Debating Political Economy: An
Approach to Teaching the United
States and the World
Patrick Iber
Traditionally, the modern United States and the world survey has been the province of
military and diplomatic history. But from the point of view of the present, it is not clear
that such an approach places the right emphasis on the distribution of U.S. power and its
effects on the world—either during the twentieth century or present. As a starting point
for analysis, you do not get far by noting that the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power (though that too is important). It is far more useful to observe
that the United States is and has been the world’s preeminent capitalist power and to use
that premise as the foundation for building a complex understanding of U.S. financial,
cultural, political, and military interventions. For that reason, I have designed my survey
course in U.S. foreign relations to emphasize issues of political economy.
I have taught this course in two different contexts: first, when I was a lecturer in a program in political economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and later as an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso (utep).
Not surprisingly, the students brought different assumptions to the course and presented
different teaching challenges. At Berkeley, the institutional culture leans to the political
left, and students are generally skeptical of U.S. military interventions abroad. I also had
several international students from Asia and Europe, none of whom had internalized the
sorts of stories that the United States tells its own citizens about its benevolence. utep is
international in a different way: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is literally visible from campus,
and some students cross the international bridge daily to attend class. At the same time,
El Paso is home to Fort Bliss, one of the largest army bases in the country. Many students
taking U.S. foreign relations are preparing for careers in the military, the diplomatic service, or the border patrol. At both Berkeley and utep, I have taught veterans of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Every class has had students spanning the political spectrum from
left to right and points in between.
It would be fair to acknowledge that the political economy approach to U.S. foreign
relations generally comes from a left-wing tradition. Anti-imperialists have often linked
U.S. military intervention to its economic interests—sometimes crudely, sometimes with
more sophistication. The reintroduction of capitalism into the study of U.S. foreign relations was strongly associated with Cold War revisionism, which disputed the belief
that the Cold War was best understood as a struggle between freedom and tyranny. And
Patrick Iber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Readers may contact Iber at [email protected].
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaw508
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March 2017
The Journal of American History
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­ iscussing the United States as a “market empire,” as we do in class, implies that the Unitd
ed States is indeed an empire. The vulgar oversimplification of this approach that is deployed in popular debate holds that although the United States claims to work to defend
democracy, it instead acts on behalf of U.S. multinational corporations, using its military
power to secure natural resources—whether bananas in Guatemala or oil in Iraq. I do not
believe such a critique is deep or persuasive, and it is not the kind of thinking I want to
cultivate. To be clear, I do share the left-wing critique of U.S. power in most of the political economy tradition. Texts such as Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s The Making of Global
Capitalism help provide the framework for the class and in the preparation of lectures.
At the same time, I do not believe that my classroom is a place to cultivate like-minded
students, except insofar as thinking about this material leads them to similar conclusions.
It is a place to give students tools they can use to better understand the world and their
place in it.1
As a way of taking advantage of the strongly held opinions of some students and sharpening everyone’s analytical skills, I incorporate weekly debates into the class. The syllabus
contains a guiding question, designed to split the class into opposing camps. Often the
questions represent splits along conservative versus liberal lines, or liberal versus radical
ones. They also often resemble political debates that took place in the time being studied.
This gives students a chance to express their views if they hold them, or to develop them
if they do not. The students do the reading with a goal of collecting evidence for one side
or the other. And since each student will be debating, his or her opinion will not be the
only one represented. Whatever ideological priors students bring to the class, they will
have to support their stance with evidence.
To give an example of how this works, let me start at the beginning of class. I begin in
the 1890s, once the United States has finished consolidating its continental position and
has become an acknowledged world power. I do not use a comprehensive textbook, but
students read Emily Rosenberg’s Spreading the American Dream over the first few weeks,
and it provides a good foundation for the rest of the course. (I also find the edited volume
America in the World useful for locating primary documents.) Rosenberg posits the terminologically difficult but theoretical useful concept of liberal-developmentalism, which we
revisit throughout the rest of the course:
The ideology of liberal-developmentalism can be broken into five major features: (1)
belief that other nations could and should replicate America’s own developmental
experience; (2) faith in private free enterprise; (3) support for free or open access for
trade and investment; (4) promotion of free flow of information and culture; and
(5) growing acceptance of governmental activity to protect private enterprise and
to stimulate and regulate American participation in international economic and
cultural exchange.
We return repeatedly to the idea of the United States understanding itself as an exemplary nation, with the recipe and knowledge to remake the world in its image.2
In combination with the secondary readings, I want students to engage with and think
about primary documents. Some are assigned as readings outside of class; shorter ones are
1
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (New
York, 2012).
