Progressive Era Diplomat: Lloyd C. Griscom and Trade Expansion

The Progressive Era, from the late 1890s to the entry of the United States into World War One, was marked by a professional commitment to global trade expansion on the part of the State Department and the McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations. Philosophically, the United States embraced the belief that a liberal, democratic, free-enterprise political and economic system would advance human progress on every continent, and that global free trade would remove many causes of war and conflict. Such a policy position attracted young and talented foreign service officers to serve in the American diplomatic corps. One young man was Lloyd C. Griscom, heir to one of the great American shipping fortunes. Griscom's career as a diplomat in Turkey, Persia, Japan, Brazil, and Italy between 1899 and 1909 revealed much about American political and economic interests during a period when the United States emerged as a major power.     

德国新政府对华政策前瞻北大核心

不同于默克尔时代,德国新政府执政纲领及部分新政要对华表态尤为强调意识形态分歧和对华竞争。在近年来中西方对抗性上升、美国不断拉欧遏华的大背景下,德国对华认知趋于负面,加之德国自身政局变化以及中德经贸关系的变化,新政府或将加强对华防范与施压,减少对华战略依赖,同欧美盟友加强协调,一致对华,在经贸、科技、全球基建、规则标准等领域争夺主动权。中德关系存在波动的可能性,但由于中德经贸捆绑、西方内部矛盾、德国外交务实传统等因素,新政府将在延续的基础上调整对华政策,中德关系尚不致发生逆转。     

An ‘Aladdin's lamp’ for free enterprise: Eisenhower,fiscal conservatism,and Latin American nationalism, 1953–61

This study explores the Eisenhower administration's efforts to promote free trade and investment policies in Latin America. US officials believed that private capital investment, rather than US foreign aid, would best promote Latin American economic development and improve its abiliry to purchase American products. By eliminating the need for foreign aid, Latin American economic autarky complemented Eisenhower's zeal for fiscal conservatism. Although most scholars have focused on the primacy of anti-communism in Eisenhower's inter-American policies, this study contends that economic nationalism posed the greatest threat to Eisenhower's policies. US officials eventually responded by expanding aid to Latin America, but the additional economic aid was always intended to complement private capital, rather than replace it. This article, based upon the papers of influential administration officials and State Department records, sheds considerable light as to why the United States promoted free trade and investment policies in the developing world, as it still does today.     

John Barrett and collective approaches to United States foreign policy in Latin America, 1907-20

As the United States was becoming a major power in the early years of the twentieth century, it was confronted by a dilemma in its desire to promote a democratic free-enterprise system among the republics of the Western hemisphere. Should the United States act unilaterally or collectively to pursue its goals? The rise of the Pan American Union as a collective political and economic organization provided the means to deal with such issues as revolution and economic instabiliry in Latin America. Nations such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic provided early opportunities to test US policy approaches. However, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and subsequent civil war, provided a major testing ground for both the Taft and Wilson administrations. Ultimately Woodrow Wilson chose to pursue unilateral military intervention in Mexico despite the offer from the Pan American Union and its director, John Barrett, to provide collective negotiations to avoid war and establish political stabiliry in Mexico. As we enter the twenry-first century, the United States finds itself still confronted by these choices on a global scale.     

Henry Cabot Lodge,Hawaii, and the Shift from Continental to Hemispheric Defense

Over the course of the 1890s, the United States shifted from a continental defense model toward a hemispheric one. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) was a leading proponent of this shift. Lodge was convinced that the United States needed to build a blue-water navy, acquire maritime bases overseas, establish its predominance in Central America, and push US influence out into the Pacific. The first test of this vision came not against Spain or Germany in the Caribbean, but against the possibility of British and Japanese influence over Hawaii in 1894–95. Domestic political and economic considerations acted mainly as a constraint on Lodge’s vision rather than as a basis for it. The main impetus was strategic, as he looked to safeguard an extended security zone for the United States in Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean waters. As he put it, “I would take and hold the outworks, as we now hold the citadel, of American power.”     

