Talks with Authors: We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus

[Music and Narration]

 

Introduction:  Welcome to Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society's Practice Groups. I'm Dean Reuter, Vice President, General Counsel, and Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society.

 

      For exclusive access to live recordings of Practice Group Teleforum calls, become a Federalist Society member today at fedsoc.org.

 

Jack Derwin:  Hello and welcome to this Federalist Society virtual event. My name is Jack Derwin. I'm the associate director of the Practice Groups here at The Federalist Society.

           

      Today we're pleased to host the "Talks with Authors" discussion with Sean Mirski on his new book, We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus.

 

      Sean is a Senior Associate at Arnold & Porter, where he practices national security, foreign relations, and appellate law. He's a foreign policy scholar who has worked on national security issues across presidential administrations, including serving as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the Department of Defense. Sean served as a law clerk to the United States Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.

 

      Our moderator today, Daniel G. West, is the Director of SCF Partners, a Houston, Texas-based company investing in energy services, equipment, and technology. Previously, Daniel served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, holding several posts, including platoon commander with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and executive officer of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines. After law school, Daniel clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

 

      In the interest of time, we'll stop intros there but give you our speakers' full bios at fedsoc.org. After discussion between our speakers, if time allows, we'll go to audience Q&A.  So you can enter questions for them using the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom window.

           

      Finally, you'll note that, as always, all expressions of opinion on today's program are those of the speakers joining us and not those of The Federalist Society.

 

      Without further delay, I will pass it over to you, Daniel.

 

Daniel West:  Well, thanks, Jack. And good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us.

 

      Like Jack said, today we'll have a conversation with Sean Mirski about his new book, We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus. It has been released. It is available everywhere that you would purchase a book, and we encourage folks to consider taking a look at it.

 

      The book tells the story of how the United States asserted its growing power in the Western Hemisphere in the century following the Civil War. And it focuses on what Sean calls "securing the neighborhood," so hemispheric security.

 

      We'll ask Sean to give a brief overview of that history, its impact of the legal and policy frameworks that govern international relations in our region, and then draw lessons from it for the world that we face today.

           

      I would like to start, though, Sean, by asking why you chose to write this book. What about the spirit of history caught your interest?

 

Sean Mirski:  Well, Dan, first, thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate the opportunity to connect with you and the rest of the FedSoc community.

 

      So, in brief, the answer to your question as to why I wrote this book is China. I've always been sort of a China/East Asia security guy. And it's, in my view, one of the most important questions of the 21st century, and, in particular, the question of: Is China going to rise peacefully, or is it going to rise aggressively and offensively?

 

      And the record from history is not exactly auspicious, as historians like to note. Rising powers tend to be aggressive and expansionist, by which I mean they pick fights with other great powers; they tend to bully and otherwise meddle in the affairs of their neighbors; and, in general, they make bigger and bigger nuisances of themselves as they try to dominate greater and greater slices of the world.

 

      And so, I thought it would be fun to write a brief academic article that would definitely only take one year to put together on the question of: How did the United States fit into this sort of historical record? And, as I'm sure we're about to discuss, the answer is that the United States was not really an exception to this pattern, although there were certainly many unusual aspects to its rise. But eight years later, here we are.

 

Daniel West:  Only eight?

 

Sean Mirski:  Only eight.

 

Daniel West:  Only eight? Okay. That's speedy. Well, great. Thanks for sharing that.

 

      One of the most fascinating aspects of the book for me was the research that you did on a series of historical episodes that -- you know, a lot of folks know about the Civil War. A lot of folks know about the two world wars. But this is a less-covered period of history. And you quote the Marine Corps, which is near and dear to my heart—their 1940 Small Wars Manual—and summarize the events of the period. And that manual says, "In spite of the varying trend of the foreign policy of succeeding administrations, this government has interposed or intervened in the affairs of other states with remarkable regularity." So that's the Marine Corps describing our own policy.

 

      So what happened? Folks in the audience should certainly buy the book and hear for themselves, but maybe a quick synopsis of the events of the period.

 

Sean Mirski:  Sure. So the book covers the period from, essentially, the start of the Civil War all the way to the dawn of the Cold War. But the heart of the book is really the period from, let's say, 1898 to 1918. And in that two-decade period, we go on what I call in the book a "regional rampage of unprecedented scope and scale." During that period, we were landing -- or we were using force against our neighbors an average of nearly twice a year. Some of those uses of force were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. It would be the landing of U.S. Marines, such as yourself, to protect an embassy during a Civil War or revolution.