2
Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945
(New York, 1982), 7–8. Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Andrew Preston, eds., America in the World:
A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror (Princeton, 2014).
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broken down as miniworkshops during lecture sessions. In the era of the Spanish-American War and the occupations of the Philippines and Cuba, we look at political cartoons
to examine U.S. assumptions of its tutelary role regarding the smaller island nations and
President William McKinley’s words in defense of American expansion to do the same,
with a bit more formality. Mark Twain’s “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), a
powerful satire circulated widely by the Anti-Imperialist League, mocked the idea that
violent occupations could bring “civilization.” From outside the United States, José Martí
and Emilio Aguinaldo comment on the desire for national independence.3
With this combination of primary and secondary reading, we have assembled plenty of
material for a debate. The question for this week could be, “Did the Philippines and Cuba
benefit from U.S. occupation?” The question is crude and, in a way, deliberately badly
put. When students come to class on the debate day, I divide the room into sections for
those who want to argue in favor of and those who want to argue against the proposition.
Typically, the class will be split, though not always equally. (I sometimes have another
question in my back pocket in case everyone agrees on the first one: in this case it might
take the perspective of someone from outside the United States, such as, “Is it legitimate
to use guerrilla warfare to resist U.S. occupation?”) But generally students sort themselves
out well; often if one side is underrepresented, undecided students will float in that direction, and so will contrarians with previous debate experience. If one group is too large, it
can be split into two so there is more than one team representing a given position.
From there, students have fifteen or twenty minutes to develop their strongest arguments. I circulate between the groups. The first thing I do is figure out how each group
is going to back up its assertions with evidence drawn from the readings. Once they have
three or four solid points, I ask them to think about how the other group is going to argue
its position, and to work out rebuttals. Each group gets practice, then, thinking on both
sides of the argument and weighing evidence. Sometimes, after ten minutes or so, someone will throw up his or her hands and declare that they sat on the wrong side.
Several other structures improve the quality of the debates. Twice per semester, every
student is responsible for bringing in a written “debate brief ” that lays out the best case
on each side and then declares a preference. Shy students will often feel more confident
in participating in the debate the weeks when they have done this. I also have a different
person serve as recorder each week, summarizing their side and delivering it to the other
groups after the transition to the large group discussion. This works against the tendency
of a few vocal and enthusiastic debaters to dominate every week. More reluctant students
have multiple opportunities to contribute—some do not like to talk to the whole class
but are deeply engaged in the small group as it constructs its argument. After both sides
have presented their case, I usually open up the space for rebuttals and a relatively freeflowing conversation that I moderate.
In the case of a question such as, “Did the Philippines and Cuba benefit from U.S. occupation?” the crude nature of the question will force the students to refine it in developing their argument. Who in the Philippines and Cuba benefited? Economic elites? Political elites? Common people? In what lines of work? Who in the United States benefited
3
For examples of these political cartoons, see John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin, 1980). Mark
Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” North American Review, 172 (Feb. 1901), 161–76. For examples of
writings on this topic by José Martí and Emilio Aguinaldo, see Engel, Atwood, and Preston, eds., America in the
World.
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from those relationships? If the occupied territories benefited (or did not), compared to
what? Continued Spanish occupation? The independence so many had fought for? Students will develop sophisticated arguments. They are perfectly capable of recognizing that
the United States might have overseen road or institution building, but that it primarily
would have done so in ways that benefited export industries. And ahistorical claims can
be dealt with by simply pointing back to the evidence. I remember one student asserting
during this debate that the United States intervened abroad in the defense of democracy,
and a few others scoffed at such a notion. I just asked for the claim to be supported with
evidence, and if it cannot be done then that is a powerful lesson for everyone. With the
final few minutes of the debate, we often try to build a kind of synthesis. Fifty minutes
pass quickly in debate; it would work even better with an eighty-minute class, although
that would leave less time for other kinds of lessons on other days.
