Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

In for a penny, in for a pound: The trouble with offshore balancing and why it matters that “1917” was not “1941”

2023; Routledge; Volume: 42; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01495933.2023.2236492

1521-0448

David G. Haglund,

European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies

AbstractOver the past couple of decades, students of American grand strategy have debated the merits (or lack thereof) of an orientation toward the global balance of power that has come to be known as “offshore balancing.” Its critics hold offshore balancing simply to be another way of expressing the dangerous allure of strategic “restraint,” or even “isolationism.” Its enthusiasts, by contrast, see in it nothing other than the best conceivable grand strategy for America, enabling Washington to avoid the pitfalls of either too little or too much interventionism in global affairs. This article challenges both positions, and argues that the historical record of offshore balancing as an American strategic orientation leads to the conclusion that, far from being a crypto-isolationist grand strategy, it actually betrays close affinities with the so-called “maximalism” to which its champions believe it to be superior. Notes1 Galen Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered: Realism, the Balance of Power in Europe, and America’s Decision for War in 1917,” Security Studies 21 (July 2012): 455–89, quote at p. 489; André Kaspi, Le Temps des Américains: le concours américain à la France en 1917–1918 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1976), quote at p. 3.2 See Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy,” International Security 22 (Summer 1997): 86–124; and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 95 (July/August 2016): 70–83. Individually, these latter two structural realists have championed this grand strategy in Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); and Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).3 For instance, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 3–4; and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Rise and Fall of American Hegemony: From Wilson to Trump,” International Affairs 95 (January 2019): 63–80.4 For the tangled paradigmatic branches of what can often seem to be the tree of a very disputatious family, see Stephen G. Brooks, “Duelling Realisms,” International Organization 51 (Summer 1997): 445–77; William C. Wohlforth, “Gilpinian Realism and International Relations,” International Relations 25 (December 2011): 499–511; and especially Jonathan Kirshner, An Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).5 Rather than being labelled “offshore balancing,” this practice of remaining aloof from continental alliances of a permanent nature was sometimes dubbed “splendid isolation,” likely the reason why some scholars today consider offshore balancing to be “minimalist” security dispensation. On the British experience, see Christopher H. D. Howard, “Splendid Isolation,” History 47, no. 159 (1962): 32–41; and Idem, Splendid Isolation: A Study of Ideas Concerning Britain’s International Position and Foreign Policy During the Later Years of the Third Marquis of Salisbury (London: Macmillan, 1967).6 Leslie W. Hepple, “The Revival of Geopolitics,” Political Geography Quarterly 5 (October 1986): S21–36. Also see Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012); and Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, “The New Cold War: America, China, and the Echoes of History,” Foreign Affairs 100 (November/December 2021): 10–20. On geopolitics as an ideational trace element in realism, see Matthew Specter, The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought between Germany and the United States (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022).7 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).8 Mearsheimer, Tragedy, 127.9 See Jonathan Kirshner, “The Tragedy of Offensive Realism: Classical Realism and the Rise of China,” European Journal of International Relations 18 (March 2012): 53–75.10 John J. Mearsheimer, “The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics,” Foreign Affairs 100 (November/December 2021): 48–58, quote at p. 51.11 On that rise, see Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Robert E. Hannigan, The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898–1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and, for a prescient contemporary assessment of the rise and its foreign policy significance, Archibald Cary Coolidge, The United States as a World Power (New York: Macmillan, 1909).12 See Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (London: Verso, 2017). Also see G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Nexon, “Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of Hegemonic Orders,” Security Studies 28 (May 2019): 395–421.13 Comments sagely one expert on Sino-American relations, apropos the strong definition of hegemony, regional or otherwise, “the United States does not have the option of imposing its will on China any more than it was able to do in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Venezuela. If the United States cannot bend Cuba to its will, then it is unrealistic to expect it will be able to do so with China.” Ryan Hass, Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 