1. I use “empire” rather than “Empire” to describe the United States because its imperial status is not officially acknowledged.
2. I use the terms “United States” and “America” interchangeably when referring to the United States of America.
3. I use the term “semiglobal” because the empire never covered the whole world.
4. Maier, Among Empires, 7.
5. Rumsfeld was responding to a question from a reporter for Al-Jazeera. Eric Schmitt, “Aftereffects: Military Presence; Rumsfeld Says U.S. Will Cut Forces in Gulf,” New York Times, April 29, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/29/world/aftereffects-military-presence-rumsfeld-says-us-will-cut-forces-in-gulf.html.
6. Schlesinger, “The American Empire?,” 45.
7. On “imperial enthusiasts,” see MacDonald, “Those Who Forget,” 48.
8. The American Empire Project was founded by Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser, leading to a stream of publications from Metropolitan Books, http://www.americanempireproject.com.
9. Both Brazil and Mexico declared themselves to be empires on independence in 1821, although Mexico became a republic two years later.
10. On the different definitions of American exceptionalism, see Lipset, American Exceptionalism; Bacevich, The Limits of Power; and Murray, American Exceptionalism.
11. Daniel White, “Read Hillary Clinton’s Speech Touting ‘American Exceptionalism,’ ” Time, August 31, 2016, http://time.com/4474619/read-hillary-clinton-american-legion-speech.
12. Blair’s speech was delivered to a joint session of Congress. “Transcript of Blair’s Speech to Congress,” CNN, July 17, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/07/17/blair.transcript/. On January 26, 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May used very similar words when she addressed a gathering of Republicans in Philadelphia; see Adam Bienkov, “Full Text: Theresa May’s Speech to the Republican ‘Congress of Tomorrow’ Conference,” Business Insider, January 26, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/full-text-theresa-mays-speech-to-the-republican-congress-of-tomorrow-conference-2017-1.
13. Nye, Soft Power, 5.
14. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiv–xv.
15. Wen Jiabao, quoted in Zeng and Breslin, “China’s ‘New Type of Great Power Relations,’ ” 774.
16. See a February 15, 2012, video presentation at a luncheon to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the National Committee on US-China relations, https://www.ncusr.org/content/video-vice-president-xi-jinping-policy-address.
17. On possible options, see Womack, “Asymmetric Parity,” 1463–80.
18. Trump even had the temerity to question “American exceptionalism,” saying in April 2015, before he declared his candidacy, “I don’t think it is a very nice term.” See David Corn, “Donald Trump Says He Does Not Believe in ‘American Exceptionalism,’ ” Mother Jones, June 7, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/donald-trump-american-exceptionalism.
19. Some have argued that Barack Obama (2009–17) was the first postimperial president. Yet Obama was a true believer in American exceptionalism and cannot therefore claim that role. See Chapter 9.4.
1. The indigenous peoples would be called “Indians” following the arrival of Europeans, as a result of a geographical error by Christopher Columbus. The most commonly used name today is “Native American,” although “American Indian” or “Indian” is also employed. I use all three variants in this book.
2. Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Weeks, The New Cambridge History, 9.
3. Thornton, “Population History of Native North Americans,” 23.
4. The part of the Northwest Territory that would become Indiana, for example, had only 2,632 white settlers of all ages in 1800.
5. For a comparison with the British Empire, see Go, Patterns of Empire.
6. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 87.
7. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 132.
8. The Indians thought they could count on their British allies, but the commanding officer closed the gates of Fort Miami to the retreating Indians and their fate was sealed. See Sugden, Tecumseh, 90.
9. Goebel, William Henry Harrison, 40–41.
10. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Rockwell, Indian Affairs, 88.
11. The slogan for William Harrison, whose vice presidential nominee in the 1840 campaign was John Tyler, was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
12. Minnesota Territory had been formed in 1849, consisting of present-day Minnesota and eastern portions of North and South Dakota.
13. Often referred to as one treaty, there were in fact three, with the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, respectively. See Horsman, “United States Indian Policies, 1776–1815,” 30.
14. Prucha, “United States Indian Policies, 1815–1860,” 44.
15. On the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 61.
16. This conflict arose because the British had agreed to 31° north with the United States in the Treaty of Paris but implicitly had accepted the more northerly boundary in a separate treaty in the same year in which the Floridas were restored by Britain to Spain.
17. Linklater, Measuring America, 169–70.
18. The first Yazoo scandal was in 1789 when the Georgian legislature sold 25.4 million acres to three land companies in what was destined to become federal territory. Following the second (similar) Yazoo scandal, there was a backlash in Georgia itself when it was discovered that all but one of the legislators who had voted for the land sale stood to benefit personally.
19. William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, February 16, 1802, Rowland, Official Letter Books of W.C.C. Claiborne, 1801–16, 1, 47.
20. Under the Constitution only the federal government could deal with “sovereign nations,” so that designating the Indian tribes in this way conferred exclusive legitimacy on the US administration. This designation was not dropped until 1871, by which time the federal government had signed nearly four hundred treaties with Indians.
21. William C. C. Claiborne to Henry Dearborn, April 19, 1802, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1798–1803, 419.
22. They were called Red Sticks because of the red clubs used to raise war parties.
23. See Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism, Chapter 5.
24. Alabama Legislature, quoted in Green, “The Expansion of European Colonization,” 517.
25. The Cherokee nation had brought suit against Georgia for violation of their sovereignty. The chief justice ruled that they could not do so in the federal courts as they were not a foreign nation.
26. Gibson, “Indian Land Transfers,” 223.
27. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History, 112–14.
28. Napoleon in return had promised to give to Spain various possessions in Italy.
29. In 1802, the last year of Spanish control, 170 of the 268 vessels that entered the Mississippi were American. See Thomas, A History of Military Government, 26.
30. As early as 1790, he had argued that it was better for Louisiana to be in Spanish possession, for the alternative was likely to be British control, with much more negative consequences for the United States. See Robertson, Louisiana under the Rule, 265–67, quoting Jefferson’s memorandum.
31. Although the extent of the Louisiana Purchase was not known at the time, it is today calculated at 828,000 square miles (529,920,000 acres).
32. William C. C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, in Carter, The Territorial Papers, 9:16.
33. The sale of the French territories by Napoleon was almost certainly illegal since he had not met the conditions laid down by Spain, including no sale to a third party, and he had not consulted the Chamber of Deputies. And Jefferson also had doubts about the legality of the purchase under the US Constitution.
34. At first it even included the southern portions of three Canadian provinces (this would be resolved by treaty with Great Britain in 1818).
35. Thomas, A History of Military Government, 40–41.
36. The second act in this tragedy was removal and the third, after the Civil War, was genocide.
37. Swagerty, “Indian Trade,” 360.
38. It would be renamed as Arkansas a few years later.
39. The western portion of Arkansas Territory had been shrunk in 1824 in order to enlarge the proposed Indian Territory.
40. New Spain became Mexico in 1821, but the boundary had been agreed to in 1819 between Spain and the United States. See Section 1.4.
41. John C. Calhoun, quoted in Kvasnicka, “United States Indian Treaties,” 221.
42. See Section 1.4 in this chapter for Oregon, Chapter 2.1 for Texas, and Chapter 2.2 for Mexico.
43. Iowa had become a state in 1846. It had been formed from the southeast portion of Iowa Territory, which had been split off from Wisconsin Territory in 1838. The rest of Iowa Territory had become “unorganized.”
44. In addition, President Abraham Lincoln during the war passed the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act. All three acts deprived Native Americans of vast amounts of territory granted to them in previous treaties. See Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History, 140–46.
45. It had fallen to its lowest point by 1900, after which it started to recover (accelerating since 1970—see Chapter 9.4). See Thornton, “Population History,” 32, Table 2.7.
46. Willoughby, Territories and Dependencies, 57.
47. Pomeroy, The Territories, 104.
48. Pomeroy, The Territories, 103–4.
49. A small part of New Mexico was also inside the Louisiana Purchase, and this was not admitted to the Union until 1912.
50. This defined the boundary with Spain as the middle of the Mississippi.
51. This was the start of the First Seminole War. “Seminole” was the name given to those who had fled south across the border from Georgia. They included not just Indians but also slaves (“black Seminoles”) who gained their freedom on arrival in Florida.
52. Dade County in southern Florida is named after him.
53. Nugent, Habits of Empire, 159.
54. In the third convention in 1794 the Spanish crown conceded the right of Great Britain to settle in areas claimed, but not occupied, by Spain.
55. The United States also inherited Spain’s feeble claims on the region through the Adams-Onís Treaty.
56. It was restored to Astor in 1818 following a show of gunboat diplomacy by the United States.
57. See Landers, Empires Apart, Chapter 7. A ukase was a proclamation that had the force of law.
58. See Weeks, John Quincy Adams, 177.
59. It was 1889 in the case of Washington and 1890 in the case of Idaho.
60. US Congress, quoted in Nugent, Habits of Empire, 186.
61. The French had originally called them Nez Percé (pierced nose), but the accent was subsequently dropped by non-French speakers.
62. This treaty would be modified in 1868. It was the last the federal government ever signed with a Native American tribe.
1. Great Britain is the name used for England, Scotland, and Wales. After the Act of Union with Ireland in 1802, the two islands were called the United Kingdom. Great Britain is used in this book as a synonym for the United Kingdom to avoid excessive repetition, although the two are not strictly the same (and since 1922 the United Kingdom has included only Northern Ireland).
2. See Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 1–10.
3. Stephen Austin, quoted in Lowrie, Culture Conflict in Texas, 25.
4. Don Manuel Mier y Terán, quoted in Stephenson, Texas and the Mexican War, 24.
5. Proceedings of the General Convention of Delegates Representing the Citizens and Inhabitants of Texas, October 1832, http://landgrantpatent.org/law-texas/law01012.pdf, 7.
6. The Nueces River had been accepted as the southern boundary of Texas during the negotiations leading up to the Adams-Onís Treaty.
7. See General Provisions, Section 9, of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/adp/archives/documents/texascon.html.
8. See Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon, 363–70.
9. Since Mexico did not recognize the Republic of Texas, the western border was never defined. In reality, however, it was far to the east of where it now runs.
10. There were two Californias in Mexico—upper (Alta) and lower (Baja). The first corresponds to the modern State of California in the United States and the second to Baja California in Mexico today.
11. William Wharton, quoted in McElroy, The Winning of the Far West, 49. The Texan Congress duly obliged by passing a resolution soon after “extending her jurisdiction over the Californias to the Pacific.”
12. Stephenson, Texas and the Mexican War, 182. Sutter was a Swiss who had been naturalized a Mexican and who later confirmed the discovery of gold on the American River in California in January 1848.
13. James Polk to Thomas Hart Benton, October 1845, quoted in Nugent, Habits of Empire, 193.
14. The Mexican Army did not respond to the presence of US troops until General Taylor was ordered to the Río Grande, where he built a fort and blockaded the river.
15. The Bear Flag Republic was launched by US settlers in northern California. The settlers were joined by John Frémont, who became their leader as the war started.
16. Hitchcock, Fifty Years in Camp and Field, 203, 212.
17. Clay’s Fugitive Slave Law was widely denounced. Theodore Parker wrote, “I believe no one political act in America, since the treachery of Benedict Arnold, has excited so much moral indignation.” Parker, quoted in McElroy, The Winning of the Far West, 342.
18. McElroy, The Winning of the Far West, 325.
19. By way of example, Trinity County in 1865 “was cleared of all Indians who lived in Rancherías. . . . The hostile tribes had been killed or captured, had been . . . driven by man, had been starved and beaten into absolute and final subjection.” Bledsoe, Indian Wars of the Northwest, 260–61.
20. Thornton, “Population History of Native North Americans,” 28. California was also one of the few states not to establish reservations, so the Indians were forced to survive as best they could on the margins of white society.
21. In addition, the Compromise of 1850 gave to New Mexico on the east much of the land that had been claimed by Texas.
22. See Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History, 149–51.
23. The biggest controversy had to do with the practice of polygamy by many Mormon men. Relations between the US government and the Mormons improved after 1890, when a “manifesto” was published by the Mormon leader ending the practice, and statehood soon followed.
24. The dispute went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Goldwater’s favor. He ran unsuccessfully in the 1964 elections.
25. The name of the country was changed to Colombia in 1863.
26. Bevans, Treaties, 6:865–81.
27. Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Vorenberg, The Emancipation Proclamation, 15–16. The speech was reported the following day in the New York Tribune.
28. See Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln.”
29. Keasbey, The Nicaragua Canal, 283.
30. Rutherford B. Hayes, quoted in Keasbey, The Nicaragua Canal, 374.
31. Roosevelt had stood as the vice presidential candidate when William McKinley was reelected in November 1900. He became president when McKinley was assassinated in September 1901.
32. See Conniff, “Panama since 1903,” 606–7.
33. Some scholars argue that Panama did not grant the United States sovereignty over the Canal Zone on the grounds that Article 3 states the United States would be treated “as if” it were sovereign. There is no doubt, however, that both countries acted on the assumption that the United States was sovereign.
34. See Conniff, “Panama since 1903,” 617–28.
35. Roosevelt announced the policy in his inaugural address in March 1933.
36. This rose from $250,000 to $430,000 per year, a fairly trivial sum even by the standards of the day.
37. The Canal Treaties are often known as the Carter-Torrijos Treaties after the presidents of the two countries at the time.
38. Central America, which included Chiapas at the time, declared its independence from Spain in September 1821. It then annexed itself to Mexico. It declared its independence from Mexico in 1823 but lost Chiapas in the process.
39. This was the name of the federation adopted by the five Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) at the time of independence. The United Provinces of Central America was dissolved in 1838, after which the five countries became separate republics.
40. Its name was the Central American and United States Atlantic and Pacific Canal Company. Its directors included De Witt Clinton, governor of New York, and Monroe Robinson, president of the Bank of the United States.
