School of War - Ep 103: Sean Mirski on American Hegemony

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Sean Mirski, author of We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus, joins the show to talk about how the United States came to its global position and China’s attempts to match it. ▪️ Times      •    01:40 Introduction      •    2:22 An accidental project     •    6:41 The view from Washington      •    13:18 American paranoia     •    16:43 Post Civil War Mexico     •    22:04 Smedley Butler     •    24:46 The problem of order     •   31:12 After WWI     •   33:04 Strategic vulnerabilities     •    38:32 Regional hegemony     •    44:51 A desire to dominate     •    48:36 A lesson and a warning  Here is a link to the article discussed today Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Whatever its intentions for the world, there is zero debate that, closer to home, China seeks regional hegemony, its island building campaign in the South China Sea, its activities around Japan's Sankaku Islands, its attitude toward Taiwan, all paint a comprehensive picture of this fact, which the Chinese certainly do not deny. Well, what's another example of a major power seeking regional leadership on the way to greater ambitions? The United States in the 19th and at the turn of the 20th century, of course. How did we establish our current role in the Caribbean and the hemisphere at large. How did existing great powers feel about it? And what lessons do we think the Chinese are taking from our historical experience or should be taking from our

experience? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, which will fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thank you for joining School of War.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Sean Merski. He's a lawyer and a U.S. foreign policy scholar. He's worked on national security issues for multiple presidential administrations. and he is the author most recently of We May Dominate the World. Sean, thank you so much for joining the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. So this book is about, I'm going to use a troublemaking phrase. It's about America's near abroad and our consolidation of regional hegemony a century or so ago.

By the way, I just have to say it's fascinating. It's really deeply researched and it is incredibly relevant for all sorts of reasons that we'll get into today. So I warmly recommend it to the listeners. But I guess my first question for you's kind of personal question was, how did you, you mean, you have like a respectable job. You know, you have clients. You know, you went to law school. What's up with this sideline and scholarship about not just foreign policy, but about the foreign policy of the United States in the Western Hemisphere? How did this all come about for you?

By accident. And in a sense, I was very much, I think, trapped into it. I had at the time just graduated from law school, and this was about eight years ago. And I was set to clerk for two years, and the general deal while clerking for a judge is that you usually can't publish anything while you're doing so, just as a matter of not wanting to, you know, publish anything controversial that might bring ill, you know, ill repute down on the judge, on the head of your judge. And so I thought to myself, well, I should just write an academic article about something historical and that way, you know, it won't be overcome by events by the time it ends up being published two years later.

And I'd always been sort of fascinated by this question of why is it that rising powers tend to be aggressive and expansionist? And the historical record is pretty clear that that is true for most rising powers. It seems to be true for China today. But the explanations as to why have always, to me at least been a little bit underdeveloped, underbaked. And so I thought it would be fun to look at the United States as a case study as a nation that in many ways is exceptional, you know, comes from this background where it has these deep. deeply ingrained principles against intervention, against colonialism, in favor of sovereignty, and nevertheless ended up carving out this fear of influence in its own neighborhood in a very violent way, as I shown in the book.

And so I thought it would be fun to sort of look at that case study and better understand why is it that rising powers act the way they do. The problem, of course, was that that academic article quickly morphed into something that was far beyond my control, and eight years later, the book finally came out. So it was not something I went into kind of with the intention to sort of write this big book or anything. Was all this before or after? I see in your bio here, you were named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Was this before or after?

So I'm teasing you slightly here. You're not going to get indicted, are you? You know, there's like a pipeline from that list to indictments. This has been well covered in the press. You know, I don't think I realize that. I've noticed that there are certainly the pipelines to indictment from certain schools and professions. I'm hoping that I can avoid that. I feel like the lawyers tend to be a little bit safer on that front.

I saw an amazing, like it was, I think it was the onion that did it actually, but it was an ad for Harvard, but done up as a community college, you know, like billboard, you know, like learn computer programming, you know, generous financial aid packages. Our alumni have gone on to, you know, careers in, careers in healthcare, Goldman Sachs and the Vietnam War, you know, is great stuff. Sorry, I'm getting it's off track here. No, no, no, no. Yeah, well, and this just all goes to the point that when I first got started with this subject, I mean, I knew, you know, I don't want to say nothing, but very close to nothing about the subject. And that's part why it took such a long time to do. And, you know, my sense is that most Americans don't know this history particularly well either.

I think for many Americans, you know, history sort of starts with World War II. Maybe there's a little bit known about the founding, about the Civil War. But it really ends up starting with World War II. And there's a sort of focus on Europe and Asia, which is completely understandable given the way that the Cold War was waged. But, you know, for the first 150 years of our history, everything was kind of oriented at Latin America in the Western Hemisphere, which really was the most important region for our security. And, you know, statesmen certainly acted that way. And I think that's something that's sort of been lost. And, you know, that's part of the reason that I ended up writing the book I did. Yeah. I think, I mean, if anything penetrates through, it's probably the Spanish-American war, you know, like, people sort of high school knowledge of history. And by the way, I mean, I don't mean, this is true of me. I mean, I've, I've sort of become a, become a foreign policy type as well. And I spend most of my time thinking about things that happen in Eurasia. I spend relatively little thinking about the Western Hemisphere. And we can talk about why that's probably a dangerous

mistake as we as we go on here. But, well, let's, let's get into it. Let's let's, let's go back to the 19th century. And maybe, I don't know when you want to start the story. We could go all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. We can we can start after the Civil War. You pick. But pick a time and just sort of paint a picture from Washington of when you're looking at the Western Hemisphere, you know, North, Central, South America, what is the threat picture like? You know, what is the view from Washington when we're thinking about the Western Hemisphere and national security terms at the start of your story? Yeah, so I'll pick three points if I can.

