when he's making mistakes, and it's when it's leading him
further and further into these interventions because he's so convinced again that kind of good
intentions are going to be all that matters. Part of the problem, too,
is that right after Wilson gets elected, World War One starts. And
on the one hand, that's a good thing from the perspective of the US's
strategic situation, because it means that the US doesn't really need to worry about
the new of these European great powers suddenly attacking in Latin America. Right It's
not like France and Germany really has the forces to spare for that. But
on the other hand, it really sets up this major concern that after the
war, and Americans for the most part believe this is going to be a
short war, but that after the war, whichever power wins or loses is
going to try and basically kind of either makeup for its loss or kind of
you know, build on its moment winning momentum by going into Latin amer America.
And I think there's good reason for the US to kind of have that
in mind, but it becomes sort of a really a driving force in the
way that American policymakers start thinking about the region, and so their attitude becomes,
we need to basically get the region in order. We need to stabilize
it while we can, because if it's not fully ready to go by the
time World War One finishes, we're gonna be seeing major trouble. And so
Wilson ends up responding to threats as they come up much more kind of I
think aggressively than previous presidents. And you see this everything from his multiple interventions
in Mexico. He occupies Haiti, he occupies the Dominican Republic, he occupies
Panama, he occupies Cuba, he occupies Nicaraguay at this point is already a
little occupied, so he doesn't get too much blamed for that, but he
you know, I mean, and he also annex is the Danish West Indies,
which becomes the US Virgin Islands. And each of these things I think
you can really link to if not a direct European threat, then at least
hovering in the background this sense that you US needs to kind of get a
hemisphere into order before things really go stile after the war. Yeah, and
that you know idea that you know, Europe eventually, you know, becomes
the centerfold for the most part, you know, during World War Two with
the battle against Hitler and the Nazis, and then obviously the Pacific opens up
with war with Japan. Um. You know, as we look back on
foreign policy, you know, the United States, you know, through these
decades has become you know, the leading superpower in the world. You know,
looking back at some of these events, you know, do you see
kind of similarities in how the United States handled those events and how we handled
some recent foreign policy related events. Absolutely. I mean, for one thing,
I have a chapter in the book where I sort of step back and
look at the US interventions, and you know, I think a huge part
of what the US was trying to do was nation builled by force. Right.
Um, the US wanted these saw these massive political and economic problems in
these nations, and it wanted to kind help stabilize them and set them up
as sort of independent states and that's not that different from what we're you know,
we're trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's not that different
in terms of results as to how you know, those two nations ended up
turning out. And I talk in the book a lot, you know about
a lot of the different reasons. I think part of it stems from basic
problems that in theory can be remedied, and so American policy makers are often
ignorant. They don't really know much about the political ecosystems that they're trying to
get involved in. They're looking for sort of silver bullet solutions without realizing how
one thing can affect another thing. And if you pull this thread, oftentimes
it'll affect something all the way over here. And those sorts of problems I
think in theory can be fixed, although I would say the fact that we
seem to continually make those mistakes suggest that perhaps even if these problems are fixable
in theory, in practice they don't seem to be, and that should be
something that policy makers should account for. But I also just point at some
of the reasons why there are kind of more structural reasons why it's very,
very difficult to stabilize the society from the outside, even if you're doing everything
exactly right. And so part of the reason is that if you want to
have these sustainable institutions, political institutions that can hold up in a nation,
they need to have internal legitimacy. And whenever you're kind of imposing them from
the outside, not only are you depriving local people of that legitimacy, but
you're also oftentimes destroying what few institutions they do have that are kind of serving
that function. And so in kind of looking at the sweep of these interventions,
you know, one of the main takeaways is not necessarily that it can't
be done, but that nation building is incredibly difficult and incredibly hard to do.
But then the other kind of lesson of the book, and in some
ways the more important lesson is sort of the one that I started with,
which is why is it the Rising power send to be aggressive an expansionist?