41. Under a treaty in 1786 with Spain, Great Britain had agreed to abandon its protectorate in Mosquitia while retaining limited rights in Belize. The end of Spanish rule in the region provided the British with an opportunity to reestablish their control over the eastern coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua.
42. Greytown was named for Charles Edward Grey, the governor of the British colony of Jamaica at the time.
43. The treaty took no account of the fact that Tigre Island was also claimed by El Salvador and Nicaragua.
44. Since the treaty only mentioned a ship canal through Nicaragua, it left open the question of whether the United States could have exclusive control over a canal through Panama.
45. See Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment, 123.
46. Under the 1860 Treaty of Managua, the British had ended their protectorate in Mosquitia but left it “autonomous.” There was always the risk, therefore, that they would return.
47. See Maurer, The Empire Trap, 113–17.
48. They would not finally leave until 1933, although there was a brief interregnum between 1925 and 1926. See Langley, The Banana Wars, Part 4.
49. Or so it thought. The abrogation of the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty in 1971, ending the US protectorate over Nicaragua, paved the way for other countries to express an interest. None did so until the twenty-first century, when a private Chinese company signed a contract with the Nicaraguan government to build a canal.
50. See Millett, Guardians of the Dynasty, 125–39.
51. See Diederich, Somoza, 18–19.
52. This remark, however, may be apocryphal. See Crawley, Somoza and Roosevelt, 153 n113.
53. The US protectorate over Nicaragua had ended in 1971 with the abrogation of the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty (see note 49). At that point Nicaragua became a client state.
54. The lease had been included in the 1916 Bryan-Chamorro Treaty. Other Central American states objected, and so the dispute went to the court.
55. It foundered in 1931 when Honduras refused to take its border dispute with Guatemala to the tribunal (an ad hoc court was then established with a US judge presiding).
56. See New York Times, August 19, 1920.
1. See Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic, 13.
2. Henry Clay, quoted in Sherwood, “The Formation of the American Colonization Society,” 222.
3. Bushrod Washington was a nephew of George Washington.
4. See Anderson, Liberia, 68, quoting from the agreement of December 15, 1821.
5. The Maryland Colonization Society, for example, established the independent colony of Maryland in Liberia that only joined the rest of Liberia in 1856.
6. Monrovia was named after James Monroe, during whose presidency (1817–25) the first settlers had arrived.
7. Abel P. Upshur, quoted in Anderson, Liberia, 77.
8. The Declaration of Independence (Liberia), http://www.onliberia.org/Downloads/Liberia_Constitution_Declaration.doc.
9. Article 1, Section 11, limited restricted suffrage among the indigenous population to those that paid the hated hut tax. Article 5, Sections 12 and 13, limited real estate ownership to black citizens (i.e., the Libero Americans themselves).
10. The senators from southern states were able to block recognition of an independent black republic until the Civil War deprived them of their vote.
11. Article 8 allowed the US government to protect the Libero Americans against the indigenous population at the request of the Liberian government.
12. “Editorial Comment: Liberia,” 963.
13. The lease was needed to circumvent the provision in the constitution that only black citizens could own real estate.
14. Chalk, “The Anatomy of an Investment,” 30.
15. Tubman was president of Liberia from 1944 until his death in 1971.
16. Between 1821 (when figures were first published) and 1830, US imports from the Pacific were twice the value of exports. About 80% of this trade was with China. See Heffer, The United States and the Pacific, 367.
17. John Quincy Adams, quoted in Wells, Romances, 760.
18. “Treaty of Peace, Amity and Commerce between the United States and China Signed at Wang Hiya (Near Macao),” July 3, 1844, https://choices.edu/resources/documents/ch_1.pdf, Article 2.
19. Guano (bird droppings) is a natural fertilizer that before the Guano Islands Act was imported by the United States (mainly from Peru) at very high prices.
20. See Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush, Chapter 5.
21. The others are Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, and Kingman Reef. In addition, the United States subsequently claimed Wake Island (1899) and Palmyra Atoll (1912). All but the last are “unincorporated.”
22. Neumann, America Encounters Japan, 2.
23. The US government did not endorse these actions by Perry, and both island chains would later be annexed by Japan.
24. See Neumann, America Encounters Japan, 60.
25. Japan had acquired Taiwan following the defeat of China in 1895 and would expand its overseas territories further following the defeat of Russia in 1905.
26. The Boxers, who were given their name by Christian missionaries, strongly opposed all foreign interference in China and targeted Christians in particular.
27. The others were Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
28. See, for example, the US literary magazine Puck, August 15, 1900, centerfold where the United States, represented by the bald eagle, joins the other imperial powers in dismembering the corpse of the Chinese dragon.
29. The first note had been published in 1899, and the second came out in the middle of the efforts to suppress the Boxer Rebellion.
30. Richards only resigned as a missionary after the King had asked him to be his official adviser.
31. John Tyler, quoted in Stevens, American Expansion in Hawaii, 4.
32. Treaty of Reciprocity between the United States of America and the Hawaiian Kingdom, 1875, Kingdom of Hawai‘i, http://hrmakahinui.com/treaties-between-the-Hawai‘i-Kingdom-and-United-States.php.
33. The McKinley Tariff eliminated duties on foreign sugar and gave a “bounty” (subsidy) to domestic sugar (cane and beet).
34. After a state department official raised the US flag at Pago Pago, he concluded, “This Treaty has been pushed and desired by these men [the CPLCC] in furtherance of [their] land schemes.” See Rigby, “The Origins of American Expansion,” 232n41.
35. By this time American Samoa included the Manu‘a islands, ceded in 1904 by its chief, and Swain’s Island, added in 1925 (it had been taken into US possession in 1856 under the Guano Islands Act).
36. Clark, History of Alaska, 133.
37. There is some truth in the accusation, but also plenty of justification for congressional action. Resources had indeed been pillaged by the Alaska syndicate and other corporate groups.
38. See Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 268–69. The main opposition came from the salmon industry, but the US military was also not in favor of statehood.
39. See Hezel, The First Taint of Civilization, 28–34.
40. As Hong Kong was a British colony, it may have seemed a strange place to base the US Asiatic Squadron. However, the British—having ruled out taking the islands themselves—favored US colonization of the Philippines, preferring it to the alternative (French, German, Japanese, or Russian control).
41. War was declared on April 25, 1898, and the naval battle was fought on May 1.
42. The US Navy on its way to the Philippines also claimed Wake Island.
43. Following token opposition, a deal was struck between Spain and the United States under which Manila would be surrendered. See Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 125–30.
44. There is a huge literature on this. See, for example, Blount, The American Occupation. What seems clear is that McKinley was determined from the start to expand the US empire in the Pacific one way or the other.
45. The US government considered its strategic goals in the Pacific could be met without these islands, although there were many who disagreed.
46. Only very occasionally did US officials intervene. One such occasion was in 1920, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the navy, overruled a ban on interracial marriage. See Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 144–45.
47. See Kramer, The Blood of Government, 145–46.
48. See Kramer, The Blood of Government, Chapter 2. The population of the Philippines at the time was around eight million.
49. See Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States, 39.
50. The number of such cases is disputed. There were between six and nine in 1901 alone and others later.
51. The rulings also applied to Puerto Rico.
52. See Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 338–40.
53. When the islands came inside the tariff wall in 1909, export quotas were still applied. These were lifted in 1912, after which the Philippines were fully inside.
54. See Maurer, The Empire Trap, 46–49.
55. Filipino immigration was particularly unpopular in California, where major riots took place in 1930.
56. A limit of fifty per year was put on Filipino migration to the United States.
57. These bases, Subic Bay for the navy, and Clark for the air force, were the largest outside the US mainland itself.
58. In some ways the Philippines were more vulnerable as a protectorate than as a colony, since there were now no restrictions on the size of US holdings.
59. See Article 7, Paragraph 2, of the Philippine Constitution, http://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1946/07/04/a-proclamation-of-the-president-roxas-4-july-1946/.
60. Japan had annexed the Bonin Islands in 1868 and the Ryukyu Islands, including Okinawa, in 1879.
61. Some US strategists, including Alfred Thayer Mahan, argued that America should have taken all the Spanish islands in 1898 for precisely this reason.
62. These included New Guinea, Nauru, and western Samoa.
63. Class C mandates were defined as those that “can best be governed under the laws of the Mandatory as integral portions of its territory.”
64. The United States gained the right of access to Yap in the western Carolinas, with its cable stations, and both Japan and the United States agreed not to fortify their islands west of Hawaii.
65. The most brilliant of these was Colonel Earl Hancock “Pete” Ellis, who anticipated with some accuracy the campaign the United States would have to fight against Japan in the Second World War.
66. The new acquisitions included the Bonin and Ryukyu Islands, which were US colonies until 1968 and 1972, respectively, when they were returned to Japan. The United States, however, kept its military, naval, and air bases on Okinawa.
67. The United Nations, established in 1945 under US leadership, decided that the former League of Nations mandates would be renamed UN Trusteeships. In theory, this gave other UN members some oversight. However, the United States insisted the TTPI be designated a strategic area, which meant its status could only be changed by the UN Security Council, where the United States had a veto.
68. The Carolinas include Palau. The Marshalls include Bikini Island, where atomic tests were carried out. The Northern Marianas include all the islands in the group except Guam.
69. Palau had been part of the Carolinas, but chose not to join the other islands in a federation. The Federated States of Micronesia included all the other Carolinas.
70. The Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia joined the UN in 1986. Palau joined in 1994, at which point the TTPI was dissolved.
71. In practice there is not much difference among the former parts of the TTPI between being a “colony” and being “independent.” All are US dependencies.
1. The country was given other names as well. To avoid confusion, it is called the Dominican Republic throughout this chapter.
2. The US Virgin Islands (USVI), acquired from Denmark, should not be confused with the British Virgin Islands (BVI).
3. Honorio Pueyrredón, quoted in Sheinin, Argentina and the United States, 1.
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Address before the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, December 28, 1933, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14593.
5. See Section 4.3.
6. See Montague, Haiti and the United States, 106.
7. Speech by Senator Charles Sumner to the US Senate, March 27, 1871, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50386/50386-h/50386-h.htm#.
8. See Maurer, The Empire Trap, 61–62.
9. The McKinley Tariff Act in 1890 had threatened higher tariffs if the country exporting was deemed to be taxing imports from the United States “unfairly.” Reciprocity treaties with a number of countries were then used to drive down tariffs on US imports.
10. The Dominican Republic only became a sugar exporter after the First Cuban War of Independence (1868–78), when Cuban exiles established a modern industry. By 1890 it had surpassed tobacco as the country’s main export. Keeping access to the US market became crucial after Cuba was granted a sugar preference and this was the main reason for the Dominican government agreeing to the bilateral trade treaty.
11. Theodore Roosevelt, Fourth Annual Message, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29545.
12. This expression would not be widely used until the administration of President William Howard Taft (1909–13), but it was always implicit in the Roosevelt Corollary.
13. See Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo, 26–39.
14. See Calder, The Impact of Intervention, 161–62.
15. The convention should have terminated in 1942, but it was ended two years earlier as the Dominican government was able to persuade the US administration that it had met all its debt service obligations.
16. How this worked is well described in Diederich, Trujillo, 20–26.
17. Even this reduced sum was not paid in full.
18. See Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis, 280–81.
19. He nearly won the 2000 presidential election at the age of ninety-four.
20. In all other countries imperial preference favored the metropolitan country and therefore discriminated against the United States.
21. Robert Hayne, quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 28.
22. Knowing that Haitian recognition would be on the agenda, the Senate engaged in such a prolonged debate that the US delegates to the Congress could not take part (one died on the way and the other arrived too late).
23. See Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of the Caribbean, Chapter 7.
24. McPherson Berrien, quoted in Montague, Haiti and the United States, 53; emphasis in the original.
25. It is known as a US Minor Outlying Island.
26. See Montague, Haiti and the United States, 162.
27. The Banque Nationale d’Haiti had been founded in 1880. Although it functioned like a central bank, it was a private institution owned by French interests.
28. Quoted in Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 105.
29. This was therefore different from the situation in the Dominican Republic, which was under direct military rule throughout the US occupation.
30. The US authorities revived a long forgotten Haitian law of 1864 in order to introduce the corvée.
31. See Montague, Haiti and the United States, 215–16.
32. Roosevelt stated, “You know I have had something to do with the running of a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and, if I do say it, I think it a pretty good Constitution.” See New York Times, August 19, 1920.
33. See Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, Chapter 1.
34. US sanctions were applied temporarily against Haiti in 1962, but they were soon lifted.
35. See Hallward, Damming the Flood, Chapter 2.
36. Aristide never actually resigned, but he was forced to leave. See Dumas, An Encounter with Haiti, 51–53.
37. John Quincy Adams to Hugh Nelson, April 28, 1823, quoted in Gott, Cuba: A New History, 58.
38. Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, October 24, 1823, in Jefferson, The Life and Writings, 185.
39. Because it had not rebelled, Cuba would be known by Spain as “la isla siempre fiel” (the ever-faithful island).
40. See Martínez-Fernández, Torn between Empires, 116–18.
41. Slavery was abolished in 1880, but the patronato—a system of apprenticeship similar to slavery—survived until 1886.
42. In addition to Navassa Island off the coast of Haiti, these included Serranilla Bank, Bajo Nuevo Bank, Quita Sueño Bank, Serrana Bank, Roncador Bank, the Corn Islands, and the Swan Islands.
43. Reciprocity treaties were scrapped in 1894 as a result of the Wilson Tariff Act, but the Dingley Act in 1897 reopened the possibility of negotiating them.
44. The First War of Independence spanned 1868–78. The rebels were eventually defeated.
45. Imperialists in the United States blamed Spain, but it is now thought that it was an accident.
46. Its name would not be changed back to Puerto Rico until 1932.
47. Articles 3 and 7, Treaty between the United States and Cuba, American Journal of International Law 4.2, supplement: “Official Documents” (1910), http://www.jstor.org/stable/2212059, 178.
