Expanding Empire

...Alan Wolfe (Alan Wolfe teaches sociology at Queens College...

...Those who seek to understand the unraveling of the world of the last thirty-five years need to begin by examining how it was put together...

...Finally, as a response to both depression and war, the state guided efforts toward global regulation, laying the foundation for the Cold War and the free-trade regime of the contemporary period...

...Promotion without cooperation is meaningless and vice versa...

...In the 1980s, Japanese engineers and managers have established plants on the West Coast that demonstrate, by example, the superior productivity of Japanese capitalism...

...Both groups could profit from a reading of Emily Rosenberg's Spreading the American Dream, which reminds us how the ideology of liberal expansionism dominated America's coming of age...

...The new powers of the regulatory state and its new capabilities for conducting economic diplomacy," she writes, "were an astonishing departure from the ingrained traditions of limited government and nonentanglement in foreign affairs...

...The story of America's expansionism has been told many times...

...While this book will satisfy those who are unfamiliar with the roots of American overseas expansionism, it will be disappointing to anyone looking for more than a narrative unfolding of events many times recounted...

...What has not been forthcoming is a text that would show us why, at a time when a belief in divine America literally prevents the United States from acting in its own best interest, America's leaders are nonetheless committed to an ideology that has lost all touch with its material base...

...But the latter treaty was never ratified by Congress, and the IMF was so transformed during the Bretton Woods Conference that it became an agent of restrictive nationalism, not state-led globalism...

...He wrote the recently published book, "America's Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth...

...There are those who call for a realistic program that recognizes the inability of the United States to recapture its glory days...

...Shortly before the turn of the century, Rosenberg argues, business and cultural leaders, intellectuals, religious figures, and politicians agreed on a set of notions according to which America, led by its buoyant entrepreneurs, would spread the benefits of its technology and culture throughout the world...

...One of the crucial questions of the next decade will be how America will respond to its decline...

...Rosenberg, a historian at Macalester College, tells the story of America's fixation on liberal expansionism...

...In international affairs, if not necessarily in domestic, there was great continuity between the second and third decade of this century, leading me to wonder why she changes her category...

...At first, government acted as a promoter, guiding private efforts to dominate the world...

...During the Hoover years, she continues, a cooperative state emerged, more in keeping with the politics of the post-World War II period...

...Unfortunately, Rosenberg's book is at its best in telling us what we need least to understand and at its worst in elaborating what we need most...

...Yet government's new role in stabilizing the international economic environment could also be seen as the ultimate extension of the promotional state," she continues...

...In the response to depression and war, Rosenberg perceives new needs in the international arena which could only be met by direct state activity...

...Either the new system was a departure or it was not...

...Her main point— that the ideology of liberal developmental-ism confused freedom in general with the freedom of America in particular—is convincingly argued...

...Government was integral to that effort...

...The original draft of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, agreed to by John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, foreshadowed this direction, as did plans for a treaty on international trade negotiated in Havana in 1947...

...What does not make sense to me is how her notion of a cooperative state differs in fundamentals from what she calls the promotional state...

...What was most interesting about the "astonishing departure" of the regulatory state was that it never happened...

...n the 1920s, Charles Beard, the distinguished American historian, visited Tokyo to help establish a research bureau for urban reform and later involved himself in that city's reconstruction following a 1923 earthquake...

...These doubts deepen as we approach the contemporary period...

...Despite claims that emanate with depressing regularity from business publications about the advantages of the market, the state was essential in promoting the reality of liberal developmental-ism, as Rosenberg terms the emphasis on global expansion...

...And there are those, currently in power, who dream of the re-establishment of the American imperium as it used to be...

...There were New Dealers and internationalists who wanted to see a state-directed global order created after World War II...

...In sixty years, the leadership in innovation has switched from West to East...

...Rosenberg's notion of a promotional state makes perfect sense to me, and her analysis of the supportive activities of government—navies, tariffs, gold standards, and government-business cooperation abroad—is adequate, if not innovative...

...It is astonishing to me that Rosenberg, having just proclaimed the innovation, next argues that it was not an innovation at all...

...Rosenberg's attempt to set out three stages in the development of the state is loosely done, and as a result, her comments on the distinctiveness of the period since 1945 are confusing and contradictory...

...Here Rosenberg confuses the intent of the Roosevelt Administration, which had its innovative moments, with the realities of Washington politics, and its strong continuity with the past...