U.S. Foreign Policy in Perspective

Clients, enemies and empire

David Sylvan, Stephen Majeski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415701358
• eBook ISBN: 9781135992545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the long-term nature of American foreign policy? This new book refutes the claim that it has varied considerably across time and space, arguing that key policies have been remarkably stable over the last hundred years, not in terms of ends but of means.

Closely examining US foreign policy, past and present, David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski draw on a wealth of historical and contemporary cases to show how the US has had a 'client state' empire for at least a century. They clearly illustrate how much of American policy revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them, representing a peculiarly American form of imperialism. They also reveal how clientilism informs apparently disparate activities in different geographical regions and operates via a specific range of policy instruments, showing predictable variation in the use of these instruments.

With a broad range of cases from US policy in the Caribbean and Central America after the Spanish-American War, to the origins of the Marshall Plan and NATO, to economic bailouts and covert operations, and to military interventions in South Vietnam, Kosovo and Iraq, this important book will be of great interest to students and researchers of US foreign policy, security studies, history and international relations.

This book has a dedicated website at: www.us-foreign-policy-prespective.org featuring additional case studies and data sets.

1 Explaining the continuity of U.S. foreign policy

The 28th of September 2006 was an ordinary day for United States foreign policy. In Slovenia, the U.S. met with the other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) about counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and peace enforcement in Kosovo. Meanwhile, in Washington, the State Department announced it was committing almost $40 million to six countries in Central America and the Caribbean to help them “enhance labor and environmental protection practices.” Thousands of miles to the east, U.S. troops were engaged in combat operations in Iraq; still further east, U.S. military advisers continuing training Philippines battalions to “fight against insurgency and terrorism.” At the same time, the Cuban government remained indignant over the decision of the U.S. to refuse its health minister a visa to attend the annual meeting in Washington of the Pan American Health Organization. Finally, the State Department’s spokesman warned that “time [was] growing short” for there to be a “negotiated settlement” by which Iran would suspend enrichment of uranium.¹

What these various U.S. policies had in common is that they were aimed at different problems faced by those in charge of the political and economic life of particular states. In some cases (the six countries in Central America and the Caribbean; Iraq and the Philippines), U.S. policy attempted to solve the problems of the states in question, either by furnishing resources or by taking over some of the tasks of the local actors. In another case, U.S. policy focused on involving third parties (here, other NATO members) as junior partners in solving the problems of one or more other states (Afghanistan and the likely future state of Kosovo). Elsewhere (Cuba, Iran), U.S. efforts were instead directed at creating problems for states, in some instances actually trying to bring about the overthrow of the regime. These cases can be multiplied many times over, not only in terms of U.S. actions but in terms of U.S. concerns; and it is no exaggeration to say that American policy is concentrated on maintenance of U.S. clients and hostility toward U.S. enemies. In August 2006, there were some 80 of the former and six of the latter (a few years before, there had been eight enemies).

This focus on clients and enemies is nothing new. Already, a full century before the policies described above, the United States was maintaining clients and acting against enemies. In 1906, the U.S.-backed government of Cuba was facing an insurgency and, after trying to cobble together a political solution, the U.S. finally proclaimed a provisional government, headed by Roosevelt’s secretary of war and backed by U.S. troops. At the same time, the U.S. was arranging an emergency loan for the Dominican Republic and negotiating a treaty by which the president of the United States would appoint an administrator for the island’s customs revenues. The U.S. was also growing increasingly exasperated with Nicaragua’s policies toward its neighbors and would, a few years later, aid rebels in deposing the country’s long-time leader. These stories, and others like them, can be repeated constantly, decade by decade, throughout the following hundred years, and there is no sign that they are becoming obsolete.²