48. The other base was at Bahía Honda on the northern coast.
49. These included tariff preferences for US firms not available to others.
50. The United States introduced quotas for sugar from Cuba and other countries in 1934. These were then revised annually.
51. He fled just before the Cuban rebels led by Fidel Castro entered Havana.
52. See Carr, Puerto Rico, 47–48.
53. There has always been a suspicion that part of the motive for this was to make Puerto Ricans available for the military draft (the United States entered World War I in April 1917).
54. See Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico, Chapter 2.
55. Four years later, in 1952, Puerto Rico would become known as an “Estado Libre Asociado.” This is usually translated as “Commonwealth,” a term that was used to suggest (incorrectly) that the country was not a colony.
56. The return of excise duty on rum had begun in 1917, but Prohibition soon rendered it irrelevant. The switch from whisky to rum consumption in the United States was a wartime measure designed to reduce transatlantic imports.
57. The last vote on the political status of Puerto Rico was in 2017.
58. The Danish West Indies comprised the three islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. St. Thomas was a major trading center in the Caribbean, while St. Croix was dedicated to sugar production.
59. Cost considerations, so soon after the purchase of Alaska, were the main reasons for rejection. See Tansill, The Purchase of the Danish West Indies, 78–153.
60. Three of the Dutch islands are close to Venezuela, but the other three are close to Puerto Rico.
61. The inhabitants of the Virgin Islands became US citizens as soon as the transfer took place and they were allowed to keep a small tariff on US imports, as they had almost no other source of income.
62. Rum exports had been important under Danish rule. Rum production did not cease during Prohibition, but the rum was used to make bay rum for medicinal purposes.
63. Sugar had never been very successful in the Danish West Indies, as the islands are so dry. Access to the US market might have helped were it not for the fact that Cuba and Puerto Rico were much more competitive.
64. The British readopted imperial preference after the First World War (it had been ended in 1846).
65. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act adopted by the US Congress in the Great Depression had led to a surge in protectionism around the world. Hull, as secretary of state under President Roosevelt, was determined to reverse this.
66. See Ryan, Eric Williams, 68–72.
67. The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 committed the Soviet Union not to place nuclear missiles in Cuba and the United States not to invade the island. That should have been the moment for the gradual normalization of the bilateral relationship, but it would take another fifty years before the process even began.
68. Grenada was invaded in 1983 following the violent collapse of the left-wing administration of Maurice Bishop.
1. See Maurer, The Empire Trap, 168–81.
2. The main additions were the islands held by Japan under a League of Nations mandate. See Chapter 3.
3. See Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 363–65.
4. The Monroe Doctrine was formally buried, admittedly not for the first time, on November 18, 2013, by Secretary of State John Kerry.
5. James Monroe, quoted in Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, 394–96.
6. Within fifteen years Britain seized the Falkland Islands and Great Britain and France occupied the Río de la Plata region.
7. Garfield was assassinated after only four months in office.
8. Blaine took office in the middle of the War of the Pacific between Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. He was also mindful of the French intervention in Mexico during the US Civil War.
9. James Blaine, quoted in Mecham, A Survey, 29.
10. Benjamin Harrison, quoted in Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System, 40.
11. Richard Olney to Lord Salisbury, July 1895, quoted in Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 33.
12. When Venezuela protested, the United States agreed to add one member to the board along with the two Americans, two British, and one Russian. See Schoultz, Beneath the United States, Chapter 7.
13. Edward House, quoted in Mecham, A Survey, 73.
14. Roosevelt, “Our Foreign Policy,” 584–45.
15. Sumner Welles, quoted in Mecham, A Survey, 78.
16. Article 4 defined the hemisphere as extending from the North to the South Poles and including Canada, Greenland, and European colonies in the Caribbean.
17. “Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decad061.asp.
18. In theory, under the United Nations Charter, the UN was to be consulted before armed force was used by a regional body in the event of an aggression that was not an armed attack. However, Article 6 of the Rio Treaty made no reference to this.
19. In theory any state could invoke Article 5(d), but in practice it would have required US support to have any chance of succeeding.
20. Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System, 230.
21. Wilson’s points were a mixture of broad generalities and very specific proposals for those parts of Europe that were most in dispute.
22. “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp.
23. See MacMillan, Peacemakers, 446–49.
24. Everyone in Paris knew that the Monroe Doctrine had always been a unilateral declaration and had never been a “regional understanding.” Its inclusion, however absurd, was recognition of the growing authority of the United States.
25. See Egerton, “Britain and the ‘Great Betrayal,’ ” 891.
26. The final vote on March 19, 1920, was 49–35, seven votes short of a two-thirds majority. See Fleming, The United States and the League of Nations, 31.
27. This was the Declaration by the United Nations signed by representatives of China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR on January 1, 1942. It was signed the next day by the other twenty-two countries that had declared war. See Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter, 976.
28. Argentina, under enormous US pressure, only declared war in March 1945.
29. In addition to the twenty Latin American republics, the United States could count on the support of the Philippines (still a colony), Liberia (a former protectorate), most of Europe, and China. By contrast, the USSR could only count on five votes in 1945—its own three plus Yugoslavia and Poland (the latter had not been invited by the United States to San Francisco, but did sign the charter subsequently).
30. The permanent members of the Security Council were China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR.
31. The Palestine mandate consisted of territory that had previously been part of the Ottoman Empire.
32. The vote was 33 in favor and 13 against, with 10 abstentions and 1 absentee.
33. The UNSC has to approve applications, giving the permanent members control over who joins.
34. See Lebe, “Diminished Hopes,” 43–47. Note that it was blocked without the need for a US veto.
35. The USSR withdrew in 1950 from the UNSC in protest at this decision. This made it possible for the United States to secure UNSC support for armed action against North Korea in the same year. The Soviet Union then rejoined.
36. Taiwan was then expelled from the UNSC (and the UN) to be replaced by the PRC as the sole representative of China.
37. In addition to the five permanent members (P5), the UNSC for the first two decades had six nonpermanent members, each elected for two years. The United States could invariably count on a majority among the eleven members.
38. The United States was engaged in covert action to overthrow the elected government. See Chapter 7.
39. The General Assembly was meeting in Paris because the new building in New York was not yet complete.
40. The petition, a remarkable document by any standards, was published in the United States. See Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide.
41. “Indian” here means “from India.” See Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 26.
42. The quote is from Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, 18–19, based in part on Hull, Memoirs, 2:1167. Cordell Hull was US secretary of state from 1933 to 1944, when he was succeeded by Edward Stettinius. The Curzon Line had been proposed in 1919 as the border between an independent Poland and Bolshevik Russia. The border agreed on in 1921 was further east. Stalin was therefore claiming part of eastern Poland.
43. Deaths attributable to the war reached 24 million in the Soviet Union compared with 420,000 in the United States.
44. Churchill, in his memoirs, makes clear he took the lead in the percentages agreement, writing numbers on a half sheet of paper and passing it to Stalin. See Churchill, The Second World War, 6:226–28. On the negotiation of the final numbers, see Resis, “The Churchill-Stalin Secret ‘Percentages’ Agreement”; and Siracusa, “The Night Stalin and Churchill Divided Europe.”
45. George Kennan to Charles Bohlen, January 1945, quoted in Siracusa, “The Night Stalin and Churchill Divided Europe,” 407. Kennan at the time was based in the US embassy in Moscow, and Bohlen was a US diplomat and later ambassador to the Soviet Union.
46. “Atlantic Charter,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp.
47. “The Yalta Conference,” February 1945, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp, Article 2.
48. Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary, although all occupied by the Red Army, were not yet Soviet satellites.
49. Three months later, following the British elections, Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee as prime minister. Like Truman, Attlee had little experience in foreign affairs.
50. The Long Telegram is reproduced in full in Bernstein and Matusow, The Truman Administration, 198–212; the quote is from 210.
51. “Truman Doctrine,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
52. The influential Senator Tom Connally, however, had no such reservations.
53. It was labeled NSC-68, and its principal author was Paul Nitze. Although classified, the content of NSC-68 soon became widely known.
54. A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, NSC-68, April 14, 1950, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/10-1.pdf.
55. George Marshall was secretary of state from 1947 to 1949. He was succeeded by Dean Acheson.
56. Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 [The Marshall Plan], George C. Marshall Foundation, http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/06/Foreign_Assistance_Act_of_1948.pdf.
57. See Mayers, George Kennan, 140–41.
58. It would become in 1961 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
59. See LaFeber, America in the Cold War, 57.
60. North Atlantic Treaty, April 4, 1949, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, http://www.nato.int/cps/cn/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm, Article 5.
61. The only time it has been invoked was on the day after September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attack on the United States.
62. France had tried to rebuild its Southeast Asian empire after the Second World War. It suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese in 1954.
63. CENTO was first called the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO).
64. SEATO collapsed because the United States was unable to persuade all its members to participate in the Vietnam War (it was dissolved in 1977). CENTO, which the United States never formally joined, ended in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution.
65. By contrast, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the United Kingdom and France—both NATO members—was not seen as a threat by the United States.
66. These three countries would go on to test nuclear weapons. North Korea did the same, after first giving notice that it would leave the NPT.
67. See Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 3:240–41.
68. As new countries joined, the US share steadily declined (it was just under 17% in 2016). However, in the first amendment of the Articles of Agreement in 1969 the majority required for key decisions was raised to 85%, so that the United States continued to enjoy a veto over key decisions even with a reduced quota share.
69. The United States had no objection to its managing director being a western European, but insisted the deputy director be a US citizen. See Kahler, “The United States and the International Monetary Fund,” 94–95.
70. While the Treasury Department has been the key US agency in relation to the IMF, it is the State Department that has taken the leading role in relation to the World Bank.
71. Harry S. Truman, “Truman’s Inaugural Address,” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.htm.
72. See Woods, “United States and the International Finance Institutions,” 101.
73. Proposals for Expansion of World Trade and Employment, November 1945, Department of State, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/historical/eccles/036_04_0003.pdf.
74. “Preliminary Agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom,” February 23, 1942, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decade04.asp, Article 7.
75. Fifty-six countries attended, but neither Argentina nor Poland signed the Havana Charter. The Soviet Union did not participate.
76. The US negotiators, however, introduced into the Havana Charter a provision that certain exceptions to trade liberalization would require approval by the IMF, where the weighted voting system gave the United States huge influence over all decisions.
77. See McIntyre, “Weighted Voting in International Organizations,” 490.
78. See Aaronson, Trade and the American Dream, Chapter 8.
79. The participants were all fifteen countries (except the Soviet Union) to which the United States had sent invitations in 1946, plus a further eight who were subsequently invited. This gave twenty-three countries in all (including the United States itself ).
80. No approval was needed, as Congress had extended the RTAA to cover the period when the negotiations were carried out.
81. Trade Agreements Extension Act of 1951, US Senate Committee on Finance, https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SRpt82-299.pdf, Section 10. See also Wilcox, “Trade Policy for the Fifties,” 65, who concluded that “GATT thus lives on sufferance, as welcome as a bastard child.”
1. There are many definitions of an MNE. The least demanding is that the company has its facilities and other assets in at least one country other than its home country.
2. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, 204–5.
3. Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise, 70.
4. The Standard Oil Company and the American Tobacco Company were the most important businesses that were ordered to be broken up. Both decisions took place in 1911 (on the same day).
5. Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise, 73–74.
6. See Tugendhat, The Multinationals, 24.
7. See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2000, 31.
8. Extraterritorial jurisdiction has a long history in the United States. It goes back to the Barbary Wars at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was not particularly controversial. It became much more so when US laws (e.g., the Trading with the Enemy Act) were used against companies based outside the United States.
9. Nye and Rubin, “The Longer Range Political Role,” 130.
10. The Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community (EEC). It would go on to become the European Community (EC) and eventually the European Union (EU).
11. See Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, 332.
12. The amendment, which stated that foreign aid would be withdrawn if expropriation was not followed by prompt and adequate compensation, was added to the Foreign Assistance Act of that year. It was initially opposed by the State Department on the grounds that it might interfere with US strategic objectives, but by the following year the State Department had reconciled itself to the amendment and supported a revised and strengthened version.
13. The Burke-Hartke bill was sponsored by the AFL-CIO labor federation. In addition to removing tax breaks for multinational corporations, it proposed restrictions on capital exports and quotas on imports. See Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy, 114–15.
14. See “Lobbying Database,” Center for Responsive Politics, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/.
15. FECA provided a means whereby corporations (and unions) could use treasury funds to establish, operate, and solicit voluntary contributions for the organization’s PAC. These voluntary donations from individuals could then be used to contribute to federal campaigns.
16. See May, “Direct and Indirect Influence,” 51, summarizing the work of Ravi Ramamurti on the Pfizer campaign.
17. Congress did, however, take important steps to strengthen IPRs in the 1980s by passing two trade acts, the Trade and Tariff Act (1984) and the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act (1988). These threatened punishment against countries not providing “adequate” protection.
18. Ramamurti, “Global Regulatory Convergence,” 350.
19. Schulzinger, The Wise Men, 11.
20. Edward Stettinius to Harry S. Truman, 1945, quoted in Snider, “The Influence of Transnational Peace Groups,” 377. Stettinius was writing at the end of the San Francisco conference in 1945 that launched the UN.
21. See Woods, “Making the IMF,” 95.
22. Abugre and Alexander, “Non-governmental Organizations,” 116.
23. There is also a third sort, called grant-making public charities or public foundations. In 2010 there were 1,371 such organizations that fund internationally. They include well-known names, such as Global Health Solutions, AmeriCares, and World Vision (see Box 6.4).
24. Those NGOs concerned with religion will be considered in Section 6.4.
25. The Carnegie Corporation should not be confused with the other NGOs established by Andrew Carnegie, such as the Carnegie Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, the Carnegie Trust, and the Carnegie Institute. See Nielsen, The Golden Donors, 134.
26. Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Corporation of New York (brochure), Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, http://shelf1.library.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/tiff2pdf.old/carnegie_jbc/box00002/fld00019/bdl0001/doc0001/carnegie.pdf, 3.
27. So anxious was Rockefeller to secure a charter from the Senate that he even agreed that the election of new trustees would be subject to disapproval within sixty days by a majority of (a) the US president, (b) the speaker of the House, and (c) the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins Universities and the University of Chicago. See Nielsen, The Big Foundations, 51.
28. Like the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation should not be confused with other NGOs bearing the same name and established by John D. Rockefeller Sr.
29. In 2006 Warren Buffett announced he was giving a large part of his wealth to the Gates Foundation. This has increased substantially the IGM capacity of the foundation.
30. In 2013, for example, the annual giving of the Gates Foundation ($3.3 billion) was four times larger than the next biggest.
31. Vogel, “Who’s Making Global Civil Society,” 643.
32. There have been numerous studies of these networks, starting with C. Wright Mills’s study of US power elites in the 1950s. See Mills, The Power Elite; Rich, Think Tanks; and Parmar, Foundations. Some have even gone so far as to refer to these networks as a US “establishment”; see Hodgson, “The Establishment.”
33. As a share of GDP, US foreign aid is typically around 0.2%. In 2000, for example, it was dwarfed by US private assistance. See Adelman, “The Privatization of Foreign Aid,” 11.
34. A good illustration is provided by Isaiah Bowman, a director of the CFR for nearly thirty years and a key adviser to several US presidents. See Smith, American Empire, passim.
35. See Ahmad, “US Think Tanks,” 4, Table 2.
36. McGann, “The Think Tank Index,” 82.
37. See Abella, Soldiers of Reason, passim.
38. See Schulzinger, The Wise Men, 209–10.
39. Medvetz, Think Tanks in America, 7.
40. The think tank Project for the New American Century is often claimed to be the intellectual author of the second Iraq War.
41. Huntington, “Transnational Organizations,” 344.
42. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 224–29.
43. See Tunstall, The Media Are American, 27–28.
44. Madrigal, “Republic to Empire,” 99.
45. Hearst did not know the explosion was accidental (that was only revealed by careful investigation much later), but it is doubtful if it would have made much difference if he had known. He had promised war and was determined to get it. On the Maine incident, see Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 16–18.
46. Time rapidly increased in circulation and even in 1997 was selling more than four million copies per week, after which sales declined in common with almost all printed newspapers and magazines.
47. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 62, 63, 65. The article was reprinted in Diplomatic History 23.2 (1999): 159–71.
48. See Emery, Emery, and Roberts, The Press and America: An Interpretive History, 272–73.
49. The FCC gave permission for the first commercial television operations to start on July 1, 1941. NBC and CBS were the first to do so.
50. Voice of America was established in 1942 by the Office of War Information.
51. Edward Jay Epstein, quoted in Tunstall, The Media Are American, 140.
52. This did not stop it coming to the attention of Senator McCarthy, but there is no evidence that there ever was a “red decade” in Hollywood.
53. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 44–45.
54. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers, 7.
55. The other international news agencies, Reuters in the United Kingdom and Agence France-Presse (AFP), were not so important, while the Soviet Union’s TASS was not widely considered a “news” agency.
56. MacBride, Many Voices, One World, 38.
57. AT&T was one of those that had formed RCA in 1919. It went on to acquire a virtual monopoly in telephone and cable until it was broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1982.
58. The seven are Comcast, News Corporation (including 21st Century Fox until 2013), Walt Disney Company, CBS Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, and Sony Corporation of America.
59. Halton, “International News,” 500, citing a survey by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.
60. Halton, “International News,” 501.
61. This phrase, implying a divine blessing, is the title of a book on US foreign policy by Walter Russell Mead. See Mead, Special Providence.
62. Skillen, With or against the World?, 78.
63. The board was established soon after the Haystack Prayer Meeting in 1806, which was part of the Second Great Awakening. See Harvey, The Columbia Guide to Religion, 31–32.
64. Missionaries were also sent to US territories in North America that were not yet part of the Union.
65. See Amstutz, Evangelicals, 31.
66. Harold Ockenga, quoted in Amstutz, Evangelicals, 33; emphasis added.
67. It is safe to assume that the imperialism he was targeting was that of the Axis powers, not that of the United States.
68. Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, Soong Mei-ling, was raised as a Methodist and converted her husband to Christianity before their marriage.
69. Guth, “Religion and American Public Opinion,” 248.
70. Mead, “God’s Country?,” 40.
71. See the World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/.
72. The figure in 2015 was 126,650. See the World Christian Database, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/..
73. Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Graham changed the name of his evangelical tours from crusades to missions.
74. Rev. Billy Graham, quoted in Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, 73.
75. It is no accident that foreign governments in dispute with the United States have regularly targeted American missionaries through expulsions or restrictions.
76. See Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, 35. Every US president after Eisenhower has attended the National Prayer Breakfast.
77. See Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, 70–71.
78. Many US missionaries had served in China before the victory of the communists and had formed close ties with the nationalists.
80. See Zinsmeister, “Is the Focus of American Evangelicals Shifting Overseas?,” 1–6.
81. See Pew Research Center, “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,” http://www.pewforum.org/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/.
82. See Smither, “The Impact of Evangelical Revivals”; and Brasil Fonseca, “Religion and Democracy in Brazil,” 163–70.
83. Examples are American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Marshall Islands.
1. See Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 12–15.
2. In 1947 the United States persuaded the British to cede the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven in their zone as they were needed by the American military for strategic purposes.
3. Neither the USSR nor the United States had envisaged a French zone, but Churchill was able to persuade Roosevelt and Stalin to add France as a fourth occupying power.
4. The Soviet Union reacted by blockading West Berlin, which had to be supplied for eleven months by air (mainly by the United States) before the USSR ended the blockade.
5. See Merritt, “American Influences,” 97–98; and Hahn, Cornerstone of Democracy, 7–35.
6. The US military, however, retained a large number of bases in West Germany in which the US government—not West Germany—exercised sovereignty.
7. Nachmani, “Civil War,” 499–500.
8. See Miller, The United States, 24–25.
9. See Stephanidēs, Stirring the Greek Nation, 239.
10. President Bill Clinton in 1999 apologized to the Greek people for this support. See Mark Lacey, “Clinton Tries to Subdue Greeks’ Anger at America,” New York Times, November 21, 1999.
11. Greece and Turkey had a long-standing territorial dispute over Cyprus, which increased in intensity after Great Britain (the colonial power) granted independence to the island in 1960.
12. By the end of 1945 membership exceeded 800,000, while affiliation with the communist-dominated Confédération Générale du Travail rose to nearly four million. See Brogi, Confronting America, 14.
13. Bird, The Chairman, 291.
14. It had 2.5 million members in 1947, making it briefly the largest in the world after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. See Brogi, Confronting America, 14.
15. The expulsion by Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi took place a few days after Sumner Welles, former undersecretary of state, had declared the Italian Communist Party to be an insurrectionary force funded by the Soviet Union. See Brogi, Confronting America, 1.
16. Cull, The Cold War, 31.
17. George Marshall to William Benton, April 1947, quoted in Cull, The Cold War, 35.
18. See Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 369–80.
19. The six states that formed the EEC in 1958 had been joined by six others (Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom) before the end of the Cold War. Later, the European Union (as the EEC became) would expand to twenty-eight members.
20. It was this lack of sovereignty that persuaded France under President Charles de Gaulle to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966 and to insist on the removal of NATO assets from French soil.
21. Calleo, The Atlantic Fantasy, 28.
22. There were over two hundred in West Germany and over one hundred in Italy at the end of the Cold War.
23. Although the Philippines became nominally independent in 1946, it remained a US protectorate with its sovereignty restricted in many ways. See Chapter 3.
24. See Scalapino, “The United States and Japan,” 44–46.
25. The Soviet Union attended the conference but refused to sign the treaty.
26. Okinawa was returned to Japan in 1972, but the United States retained its military bases on the island and the right to introduce nuclear weapons in an emergency. See Schaller, Altered States, 218–20.
27. Schaller, “Japan and the Cold War,” 173–74.
28. Barnett, “The United States and Communist China,” 149.
29. See Chapter 6.4 for the role of US missionaries in this decision. In addition, former President Herbert Hoover released a seven-point letter in January 1950 explaining why the US government should not recognize the PRC. See Ballantine, Formosa, 118–19.
30. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on the Situation in Korea,” American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13538.
31. See Whiting, “The United States and Taiwan,” 190.
32. Kissinger’s secret visit to China in July 1971 was the prelude to a vote in the UN General Assembly recognizing the PRC as the sole representative of China. The ROC then left the UN, but the United States continued to grant it diplomatic recognition until January 1979. Only then did the United States recognize the PRC officially as the sole representative of China.
33. Chiang Kai-shek was not invited to Yalta, but Stalin wanted China to be part of the four-power trusteeship, along with the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR.
34. The 38th parallel had been proposed by two US colonels, one of whom was future secretary of state Dean Rusk, and it was accepted by the Soviet side as reasonable. It did, however, leave two-thirds of the Korean population in the south. See Buckley, The United States in the Asia-Pacific, 52.
35. Syngman Rhee had been educated at an American Methodist school in Korea before completing his education in the United States.
36. The Soviet Union had abandoned the Security Council in January 1950 in protest at the failure of the UN to award the China seat to the PRC government. It returned in August, after the crucial resolution on Korea had been passed.
37. Article 4 stated, “The Republic of Korea grants, and the United States of America accepts, the right to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about the territory of the Republic of Korea as determined by mutual agreement.” “Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea,” October 1, 1953, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/kor001.asp.
38. The United States was officially neutral before 1950, but in practice policy favored France, which was seen as a key ally in Europe. In addition, the United States was well aware that its grants to France under the Marshall Plan were being used partly in Indochina. See Thomas, “French Imperial Reconstruction,” 141.
39. Australia and New Zealand, much to the annoyance of the United Kingdom, had already formed the ANZUS Alliance with the United States in 1952. See Reese, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, 126–49.
40. The other was Thailand, which faced a left-wing insurgency at the time and whose government welcomed US support to defeat it. In return, Thailand provided the United States with military bases all over the country that would be used subsequently to bomb North Vietnam. See Logevall, “The Indochina Wars,” 138–40.
41. “Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (Manila Pact),” September 8, 1954, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/usmu003.asp, Article 4, Part 1; emphasis added.
42. Five other countries sent troops, and thirty-eight provided nonmilitary assistance to the government in South Vietnam. This was less than the US government demanded, but probably more than it expected given the unpopularity of its intervention.
43. See Simpson, Economists with Guns, 14.
44. On the role of the Ford Foundation, see Parmar, Foundations, 124–48. For other actors, see Simpson, Economists with Guns, passim.
45. “Middle East” is defined here as the majority Arab countries together with Iran, Israel, and Turkey.
46. Spain had protectorates in northern Morocco, but the largest ended in 1956 leaving only the tiny enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Spain also controlled Western Sahara until 1975.
47. Lebanon and Syria, with US support, became founding members of the UN, while the United Kingdom was able to engineer the withdrawal of all French troops. See Ovendale, Britain, the United States, and the Transfer of Power, 1.
48. Saudi Arabia, unified in 1932 and nominally independent, was part of the British informal empire and recognized as such by the United States. See O’Sullivan, FDR and the End of Empire, 147–53. As late as 1941, for example, FDR had said in response to a request for American help, “Will you tell the British I hope they can take care of the King of Saudi Arabia. This is a little far afield for us!” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, quoted in Little, American Orientalism, 48.
49. See Ovendale, Britain, the United States, and the Transfer of Power, 69–74.
50. The Suez Canal was nationalized in June 1956. Britain and France then colluded with Israel to retake it by force just before the US presidential elections. Swift action by President Eisenhower soon forced a retreat by the invading forces. See Ovendale, Britain, the United States, and the Transfer of Power, 166–67.
51. The overthrow of King Faisal in 1958 by the Iraqi Army was seen at the time as a triumph for the USSR. See Hallock, The Press March to War, 55. However, a covert US operation led to the installation of a pro-American regime in 1963. This in turn was overthrown in 1968 in the Ba‘athist revolution from which Saddam Hussein soon emerged as the dominant figure. He would remain on good terms with US governments for most of the time until Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
52. It was seen at first as an opportunity to supply the rest of the world rather than the United States itself.
53. The San Remo agreement in 1920 had excluded US companies from Iraqi oil. Britain and France only changed their minds when they become worried about US commercial retaliation.
54. Gulbenkian was an Armenian who had participated in the prewar concession controlled by Turkey.
55. This was the famous Red Line drawn by Gulbenkian and which aimed to restrict oil supplies and raise prices. The so-called Red Line Agreement was finally ended in 1946.
56. The pipeline had to pass through Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Only President Shukri Quwatly of Syria objected, and he was overthrown by his army chief of staff on March 31, 1949. Six weeks later the pipeline was approved.
57. US oil companies were warmly welcomed during the long reign of King Idris. When he was overthrown by Colonel Muammar al-Gaddhafi in 1969, the relationship soured.
58. See Safran, The United States and Israel, 42.
59. The United States was the first country to do so (the Soviet Union was the second). Marshall could not give his support, but agreed not to oppose it. See Little, American Orientalism, 86.
60. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the United States sponsored UNSC Resolution 242 that called for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from territory captured in the six days of conflict. Resolution 242, however, did not call for the establishment of a Palestinian State, and US policy on a two-state solution vacillated until after the Cold War had ended.
61. It is surely no accident that by this time US oil imports—in particular, from Iran, Kuwait, Libya and Saudi Arabia—appeared to be completely secure with friendly governments in place. Unlike Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were therefore less concerned about the energy security implications of leaning toward Israel.