 

      But in other cases, the uses of force were much bigger, much larger-scale, and certainly more consequential. And so, by the end of that period, you see U.S. occupations of entire nations. You see annexations. You see counterinsurgencies, protectorates, and all manner of sort of not only military but also political, economic, and diplomatic control. And so, in large part, the book is sort of looking at the question of: Why is it that the United States ended up going on this interventionist search through its region?

 

      And just to give you one example from one country that hopefully illustrates some of the dynamics: so in 1898, the Spanish-American War begins. At the end of the war, we are occupying Cuba and trying to figure out what to do with it. We end up giving Cuba its independence, but we do so under the condition of something that's called the Platt Amendment, which, among other things, gives the United States the right to militarily intervene in Cuba, either to preserve its independence or to guarantee, essentially, a government in the event that anarchy is looming.

 

      And at the time that we do this, this is considered a relatively minor imposition on Cuban sovereignty. And I think most of U.S. policymakers really, truly believed that the amendment would not be used in a way to meddle in Cuba's internal affairs. It really was sort of a last resort fail-safe in the event that Cuba's tipping into anarchy and there's a risk of, essentially, European intervention. And it doesn't quite pan out that way.

 

      Cuba gains its independence in 1902. By 1906, we're reoccupying the country again. And we leave the country in 1909, but then, during the next four years, the administration embarks on something called "preventative diplomacy," which is a euphemism for, essentially, micromanaging Cuba's affairs under the auspice of this right of intervention. And by the end of that period, we're once again landing Marines. And then we end up, once again, occupying parts of Cuba a few years later.

 

      And Cuba is just one nation among many in the region where you can sort of tell a similar story of U.S. forces landing, leaving, landing, and, in general, this sort of increasing U.S. military presence.

 

Daniel West:  Yeah. And in driving all of that in the background is the Monroe Doctrine, right? It's a desire to push other great powers out of the hemisphere, kind of keep the American hemisphere as our neighborhood without intervention from other rivals or potential rivals. And throughout this series of interventions, the U.S. is trying to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, trying to keep these powers out. But it bumps into a challenge over and over in the way that you tell this story. And you call that challenge "the problem of order."

 

      So what is the problem of order? And what are the various approaches that American leaders try to use to work their way through or around that problem?

 

Daniel West:  So, as listeners will undoubtedly remember from their U.S. History classes, the Monroe Doctrine was declared by President Monroe in 1823. And the basic idea was we were going to erect a giant “keep-out sign” in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The United States promises not to intervene in European affairs. But in exchange, Europe is prohibited from crossing the ocean and either recolonizing any part of Latin America or otherwise attempting to control it.

 

      And so, the basic idea behind the Monroe Doctrine was defensive. Essentially, the United States was saying that we are here to defend the Western Hemisphere from European expansion. But the problem—and, as you mentioned, the kind of the core thesis of my book—is that there was something called the "problem of order" that made the execution of the Monroe Doctrine very difficult.

 

      And the problem of order basically had three aspects. The first was that there were certain parts of the region that were strategically important to the United States just by virtue of the way that the geography worked out. And, for purposes of the book, that essentially ends up being all of the Caribbean, all of Central America, along with places like Hawaii, because those are the places where if a foreign power was able to establish itself, it would endanger American security in a really meaningful way.

 

      The second aspect to the problem of order is the presence of a foreign threat. And the thing that I point out in my book that is sometimes underappreciated about this period of history is that U.S. foreign policy was being conducted at the same time that Europe's great powers were engaged in this massive colonialist binge across the rest of the world. And so, historians sometimes call this "The Second Age of Imperialism" as a sort of sequel to Christopher Columbus and the Age of the Conquistadors. But, basically, between 1870 and the start of World War I in 1914, Europe was just going on a tear through the rest of the world. The numbers are so high that they can sometimes be hard to believe. Between 1870 and 1900, for instance, Great Britain, Germany, and France alone, colonized over nine million square miles, which is roughly twice the size of Europe itself.

 

      And so, by the time you get to 1914, something like 85 percent of the earth's landmass is controlled by colonial powers. And Africa's carved up in the scramble for Africa. The Middle East is carved up. Asia's carved up. You can literally count on one hand the number of independent countries left in all three regions by the end of this period.

 

      And so, when I say that 85 percent of the earth's landmass was under the control of colonial powers, much of the remaining 15 percent was the Western Hemisphere. And, for Americans, there was this palpable sense—I think, really, a crisis mentality—that unless they acted,  unless -- if they did not act, that there was a real risk that Europe would move on from the Old World and come to the New World and recolonize much of Latin America. And so, the second answer to the problem of order is just this sense of foreign threat.