And I think they sort of form a useful kind of set of comparison points. So the first is just at the founding of the country. And the thing that is sort of underappreciated, I think, is that when the United States first became independent, it's 13 colonies clinging to the edge of the eastern seaboard and surrounded everywhere you look by hostile powers, France, Great Britain, the Native American tribes, and then a little further out, Russia, and then there's Spain to the south. And so the United States, that sort of threat assessment ends up pushing the United States towards George Washington's famous. you know, isolationism and sort of staying out of the politics of Europe for fear that we're going to get dragged into wars with the great powers. The problem is that even though I think the United States on the whole does a relatively good job of following that advice, we still get dragged into two great power wars very early in our history. We end up in the quasi-war with France in the 1790s, and then, of course, war with Great Britain in 1812. And the capital gets burned. So these are not, you know, so I think American statesmen at the time had a very real

sense of the great power danger from Europe, and we're looking for ways to sort of improve their strategic situation. The second moment is 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine gets declared. And it's a big deal for the United States, because over the previous decade, the Western Hemisphere has gone from being a hemisphere that is entirely great power colonies, with the exception of the United States and Haiti, to being a hemisphere that is largely now independent Latin American states who have thrown off their colonial shackles and declared independence. And from the United States perspective, this is such a strategic shift and such a good strategic

shift because it means that the United States can now imagine a world in which the entire hemisphere is cleansed of any foreign great power. And if the United States can do that, then just by virtue of the United States' own size and power and military might, the United States will end up being the only great power in the hemisphere. And that will make it essentially invulnerable. The United States will not have to worry about attack from any of its neighbors for obvious reasons. There's not a lot of danger coming to the United States directly from, let's say, the militaries of Central America or, you know, South America or even Mexico. And likewise, the United States won't have to worry about any attacks by the European

great powers, so long as it has a reasonable Navy, because it has two moats that will protect it, and there won't be a significant land presence of any of the European militaries. And so I think in 1823, all of that crystallizes in the Monroe Doctrine, which is, at its sort of platonic ideal, this vision of the United States in a hemisphere where it is it has removed every other great power, every other significant threat to its national security, and it sort of stands alone and vulnerable, as I said. But at the same time, there's this danger that that is a vision that not only won't come to pass, but might actually be reversed because in 1823 there's this danger that the United States spies

from what's called the Holy Alliance, which is this alliance of monarchies in Central and Eastern Europe that is actually dedicated to stamping out democracy, stamping out classical liberalism in Europe itself. And the risk that the United States sees is that these monarchical powers are going to come back and try and restore the colonies in Latin America and the Western Hemisphere to their original colonial rulers, Portugal and Spain. And so the Monroe Doctrine comes out of this. It's these two paragraphs in President Monroe's State of the Union address, where he basically says, we are erecting a keepout sign in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

We promise not to interfere in European politics. In turn, Europe's powers should not interfere in anything in the Western or in the Western hemisphere. And in particular, they should not try and control or oppress the destinies of our neighbors. And so it's, I think, one of those. moments in American history where there's just a real clear vision that's sort of set out for the country and it ends up sort of setting the North Star for American foreign policy all the way up to the to the Cold War. The problem, though, is that we have very little means to enforce any of

this. And so for the next 40 years, the Mono Doctrine is mostly treated as a laughing stock by Europe. And the United States itself doesn't take it that seriously because it's occupied by more important things like settling the West, but also by sort of its internal sectional conflict between the north and the south. And so the third moment that I just wanted to highlight in response to your question is the civil war itself, because that's the moment when I think the threat really crystallizes for Americans, because in the middle of the civil war, France, along with Great Britain and Spain, end up invading Mexico. And Spain and Great Britain leave, but France ends up occupying the entire country. France takes the younger brother of the Austrian Habsburg Emperor and puts him on the throne

of Montezuma as essentially a puppet emperor. And the entire plan on the part of the French Empire is very explicitly an anti-American, stop the United States from expanding and start checking its rise kind of thing. And Americans go ballistic. I mean, even in the middle of the Civil War in 1864, you have senior policymakers in both the North and the South saying, let's put the Civil War on hold. Let's send a combined force down south where General Lee and General Grant will work together They're taking spelled the French out of Mexico. And once that's done, we can resume the civil war or come to negotiated settlement. I mean, it just sounds crazy to modern years because the civil war is, of course, the sort of

defining clash in American history. But the mere fact that these ideas were seriously considered, I think sort of underscores the threat that the United States saw. This threat of European great powers coming back into the hemisphere and establishing themselves militarily in or near our borders. So the French imperial play in Mexico leads me sort of to Manetka. question, which is if we flip the map around and look at North America or look at the United States from the perspective of European capitals, you know, our American fear is justified.