Of course, U.S. foreign policy is and has been concerned with other issues beyond the maintenance of clients and hostility toward enemies. For decades, the U.S. has directed many of its actions at the creation and enhancement of a liberal economic order, one involving large numbers of minimally regulated commercial and financial transactions among private actors. The U.S. has also acted to foster its own security via a host of policies (including, critically, the possession of nuclear weapons and attempts to deter their use by others). In addition, the U.S. acts in various ways regarding the production and sale of narcotics, access to energy, and numerous other functional domains. What distinguishes these various types of policies from those concerned with clients and enemies is that the latter cut across the former. On the one hand, policy toward a given state may involve addressing problems of nuclear weapons transit, energy, port facilities, trade, and any number of other issue domains. On the other hand, policy making regarding functional issues has to be concretized as regards the political and economic situation of particular places: not only, say, energy production in general but building a pipeline across a specific country, providing particular investment incentives for pipeline investors, and training troops to protect that pipeline from potential attacks. For these reasons, a focus on resolving the problems faced by clients and exacerbating those faced by enemies captures much of the overall structuring of U.S. foreign policy, that is, how it is organized in such a way as to inform numerous specific policies in specific times and places. Put differently, our claim is that the U.S. has, for over a hundred years, resorted to the same set of activities: surveilling countries’ domestic politics and economic policies, providing development assistance, coordinating with allies, selling weapons, running covert operations, carrying out overt acts of warfare.

How to explain this continuity? Why has the United States organized so much of its foreign policy, for over a century, around clients and enemies? Our answer is that the U.S. has a certain number of what we will call policy instruments: capabilities, embedded in particular organizations, for engaging in particular sequences of action. Policy making is instrument-driven: the U.S. spends much of its time devising programs to aid clients and hinder enemies because those are the competences it has. In this sense, policy is not driven by any overarching goals over and beyond those of helping clients and hurting enemies; instead, it is driven by the relatively limited set of means the U.S. has at its disposal. Policy making, as a process, is not a matter of trying to achieve long-term or structural goals by various means but of choosing a particular means that corresponds to whatever the immediate problem is faced by a client or presented by an enemy. Long-term, and indeed, intermediate, goals of various sorts are then, so to speak, pasted onto the means.

This argument, which we will develop abstractly in this chapter and then, with numerous historical examples, throughout the rest of the book, is obviously a far remove from the way in which U.S. foreign policy is normally presented. To see why, it is helpful to begin with a brief discussion of the more standard explanations for the continuity of U.S. policy. These are of three types: (1) those that posit certain goals which, it is claimed, U.S. leaders have pursued for over a century; (2) those that concentrate instead on the political culture of the United States and its elites’ sense of mission; and (3) those that see the U.S. as simply one more powerful state driven by expansionist imperatives. Although these explanations are in many ways quite different from each other, they overlap in one important respect: that of ignoring policy instruments or at the least seeing them as of minor importance. In our view, this bias makes it impossible really to answer the question of why U.S. foreign policy has exhibited such striking continuity.

Explaining continuity: the problem with structural accounts

The most common account of why U.S. foreign policy has shown such strong continuity is that U.S. leaders have for over a century pursued an unchanging set of goals. Among those goals, the two most often mentioned are democracy and open markets: the claim is that the makers of U.S. policy have consistently tried to make other states democratic and their economies free market, whether by using marines and extending bank loans in Central America and the Caribbean in the early years of the twentieth century, or by similar means in Europe during and after World War I, or through a variety of overt and covert means in various parts of the world since the waning days of World War II. Of course, the argument continues, the U.S. has often been economically protectionist, just as it has often supported nondemocratic regimes, but such policies are, as one former ambassador to the United Nations put it, temporary compromises made to ward off the prospect of long-lasting illiberal systems. From this point of view, the U.S. acts more from ideological concerns than security-oriented ones, so that, for example, American policy makers’ nearly 70-year long struggle with communism is explained not because communism posed a military threat to the U.S. but because it was the antithesis of the deepest American goals. Indeed, as several advocates of “grand strategy” have seen it, the U.S. has frequently pursued policies which were irrelevant, if not downright harmful, to its security because of its leaders’ firm belief that the long-term prosperity and even survival of the U.S. as a liberal democracy depended on the world’s being remade along American lines. The connection to clients and enemies is straightforward: the U.S. has faced a never-ending series of tasks, involving oversight, advice-giving, and frequent interventions to make sure that client states stayed on the right political and economic path and that enemies were at least overthrown, if not converted into clients.³