 

      And then the final piece of the puzzle is instability, or, more broadly, power vacuums. Large numbers of the United States' neighbors during this time were extremely politically and economically unstable, to the point where, I think, in today's terms, you would say that they were failing or failed states. And just to -- I think sometimes today there's this sense that, "Well, you know, when the U.S. criticizes or calls another nation unstable, it's really engaged in a form of critique. And it's essentially saying, 'Well, these other countries don't look exactly like the United States.'" That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about nations that had new presidents more than an average of once a year. There's just constant civil war, constant revolution, and fiscal instability to the point where, again, the numbers just boggle the mind.

 

      So to give you one example: Honduras, in 1909, owed something like $120 million to European creditors on annual government revenues of a million dollars a year. I mean, they're just surreal sums that, really, these nations had no prospect of paying back. And so, from the United States’ perspective, when you bring those three things together: the strategic importance of the country's neighbors, the fact that they are under a foreign threat, and the fact that they are extremely unstable, those three things together create a situation where the United States becomes very concerned that the vulnerability of its neighbors ends up becoming a vulnerability for itself and for the region as a whole; and, in particular, that Europe was going to take advantage of the instability of the United States’ neighbors to expand into those power vacuums in ways that then set off a scramble for Latin America and ended up with sort of the destruction of the Monroe Doctrine.

 

      And so, the book makes the case that that central problem framed American foreign policy between, essentially, the Civil War and the Cold War. And part of the problem was that the United States, in response to this problem, wanted to stabilize and strengthen its neighbors. It wanted them to become strong enough and sort of self-contained enough that they could -- that they no longer presented an easy target for European expansion. And so, classic examples at the time were countries like Brazil, Chile, Argentina. Yes, they had their occasional revolutions, their coups, their kind of internal troubles, but no one seriously thought that a European great power could come into those countries and take them over precisely because they were stable and strong enough.

 

      And so, the U.S. was essentially trying to accomplish that same objective in the more unstable parts of the hemisphere, like the Caribbean and Central America. The problem was the U.S. just never figured out how to do it well. At first, the U.S. tried to do it in a sense from over the horizon through trade and diplomacy and these sort of indirect ways of helping its neighbors stay stable. But for various reasons, that just didn't seem to work out very well. And so, starting at the time of the Spanish-American War, the United States ended up getting more and more involved in the internal politics of these nations and, essentially, trying to stabilize these countries from the inside out. And there was this belief among Americans that you could do so with this sort of easy silver bullet. If you just fix this one aspect of their kind of internal political institutions, you would somehow magically turn the key that made these into stable states.

 

      The problem is, of course, that's not the way it worked out, and the U.S. found that the more it kind of got involved in these countries' affairs, the more it ended up actually destabilizing them, which in turn led the United States to feel that it needed to become more involved in their affairs. And so, you saw this sort of cycle that led to more and more intervention and ultimately culminated at the logical endpoint of the U.S. essentially occupying these nations and governing them from top to bottom.

 

      And so, the overall kind of argument that the book makes is that, on the one hand, there's no doubt that American foreign policy was very aggressive and expansionist and offensive, but at the same time that it -- the primary motivation behind it was this sort of defensive keep Europe out at all costs motivation.

 

Daniel West:  So from a policy perspective, the U.S. feels compelled to intervene. It's important territory. The Europeans are threatening, and there's a kind of a destabilized power vacuum. And so the U.S. wants to do something.

 

      Can you talk about the legal frameworks under which these American interventions happened, both in terms of U.S. internal law for taking these actions as well as international law? Who—and there's so many anecdotes in the book, I know you can't cover them all—but who in our government is making these decisions to intervene: military officers, diplomats, the president, Congress, and how those practices evolved both during that time period and up to the present?

 

Sean Mirski:  Sure. So I'll start with international law. So under the international law of the time—at least the way it was interpreted by the great powers, which is an important caveat—states could use military force to collect on -- or to redress wrongdoings and to collect on debts. And so, if you were a European power and one of your banks is owed a significant amount of money by, let's say, Venezuela, and Venezuela refuses to pay that money back, you can use military force against Venezuela to get that money back.

 

      You can also use military force, as I said, to kind of redress wrongdoing. And so, if Venezuela has experienced a lot of civil wars and your citizens that live in Venezuela are hurt in those civil wars or their property is destroyed, you, as the nation-state to which you're formed—well, you can represent your citizens' claims against Venezuela. And you can say, "Hey, Venezuela, you owe me X amount of money for the damage that occurred during your most recent war to my citizens who were in your territory. And if Venezuela, once again, says, "Sorry, no dice, I refuse to pay you. I don't accept your claims" or whatever the case may be, then, again, you, as a foreign state, have the right to use force to sort of collect on what you're owed.