Obviously, in this French case in the 1860s, it seems to be the case. But if you look at British policy or for that matter, the policy of the Holy Alliance, you know, do they do they see, I mean, it's very potential in a way. It's like, yes, America could one day be this problem for us. But if you're there, I'm going to pick a year 1820, it's more conceptual than real. And nevertheless, Is it on their minds? Are they actively plotting or is Washington a bit paranoid? It's a mix of both, I would say. American policymakers certainly are paranoid in the sense that this is something that they are continuously worried about between basically the start of the Civil War all the way up to the end of World War I where the threat at that point just really disappears. But in that intervening period, and particularly in the 1880s forward, this great power threat ends up becoming sort of the central focus of. American policymakers and frankly it's a little bit of a crisis mentality. But at the same time,

I think there is much truth to it. The first point to make is that as you say, it's a potential risk. American policymakers aren't dumb. They understand that at any given moment, it's not likely that Great Britain or Germany or France is about to invade Latin America. What they worry about, though, is that even if you think it's a 5% chance, a 25% chance, a 1% chance, whatever the odds are, there's a risk that it ends up quickly spiraling and becoming existential for the Republic. And so part of what informs their thinking on this is the overall global context. And from the period 1870 to 1914, the world is undergoing what's oftentimes called the second age of imperialism after the first of Christopher Columbus.

And during the second age of imperialism, Europe's great powers end up colonizing what is essentially left of the rest of the world. And so this is when the scramble for Africa happens. This is when much of the Middle East is colonized, much of Asia is colonized. And it's a really remarkable grab of land on the part of the colonial powers. Between 1870 and 1900, Germany, Great Britain, and France alone colonize, I think, something like eight or nine million square miles, which is twice the size of Europe itself. By the time you get to 1914, 85% of the world's landmass is under the control of colonial powers. And that 15% that's left is basically the Western Hemisphere.

If you look at a map, it is remarkable the number of countries that have managed to maintain their independence outside of Europe and outside of the Western Hemisphere. By some counts, it comes down to three, Ethiopia, Japan, and Thailand. And of course, Ethiopia gets colonized by Italy within a couple of decades, and Japan is a colonial power itself. And so it's not a happy record. And what Americans are worried about is essentially one of these European great powers getting a foothold somewhere in Latin America and all the other great power is concluding that,

well, they can't be left behind because otherwise they'll be at a strategic disadvantage. And so there's this concern about the spiral, this scramble, where one power gets a foothold and that all the others jump on and suddenly within a few decades, all of Latin America's carved up into new colonial empires, much in the way that Africa was, much in the way that the rest of the world was. And I think that's to some extent a valid concern. I mean, if you look at the map, it really is remarkable how the Western Hensens. hemisphere survived this age of imperialism in a way that the rest of the world didn't. And frankly, I just think that's hard to explain other than by pointing to the presence of

the United States. Yeah. So you divide the post-cold war, sorry, post-Civil War, American approach to this problem set into multiple stages, three stages, right? And the first being a stage that involves more diplomacy and sort of the more indirect approach. Maybe we can start with Mexico and talk about that. And then what I really want to get to is this sort of maximally interventionist. stage, which you, I think, do a really interesting job of explaining the logic of.

But before we get, how do we resolve things in Mexico? Yeah. Well, so the United States in Mexico, Abraham Lincoln and Seward, William Henry Seward, who's the Secretary of State, they're urged to go. And as I mentioned, to invade Mexico and expel the French. After the Civil War ends, this really ends up becoming a very serious debate in American politics, and especially even within the cabinet. Andrew Johnson himself was vociferously, as part of the 1864 campaign, said that once the civil war would end, he would invade Mexico to expel the French.

Seward ends up very delicately sort of maneuvering through the cabinet and preventing an open invasion of Mexico. But the United States nevertheless engages in this massive proxy war that I think is really unrivaled in the rest of American history, with a possible exception perhaps of the anti-Sovic campaign in Afghanistan during the 1980. But General Philip Sheridan goes down to the border with 50,000 Union soldiers. They start piling up arsenals right across the river from the kind of Haurista rebels who are fighting the French. Those massive arms caches go missing, of course, and the Huarista rebels the next day end up having, you know, some of the best American arms, you know, in their campaign. And when combined with sort of diplomatic pressure from Seward, the French Empire in Mexico

starts to gradually collapse. And by 1867, the French have withdrawn. on their forces, and the puppet emperor ends up being executed by Benito Juarez. And so the Mexicans essentially retake their country. And so it's a happy story from the U.S. perspective, and the U.S. really sort of takes to heart the lessons from this story that first, the country needs to be on its guard against these foreign powers. And that second, the threat is a real one, and that there will be a repeat someday, and that the monroe doctrine needs to be strengthened before that. At the same time, the U.S. approach to its national security is not, and I don't think really

has ever been aimed at dominating its neighbors. As I mentioned before, the United States doesn't really need to dominate its neighbors in order to achieve its security objectives, right? There's no particular reason why the United States needs to, let's say, overthrow central American governments or install puppet presidents in Cuba. From its perspective, all it needs to do is kick out the European great powers, which have always been the main focus. And so the Monroe Doctrine, at least as it was sort of originally intended,

was always a defensive doctrine that was aimed at protecting Latin Americans from European colonization, not for their own sake, but really for the United States' sake. The problem that the United States faces, and in a lot of ways Mexico's invasion by France, typifies this problem, is that much of Latin America, particularly in the Caribbean basin, is deeply unstable, politically, economically, in today, days terms, we would say that these are failing or failed states. And I don't use that terminology lightly. This is not just countries that have different forms of government than the United States. These are countries that oftentimes change presidents more frequently than the season. Mexico alone,

