全球智库信息集成服务系统

The sixteen national security strategies issued by presidents Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama reaffirmed U.S. leadership of a liberal international order, even as they acknowledged it enabled the rise of others and eroded U.S. economic dominance. President Donald Trump may decide that is no longer tenable. His forthcoming national security strategy will be closely scrutinized to understand what “America First” means for the U.S. role in the world and whether it represents a shift toward a narrower, neo-mercantile approach. 

A Potential Historic Turning Point

• Historically, discussion of mercantilism has resurfaced in moments of upheaval, when accepted ideas on the relationship between politics and economics are thrown into question. 
• In response to a financial crisis and structural shifts in the global economy, Obama pursued a strategic rebalance that sought to wind down major ground wars, increase investments in long-term U.S. competitiveness in an open-trading system, and strengthen U.S. partnerships in emerging centers of global economic growth.
• Like previous presidents, Obama rejected nationalism and protectionism, concluding that the absolute benefits from supporting allies and globalization far outweighed the costs and risks.
• The Trump administration has sent mixed messages about its strategy—at times signaling a neo-mercantile, transactional vision for the United States’ alliances and role.

Key Issues to Note in Trump’s Strategy

Does it acknowledge the limits of protectionism? Previous administrations did not do enough to assist Americans losing out from globalization. Protectionist measures could aid certain struggling industries, but if reciprocated, they could have significant negative consequences, especially for U.S. businesses and consumers benefiting from an open, global economy. Further, trade is not the only culprit. Myriad factors—from technology to underinvestment in education and job training—have contributed to job losses and stagnant wages.

Does it view trade in both strategic and economic terms? Trade has been a central pillar in U.S. strategy—not only to buttress economic growth but also to build partnerships with states with shared interests and values. If the alliance system weakens due to heightened friction over trade, it could undermine U.S. political and security interests.

How does it propose to avoid the increased threat of war that characterized the mercantile period? U.S. administrations since 1945 have recognized the value of international institutions and conventions that provide a framework for nations to compete, cooperate, and resolve differences peacefully. Absent U.S. leadership and support, this framework will weaken and the risk of interstate conflict will rise.

Introduction

The preparation of a national security strategy provides U.S. presidents and their administrations an opportunity to explain how they see the country’s place and role in the world. As the global environment evolves, it is natural for strategies to evolve accordingly. However, in the sixteen national security strategies submitted to Congress by presidents Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, pursuant to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, certain core beliefs have largely held constant. Each president has used the national security strategy to reaffirm a central principle: that the United States should employ its unrivaled power to defend and advance a liberal international order based on strong alliances in Europe and Asia, open markets, and the promotion of democracy. In this respect, they have demonstrated remarkable continuity. It is not yet clear whether President Donald Trump will follow suit, but we may soon find out.

Trump’s administration is now preparing the seventeenth national security strategy. It is likely to be the most widely read and closely scrutinized in many years, both in the United States and abroad.

Trump’s administration is now preparing the seventeenth national security strategy. It is likely to be the most widely read and closely scrutinized in many years, both in the United States and abroad. The exercise is being overseen by the national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, a well-respected military strategic thinker. They face a daunting task.

In addition to overcoming legitimate confusion and skepticism about the purpose and value of the national security strategy, they will need to address prevailing questions about Trump’s America First vision. What does it mean, in practical terms, for the conduct of U.S. foreign, defense, and international economic policy? How will the strategy adapt or rework the seventy-year-old, bipartisan consensus that U.S. interests are best secured by upholding a liberal international order? Is America First compatible with the principles of leadership and mutual benefit that have permeated every national security strategy since the first one issued by Reagan in 1987? Or does America First really mean “America Only” and therefore represent a more fundamental tilt toward a zero-sum vision of relations among nations?

In their Wall Street Journal op-ed of May 30, 2017, McMaster and the director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, offered a preliminary answer, indicating that “America First does not mean America alone” and proclaiming that “strong alliances and economically thriving partners” are a “vital American interest.”¹ They elaborated in their New York Times op-ed of July 13, 2017, that “America First is grounded in American values—values that not only strengthen America but also drive progress throughout the world.”² They reaffirmed that “America champions the dignity of every person, affirms the equality of women, celebrates innovation, protects freedom of speech and of religion, and supports free and fair markets.”³ These statements bear striking similarity to those found in the previous sixteen national security strategies. 