Over the course of the semester, we get to interrogate serious and weighty questions
about U.S. intervention, and I try to arrange the readings to surprise and challenge everyone. For the era of dollar diplomacy, for example, I have had great success (especially
in versions of this class focused on U.S.–Latin American relations, where I use the same
debate format as for the general U.S. foreign relations class) with Michel Gobat’s Confronting the American Dream, which covers the long occupations of Nicaragua. Gobat’s
study shows how serious the U.S. military was about implementing U.S.-style democracy
in Nicaragua. The economic policies of occupation actually ended up benefiting Nicaragua’s middle classes at the expense of the elites, and the U.S. military oversaw honest
two-party elections that dismantled networks of rural patronage. But it also built up an
elite constabulary force to protect those elections, and when the U.S. military departed in
1933, the head of that force, Anastasio Somoza, took power. A dictatorship was not the
United States’ preferred outcome—but it was an acceptable one, since Somoza granted
privileges to U.S. businesses and fulfilled larger geostrategic needs during World War II
and the Cold War. His family held political power, at great cost to the Nicaraguan people,
until they were overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. Gobat’s book—not by accident
but without heavy-handedness—reminds students of the recent war in Iraq. That week
we can debate the question, “Could the United States have created a democracy in Nicaragua through military occupation?”—which gives students the opportunity to think
about the motivations of U.S. and non-U.S. actors who are well represented in Gobat’s
book. By the time we read Smedley Butler, the disgruntled U.S. Marine who declared that
he had been a “racketeer for capitalism” when he oversaw occupations in the Caribbean,
we can debate whether or not he was right.4
When we arrive at the post–World War II period and the dawn of the Cold War, we
revisit and extend Rosenberg’s theses on liberal-developmentalism with the introduction
to Victoria de Grazia’s book Irresistible Empire. There, de Grazia posits the United States
as a “Market Empire,” to distinguish it from European territorial empires. She defines the
market empire as having five qualities: it gives other nations limited sovereignty over their
public space; it exports its civil society, along with and sometimes ahead of its economic
exports; it has the power of norms-making; it has a democratic ethos; and it is apparently
peaceable when compared with European militarism. It is through this lens that we look
at the Marshall Plan, the occupation of Japan, and the United States’ perceived need not
4
Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, N.C., 2005).
Smedley Butler, “America’s Armed Forces,” Common Sense, 4 (Nov. 1935), 8.
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only to eliminate reactionary nationalism but also to reduce the power of the Left in its
areas of influence. But this is combined with a discussion of the ways the practices of U.S.
power varied in different parts of the world. If de Grazia is right that the United States’
particular form of market empire was peaceable in the European context she is writing
about, that is hardly true in the rest of the world. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
market empire was far from peaceful. We talk about the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 and read Nick Cullather’s Secret History, an account based on
internal Central Intelligence Agency (cia) documents of the overthrow of the left-wing
nationalist Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. That book interrogates the relationship
between the U.S. government and the United Fruit Company, whose lands Arbenz expropriated by paying them the value they had declared for tax purposes (which was, of
course, far less than their actual worth). With this background, we can get directly back
to the student who asserted that the United States intervenes in the defense of democracy,
exploring through debate the meaning of democracy for the United States and its relationship to capitalism broadly and particular business interests narrowly.5
I usually devote two weeks to Vietnam. We read a chapter from Walt Rostow’s modernization manifesto, The Stages of Economic Growth. We use Mark Atwood Lawrence’s
short introduction to the conflict in the second week. And we read Graham Greene’s
novel The Quiet American as a break from more technical writing and because it engages
students’ imaginations with what the United States “should” have done in Vietnam. Although the character of the American Alden Pyle is more naïve than the real-life people
he was based on, the basic dilemma of U.S. foreign policy is so well expressed in that novel and so frequently repeated: the United States, in seeking to be both anticolonial and
­anticommunist, convinces itself that one or another “third force” will be the reliable ally it
needs to bring about the political and economic modernization it seeks. But the allies do
not always exist, and the process of inventing them is frequently full of cruelty and selfdelusion. The debate that week usually has three positions: one asserting the United States
should have withdrawn completely from Vietnam, one saying it should have supported
Ho Chi Minh, and one saying it should have tried to create a “third force.”6
Reliably, one of the liveliest debates of the year focuses on the behavior of Henry Kissinger. Because he is considered simultaneously the most effective secretary of state of the
last seventy years and a war criminal, the debate circles around whether or not Kissinger
should be put on trial for his actions. We watch parts of Eugene Jarecki’s 2002 documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger (based on Christopher Hitchens’s similarly titled polemic), which makes the affirmative case. I generally focus the readings on Chile. We read
briefly about the free-market experiment that followed Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of
the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. Almost no one comes away with a positive appraisal of Kissinger. But whether he is criminally liable is another matter, and that becomes the
subject of the debate. Kissinger might be protected by his position, where everyone has to
make decisions that result in deaths. Or it might be that he simply is not sufficiently responsible for the outcome in Chile. We watch clips from Patricio Guzmán’s documentary
5
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.,
2005), 8. Nick Cullather, Secret History: The cia’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954
(Stanford, 1999).
6
W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (Cambridge, Eng., 1960); Mark
Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York, 2008). Graham Greene, The Quiet
American (London, 1955).