I think by one count, goes through dozens of presidents between its independence and 1860. You know, other countries like Honduras are racking up $120 million in debt when they have annual government revenues of a couple million dollars. It's, you know, level. of debt and sort of political instability that are really about as extreme as you can imagine. And the concern that the United States has is this disorder, these power vacuums, are a temptation to European great powers and that these European great powers can essentially take advantage of this disorder to move in and establish themselves. And so the U.S. foreign policy towards the region ends up being oriented at stabilizing its

neighbors and strengthening them, making them, if not ideal platonic models of democracy and good governance, then at least strong enough that they can defend themselves against any kind of European colonialism. And the model that the United States has in mind is much of South America, where, yes, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, these countries occasionally experienced some disorder, but on the whole, they're sufficiently strong that there's not a real threat of European colonialism. And so the U.S. basically wants that kind of stability in the Caribbean basin. And as you mentioned, the sort of first phase of this diplomacy is this period between the Civil War and the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, where the United States tries to achieve this through, I would say,

non-intrusive means or less intrusive means. It's a lot of diplomacy. It's a lot of talk about pan-American communities. It's a lot of trade reciprocity treaties, efforts to sort of economically stand up its neighbors from the outside. The problem is that by the 1890s, this just doesn't seem to be working very well. The United States' neighbors are no more stable than they were before, and the European threat, if anything, seems graver because now the rest of the world has almost been fully colonized. And so it looks like Latin America is next on Europe's menu. And so that's, I think, the context in which the U.S. ends up entering the Spanish-American War and the way in which U.S. foreign policy changes afterwards. Yeah. You know, of course, as a Marine, you know, the quote-unquote banana war is in the

sort of period of American interventionism in the Caribbean, you know, in Central America that you're writing about South America is part of the Marine Corps' story and ether. I was thrilled to see Smedley Butler in your book. A great, maybe we could talk about him for just a second, but he's a great, great figure in American history, one of only two Marines, I believe, to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice. I think that's correct. He's just an enormously colorful character.

He's born into a Quaker family in Pennsylvania, but ends up signing up for the Spanish American War, signing up for the Marines during the Spanish-American War, in part because there's this burst of sort of patriotism. And at that point, there's just no looking back. he ends up making nearly his entire career in the Marines, and he ends up being the tip of the spear in just about every U.S. intervention in Latin America, along with interventions further abroad, so he's involved in the Philippine-American War, as well as in putting down the boxer rebellion in China. And so he's just this enormously colorful character, but part of what makes him,

I think, stand out in history is that he ends up sort of repudiating all of this in the 1930s, where he basically takes a stand against interventionism and becomes a real, frankly, hardcore pacifist who makes claims that a large part of the motivation for these interventions was economic greed, that essentially the U.S. was going into what you call the banana wars at the behest of banana companies and the Wall Street banks. And as I argue in the book, I don't think that's really accurate. General Butler, for all his enormous talents, was at the end of the day he was the guy on the ground. He was not the one in Washington ordering the interventions and really didn't have much insight into why they were being ordered. But he ends up, you know, in part because he has both

this like distinguished military record and also this very sort of counterintuitive take on military intervention, he ends up really earning himself a pretty prominent place in both marine history, but also frankly, among the larger public. Yeah, war is a racket, right? Isn't that his book? Exactly, war is a racket. And actually, I mean, he, one of the, I don't touch on this in the book, because it's sort of off topic. But during the 1930s, he comes, he makes public, that he was approached to help lead a coup against FDR. And, you know, there's, I think to this day, significant debate about how accurate that statement is, but there's at least some evidence to suggest that that might have been right.

So back to this interventionist period in the actual logic driving it, not that economic considerations weren't there, but I am curious to know your view of the primary considerations. You talk about this thing in the book you call the problem of order, and I thought it was a really sort of thoughtful way of unpacking the reasons for American intervention, but that and also sort of foreshadowing the ways in which, you know, it's not like we, you know, go into Haiti the first time and then our problems are solved, right? These, we seem to get caught in these cycles of intervention and then reintervention dealing with the problems that are, you know, to quote Kissinger, the solution,

every crisis seems to engender the next crisis in this process. Walk us through how, I don't know if you want to pick an example or just more generically, like walk us through this period at the turn of the century of American interventionism and how it actually functions. Yeah, so I think the place to start is sort of, I think, to clear up the misconception that the United States was doing these military interventions in the 19-Ots and the 1910s with anything approaching enthusiasm. I think there's a sense sometimes, including in history books, that the United States was sort of gratuitously invading its neighbors because either it was under the influence of imperialist ideology or because it was, as I mentioned before, acting at the behest of business interests or because it was simply racist. and sort of wanted to dominate its neighbors. I think if you start looking at individual interventions, however, the overall trend is that

the United States entered them quite unwillingly, that even presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, who have this reputation for being kind of gung-ho, rough riders, really almost without exception, and there are exceptions, but very few, was quite unhappy every time he was forced to, in his view, occupy Cuba or to take over the Dominican Republic custom houses. And I think that sort of reluctance reflects the fact that the United States was never really that interested in dominating its neighbors. Instead, it was felt as if it was forced into that situation by what I call in the book the problem of order.