 

      And so, the international law at this time was actually quite favorable to foreign intervention. And from the United States' perspective, this was a total disaster, right? I mean, the U.S., more than anything, didn't want European powers intervening in the Western Hemisphere. But all these civil wars and revolutions taking place in its neighbors, along with the sort of fiscal problems that come with them, made it much more likely that Europe would, in fact, use force. And so, as an international law matter, most of the U.S.'s interventions were sort of easily justified under the prevailing norms of the time. The United States actually itself made a pretty significant effort to try and change international law in a way that was more favorable to these smaller states, in large part because it wanted to sort of legally forestall some of the interventions taking place on behalf of Europe. So that's, I think, international law.

 

      At the domestic level, this story's much more complicated in part because, as you said, there's just so many different interventions, and they're all sort of unique in their own way. But it's fair to say that by this period, there was some case law in the United States that essentially said that the -- or suggested that the executive branch had the right to use military force as part of its sort of self-defense Article II powers to defend American properties and citizens abroad.

 

      And, as I mentioned before, most of the places the United States was interfering in were places that were politically unstable. And so, oftentimes, there was, at least, a sort of nominal risk to Americans that could justify the use of force. In most cases, I think it was a very real risk, legally speaking. In other cases, I think the executive probably pushed the envelope a little bit.

 

      One of my favorite anecdotes is someone you probably well know, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who's this famous and kind of legendary Marine figure. And he tells this story of a kind of a U.S. intervention in Nicaragua in 1910, where there was civil war and for various reasons, the United States wanted the rebels to win. And so, to help that -- to make that happen, the United States -- Butler and his colleagues sent an American citizen into rebel-held territory in order to have the pretext of having an American to defend. And so, once that American citizen was there, they could then go to the government of forces that they wanted to kind of undermine and say, "Well, you can't attack this town. There's Americans in it. And so, you're not allowed to shoot at the rebels." And, of course, this sort of eventually leads to the collapse of the government, particularly when, as Butler says, they repeated the farce at the next time and just kept sending in one American citizen after another as they sort of helped the rebel forces hopscotch towards the capitol. But, broadly speaking, I think that's sort of the legal -- domestic legal framework in which this was happening.

 

      Force was usually authorized, at least at the big levels, by kind of policymakers in the State Department and the White House. On rare occasions, Congress got involved for some of the bigger expeditions. More frequently, you saw use of force by kind of naval commanders in the area who, at the time, cables were starting to come into effect, but there was still a little bit of lag time between communication of naval vessels on the ground and sort of the Navy department back in Washington. And so, oftentimes, you also saw a naval vessel sort of using force as they saw fit given the necessities of the situation.

 

Daniel West:  Oh. So it's commonly said that hindsight is 20/20. And while you're quite critical of many of America's actions on the ground in the book, you also acknowledge that the problem of order is tricky: you know the power of acting swarm in action could also have pretty severe negative consequences, such in light of the European actions elsewhere in the world that you mentioned. And just to say that stat again—because I had not heard it and I thought it was fascinating in the book—85 percent of previously independent nations in that period from 1870 to 1914 taken over by European powers. Amazing.

 

      So in light of that backdrop, in light of the fact that many things happened that we would probably not be excited about, and at the same time Latin America remained independent, how successful were our policies at a high level during that period? And, in your view, what could have been done differently or better?

 

Sean Mirski:  Yeah. So, at the broadest level, Latin America survived the Second Age of Imperialism relatively unscathed, at least by European powers, right? And I just think it's hard to look at a map of the world in 1870 and a map of the world in 1914 and see how all of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East fell and none of Latin America did to Europe and say that that would have happened the same way if the United States had not been there. In fact, we know from kind of internal German archives and things like that that the Kaiser, for one, was very interested in colonizing Latin America. There's marginality that you can find on sort of internal government reports in Germany where he's basically actively saying, "We need this slice of Latin America, and we need it soon."

 

Daniel West:  You mention in the book that someone suggested sending him a statue of President Monroe. [CROSSTALK].

 

Sean Mirski:  Yeah. Well, it would be -- Germany, for the most part, didn't really care very much about how it was perceived inside the United States. But on rare occasions, it would get invested in sort of improving its PR. And so, at one point, they sent over a statue of Frederick the Great as sort of a gesture of supposedly good intent. But the Army and Navy Journal wanted to send back an image of James Monroe to kind of get the point across to Germany about exactly how America's felt about its incursions into the hemisphere.

 

      And so, you really do -- so I really do think there was a very real threat to Latin America from Europe at this time. The much harder question is, "How far did the United States have to go in order to protect the hemisphere? Did it have to be as interventionist as it was?" And, frankly, it's a very difficult question because you can look at each of these individual interventions and you can find cases where you say, "You know what? It wasn't realistic that Europe was going to intervene in this particular context, so it was over the top for the United States to use military force to sort of preempt it." And sometimes that was a reasonable choice on the part of America, and sometimes it wasn't. And sometimes you can even look at the foreign government archives, to the extent they still exist, and say, "Well, it's clear Europe wasn't really looking to intervene here."