There are numerous variants of the democracy and open-markets arguments, depending on claims about the relative importance and mutual compatibility of the two goals, the extent to which these were conscious and long-term aims of U.S. leaders, and the significance of material interests as opposed to ideology in the formulation of particular policies. Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus among writers of various viewpoints that there is indeed an “American foreign policy tradition” based on open markets and the “liberal goal of democracy promotion” and which leads directly from John Hay’s “Open Door” policy in China, through Wilson’s war to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and so on up to George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq and his war on terror. Indeed, it has been argued by some authors that even isolationism – the policy of “escape from a decadent Old World”–was still based on the “liberal impulse” that elevates democracy and open markets to the principal goals of United States policy. Note that this latter argument implies that U.S. foreign policy has been animated by the same goals not only since the end of the nineteenth century but far back into the days of pre-1898 isolation, perhaps even all the way to the dawn of the republic under Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.⁴

Of course, the fact that democracy and open markets are the most-often cited goals of U.S. foreign policy does not mean that they are the only goals ever put forward to explain that policy. Some authors, struck by the frequency with which U.S. officials have pursued nondemocratic or protectionist policies, or by just how often those officials have been violent, exclusionary, or dominating toward those not deemed worthy of democratic rule or free exchange, have instead argued that the U.S. is principally animated by the goal of security, understood in practice as countering other states or ideologies that do or could pose a threat. Clients would have to be defended against foreign and domestic enemies, either because their “loss” might endanger the U.S. at some future point or because the lack of a defensive effort would embolden enemies. Other authors, though, claim that U.S. policy toward many clients is motivated less by concern with U.S. security and more by a general goal of maintaining “stability,” i.e., a pattern of regional and global power relationships that change slowly, if at all. Most U.S. efforts would in this case be directed at maintaining client states; enemy states would for the most part be dealt with by means of containment. Still other authors concentrate instead on economic goals that may have little or nothing to do with open markets: guaranteed access to resources such as oil; protection of major foreign holdings; captive markets for export or investment purposes. In these cases, clients would be aided because of their direct or anticipated economic utility, whereas enemies would normally be of less immediate concern.⁵

None of these most-cited long-term goals of U.S. foreign policy is in fact very good at helping to explain the continuity of that policy. One problem is that particular goals clearly conflict with each other – for example, stability may be interpreted as a warrant for backing dictatorial regimes – and there is nothing in the literature that sheds any light on which goals take precedence over which others under which circumstances. This problem is one aspect of an even more serious difficulty with goal-oriented explanations: they lack any sort of translation mechanism for determining what specific actions ought to be undertaken. A good case in point is the democracy goal discussed above. Even if we assume that U.S. leaders fervently wish to promote democracy in states around the world, that goal tells us nothing about what the U.S. will do in particular circumstances: will officials in Washington try to overthrow a nondemocratic regime, or conversely will they try to be close friends with it, hoping to convince the regime’s top officials gradually to give up power to democratic institutions? If overthrow is the policy opted for, will the U.S. send in troops or simply content itself with condemnatory statements? If friendship is instead pursued, will the U.S. train the regime’s armed forces, or instead try to bankroll particular politicians? And for all of these questions, when, and for how long, will these actions take place? In sum, long-term goals simply do not, and indeed cannot, translate convincingly into particular, country-specific policies; and for this reason, such goals are of little help in accounting for the continuity of U.S. foreign policy.⁶

