Capitalist Peace: A History of American Free-Trade Internationalism

A wide-ranging 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 long-term 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 st