For all the books published on the history of U.S. foreign policy, the scholarship on the economic foundations of national security remains sparse and often somewhat superficial. Historians continue to emphasize the American search for foreign markets and the nation's recent dependence on foreign resources, especially fossil fuels. Strategic specialists focus on the importance of infrastructure, including foreign bases, transportation routes, and supply chains. This scholarship is strong on material factors, but weak on the role that economic assumptions play in defining American perceptions of the wider world. How are economic judgments integrated with military and political calculations about foreign policy?
No one has addressed this difficult question with more archival diligence and analytical rigor than Melvyn Leffler. Across a long and productive career, he has written some of the biggest and most thoughtful books chronicling the development of American international political economy after World Wars I and II. He has also written some of the most sophisticated articles on frenetic American policymaking after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Leffler's early research followed the venerable tradition of the Wisconsin school, focusing on Washington's efforts to enforce an “open door” for economic influence abroad through the spread of surplus American capital, industry, and agriculture. A close reading of the sources, however, revealed a more complex story. Leffler recalls that he uncovered “the pluralism of the business community, the messiness of the legislative process, and the salience of organizational pressures within executive branch departments” (p. 29).
This acute recognition of complexity, and an almost obsessive desire to make sense of it without oversimplifying it, is what makes Leffler such a groundbreaking historian. Better than any others, his writings narrate the messy, contingent connections between economics, politics, and foreign policy across the twentieth century. He marinates in the dirty details of foreign loans, military deployments, and political negotiations. He shows how the realities of policy defied most of the categories we use to explain policy.
But Leffler does not stop there. He writes with a sharp pen, tracing coherent patterns from the complex details in the archives. Almost all of his work reveals the economic ecumenism among American policymakers, married to a dogmatic pursuit of insulation for the nation's prosperity. The presidents, cabinet officials, generals, and other public officials who dominate Leffler's writings were intelligent pragmatists in their day-to-day decisions, but they were deep pessimists about the possibilities for chaos, violence, and destruction abroad. Fearful of the worst, they used their best energies to protect the United States by maximizing American leverage over markets and resources. They defined global economic preponderance, in varied forms, as essential to national freedom.
Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism reflects Leffler's career-long grappling with this historical dynamic. The book contains some of his most important scholarly articles, with a biographical introduction and short reflections contextualizing each piece in light of later scholarship. The parts of the collection, written over five decades, come together powerfully to chronicle the consistent struggles of American international political economy from the 1920s to the current moment. Unlike most edited volumes, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism brings coherence to a wide range of policy details.
Leffler hits his stride with Herbert Hoover, showing how the Great Engineer sought to stabilize international affairs and protect the American economy. That impetus was the source of Hoover's remarkable internationalism, but it also encouraged an excessive emphasis on the role of business and markets, instead of the necessary redistribution of resources and control over violent forces in societies suffering from damaging economic inequalities. Leffler writes that Hoover's “efforts to establish a stable world order failed because of his overconfidence in the ability of business experts to deal with complex problems. . . . His efforts, although flawed, remain noteworthy because they underscore how difficult it is to balance American foreign interests with American overseas commitments and to reconcile domestic needs with international imperatives” (pp. 74–75).
The generation of Americans who fought in World War II embodied Hoover's faith in building security through economic preponderance, but they accepted a more direct role for the federal government. Although the New Deal was not Keynesian, it promoted the state as a forceful actor in rebuilding foreign societies—insuring order and containing threatening adversaries, particularly the Soviet Union.
Only American foreign intervention could make the world safe for democratic capitalism in the shadow of fascism and communism. This “lesson” from history motivated even military critics of extended postwar commitments to support exactly those policies—unprecedented in American history. “In the spring of 1946,” Leffler writes, “military planners working on contingency plans for the emergency withdrawal of American troops from Germany, should war with Russia unexpectedly occur, also took note of the economic turmoil and political instability in neighboring countries, especially France. Sensitivity to the geopolitical dimensions of the socioeconomic crisis of the postwar era impelled Chief of Staff Eisenhower to give high priority in the army budget to assistance for occupied areas” (p. 141).
Immediate profit did not motivate wider foreign intervention by cautious American leaders. Instead, fears of chaos and conflict abroad that would harm the American economy jolted men in Washington to action. Militant anticommunism in the Cold War reflected anxieties of global capitalist fragility. Similarly, the overambitious global war on terror revealed the nightmares of economic implosion made vivid by both the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Great Recession of 2007–2008.
Leffler's analysis is powerful because it is complex and coherent at the same time. A multiplicity of potential economic vulnerabilities for the United States in an integrated capitalist system create ever-varying pushes for intervention to plug the holes, eliminate the bad guys, and shore up the weak links. This is indeed a long crisis of capitalism, driven not by class conflict, as Marx predicted, but by proliferating brush fires around the globe. The leaders of the British and French empires in the late nineteenth century would recognize this predicament, although Leffler offers little comparative analysis in this book.
Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism is compelling in its rigorous attention to diverse details and recurring patterns over time. Of course, there were policy alternatives—including a more vibrant New Deal state after World War II and more investment in international institutions—but Leffler does not explore those paths in essays that largely assess the world from Washington, D.C. Most relevant to our current moment, Leffler does not address how the political economic dimensions of American power have distorted not just foreign policy, but the basic functioning of domestic institutions in the United States. Our democracy has become more militarized and, recently, more unequal in part because of the dynamics that Leffler chronicles so well. And democratic deterioration at home has reinforced more of the same abroad.
Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism provides the conceptual architecture for diving deeply into the political economy of contemporary American power. This is an accessible and necessary history for contemplating our future in a time when economy and politics are driven by so many corroding fears.
