We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety and the Rise of the American Colossus

In this penetrating study, Hoover Institution foreign policy scholar Mirski argues that the international order established by the U.S. after WWII was prefigured by well-intentioned but abusive and bloody imperialism in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Surveying America’s “regional” foreign policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries—covering the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and military occupations of Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and other countries—Mirski argues that U.S. policy was motivated by the fear that expansionist powers—namely Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—might extend their empires into these regions, threatening the growth of fledgling republics in the Americas. Mirski demonstrates that only after making these preemptive incursions to restore order and support democracy in its “mortal combat” against imperialism, as Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan put it, did the U.S. get bogged down in interventionist quagmires, leaving behind “a string of shattered peoples and principles”—a dynamic that recurred on a global scale during the Cold War and into the 21st century. While his downplaying of the impact of business interests on U.S. interventionism will strike some as naive, Mirski’s argument that U.S. officials’ reasoning behind intervention has remained consistent over time is well documented and convincing. This is an elegantly told and engrossing history. (June)