And essentially, the problem of order has sort of three prongs as I lay it out. It basically says that the United States has a serious problem whenever it has an area of the world that's strategically important, which ends up being the entire Caribbean basin. when that area of the world is under threat from foreign great powers, which during this time, the United States thought that the Caribbean Basin was, and when the area in question is unstable and therefore offers an opportunity for foreign expansion. And when you put those three things together, strategic importance, foreign threat, and instability, the result is this sort of problem that needs to be solved one way or the other.

And the United States, as I mentioned before, tries to do this, tries to solve that problem through diplomacy and trade. But since that doesn't work, it ends up concluding that the best way to do this is to kind of start tinkering with these nations' sovereignty directly, to sort of go in and not necessarily occupy them, not necessarily govern them fully, but sort of help them along the process of developing into stable states. And this starts out in relatively minor ways, relatively. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, for instance, the United States imposes what's called the Platt Amendment on Cuba. And the Platt Amendment is essentially a list of rules that Cuba's government is supposed to follow. They can't alienate any part of their

territory to foreign great power for obvious reasons. They're not allowed to take on too much debt because, once again, the United States is worried about them finding themselves in financial thrall to a European bank or European great power. And finally, the United States reserves the right to militarily intervene in Cuba if there's ever essentially anarchy or kind of a loss of government in Cuba. And the United States doesn't impose the Plaid Amendment as this sort with the idea that it's going to start intervening in Cuba militarily every other year or anything like that. Instead, it's sort of seen as a failsafe. And if anything, it's seen as a sort of Damocles that's going to hang over the head of Cuban politicians in Havana who will have every

incentive to govern responsibly, to not lead to revolutions, to not revolt, because they know that if they do, the United States can potentially come in and lead them to lose their sovereignty. The problem is, though, that initial kind of what I would call minor, and again, minor in quotation marks, interventions like the Platt Amendment end up setting the scene for sort of later, bigger interventions. And so in 1906, for instance, the Cuban liberals, one of the two political parties, ends up purposefully launching a revolution on the understanding that it's going to bring the United States in. And the liberals basically conclude that this is a better alternative than letting the moderate party continue to govern. And so the Platt Amendment starts setting up these perverse incentives. In other ways, the United States' initial interventions end up kind of leading to more instability down the road. And so what ends up happening is that the problem of order starts to become sort of self-sustaining.

Each intervention leads to more instability, and that instability in turn leads to the need for additional intervention. And on and on the cycle goes until by the end of the decade, the United States is occupying multiple countries. It has, you know, entirely governing them. It has counterinsurgencies being, it's waging counterinsurgencies. In other countries, it's running the custom houses of these countries, which essentially means administering their finances. It's just this massive, massive invasion of Latin American sovereignty across the board in a way that frankly no one is happy about, certainly not the Latin Americans, but even the American

presidents who are ordering these interventions are, on the whole, quite unhappy to be doing so. And so the record between 1898 and 1918 is something like the United States, the United States, used or threatened force, I think, an average of nearly three times a year against a country in Latin America. And as I mentioned, some of those are relatively minor threats of force. Others are massive impositions, including, for instance, the occupation of Haiti for 19 years or the occupation of the Dominican Republic for eight years.

And it just really, it ends up in a place where no one is quite happy that the situation ends up the way it does. And it's engendering this backlash where we talked about Smedley Butler a bit, but there is, you know, obviously post-World War I an American rejection of, of internationalism on some level. How does that then play out in the Caribbean context? So at the end of World War I, the United States' security situation has once again changed dramatically. Going into the war, the United States expected that the European great powers would end the war relatively quickly and then be in a position potentially to start looking at the Western Hemisphere. Instead,

the war drags on as long as it does and is so costly that by the end of it, the great powers are essentially lying flat on the ground, and the United States really has such a surplus of power that it really doesn't need to worry about any foreign great power thought to the hemisphere. And so at that point, the underlying rationale for this sort of intervention to quell instability in the region has disappeared. And at the same time, Latin Americans have, by this point, sort of formed a hemispheric-wide coalition against the United States, where they're really criticizing the United States quite loudly in international forums and bilateral relations. And on top of that, of course, domestically as well, these interventions were never popular.

But the occupations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in particular lead to allegations, credible allegations, of very serious human rights abuses. And those spill out into the public press. The 1920 presidential election, this becomes a huge issue when Warren Harding seizes on a statement made by FDR, who is the vice presidential candidate for the Democrats, that he wrote the Haiti's constitution. And Harding says, you know, it's not the place of the assistant secretary of the Navy to write, you know, constitutions for our neighbors. This is just counter to American values. And so during the 1920s, you see the United States basically liquidating its sphere of influence. It withdraws its Marines from these countries. It ends these occupations.

And then it starts to unwind the various policies that kind of led to them. And so this all culminates in the 1930s with FDR. being elected president and sort of reputing much of his own history in the 1910s and establishing what's called the good neighbor policy, where he basically ends up promising never to intervene again in Latin America and never to even interfere in Latin American politics. Yes, it's fascinating. If you read someone we've talked about on the show before, Nicholas Spickman and, you know, it's American strategy, America's strategy in world politics, I think is the book.