The book is obviously there a discussion so far as I think supported it was
not an exception to this rule. It was quite aggressive, It was quite
expansionist, But I think the reasons why it acted that way are not exactly
what conventional wisdom would suggest and paradoxically that I think the US was often acting
from a sort of defensive impulse. And I think that that's important to understand
as we look at the rising powers of today, or at least the kind
of other great powers of today, so Russia and China and then obviously to
a lesser extent or on and sort of understanding what might lead those nations to
be aggressive is important, even if the kind of answer might be one that
is, you know, not necessarily kind of consistent with what we think about
when we think about what drives you powers to be aggressive and expansionist. Yeah,
that actually ties into my next question. You know, you mentioned China.
You know, early on in our conversation you talked about how they are,
you know, this growing power. They very clearly have regional and global
ambition that they're trying to achieve, and you note this in the book that
they are you know, they have all the characteristics of arising power, but
they're not exactly following the same track as the United States. Because you expand
upon that point, So I would say that they're not. They're rising obviously
in a very different world, right, And so you know, for one
thing, we have nuclear weapons, which present their own kind of problems and
perils, but also inject an element of stability through you know, mutually assured
destruction and the fact that great powers with nuclear weapons tend not to want to
go to war with each other for obvious reasons. China's also, it's rise
has in large part been historically unique and so far as it's been fueled almost
exclusively by trade as opposed to by conquest, and that's very, very unusual.
I mean, even the United States, you know, Secretary of State
Canto Leasa Rice, because this great vote where she says, you know,
people say that the United States was isolationists, But if we are isolationists,
how did we get so big? And you know, the point is we
started out as thirteen original colonies and we ended up the size of a continent.
And so even the US, in large part it's rise was a function
I think of conquest and kind of you know expansion. China is sort of
unusual and that it comes out of, you know, kind of the turbulence
of the first half of the twentieth century, and it ends up becoming powerful
by integrating itself into the trade architecture that the United States set up after World
War Two, and a large part of that is, you know, they're
not exactly playing by the rules and things like that, but it's not the
same sort of aggressive kind of impulse of conquest that you sometimes see with a
lot of other rising powers. And so talking to Chinese scholars, what you
often hear is, while China is different from other rising powers, it's not
going to be aggressive an expansionist. It's not gonna it's not going to try
and become a hegemond, it's not going to try and dominate its neighbors because
we're just different, right. And the point that I make at the end
of the book is that, yes, there are those differences, but this
kind of example of the United States suggests that they might not matter very much
because the United States was also different in its own way. I mean,
it's trite, I think to say that, you know, the United States
is exceptionalists and exceptional power, but I think there's a lot of truth to
that in certain ways. And certainly that's the way that Americans saw themselves at
this period. As I mentioned before, one of the surprises in the research
was how much American policymakers, as they were taking these steps, were really
regretting them and sort of seeing them as a last resort that they had been
driven to. And so it's not like Wilson or taft A rose of alt
didn't you care about other nations sovereignty, It didn't support classical liberal values,
didn't you know, oppose intervention on principle. It's just that none of those
things were important enough when it came down to it, because they thought that
they faced sort of security imperatives. And my point in the end of the
book is when I talk about China, is that there's reason to think that
is going to face those exact same security imperatives, and that it will react
equally aggressively and expansionally if it expansively, if it comes down to it.
And so you know, my caution is that on the one hand, you
know, history and ever repeats itself exactly, but it does tend to rhyme,
and sort of looking at these lessons of kind of how other powers rose
and the reasons why they did it helps shed light on the mechanics and dynamics
that might also be a play in our own age. Absolutely, and I
think that's a good place to leave it. If people want to order the
book, where can they go to get it? And if they want to
find you and more of your work, where can they go? So the
book is available anywhere books are sold. I'm not sure I open this episode
is airing, but it's coming out on June twenty seventh, but you should
pre order today if it's this episodes getting aired before then. And then as
far as my work, I published a variety of publications and so there's I
guess no one a good spot for that, but yeah, just keep an
eye on in general, I suppose awesome. Well, thank you so much
again for joining us, and thank you our listeners for joining us as well.
You've been listening to another edition of the Federal's Radio Hour. I'm Sean
Fleetwood. We'll be back with more, and until then, be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the Freddy. I heard the fame by the reason,
and then it faded away