Public and Private Spheres in U.S. Foreign Relations: How to Hide an Empire

We’ve been discussing public goods recently and will continue to expand on that theme going forward. Let’s make an initial stab at what public goods have to do with U.S. foreign relations and with American empire. At first glance, the answer is obvious, if pedantic: the instruments of statecraft are public goods. Economic aid (or sanction), real or threatened military action, diplomacy itself, all of these activities – goods and services, if you like – are pursued and provided by the government, under the collective umbrella of “U.S. interests.” Many of the instruments of our statecraft operate in secret as covert operations. But the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency are no less providers of public goods for all their secrecy.
 
Now here is where I present the outlines of an historical argument about American foreign relations and about American imperialism:

The essence of the argument is this: Americans tend to make a distinction between public and private goods, more or less along the lines I have been sketching thus far: governments provide public goods, private individuals (including commercial businesses) acting in their capacities as free men and women provide and consume private goods. Americans have generally preferred a world of limited governmental authority, in which private interests, and hence freedom, can thrive (as we shall see, the reality is far more complex than this ideological sketch.) This is why many Americans maintain a strict preference for markets rather than the political world of governmental authority: the free flow of goods and services within markets is the conceptual space where freedom is manifested and flourishes, as opposed to the world of political assignations and determinations, in which authority flourishes. Public goods, we often think, limit, even consume, our freedoms.
 
We take these traditional attitudes into our pursuit of foreign policy. Foreign policy is carried out as a public good, about which we Americans are traditionally dubious. American officials for decades after the Revolution lamented having to engage in foreign diplomacy of any kind. The world of international statecraft was and is a world of authorities, pressures, and intrigues directed by regimes typically not accountable to “the people.” It is a world that generally disgusted the first several generations of American diplomats, who earned a (not always deserved) reputation in foreign courts for their alleged naivety. But they were not naive so much as they were idealistic republicans. Public statecraft, for many of these early diplomats, was often deigned a sordid world in which freedom was curtailed and individual liberty intensely threatened. International statecraft was a necessary evil for many of them, such as John Quincy Adams (ironically, one of the best practitioners of statecraft) who famously declared that the U.S. “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” his picturesque depiction of this tradition of diplomatic reluctance. 
 
In more recent decades, diplomacy has caused intense political dispute. Americans only very reluctantly engaged in both of the 20th century’s world wars, after infamous provocations. Even more reluctant still did Americans embrace the ongoing diplomatic commitments required by the Cold War, and then only to protect what they saw as the threat to private markets from the encroaching statism of the Soviet Union. Growing accustomed to the deployment of our public power -- whether military or economic, covert or overt – has been a function of the Cold War where, as numerous historians have shown, even in those heated days policy choices occasioned profound disagreement.

Americans, in other words, enjoy a long history of engaging diplomatically with the world only reluctantly and as a last resort. This is an ironic observation to recent generations of Americans who have grown up accustomed to deployments of American power. But for very much of our history, Americans have been highly reluctant, or at least claimed they have been reluctant, to deploy American power -- military, economic, or otherwise. We are suspicious of public goods, and for much of American history that included our diplomacy.
 
This essential distinction carries enormous implications for how Americans understand our foreign relations, compared to how outsiders understand those relations. We have battled over, and accepted only grudgingly, the extension of power abroad. But Americans have never, to any significant degree, contested their rights to extend their private interests abroad. Indeed, American policy has almost always stood unanimously behind the conviction that American producers, American farmers, American artists and engineers and technicians, American missionaries and religious zealots – the lot of us – should all, always, be free to sell our wares, to find new customers, to market our products and services and ideas abroad. Indeed, we have defined freedom itself, one of our most essential values, in terms of how open foreign realms are to our private interests. When they have not been sufficiently open – as we shall see -- public pressures have often been brought to bear to force such an opening.
 
So the argument is this: defining our influence abroad in the public/private dichotomy that is traditional to Americans has disguised American empire from Americans themselves, who have never understood their private interests to be imperial. Taking refuge in myths of American reluctance to use its (public) power unless pressed to extremes, we tend not, until very recent times, to see ourselves as willing international players at all. Private interests do not count in this ideological formulation since they are, of course, private, merely the natural outgrowth of free individuals pursuing their God-given rights, abroad as at home. Private interests are freedom itself. They cannot be imperial.
 
But the state is not the only carrier of American power and influence abroad, whatever claims Americans traditionally make about it. The extension of private interests, and the subtle and not subtle influence that those private interests exert around the world, has also been part of what American power means. We have in that way exerted influence around the world independent of our public statecraft. And we have not always been aware of how extensive those interests are, how powerful they are, and what consequences they hold for those on the receiving end. And despite all the foregoing about traditional American ideology, the fact is that Americans have rarely been reluctant to call upon the powers of the state, powers that they have augmented over the centuries, to protect and serve those private interests. Much of this, too, has been hidden.
 
I’ll be presenting lots more evidence and argumentation in the weeks to come.
 
What are your thoughts?
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Further reading: Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century (Chicago, 1999)