Yet one sentence in McMaster and Cohn’s Wall Street Journal op-ed has commanded the most attention: “the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, on July 6, 2017, Trump referred on several occasions to the “community of nations.”⁴ But against the backdrop of what he has said and tweeted about the need for the United States to take a more assertive approach to protecting its own interests, and about the doubtful value to the United States of many traditional U.S. alliances and trade agreements, some have pounced on this Hobbesian portrait of the international system as confirmation that Trump aims to break sharply with his predecessors and resurrect a kind of political and economic nationalism from an earlier era—mercantilism.

Mercantilism has become a meme in covering Trump. A simple Google search for “Trump” and “mercantilism” produces thousands of hits, in publications ranging from obscure financial blogs to the pinnacles of the mainstream media.

Mercantilism has become a meme in covering Trump. A simple Google search for “Trump” and “mercantilism” produces thousands of hits, in publications ranging from obscure financial blogs to the pinnacles of the mainstream media. “Mr. Trump is bringing mercantilism back,” observed Binyamin Appelbaum in the New York Times, “challenging the last 200 years of economic orthodoxy that trade among nations is good, and that more is better.”⁵ “The benighted mercantilist policies reflected in slogans such as ‘America First’ . . . will be disastrous,” warns the economic historian Joel Mokyr.⁶ Trump has “expressed a mercantilist view of foreign policy. . . . in which countries took resources and constructed security arrangements that focused only on the direct immediate benefit to themselves,” wrote Charles Szrom.⁷ Looking at the composition of Trump’s cabinet, Dan Kopf writes in the online magazine Quartz that “Trump’s administration is packed with mercantilists.”⁸ These examples could be multiplied with ease.

With the continuing high degree of uncertainty over the relationship between presidential rhetoric and policy action, it is still too early to clearly characterize Trump’s strategic approach, whether in mercantilist terms or otherwise. And it is not just about Trump. Historically, interest in mercantilism has tended to resurface in moments of profound upheaval, when accepted ideas on the relationship between politics and economics are thrown into question.⁹ The great studies of the subject were penned in Germany during the period of rapid industrialization and urbanization following unification in 1871 and in the years after the Great Depression of the 1930s. And mercantile ideas found a new audience during the 1970s, when president Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries succeeded in significantly increasing oil prices, and the world fell into recession for the first time in more than forty years.¹⁰

It is unsurprising, therefore, that discussion of mercantilism has reappeared today, as the United States struggles to (1) come to terms with the underlying causes and consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, (2) restore higher and more inclusive economic growth, (3) address a multitude of new challenges in labor markets due to rapid changes in technology and globalization, and (4) contend with the rise of China and the success of its alternative model of state capitalism—a model that has generated more than three decades of sustained economic growth.

Historically, interest in mercantilism has tended to resurface in moments of profound upheaval, when accepted ideas on the relationship between politics and economics are thrown into question.

As the moment and the man now occupying the White House thrust the term back into the public discourse, it is useful to refresh our understanding of mercantilism and situate some of the strategic choices now confronting the Trump administration within a longer historical debate. U.S. presidents have faced similar choices in the last sixteen national security strategies, and each time, to a certain degree, Republican and Democratic administrations alike rejected unbridled nationalism, protectionism, and a zero-sum conception of international trade. They did so knowing that while the United States remained the world’s preeminent economic and military power, over time its relative strength was declining. In his two national security strategies, Obama likewise rejected that course, reaffirming that U.S. leadership and sustainment of the liberal international order best served long-term U.S. interests. But he also concluded that a significant strategic rebalance in the ways and means the United States engaged in the world was required for it to both compete and cooperate more effectively with other nations.

The Trump team faces the same fundamental challenge. It could use its forthcoming strategy to reaffirm the U.S.-led international order, while offering different ways and means to enhance the position of the United States within it; or it could abandon this order in favor of pursuing U.S. interests defined in far more narrow, neo-mercantile terms. How the team answers a few key questions in that document will offer important clues as to the choice they are making.

What Is Mercantilism?

