Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  And what did our first decade of official existence bring? There was an undeclared quasi-war with France that triggered, in a spasm of fear, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—John Adams presaging Dick Cheney. There were also three significant insurrections, including one—the Whiskey Rebellion, peaking in 1794—that forced, for the first and only time in American history, a sitting president (Washington, naturally) to assume actual field command of U.S. military forces. Meanwhile, our ships came under such casual assault across the world’s oceans that at one point roughly one-fifth of the federal budget went to paying Barbary Coast pirate kings ransom for cargo and personnel captured. Amazingly, with all that going on, there wasn’t a single slave rebellion. Those would come later.

  Despite its internal divisions and inherent weakness, this young nation put aside all logical fears of becoming, as Washington feared, the “sport of European politics,” and instead concentrated all its energies on rapid expansion westward. As Robert Kagan writes in Dangerous Nation, “inducements to expansionism were embedded in the new republic’s legal and institutional structures,” meaning that “American settlers venturing to the frontier carried their rights and their political influence with them.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the road map, less a foreign policy than simply the continued exploitation of an inviting geography. The same private initiative that drove the original colonies’ success made Americans the most invasive of species. This “guest worker” would one day show up in your territory and not leave your lands until they were his. Once his numbers were great enough, his portable rights suddenly became your insoluble problem and his new nation’s new cause célèbre. Early Americans were the economic jihadists of their age, with their “caliphate” incomplete until they had reached the Pacific shore, driving off or killing any who stood in their way and calling upon their government’s “revolutionary guards,” or state militias, as their bodyguards.

  Although early Americans saw nothing revolutionary in their philosophy of work as self-improvement, especially working the land, its impact on Native Americans was clearly catastrophic. They were simply swept aside by the Americans’ superior numbers and willingness to use force to protect their new holdings. As Kagan notes, by imposing “one set of values upon a people with a very different conception of human nature and social order,” American settlers were effectively pioneering globalization—the cross-cultural engulfing of traditional societies by American-style market economics—as in, Whatever your old values were, this is how property and goods and services will now be valued and traded. As today, the rationale is always brutally competitive: If I can create more value than you, then why shouldn’t I be allowed to dominate this market for the larger good? To the extent that many Americans today find themselves on the receiving end of such cruel logic (e.g., the “China price,” sovereign wealth funds), that chicken has finally come home to roost.

  In forging this ambitious course, America was likewise pioneering the art of separatism prompted by a propitious exposure to the global economy—another invention that now circles back to haunt us. As we have already seen with modern globalization and will continue to witness in the decades ahead, once transnational connectivity takes root across a political entity easily divided by geography or ethnicity or socioeconomic status, it is always the most ambitious portion that inevitably seeks political divorce in order to cut a better economic deal with the outside world. Examples are Slovenia in the former Yugoslav Republic and the Kurds in what will someday be the former or federated Iraq. In colonial America, the proximate trigger for such revolution was the British crown’s illegitimate taxes, but the ultimate rationale was that the colonies simply felt they could do better on their own and that Britain was holding them back from their natural potential to dominate the continent, regardless of the geopolitical grief it might cause distant London with Europe’s other colonial powers. As such, George Washington’s retiring admonition to avoid “foreign entanglements” spoke less to avoiding meddling in European affairs than to concentrating all attention on America’s westward advance at the expense of those same European powers. We didn’t revolt from Britain to become something unlike it but ultimately to grow beyond it in strength and world influence. Not surprisingly, our great divorce from Britain lasted until British needs for protective alliance against Germany early in the twentieth century made a new arrangement possible and necessary. Only then did the “special relationship” take root. Before that, America was at once dependent on British investment and resentful of British power and prestige—a situation the United States would experience from the other side with many countries in the twentieth century.

  Intimidated by the loss of Britain’s protection on the high seas and subject to its economic sanctions, America had the grand strategic goal from the start, as Kagan notes, to become a “great world power” by establishing an inland empire. On this point, all our Founding Fathers were in clear agreement. The real question, however, was the best method for achieving that power, and here is where the matter of grand strategy actually shaped the future course of American politics by ultimately encouraging the rise of competing political parties, each centered on a particular answer to the question, How best to make America a world power? This development was neither preordained nor desired by the Founding Fathers, virtually all of whom feared divisive “factions” as a source of internal weakness leading to failed statehood that would invite foreign meddling. Indeed, Washington himself foresaw the possibility of secessions and civil strife as a result of political parties, believing they were inimical to the long-term health of the nation.