75.14 Apropos that rallying, one analyst remarks that “[f]or the first time in years, the United States has demonstrated policy competence during a global crisis.” Daniel W. Drezner, “The Perils of Pessimism: Why Anxious Nations Are Dangerous Nations,” Foreign Affairs 101 (July/August 2022): 34–43, quote at p. 43.15 G. John Ikenberry, “Getting Hegemony Right,” National Interest, no. 63 (Spring 2001), 17–24.16 On those campaigns of the neutrality years, see John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974).17 Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1943). Also see Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System: The Story of Anglo-American Control of the Seas (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941).18 Richard W. Leopold, “The Problem of American Intervention, 1917: An Historical Retrospect,” World Politics 2 (April 1950): 405–25, quote at p. 423, n52.19 On those claims, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983). For a critique of Wilsonian diplomacy mounted by a prominent realist scholar during the early post-Second World War period, see Robert Endicott Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Osgood was the Harvard graduate student mentioned in the Leopold article; this book stemmed from his dissertation.20 Daniel Malloy Smith, “National Interest and American Intervention, 1917: An Historiographical Appraisal,” Journal of American History 52 (June 1965): 5–24, quote at pp. 23–24. Also see Idem, The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914–1920 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965).21 Jackson, “Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 485–86 and 488–89 (emphasis added).22 In addition to Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest, Wilson critics include Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, DEL: Scholarly Resources, 1991); and Richard Striner, Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).23 Arthur S. Link, The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971). Also rejecting the critics’ interpretation of Wilson are William G. Carleton, “A New Look at Woodrow Wilson,” Virginia Quarterly Review 38 (Fall 1962): 545–66; and John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).24 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).25 For this intriguing thesis, see Ross A. Kennedy, “Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and an American Conception of National Security,” Diplomatic History 25 (Winter 2001): 1–31. Also see Idem, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009).26 On this contested question of causation, see John W. Langdon, July 1914: The Long Debate, 1918–1990 (Oxford: Berg, 1991); and Hew Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Analytically, the debate can be broken down into two chief paradigms, stressing different sorts of pressures leading to war, ranging from ascriptions of deliberate intent on some state’s part to assertions that no one wanted the war into which European states blundered for a variety of reasons. These contrasting perspectives are sometimes given the respective labels of “German paradigm” and “Balkans-inception thesis.” See Annika Mombauer, “The Fischer Controversy, Documents, and the ‘Truth’ about the Origins of the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 (April 2013): 290–314; John C. G. Röhl, “Goodbye to All That (Again)? The Fischer Thesis, the New Revisionism and the Meaning of the First World War,” International Affairs 91 (January 2015): 153–66; Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., “July 1914 Revisited and Revised: The Erosion of the German Paradigm,” in The Outbreak of the First World War: Structure, Politics, and Decision-Making, ed. Jack S. Levy and John A. Vasquez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30–62; and Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2013).27 The second era in which revisionism, so named, has made inroads into the community of foreign policy analysts is a more recent one, and can be said to have begun around the time of the Vietnam War; it continues to be an attractive perspective for those whose epistemological tastes run more toward critical theory and less toward explanatory theory.28 See Harry Elmer Barnes, Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926); as well as C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard, 1929).29 Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Also see Stuart I. Rochester, American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of World War I (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).30 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). For a critical assessment of the Carthaginian trope, see Sally Marks, “Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921,” Journal of Modern History 85 (September 2013): 632–59.31 For this staple of interwar revisionism, see Edwin Borchard and William Potter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937); and Alice Morrissey, The American Defense of Neutral Rights, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939).32 Quoted in Denna Frank Fleming, “Our Entry into the World War in 1917: The Revised Version,” Journal of Politics 2 (February 1940): 75–86, quote at pp. 78–79.33 In the apt words of one student of the intervention decision, “[u]nlike Washington, Wilson would never have tolerated a Hamilton…. Wilson’s isolation was unparalleled among American presidents.” Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 20–21. Supporting the view of an isolated Wilson is Henry A. Turner, “Woodrow Wilson and Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 21 (Winter 1957–58): 505–20.34 Illustratively, Brandy Lee, et al., The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Discuss a President (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017); Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); Daniel W. Drezner, The Toddler-in-Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021); and Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (New York: Penguin, 2022).35 Expressive of the thesis that Wilson was “prejudiced,” and that this was an important consideration in his opting for war, is Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), quote at p. 6.36 Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 148–9.37 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson’s Health and the Treaty Fight, 1919–1920,” International History Review 9 (February 1987): 73–84.38 Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-Eighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: John Day, 1956); Bernard Brodie, “A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Woodrow Wilson,” World Politics 9 (April 1957): 413–22; Robert C. Tucker, “The Georges’ Wilson Reexamined: An Essay on Psychobiography,” American Political Science Review 71 (June 1977): 606–18; Edwin A. Weinstein, "Woodrow Wilson’s Neurological Illness," Journal of American History 57 (September 1970): 324–51; Weinstein, James William Anderson, and Arthur S. Link, "Woodrow Wilson’s Political Personality: A Reappraisal," Political Science Quarterly 93 (Winter 1978–1979): 585–98; and Dorothy Ross, “Woodrow Wilson and the Case for Psychohistory,” Journal of American History 69 (December 1982): 659–68.39 On the causal impact of the submarine, see Kendrick A. Clements, “Woodrow Wilson and World War I,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (March 2004): 62–82.40 Charles Seymour, American Diplomacy during the World War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934).41 See John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).42 Arguing that Wilsonian decisionmaking was motivated by idealism born of moral certainty rather than any power-based calculations is Robert H. Ferrell, “Woodrow Wilson: Man and Statesman,” Review of Politics 18 (April 1956): 131–45. “The immediate occasion for American entrance into the war was the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, which to Wilson’s way of thinking was a criminal act. He seems to have gone into the war under the feeling that the balance of justice in the world was being sacrificed to the unjust Central Powers. There is no proof as yet that Wilson led the country into war with a clear determination to preserve the balance of power in Europe…. The ‘new diplomacy’ – a weighing of good against evil, rather than power against power – dictated his decision for war in 1917” (quote at pp. 143–44).43 Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War, 204. Also see Justus Drew Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of American Entry into World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 249: “Germany’s public announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare marked the beginning of the end of peace with the United States.”44 See, especially, Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest.45 Robert W. Tucker, “Woodrow Wilson’s ‘New Diplomacy’,” World Policy Journal 21 (Summer 2004): 92–107.46 “The great crusade of 1917–18 was a war of choice. What is more, it was a choice made under the worst possible circumstances.” Walter A. McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 141.47 For one such analysis, see Ionut Popescu, “American Grand Strategy and the Rise of Offensive Realism,” Political Science Quarterly 134 (Fall 2019): 375–405.48 The differences between the two are explicated in Jack S. Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,” World Politics 40 (October 1987): 82–107.49 Particularly, Frederick W. Marks III, Wind over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). But for a critique of this claim, see David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the Second World War (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2001).50 Harvey J. Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Great (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).51 On the impact of revisionism during the interwar period, see Cohen, American Revisionists; on FDR’s years as an isolationist, see Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1970).52 Waldo H. Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).53 John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60. Also see, for this 1930s’ Rooseveltian focus on “hemispherism,” David G. Haglund, Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984).54 See John MacCormac, Canada: America’s Problem (New York: Viking, 1940).55 Eugene Staley, “The Myth of the Continents,” Foreign Affairs 19 (April 1941): 481–94, quotes at pp. 490, 494.56 On those measures, see Warren F. Kimball, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (March 2004): 83–99.57 Of these, the most consequential was the decision to violate international law and transfer a portion of America’s naval forces to Britain; see Richard M. Pious, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Destroyer Deal: Normalizing Prerogative Power,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 42 (March 2012): 190–204.58 Unpublished diary of Adolf A. Berle, Jr., 26 September 1938, Berle Papers, box 210, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library [FDRL], Hyde Park, NY (hereafter, “Berle diary”). Berle was addressing his remarks to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and departmental policy advisors James Dunn, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, and Norman Davis.59 Samuel I. Rosenman, comp., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 vols. (New York: Random House, 1938; Macmillan 1941–50), 7: 546.60 New York Times Magazine, October 16, 1938.61 For a useful reminder that it was not always this way, see Michael C. Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).62 Illustratively, these advocacies included Raúl Diez de Medina [Gaston Nerval], “Europe versus the United States in Latin America,” Foreign Affairs 15 (July 1937): 642–45; Carleton Beals, The Coming Struggle for Latin America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938); Pedro Motta Lima and José Barboza Mello, El Nazismo en el Brasil: Proceso del Estado Corporativo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Claridad, 1938); Ernesto Giudici, Hitler conquista América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Acento, 1938); Adolfo Tejera, Penetración nazi en América Latina (Montevideo: Editorial Nueva América, 1938); Th. Thetens and Ludwig Lore, “Chile as a Nazi Outpost,” Nation, September 24, 1938, 296–98; José Bernal de León, La quinta columna en el continente Américano (México, D.F.: Ediciones Culturales Mexicanas, 1939); Enrique Dickmann, La infiltración nazi-fascista en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Sociales Argentinas, 1939); John T. Whitaker, Americas to the South (New York: Macmillan, 1939); Manuel Seoane, Nuestra América y la Guerra (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Ercilla, 1940); Hugo Fernández Artucio, Nazis en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Talleres Gráficos Sur, 1940); Tomás G. Brena and J. V. Iturbide, Alta traición en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Editorial A.B.C., 1940); Norman P. Macdonald, Hitler over Latin America (London: Jarrolds, 1940); and Felipe Barreda Laos, ¿Hispano América en guerra? (Buenos Aires: Linari, 1941).63 The evidence is contained in archives in both Washington and Hyde Park, New York (the site of the Roosevelt presidential library). Archival sources on the threat perception associated with Latin America include the following, in the National Archives in Washington: State Department Decimal File, Record Group 59; as well as the War Plans Division and the Military Intelligence Division, War Department Files, Record Group 165. In Hyde Park, consult the unpublished papers of the president contained in his Official File, his Personal File, his Secretary’s File, and in the voluminous unpublished diaries of Adolf A. Berle Jr., and Henry Morgenthau Jr.64 For instance, see Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); David Kaiser, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War (New York: Basic Books, 2014); J. Garry Clifford, “Both Ends of the Telescope: New Perspectives on FDR and American Entry into World War II,” Diplomatic History 13 (April 1989): 213–30; John M. Schuessler, “The Deception Dividend: FDR’s Undeclared War,” International Security 34 (Spring 2010): 133–65; and Christopher Darnton, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” International Security 42 (Winter 2017/2018): 84–126.65 All but impossible, because some scholars have indeed argued that not only was there no actual threat to the hemisphere, but that there was not even any perceived threat; see for this claim, Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).66 See Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War (New York: Basic Books, 2021).67 Kennedy to Roosevelt, 15 May 1940, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1862- ), 1940, 3: 29–30.68 John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, vol. 1: Years of Crisis, 1928–1938; vol. 2: Years of Urgency, 1938–1941; vol. 3: Years of War, 1941–1945, 3 vols. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1959–67), 2: 150.69 Strong to Marshall, 17 June 1940, War Plans Division, Record Group 165, 4250-3.70 Marshall to SLC, 17 June 1940, ibid. (emphasis added).71 On the hesitancy of that public, see Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid G. HaglundDavid G. Haglund (david.haglund@queensu.ca) is a Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). His research focuses on transatlantic security, and on Canadian and American international security policy. Among his books are Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–1940 (1984); Alliance Within the Alliance? Franco-German Military Cooperation and the European Pillar of Defense (1991); Ethnic Diasporas and the Canada-United States Security Community: From the Civil War to Today (2015); The US “Culture Wars” and the Anglo-American Special Relationship (2019); and Sister Republics: Security Relations Between America and France (2023).