Given its frequent invocation over the past year, it is fair to ask: what is mercantilism? The answer is more complicated than one might think. To begin with, no one consciously set out to define or pursue policies under the name mercantilism. Rather, the term has become shorthand for describing a common set of practices and policies that evolved in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, as the very notion of the nation state was taking hold and long-distance maritime trade between Europe and Africa, Asia, and the Americas was rapidly accelerating. In navigating these fundamental transformations, leading merchants and statesmen departed from classical and medieval ideas to radically reconceive the relationship between wealth and power. Although there was considerable disagreement among individual mercantilists on matters of policy, they shared a basic project: to organize all instruments of state power to expand trade and industry, more effectively compete with foreign rivals, and enable their sovereigns to amass the resources required for war.

The term mercantilism was used for the first time in the 1750s, when French physiocrat Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, derided what he called the “mercantile system.” Twenty years later, Adam Smith carried Mirabeau’s critique further, devoting nearly a quarter of his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (hereafter The Wealth of Nations) to a systematic analysis of the limitations and failures of mercantile policy. From the beginning, mercantilism was a creation of its critics.

In the current context, the most salient features of mercantilism include a rejection of communitarian arguments in favor of explicit political and economic nationalism; a zero-sum conception of the benefits to individual states from international trade; and, at least partly as a consequence of these features, frequent and intense intra-European conflict.

In orientation, mercantilism was fundamentally nationalist.¹¹ Its authors implicitly refused to be guided by rules and dictates set by those beyond their borders—whether other states or the church and the Holy Roman Empire, which in theory at least claimed dominion over all of Christendom. Instead, they addressed their proposals to monarchs and parliaments within the confines of the newly forming national borders. At the same time, within those borders, mercantilists sought to strengthen the state against internal rivals such as the nobility, guilds, and other actors. To be clear, this was not the nineteenth-century nationalism of blood and soil. While stereotypes of national character appear frequently in mercantile texts, the focus was squarely on strengthening the state as an institution. In this way, mercantilists made a central contribution to the erosion of inherited norms of Christian virtue and community that governed the political conduct of princes and replaced them with arguments based on raison d’état—arguments suited to a system of sovereign states self-consciously pursuing their own interests in rivalry with one another.¹²

In orientation, mercantilism was fundamentally nationalist. Its authors implicitly refused to be guided by rules and dictates set by those beyond their borders.

Power and plenty, as the economist and historian Jacob Viner explained, were the twin goals of mercantile policy. Mercantilists “sought enough superiority of power to ‘give the law’ to other countries, to enable conquest of adjoining territory or overseas colonies, or to defeat their enemies in war. It was general doctrine that strength was necessary as a means of protecting wealth and of augmenting it, while wealth was a strategic resource necessary to produce strength and to support its exercise.”¹³ The classic example of this interdependence of wealth and power is provided by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, first minister to Louis XIV of France. Colbert undertook literally dozens of projects to increase the prosperity of the kingdom, using the power of the crown to nurture French industry, encourage the construction of public works, attract skilled artisans from abroad, and open new markets to French overseas trade. This wealth, in turn, was made available when necessary to enhance the prestige and power of the king. “Trade is the source of finance,” Colbert famously wrote, “and finance is the vital nerve of war.”¹⁴

To the modern reader, the intimate link drawn here between money and power is entirely familiar. But in Colbert’s time, it was radically new—a consequence of the increasing importance of commerce to the successful conduct of statecraft. In medieval Europe, trade and industry were primarily a matter for the towns and cities—pursuits appropriate to the merchant but well beneath the status and majesty of a king. By the late seventeenth century, a ruler who neglected to cultivate trade and industry risked forfeiting a leading role in European politics.¹⁵ Contemporary anxieties about the United States’ ability to compete with China and the potential consequences for international politics are the modern expression of this challenge. Economic statecraft—meaning both the use of economic tools to achieve diplomatic ends and the use of diplomatic and military tools to advance economic objectives—is an inheritance from mercantilism.¹⁶

With few exceptions, mercantilists believed that international trade was zero-sum—at least in terms of the consequences for each individual state.

