Power and Restraint

The Rise of the United States, 1898–1941

Jeffrey W. Meiser

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626161795
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States emerged as an economic colossus in command of a new empire. Yet for the next forty years the United States eschewed the kind of aggressive grand strategy that had marked other rising imperial powers in favor of a policy of moderation.

In Power and Restraint, Jeffrey W. Meiser explores why the United States—counter to widely accepted wisdom in international relations theory—chose the course it did. Using thirty-four carefully researched historical cases, Meiser asserts that domestic political institutions and culture played a decisive role in preventing the mobilization of resources necessary to implement an expansionist grand strategy. These factors included traditional congressional opposition to executive branch ambitions, voter resistance to European-style imperialism, and the personal antipathy to expansionism felt by presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The web of resilient and redundant political restraints halted or limited expansionist ambitions and shaped the United States into an historical anomaly, a rising great power characterized by prudence and limited international ambitions.

1

THEORIES OF RISING
POWER EXPANSION
AND RESTRAINT

WHY ARE MOST RISING POWERS EXPANSIONIST? Why did the United States not follow this pattern? Answering these questions requires a theory of expansion and a theory of restraint. It is the purpose of this chapter to articulate these theories. The first part of this chapter focuses on rising power expansion. Explaining expansion is not a central goal of this book, but a theory of expansion is necessary to enable us to identify when we expect expansion to occur. Only after we set the baseline for expansion is it possible to identify cases of restraint. In other words, without a theory of expansion it is impossible to differentiate between cases where domestic structure actually causes restraint and cases where expansion is not likely. The second part of this chapter explains how domestic structure causes restraint, and then contrasts this theory with competing theories of restraint.

A Theory of Expansion

International relations theories of rising power grand strategy consistently argue that rising powers are war-prone, revisionist powers intent on implementing highly expansionist foreign policies meant to reshape the international order.¹ But why? International relations theory provides several explanations. While different theories of expansion are sometimes portrayed as rival explanations, I instead integrate them into a holistic approach to explaining expansion.² I assume that rising powers expand for a variety of reasons, but that all of these reasons are derived from the basic characteristic that defines a rising power: the long-term relative balance of power is shifting in their favor. This increase in relative power provides a rising power with new opportunities for expansion.³ As a state’s relative power increases, it gains an advantage in material power or increases its advantage over other states, thereby making expansion easier. Increased power provides the opportunity for expansion and a straightforward cost-benefit calculation provides the logic of expansion. According to Randall Schweller, “states expand when they can; that is, when they perceive relative increases in state power and when changes in the relative costs and benefits of expansion make it profitable to do so.”⁴ States also expand at a level and pace “commensurate with their new capabilities.”⁵ The new opportunities hypothesis is the foundational reason for political–military expansion by rising powers, and is best thought of as a necessary but not sufficient cause of expansion. The following two sections describe the types of opportunities that encourage a rising power to expand and the more proximate mechanisms that actually cause the expansion to occur.

New Opportunities for Expansion

The three main reasons for rising power expansion are opportunities to increase profit, security, and prestige. Profit comes mainly from expropriation of property and other assets. The clearest example of the profit motive is territorial conquest either for capturing industrial capacity or for obtaining the ever-increasing amount of resources required to maintain domestic economic growth.⁶ Pushed to an extreme, this logic forms the basis of the offensive realist argument that states maximize power in order to ensure their own survival in an anarchic international system. Territorial conquest is a vital component of a power maximization strategy because it conveys clear economic and strategic benefits.⁷ However, great powers will not simply attempt to conquer any and every piece of foreign territory they have access to. The expectation is that they will rationally choose specific territories that either increase their economic capacity or provide some other strategic benefit. And they will only act if they have a reasonable chance of success. In short, rising powers gain new opportunities for expansion and tend to take them when decision makers perceive the benefits to be higher than the costs.

Opportunities for expansion are not defined only by profit potential; the logic of security through expansion is also very strong among rising powers. Security goals that were previously out of reach become attainable as states increase in power. Or, put another way, rising powers are able to acquire more security because their new resources and capabilities allow them to do so. They have the newfound ability to fill up power vacuums to prevent other states from gaining a foothold in the neighborhood or gain a geographical advantage through the occupation of geostrategically important territory.⁸ Drawing on balance of threat theory, Sean Lynn-Jones concisely and cogently communicates the logic of security through expansion:

States attempt to expand when expansion increases their security. In general terms, threats might cause a state to expand when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a threat exists; (2) expansion is an effective strategy for reducing the threat; (3) the state has the capability to adopt an expansionist strategy.⁹

When decision makers in rising powers perceive a situation of high vulnerability, they are especially apt to view aggressive expansionism as a viable—and even necessary—strategy.¹⁰