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film The Battle of Chile, which shows deep divisions in Chilean society, even within its
left. Students read primary documents from Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, showing
the cia’s actions in Chile to destabilize Allende, and a review of the book by the Chilean
scholar Joaquín Fermandois, who argues that the documents actually show events getting
away from the cia, whatever its intentions. Figuring out a position on this debate thus
provides an opportunity to go beyond whether or not one likes Kissinger and requires
thinking through complicated issues of historical causation.7
One of the challenges of the political economy approach lies in convincing students
that it will meet their expectations of what the class should be. After all, some students are
enthusiastic about history precisely because of an interest in military and diplomatic history, which I deliberately deemphasize. I do not talk very much about tanks or weapons,
except to point out how the size and productivity of the U.S. economy gave it important
long-run advantages in its conflicts with Germany and the Soviet Union.
The end of the course, however, does make an important concession to the military experience. In talking about the war on terror, students watch the Sebastian Junger and Tim
Hetherington 2010 documentary Restrepo, about the experience of a platoon deployed in
Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. At the same time, we read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006), which covers postwar “reconstruction” in Iraq. Junger
and Hetherington’s document is deeply respectful of the experience of the enlisted soldier,
and it refuses to editorialize on the war. It becomes a kind of Rorschach test for student
thinking: some find the risks and sacrifices borne by the soldiers thrilling, others find
them horrifyingly pointless. But both the film and Chandrasekaran’s book make clear that
military victory is one thing, reconstruction is another. We are, in many ways, back to
the beginning of the course, and Rosenberg’s concept of liberal-developmentalism. Chandrasekaran is very clear that the United States’ efforts to introduce U.S.-style conservative
capitalism—all the way down to co-pays for medical visits—was an important part of the
disaster of Iraq. (As was the George W. Bush Administration’s refusal to think through
the political economy of dictatorship.) But it is also clear from Restrepo how far that goal
of sociopolitical transformation and “Americanization” is from the military realities on
the ground. That week’s debate question asks simply whether postwar chaos in Iraq and
Afghanistan was inevitable, bringing us back to the questions that we began with when
talking about the Philippines and Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. Almost all of
the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan I have had in class have had strong views
about what might have been done better and how they might have been better served by
their civilian commanders. But they also have emerged skeptical of the alignment of U.S.
goals, practices, and rhetoric. Generally, the students who are most inclined to wave the
flag are those planning military careers but who have not yet served—and this debate allows for a useful and respectful exchange of views across different phases of military careers and across the civilian-military divide.8
7
The Trials of Henry Kissinger, dir. Eugene Jarecki (First Run, 2002). Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry
Kissinger (London, 2001). The Battle of Chile: Part I, dir. Patricio Guzmán (Equipo Tercer Año, 1975); The Battle of
Chile: Part II, dir. Patricio Guzmán (Equipo Tercer Año, 1976); The Battle of Chile: Part III, dir. Patricio Guzmán
(Equipo Tercer Año, 1979). Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
(New York, 2003); Joaquín Fermandois, “The Persistence of a Myth: Chile in the Eye of the Cold War Hurricane,”
World Affairs, 167 (Winter 2005), 101–12.
8
Restrepo, dir. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (Outpost Films, 2010). Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial
Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York, 2006).
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Since we have practiced reading primary documents throughout the class, and endeavored to understand the actions of historical people through the lens of their own
experiences and perspectives, I end the class by having students locate primary sources
to explore a topic that interests them. Generally, this means guiding students to the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, which are now available online. The
National Security Archive, which works to declassify government material, has databases
and briefing books on topics in the decades not yet available in FRUS. Depending on
prior levels of student preparation, I provide more or less structured support to these final
presentations, but the fundamental goal remains to present primary documents, explain
what they mean, and set them in the context of what we have discussed and debated in
class.9
The fundamental idea of political economy is to study politics and economics as an
interconnected system. This course has been designed to provide students with tools they
can use to perform that sort of analysis and to apply it to an understanding of the U.S.
role in the world in the twentieth century. Many students enter with one of two beliefs
about the United States and its foreign policy: either that it is fundamentally good and
advancing democracy around the world, or that it is fundamentally malign and destroying democracy around the world. Regardless of where the students begin, my goal is to
get them to a position from which they will begin to ask whom U.S. foreign policy has
benefited and in what ways. I hope it provides students with a well-rounded sense of the
sources of U.S. power—including its cultural and economic influence. The goal of historical study is not to predict the future, but I think this approach is the right one to prepare
students to understand the present and future of U.S. power, whether they plan to work
for the U.S. government or act as its critics.
9
The Department of State now issues Foreign Relations of the United States digitally. See Foreign Relations of the
United States, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. The University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries has
digitized older volumes. See Foreign Relations of the United States, https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/frus/
National Security Archive, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/.