The political economy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: a US perspective

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), signed in February 2016, is the most ambitious free trade deal of the postwar era. The 12 TPP countries account for nearly 40 percent of the world's economy. Coupled with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—which is still being negotiated between the United States and the European Union—the TPP represents an attempt by the Obama Administration to lead in promoting regional trade and investment arrangements despite the failure of the Doha Round to reach a comprehensive global trade deal under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Although the agreement among the 12 TPP countries has been reached, ratification by their legislatures is pending. Ratification by the US Congress remains uncertain due to complex economic and political factors in the United States, including the presidential election of 2016.     

The U.S. press and political change in the Third World: The coverage of military coups

One of the chief features of the Third World is how often regimes change. These regime changes have many implications both for internal political stability in the Third World and in the relationships between the Third World and the superpowers. In the United States, it is generally the media that inform the American people about these changes and their implications for the United States. This paper analyzes the coverage of the two most recent military coups in Nigeria by the U.S. press.

Our analysis indicates that if a government that is supportive of American interests is overthrown, and the personalities and policies of the new leaders are not readily apparent to the press, the change is greeted with hostilities by the U.S. press. However, as soon as it becomes apparent that the new regime will not threaten the economic and political interests of the United States, the press rallies behind the new regime and begins to proclaim it as a savior. The press lamented the overthrow of Shagari's government and proclaimed the coup a setback for democracy in Africa. However, within a few weeks of this judgement, the coup that overthrew President Shagari was hailed as necessary for the political stability and economic prosperity of Nigeria. When the military government that seized power from Shagari was itself thrown out of office in a military coup, the new regime was welcomed by the press. We also found the U.S. press utilizes a biased and distorted framework in its coverage of political events in the Third World. The framework used in the Nigerian case asserts that all economic and political crises emanate from tribalism, corruption, and the criminal tendencies of Nigerians. We argue in this paper that this perspective, which informs the coverage of political events in Nigeria by the U.S. press, does not allow it to present valid and truthful explanations of political changes in Nigeria. We also argue that this shallow coverage is done deliberately so as to obscure the reality of political struggles in Nigeria. We assert that it is in the interests of both the Nigerian ruling class and international capitalism to attribute economic and political crises in Nigeria to tribalism, corruption, and nepotism.     

An 'Aladdin's lamp' for free enterprise: Eisenhower, fiscal conservatism, and Latin American nationalism, 1953-61

This study explores the Eisenhower administration's efforts to promote free trade and investment policies in Latin America. US officials believed that private capital investment, rather than US foreign aid, would best promote Latin American economic development and improve its abiliry to purchase American products. By eliminating the need for foreign aid, Latin American economic autarky complemented Eisenhower's zeal for fiscal conservatism. Although most scholars have focused on the primacy of anti-communism in Eisenhower's inter-American policies, this study contends that economic nationalism posed the greatest threat to Eisenhower's policies. US officials eventually responded by expanding aid to Latin America, but the additional economic aid was always intended to complement private capital, rather than replace it. This article, based upon the papers of influential administration officials and State Department records, sheds considerable light as to why the United States promoted free trade and investment policies in the developing world, as it still does today.     

Negotiating the EU–U.S. Open Aviation Area Agreement 2007 in the Context of Transatlantic Airline Regimes Since 1944

Between 1944 and 2002, the United States sought to create a competitive and commercially driven international civil aviation regime. It tried to peel away politically inspired regulations, which fragmented the marketplace, and deliver efficiencies and consumer benefits. In contrast with the American liberal tradition—albeit with limitations—the industry in Europe was over-regulated and largely based on subsidised state-owned carriers with international market quotas. Thus for many years Europe and the U.S. followed different paths; but political and economic dynamics conspired together in the 1980s and early 1990s to produce remarkable change in the European Community and, by 1997, there were the makings of a competitive and lightly regulated single market, which brought it close to U.S. practice. Since 2002, the United States has been less liberal in its airline policies; the EU has been more liberal. It would be an irony indeed if the great regime liberaliser since 1944 were now to become a force of regulatory conservatism that denied consummation to the vision of a transatlantic open aviation area that could be a magnet to draw in the rest of the world into a truly global commercial airline market.     

How soon is now? The effects of the IMF on economic reforms in Latin America

This study assesses the effects of IMF loans on economic liberalization in Latin America. Specifically, we are interested in whether the Fund receives greater cooperation from Latin American borrowers in the initiation of some economic reforms over others. Using a two-stage treatment effects model as well as panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) regression for 15 Latin American countries from 1980 to 2003, we find that IMF participation tends to lead to greater trade and capital reforms and less reform in privatization. These relationships are tempered by the country??s relationship with the United States along with domestic group pressures.     