  On the one side stood the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, an entirely self-invented individual whose Dickensian childhood in the West Indies taught him much about the value of commerce and available finance and the dangers of relying primarily on agricultural commodities for export earnings. The Federalists believed in a strong central government and focused their sights on commercial expansionism. On the other side stood an evolving cast of characters: first the Anti-Federalists, concentrated primarily in the South, where states’ rights would remain a battle cry for decades, over time to be embodied in Thomas Jefferson and his leadership of the republican faction (the forerunner of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party) that clashed with Hamilton, hurling the slander at him that, through his proposed strong central government, he sought to replicate aspects of the British monarchy in the New World. Jefferson believed America’s future development should remain more agriculturally based, fearing that the rise of too much industry would generate the many social ills seen in industrializing England.

  Yet Jefferson too was an avowed expansionist. It’s just that he, like most “states’ rights” elements from the South, defined their expansionism first and foremost as the acquisition of land—meaning more farmland. In Jefferson’s dream of America, the reach of the central government would have been limited (e.g., a small committee would manage affairs in peacetime, with Congress seeing only episodic sessions), cities would remain of modest size, farmer-citizens would rule largely from below, and our country would become an agricultural superpower in the mode of today’s Brazil. Indeed, Jefferson would have found much to praise in Brazil’s current role as leader of emerging markets in globalization. If Hamilton took his cues largely from urbanizing, industrializing Britain, then Jefferson’s ideal (based on his time there as ambassador) was rural, republican France. How reasonable was this view? You have to remember that throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Europe viewed America, 95 percent of whose population at that time was involved in agriculture, almost exclusively as a source of staple commodities. Indeed, beaver pelts were the signature export through the 1830s, giving American explorers their primary motivation to map the Western wilderness. Later, as cotton became king, America would dominate that global market at a level that today’s OPEC could never dream of achieving in oil.

  Hamilton, in contrast, saw our agricultural exports and depend
ence on raw materials as a prescription for permanent underdevelopment. Indeed, America’s living standards in the first quarter of the nineteenth century compare nicely to your average Third World economy today. Hamilton had no desire to see America in a state of permanent anger against the Great Satan of his day, Britain, or locked into a long-term dependent trade relationship with the advancing economies of the age, held back by the scourge of slavery. If, in looking deep into the future, Hamilton could have named the country plight to be avoided, he might have easily selected today’s Iran as his nightmare: pointlessly revolutionary and anti-imperialist, with a leadership fixated and provocatively hostile to past colonial rulers, commercially and financially retarded, dominated by religious and cultural zealots who limit trade ties with the outside world and keep economic development largely centered on natural resources—in short, a country operating far below its natural potential for power and influence.

  Hamilton had argued from the beginning that unless a strong central government was created, America would be permanently subject to the dangers of secession, breakup into smaller confederacies, and even civil war, with each possibility affording opportunity for Europe’s meddling powers to divide and conquer these disunited states. In his mind, unless an organizing principle of economic-development-leading-to-world-power were enunciated and pursued, America would dissolve into pieces for all the same reasons that the colonies first sought independence from Britain: States or sections would simply decide to follow their own vision of development (with slavery a crucial delineator) and, believing a better deal could be cut with the global economy, would go their own way.

  Hamilton’s grand strategy was actually a catch-up strategy, in many ways the first great rapid-development strategy of the modern world. Today we view such strategies primarily through the lens of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century: Stalin’s forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, Mao’s insane “great leap forward,” and so on. But Hamilton’s was the first great expression of a market-based “great leap forward,” and in his precocious brilliance, he laid it all out, at age thirty-six, in his 1791 “Report on Manufactures” as our nation’s first secretary of the treasury. This document is reasonably described as the world’s first grand strategic description of what we today know as globalization, originally defined within the American context: a superstate directing the development of a common, continental-sized market. It was the first clear articulation of the American ambition to global power.

  The plan featured aggressive state intervention in the economy’s development. It would select which industries should be developed first and then encourage their rise through protective tariffs and favorable credit. Following Washington’s lead, Hamilton believed first attention should be given to industries that provided America capacity to build its own military armaments. Moreover, industrial espionage was to be encouraged and sanctioned by the government. Once such thievery was achieved, Hamilton directed the U.S. government to issue patents. As biographer Ron Chernow writes, “Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.”

  But even more crucial than such initial industrial planning, protectionism, and espionage, Hamilton’s vision of an American System centered on the state’s active role in financing “internal improvements,” with a special focus on roads and canals and other modes of public infrastructure, the avowed goal being, in Chernow’s words, “to meld America’s scattered regional markets into a single unified whole.” By arguing for this course, Hamilton laid out a truly grand strategy for a young nation, one that can only be viewed, from the perspective of that age and America’s meager government, as insanely ambitious. But in this precocious description of multinational union leading to global economic power, we can locate the very same prime directives that later animated the rise of the European Union and today’s China, right down to the need for the government to closely inspect its products for compliance with regulations specifically designed to advance the nation’s industrial prowess.

  Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” was clearly ahead of its time. Chernow calls him “a messenger from a future that we now inhabit.” But Hamilton was far more than a prophet. As Winik notes:

  Hamilton’s fingerprints are on every facet of modern American life: the Constitution, the Federalist Papers (which he wrote the bulk of), a strong presidency, an independent judiciary, a powerful federal government, big cities, capital markets, Wall Street, the legal profession, the newspaper profession (he started the New York Post), a vigorous military, and remarkably, that is not an exhaustive list.

  Indeed, for Hamilton likewise created the Customs Service and the U.S. Coast Guard during his initial stint as secretary of the treasury, and launched the original Bank of the United States, the forerunner of today’s Federal Reserve System. But it is true that Hamilton’s vision of an American System would not enjoy its realization until the decades immediately following America’s Civil War.

  The great bridge between Hamilton’s original articulation of an American grand strategy to achieve global power and its true flowering in the Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century can be found in the long political career of Kentucky’s Henry Clay. A committed Jefferson Republican from the day he first arrived in Washington in 1807 and the acknowledged leader of the Whigs at the time of his death in 1852, Clay played, across four decades of national statesmanship, the role of tireless champion of what he first dubbed “an American System” that would allow its citizens, in their economic integration of not just the United States but over time possibly the entire Western Hemisphere, to “become real and true Americans.” Clay followed Hamilton’s plan to the best of his considerable ability as the “great compromiser” of his age, serving consecutively as the first dominant speaker of the House of Representatives (he engineered the Missouri Compromise of 1820), then as John Quincy Adams’s secretary of state, next as Andrew Jackson’s main political foil, and finally as the Senate’s “great pacificator,” whose 1850 “great compromise” staved off Civil War for another decade. It is argued by some historians that if Clay, a perpetual candidate for the presidency, had won the office in 1844 instead of James K. Polk, not only would there have been no Mexican War but possibly the Civil War itself might have been averted.

  Clay’s primary scheme to implement “internal improvements” was to use high tariffs to protect nascent industries and develop what he called “the home market,” while promoting the sale of public lands and using the proceeds as the basis for funding roads and canals. An unrepentant economic nationalist, Clay effectively played Hamilton to Andrew Jackson’s Jefferson, battling “King Andrew the First” over high tariffs, the second chartered Bank of the United States, and Jackson’s preference for infrastructure development that favored agricultural exports over industrial goods—in effect, external improvements. Still, much as Hamilton pushed Jefferson toward significant infrastructure development, Clay’s persistence likewise helped to steer Jackson’s two administrations (1829- 1837) toward a rough tripling of federal expenditures for infrastructure in a frenzy of spending that would not be surpassed until the late 1850s. Clay’s Whigs were the essential modernizers of antebellum America, and railroads, encouraged through state and local public-private partnerships, became their primary instrument for knitting America together east to west, just as canals and turnpikes had been in the decades before. Jackson, as historian Daniel Walker Howe notes, entered Washington for his inauguration in a carriage but left the town eight years later on a train.

  Howe argues that Clay expanded Hamilton’s original vision of the American System from one of mere national development to a sense of hemispheric dominion and direct resistance to Britain’s growing domination of the global economy. In that sense, Clay gave fuller voice to America’s emergent grand strategy of not just surpassing Britain in power but ultimately replacing it as the grand arbiter of international com
merce. This was Hamilton’s ambition from the start, for as early as 1774 he predicted that “in fifty or sixty years, America will be in no need of protection from Great Britain,” for “she will then be able to protect herself, both at home and abroad.” That day was indeed coming, but not before America would finally collapse in an unprecedented spasm of violence over the issue of slavery. After that crucible, America would need a new generation of grand strategists to realize the dream of a United States that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

  THE AMERICAN SYSTEM, TESTED AND TRANSFORMED

  It is interesting to note that virtually all America’s grand strategists- cum-politicians were natural outsiders or, in the American vernacular, “men of the West.” But in a political system whose underlying ethos constantly spoke to westward expansion, this only makes sense, for Americans have always been frontiersmen of sorts, it’s just that the frontiers have changed with time from the wilderness to untamed technologies and markets. Where the cutting edge of Kentucky once produced Henry Clay and then, farther westward, Illinois tempered his onetime acolyte Abraham Lincoln for greatness, future American generations would likewise see great leaders arise from across the plains and then finally spring with regularity from the Pacific coastal state of California, where today Silicon Valley continues to sharpen our competitive blade.

  America of the mid-nineteenth century was a country out of sync with itself. Driven westward at a hurtling speed over the first half-century, it had increased its geographic size several times over from its original thirteen-colony spread. In this blindingly ambitious dash, America’s economic acquisitiveness knew few bounds and respected few political boundaries, and not surprisingly, when such a gap opens up between economic connectivity and the political rule sets by which such dominion is determined, much violence ensues. If the first arc of America’s continental ascendancy was driven by economics, then its second was riven with war, as America, which found its house divided between an industrializing North and an agriculture-bound South, would end up fighting its first true war of globalization within its own tenuous boundaries.