62. See, in particular, Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, passim.
63. See Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 9–32.
64. Stalin reversed his position after the United States took the dispute to the UN Security Council in 1946.
65. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President following the Landing of United States Marines at Beirut,” American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11133.
66. The United Arab Republic would dissolve in 1961.
67. CENTO grew out of the Baghdad Pact, which included Iraq. However, the overthrow of King Feisal in 1958 led to Iraqi withdrawal and the need for a new organization. CENTO collapsed when Iran withdrew after its own revolution in 1979.
68. Ethiopian leaders after Haile Selassie demanded the withdrawal of all US forces. US attention then switched to Somalia, Ethiopia’s neighbor that guards the entrance to the Red Sea. It had previously been allied with the USSR, but supported the United States through the remainder of the Cold War. See Jackson, Jimmy Carter, 111–17; and Woodward, US Foreign Policy, 22–27.
69. See Hubbard, The United States, Chapter 3, where McGhee’s speech to the Foreign Policy Association is summarized.
70. The imperial powers were Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Italy lost its colonies following the defeat of Benito Mussolini and would be confined to a purely administrative role in the former Italian Somaliland, while South Africa illegally retained the League of Nations mandate for South West Africa (modern Namibia).
71. The first was Sudan and the last was Namibia. After that, the African states that became independent (Eritrea and South Sudan) were the results of civil war rather than decolonization.
72. After independence in 1958, Guinea under President Sékou Touré refused to join the currency union established by France, leading to a major rift with the former colonial power and close ties with the USSR until the Soviet ambassador was expelled in 1961. See Laïdi, The Superpowers, 7. Ghana, under President Kwame Nkrumah, also established close relations with the Soviet Union until Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966 in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. See Blum, Killing Hope, 198–200.
73. See Grubbs, Secular Missionaries, passim, for a study of how these institutions operated in different African countries in the 1960s.
74. Three out of four US military flights across the Atlantic were still stopping in the Azores when the lease on the base came up for renewal. In return for renewal, the Kennedy administration accepted the Portuguese government condition of no US interference in its African colonies. See Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, 121–27.
75. South Africa under apartheid feared the presence of a pro-Soviet regime in Angola on the northern border. See Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 275–76.
76. See Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 28–30.
77. Negotiations involving Angola, Cuba, South Africa, United States and the USSR concluded in 1988 with an agreement to withdraw all foreign troops from Angola immediately and grant South West Africa independence as Namibia in 1990.
78. US government cooperation with South Africa in Angola was one reason why Congress was unwilling to impose sanctions until 1986, when it passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. Even then it had to overcome a veto by President Reagan.
79. The British government, with US support, suspended the constitution in 1953 and imposed direct rule until 1957. See Rabe, U.S. Intervention, Chapter 2.
80. UFCO concentrated on banana production, but controlled other companies in Guatemala that owned the railways, ports, and telegraph facilities.
81. See Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 128–29.
82. Council on Foreign Relations, quoted in Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, 128. The document was written by Ambassador Adolf Berle and directed to John Cabot, assistant secretary for inter-American affairs.
83. The exile force was not expected to defeat the Guatemalan Army. However, once it was known that the exiles had US support, it was assumed that the officer class would be unwilling to confront them, and that is exactly what happened.
84. The US government had a controlling interest in the IADB, which was also headquartered in Washington, DC. It focused on long-term development loans, while USAID and ALPRO mainly distributed grants.
85. “In Office but Not Power” is the title of Chapter 11 of Jagan’s autobiography that describes the period from 1957 to 1961 when he had to share administrative responsibilities with the British governor. See Jagan, The West on Trial.
86. See Rabe, U.S. Intervention, passim.
87. Technically the French territories were not colonies but part of France, while the Netherlands Antilles were a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. However, these constitutional subtleties were of little concern to the United States, since foreign affairs and defense were in the hands of NATO allies.
88. The United States would intervene in Jamaica in the mid-1970s, however, after the administration of Prime Minister Michael Manley normalized relations with Cuba. US intervention contributed to the destabilization of the economy and the defeat of Manley in the 1980 elections. See Smith, Michael Manley, 214–43.
89. Trujillo had become a liability as a result of his meddling in the affairs of countries allied to the United States, such as Venezuela, while Bosch was considered sympathetic to Castro. See Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis, 104–6, 303–7.
90. Allende won a plurality, but not a majority, in September 1970. Under the Chilean Constitution, the Congress had to choose a president from the two candidates with the highest number of votes, and Allende was duly elected the following month.
91. Church, Covert Action in Chile, 9.
92. See Church, Covert Action in Chile, 33.
93. The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) had been founded in 1961 and was inspired by the Cuban Revolution. It took its name from Augusto César Sandino, who had fought the US Marines in Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933.
94. To circumvent the Boland Amendment outlawing US funding for the contras, the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and used part of the proceeds secretly to fund the contras. See Walsh, Firewall, 18–22.
95. This action by the CIA was such a flagrant abuse of international law that Nicaragua was able to secure a ruling from the International Court of Justice that condemned it. However, the ruling could not be enforced, as the US government refused to participate in the case.
96. The biggest challenges to US interests were from the guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. These would be ended by negotiations in the 1990s, leaving US interests secure.
97. Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth and a former British colony, had been ruled by the New Jewel Movement since 1979. When its leader (Maurice Bishop) was assassinated in 1983 by other members, the Reagan administration used the opportunity to intervene and establish a government more sympathetic to US interests.
1. Fukuyama, The National Interest, 3.
2. A total of 128 countries joined the WTO as founder members, but this still left around 60 outside the organization.
3. In theory other countries could do the same, but in practice the United States exercised a virtual veto since access to its market was so important for new members. Only the European Union came close to the United States in the leverage it could exercise over new members.
4. Stiglitz, “Multinational Corporations,” 18.
5. The most serious was in 2008–9, when the dollar value of world trade declined sharply, but it soon recovered.
6. Taiwan joined as the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu (Chinese Taipei) under rules that allow membership by nonsovereign entities if they have autonomy over their commercial relations.
7. Russia took nineteen years and two months to secure membership, the longest wait of any country.
8. Lawrence, The United States and the WTO, 15.
9. This also happened in the United States, where WTO negotiations in Seattle in 1999 were seriously disrupted by protestors.
10. It is no accident that Doha in Qatar was chosen as the site of negotiations after Seattle, as there was no danger of the local police allowing protestors anywhere near the meeting.
11. The best that could be achieved, after nearly fifteen years, was a modest agreement on trade facilitation measures. This, however, fell far short of the original ambitions for the Doha Round.
12. The one exception was the European Economic Community (EEC). Despite the very real threat of trade diversification, US governments supported the EEC enthusiastically for security reasons.
13. See Ritchie, Wrestling with the Elephant, for a Canadian “insider” account of how the US team negotiated CUFTA.
14. Office of the United States Trade Representative, “Fact Sheet: Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS),” https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/fact-sheets/2015/march/investor-state-dispute-settlement-isds; emphasis added.
15. The most famous example is the steady erosion of the Glass-Steagall Act that placed restrictions, among other things, on dealings in securities by commercial banks.
16. See Skidmore-Hess, “The Corporate Centrism of the Obama Administration,” 88–89.
17. Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” Atlantic, May 2009, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/.
18. See UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2015, Annex, Table 2.
19. The EBRD was established in 1991 with a mandate to further progress toward market-oriented economies and the promotion of private and entrepreneurial initiative. Uniquely for a development bank, it can assist only those countries “committed to and applying the principles of multi-party democracy and pluralism.”
20. Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, 164.
21. See Florio, “Economists,” 359–400.
22. Executive Office of the President, National Space Policy of the United States of America, 7–8.
23. It was originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) but has been known only as DARPA since 1996. See Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, 74–75.
24. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “About DARPA,” http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/about-darpa.
25. Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), developed Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the uniform resource locator (URL), and uniform Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), without which the Internet would be extremely cumbersome. His inventions were not patented.
26. The largest non-US company is Samsung Electronics, based in South Korea.
27. “Annual Revenue of Global Publicly Traded Internet Companies from 2014 to 2016 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, http://www.statista.com/statistics/276709/revenue-of-global-public-internet-companies/.
28. As recently as 1993, the share was estimated to be as little as 1%.
29. The companies are JD.com, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and NetEase.
30. Its full title, published in July 1976, was Final Report of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. It was named the Church Committee Report after its chairman, Senator Frank Church.
31. A US person is defined in law as a US citizen or long-term resident. A non-US person is anyone else.
32. Clarke et al., The NSA Report, 26.
33. Clarke et al., The NSA Report, 84–85.
34. See Clarke et al., The NSA Report.
35. The USA Freedom Act did, however, end bulk collection of all records (previously allowed under Section 215 of the Patriot Act).
36. See Harrison, “Indexing the Empire,” 145. The cables themselves are available at “Public Library of Public Diplomacy,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd.
37. Assange, “Introduction,” in WikiLeaks, The WikiLeaks Files, 2.
38. The Warsaw Pact was the military alliance formed by the USSR and its European allies in opposition to NATO in 1955. It was dissolved in early 1991.
39. The White House, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, February 1995, Defense Technical Information Center, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/research/nss.pdf, i.
40. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020, 59.
41. These efforts were generally successful. However, three states (India, Israel, and Pakistan) never signed the NPT while North Korea signed but withdrew in 2003. Israel, despite some US reservations, had acquired nuclear weapons before the end of the Cold War. The other three did so later and were subject to major US sanctions (those on India were eventually reversed; see Chapter 12).
42. Not all states of the FSU had such stockpiles, but several did including (apart from Russia) Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
43. START I had been signed in 1991 by President Bush with President Mikhail Gorbachev a few months before the dissolution of the USSR.
44. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and Albania and Croatia in 2009.
45. Gorbachev had been promised that NATO expansion would be limited to East Germany if German unification went ahead.
46. See MccGwire and Clarke, “NATO Expansion,” 1282.
47. MccGwire and Clarke, “NATO Expansion,” 1283.
48. Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 20.
49. Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, iv.
50. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 15.
51. The two governments, however, did agree in 2003 to the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which was superseded in 2011 by New START.
52. The Clinton administration signed the statute in 2000, but it was not subsequently ratified by the US Senate.
53. See Lutz, Bases of Empire, 1.
54. See Vine, Base Nation, 45–46.
55. Vine, Base Nation, 58.
56. See US Department of Defense, The Department of Defense Cyber Strategy, 5.
57. These special cases almost invariably involve countries in civil wars.
58. The most (in)famous is Blackwater, which is now known as Academi and is part of the Constellis Group.
59. China wanted to avoid confrontation with the United States in order to concentrate on rapid economic growth, while Russia was preoccupied with its painful transition to a market economy.
60. UN sanctions were first applied to Libya in 1992 in response to the bombing of a Pan Am flight full of US passengers (they were lifted in 2003). Those against Sudan were first applied in 2006 for alleged complicity in an assassination attempt against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (a key US ally). Those against Afghanistan and al-Qaeda were both adopted in 1999 to compel the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden.
61. It is too early to say how closely President Trump will follow this strategy, but there is no reason to assume it will not be tried.
62. Two countries (Cuba and Yemen) voted against, and China abstained. All other members of the Security Council supported UNSCR 678.
63. The best known of these incidents was the destruction of two US helicopters in Mogadishu, an episode later made into the film Black Hawk Down (2001). See Dawson, “New World Disorder,” for an account of the event and a critique of the film.
64. Although a Chapter 7 resolution, UNSCR 1368 did not invoke Article 42 but instead referred to the right of a state (i.e., the United States) to use force in self-defense under Article 51.
65. “Regime change” was not explicitly endorsed by UNSCR 1973, although it was what the United States wanted. Whether the removal of Gaddhafi was justified in international law remains in dispute to this day.
66. The negotiations, held at an air base in Ohio, led to the Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
67. In 2005 the UN World Summit adopted the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in an effort to ensure that in the future humanitarian intervention would be consistent with international law. However, any action—by NATO or others—would still require a UNSC resolution under Chapter 7.
68. Russia, which has used its veto powers sparingly since the end of the Cold War, did so in the case of Syria, and some NATO members have been reluctant to become involved without explicit UN approval.
69. The coalition against IS in Iraq was broadly based, as it had the support of the Iraqi government. It was much narrower in the case of Syria, since many allies were reluctant to use force without the government’s explicit approval.
70. The sanctions were first applied in 1960, but were extended after the Cold War by the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 with extraterritorial implications (see Box 8.4). There has been a vote on sanctions against Cuba in the UN General Assembly every year since 1992. The United States always voted to keep the sanctions until 2016 when it abstained (only Israel supported the US position in that year).
71. For the full list, see US Department of the Treasury, “Sanctions Programs and Country Information,” https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx. In some cases, other countries later joined the United States in imposing sanctions.
72. The annual survey started in 1985, but had much more impact after the Cold War as allies against the USSR were never going to be punished. Unless accompanied by a waiver, decertification means a country is denied US support in various ways.
73. Report of the National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the United States Intelligence Community, iii.
74. US Congress, Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Public Law 107-40, September 18, 2001, https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ40/PLAW-107publ40.pdf.
75. The story of the killing of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen is told in detail in Scahill, Dirty Wars.
76. It is known as the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force executive order and exempts special forces from seeking presidential approval on each occasion. See Scahill, Dirty Wars, 282.
77. See Nye, “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,” 107–8.
78. US Department of State and US Agency for International Aid, Leading through Civilian Power: The First Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, ii–iii.
1. See Onuf, “Imperialism and Nationalism,” 21–40.
2. On settler colonialism in America, see Hixson, American Settler Colonialism.
3. The obvious example is what proportion of a slave should count toward the population of a state. This led to loud protests by some opponents of the Constitution, but it could hardly be called anti-imperialist.
4. See Borden, The Anti-Federalist Papers.
5. “ ‘Centinel’: Number 1,” October 5, 1787, Constitution Society, http://www.constitution.org/afp/centin01.htm. Centinel is generally thought to have been George Bryan from Pennsylvania.
