American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks

The Open Door since the End of the Cold War

Bastiaan Van Apeldoorn, Naná de Graaff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415844987
• eBook ISBN: 9781135011208
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book presents a novel analysis of how US grand strategy has evolved from the end of the Cold War to the present, offering an integrated analysis of both continuity and change. The post-Cold War American grand strategy has continued to be oriented to securing an 'open door' to US capital around the globe. This book will show that the three different administrations that have been in office in the post-Cold War era have pursued this goal with varying means: from Clinton's promotion of neoliberal globalization to Bush's 'war on terror' and Obama's search to maintain US primacy in the face of a declining economy and a rising Asia.

In seeking to make sense of both these strong continuities and these significant variations the book takes as its point of departure the social sources of grand strategy (making), with the aim to relate state (public) power to social (private) power. While developing its own theoretical framework to make sense of the evolution of US grand strategy, it offers a rich and rigorous empirical analysis based on extensive primary data that have been collected over the past years. It draws on a unique data-set that consists of extensive biographical data of 30 cabinet members and other senior foreign policy officials of each of the past three administrations of Clinton, G.W. Bush and Obama.

This book is of great use to specialists in International Relations – within International Political Economy, International Security and Foreign Policy Analysis, as well as students of US Politics.

1 The social sources of American grand strategy

This chapter lays out the theoretical and analytical framework of this study. It starts with a review of the literature on the book’s central research problem, which is continuity and change of U.S. grand strategy, in particular since the end of the Cold War. After reviewing, in particular, neorealist, neoclassical realist, and some existing political economy accounts the chapter concludes that none of these established approaches can sufficiently account for the puzzle of both the strong continuities and the significant variations of U.S. grand strategy. The chapter then proceeds by outlining the meta-theoretical foundations of our alternative approach, which is rooted in critical political economy. Offering a perspective on the dialectical interplay of structure and agency over time the chapter explicates what we call our “transformational model” of U.S. grand strategy. In this model we link the agency of grand-strategy makers to their structural context, in particular the global context, and the (perceived) position of the U.S. within it, and what we identify as their social position. The latter refers to the social networks in which U.S. grand-strategy makers are located in terms of their (previously held) institutional, political and corporate affiliations. We will subsequently argue, within the context of our particular theorization of the U.S. state–capital nexus, that these social networks are centered around America’s corporate elite

The puzzle of continuity and change in U.S. grand strategy

Grand strategy can be seen as the “highest” level of foreign policy representing a comprehensive vision of the state’s critical “interests” and how best to promote and achieve them, and thus about the state’s role and position in the world (Layne, 2006a: 13). As such, grand strategy is about defining overarching and long-term goals and identifying the means to achieve those. Relating means to long-term ends implies not only short-term balancing of goals and limited resources and prioritization of foreign policy goals (Dueck, 2006: 10–11), but also necessitates long-term planning (Lobell, 2009: 61). Whether grand strategy as such is pursued (even unconsciously) by all states or just by the most dominant states or “great powers” in realist parlance may be disputed, but we maintain that the U.S. has been pursuing a grand strategy since the end of the nineteenth century, and even more unambiguously since 1940 (see also Layne, 2006a). As we shall detail in Chapter 2, since that time American grand strategy has been an expansionist and “globalist” one, in which the grand strategic ends have been related to shaping not just its regional environment but that of the whole global system. In our view, and as will be elaborated below, this global system or what we may call world order, involves not just the inter-state system but also the global political economy, and as such a deeper social structure (Cox, 1987).

The key question that informs our study is how we can account for both continuity and variation of (American) grand strategy. With respect to the continuity we may say that, formulated at the “highest level” and oriented toward the long term, the overarching goals of grand strategy by definition are not subject to continuous change. In the shorter term, however, these ends may gain different emphases or colorations, or become framed within a different discourse, or combined with additional goals (including domestic ones). Yet, arguably more importantly, grand strategy may – and often does – vary in the short term when it comes to the means employed, and how those means are related to the ends. The means employed in the pursuit of grand strategy naturally involve the whole gamut of state craft, from the use of force to diplomacy, and from foreign economic policy to “soft power” (Nye, 2011). Deciding upon the mix of these means and how exactly to put them to use is then an important element of potential variation of grand strategy.