The New Aerospace Diplomacy: Reconstructing Post-Cold War US-Russian Economic Relations

Post-Cold War U.S.-Russian diplomacy reveals the increased importance of new diplomatic actors and processes, whilst underscoring the continued key role of state-state negotiation in reconstructing the bilateral relationship between the United States and post-Soviet Russia. The Clinton administration and Yeltsin government negotiated measures to promote political stability, democratization, and conversion to a neoliberal market economy in Russia, a centrepiece of which was the integration of Russia’s globally competitive aerospace sector into the global production chain. Establishing the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, a top-level binational economic and technology policy committee, and signing a bilateral trade liberalization treaty on commercial satellite launch services paved the way for public-public and public-private bilateral space cooperation, and for major private joint ventures between US and Russian aerospace firms.     

Can Europe Fill the Void in U.S. Military Leadership?

This article lays out the case for why Washington's European allies are incapable, both now and in the foreseeable future, of replacing American military leadership. Despite recent substantial force contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan and small-scale interventions in Africa, European military capabilities are limited, declining, and unlikely to rebound, regardless of whether the United States is in strategic retreat. As a result, the United States faces a bleak choice: not whether to trade American global leadership for an equally benevolent European world order, but whether to give up its mantle of leadership and thereby create a void that may be filled by unfriendly, if not overtly hostile, actors.     

A Postscript to the Asian Financial Crisis: The Fragile International Economic Order

This article situates the East Asian financial/economic crisis among other key economic events of the post-Cold-War world, assessing its significance alongside that of America's extraordinary economic growth in the 1990s and the collapse of the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. According to the author, the financial crisis could not have been avoided merely by removing national governments and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund from markets. Such faith in unregulated markets is based on the incorrect assumption that investors are rational, as well as on the anomalous experience of the United States in the 1990s. While the US economy did improve markedly over the last decade, this growth was not due to unfettered capitalism, but rather to idiosyncratic aspects of the economy, such as a high borrowing rate. Gilpin points out that the end of this economic growth, alongside the protectionist impulses exhibited at the Seattle meeting, has contributed to a move away from international trade liberalization. The American free-market model, tarnished by corporate corruption, he argues, is no longer the goal of developing economies concerned about the lack of market controls. The result, he fears, is a growing fragility in the stability and governance of the global economy.     

Targeted Sanctions in a World of Global Finance

This is the golden age of economic statecraft—and the study of economic statecraft. This is in large part due to the evolution of economic coercion from trade embargoes to targeted financial sanctions. Targeted financial sanctions are attractive because they can generate economic costs similar to those of more comprehensive sanctions, with fewer negative externalities. Over time, however, the intersection of economic sanctions with globalized capital markets will provoke three interesting research questions. First, do financial sanctions spare a target country’s population from negative humanitarian and human rights outcomes? Second, to what extent are financial sanctions an exercise in learning by both targets and senders? Third, will the United States’ use of financial sanctions trigger blowback against US primacy in the international financial system? These last two questions offer the prospect to linking research on economic statecraft with larger questions of international security and global political economy.     

大国安全与地区发展的悖论?——基于冷战早期美拉关系的考察

为了遏制共产主义的发展,战后初期美国积极在西半球编织反共防务安全体系。与此相比,美国对拉美国家的经济援助需求消极怠慢,对它们所面临的经济发展问题视而不见,采取了“贸易而非援助”的经济政策,激化了美拉矛盾。20世纪五六十年代,一些拉美国家实行了国有化和土改等民族主义改革,并同苏联加强贸易往来,反美反独裁的游击运动风起云涌。在美国看来,这与其在西半球的经济安全和反共战略相悖。为了化解危机,美国一方面以反共和集体安全为名,对“敌对”政权进行军事干预,另一方面也在不断调整自身政策,加大对拉美国家的经济援助力度。不论怎样,谋求和巩固在西半球的霸主地位始终是美国制定拉美政策的根本目的,安全和稳定是其维护的主要利益。在理论上,只有拉美国家的深层经济发展问题得到有效解决,才能消除不稳定的隐患,所以,美国国家安全与拉美地区发展是并行不悖的。但在现实中,由于拉美国家的既得利益集团与美国关系密切,美国不可能切实推进拉美国家的经济改革,同时美国又常以安全防务政策化解由经济发展引发的拉美问题,这种立场上的偏差注定了美国提出的经济改革方案的“无效性”,而仅仅是一种权宜之计。     