6. See “Antifederalist Paper 14: Extent of Territory under Consolidated Government Too Large to Preserve Liberty or Protect Property,” New-York Journal, October 25, 1787, Federalist Papers Project, http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/antifederalist-paper-14. Cato was George Clinton, the governor of New York.
7. See Brown, The Constitutional History, 17–29; and Lawson and Seidman, “The First ‘Incorporation’ Debate,” 19–40.
8. Roger Griswold, quoted in Kauffman, Ain’t My America, 15.
9. Gannon, “Escaping Mr. Jefferson’s Plan of Destruction,” 423.
10. Morris Miller, quoted in Hoey, “Federalist Opposition,” 7.
11. Robert Toombs, quoted in Clark, Lincoln, 96.
12. Corwin, Life and Speeches of Thomas Corwin, 305.
13. Quoted in Seymour, American Insurgents, 32.
14. William Lloyd Garrison, quoted in DeWitt, “Crusading for Peace,” 109.
15. Cadwalader Washburn, quoted in Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1.
16. See Box 4.1.
17. A good example is provided by Frederick Douglass, who vehemently opposed the war against Mexico and yet supported the annexation of Santo Domingo.
18. The first AIL was in Boston, and it would be swiftly followed by AILs in many other cities. A national AIL was then established in 1899. See Harrington, “The Anti-imperialist Movement,” 216–18.
19. See Murphy, “Women’s Anti-imperialism,” 244–70.
20. Carl Schurz, quoted in Harrington, “The Anti-imperialist Movement,” 212. Schurz had been a leading figure in the Republican Party before the mugwump movement in the 1880s.
21. Cuba, although under US occupation, did not exercise the AIL to the same extent, as the Teller Amendment ensured that it would eventually achieve some kind of independence. See Chapter 4.
22. See Lasch, “The Anti-imperialists,” 322–28.
23. See Harrington, “The Anti-imperialist Movement,” 226.
24. See Lutz, Bases of Empire; and Vine, Base Nation.
25. George Washington, “Washington’s Farewell Address 1796,” Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp.
26. Elbridge Gerry, quoted in Johnson, The Peace Progressives, 14.
27. Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp.
28. See Braumoeller, “The Myth of American Isolationism,” 8.
29. See Johnson, The Peace Progressives, 60.
30. Hiram Johnson, quoted in Johnson, The Peace Progressives, 87.
31. See Johnson, The Peace Progressives, 135.
32. See Braumoeller, “The Myth of American Isolationism,” 349–71.
33. The Senate had voted strongly in favor of joining in 1926, but a series of reservations were added that would have given the United States privileges and immunities that other countries lacked. This so unsettled other members of the Court that they proposed further negotiations. These never happened, and so the United States never joined the World Court. See Guinsburg, The Pursuit of Isolationism, 102–6.
34. See Langer and Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 232.
35. See Kauffman, Ain’t My America, 80.
36. Wallace did not even win a single vote in the electoral college, yet four years before he had been the overwhelming favorite to retain his position as FDR’s vice presidential nominee. How he was outmaneuvered at the convention is one of the great “what ifs?” of American history. See Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History, 138–40.
37. Their number included Howard Buffett, father of Warren.
38. Sterling Morton, quoted in Carpenter, “The Dissenters,” 240.
39. Laqueur, Neo-isolationism, 19.
40. On the debate around grand strategy after the Cold War, see Posen and Ross, “Competing Visions”; see also Art, America’s Grand Strategy.
41. See Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured, 5.
42. See Andrew Kohut, “Americans: Disengaged, Feeling Less Respected, but Still See U.S. as World’s Military Superpower,” April 1, 2014, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/01/americans-disengaged-feeling-less-respected-but-still-see-u-s-as-worlds-military-superpower. The Pew Research Center has asked the question regularly since 1991. Earlier data were taken from Gallup. Other polls, however, notably the annual survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, suggest a lower level of support for isolationism.
43. Trump denied in public that he was a neo-isolationist but was happy to be associated with the isolationist notion of “America first.”
44. See Pew Research Center, “Faith and Skepticism about Trade, Foreign Investment,” September 16, 2014, http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/09/16/faith-and-skepticism-about-trade-foreign-investment/.
45. The TPP was negotiated between twelve countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including the United States, Japan, and Canada but excluding China and India. It was signed by all states, but had not been ratified by the time of the US presidential elections in November 2016. As President Trump (2017–) has made clear his opposition to ratification, it is unlikely to go into force.
46. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Ekirch, The Civilian and the Military, 46. Jefferson wrote these words in 1799, but he could just have easily done so before the Constitution was adopted.
47. Benjamin Rush, quoted in Reagan, “Book Review: The Civilian and the Military,” 484. Reagan was reviewing Ekirch’s book.
48. Henry Knox, quoted in Ekirch, The Civilian and the Military, 35.
49. This essay is still in print but is now called Civil Disobedience. See Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays.
50. See Johnson, The Peace Progressives, 16. Taylor and Scott were the leading generals in the Mexican-American War.
51. Thomas Corwin, quoted in Ekirch, The Civilian and the Military, 83–84.
52. Daniel Webster, quoted in Kauffman, Ain’t My America, 28.
53. Ekirch, The Civilian and the Military, 78.
54. Even so, the Civil War draft in the North provoked riots and thirty-eight officers in charge of recruitment were assassinated. See Flynn, The Draft, 167–68.
55. See Seymour, American Insurgents, 82.
56. Despite being in jail, he still managed to win 3.4% of the vote (down from 6% in 1912).
57. See Engelbrecht and Hanighen, Merchants of Death; and Butler, War Is a Racket.
58. Nye Committee, Report of the Special Committee, 3.
59. See Seymour, American Insurgents, 104.
60. See Seymour, American Insurgents, 105.
61. The numbers convicted of draft dodging peaked at 3,450 in 1953. See Flynn, The Draft, 126.
62. Quoted in Flynn, The Draft, 150. “P.F.C.” stands for Private First Class.
63. See Brick and Phelps, Radicals in America, 129.
64. See Gettleman, Vietnam and America, 296.
65. In the Boston area, for example, one-tenth of resisters were divinity students who were exempt from the draft. See Flynn, The Draft, 178–79.
66. “Fragging” is the word given to the killing or attempted killing of a fellow soldier. There are thought to have been nine hundred such episodes by US soldiers during the Vietnam War. See Lepre, Fragging, 19–60.
67. See Think Squad, http://think-squad.com/post/13664798101/one-soldier-keith-franklin-wrote-a-letter-that.
68. Congress limited the number of military advisers the United States could send to El Salvador to fifty-five.
69. See “Peace Activists Pledge Resistance against U.S. Military Intervention in Central America, 1984–1990,” Global Nonviolent Action Database, http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/peace-activists-pledge-resistance-against-us-military-intervention-central-america-1984-1990.
70. The School of the Americas is now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
71. The two organizations had a very public falling out in 2005, but this was due to tactical reasons rather than disagreement over the strategy of antimilitarism. See Seymour, American Insurgents, 191–93.
72. See Smeltz et al., America Divided, 26.
73. For Afghanistan, see http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/12/most-want-some-troops-in-afghanistan-despite-strong-criticism; for Iraq, see Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Anthony Salvanto, and Fred Backus, “Most Americans Say Iraq War Wasn’t Worth the Costs: Poll,” CBS News, June 23, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-say-iraq-war-wasnt-worth-the-costs-poll/
74. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Syria,” September 10, 2013, Obama White House Archives, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/10/remarks-president-address-nation-syria. The next day, in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Russian president Vladimir Putin responded, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.” Vladimir V. Putin, “A Plea for Caution from Russia,” New York Times, September 11, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html.
75. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony,” May 28, 2014, Obama White House Archives, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/28/remarks-president-united-states-military-academy-commencement-ceremony.
76. Handsome Lake’s vision was part of oral history until it was recorded in a document edited by Arthur C. Parker in 1912 (“The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet”). The quotation used here can be found in Madsen, American Exceptionalism, 47.
77. See Madsen, American Exceptionalism, 52–53. The reference to the “city upon the hill” is from John Winthrop’s famous sermon of 1630.
78. See United States Census Bureau, The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010, January 2012, https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-10.pdf.
79. The book documents the story of the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. See Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. On the 1973 siege, see Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous’ People’s History, 192.
80. Examples are the disputes over the team name Washington Redskins in the National Football League and the Lord Jeff mascot at Amherst College (a reference to Lord Jeffery Amherst, who is alleged to have given Native Americans blankets infected with the smallpox virus in the eighteenth century).
81. See Selig, “The Revolution’s Black Soldiers,” 2–3.
82. Sir George Cockburn, quoted in Cassell, “Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area,” 152.
83. The speech was delivered in Washington, DC, on April 16, 1889, at the invitation of the Bethel Literary and Historical Society. See Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem,” 728
84. W. E. B. Du Bois, quoted in Seymour, American Insurgents, 50.
85. Kelly Miller, quoted in Cullinane, Liberty, 71.
87. See “Muhammad Ali Refuses to Fight in Vietnam (1967),” Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/muhammad-ali-refuses-to-fight-1967/.
88. See “ ‘Beyond Vietnam,’ Address Delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church,” A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., December 18, 2000, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/kingweb/publications/speeches/Beyond_Vietnam.pdf, 3.
89. Stokely Carmichael, quoted in Seymour, American Insurgents, 123.
90. Pastor Wright said, “And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America’. No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.” Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “Confusing God and Government,” April 13, 2003, http://www.blackpast.org/2008-rev-jeremiah-wright-confusing-god-and-government.
91. The Pew Research Center divided respondents into (a) Steadfast Conservatives, (b) Business Conservatives, (c) Young Outsiders, (d) Hard-Pressed Skeptics, (e) Next Generation Left, (f ) Faith and Family Left, and (g) Solid Liberals. See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/02/most-americans-think-the-u-s-is-great-but-fewer-say-its-the-greatest/.
1. GDP can be measured in US dollars at current or constant prices using official exchange rates. It can also be measured in US dollars at current or constant prices using exchange rates at purchasing power parity (PPP) that reflect the actual cost of buying a basket of goods and services.
2. Official exchange rates can provide a useful point of comparison for that part of GDP consisting of “tradables” (i.e., those goods and services that enter into international trade). However, large swaths of every country’s economy are “nontradable” (e.g., haircuts). In addition, official exchange rates can be subject to enormous volatility from one year to the next. PPP exchange rates are designed to eliminate both these problems.
3. The growth rate of US GDP is forecast at 2.25%, compared with 3.5% for the world as a whole. See International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook.
4. The five with a slower growth were four members of the European Union (France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) and Japan. The European Union, which is a member of the G20 despite not being a single country, also had slower growth. However, its growth is essentially the same as the four European countries already mentioned.
5. Its share of global GDP was 20.8% in the same year. See Figure 10.1.
6. By contrast, the US share of global exports of goods and services in 2000 was only 13.8%.
7. Both the import and export share fell by roughly one-third between 2000 and 2014.
8. The IMF, however, in its World Economic Outlook uses projections for US trade that leave its share of the global total unchanged. This seems unlikely.
9. Data on FDI flows are always given on a net basis (capital transactions credits less debits between direct investors and their foreign affiliates).
10. The value of US exports exceeded US imports on a regular basis from the mid-1870s onward. See Carter et al., Historical Statistics, vol. 5, 5.454–6, Table Ee1-21.
11. In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the stock of US FDI was $2,652 million, of which $618 million was in Canada, $587 in Mexico, and $281 in Cuba and Puerto Rico. See Davis and Cull, “International Capital Movements,” 787, Table 16.4.
12. Figures are not available before 1980, but in that year the United States accounted for 42% of the global FDI outward stock. See UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2000, 300.
13. See UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2015, Annex Table 2, A7–A10.
14. President Trump has even indicated his wish to reverse the outflow through reforms to the tax system designed to encourage firms to repatriate assets held abroad.
15. See World Bank, World Development Indicators.
16. None of these countries are shown in Figure 10.4, since they were not in the top twenty in 1960.
17. Net savings are the difference between federal current receipts and spending. The federal deficit also takes into account capital receipts and spending.
18. The date is either 1986 or 1988, depending on whether FDI is valued at historic cost or market values. See Landefeld and Lawson, Valuation, 40–49.
19. See Mann, “Perspectives on the U.S. Current Account Deficit,” 135.
20. These are the famous “twin” deficits about which so much has been written. See, for example, Roubini, “The Unsustainability of the U.S. Twin Deficits,” 343–56.
21. See Modigliani and Modigliani, “The Growth of the Federal Deficit,” 461.
22. President Clinton introduced tax increases in his first presidency that had most of their impact in his second term. This was also the moment when the country enjoyed a brief “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War and a boom in technology sectors that boosted receipts from capital gains tax.
23. There was a modest recovery in the personal savings rate after the Great Recession, but it remained less than half what it had been in the early 1970s. See Clinton P. McCully, Trends in Consumer Spending and Personal Saving, 1959–2009, June 2011, https://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2011/06%20June/0611_pce.pdf, 9.
24. The debt-to-GDP ratio declined briefly after the Great Recession but soon surpassed its previous peak. See Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Economic Research,” https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/.
25. Federal debt was valued at $19.4 trillion at the end of the fiscal year 2015–16; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Federal Debt: Total Public Debt (GFDEBTN),” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN. Government debt, which includes state and local government, was $22.4 trillion.
26. See https://www.treasurydirect.gov/np/debt/search?startmonth=01&startday=01&startyear=2017&endmonth=&endday=&e.
27. See UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2015, Annex Table 2, A-7. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has lower figures for the stock of net inward FDI, but these are valued at historic cost.
28. See, for example, numerous articles on this theme by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
29. Keynes is alleged to have said, “If you owe your bank one pound, you have a problem. If you owe one million pounds, the bank has a problem.”