An important source of variation relates to the global context in which grand strategy is formulated, and how that context is interpreted. Assuming that conflict – if not necessarily only interstate or military conflict as realists would have it – is a perennial condition of global politics, grand strategy is always formulated in the “face of one or more potential opponents” (Dueck, 2006: 10). There will be other states or non-state actors and movements who, given their ideas and interests, will try to resist the state’s grand strategy. Indeed, if a grand strategy would be completely unopposed there arguably might be no need for grand strategy as such (ibid.). Grand strategy thus also involves the identification and discursive construction of both allies and (potential) adversaries and will include the design of strategies to deal with these allies and adversaries. Here, too, may we observe variation.¹

In sum, grand strategies will generally have rather stable long-term ends, yet may vary over time both with regard to their short-term articulation with (limited) means, and with regard to the identification of others vis-à-vis or against whom the grand strategy is implemented. It is continuity and change of U.S. grand strategy defined in these terms that this book seeks to analyze and explain for the post-Cold War period. Below we review several alternative approaches to this puzzle before introducing our own.

“Systemic” explanations

Change within U.S. grand strategy provoked renewed scholarly debate after 9/11 when George W. Bush had, in the eyes of many, dramatically shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Notably absent from this debate have been attempts to explain this real or alleged turn from the perspective of “systemic” International Relation theories that argue that international political outcomes can be explained in terms of the rational (utility-maximizing) behavior of states within an anarchic environment. By their own admission, however, systemic theorists are unable to explain shifts in U.S. grand strategy, or at least within the bounds of their own theoretical models (Lobell et al., 2009: 1–3; see also Dueck, 2004a, Skidmore, 2005).

The most dominant systemic theory is still neorealism, which views anarchy as a self-help system exercising strong pressures on states to maintain or maximize their power as key to their “national security.” Both defensive and offensive varieties of neorealism (Layne, 2006a: 23) predict that assuming rational behavior the United States would pursue a grand strategy of “offshore balancing,” involving a minimization of overseas commitments (Layne, 1997, 2006a; Mearsheimer, 2001, 2011). Yet prominent neorealists, such as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, argue that the United States in fact pursues an opposite (and thus “irrational”) strategy of what Layne (2006a) calls extra-regional hegemony, and have “united” with others (mainly conservatives and libertarians) “in our opposition to American empire” (Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, 2010).² Thus offensive realist Mearsheimer (2011) qualified the U.S. grand strategy of the past 20 years as a “disastrous” policy of global hegemony – though distinguishing a less disastrous “liberal imperialism” from a more pernicious neoconservative variant, without offering an explanation of either. We may conclude that contemporary American grand strategy represents one of those “anomalies” that Mearsheimer admits his parsimonious theory has to allow for (Mearsheimer, 2001: 10). Such anomalies, then, have to be explained by ad hoc hypotheses such as alleged domestic factors like the “Israel Lobby” (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007), which in fact fall outside the purview of realist theory in which only the distribution of power (polarity) explains which of the several strategies at their disposal (such as war or balancing) – states are likely to adopt in order to maximize their power Although having to admit then that in practice these “non-systemic factors” at times do play a role, incorporating the role of “domestic” or societal variables theoretically is beyond neorealism as it lacks any conceptualization of state–society relations (for a critique of realism in this respect see Rosenberg, 1994; also Teschke, 2003).

While (neo)liberals generally have less to say on U.S. grand strategy, those (neo)liberals who have contributed to the debate, and who are focusing on the systemic effects of globalization and interdependence, have for instance equally treated the “neoconservative moment” under Bush as an anomaly (e.g., Ikenberry, 2004). Lacking the theoretical tools to properly explain U.S. grand strategy, variations of which sometimes directly contradict their models, most (neo)realists and (neo)liberals in fact have been preoccupied with prescriptive analyses, engaging in normative debates on U.S. grand strategy (for recent contributions along those lines see Craig et al., 2013). Within the realist tradition, but significantly deviating from neorealism, an important exception is formed by neoclassical realism, which has turned out to be a much more productive avenue of research.

