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Books
Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy
Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press (2020)
Hardly any Americans imagined their nation would or should attain armed supremacy across the world — until, within eighteen months between the fall of France in 1940 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, U.S. officials and intellectuals decided that the United States should become the world's supreme power, forever responsible for underwriting law and order on a global scale.
Journal articles and Chapters
Internationalism/Isolationism:
Concepts of American Global Power
in Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes, eds.,
Rethinking U.S. World Power: Domestic
Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), ch. 3 publisher
version
This chapter provides a conceptual history of the emergence of the
internationalism/isolationism dualism in U.S. political discourse. It asks how,
why, and to what effect Americans came to speak in these loaded terms, which
scholars and practitioners often employ as coherent and neutral categories.
“Internationalism” emerged in the nineteenth century in close association with
the peace movement. Early in World War II, however, U.S. officials and
intellectuals decided that the United States should henceforth project preponderant
political-military power in Europe and Asia, transcending hemispheric
constraints. They cast U.S. global dominance as the fulfillment of
internationalism, a term they redefined in opposition to their pejorative
coinage, “isolationism.” In so doing, they made U.S. hegemony sound essential
rather than antithetical to international peace and cooperation: the only hope
of taming power politics, if that were even possible, was now to master it.
Instrumental
Internationalism: The American Origins of the United Nations, 1940-3
Journal of
Contemporary History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (April 2019):
265-283 publisher
version
Why did the United States want to create the United Nations Organization, or any international political organization with universal membership? This question has received superficial historiographical attention, despite ample scrutiny of the conferences that directly established the UN in 1944 and 1945. The answer lies earlier in the war, from 1940 to 1942, when, under the pressure of fast-moving events, American officials and intellectuals decided their country must not only enter the war but also lead the world long afterwards. International political organization gained popularity – first among unofficial postwar planners in 1941 and then among State Department planners in 1942 – because it appeared to be an indispensable tool for implementing postwar US world leadership, for projecting and in no way constraining American power. US officials believed the new organization would legitimate world leadership in the eyes of the American public by symbolizing the culmination of prior internationalist efforts to end power politics, even as they based the design of the UN on a thoroughgoing critique of the League, precisely for assuming that power politics could be transcended.
The Birth of Global Knowledge: Intellectual
Networks in the World Crisis, 1919-1939
International
Politics, Vol. 55, No. 6 (November
2018): 727-733 (with Ludovic Tournès
and Inderjeet Parmar) publisher version
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the interwar
world emerges as the birthplace of familiar forms of global knowledge. This
special issue examines the production of global knowledge in the 1920s and 30s.
It explores how think tanks and similar organizations generated and still
generate knowledge of the world and by so doing helped and help constitute what
is now called global governance.
in Nicolas Guilhot and Daniel Bessner, eds.,
The Decisionist
Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the 20th Century (Berghahn, 2019), ch. 1 publisher
version
“Public opinion” today evokes the momentary preferences of individuals aggregated together, as expressed in scientific opinion polls. Such polls, however, came into being only in the latter half of the 1930s and became widely used outside the United States after World War II. Until then, internationalists possessed no reliable method for quantifying momentary mass preferences within their own nations, let alone across nations. And they knew it. When they invoked international public opinion — staking the peace of the world on it in 1919 — what did they mean and what were they doing?
The League of Nations: A Retreat from International
Law?
Journal of Global
History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2012):
210-232 publisher
version
During the First World War, civil society groups across the North Atlantic put forward an array of plans for recasting international society. The most prominent ones sought to build on the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 by developing international legal codes and, in a drastic innovation, obligating and militarily enforcing the judicial settlement of disputes. Their ideal was a world governed by law, which they opposed to politics. This idea was championed by the largest groups in the United States and France in favor of international organizations, and they had likeminded counterparts in Britain. The Anglo-American architects of the League of Nations, however, defined their vision against legalism. Their declaratory design sought to ensure that artificial machinery never stifled the growth of common consciousness. Paradoxically, the bold new experiment in international organization was forged from an anti-formalistic ethos – one that slowed the momentum of international law and portended the rise of global governance.