 

      But the problem is that all of this was a game of probabilities for American policymakers, right? I mean, first off, they didn't have 20/20 hindsight. All they knew was that there was a -- there was a real threat in general, and there was a risk that every individual intervention or opportunity for European intervention might lead to something darker. And, even if the European capitals didn't have any intention of actually going in and colonizing part of Latin America when any particular intervention began, there was just no guarantee that, in the course of the intervention, things wouldn't change in a way that ultimately led to Europe grabbing territory.

 

      And you actually see this, I think, in the colonialist kind -- in the way that colonialism developed across the rest of the world where, in a lot of these cases, I mean, there's the famous saying about the British Empire being acquired in a fit of absentmindedness. And that's always been a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it does sort of highlight the underlying truth that sometimes events on the periphery of an empire kind of took on their own -- their own momentum and ways that eventually led to capitals deciding to grab territory even if that wasn't their intention at the start.

 

      And so, for American policymakers, they were faced with this, I think, really difficult choice for any given intervention through this period as a whole. Let's say that there's a five percent chance with any given intervention that it's going to lead to Europe seizing territory, which then leads to this scramble for Latin America that just destroys the Monroe Doctrine. If it's a five percent chance, what do you do? Do you launch the intervention, or do you not? What happens if it's a fifty percent chance; a one percent chance? And so, that sort of calculation is always going through American policymakers' heads. And they were doing it, obviously, with a fog of war-type conditions where they just didn't know.

 

      But then, of course, the final piece of the puzzle is that, to the extent the U.S. miscalculated and intervened where it didn't need to, the costs were all—for the most part—most immediately borne by the countries in which it was intervening and not by the U.S. itself.

 

      And so, for the U.S. perspective, there was relatively little downside to launching most of these interventions, at least kind of immediate -- at least in the immediate future. And so, I don't have a super satisfactory answer, but I think that's sort of the framework for sort of thinking about this and appreciating that this is much more difficult sometimes than I think historians really appreciated.

 

Daniel West:  Yeah. In the book, you mentioned what you described as misconceptions that some other historians have had about what, really, the motivations were driving American interventionism. Smedley Butler, who you mentioned—whose name every Marine learns in boot camp or officer training—Smedley Butler, famous for writing this book called War is a Racket, and he went on that circuit. He basically -- he said that Marines were simply "a debt collector with a big stick" doing Wall Street's bidding in foreign nations.

 

      But you write, Sean, that "Washington was usually after bigger game than bananas. So what do you mean by that, and what were maybe some other misconceptions that folks have had about the American actions during that period?

 

Sean Mirski:  Yeah. So I think one of the prevailing sort of -- to the extent Americans know about this period, I think there's sort of an implicit understanding that we were not on our best behavior in the region. And I do think one of the more common conventional explanations is that essentially the U.S. was acting on behalf of corporate interests. And, in particular, either the banana companies or the Wall Street banks, both of whom were kind of targets of Butler's criticism in the 1930s.

 

      I don't -- the truth is much more complicated. For starters, the U.S. certainly did—particularly starting in the Taft administration—work relatively closely with banks, and banana companies, and all that. But it was always sort of an alliance of mutual convenience where the U.S. needed the banks' help and needed the banana company's help to accomplish certain things that it wanted, but that didn't necessarily mean that the United States was shilling for those companies or really in any way interested in their kind of immediate objectives.

 

      And then, actually, quite to the contrary, the U.S. was worried and appreciated the fact that a lot of these companies had their own interests, that they were primarily interested in their bottom line, and that those interests could sometimes lead them to behave in the region in ways that were counterproductive for American national security interests. And so, as I've been mentioning, one of the things the United States cared most about was the stability of the region. And there was an understanding that if American companies exploited Latin America economically, that that could actually make the region more unstable. And so, the State Department spent a large amount of its time really reviewing Wall Street contracts and loans to Latin American countries to make sure that they were relatively fair to the Latin American countries and not sort of predatory.

 

      In general, though, it's hard to really -- in looking at the archival evidence, to really find much of a connection between these sort of business interests and U.S. foreign policy. So that's one conventional explanation I dismiss in the book.

 

      One of the others that I think is worth mentioning is sort of ideological explanation. And there's a lot of different explanations that sort of fit under that umbrella, everything from sort of imperialist ideology to the individual quirks and interests of the presidents who were launching these interventions, so: Theodore Roosevelt's mania for order, the Taft administration's interest in dollar diplomacy, or Woodrow Wilson's sort of missionary moralism.