Neoclassical realism and the role of ideas

Seeking to go beyond the systemic approaches discussed above, neoclassical realism stands out as the most elaborate attempt within the literature to introduce so-called unit-level variables while also holding on to the importance of the international system (Rose, 1998; Rathbun, 2008, Lobell et al., 2009). Neoclassical realism is realist in as much as it sticks to a state-centric conception of world politics in which the foreign policy behavior of states is conditioned to a significant degree by the purported systemic pressures emanating from anarchy. Yet it also significantly opens the black box by arguing that these systemic pressures – the distribution of power within the international system – combine with domestic (economic, political, and ideational) factors (Rose, 1998; Layne, 2006a: 8; Rathbun, 2008).³ Although critics may rightly have pointed out that this strategy leads to ad hoc and post hoc adding of variables underlining the degenerative nature of the realist research program (Legro and Moravcsik, 1999; cf. Rathbun, 2008), neoclassical realism as applied by some does produce much richer and more convincing accounts of foreign policy than the ultra-parsimonious neorealism.

Neoclassical realism comes in different colors, varying in part with regard to the relative weight they accord to, respectively, systemic and domestic factors (for an overview and critique of some of these varieties see Onea, 2012). Some stay fairly close to systemic realism, continuing to give explanatory primacy to “external stimuli.” A case in point is Benjamin Miller, who seeks to explain variations in post-Cold War U.S. strategy in terms of how the variables “distribution of power” and “degree of external threat” act as “the selector” of pre-existing sets of ideas or ideal-typical grand strategies (Miller, 2010: 29). The problem with this variety of systemic theory is that it takes as given what needs to be explained in any comprehensive account of U.S. grand-strategy making. Thus Miller distinguishes four main U.S. grand strategies which according to him are present in the U.S. foreign policy community (Miller, 2010: 29), but fails to explains the origins of any of these four types.

Other neoclassical realist accounts of American grand strategy tend to take the domestic variables, and in particular the role of ideas, more seriously. As such they tend to move in the direction of more ideational theories like constructivism, or at least adding “constructivist” variables. A prominent example is the work of Colin Dueck, which seeks to explain both continuity and change in American grand strategy since Woodrow Wilson from within a neoclassical realist framework that attempts to bridge the gap between constructivism and realism (Dueck, 2006: 4, see also Dueck, 2004b; for a similar approach to U.S. grand strategy, see Monten, 2005). Whereas for Dueck, the constructivist variable is about “culture,” in the case of the U.S. liberal culture (see Dueck, 2006: ch. 2), his analysis remains realist in as much as “it is ultimately international conditions that drive the process of both strategic adjustment and cultural change” (ibid.: 20).⁴

Even more problematic from our perspective is that in this way the domestic is reduced to ideational or cultural variables without any reference to a broader political context, including those of prevailing power structures, whether rooted in the economy or elsewhere. In this way the origins of the ideas themselves are left unexplained. Thus while, again, Dueck in our view not incorrectly claims that G.W. Bush’s strategy of “primacy” has to be explained in terms of the “[p]romotion and selection of particular [neoconservative] ideas … on the part of leading defense and foreign policy officials” (Dueck, 2004b: 535), his analysis (like that of Miller) fails to answer the question of why certain ideas rather than others were “promoted” and “selected.” While referring to the “recurring power of classical liberal ideas in U.S. grand strategy” (Dueck, 2006: 165), he fails to explain the apparent hegemony of this liberal culture since at least Wilson. That this, for instance, might have something to do with America’s liberal capitalist political economy and its concomitant hegemonic interests remains outside the purview of this analysis. Indeed, any notion of political economy remains conspicuously absent from Dueck’s, as well as most other neoclassical realist, accounts.⁵

The Open Door as a domestic source of American grand strategy

One of the most lucid and penetrating accounts of U.S. grand strategy – written from a neoclassical perspective that, on the one hand, very much emphasizes the constructivist dimension of ideas and beliefs but, at the same time, is at least indirectly more attentive to political economy – is that of Christopher Layne (2006a). Layne draws inspiration from the same “Open Door” revisionist school of U.S. history that undergirds the interpretative framework of this book. Indeed, Layne compellingly argues how U.S. grand strategy since 1940 and up to the present period has been driven by a set of “economic and ideological concerns” that define U.S. national interests as lying first and foremost in creating a world “open to U.S. economic penetration” (Layne, 2006a: 30), and that explain America’s pursuit of “extra-regional” hegemony. This pursuit of global hegemony, and a concomitant perception that America faces potential threats to its national security around the globe, not only confounds, as we have seen, neorealist predictions, but is also puzzling in light of the fact that, as Layne maintains, the U.S. is in fact one of the most secure states (ibid.: 10). In this respect, and following the logic of neoclassical realism, Layne maintains that domestic variables become more important to the extent that, for geographical reasons, systemic pressures are significantly attenuated (ibid.: 10): “[s]ystemic factors constitute the permissive conditions for the U.S. expansion. Domestic factors – Open Door economic and ideological expansion – explain the motives underlying American grand strategy, why the United States has behaved as it has” (ibid.: 28).