30. See Coughlin, Pakko, and Poole, “How Dangerous Is the U.S. Current Account Deficit?” 5–9.
31. Great Britain, one of the closest US allies, was made to learn this the hard way (first in 1947, when the United States insisted that sterling be made convertible, and second in 1956, during the Suez Crisis).
32. See Zorlu, Innovation and Empire, Chapter 3.
33. Gordon, Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?, 4. Robert Gordon has developed his ideas more fully in Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
34. Cardarelli and Lusinyan, “U.S. Total Factor Productivity Slowdown,” 4.
35. Derived from the BEA website comparing gross private domestic investment with private consumption of fixed capital. See https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1#reqid=9&step=3&isuri=1&903=138.
36. The fiscal stimulus, mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was large (about $800 billion), but 37% was in tax cuts and much of the rest was current rather than capital spending.
37. The poor state of US infrastructure became a big issue in the presidential election of 2016. A promise to massively increase spending on infrastructure was one of the factors behind President Trump’s election victory in that year.
38. See World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report, which includes infrastructure as one of its components. The United States was in eleventh place in 2015–16.
39. American Society of Civil Engineers, 2013 Report Card, 8. The ASCE produces every four years a grade from A to F on the state of US infrastructure. The grades in the 2013 report varied from B– (solid waste) to D– (inland waterways and levees), for an overall average of D+. By the time of the 2017 report, the grades had hardly changed at all.
40. Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President, 255, 258.
41. See, for example, Blundell et al., “Human Capital Investment,” 16–17.
42. See Rockland, Sarmiento’s Travels.
43. See, for example, Denison, Accounting for United States Economic Growth.
44. Richard Freeman, a Harvard University economist, even used The Overeducated American as the title for his book on the topic. See Freeman, The Overeducated American.
45. See National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk, 1.
46. The National Center for Education Statistics was required by Congress to produce an annual report entitled The Condition of Education.
47. See Goldin and Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, Chapter 8.
48. The OECD periodically carries out a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The 2016 scores for the United States compared to other OECD countries, based on 2015 tests, can be found in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Country Note: Key Findings from PISA 2015 for the United States, 2016, https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States.pdf.
49. See Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 16. Figure 1.2, which shows that between 1920 and 1970 TFP annual growth averaged 1.8% and explained most of the annual increase in output per hour worked (2.82%).
50. Labor productivity growth for the nonfarm business sector after the Great Recession fell to half what it had been before. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Productivity and Costs,” http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm.
51. See, for example, Cardarelli and Lusinyan, “U.S. Total Factor Productivity Slowdown,” which compares TFP for each US state and finds a slowdown across the board.
52. See Grueber, 2012 Global R&D Funding Forecast.
53. See National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators, Figure 4.6.
54. See Summers, “The Age of Secular Stagnation.”
55. Adams, The Epic of America, 415; emphasis in the original.
56. See King, The Wealth and Income of the People, 228, Table 44.
57. See Young, “Nearing’s Income,” 584–85. In fact, subsequent research showed his results to be fairly accurate.
58. See Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 299, Figure 8.7. Thomas Piketty’s work has been much criticized on theoretical grounds (see, for example, Jones, “Pareto and Piketty”; and Acemoglu and Robinson, The Rise and Decline), but there is much greater consensus around the long-term trends shown in his empirical data.
59. A good example is the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill, which provided veterans of World War II with cash payments for tuition fees and living expenses to attend university, high school, or vocational training.
60. The database prepared by the team led by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, “Table 1. Real Income Growth by Groups,” http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2013prel.xls, uses market income (with or without realized capital gains). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), on the other hand, uses a measure of income that adds government transfers to market income. And the Economic Policy Institute has carried out an analysis of income distribution shifts for each state as well as the nation as a whole. See Sommeiller, Price, and Wazeter, Income Inequality.
61. See Saez, “Striking It Richer,” Figure 1 and Figure 2.
62. See Saez and Zucman, Wealth Inequality in the United States, 51, Figure 6. The authors used capitalized income to estimate wealth, which gives similar results to Surveys of Consumer Finance.
63. See Saez and Zucman, Wealth Inequality in the United States, Figure 1, 44.
64. See Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 315–21.
65. According to the CBO, whose definition of primary income includes government transfers, the posttax share of income in 2011 received by the top quintile was 48.2% compared with 51.9% before tax. For the bottom quintile, the posttax share only went up from 5% to 6%. See https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/113th-congress-2013-2014/reports/49440-distribution-income-and-taxes-2.pdf, 5.
66. Income is defined here as market income (i.e., excluding government transfers but including realized capital gains).
67. The median is the number that separates the population into two equal halves. Thus, 50% earn above it and 50% below it.
68. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Table 1. Median Usual Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Sex, Quarterly Averages, Seasonally Adjusted,” https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm.
69. See Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Real Median Household Income in the United States,” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N. The revised series provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) starts in 1984.
70. See US Census Bureau, “Historical Income Tables: Households,” http://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html, Table H-3.
71. See Drew Desilver, “For Most Workers, Real Wages Have Barely Budged for Decades,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/.
72. See Corak, Inequality, 1.
73. See Conference Board of Canada, “Intergenerational Income Mobility,” http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/intergenerational-income-mobility.aspx.
74. See Mitnik et al., New Estimates, 69–72.
75. See Chetty et al., Where Is the Land of Opportunity?
76. See Betsy Cooper, Daniel Cox, Rachel Lienesch, and Robert P. Jones, “The Divide over America’s Future: 1950 or 2050? Findings from the 2016 American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, http://www.prri.org/research/divide-americas-future-1950-2050/.
1. From 2006 to 2015 there were eleven UNSC resolutions calling on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment or face sanctions.
2. The exception was just before the end of the Obama presidency, when the United States abstained on a resolution critical of Israel for building settlements in the occupied territories.
3. Heads of state and government met in September 2005 for the World Summit to discuss UN reform and produced a Summit Outcome Document that was noticeable for its emphasis on procedure and management rather than substantial reforms, although they did endorse the principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). See Bellamy and Dunne, The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect.
4. See McDonald and Patrick, UN Security Council Enlargement, 13–14.
5. The George W. Bush administration voted against the establishment of the council and then refused to stand for election to it. The Obama administration reversed this decision but gave only qualified support to the council. The Trump administration regularly threatened to withdraw the United States from the council, although at the time of writing it had not yet done so.
6. When UNESCO admitted Palestine as a member in 2011, the Obama administration cut funding to the UN agency and two years later lost its vote in the UNESCO General Conference because it had not paid its dues for two consecutive years. See Blanchfield, United Nations Reform, 4.
7. On US influence over the IMF, see Thacker, “The High Politics of IMF Lending”; and Oatley, International Political Economy.
8. See Weisbrot, Voting Share Reform, 1–7.
9. By mid-2016 nearly 75% of the stock of IMF loans and credits was to European countries. See International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, 6–8.
10. At the end of 2016 the largest recipients of IMF loans outside of Europe were Egypt and Pakistan, whose geopolitical ties to the United States are well known.
11. Dreher and Sturm, “Do the IMF and the World Bank Influence Voting?,” 387.
12. This was the Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, whose trenchant criticisms of the World Bank can be found in Stiglitz, Globalization.
13. The US Treasury fought hard against a Japanese campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to give a higher priority to the role of the state in development economics. See Wade, “Japan, the World Bank, and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance.”
14. BRICS is the acronym given to five of the most important “emerging” markets (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
15. The Bali Package, as it became known, covered more than trade facilitation, but the other elements soon ran into dispute. See Schnepf, Agriculture in the WTO, 1–15.
16. Hopewell, Breaking the WTO, 14–15.
17. Protests against trade agreements were a constant refrain during the US presidential election campaigns in 2016.
18. The Rio Group grew out of the Contadora Group (Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela) that was established in 1984 to find a peaceful solution to the Central American crisis.
19. President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was removed from office and deported from the country by the military in 2009. This action was unanimously condemned by the OAS.
20. Despite the US-supported OAS resolution, the Obama administration subsequently, and unilaterally, accepted the results of the elections organized by the Honduran military that installed a new president. See Landler, Alter Egos, 324–26.
21. These included a new bank, Banco del Sur, that was planned to be an alternative to the IMF. It has not yet been established.
22. See Sarotte, “Perpetuating U.S. Preeminence,” 110–37.
23. NATO members are committed to spending at least 2% of GDP on their armed forces (the United States spends more than 3%), but very few of them do so. Furthermore, some of these countries only meet the threshold through extreme examples of creative accounting.
24. Sergei Karaganov, quoted in Wolff, “The Future of NATO Enlargement,” 1111.
25. When Montenegro joined NATO as the twenty-ninth member in 2017, it was strongly condemned by Russia in words that implied there would be “consequences.”
26. Changes to corporate taxation are expected during the Trump administration but had not been implemented at the time this book was completed.
27. When state and local taxes are added, the rate can rise to nearly 40%.
28. See Contractor, Tax Avoidance, 1–2.
29. The US Treasury issued a new interpretation of the tax inversion rules, but it did not block tax inversions as such. Only Congress can do that.
30. The trigger was Pfizer’s plans to be purchased by Allergan, a much smaller company based in Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in the world.
31. “Pfiasco: Open Warfare Breaks Out,” Economist, April 9, 2016.
32. US Department of Defense, quoted in Paul Mozer and Jane Perlez, “U.S. Tech Giants May Blur National Security Boundaries in China Deals,” New York Times, October 30, 2015.
33. This was the case of Uber, an aggressive, app-based independent taxi service based in San Francisco, which ran at a large loss in China for many years before selling its assets to its Chinese rival in 2016 and acquiring a minority stake.
34. Donahue, “High Technology,” 3.
35. Following the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack in December 2015, when fourteen people were killed, the FBI found an iPhone that they wanted to unlock. Apple refused to comply. See Box 11.2.
36. See Martin Maximino, “Does Media Fragmentation Contribute to Polarization? Evidence from Lab Experiments,” Journalist’s Resource, http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/media-fragmentation-political-polarization-lab-experiments.
37. The extreme right media has no parallel on the left in US politics, where the most “left-wing” are identified in a 2014 Pew Research Study as Slate and the New Yorker. See Aaron Blake, “Ranking the Media from Liberal to Conservative, Based on Their Audiences,” Washington Post, October 21, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/lets-rank-the-media-from-liberal-to-conservative-based-on-their-audiences/.
38. Steve Bannon, CEO of Breitbart, even became the campaign manager for Donald Trump in August 2016. Subsequently, he was appointed chief of strategy in the Trump administration, but left in August 2017.
39. John Ziegler, “Modern Media Has Turned the USA into the Divided States of America,” http://www.mediaite.com/online/modern-media-has-turned-the-usa-into-the-divided-states-of-america-2/.
40. See “Obama Disses Think Tanks,” Think Tank Watch, March 11, 2016, http://www.thinktankwatch.com/2016/03/obama-disses-think-tanks.html. See also Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” 70–90.
41. A social policy favored by many leading US politicians is gay marriage. This is a complete anathema to the conservative American churches that operate abroad in many countries and has led to serious friction with the US government.
42. King, Congress and National Security, 6.
43. Ash Carter, defense secretary, in March 2016 listed terrorism below Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran in his list of strategic challenges faced by the United States. See Lisa Ferdinando, “Carter Outlines Security Challenges, Warns against Sequestration,” March 17, 2016, US Department of Defense, http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/696449/carter-outlines-security-challenges-warns-against-sequestration.
44. That is not true if foreign policy is defined to include immigration, but that is usually seen as a matter for domestic policy.
45. King, Congress and National Security, 8.
46. See Wiktor, Unperfected Treaties.
47. The United States also signed in 1925 the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, but the Senate did not pass it until 1975 (fifty years later). See Bradley, “Unratified Treaties,” 309–10.
48. See Mission of the United States, “Human Rights Commitments and Pledges of the United States of America,” https://geneva.usmission.gov/2016/02/24/human-rights-commitments-and-pledges-of-the-united-states-of-america/. The US government was successful and secured its seat.
49. These include the 2006 Convention against Enforced Disappearance, the 1997 Ottawa (Mine Ban) Treaty, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the 2002 Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture.
50. CEDAW was even favorably voted out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on two separate occasions (1994 and 2002).
51. He argued that it was not a treaty and therefore could be ratified by sole executive agreement. Needless to say, this was disputed by the Senate.
52. The United States is now the only UN member not to have ratified it.
53. It required 55% of countries accounting for 55% of world emissions. Russia’s ratification in 2005 was the last one needed for the Kyoto Protocol to take effect.
54. As with the Kyoto Protocol, 55% of countries accounting for 55% of emissions must ratify. This target was met before the end of 2016.
55. President Obama ratified it in September 2016 at the same time as China, whose parliament had already approved it. US ratification allowed Obama to claim joint leadership with China on the global environment, but it risked being reversed at a later date by a Republican president. Indeed, this was the promise of Donald Trump during his successful presidential campaign in 2016. President Trump then announced in June 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the agreement at the earliest possible opportunity.
56. Aspiration to global leadership was also undermined by the decision of the Supreme Court in February 2016 to suspend the implementation of the Clean Power Plan that the Obama administration needed to meet its NDCs pending a judicial ruling.
57. The Senate, for example, approved the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972 and it was the executive, not the Senate, that withdrew from the treaty unilaterally in 2002.
58. All these arms control treaties received strong support from the Senate. However, START II ended prematurely in 2002 when Russia canceled it in response to the US unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.
59. The Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea was completed in 1982, but it soon became clear it was unacceptable to the US executive as well as the Senate. The convention was then modified to meet US concerns between 1990 and 1994.
60. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, complained that “President Clinton’s decision to sign the Rome treaty establishing an International Criminal Court in his final days in office is as outrageous as it is inexplicable.” Bradley, “Unratified Treaties,” 311n15.