 

      The problem with sort of explanations that focus on the ideological kind of views of a particular leader is that U.S. foreign policy over this period was sort of remarkably consistent; that as across different presidents—even ones as different as Woodrow Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt—you had roughly the same foreign policy kind of continued year after year, in large part because, as I argue, the problem was the same across all those administrations, and so the policies didn't change very much. And then, once the foreign threat, the European threat, sort of vanishes at the end of World War I, you see both Republican and Democratic administrations reverse in course and undoing the interventionist policy, even though many of those governments had similar ideologies to sort of the "interventionist" presidents of previous years. And so, I find that most of the ideological explanations are a little hard to square with the overall trends of the time.

 

      The only one that I'll single out as being sort of a little bit more -- having more substance to it, is the sort of racism explanation, in large part because racism was obviously omnipresent in one way or another among all the leaders of this period. But one of the things you find is that, while racism certainly impacted the way that interventions unfolded -- so when the U.S. was occupying Haiti, there's just no doubt that the way that many American soldiers—and in particularly, those from the South—conducted themselves was reflected there, the racial prejudices.

 

      But racism actually, counterintuitively, I think, oftentimes made the U.S. less likely to intervene in the region. You don't see a lot of the "white man burden" kind of justification for intervening. If anything, I think presidents of both parties and of all different views were really, really reluctant to intervene and to use force in the region. And they almost always did it as what they saw, at least as a last resort. And racism sort of reinforced that in large part because there were these prevailing ideas at the time that if the U.S. went into the tropics, it would -- that would be bad, essentially, for white Americans. And so, there was this reluctance to get involved with Latin America at all because of these racist beliefs.

 

      And so, you actually, over time, kind of see racism as really, first, making annexation much, much, much more difficult. But even for kind of the less annexationist interventions being kind of acting as a break on kind of some of the more aggressive versions of U.S. foreign policy.

 

Daniel West:  Yeah. Interesting.

     

      So let's shift, then, to the present day. Sean, you mentioned one of the reasons for writing the book was an interest in China, and you say just a counterintuitive, "I'm so interested in China, I'm going to write about the Western Hemisphere."

 

      So what can we -- what did you learn, and what can we learn from this period of American history about the behavior of other powers in their respective neighborhoods?

 

Sean Mirski:  So first and foremost, the main lesson here, of course, is that rising powers are going to try to achieve the same thing the United States did. This regional hegemony, this status of essentially being the only great power in their neighborhoods. And so, I don't think it's surprising that today you see China following the same course as the United States in a lot of respects. We've been talking about the Monroe Doctrine, and in 1823, Monroe says essentially, "America for the Americans," right? "I mean, Europe, stay on your side of the ocean."

 

      In 2014, Xi Jinping gave this speech in which he said that the problems of Asia were to be solved by the people of Asia, the states of Asia, and should essentially be only for Asia. And you take that language and you swap out Asia for the Americas, and President Monroe might well have written it himself. And so, you are sort of starting to see these eerie echoes of American foreign policy a century ago in Chinese foreign policy today.

 

      I'm old enough to remember the days when China promised that it would never have a naval base abroad, that China promised it would never fire an aircraft carrier, when China criticized the sort of "dollar diplomacy" of the United States and other Western institutions. And, of course, today some of those criticisms are still being made, but China, to a remarkable extent, had sort of given up on its earlier statements and promises and is starting to follow kind of similar policies that the United States did, all, I think, with ultimately the same objective the United States had, which is to eject foreign great powers. And in China's case, that's the United States in particular.

 

      And so, my expectation would be that history never repeats itself exactly, of course, but I think it does rhyme to significant extent, and there's sort of reasons to believe that, as China continues rising, and as the competition with the United States grows more heated, we shouldn't be surprised that China will start to take more and more leaps out of the rising power playbook that we wrote.

 

      One other kind of lesson that I take away from the book—and this is a relatively sobering lesson—is that it can be difficult, I think, for Americans to square the foreign policy of the time with American values in a lot of ways. I mean, it seems this is a country that was founded in sort of anti-colonial, pro-sovereignty, pro-republican values. And the way that the United States conducted itself in the region a century ago wasn't necessarily fully consistent with that.

 

      And I think a lot of Americans look at that, and they basically say, "Pah, this means that the U.S. never held these values. They just weren't -- the U.S. didn't really believe this. Policymakers didn't care about this stuff." And that's just not true, right? I mean, I think any sort of fair-minded look at the internal documents at the State Department or the Archives shows that American policymakers cared about this stuff a lot, and, frankly, it made them extremely, extremely reluctant to intervene. But it just wasn't important enough in the face of security imperatives. And that's not, ultimately, that surprising. I mean, nations are not that different from people. When your survival is at stake, you're willing to do just about anything to protect it.