That does not mean, of course, that mercantilists conceived of trade in exactly the way that most economists do today. With few exceptions, mercantilists believed that international trade was zero-sum—at least in terms of the consequences for each individual state. Gains by one necessarily meant losses for another. In the extreme, this logic led some mercantilists to conclude that famine or pestilence in a rival state increased wealth at home. But in general, it manifested in a fixation with maintaining a favorable balance of trade. By ensuring that exports exceeded imports, the reasoning went, the state was guaranteed a steady income in precious metals, a critical resource for outfitting armies and navies, procuring military supplies, hiring mercenaries, and providing subsidies to allies in wartime. States employed numerous means to ensure a favorable balance of trade, including inducements or regulations designed to promote domestic manufacturing in specific sectors, tariffs, or other restrictions on the import of foreign goods, and in some cases, even legal prohibitions on making overseas payments in gold and silver.¹⁷

For Adam Smith, such measures made little sense: wealth consisted not in gold or silver but in the commodities that those metals could be used to buy. The balance of trade, from this perspective, was irrelevant, so long as trade allowed each country to benefit from its unique comparative advantage and increase its access to goods—and thus its wealth.

But mercantilists were less sanguine. They recognized that possession of precious metals was critical to the European balance of power. The discovery by Spain in the early sixteenth century of rich mines in the New World provided the Habsburg monarchs with a significant advantage over rival states—especially China, where European trade was conducted almost exclusively in silver until well into the eighteenth century.¹⁸ More generally, the combination of intra-European religious and dynastic conflicts with intense competition to secure markets and territory outside Europe sharply elevated the appeal of zero-sum arguments. Control over trade with Africa and Asia, for example, was the primary cause of three Anglo-Dutch wars in the mid-seventeenth century—wars that ultimately signaled the decline of Dutch commercial hegemony and its replacement by England as the preeminent naval power. More generally, European rulers were largely content to accept a state of near-constant warfare among their subjects “beyond the line,” at least until the 1640s.¹⁹ And for far longer, European wars spilled into the colonies or, conversely, originated in the colonies and spilled into Europe, as was the case with the Seven Years’ War between France and England in the mid-eighteenth century.

The tight analogy between the balance of trade and the balance of power that mercantilists drew contributed to a bellicose approach to foreign policy and to the frequency and intensity of warfare during the mercantile period.

The tight analogy between the balance of trade and the balance of power that mercantilists drew contributed to a bellicose approach to foreign policy and to the frequency and intensity of warfare during the mercantile period. Later writers would reject this analogy, arguing instead that the mutual benefits from trade made commerce an alternative to conquest or war.²⁰

The Liberal Critique

Mercantilism was at once too ingrained and too diffuse to simply vanish, but by the end of the eighteenth century, its core principles were under sustained attack. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, mercantile policies were being replaced across Europe by an entirely different conception of political economy—liberalism. This transformation was solidified by the rise of Britain as the world’s dominant industrial, commercial, and financial power.

The most comprehensive assault on mercantilism was Adam Smith’s. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith explained how exchange between private individuals seeking to fulfill their own self-interest could, by an “invisible hand,” lead to benefits shared by society as a whole. What was true for the individual was also true for commerce between nations: through free exchange, each nation could find buyers for the surplus of its industries and ready access to goods unavailable at home or produced more cheaply abroad. While Smith recognized that the importation of foreign goods might harm a specific industry, he argued that the negative impact was more than compensated by the increase in overall wealth from trade. Rather than attempt to regulate this exchange, it was the responsibility of statesmen to create the most favorable conditions for it to flourish and to leave questions of trade to the merchants who understood them best.

Few, if any, of these ideas were entirely original.²¹ In the 1590s, at the peak of the first global empire built by Philip II of Spain, the lapsed Jesuit Giovanni Botero speculated that God created the seas to allow men to exchange with one another, to the benefit of all. The Dutch cloth manufacturer Pieter de la Court argued in the 1660s that state monopolies, by reducing the volume of trade, inhibited the accumulation of wealth. In the 1750s, Baron de Montesquieu explored in The Spirit of Laws how harmony could result from a balance of competing interests and how commerce could create bonds between potential adversaries. And Smith’s mentor, David Hume, attacked what he called the “jealousy of trade,” a common (but in his view unfounded) belief that one nation could flourish only at the expense of another:

Nothing is more usual, among states which have made some advances in commerce, than to look on the progress of their neighbours with a suspicious eye, to consider all trading states as their rivals, and to suppose that it is impossible for any of them to flourish, but at their expense. In opposition to this narrow and malignant opinion, I will venture to assert that the increase of riches and commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its neighbours; and that a state can scarcely carry its trade and industry very far, where all the surrounding states are buried in ignorance, sloth, and barbarism.²²

