This excellent book explains how the United States ended up ruling an Empire since the early twentieth century (despite its refusal to accept it), and how the country sorted out the contradiction between being a full democracy and subduing foreign territories. Such a contradiction became apparent after the Spanish-American War. The case of the Philippines uncovered American difficulties in running a British-style Empire: foreign occupied territories could not be indefinitely excluded from the U.S. Constitution, but racial prejudice established strict limits to the political assimilation of new societies. In the Philippines, the solution to this puzzle was the ban on U.S. investment in order to prevent the consolidation of the colonial link. From then onwards, and in contrast to European powers' imperial rule, American investment abroad would exclude de iure colonial occupation. But it would actually be the origin of U.S. de facto political control of an increasing number of world countries. In fact, the main characteristic of U.S. imperial policy would be its close association with American investment overseas. From the early twentieth century, American foreign intervention would shadow U.S. investment in countries plagued with political instability.
The subordination of American imperial policy to the interests of American investors overseas is behind Noel Maurer's idea of the “Empire Trap.” Maurer suggests that successful intervention of U.S. administrations on behalf of American investors encouraged more overseas investment, and made it difficult for future administration to refrain from further intervention, despite potential strategic reasons that would have made that refraining convenient. The successive presidents would never resist the pressures to intervene, due to either the investors' personal or political connections or the mobilization of political opinion against the nationalization of American property overseas. And the U.S. would end up supervising and, when necessary, readdressing the political life of its “colonies” whenever the interests of U.S. investors were threatened. Such unintended imperial policy would last at least until the 1980s, although the instruments applied in American interventions abroad would gradually change from military action and taking over of domestic institutions to threats of aid reduction and covert action. However, the imperial “trap” would always mean the subordination of U.S. government foreign policy to the strategies of private business groups, even when the potential cost was very high, as in the Cuban crisis. American success, as reflected in compensation received by investors, reinforced the trap in a typical vicious circle dynamic.
The book is organized chronologically in 11 chapters. After the Introduction, Chapters 2–7 focus on U.S. intervention overseas during the “First American Empire,” i.e., between the 1890s and WWII. The second part (Chapters 8–11) covers the period from 1945 to the present, and is loosely associated to the history of the “Second American Empire.” Both parts are very different in content and character. It could not be otherwise, given the significant change that took place in U.S. international policy after 1945. The first part can be read as a history of the U.S. Empire until the 1940s, due to the close equivalence between the “First American Empire” and U.S. intervention to defend overseas investors. This first American Empire was made up by those territories in which the U.S. could eventually send its army to change policies or governments that were not friendly enough to American interests, including mainly the Caribbean and Andean countries and Liberia.
Things were completely different since 1945 and, if there is something to criticize in this book, it is that this epochal change is not sufficiently stressed. Since WWII, the United States went on intervening overseas to defend the interests of American investors. However, those interventions were now a rather small part of the U.S. imperial strategy. The “Second American Empire,” which was built during the Cold War period, was very different from the first one, loosely covering a large part of the planet and being much less associated with the defense of U.S. investment abroad than before the war. Thus, the second part of the book is no longer a history of the U.S. imperialism, but a detailed study of strategies to defend the interests of American overseas investors under threat of nationalization. This is only a small demerit, since this part is an excellent and exhaustive research on the numerous cases of American foreign intervention, and on its gradual disappearance since the 1980s, when international arbitration mechanisms made U.S. unilateral action less necessary. The last chapters of the book provide a careful analysis of the origin and operation of those arbitration mechanisms, and also of their flaws, which might involve the return of the empire trap in the future.
Noel Maurer's book is an outstanding contribution. It provides a powerful interpretation of U.S. imperial policy, based on an impressive amount of quantitative and anecdotal evidence and a great wealth of detail on the most representative interventions. The book is a must-read, not only for those interested in the history of U.S. foreign relations or in the evolution of the international economy, but also for anyone willing to understand the economic and political history of twentieth century Latin America (which, for obvious reasons, receives the most attention in the book), and other peripheral areas. And, last but not least, it is also a crucial contribution to the long-debated issue of the potential conflict between globalization and democracy. As the author points out at the end of the book: “The history of the first and second American empires indicates that it is not the international investor who is at risk from the loss of the institutions that protect foreign investment, but the independence of national foreign policy” (p. 451).