 

      And so, the kind of -- the lesson for China's rise today is that China's leaders like to tell a story about how China's rise is unique among those of great powers and how China's rise will be peaceful as it goes forward. And I think, to a significant extent, some of them really mean that. But it doesn't really ultimately change the fact that there are situations in which nations can have what they perceive as their security interests at risk and that they will act aggressively in those instances to protect those interests, no matter what their values may be.

           

      And so, at the end of the book—I won't spoil it—but I sort of talk through some of the areas in which -- where China's foreign policy might turn—that force might be used. And Taiwan has always been sort of the example that Americans know about, but in a lot of ways, I actually think that there's other parts of East Asia where it's more likely that China may use force in the near future.

 

Daniel West:  Yeah. Okay. I want to pause just to remind the audience that if you have any questions for Sean, feel free to submit them in the Q&A function at the bottom of Zoom. And if you just send those questions in, we'll take a look at them when they come in.

 

      But a couple more questions, and still in the present day but coming back to our own neighborhood. On this side of the ocean, we've seen signs of growing Chinese influence in Latin America. There have been on-again, off-again plans for Chinese companies to build a canal through Nicaragua. Honduras—which hosts Soto Cano, which is a big U.S. military airbase, one of the most significant ones in our hemisphere—broke ties with Taiwan recently and opened an embassy in Shanghai, so just a couple of anecdotal data points.

 

      Do you think the influence of great powers in our hemisphere is still a threat today? Do we still face the problem of order? And what are we doing about it?

 

Sean Mirski:  So the answer is yes. I mean, certainly through the Cold War, we did face that threat from the Soviet Union. And I think this is -- I covered this a little bit in the last -- or penultimate chapter of the book, but don't focus on it. But a large part of U.S. Cold War policy—both, actually, in Latin America and elsewhere—really, I think, echoed sort of U.S. regional policy up to World War II.

 

      Starting in the early 1990s, though, I think that great power competition does sort of vanish from the hemisphere completely, in large part because we had the famous unipolar moment. There just wasn't that same concern about foreign great powers coming into the hemisphere. That, as you mentioned, is starting to change again, I think.

 

      In the last couple of years, China has started to make real inroads into the hemisphere. Some of those are expected -- I guess I would say, innocuous, even. I mean, China's increased trade with the region has really skyrocketed, but that's not too surprising given the size of the Chinese economy. The problem is, I think, that a large part of Chinese influence in the region has started to tend in a more political, military, or security direction.

 

      And so, you gave a couple of examples. The Wall Street Journal has been, in the last month, reporting on developments in Cuba. China, for instance, has set up four eavesdropping facilities in Cuba that are aimed at the south coast of the United States. And there's also talk of setting up a joint military training facility in Cuba that would actually see Chinese troops stationed in Cuba. And these are, obviously, concerning developments from the perspective of the United States.

 

      And so, I do think we still sort of face a similar set of problems to what we've faced before. It's a little bit different now, I think, because in a century ago, a century and 25 years ago, the main problem that the United States saw was European colonialism, so Europe, essentially, coming into the region via intervention and establishing a foothold.

 

      Nowadays, the problem's a little bit different. No one thinks China's about to invade Guatemala, to just give a sort of facetious example. Instead, the concern is, I think, much more that China will come in and establish a foothold by invitation. Now, one of these countries, for either economic reasons or sort of security-based reasons, will think that it is in its interest to help China into the hemisphere by setting up a military base or something like that. And so, Cuba's, I think, a pretty good example of that.

 

      I mean, so the challenge for U.S. foreign policy today is, "How do you convince our neighbors to not, essentially, invite the Chinese in?" And, of course, what makes the U.S. -- what makes that task difficult for the United States is its history of interventionism in the region, both in the period I cover in the book and, of course, in the Cold War, which has left this lingering kind of patina of anti-Americanism among many states of the hemisphere and, particularly, sort of the left-leaning political parties in those states that makes it a little more challenging for the United States to kind of come in and say, "Listen, we are not -- we are not the threat you need to worry about."

 

      But I think that the answer ends up being, essentially, convincing these states that the hemisphere, as a whole, benefits from excluding great power competition. And so, that's an incomplete answer, but I think that's kind of the framework in which American policymakers have to be thinking through their regional policy.

 

Daniel West:  That makes sense.

 

      So question from the audience here: "Do you feel that changing U.S. demographics, and in particular, large communities descended from Latin-American countries and China and their electoral influence, will impact America's application of the Monroe Doctrine and overall security strategy?"

