We begin with the story of a rising American republic fresh out of the Civil War, rebuilding at home, and facing a familiar challenge abroad: European intervention in the Americas. France, looking to prove its imperialist mettle in the West, launched an invasion of Mexico to install a friendly emperor. Sensing American weakness, Spain annexed the Dominican Republic to reinforce its colonial presence in the Caribbean.
This is the beginning of the story told in Sean Mirski’s new history of a (supposedly) hidden and neglected period in American foreign policy, We May Dominate the World, a book that draws us into the rich, complex, and often brutal history of U.S. involvement with Latin America in the century from the 1860s to 1960s. Extremely entertaining, insightful, and uniquely presented, We May Dominate the World offers an accessible history that should prove tempting to anyone who is interested in foreign policy, Latin America, or American history.
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Civil War Secretary of State William Seward said at the time that foreign countries’ attitudes about the United States would “depend much more on her estimate of our power than on moral considerations.” America could no longer afford to stand on the sidelines of Latin American affairs. The U.S. came to realize that to make its rise possible, it must commit to stopping European powers from building almost any influence on its own side of the Atlantic. It was time to dust off the Monroe Doctrine, a previously unenforced declaration that European invasion into the Western Hemisphere is a hostile action against the U.S.
The predominant view of Americans, especially American politicians, during the period covered in We May Dominate the World is that America is a unique and exceptional power. Its rise, they felt, wouldn't destabilize Latin America since the U.S. was meant to be, if a dominant regional power, also a benevolent and protective one. Yet all too often, benevolence gave way to hostility (or, at best, paternalism) as America’s security interests expanded in scope and the passive pull of the U.S. market began to have an outsize impact on Latin American politics.
The U.S. would become trapped in a constant cycle of interventions, each of which American policymakers genuinely believed to be strategic necessities. Suddenly, instability from any country became a threat to U.S. interests everywhere else, resulting in a violent intervention. The interventions, in turn, bred their own disorder and created problems further down the line. Once it was established that a country in the Americas could expect Washington to intervene if things went sour, local political groups exploited the dynamic. They’d get the U.S. to crush their enemies and elevate their status, reducing the prospects for long-term stability. For instance, the Cuban government in 1917 intentionally provoked the opposition into a revolt, knowing the U.S. would send in Marines to stabilize the situation, thereby crushing any dissent.
By the end of World War I, the U.S. had achieved an unshakable dominance over the Western Hemisphere sought by every president since Ulysses S. Grant. But the way they achieved it, through constant warfare and cycles of instability exacerbating anti-American resentment in Latin America, made victory Pyrrhic at best.
In the post-World War II period, the world settled into what scholars dryly call “the U.S.-led international order.” Mirski describes how the U.S. learned to govern the world from its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and many of the same strategies, ideals, and mistakes that had been developed in the Americas translated to a global scale in the postwar era. For instance, the International Monetary Fund draws its conceptual origins from the Taft administration’s so-called dollar diplomacy, a strategy to promote stability in Latin America by providing preferential loans to governments.
Admirably for readability, Mirski tells his story through human characters. Whether it be presidents or revolutionaries, hardly anyone important to this history is reduced to a set of bullet points. Instead, Mirski spends time outlining the motivations, personal struggles, and often happenstance that challenge our conventional understanding of the Panamanian revolution or the Philippines’ anti-U.S. insurrection. For example, Mirski writes about Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French engineer who invested his savings into France’s failed canal in Panama. Desperate to recoup his losses, he took charge of the Panamanian independence movement and was appointed envoy to the U.S. to work out a canal treaty. After learning his Panamanian bosses were on their way to hold him accountable, he signed the treaty behind their backs, promptly scamming his own government into a treaty that only benefited himself and the Americans. In the aftermath, Mirski describes, one of the Panamanians "reportedly struck the smug Frenchman in the face."
Despite key differences in policy and implementation, the point of We May Dominate the World is to identify cycles and themes. We hear about how American policy is made by a nation convinced of its exceptionalism yet possessed of a paranoia about foreign threats (sometimes rightly). Over a long span that includes a seemingly perpetual cycle of war and crisis, we see intervention begetting intervention.
The century after the Civil War cemented attitudes and habits in U.S. foreign policy thinking that are still with us today. After the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise in 2021 by a Colombian hit squad called in by who knows who, America’s poorest neighbor plunged into chaos. And Washington has heard calls, once again, to intervene. President Joe Biden does not seem willing to engage, but neither was Woodrow Wilson before his hand was forced to intervene in Haiti following the assassination of the Haitian president in 1915. We May Dominate the World is an engaging, slanted, and ultimately rewarding call to humility and caution in a world that will continue to see the U.S. challenged by hostile powers across the sea. It’s a call to remember that we are not immune to our history. No people is. But we can put our long-held sense of our own exceptional nature to work in service of foreign policy humility rather than hubris.
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Jackson Lopez is a student at Bard College.