An alternate argument about continuity in U.S. foreign policy is that it stems from something in the country’s political culture. The approach here would concentrate not on long-term goals pursued for many years but on the way in which members of the U.S. foreign policy elite understand the world and see themselves as bound to act. Numerous authors, going back as far as Alexis de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century, have argued along these lines, claiming that U.S. political culture is marked by a sense that the United States is an “exceptional” country with a mission to serve as a moral, and perhaps a political, leader in the world. Advocates of this sort of argument have a lengthy and apparently inexhaustible collection of speeches and writings to choose among, starting with the famous statement by John Winthrop in 1630 that “wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us” and running through any number of nineteenth-century statements about “manifest destiny” and of twentieth-century presidents who spoke routinely of Americans as being “heirs of [the] first revolution,” ready for “the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger” and thus to “truly light the world.” Given an outlook of this sort, officials could feel responsible for protecting client states and/or trying to rid the world of enemies. Note that these arguments do not necessarily presume that the United States is exceptional but simply that U.S. leaders feel they have a mission vis-à-vis other countries, if not the entire world. That mission may have religious roots, as in Winthrop’s original statement, but it could also stem from a liberal political culture; from ingrained habits of expansion beyond a frontier; or from a sense of racial superiority.⁷

However, since there are numerous cases of threatened countries whom the U.S. clearly feels no responsibility to protect and of aggressive states against whom the U.S. does not intervene, theories that explain American foreign policy continuity by American political culture need to be refined. One common way of doing so is to notice that the U.S. appears to go through cycles of engagement abroad. During activist periods, U.S. officials act on behalf of clients and against enemies; during isolationist periods, by contrast, U.S. elites see the world as hopelessly fallen and unworthy of American attention. Even such “mood” theories, though, fail to solve the precedence and translation problems discussed above with respect to goals: for example, they say nothing about whether, in a period of isolationism, existing clients will be abandoned to their fate or if instead the sense of responsibility trumps that of being special; nor do they help in determining precisely how the U.S. will respond to an enemy state even in a period of involvement (e.g., will the policy be one of negotiation, quarantine, or direct overthrow?). In short, even if U.S. elites do feel a sense of responsibility stemming from something in the political culture, that feeling gives them little guidance about what they should do with respect to particular countries at particular times.⁸

The third, and final, standard argument about continuity in U.S. foreign policy brackets both long-term goals and political culture, highlighting instead the sheer growth in U.S. power. Whenever a country becomes populous and wealthy, the claim goes, its elites will tend to increase their military capabilities and expand abroad, annexing territory – or, as in the case of the United States, acquiring states as clients – and defending it against actual or potential enemies. The mechanisms behind this type of imperial expansion are varied, ranging from economic and political crises at home to bumping up against states seen as endangering present or future prospects; but all of these factors only can come into play for states whose power has increased considerably and whose elites see themselves as having no room for further growth under existing interstate arrangements. In the same way, whatever specific goals U.S. officials may have in mind are subordinate, in these kinds of explanations, to the structural factors that lead the U.S. to expand in the first place. Note that most such theories of imperial expansion are concerned with an initial leap abroad or a major jump in the extent and geographical scope of annexation or client acquisition; the routine maintenance of empires, including prolonged campaigns against enemies, is considered as mundane and not terribly interesting.⁹

However, using general theories of imperial expansion to account for the continuity of U.S. foreign policy is not much more convincing than is the case for theories based on long-term goals or political culture. One quite obvious problem is that, as we will see in Chapter 7, the United States was busily annexing territory belonging to others, including Western-style states, for many decades from its founding right up through the end of the nineteenth century; then, suddenly, annexation ended and the U.S. began operating through client states. To account for a century of clientilism by the same factors that are used to explain Roman or British territorial acquisition – or, for that matter, the U.S. expansion across North America – is unconvincing. A second problem is that the maintenance of annexed territory or client states is hardly a minor issue. As we will see later in this book, particularly in Chapter 5, client states are frequently beset by problems, and although U.S. policy makers usually expend considerable effort to defend them, on occasion, the decision is just to give up rather than to escalate. Theories which focus primarily on expansion are not good at dealing with the far more frequent cases of attempted client maintenance. Finally, as with the two other types of arguments, explanations of continuity as accounted for by imperia...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Explaining the continuity of U.S. foreign policy
• 2 An empire of client states
• 3 Acquiring client states
• 4 The routine maintenance of client states
• 5 Client maintenance by interventions
• 6 Hostile intervention against enemy states
• 7 The persistence of client-state imperialism
• Notes
• Bibliography