Diplomatic
History, Vol. 35, No. 5 (November
2011): 797-836 publisher
version
Awarded
the Fishel-Calhoun Prize by the Society for
Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Two rival conceptions for international organization circulated in
America during World War I. The first and initially more popular was a
“legalist-sanctionist” league, intended to develop
international legal code and obligate and enforce judicial settlement of
disputes. The second was the League of Nations that came into being. This
article traces the intellectual development and political reception of the former
from 1914 to 1920. Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and William H. Taft were its
most important architects and advocates. Like President Woodrow Wilson, they
aimed to create an international polity without supranational authority. Unlike
Wilson, they insisted on the codification of law and the necessity of physical
sanction: the league had to enforce its word or not speak at all. Wilson
fatally rejected legalist-sanctionist ideas. Holding
a thoroughgoing organicist understanding of political evolution, he and the
League’s British progenitors preferred international organization to center on
a parliament of politicians divining the popular will and anticipating future
needs, not a court of judges interpreting formal codes of law. A flexible model
of organization carried over to the United Nations, the alternative forgotten
by a world leader that now found it natural to subordinate law to politics.
A Solution from Hell: The United States and the
Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991-2003
Journal of
Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 3-4 (September-December
2010): 149-172 publisher
version
This article traces the rise of humanitarian interventionist ideas
in the U.S. from 1991 to 2003. Until 1997, humanitarian intervention was a
relatively limited affair, conceived ad hoc more than systematically,
prioritized below multilateralism, aiming to relieve suffering without
transforming foreign polities. For this reason, U.S.
leaders and citizens scarcely contemplated armed intervention in the Rwandan
genocide of 1994: the “duty to stop genocide” was a norm still under
development. It flourished only in the late 1990s, when humanitarian
interventionism, like neoconservatism, became popular in the US establishment
and enthusiastic in urging military invasion to remake societies. Now inaction
in Rwanda looked outrageous. Stopping the genocide seemed, in retrospect,
easily achieved by 5,000 troops, a projection that ignored serious obstacles.
On the whole, humanitarian interventionists tended to understate difficulties
of halting ethnic conflict, ignore challenges of postconflict
reconstruction, discount constraints imposed by public opinion, and override
multilateral procedures. These assumptions primed politicians and the public to
regard the Iraq war of 2003 as virtuous at best and unworthy of strenuous
dissent at worst. The normative commitment to stop mass killing outstripped
U.S. or international capabilities — a formula for dashed hopes and dangerous
deployments that lives on in the “responsibility to protect.”
The Wilsonian Chimera: Why Debating Wilson’s Vision
Hasn’t Saved American Foreign Relations
presented
in “World of Power/World of Law,” Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, April
15-16, 2010; published with conference proceedings in White House Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2011): 343-359
Scholars of Wilsonianism emphasize
Wilson’s determination either to spread liberal democracy abroad or to support
international law and organization. On both counts, however, Wilson’s
principles and actions betrayed deep ambiguities. Mixing Burkean
organicism with a loosely neo-Hegelian teleology, Wilsonianism
was a capacious set of ideas that, on principle, could and did cut either way
on whether to implant democracy by force of arms. This gave Wilson a particular
conception of liberal democracy, one that challenges Wilson’s reputation as a
champion of the rule of “global public opinion.” Wilson did not mean “public
opinion” literally. Statesmen in the League were supposed to divine the latent
general will of international society through introspection, not to obey
momentary mass preferences. Nor was Wilson the wholehearted advocate of binding
international institutions that he might seem. His teleological vision allowed
him to skate over the tensions between unilateralism and multilateralism,
national interests and common concerns. Rather than decisively prioritize one
value over the other, Wilson assumed there was no need, for national and common
interests would draw ever nearer. Moreover, Wilson in 1919 rejected popular
proposals to strengthen the League’s commitments to international law and
collective security. He did so to preserve the League as a flexible and thus
formally weak organization that would constantly remold itself around an
organically growing world spirit. In sum, Wilsonianism
is unintelligible except by understanding the categories Wilson employed
himself. His assumptions are so unlike those currently popular in
international-relations discourse that it is difficult to apply Wilsonianism to present dilemmas.