Finally, increased power creates the opportunity and desire to gain intangible qualities like influence, status, and prestige.¹¹ The status of nation-states is largely a function of their material power, but not entirely. There is no clear threshold that distinguishes a secondary power from a great power or great power from superpower. Therefore, rising powers often require some form of recognition from other states in order to gain higher status.¹² The problem for rising powers is that their status typically lags behind their material power, creating a power–status imbalance. Rising powers can prove they deserve a higher status “by challenging the existing order” and competing with status quo states.¹³ Territorial expansion is one of the main ways that modern rising powers have attempted to demonstrate to other states that they are deserving of higher status.¹⁴

Agents of Expansion

Opportunities matter, but only if there are agents that act on those opportunities. The types of agents mentioned most often in the literature on expansion are interest groups, politicians, and government officials. Interest group theory posits that state action is best explained by understanding the goals of the dominant interest group coalition—usually united by economic interests.¹⁵ In a historically nuanced account of imperialism, Abernethy argues that European expansionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was driven by a conjunction of capitalist pursuit of profit and missionary pursuit of converts. These efforts destabilized traditional societies, and the ultimate failure of these efforts led business and religious leaders to request state intervention. Thus a coalition between public, private, and religious groups made expansionism possible.¹⁶ This explanation is consistent with the classic interpretation and critique of British imperialism offered by John Hobson and revised by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: imperialist economic interest groups (or financial capital) captured the policymaking process and turned it toward their own economic benefit. That the “superprofits” hypothesized by Lenin never materialized is not as important as the belief at the time that colonialism was profitable.¹⁷

More recent formulations of the interest-group explanation for expansionism build on this classic approach, but broaden our understanding of which interest groups will tend to support expansionism and how exactly they “capture” the state. Jack Snyder provides a particularly sophisticated application of the interest group approach, arguing that expansionist interest groups can gain control of the policymaking apparatus because they have inherent advantages over other interest groups in terms of “concentrated interests,” “propaganda advantages,” and “ties to the state.”¹⁸ In other words, expansionist or imperialist groups usually have much to gain, while the costs of expansion are diffused throughout society. Expansionist groups also have considerable influence in society and are usually strongly represented in state bureaucracies that have much to gain from expansion (e.g., the military, colonial agencies). From this perspective, expansion is explained by the logrolling power of expansionist interests and their ability to promote strategic myths about the necessity of expansion.¹⁹

Politicians and intellectuals provide the public justifications for expansion—sometimes as part of an expansionist coalition, sometimes in response to domestic problems or opportunities.²⁰ Regardless of the specific motivations of these individuals, their justifications for territorial expansion are typically stated in terms of grand ideas rather than in terms of narrow national self-interest or the claim that might makes right.²¹ The promotion of grand ideas, like taking up the “white man’s burden,” can cause politicians and their broader coalition to become “politically entrapped by its own rhetoric.”²² Expansionist politicians, therefore, have vested interests in continuing expansion, because changing course would undermine their credibility and force them to admit they supported misguided policies.²³ Over time, the original ideological justifications for expansion can become taken-for-granted beliefs that crystalize into a national identity, or strategic culture that promotes and reinforces efforts to mobilize power to pursue ever more expansionist policies.²⁴

The actions of colonial officials, diplomats, and entrepreneurs on the ground also push the boundaries of expansion. These agents of empire have vested interests in continued expansion, and their actions create a dynamic of positive reinforcement whereby each increment of expansion must be protected by additional increments of expansion. Abernethy uses the phrase “imperial inertia” to describe the process whereby unauthorized actions by colonial officials, diplomats, military officers, or private sector entrepreneurs can lead to control of new territory, presenting the home country with a fait accompli.²⁵ Actions on the ground by colonial officials, entrepreneurs, or indigenous leaders and groups can also trigger a crisis that compels increased intervention. The creation of vested interests and the internalization of expansionist justifications entrench initial experiments in territorial expansion and encourages future expansion.²⁶

The success of expansionist endeavors can also initiate positive reinforcement. In his analysis of the expansion of war aims, Eric Labs argues that the achievement of initial goals fosters the sense that an expanded set of goals is also achievable.²⁷ This is positive reinforcement in is simplest form. From this perspective, expansion can begin as a rational response to international threats and opportunities, but then morph into an impossible search for absolute security or unrestrained ambition where each territorial gain must be protected t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Theories of Rising Power Expansion and Restraint
• 2 Origins of Expansionism, 1898–1900
• 3 Consolidation and Backlash, 1899–1903
• 4 Adaptation and Recession, 1904–1912
• 5 Expansionism Transformed, 1913–1921
• 6 Republican Interregnum, 1921–1933
• 7 From Nonintervention to Noninterference, 1933–1941
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index