 

      This commenter also says, "Thanks for a well-written, informative book." So kudos.

 

Sean Mirski:  Well, thank you to the commentator.

 

      Changing U.S. demographics: So there's a couple ways in which you can imagine that those demographics starting to impact American foreign policy. Certainly, sort of the greater proportion of Americans, who can trace back their ancestry to Latin America, I think does help in some ways kind of at a people-to-people level establish closer ties between the United States and some of its neighbors.

 

      One of the things you saw in this period was, for instance, that the United States and Great Britain really managed to sort of repair relations, even though for the first 125 years of American foreign policy, Great Britain was always the bête noire, right? It was always this massive threat. And part of the reason that U.S. and Great Britain were able to kind of make amends and become the allies that they are today was for security reasons. I mean, both nations were sort of independently concerned about Germany. But part of it, too, was the sort of cultural people-to-people ties. British elites intermarried with American elites. There was lots of tourism between the two countries. And, in general, there was sort of a greater understanding at the interpersonal level between these nations in a way that then kind of was conducive to more peaceful relations. And so, one could imagine the same thing happening with the United States and Latin America given that we are sort of, I think, more at an interpersonal level connected to them.

 

      On the flip side, however, there's also -- I mean, I won't get into the internal politics, in large part because that is not my area of expertise, but it's hard to, I think, gainsay that at least parts of American foreign policy are significantly affected by the fact that there are communities within the United States, like the Cuban American community in Florida, for instance, that has a particular view on sort of the ideal U.S. foreign policy towards whatever the country they came from, so Cuba, in particular. And so, that can sometimes often make U.S. foreign policy a little bit challenging because navigating those -- the kind of currents of domestic politics can oftentimes mean that U.S. foreign policy might be different than it might otherwise be. But again, that's -- it's a case-by-case kind of a [inaudible 43:54]. It's hard to draw any overarching conclusions.

 

      On the kind of --The other side of the question—if I remember correctly—was the increasing percentage of our population that's Chinese. You know, I don't -- again, in theory, you might hope that that sort of Chinese American population could help sort of ameliorate some of the security competition with China. I think, in practice, though, the security imperatives and the sort of security dilemma that we have with China and sort of the competition in which we have engaged makes it difficult for that factor to really do -- to have much of a mitigating role.

 

      I also think -- I mean, kind of similar, I guess, in some sense to the Cuban American example -- I haven't looked at polling, but I would assume that many Chinese-Americans don't necessarily feel particularly charitable towards the existing regime in Beijing. And so, again, you could actually sort of imagine a world in which having a greater Chinese American community in the United States actually leads to a relatively more hawkish policy towards China than you might otherwise see. But I guess the answer is, "Well, we'll see."

 

Daniel West:  Great. So last question for you, Sean, before we close today, and that's: You finished the book. It only took you eight years. So what next? What are you thinking about today, and what's your next project?

 

Sean Mirski:  Well, so my wife, Courtney, has made it very clear there will be no more additional books. She is very excited about the book-burning party that she will be hosting definitely later this month, which I am also excited about because, knowing the laws of supply and demand as I do, I realize that book burning will only make the book more valuable as long as people buy the book before burning it.

 

      So, no, I think for the foreseeable future, there's not going to be any new books. But I did -- I started this project in a very roundabout way because of China. And I think that that's sort of where my research interests are headed.

 

      There's just so many issues, I think, today in the kind of competition between the United States and China that still remain to be explored, and I do think it's the most important question in the 21st century probably. And so, getting those questions right and sort of thinking through what is the best way to maintain the kind of the American-led international order and to do so without risking war with China. I mean, it's an incredibly difficult question, and I think getting it right will require a lot of thinking and, frankly, a lot of looking at parts of American history that I think sometimes are better analogs for the current competition than sort of the usual Cold War comparisons that people often hear about. And so, I think that's going to be the trend of my next kind of project.

 

Daniel West:  Great. Great. Well, Sean Mirski, thanks for making time to be with us today. It's a great book, We May Dominate the World. We encourage folks to buy it. Up to you whether or not to burn it after you buy it, as Sean -- I didn't think suggested, but maybe suggested.

 

      And thanks to Jack and to our audience for being with us today.

 

Sean Mirski:  Thank you so much.

 

Jack Derwin:  Thank you both very much. And as Daniel said, thank you to our audience for tuning in today.

 

      You can stay up-to-date on all social media platforms at FedSoc or check out our website, fedsoc.org. Thank you very much.

 

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Conclusion:  Thank you for listening to this episode of Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society's Practice Groups. For more information about The Federalist Society, the Practice Groups, and to become a Federalist Society member, please visit our website at fedsoc.org.

 

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