Presidential
Studies Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September
2009): 494-518 publisher
version
Theodore Roosevelt is well known as an imperialist. The common
understanding is both too weak and too strong. Too weak, because Roosevelt
idealized an imperialism that could last forever in civilizing savages. Too
strong, because Roosevelt prepared the American-occupied Philippines for
independence within a generation. This article analyzes Roosevelt's philosophy
of self-government and reinterprets his Philippines policy in light of the
philosophy. Roosevelt emerges as a reluctant anti-imperialist — an imperialist
by desire but an anti-imperialist in governance. His imperialist ambitions were
thwarted by America's ideals of self-government and its democratic political
system, channeled through the powers of Congress and the process of regular
elections. At a crest of imperial opportunity, America eschewed empire.
Imperial occupation remained a great aberration in American foreign relations.
The Unchosen War of Choice: George W. Bush’s
Decision for War in Iraq
Tempus, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter 2006): 43-70
Bush never chose, in a meaningful sense, to invade Iraq. He chose to
brand Iraq ringleader of an “axis of evil,” to seek weapons inspections backed
by the threat of force, and to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to the
region. The administration did debate these steps one by one, but it does not
appear that Bush ever prefaced those steps, nor followed them, with substantial
debate on whether and not merely how to go to war. Quickly, and
almost certainly by January 2003, when Bush approved invasion, war in Iraq
became a fait accompli; the decision was over before it was seriously
made. Bush had asked neither Powell, Rumsfeld, nor Cheney for an overall
recommendation on whether to go to war, perhaps because there never seemed an
appropriate time to do so. In the absence of a clear decision — made early,
with the benefit of foresight, and considering all the factors involved in
going to war — the administration’s failures of coalition building
and postwar occupation planning become intelligible.
essays
To the Grand
Area and Beyond: The Sudden Transformation of the United States’ Strategic
Space
“Mapping China’s Strategic Space,” National Bureau of Asian Research,
August 23, 2023
The very people who made U.S. ambitions global had long planned to do nothing of the sort until unanticipated events shocked them into changing their minds.
Trump Against Exceptionalism: The Sources of
Trumpian Conduct
in Diane Labrosse, Frank Gavin, Joshua Rovner,
and Robert L. Jervis, eds., Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency
and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University
Press, 2018), ch. 9 publisher version
Trump’s America enters the international arena to square off against comparable competitors, each equally capable of becoming great. What will become of American foreign policy when greatness, no longer bestowed, must be seized?
Donald Trump Versus American Exceptionalism: Toward
the Sources of Trumpian Conduct
H-Diplo and The International Security Studies Forum, Policy
Series: America and the World – 2017 and Beyond (February 1, 2017) publisher version
Observers are not wrong to detect in Trump a profound break from the precepts of U.S. foreign relations, a difference in worldview that transcends individual policies. In the one area in which Trump possesses an ample record — that of public discourse — the President has already discarded America’s traditional identity in the world: Donald Trump does not speak the language of American exceptionalism.
On Moralism and Rwanda: A Reply to Linda Melvern
Journal of
Genocide Research, Vol. 13 No. 1-2
(March-June 2011): 159-163 publisher
version
The
important questions in politics are of probability, not possibility. What would
the plausible and probable consequences of a particular intervention have been?
What would have had to differ in order for successful intervention to result?
Only an anti-political ethical framework — a kind of crude deontology — could
find overriding significance in the mere possibility that lives could have been
saved.