I remember reading for the first time some years ago and being struck and kind of surprised speaking to my own, the sort of biases we were talking about at the start of our session today, about how much time he invests in talking about the military geography of the Caribbean, South America, and how in a conflict with aspiring Eurasian hegemon's, that's incredibly relevant. Like, is hemispheric defense feasible, et cetera, et cetera, et, so, you know, like, so, you know, there's clearly, as of the early 40s, a concern. I mean, I've not tested this statement, so I'm going to make an observation.

You tell me if I'm way off base. There's kind of a concern that there remain vulnerabilities in just pure strategic terms. There remain vulnerabilities to our South that Nazis could exploit. Absolutely. I mean, one of the, so between let's say the end of World War I and mid-1930s, the United States really does have a privileged place in the hemisphere where it doesn't need to worry about foreign security threats. But the rise of Germany and the rise of imperial Japan changed that picture.

And by the, let's call it the 1937, 1938, FDR in particular, has become gravely concerned about the Nazi threat to the Western Hemisphere. And there's a number of reasons for that. Germany is acting aggressively economically in terms of the deals they establish. But there are also local German expats as well as Nazi sympathetic local organizations that at least from FDR's perspective are launching potential revolutions and coups in much of South America. And so there's once again this concern that this sort of local instability might lead to the rise of a regime that, if not directly controlled by Nazi Germany, is at least closely aligned with it. And part of that too is just technological. I mean, FDR is obsessed with how far airplanes can fly and how fast they can fly. And so if you ever read through his press conferences, which were for the most put off the record, but now we have the transcripts, he's always talking to the reporters about how long it would take for, you know, let's say a German planes to fly from, let's say, a German planes to fly from, let's

say the bulge of Brazil to, you know, Florida or the like. And so he does become extremely, extremely concerned about this. And the question that ends up being posed for the United States is, what do you do about this, right? And conventionally, the answer would be, well, you bend down the hatches, you sort of re-exert the American sphere of influence over the Western Hemisphere, and we can ride out the storm, right? Whatever might happen in Europe, whatever might happen in Asia, at the end of the day, it's not going to be a problem for the United States because we can sort of protect the hemisphere. But for a variety of reasons, some of its technology, some of its FDR's concerns about the stability of the hemisphere, FDR ends up concluding that the best

way to deal with the Nazi threat to the hemisphere is by having Nazi Germany defeated on the battlefields of Europe. And so by the summer, I think of 1940s really when he sort of makes that call. And that's when the United States really starts entering the conflict on the side of the allies. And of course, eventually we end up in World War II. But it's remarkable in reading, for instance, FDR's major speeches up to Pearl Harbor, how much all of those speeches are framed in terms of the hemisphere. We tend to look at World War II with the sort of 20-20 hindsight of being focused on Europe today. But that's not the way that FDR was thinking through the issue. He was talking about how Emperor Maximilian in Mexico had been, you know, installed by the French and how the Nazis

would do the same thing. And, you know, it's all about the hemisphere because that's the terms that Americans understood. Even the polling of the time shows that as of September, first when, you know, 1939, when Nazi tanks rolled into Poland, Americans were already ready to go to war with Germany, just not in Europe. But the polls showed that if Germany ever tried to invade Latin America, Americans were ready by large majorities to declare war. And so in large part, what FDR was doing was connecting that hemispheric defense imperative to the broader kind of global scene and explaining why it wouldn't be enough to sort of wait until Nazi Germany conquered Europe just to really wake up to the threat. And then,

of being kind of a common theme among a lot of the other internationalists of the day. Right. Well, Spickman's book, I mean, of course, is a, you know, a lengthy, there includes a lengthy demonstration of the fact that hemispheric defense is just not feasible. I mean, it makes sense that it's the subject of conversation because formally it's a perfectly reasonable option to consider. Yeah. And Strong View, at least, I mean, he's publishing post-Peral Harbor, but Strong View is like,

this is crazy. Like, we will not succeed. Yeah. And he was writing much of that before Pearl Harbor happened. And, you know, his, and both he and FDR and, and both he and FDR and, and kind of the other internationalists, they were battling against 150 years of the monodactrine being the sort of guiding light for American policy. But I think sort of they had concluded that given the technological changes, if Nazi Germany ever consolidated control over Europe,

the U.S. just wouldn't stand a chance at that point. Right. So I want to talk about China, and I want to talk about today, and there's a couple different ways into this. But, you know, the relevance of everything we've discussed so far is probably clear to a lot of listeners, but I want to make it explicit. So, you know, the United States does with great trial and a lot of error and a lot of starts and stops achieve, you know, what political scientists might call something like regional hegemony. And that then does become the basis, the kind of secure basis of the post-1945 American role

in the world. You know, it's hard to imagine us playing the same role post-45 had we lacked regional hegemony, right? Now, that hegemony is complicated, and I'm using these sort of blunt terms, as you, I think, correctly point out. It's not driven by an American desire to dominate its neighbor. It's more nuanced and complicated than that. And nevertheless, the brute fact remains. China clearly in 2023 and for some time now has paid attention to that fact and is attempting to achieve something similar.

And they're obvious, like they're like really startling echoes in terms of the South China Sea, the East China. see the way in which the geography of China's neighborhood works in the parallels you can draw with the Caribbean. And maybe the place starts to put that into a form of the question. Like, what parallels do you see in terms of China's strategic vision and prospects compared to the United States is 100 years ago? It's a great question. And I think the, as you said, there are real echoes between what we did a century ago

and what China is trying to do today. Start with the underlying objective. as you said, China is clearly pursuing regional hegemony itself. And this is understandable, right? If you define regional hegemony as essentially the elimination of neutralization of every other great power in your neighborhood, who wouldn't want that, right? Whether it's China or Monaco, you know, I think any state would prefer to be in a position where it doesn't have real rivals anywhere near its borders.