Smith’s synthesis placed enlightened self-interest at the center of political economy. If trade was positive-sum, the objective of statecraft was not to diminish the wealth of rivals but to foster economic liberty and commerce among nations to the benefit of all. His internationalism was not blind to power politics: Smith was clear on the state’s responsibility for national defense and readily accepted that trade in certain items related to military purposes should be restricted. But he decidedly tilted the balance from power to plenty. To the extent the state interfered in normal trade, it did so to its own detriment. Instead, the state’s role should be to administer justice, erect public works and public institutions (among which Smith included public education), and establish an environment conducive to commerce. These ideas have been greatly elaborated and formalized since Smith’s time, but they remain to this day the core of liberal thought and the substance of economics textbooks read by millions of students worldwide.

Smith’s synthesis placed enlightened selfinterest at the center of political economy. If trade was positive-sum, the objective of statecraft was not to diminish the wealth of rivals but to foster economic liberty and commerce among nations to the benefit of all.

That Smith’s ideas gained such currency is largely a consequence of Britain’s meteoric rise in the nineteenth century. As Smith was composing The Wealth of Nations, the Industrial Revolution was already gaining momentum all around him, though he never gave it a name. Its transformation of British society is visible in his illustration of the pin factory where, by the division of labor, ten men could produce 48,000 pins in a day, when a generation earlier, working alone, each man could produce in a day no more than twenty.²³ These explosive gains in productivity were augmented by the widespread introduction of steam power in the 1780s. Britain’s dominance of the seas, its growing financial might, and the tremendous wealth flowing from its colonies established it as the first genuine global power.

With its significant edge in manufacturing and its global reach, no one benefitted from this opening of trade more than Britain. Beginning in the 1820s, Britain and then other European states began reducing duties and other barriers to trade. The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 eliminated virtually all trade barriers between England and France, leading to a golden age of free trade that lasted until the late 1870s. At the same time, Britain’s defense expenditures were reduced to between 2 and 3 percent of its gross national product.²⁴ Britain sought to maintain a balance of power in continental Europe but largely abstained from military intervention there, instead employing force primarily to open trade to new areas and preserve its access to existing markets, notably in Africa, China, India, and Latin America. London’s sophisticated financial institutions provided both liquidity and stability that facilitated the rapid expansion of international trade.

The United States was slow to embrace trade liberalization, and when it did so, the benefits were viewed largely through the prism of geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union.

There were of course limits to Britain’s influence; it could not, for example, compel the United States to abandon the protectionist policies it maintained throughout the nineteenth century.²⁵ And there is a far darker story of coercion, exploitation, and social and economic dislocation on a vast scale that was a direct consequence of British colonial policy. But Britain’s vision for the international order—for a Pax Britannica—explicitly rejected mercantile competition in favor of a model of interstate harmony built and sustained by increasing material prosperity.

National Security Strategies From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush

The United States inherited the mantle of British global hegemony, reluctantly, at the end of the First World War and ultimately embraced it after 1945. The transition between hegemons was perhaps uniquely cooperative and nonviolent, but it did not result in a simple continuation of the British liberal tradition.²⁶ The reality is more complicated. The United States was slow to embrace trade liberalization, and when it did so, the benefits were viewed largely through the prism of geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. Once the Cold War ended, the United States embraced trade liberalization afresh, leading to a rapid acceleration of global trade and financial flows. The new U.S.-led liberal order would bring enormous benefits in terms of increasing absolute wealth at home and abroad, but it also increased the U.S. economy’s exposure to foreign competition and contributed to a gradual erosion of its relative economic dominance.

The United States was staunchly protectionist throughout the nineteenth century and in the years leading up to the First World War. Tariffs were further increased during the interwar period, culminating in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 and reciprocal policies across Europe that accelerated and deepened the consequences of the Great Depression. Trade liberalization began in earnest only after the Second World War, with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade signed by twenty-three nations in Geneva in 1947.²⁷ Even after the United States became the champion of free trade abroad, it contended with the periodic resurgence of protectionist impulses at home. For example, as trade surpluses with Japan and other countries turned to deficits in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. trade policy reflected increasing domestic sensitivity to perceptions of unfair foreign trading practices.²⁸ This led at times to restricting imports, from steel and automobiles to textiles and televisions.

But U.S. trade policy cannot be understood in isolation from broader concerns about national security. In the wake of the Second World War,