We May Dominate the World

May 1, 2023
In this penetrating study, Hoover Institution foreign policy scholar Mirski argues that the international order established by the U.S. after WWII was prefigured by well-intentioned but abusive and bloody imperialism in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Surveying America’s “regional” foreign policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries—covering the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and military occupations of Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and other countries—Mirski argues that U.S. policy was motivated by the fear that expansionist powers—namely Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—might extend their empires into these regions, threatening the growth of fledgling republics in the Americas. Mirski demonstrates that only after making these preemptive incursions to restore order and support democracy in its “mortal combat” against imperialism, as Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan put it, did the U.S. get bogged down in interventionist quagmires, leaving behind “a string of shattered peoples and principles”—a dynamic that recurred on a global scale during the Cold War and into the 21st century. While his downplaying of the impact of business interests on U.S. interventionism will strike some as naive, Mirski’s argument that U.S. officials’ reasoning behind intervention has remained consistent over time is well documented and convincing. This is an elegantly told and engrossing history.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
A thoroughgoing history of how the U.S. moved from the Monroe Doctrine to "regional hegemony." As Mirski, a lawyer and foreign policy scholar, delineates, becoming an interventionist power in its own hemisphere was a dangerous moral compromise for the U.S., a fraught trajectory that many observers still don't feel comfortable examining. The author offers an evenhanded account of the political gains and drawbacks of annexation, occupation, and intervention in troubled regional states from 1870 to 1945 as well as the moral challenge of not acting like the imperialist Old World powers. While the U.S. was torn by civil war, France and Spain made moves into Mexico, challenging the Monroe Doctrine. Mirski looks closely at decisions by successive secretaries of state and presidents regarding these incursions, and he takes each regional crisis in turn: Haiti, Chile, Venezuela (twice), Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, among others. He also chronicles the annexation of Hawaii and the 1898 war with Spain to liberate Cuba, thereby joining "the great power club." The Panama Canal, by connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, effectively doubled the size of Theodore Roosevelt's beloved Navy, and the so-called "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine essentially forced the U.S. to become "an international police power," which ushered in a brief but disastrous interventionist period. Mirski offers an extensive, incisive analysis of why the interventionist period did not work, and his excellent, relevant conclusion about current moves by Russia and China shows how rising powers tend to embrace "expansion and aggression." Regarding the former, the author writes, "Since the Soviet Union's collapse, several of Russia's neighbors have experienced chronic domestic unrest, including 'color revolutions' that replaced neutral or Russia-aligned regimes with pro-Western ones. Moscow blames Europe and the United States for the trouble, and it has responded by aggressively exploiting its neighbors' instability for its own ends." A tremendous work of well-structured research that will appeal to a wide audience.

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