From the Chinese perspective, that primarily means getting the United States out of Asia, and in particular getting U.S. military forces away from Chinese borders. China has already, I think, made the kind of equivalent declaration to the Monroe Doctrine in 2014. President Xi in this widely reported speech basically told a regional gathering that it was for the people of Asia to solve the problems of Asia. If you swap out Asia for Western Hemisphere, it ends up being kind of very similar in tone to the Monroe Doctrine. And China, I think, is sort of pursuing the project in a sort of similar way. They are gradually expanding their naval bases around their perimeter.

They were trying to consolidate control over the South China Sea, much in the same way we did over the Caribbean. And sometimes you even hear Chinese military analysts talking about the South China Sea as China's Caribbean, much in the same way we used to talk about the Caribbean as our Mediterranean. And so there's this real like through line through history and the way that the strategists talk about these issues. The problem that China faces, though, and I talk about this a little bit at the end of the book, is that it is facing, I think, a much worse geopolitical situation than the United States.

United States ever did. In at least two respects. The first is that the United States was remarkably lucky in its rise that it did not have any other great power located in its neighborhood in a way that is sort of, yeah, centrally located in its neighborhood. There were great power outposts in the hemisphere. There were foreign great powers in Europe who were interested in colonizing parts of Latin America, but there was no great power that was itself based in Latin America. And that meant that the U.S. task was essentially the task of, you know, a process of elimination that gently pushing Europe or sometimes not so gently pushing Europe out of the region. For China, not only China faces kind of the mirror image of that vis-a-vis the United States, but it also has a number of strong

neighbors that, I don't know if you want to call them great powers, but they're at least quasi-great powers, Japan, India, even Russia to the north. And for China to really achieve the same thing that the United States has achieved, it has to somehow figure out how to either outgrow these neighbors to the point where they're no longer great powers relatively, or it has to essentially subdue them forcibly. And given, you know, India's nuclear arsenal and Japan's, you know, alliance with the United States, these are not easy things for trying to do, and certainly not anything that China is likely to do in the next, let's call it decade. And so that's the first problem in China faces. The second problem that China faces is that when we were rising, we were

really, really lucky in a sense that Europe's great powers were all competing against each other, that rising Germany in Europe concentrated the interests of Great Britain, France, and Russia, and there was this constant kind of competition going on on the continent and in the rest of the world that really distracted the great powers from the United States. They all understood the long-term threat that the United States posed and the sort of risk that the U.S. would one day be a global superpower that could meddle in Europe. But at the end of the day, there was never immediately important enough for them to justify diverting forces, let's say, to the Western Hemisphere or anything like that.

At the end of the day, they were always much more worried about the guy, you know, that's across their border than they were about the country across the Atlantic Ocean. China doesn't face that sort of benign strategic environment because it's only real rival the United States doesn't have any sort of great power competition going on except arguably with Russia in Eastern Europe. And so to the extent that United States stays focused on its great power competition with China, it's going to be able to, I think, bring forces and energy and resources to bear in a way that the United States' own rivals couldn't a century ago.

And so those are the two kind of major differences I would highlight between the two situations. Can I ask about a potential third? And this is a real question for me. It's like it's a hard set of facts to wrestle with. You know, is there a way in which just China's political character as compared to the political character of the United States has been strategically helpful to the United States and it's going to be, is in an ongoing way harmful to China's prospects? And what I mean is this. As you point out, it's not like American intervention throughout the Caribbean is popular, you know, whether here or in, it's not like Latin American countries or linking arms and in the aggregate warmly welcoming this kind of thing, even if, you know, parties and individuals here and there may see an interest in it. You know, it's an ongoing problem for everyone.

That said, as you also point out, and for all the hard power kind of elements here, the sort of pure desire to dominate for domination's sake. is not, you know, critics of American policy notwithstanding. It's not driving this policy. It's a much more complicated set of factors that is. And without painting the Chinese in cartoonish terms, because they have their own security concerns and there's nuance and complexity there as well, there is a hierarchical view of the world in Beijing

that does not admit much of a liberal way of thinking, even whether in terms of individual equality or equal sovereignty of states. Now, you can easily like sneeze and you're into a very hypocritical space here because obviously American attitudes towards sovereignty in the Caribbean are complicated at best. Nevertheless, there is a kind of distinction here in the American attitude towards its neighbors versus what I take to be China's actual attitude towards its neighbors that it seems to me could redound to the American benefit.

You know, as it were, the Dominican Republic just sort of sitting there all, other things being equal has nothing to fear from the United States. It's when things become unequal that it does. Am I wildly off base here? Am I just an American, sort of in a patriot in a kind of narcissistic way? Tell me if I'm off base here, if there's something to this. No, I think there is something to that. The problem that the United States faced was that the larger context, it was, I would say Latin Americans didn't necessarily share that view of the United States. For starters, they were operating against the backdrop of the sort of pre-Civil War period when the United States annexed much of North America quite aggressively. Mexico certainly knew firsthand that the United States was, at least in a certain period of its history, looking very much to kind of affirmatively dominate its neighbors and sort of control them.

