Charles W. King

The United States is the world’s leading exporter of arms, more than the next two largest exporters, Italy and Germany, combined. The United State exported more than a billion dollars’ worth of small arms in 2013 according to the Small Arms Survey, a non-governmental organization supported by a group of western nations. The export of arms, from pistols and rifles to military aircraft and advanced technical systems represent not just an economic boon for the United States that incentivizes the continued growth of its arms industry, but a strategic asset for its foreign policy. Just as the United States controls the export of advanced technologies that it does not want its rivals or pariah states to possess (particularly nuclear and missile technology), it uses arms export agreements to bolster its allies and as an incentive.

The two most famous American arms export schemes are Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program during World War Two and the Iran-Contra Scandal that rocked the administration of Ronal Reagan. Between 1941 and 1945 the United States exported $667 billion in 2017 dollars to its allies under Lend-Lease. Iran-Contra circumvented American law to fund the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua with the proceeds of arms sales to the Islamic Republic of Iran, primarily missiles and also illegal. While these two programs differ greatly in scope, publicity, and legality they were both intended to provide material support to allies—long standing or of convenience—engaged in conflicts the outcome of which the respective administration felt it had a vested interest in. Today the supplying of arms to belligerents is highly controversial, and when doing so policy-makers must weigh the potential benefits of tipping the scale in a conflict, with the fallout, both domestic and diplomatic, of doing so.

Attempting to decide the winner in conflicts is not the only way that the United States uses arms exports to affect geopolitics. Bolstering the capabilities of allies and even competitors during peacetime can also be of strategic value. Sometimes it is possible to provide support with a direct American military presence, as the deployment of the US Army to West Germany did during the Cold War, and American AWACS Radar and Tanker planes did to the intervention in Libya in 2011. This is not always the case. In 1979 it would not have been possible to deploy American troops to the border between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. After recognizing the Sino-Soviet split American administrations sought to improve the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to fight their Soviet counter-parts, particularly against Soviet tanks. Even with the normalization of diplomatic relations between the US and China in 1979, this was a complicated task to accomplish. Eventually, the Carter Administration received the legislative approval it needed to let the PLA manufacture American designed anti-armor weapons in China under license, direct sales would have been politically impossible.

There is a third strategic use for arms exports that the US actively engages in; incentive and subsidy. The US government subsidizes the Iron Dome missile shield deployed in Israel, much of the money transferred to Israel as military aid comes right back to the United States as payments to US defense companies. This is not only good for the defense sector, but it encourages firms to perform research and development on certain kinds of technologies, like Iron Dome, that the US government wants to encourage but may not have a direct use for at the time.

The United States will remain the world largest exporter of arms for the foreseeable future. Arms sales are an important sector of the American economy. Arms export deals influence manufacturing and the development of advanced electronics and other technologies. They also provide considerable, if controversial, strategic options for American foreign policy. While picking winners may be the most obvious use, policy-makers should remember the utility of enhancing the capabilities of nations with similar interests during peacetime as a preventative measure.

Further Reading

Irene Pavesi, "Trade Update 2016: Transfers and Transparency," Small Arms Survey, (Geneva, Switzerland: Small Arms Survey, 2016).

Charles W. King

President Trump has moderated the disparaging comment he made about NATO during and after his campaign but these comments touched upon the identity crisis that NATO has had since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Since then NATO has been looking for the unity of purpose that it had when Soviet tanks sat in East Germany. In the 1990’s it expanded east and many former Soviet satellite states joined the alliance, and it intervened to quell the violence in the Balkans. In the 2000’s it responded to the US’s call for aid in its invasion of Afghanistan and turned its sights to terrorism and piracy. Understanding the alliance’s ongoing identity issues requires examining the purpose of the alliance when it was formed in 1949.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is famous for being the military alliance formed to prevent an invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Warsaw Pact, but that is not the whole story. By 1949 the Americans, French, and British knew that it was not going to be conventional armies that dissuaded the Soviet Union from striking westward. Plans declassified since 1990 show that the Alliance knew that any effective defense of Western Europe would require the use of nuclear weapons. The Red Army simply had too many men and tanks for anything else to work. This raises the question as to the purpose of the continued presence of foreign forces in West Germany after the end of Allied occupation in 1954?

