An Economist Biggest Book of the Year
How commerce determines whether America preserves the peace or goes to war
When the Cold War ended, many believed that expanding trade would usher in an era of peace. Yet today the United States finds itself confronting not just Russia in Europe but China in the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. Shedding new light on how trade both reduces and increases the risks of international crisis, A World Safe for Commerce traces how, since the nation’s founding, the United States has consistently moved from peace to conflict when the commerce needed for national security is under threat.
Dale Copeland shows how commerce pushes the United States and its rivals to expand their spheres of influence for access to goods even as they worry about provoking a breakdown in trade relations that could spiral into military conflict. Taking readers from the wars with Britain in 1776 and 1812 to World War II and the Cold War, he describes how America’s leaders have grappled with this inherent tension, and why they have shifted, sometimes dramatically, from peaceful, mutually beneficial policies to coercion and force in order to increase control over vital trade and prevent economic decline.
A World Safe for Commerce reveals how trade competition could lead the United States and China into full-scale confrontation. But it also offers hope that both sides can work to improve their overall trade expectations and foster the confidence needed for long-term peace and stability.
When seeking to understand why nations come into conflict, political scientists tend to focus either on threats to national security (realism) and or on moral duty, ideology, and domestic pressures (liberalism). Liberalism has been the major lens for international relations scholars analyzing the United States, due to the country's strong democratic foundations. In this expansive new book, Dale Copeland argues that the realist cast can shed fascinating light on American foreign policy--if one looks beyond security threats to consider economic threats as well. Copeland's "commercial approach to realism" establishes a new understanding of realism in three ways: by building out a new realist theory, by showing how this commercial approach applies to the United States, and by projecting this theory onto different scenarios that may arise in future conflicts between the United States and China.
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[M]agisterial... a comprehensive examination of U.S. foreign policy from the Revolution to China’s rise.
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---Michael Holmes, Responsible Statecraft