So I think that partially informed the Latin American view. If I was a representative of the Chinese government, I would also argue that in a lot of ways, the Chinese history is actually better than the United States. is comparatively. China hasn't fought a major war in, what is it now, over four decades. It also has been, I think, for the same period of time, espousing foreign policy principles that at least nominally are very deferential to sort of internal sovereignty questions. The United States is always over there trying to promote democracy and human rights and all that, whereas, you know, we the Chinese don't care. We're happy to let societies determine their own form of governance. We're not interested in sort of tinkering around with that. And so if I was, you know,

representative of the Chinese government, I think that's what I would say. I think probably stepping back, I'm not sure it makes a tremendous bit of difference. I certainly think China's neighbors don't buy that story from China. And I think for good reason. I mean, even if you open up the New York Times today, I'm sure there's some article about what China is doing in the South China Sea and how it's acting quite aggressively in ways that certainly a country like the Philippines doesn't take very kindly. And so I think in practice, it'll end up being a sort of similar situation where China's are going to be looking for an outside power to balance with against China, much in the way that Latin American countries, by the 1910s, we're also looking for outside powers to balance

against the United States. And again, we got tremendously lucky. World War I basically happened at the moment when Latin American countries were actively considering entering into defensive alliances with Europe against the United States. And by the end of World War I, that was, of course, just no longer a viable option. But you could certainly not only imagine, but see this sort of same dynamic playing out in East Asia right now, where countries like Vietnam, for instance, are drawing much closer to the United States and the knowledge that if China ever does start going on its own regional rampage, they would much rather have friends outside the hemisphere to help them than not.

Yeah, I had a senior minister in a Middle Eastern state tell me not that long ago that there was no history of Chinese imperialism, that that was not a thing that existed. There was French imperialism. There's a quote. There's French imperialism, of course, in British imperialism. No such thing as Chinese imperialism. Yeah, well, that would be not such a good view of Chinese history, even recently, frankly. Yeah, totally.

Well, I asked him how the, you know, the Turkic Muslims of Northwest China might feel about that assertion. He did not, he did not answer the question directly. Well, last question for you, you know, I have the, I have a general sense that we could, we the United States could do better in our own thinking about Central and South America from a national security perspective today than we do. and that we do, in fact, give it less attention, it being this set of considerations, less attention than they deserve. Do you share that view? What would you take from you?

And I've said at the start of the episode, but I'll say it again. I mean, this is really a deeply researched book where you are in the primary sources. You're in the correspondence and writings of the key figures here. And it's a really well written narrative as well. So, you know, what have you learned that you think is applicable in 2023 or ought to be applicable to American Western Hemisphere policy, either as a useful pointers that you've learned or things to avoid. So I'll give one of each, I suppose.

The one thing that because of the reputation that the Monroe Doctrine has in Latin America, you sometimes see politicians, particularly in the Democratic Party, being sort of eager to say that the Monroe Doctrine is dead. So Secretary Kerry in 2014 actually gave a speech in which he said that the Monroodiction is dead, which in a lot of ways was for it. Yeah, well, that sounds that. And it was an echo actually of Khrushchev, who said the same thing two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ended up proving him wrong. But look, I think the reality is that unless the United States is willing to contemplate, you know, 60 divisions of the People's Liberation Army on the Rio Grande, you know, without so much as kind of a murmur, the monodarchan will never die, right?

The United States will always be more secure if other great powers do not have military. forces in the hemisphere. So the first lesson, I think, is just to appreciate that. For the last three decades, it's not been a big problem because post-Cold War, we've had no other great power rivals. And so the concern about the hemisphere has been basically muted during that time. I think that's starting to change now, right? China's making major inroads into Latin America. And a couple months ago, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that China has not won, but four signaling stations in Cuba, spying on the south of the United States. And the United States, and and that it's in talks to build a training facility that would actually see PLA troops in Cuba.

And so the first, I think, takeaway point is that the United States should very much start caring again about the Western Hemisphere. But the second point that I actually made in a recent Washington Post article is that you have to be very careful about it. Because of this history, because of the legacy of U.S. interventionism in land America, the United States should not go to the opposite extreme of saying the moderate doctrine's back, baby, and sort of expecting all of our neighbors to say, who's ah, we're on board with this. The very phrase, I mean, to this day conjures up, I think, real concerns among our neighbors. And so while the underlying strategic logic remains sound, I think that the United States has to always sort of bear in mind that the word itself has kind of negative connotations and that the way to sort of thread that needle is to ultimately pursue the underlying objective, but do so in a way

that as maximally possible is sort of respectful of sovereignty and frankly is cognizant of our history in the region in a way that allows us to tackle this problem in a way that's productive for really for all countries involved. And the truth is that I think land America has benefited from the relevant absence of great power competition from the hemisphere and that some of the darker moments of land American history and in relations with the United States have come precisely when the US is engaged in great power competition in the hemisphere. And so to some extent, by having a sort of mutual understanding within the hemisphere that there will be no great power competition within the hemisphere, I think ultimately that is going to redound more to Latin Americans

benefit than trying to, for instance, ally against the United States of China or to bring China in a big way militarily or politically. Sean Merski, author of We May Dominate the World, Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus. This has been a great conversation. Thank you very much for making the time. Thank you so much for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.