The answer lies in the fact that West Germany was not a founding member of NATO. When it was founded in 1949 NATO was just as much about deterring German aggression as Soviet aggression. The United Kingdom and France were justifiably concerned that a re-armed West Germany could turn its attentions west for a third time. West Germany only became a re-armed NATO member at American insistence. The French in particular did not want to let an independent West Germany re-arm. A solution was found in the European Defense Community which would’ve established multinational armed forces for Western Europe. The EDC was rejected by the French National Assembly as an unacceptable loss of sovereignty. This loss of sovereignty, particularly by West Germany, was the point. It would’ve prevented a re-armed West Germany from exercising direct control of its military. In the wake of the EDC’s rejection another solution had to be found. France and the United Kingdom were willing continue the occupation of West Germany, but the United States was not. Instead, over the span of a few short weeks, the leaders of the US, UK, France, and West Germany found another solution; West German membership in NATO. Not only would it permit West Germany to re-arm without an independent defense policy, it would permit the NATO militaries to have a continued presence in West Germany. From now on they would be allies rather than occupiers, but it was enough to soothe fears of another German war of expansion.

France, the US, and the UK are no longer afraid that Germany will invade its neighbors. The threat from modern Russia is not the same as when the Red Army occupied all of Eastern Europe. NATO has lost not one but both of its original purposes. Along with other post-war initiatives, it succeeded in mollifying German aggression. The question now must be asked whether or not it is possible to transition NATO to a new purpose. Thought of strictly as a defensive alliance it still can be an effective deterrent to foreign aggression. If policy-makers do not recognize how the alliance changed, dramatically, the geopolitics of Europe, then they fail to recognize how it is continuing to effect European geopolitics as NATO expands west towards Russia, and will not be able to shape those changes.

Further Reading

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and The Cold War (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2007).

Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, C. Earl Edmondson, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).

Charles W. King

The discipline of anthropology has a problematic past. It was created by the imperial powers of the eighteenth century to apply scientific rigor to examinations of their imperial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The premise of these studies of subject peoples was to catalog how they were different from their European masters.  This is a process which social scientists now term ‘othering’. Describing persons as ‘others’ permits that would violate societal norms if taken against people you identify with. The ways in which imperial anthropologists described their subjects further established justification for European imperial domination. Cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were frequently described as emotional and matriarchal, in contrast to rational and patriarchal Europeans. For societies like those of imperial Europe that associated femininity with irrationality, and that prized the scientific and the rational as inherently morally superior describing a culture as matriarchal or emotional is a way of describing them as inferior.

Being inferior and being sub-human was a distinction made by imperial anthropologists or the government that funded them, it provided justification for the way those government wanted to treat their subjects. The historiography of slavery in the United States is an excellent example of this. To this day most American high school students are taught that slaves in the American South had a matriarchal culture. The historical record does not support this. Enslaved women were more equal to their male peers and had more access to positions of authority within enslaved communities, but only relative to free women at the time. Nowhere in the United States were enslaved women at the top of the hierarchy of enslaved people. What is a matter of historical record is that enslaved people in the United States were not considered to be human. This is a matter of record in speeches, laws, and court decisions and one of the frequent rationales for their supposed inferiority was a lack of a capacity for reason.

The historic purpose of anthropology as justification for enslavement and exploitation is something that the discipline continues to grapple with today. For policy-makers it is important to take lessons from anthropology’s attempts to reform their discipline. The western world continues to prize rationality, and it is easy to describe those it competes with as irrational, whether they are religious zealots, nationalist fanatics, or both. Previous articles have discussed the rationality and strategic value of suicide terrorism and nuclear weapons, and warned how treating these threats as the results of irrationality is unproductive and dangerous. A certain amount of ‘us versus them’ is inescapable in geopolitics, borders are drawn on maps and people self-identify as specific nationalities and cultures. Policy-makers must be careful not to exacerbate these perceptions. Doing so makes it easier to justify exploitation and the use of force, and harder to come to diplomatic agreements. Policy-makers must be wary of repeating the mistakes of their imperialist forebears who treated the rest of the world as resources to be enslaved and exploited and suffered a crippling backlash in the twentieth century.

Further Reading

Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Charles W. King

The second major continuity of American foreign policy is its focus on trade, and the specific terms under which it prefers to trade. Not only is the United States a 'Free Trade' evangelist today, it has always been one. This consistency illuminates how the United States has historically approached diplomacy. Understanding that can help policy-makers through a more complete understanding of the history of American foreign policy and how the American perspective and method in foreign affairs and international trade differs from other countries'.

A number of the Intolerable Acts passed by the British government that prompted American rebellion were indented to reinforce mercantilist policies and crack down on smuggling. Smuggling was rife in the American colonial era, as trade with foreign powers and the colonial possessions was illegal under British colonial policy. Along with the imposition of monopolies on specific goods in the colonies, these policies combined to restrict trade significantly and inflate prices. American consumers suffered and the coffers of companies like the British East India Company filled. When the Revolution broke out in 1776 it was in part a response to the British crack down on foreign goods and trade in foreign markets. Americans have been committed to free trade from their founding onward.

The Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Policy are continuations of this commitment to these free trade principles. The Monroe Doctrine was not only a prohibition against European intervention in events in the Americas, it also insisted upon open access to colonial possessions in the Americas for trade, and freedom of navigation on the seas. Monroe declared that the United States was going to trade with Latin and South America, whether Europe liked it or not.

In 1899 American Secretary of State John Hay sent diplomatic notes to the great powers, asking them to commit to Chinese territorial integrity after the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Known as the 'Open Door Notes' they formally established the mode under which the United States would operate for the next hundred plus years, and enumerated the principles it had operated under since the American Revolution.

The United States has always insisted upon free trade, and done so using language that couches it as fair, moral, and just, giving people the ability to exercise their god given rights. It must be recognized that the United States has promoted these policies because they benefit the US and its citizens. Breaking free from British mercantilism and monopolies allowed American merchants to sell their goods for more in foreign markets and lowered prices for imports to the United States. The Monroe Doctrine relied upon the fact that the British Royal Navy already enforced freedom of navigation. The Open Door Notes attempted to level the playing field in China for the United States without the commitment of troops, but it was not rebuke of European intervention in China or an insistence of Chinese sovereignty.

The United States has been a trading nation since its founding. As a trading nation is benefits from access to foreign markets and good, and freedom of navigation. The nations the United States trades with do not necessarily receive the same benefits. While there are excellent moral arguments for free trade, to imagine the United States is pursuing its own prosperity is foolhardy. It is the responsibility of the government to protect the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the American people. Since its founding that has been understood to include its economic prosperity through free trade. It is essential that American policy-makers recognize that foreign governments will, and should, resist throwing their country's doors wide open when they believe it will harm their people and their well-being. Doing so will facilitate better diplomatic and economic arrangements that benefit both the US and its trading partners and retain the moral high ground sought by liberal democracies.

Further Reading

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

Charles W. King

Only after being attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and very reluctantly the United States took its place on the world stage. Having retreated back to isolation on its own side of the Atlantic after the World War One; American involvement in World War Two and after marked a watershed moment in the popular conception of American history. For most America the superpower is fundamentally different in its approach to the world than America the isolationist. On the contrary, America the isolationist is a fiction, and American foreign policy has been consistent across its entire history. American foreign policy as a superpower in the twentieth century continued the priorities and methods of the United States not only during the nineteenth century, but also the eighteenth, including prior to the American Revolution.

In the decades before the turn of the twentieth century an increasing number of Americans advocated that the United States should pursue a policy of imperialism, acquiring overseas possessions like the British, French, and Germans. Theodore Roosevelt was one of imperialism’s advocates, but Alfred Thayer Mahan was its most important. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History convinced Roosevelt and others that the United States needed a strong navy to ensure its continued prosperity, and a global network of coaling stations was an essential part of that plan. In 1898 the United States declared war on Spain, under the pretext of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The war was swift and decisive, and as a result the US took the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and Cuba became an American protectorate. For some the acquisition of overseas colonies after the Spanish-American War marks the change in American foreign policy, heralding how the US will engage with the world after World War Two.

The acquisition of overseas colonies was not a change in method for the United States but a change in target. The United States had been steadily expanding its territory for more than a hundred years. British prohibitions against the Thirteen Colonies expanding past the Appalachian Mountains were a major cause of the American Revolution. The Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush all continued the US’s westward expansion. In the eighteenth centuries while the British, French, and Germans sent their colonial settlers by boat to Africa, India, Asia, and Australia the US sent theirs West in covered wagons. Manifest Destiny was imperialism by another name. Westward expansion was an important engine of American prosperity, after reaching the Pacific continued prosperity demanded that American policy-makers look abroad.

From the establishment of Jamestown until the Spanish-American War the US’s mode of expansion was settler colonialism, the hallmark of European imperialism. Comparing American westward expansion with European colonization of Africa, India, Asia, and Australia runs counter to the idea of American exeptionalism. It is essential to recognize the long standing continuities of American foreign policy, of which expansion is only one. The United States continues its expansion today, no longer through settler colonialism, or imperial administration but through market access. This sobering assessment of American foreign policy and understanding of how the US continues to expand its influence today will help policy-makers to better understand why foreign nations are wary of American influence and produce better strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Further Reading

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, (New York, NY: Little, Brown, & Co.: 1890).

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).