61. By then President George W. Bush had taken the highly unusual step—along with Israel and Sudan—of “unsigning” the state’s signature to the statute, further isolating the United States on this issue.
62. The spending bill was so critical for the Obama administration that the president could not afford to veto it.
63. The chair, Bob Corker, was the junior senator for Tennessee and was first elected in 2006.
64. Sadly, Senator McCain was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer in July 2017.
65. Some scholars have called this “being asleep on the job.” See Ornstein and Mann, “When Congress Checks Out,” 67–82.
66. William J. Clinton, “Transcript of ‘Global Challenges,’ ” Yale Global Online, October 31, 2003, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/transcript-global-challenges.
67. See Bradley, “Unratified Treaties,” 320.
68. Bill Clinton, quoted in Bradley, “Unratified Treaties,” 316n39.
69. There are also congressional-executive agreements that are often used to circumvent the two-thirds majority requirement, but these still require a congressional majority in both houses. See Congressional Research Service, Treaties, 5.
70. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed as a joint resolution before being repealed in 1971.
71. So strongly did Congress feel about this issue that it overrode a presidential veto.
72. Quoted in Hendrickson, The Constitution, Congress and War Powers, 127.
73. See Chollet, The Long Game, Chapter 1.
74. See Landler, Alter Egos, 204–30.
75. Obama’s actions may well have been correct, but they cannot be reconciled with his claim that America was the global leader.
76. It was called Fast Track Authority until 2002.
77. The Republicans, who held a majority in the House and Senate after 1994, refused to support a Democratic executive despite their belief in globalization.
78. The Senate was strongly in favor, but in the House it was very close (215–212).
79. The agreements were with Chile, Singapore, Australia, Morocco, Central America (including the Dominican Republic), Bahrain, Oman, Peru, Colombia, South Korea, and Panama.
80. The final two nominees in 2016, Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and Donald Trump for the Republican Party, both opposed TPP in their presidential campaigns.
81. This is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) involving ten ASEAN countries together with China, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, and South Korea.
82. See Shaxson, Treasure Islands, Chapter 1.
83. See “Base Erosion and Profit Sharing,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, http://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/.
84. See Deloitte, BEPS Actions, 2–3.
85. All signed tax treaties since 2011, for example, have remained “unperfected” in the Senate.
86. See “Loophole USA: The Vortex-Shaped Hole in Global Financial Transparency,” January 26, 2015, Tax Justice Network, http://www.taxjustice.net/2015/01/26/loophole-usa-vortex-shaped-hole-global-financial-transparency-2/.
1. The resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had led President John F. Kennedy (1961–63) to promise not to invade the island. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a hardening of congressional policy toward the government of Fidel Castro that could only be interpreted as the pursuit of regime change.
2. A few, such as Chile, had even started to do so in the 1970s.
3. The Clinton plan, launched at the Summit of the Americas in Miami, built on the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) launched by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
4. The model was NAFTA, and especially its Chapter 11 on investment, which provided for an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism that proved highly controversial.
5. See Von Bülow, Building Transnational Networks, 128–30.
6. ALBA initially had two members (Cuba and Venezuela) but soon expanded to eleven, with two others as associates.
7. See Cannon, The Right in Latin America, Chapter 5.
8. All of these were modeled on NAFTA.
9. Brazil alone (over two hundred million in 2016) has almost one-third of the LAC population. Venezuela’s membership of MERCOSUR was suspended in 2016.
10. China’s rapacious appetite for commodities, such as soy and iron ore, had already made it the main market for MERCOSUR exports.
11. US Department of State, “Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs,” https://www.state.gov/p/wha/.
12. See Chapter 11.1.
13. See US Department of State, “Human Rights Reports,” https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/; US Department of State, “Narcotics Control Reports,” https://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/index.htm; and US Department of State, “2017 Trafficking in Persons Report,” https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/ (which also has links to the Trafficking in Persons Report for prior years.).
14. The Clinton administration forced the military junta from office in 1994. Despite being in effect a US protectorate since then, Haiti failed to establish representative democracy. See Deibert, Haiti Will Not Perish, Chapter 15.
15. If these countries had supported the resolution, the United States would have had the nine votes needed for the resolution to pass provided no permanent member vetoed it.
16. Shiprider agreements give US authorities the power to chase suspected drug traffickers in another country’s territorial waters.
17. See US Drug Enforcement Agency, “DEA and European Authorities Uncover Massive Hizballah Drug and Money Laundering Scheme,” February 1, 2016, https://www.dea.gov/divisions/hq/2016/hq020116.shtml.
18. In June 2017 President Trump announced a series of measures that partially reversed Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba, but diplomatic relations were not broken.
19. Latinobarómetro, a Chilean polling company, regularly asks the public in different Latin American countries their opinion of the United States.
20. “Guatemala Academia and Think-Tank 01,” Chatham House, http://eliteperceptions.chathamhouse.org/essay/guatemala-academia-and-think-tank-01/.
21. The NSAg, it later transpired, had hacked into the phones of twenty-nine top Brazilian officials—not just that of President Dilma Rousseff. See “Bugging Brazil,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/nsa-brazil/selectors.html.
22. The island government had warned for many years that it was heading for default. Not being a US state, it was unable to seek protection from its creditors until Congress eventually passed emergency legislation in June 2016.
23. In the end, the project looked set to collapse due to the opposition of environmentalists and lack of support from the Chinese government. However, the US government did not know that when the agreement was reached.
24. The peace agreement was signed in September 2016, in the presence of Secretary of State John Kerry, only to be narrowly rejected by the Colombian people in a plebiscite in October. A revised version was subsequently approved by the Colombian Congress.
25. See Transatlantic Declaration on EC-US Relations, 1990, http://www.comercio.gob.es/es-ES/comercio-exterior/politica-comercial/relaciones-bilaterales-union-europea/america/PDF/estados-unidos/trans_declaration_90_en.pdf. The Transatlantic Declaration was then updated in 1995 with the New Transatlantic Agenda that provided more detail. See The New Transatlantic Agenda, http://eeas.europa.eu/us/docs/new_transatlantic_agenda_en.pdf.
26. The European Community changed its name to the European Union (EU) in 1993. In what follows, it will be referred to as the EU only.
27. Russia shares a border with Georgia and Ukraine, while Moldova contains a de facto republic (Transnistria) that is strongly pro-Russian.
28. Russia threatened retaliation in 2013 if the Ukrainian government signed an accession agreement with the EU. The threat worked, but Ukrainians took to the streets in protest leading to the imposition of a pro-US and anti-Russian government in 2014.
29. Crimea only became part of Ukraine in 1954, when both were still part of the Soviet Union. It hosts an important Russian naval base on the Black Sea, and most of the population is ethnically Russian.
30. In the end, they did not need to worry, as the election of Donald Trump as president killed the TTIP.
31. Putin was president from 1999 to 2008, prime minister from 2008 to 2012, and is now president again since 2012. Throughout this time, he was the de facto leader of the Russian Federation.
32. The Serbian enclave, Republika Srpska, had been created in 1992.
33. South Ossetia had been a province of the Soviet Union, but after 1991 sovereignty was soon in dispute between the Russian Federation and Georgia. The unsuccessful Georgian invasion ensured that it would fall entirely under Russian influence, although it became nominally independent.
34. Kosovo had been part of Serbia until 2008, but Serbia—supported by Russia—refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence.
35. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, repeatedly questioned the future of NATO in view of the persistent failure of non-US allies to make a greater contribution.
36. See, for example, Kagan, Power and Weakness, 3–28.
37. The friction, of course, resurfaced when President Trump indicated in June 2017 that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change.
38. The White House, “Remarks by President Obama, President Tusk of the European Council, and President Juncker of the European Commission after U.S.-EU Meeting,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/08/remarks-president-obama-president-tusk-european-council-and-president.
39. The best known example is regime change in Libya in 2011, where European states (notably France and the United Kingdom) were allowed by the United States to take the lead although they would have been incapable of doing it on their own.
40. Only Belarus turned its back on the western alliance, preferring to remain in close association with Russia.
41. Public opinion in Poland, for example, always produced the highest favorable score of the United States among all European countries and never dropped below 60%. See Pew research Center, “Opinion of the United States,” http://www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/1/group/3/.
42. In one survey, only 33% in Bosnia & Herzegovina approved of the job performance of the leadership of the United States. See Meridian International Center and Gallup, U.S.-Global Leadership Project (Report for 2013), 6.
43. See Office of the US Trade Representative, Beyond AGOA, 1.
44. US Congress, Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, May 18, 2000, https://agoa.info/images/documents/2385/AGOA_legal_text.pdf, Section 104.
45. Eligibility required that for each indicator (e.g., trade policy as ranked by the Heritage Foundation), the country in question had to exceed the median score of its peer group.
46. Those without a compact could still be “threshold” countries provided the MCC deemed they were moving in the right direction.
47. In West Africa, for example, the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline was built in large part by US companies. Both countries were then deemed eligible for AGOA despite the fact that the US trade representative found widespread human rights abuse in both countries. See Office of the US Trade Representative, 2016 Biennial Report, 19–21.
48. In FY 2016, Congress authorized $900 million, compared with some $3 billion a decade before.
49. See Office of the US Trade Representative, Beyond AGOA, 13, Figure 6.
50. See Office of the US Trade Representative, 2016 Biennial Report, 22–23.
51. In addition to the “official” base in Djibouti, USAFRICOM was responsible for many other outposts across sub-Saharan Africa. See Vine, Base Nation, 308–14.
52. US Department of State, “Addressing Instability in Sub-Saharan Africa,” http://www.state.gov/p/af/rls/rm/2016/257081.htm.
53. Power Africa was launched by the Obama administration to increase the number of people connected to the grid.
54. The countries were Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
55. US Department of State, “U.S. Relations with South Sudan,” October 6, 2016, https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/171718.htm.
56. The Middle East is defined broadly here to include Afghanistan and Pakistan.
57. Others under negotiation are Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria.
58. See World Integrated Trade Solution, “Middle East & North Africa Trade Indicators 2014,” http://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/MEA/Year/2014/.
59. The Oslo Accords committed Israel to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinians, while the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace.
60. The US occupation of Afghanistan began in October 2001; in the Bonn Agreement later that year the Bush administration committed itself to hold parliamentary and presidential elections as soon as possible.
61. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized power in 2013, but the Obama administration refused to label it as a coup as this would have required cutting off funding and losing leverage over a key ally.
62. By no means had all Sunnis supported al-Qaeda, but for many it was seen as the only bulwark against the sectarian government in Baghdad.
63. The phrase, which means “Let them hate as long as they fear,” is attributed to Lucius Accius, a Roman poet.
64. Saudi intervention began as soon as its Sunni ally, President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, fled the country in response to attacks by the rival Houthi government in the north of Yemen. Hadi later returned, but his government was only prevented from collapse by a Saudi aerial offensive that killed thousands of civilians.
65. The official reason given for the boycott focused on Qatar’s alleged support for international terrorism, but most observers assumed it had more to do with media criticism in Qatar of the governments of the neighboring states (Al-Jazeera is based in Qatar).
66. With its only Mediterranean naval base located in Syria, Russia had a major strategic interest in the country and provided crucial support to the Assad regime throughout the civil war.
67. In 2015 over 80% of Israelis had a favorable opinion of the United States, but only 49% in the case of the US president.
68. The speech spoke of a “new beginning” to the relationship between the United States and Muslims throughout the world.
69. In 2015 the United States imported 9.4 million barrels of oil per day, of which 1.06 million (11%) came from Saudi Arabia.
70. The Turkish government was determined to crush the Kurdish rebels, who provided the United States with its most effective allies in the Syrian civil war. This led Turkey in 2016 to move away from the US position on Syria and to come closer to that held by Russia.
71. Egypt was one of only four countries to back a UN Security Council resolution for a cease-fire in Syria in October 2016 proposed by Russia. The others were China, Russia, and Venezuela.
72. During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, e-mails were leaked that revealed US intelligence on the funding of IS and al-Qaeda by Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
73. In April 2017 the United States launched a military strike against a Syrian air base in retaliation for the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, but it did not amount to a change of strategy by the Trump administration.
74. The Asia-Pacific region, as defined here, excludes Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the countries of Latin America with a Pacific coastline.
75. There is some double counting here, as APEC includes Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Russia that have been considered elsewhere in this chapter. However, even after stripping out these countries, bilateral trade between the United States and APEC is enormous.
76. US goods exports to China were only $116 billion in 2015. See US Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with China,” http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html.
77. The RCEP is a proposal for a FTA between the ten members of ASEAN and the six countries with which ASEAN already has FTAs (including China). B&R involves both sea and land routes through Asia and Europe, connecting as many as sixty countries.
78. As a nonsignatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that subsequently became a nuclear power, India was subject to numerous sanctions under US law. These laws had to be amended and a waiver secured from the international Nuclear Suppliers Group before the agreement with India could go into force.
79. President Obama later provided an additional reward by publicly supporting India’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
80. See Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011, http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/.
81. US Department of Defense, “Joint Press Conference with Secretary Carter, Secretary Kerry, Foreign Minister Kishida and Defense Minister Nakatani in New York, New York,” April 27, 2015, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/607045/joint-press-conference-with-secretary-carter-secretary-kerry-foreign-minister-k/.
82. This had been interrupted by the decision of the New Zealand government in 1984 not to allow visits by nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships.
83. US Department of State, “Democracy in Southeast Asia,” November 19, 2015, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/rm/2015/249788.htm.
84. The military junta permitted general elections in 2010 and by-elections in 2012, giving just enough credence to their claim to be restoring democracy. Parliamentary elections in 2015 led to the selection of a civilian as president, although the military still held 25% of all seats.
85. Born in Hawaii, President Obama lived in Indonesia for a number of years as a child.
86. President Duterte took exception to US criticism of his policy toward drug traffickers and on a visit to China in October 2016 called for “separation” from the United States.
87. See Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom.
1. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/.