Steadfast Yet Reluctant Allies: Japan and the United Kingdom in the Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War there were high expectations from the Johnson and Nixon Administrations for Japan and Britain to provide practical and political support for American military and strategic objectives in Indochina. The leader of Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party, Sato Eisaku, and the British Labour Party's Harold Wilson, balanced political support for the United States with significant public pressure at home to eschew any entanglement in the highly unpopular conflict. As junior allies of the United States both Sato and Wilson did not want to see the United States fail in Vietnam or the communist sphere expand in Southeast Asia. Both leaders accrued significant foreign policy advantages as a result of politically and publicly supporting American actions in Vietnam. But to placate domestic electorates that clearly felt uncomfortable over their governments providing explicit, albeit non-military, support to the United States in Vietnam, Sato and Wilson expended substantial prime ministerial diplomacy in attempting to play a mediatory role in the conflict. Each was highly successful in balancing domestic and American demands, whilst maintaining their security partnerships with the United States.     

America's freedom to act in the Caspian Area

After the break up of the Soviet Union the conflict over energy resources in the Caspian area has flared up again. The United States has entered the stage, but the only remaining superpower finds it hard to forward its security policy interests and interests in the economic sphere in the area. The creation of a US‐dominated hegemony in the area would be beneficial for the United States, but the policy of containment of Iran and Russia, and US policy towards Azerbaijan seriously limits this possibility. Thus it is not possible to secure American influence in the Caspian area. In the long term this leaves the area open to Russia and Iran, or new actors such as China and the EU, unless the United States is willing to soften its policy vis‐à‐vis Iran and/or Azerbaijan in order to create the needed hegemony, and in this way achieve economic and political influence in the former Soviet republics.     

On the Brink of War: The Crisis Year of 1915 in Relations Between the US and Austria-Hungary

This article deals with the development of political relations between the United States of America and Austria-Hungary in 1915. These relations are especially marked by the pressure applied by the Austro-Hungarian government towards diminishing American support of the countries of the Entente. It was a conflict of crucial significance—the actual performance of American neutrality was at stake. The study proves that, as early as 1915, Vienna had already considered the United States as a de facto ally of the powers of the Entente, and it did not put much hope in President Woodrow Wilson's mediating efforts. Furthermore, the article disproves the generally held but erroneous view that, almost till the end of the Great War, the American administration and public felt a certain fondness toward the Danubian monarchy. This is evidenced by the harsh reactions of the American press to the scandalous activities of the Austro-Hungarian embassy in the United States. However, the relations of the United States with Austria-Hungary were less dramatic than those between the United States and Germany.     

The Struggle for Sea Power: Lessons from the Great War

The history of the contest for naval mastery during the Great War has particular resonance for today because the United States now faces a serious threat from China's increasing capabilities to wage war at sea. China's naval challenge calls into question America's continued command of the maritime commons. The stakes at risk for the United States in today's contest are just as high as they were a hundred years ago for Britain. Defeat at sea would wreck American global leadership in the twenty-first century just as surely as it would have meant the collapse of British power in the twentieth. What, then, can we learn from past struggles for sea power and America's entry into the First World War that offers guidance for understanding our current strategic predicament?     

The New Aerospace Diplomacy: Reconstructing Post-Cold War US-Russian Economic Relations

Post-Cold War U.S.-Russian diplomacy reveals the increased importance of new diplomatic actors and processes, whilst underscoring the continued key role of state-state negotiation in reconstructing the bilateral relationship between the United States and post-Soviet Russia. The Clinton administration and Yeltsin government negotiated measures to promote political stability, democratization, and conversion to a neoliberal market economy in Russia, a centrepiece of which was the integration of Russia's globally competitive aerospace sector into the global production chain. Establishing the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, a top-level binational economic and technology policy committee, and signing a bilateral trade liberalization treaty on commercial satellite launch services paved the way for public-public and public-private bilateral space cooperation, and for major private joint ventures between US and Russian aerospace firms.