Ideology, Economic Interdependence, and International

Chapter Two The United States and the World, 1790-1848 Dale C. Copeland University of Virginia April 29, 2016 [Note to conference readers: The following is the first empirical chapter for a book I am completing for Princeton UP, tentatively entitled Commerce, War, and American Foreign Policy, 1790 to the Present Era. The book can be considered a companion volume to my recent book Economic Interdependence and War (Princeton UP, 2015). A bit of background so that the chapter below makes more sense: Chapter 1 of the new book briefly outlines the competing theories linking trade to either peace or war. Liberals as you know argue that the benefits of trade give states an incentive to be peaceful (the “opportunity costs” of going to war are high), while realists contend that trade increases the probability of war because it compels states to struggle for vital raw materials and markets. I argue that under certain conditions, higher economic interdependence can lead to either peace or to conflict and war. Specifically, when dependent states have positive expectations regarding the future trade environment, they will likely stay peaceful to avoid spirals of hostility that could restrict their access to key markets. But if those expectations turn negative, and dependent states believe they are being cut off or will be cut off in the near future, they will turn to hard-line actions, including war, to ensure access to the goods and markets needed for long-term power and security. Chapter 1 also outlines some of the more important non- economic theories of American foreign policy (ideological, bureaucratic, governmental structure, personality, etc.) to allow a full test of competing arguments for the specific cases. In later chapters, particularly chapter 4 on Wilson and the U.S. entry into World War I, the ideological mission to spread American democratic values serve as an important competing explanation to my own more security- driven argument. I hope to talk more about this in the presentation on Saturday.] The purpose of this chapter is to explore the commercial determinants of U.S. foreign policy between the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The overall goal is to evaluate to what extent these determinants were more or less important compared to non-commercial factors in explaining the outbreak of crises and wars during this period. The more specific objective is to understand which of the economic logics from chapter one works best to explain American decisions for war or peace when in fact commercial forces can be shown to matter. The bulk of the chapter will center on the lead-ups to the two large- scale wars that the United States initiated and fought during this period: the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. The next chapter will consider U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to the end of the nineteenth century, with a focus on the origins of the Spanish-American War of 1898. 2 In unpacking the causal forces leading to these three important conflicts, I show that commercial factors not only played dominant driving roles in the shift from peace to war, but that the logic for the initiation of crisis and war followed closely the trade expectations theory detailed above. American leaders of all stripes were driven by the need to safeguard the nation's access to resources and markets, whether abroad or between the individual American states themselves. The evidence shows that whenever that access was threatened by outside powers -- that is, whenever American expectations for future trade were reduced because of the current or anticipated actions of others -- U.S. leaders quickly reacted with harsh policies commensurate with American military power. Yet when expectations were improved through agreements or because Europeans powers were distracted by their own issues, U.S. foreign policies became more moderate. This chapter makes a bold and controversial claim. Contrary to the view that American expansionism in the 19th century was the result either of a constant systemic need for more control of territorial resources (economic/offensive realism) or of powerful domestic drives such as greed or ideology (liberalism), I show that the variation in the intensity of American expansionism was primarily a function of changes in the level of outside economic threats. John Adams reluctantly entered into a "Quasi-War" with France from 1798 to 1800 as a result of French commercial restrictions. His successor Thomas Jefferson, a man with a very different ideological outlook, was willing to go to war with France over control of Louisiana in 1803 and then contemplated war with the British in the face of vicious depredations to U.S. trade. Jefferson's secretary of state James Madison, once president, completed the task by initiating war against Britain in 1812 as a last-resort option when Britain refused to end its attacks on U.S. trade. The period from 1815 to 1848 was ostensibly a period of relative peace for the United States and the European great powers. Yet pretty well every major dispute save the period of the Maine-Canada boundary dispute with Britain 1839-42 was driven by fears of European 3 encroachments that would constrain American commerce and thus reduce U.S. economic growth and long-term security. After much reflection, President James Monroe announced his famous doctrine in late 1823 to deter not only monarchical states such as France, Austria, and Russia from intervening in the rebellions of Spanish America, but also to minimize Britain's role in the trade and defense of the newly emerging Latin American states. By the 1830s and especially into the 1840s, Washington's anxiety over who would control the territories of Texas, Oregon, and California became palpable. Perhaps surprisingly, this anxiety had, in the end, little to do with the slavery question then dividing the country. National leaders from the south were initially worried that Texas' incorporation would only exacerbate the north-south divide, and they understood that it was highly unlikely that the Oregon and Californian territories would accept the extension of slavery. This chapter shows that the dominant pressure leading to active U.S. incorporation of these areas came from outside, namely, the fear that the economic juggernaut Britain would dominate these areas and the trade relations in the Caribbean and the Pacific unless the United States acted forcefully. As this and the next chapter shows, American policy from 1790 to 1900 had a common but important thread running through it. Almost every time the United States was threatened with an immediate or looming cut-off or restriction in its access to resources and markets, American leaders, regardless of their stripes, reacted swiftly and harshly. There are times when economic realism provides a more plausible explanation for the events than the trade expectations approach -- in particular, U.S. diplomacy with Spain in 1818-19 over Spanish Florida. And liberalism's emphasis on domestic pressures and ideological pathologies does enhance our understanding of America's annexation of Texas in 1845. In general, however, both theories underplay or ignore the way changing threat perceptions interact with growing U.S. military power to shape U.S. decision-making over time. Trade expectations theory is thus powerfully upheld, not only on its own terms but in comparison to its competitors. 4 The Early Republic and the Origins of the War of 1812 This section's primary focus is the lead-up to the War of 1812 over the years 1805 to 1812. I will also briefly explore the crises from 1794 to 1804 as background to this significant conflict. The United States was clearly the initiator of the War of 1812, insofar as it was the first to launch military attacks and did so while the British government was still hoping to avoid a direct conflict. So the key question on the table is: why? The prime competitors to trade expectations theory here are a variety of domestic-level explanations compatible with commercial liberalism's overall view, including the arguments that as U.S.-British trade plummeted, President Madison and his supporters in Congress used war to consolidate their party's hold on power and to satisfy the greed of sectional interests. I will show that these explanations hold little water as we go deeper into the documents. Madison and his secretary of state James Monroe acted only for what they saw as the national interest, namely, the survival of United States as a strong, cohesive country. They only stirred up support in Congress once they had decided (in mid-1811) that war with Britain was the only means to break the harsh economic restrictions on the United States that Britain, the stronger power, had been imposing since 1805. The tragedy of this war is that the British believed they had little choice but to maintain the costly restrictions on America if they were going to defeat their primary enemy, Napoleonic France. Hence, this is a classic case where third-party pressures on state X (Britain) from state Z (France) cause it to restrict trade with state Y (the United States), despite X's understanding that the restrictions pose a high risk that Y will ultimately initiate war. In our case, Britain's cabinet understood, especially near the end, that its policy had completely undermined American expectations of future trade and was thus driving Madison into war. Yet given the exogenous threat of Napoleon, London could not moderate its demands or restrictions. War was then reluctantly chosen by U.S. leaders as the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being long-term U.S.

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