Although sharing much of Layne’s characterization of the fundamental and unchanging overarching objectives of U.S. grand strategy, we maintain that in as much as his analysis ultimately remains wedded to a state-centric realist paradigm that, as indicated, lacks any framework for understanding state–society relations, Layne’s neoclassical realism remains unable to explain what it identifies as the driving forces of American grand strategy. Layne convincingly makes the case that the U.S. has sought global hegemony because of the Open Door worldview of its policymakers, but he does not explain why this view has become so dominant (or indeed, hegemonic). Although Layne refers to “economic interests” as the “catalyst” for U.S. hegemonic expansion since 1940 (Layne, 2006a: 33, also: 72–80; 95; 125–6; 196), nowhere throughout his historical narrative are these interests specified beyond observing (correctly) that U.S. policymakers “believed that America’s prosperity was tied to its access to export markets” (ibid.: 72, his emphasis).⁶ Only at the very end of his book, Layne suggests that policymakers stayed the course of global hegemony “because that grand strategy has served the interests of the dominant elites that have formed the core of the U.S. foreign policy establishment since at least the 1930s” (ibid.: 200–1), and that at the core of this elite coalition we find “large capital-intensive corporations that looked to overseas markets and outward-looking investment banks” (ibid.). This conclusion, however, does not as such follow from Layne’s own analysis that does not explore the role of these (corporate) elites, and ultimately stays at the surface of the U.S. state and its “managers,” without probing deeper into U.S. state–society relations.

Ultimately, what Layne’s analysis tends to boil down to, and what it shares with other neoclassical foreign policy analysis, is that “domestic” and “ideational” variables are added, but primarily to explain deviations from the putative neorealist “optimal” policy. As Rathbun argues in defense of the approach, this way neoclassical realism must be seen as a “logical extension” of neorealism, one in which domestic politics and ideas explain those outcomes in which “states do not respond ideally to their structural situations” as their foreign policies are “distorted” by these “interfering” unit-level variables (Rathbun, 2008: 296). According to Rathbun, the realist logic still applies in as much as states are in the end punished for this foolish behavior (ibid.). Similarly, Taliaferro et al. (2009: 4) argue that “[o]ver the longer term, international political outcomes generally mirror the actual distribution of power among states” whereas in “shorter term” states’ policies are “rarely objectively efficient or predictable” on the basis of systemic theory (see also Dueck, 2006: 20). Taliaferro and his colleagues, however, do not indicate exactly why it is assumedly the case that over the longer term states are supposed to conform with the supposed objective laws of realism, nor how long the longer term is. In as much as, for instance, the liberal expansionism seeking extra-regional hegemony is a deviation from the rational (realist) norm, this “shorter term” is already lasting since 1940, and, as we shall argue in the next chapter, in many respects since the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Layne would probably disagree with Taliaferro et al. and argue that such deviations can last as long as circumstances allow, which in the case of geography (the fact that the United States lies between two oceans) can be rather long indeed. From our perspective, however, it is not onl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The social sources of American grand strategy
• 2 Three waves of non-territorial expansionism: American grand strategy from the Civil War to the Cold War
• 3 America’s post-Cold War grand-strategy makers and corporate elite networks
• 4 American grand strategy after the Cold War: Clinton’s grand-strategy makers and neoliberal globalization
• 5 American grand strategy after September 11: Bush’s grand-strategy makers and the neoconservative shift
• 6 American grand strategy after the global financial crisis: Obama’s grand-strategy makers and imperial restoration
• Conclusion
• Appendix: overview of grand-strategy makers of Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and their affiliations
• References
• Index