In the post-Cold War era, when policymakers have increasingly used foreign trade as a national security tool, Dale Copeland’s timing is perfect in publishing the magnificent A World Safe for Commerce. While it is a must read in the Trump era, the book reinterprets the entire history of US foreign relations within a context of the drive to protect and expand the nation’s commerce. From colonial times to the early twentieth century, chapters cover roughly a half century until Copeland, an international relations scholar, slows down with a more focused chronological look from the First World War to the present. A final chapter appropriately drills into US–China relations. One of Copeland’s (noble) intentions is to breach the chasm between historians and political scientists (or archives and theory), a task he accomplishes less impressively than his other aim of connecting national security studies to political economy in the field of international relations (IR).

Copeland’s mission goes beyond illuminating the connection of trade to defense to deriving a novel theory—one that he calls dynamic realism—from historical data. Contending with realist and neorealist critiques in political science, as well as economic determinists in the history field, he argues that the search for markets and trade expansion were essential to US military, territorial, and security affairs. Depending on the circumstances, dynamic realism meant that the US could either minimize a hostile stance toward other nations or take an aggressive tone, turning engagement and negotiation into ruthless, imperial expansion. Thus, trade was not just commerce for the sake of prosperity and profits but embedded in the US’s quest for global democracy and peace through open markets. At the same time, the nation solidified its hegemonic position even by war, if necessary. In short, grand strategy undergirded trade policy over the centuries. Power politics joined with internationalism to reveal the US’s interests, policies, ambitions, and its very identity in the international arena.

Both historians and theorists should welcome Copeland’s refreshing interpretation. The book is breathtaking in breadth: it covers seemingly every category of US foreign policy—from interdependence to reputation, with finance, trade, and military affairs in between. In crafting an all-encompassing synthesis, Copeland grounds his bold theory in federal archives. Dynamic realism also makes sense as a guide to the future as well as the past. Considering the current administration’s ability to shoot US power in the foot with self-defeating protectionism, perhaps history can assuage our worries, for after all, the US had turned inward for much of its early history.

A World Safe for Commerce, steeped as it is in theory, is not a standard history of trade and commerce, nor does the author claim it is. Scholars of trade and business history should not come looking for answers to many of their key questions. When it comes to John F. Kennedy, to take just one example, the reader encounters the Berlin and Cuban Missile crises but not the historic Trade Expansion Act that was geared to deal with the new, six-nation European Economic Community that so transformed US grand strategy going forward. Surely, change wrought by the Community is part of the dynamic realist push and pull, because the gains from commerce in part funded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), along with alliances with Japan, South Korea, and others.

The point is that Copeland may have taken a stab at intertwining US trade policy with US foreign policy as historians do, particularly because this book should be a touchstone for economic historians. It is a bit surprising that the word “tariff,” for instance, does not appear in the index. Neither does the pivotal Smoot–Hawley Tariff of 1930, and its bearing on the Great Depression, hostile trade relations in the Anglo-American world, and the rise of fascism in Europe and militarism in Asia. That is, legislation such as Smoot–Hawley ties nicely into Copeland’s dynamic realist equation and meets his quest for joining economics to military affairs. In this book, Congress, in fact, gets short shrift, as do the politics of trade and even globalization. Indeed, he contests Marxism and the New Left, thus it would be appropriate to deal with some of these issues, particularly the domestic roots of the commercial–military network. In a book based on the significance of commerce, then, there is scant notice given to that commerce in its detail, at least in the sense that historians have come to expect it.

Pointing out these omissions, however, is not meant to detract from Copeland’s purpose and grand scholarly feat or warn off historians. Quite the contrary; I hope this magisterial book deservedly attracts them, as well as scholars in other disciplines.