CAPITALIST PEACE A HISTORY OF AMERICAN FREE-TRADE INTERNATIONALISM

A wideranging history of modern America that argues that free trade has been an engine of US foreign policy and the key to global prosperity. Surprisingly exports and imports tariffs and quotas and trade deficits and surpluses are central to American foreign relations. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression the United States has linked trade to its longterm diplomatic objectives and national security. Washington DC saw free trade as underscoring its international leadership and as instrumental to global prosperity to winning wars and peace and to shaping the liberal internationalist world order. Free trade in short was a cornerstone of an ideology of capitalist peace. Covering nearly a century Capitalist Peace provides the first chronologically sweeping look at the intersection of trade and diplomacy. This policy has been pursued oftentimes at a cost to US producers and workers whose interests were sacrificed to serve the purpose of grand strategy. To be sure capitalists sought a particular type of global trade which harnessed the market through free trade. This liberal trade policy sought the common good as defined by the needs aims and strengths of the capitalist and democratic world. Leaders believed that free trade advanced private enterprise which in turn promoted prosperity democracy security and attendant byproducts like development cooperation integration and human rights. The capitalist peace took liberalization as integral to cooperation among nations and even to morality in global affairs. Drawing on new research from the Reagan George H.W. Bush Clinton and George W. Bush presidential libraries as well as business industry and civic association archives Thomas W. Zeiler narrates this history from the road to World War II through the Cold War to the resurgent protectionism of the Trump era and up to the present. Offering a new interpretation of diplomatic history Capitalist Peace shows how US power interests and values were projected into the international arena even as capitalism brought both positive and negative results to the global order.