When Economics and Great-Power Foreign Policy Collide

The front cover of the original edition of Paul Kennedy’s blockbuster The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers neatly summarizes the conventional wisdom on geopolitics at the end of the Cold War. John Bull holds a Union Jack and is stepping off a pedestal. Next to him is Uncle Sam, carrying a U.S. flag, looking glum. Climbing up behind him is a man carrying the flag of Japan. That 1987 edition came out at a time when it was pretty universally agreed—in popular culture and in the U.S. State Department, as well as in scholarly tomes about the great powers—that Japan would soon be running the world.

When Kennedy published an article in September 2023 revisiting his book, the image accompanying it replaced Japan with a Russian soldier and a suited Chinese man, pushing Uncle Sam off the pedestal as John Bull fell into the abyss.

A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy From the Revolution to the Rise of China, Dale C. Copeland, Princeton University Press, 504 pp., $38, February 2024

The cover of Dale C. Copeland’s magisterial new book on the history of economics in great-power foreign policy, A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, tells a more subtle story, about two possible patterns of commercial usurpation: one violent and one cooperative. The image is of Hong Kong harbor shortly after Hong Kong had been annexed by the British following the First Opium War in 1839-42. Steam-and-sail ships take up the foreground; one carries a U.S. flag.

The U.S. ship signals the rising power’s growing trade presence in Asia and the competition that British traders faced as a result. What happens when a country’s trade is threatened? Copeland says all great powers have a “natural predisposition to expand the size of their economic power spheres and to protect their trade routes with naval power.” This is the foundation of his theory of the role of “trade expectations” in foreign policy. Neither the liberal argument that trade interdependence fosters cooperation nor the realist argument that trade interdependence creates insecurity and conflict fully explains why and when conflicts arise between countries. A middle way outlined by Copeland—dynamic realism—helps explain the United States and its foreign policy since its founding. As Copeland’s theory dictates, if positive expectations of future trade look secure, then cooperation and peace prevail; if future trade expectations appear to be constrained by another power, then conflict could follow.

In A World Safe for Commerce, Copeland uses the case of the United States to show how it has consistently pursued a foreign policy driven not by ideology or interest groups, as alternative theories of foreign relations posit, but instead by a mandate to protect trade—or future trade—by U.S. citizens. This was part of the original bargain struck between the government and its citizens from the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and it has carried through to operations against Houthi pirates and Chinese chip manufacturers today.

As a catch-all explanation of foreign-policy decisions at key moments in U.S. history, Copeland’s book provides a convincing path through the ideological-materialist weeds. As an instructive story about how a rising power could manage a tense but ultimately mutually productive relationship with the great power it was overtaking, the U.S.-U.K. relationship provides some interesting implications for contemporary geopolitics.

What is remarkable about Copeland’s historical approach is how it reveals the extent to which antagonism with Britain remained the defining feature of U.S. foreign policy well into the 20th century. Britain and the United States may now be friends, but that was never guaranteed, as he shows. While the American Revolution and the War of 1812 are the obvious examples, Copeland takes seriously the other ways that British free trade imperialism in the 19th century was a real threat to the U.S. view of its future commercial prosperity. Across the 19th century, everywhere the British Empire went, U.S. traders were also there: Hong Kong, Zanzibar, West Africa, Japan. Often, they were nipping at Britain’s heels. Sometimes, they were there first, to make sure that Britain couldn’t cut them out.

Yes, we know that the United States didn’t go to war with Britain in 1917. But it was surprising how close they were. In November 1914, with cotton shipments to Germany moldering in U.S. ports after Britain legislated to allow for the interception and seizure of neutral shipping to the continent, State Department counselor Robert Lansing pushed “for a hard-line stance against the British, even at the risk of war.”

The book’s careful pacing and unspooling of events keep the reader interested in just what it was that tipped U.S. President Woodrow Wilson off the fence of neutrality. And then the descriptions of the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II, in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill repeatedly undermined U.S. President Harry Truman in deliberations with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, serve to underscore just how unlikely a U.S.-U.K. alliance was.

During World War I, for instance, when the United States found it could finally do something about preserving the commercial access driving its defensive stance against the British Empire throughout the 19th century, it chose instead to take on a lesser power—Germany, already on the back foot—rather than aim directly for the British. In this analogy, would China seize the current “polycrisis” to finally take on the United States directly, or would it see an opportunity to work with the United States against, say, Russia?

A World Safe for Commerce convincingly argues that commerce shapes U.S. foreign policy and, in so doing, opens a new set of questions about which economic interests matter. When future trade prospects are the driving factor of foreign policy, does it matter if that trade is exports or imports? Does it matter if the commercial relationship is financial? Does it matter if the trade is funded by government borrowing—presumably from international institutions to which the United States is a major contributor?

If you’re asking about when protecting commerce might tip over into conflict or becomes a threat to existing great powers, the internal processes that might enable conflict become important. In a democracy, competing voices would theoretically act as a counterweight to any one economic interest, as they did as Wilson deliberated about whether to enter World War I. But in an oligarchy, they might not.

For many liberal democracies, the development bargain between governments and people means that what is most prioritized is not, in fact, trade specifically but the standard of living more generally. “A weakened economy at home would have reduced the nation’s ability to protect its interests and might even leave the homeland vulnerable to attack or outside efforts to subvert the social order,” Copeland suggests. Citizens of liberal democracies are taxpayers and consumers of state services. If the state fails to provide them with value for money, they will demand a new government. There is consistent pressure on leaders to give the people access to low-cost consumer goods, a high level of government service, and an increasing standard of living.

But historically not all great powers have made this particular bargain with their citizens. Some, in fact, have made no bargain at all. They simply maintain the monopoly on violence or have made a bargain with an oligarchy instead of with the people. And even liberal democracy isn’t a guarantee of rational behavior. In the end, it may have been Brexit that finally knocked Britain off that pedestal, when it voluntarily blew up its trade interest and standard of living for the sake of making a point.

What about China—has it really struck a development bargain with its citizens? And what mechanism of accountability exists between its citizens and leaders? Copeland writes that “the ability of the Chinese state to resist the internal threat posed by liberal democracies will depend fundamentally on whether the economy keeps growing.” Because if the ability of a country to provide a growing standard of living for its citizens is the ultimate goal of both China and the United States, as it was for both the United States and the U.K. in the era of their rivalry, there is no particular reason that China’s rise should have to cause conflict.

In other words: There is no pedestal, no Uncle Sam, no one has pushed John Bull, and no path to great power is guaranteed. Sometimes, the interdependence of great powers can be an evolving, dynamic relationship. And in some cases, people—and nations—just jump of their own accord, irrationally.