Review: Irresistible Empire
| Author | Kristin Hoganson |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/002070200806300125 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 240 | International Journal | Winter 2007-08 |
IRRESISTIBLE EMPIRE
America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe
Victoria de Grazia
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 586 pp, US$19.95 paper
(ISBN 978-0674022348)
On the eve of US entry into World War I, Woodrow Wilson spoke on inter-
national affairs to a congress of salesmen gathered in Detroit. As the presi-
dent saw it, the nation faced the same options as the conventioneers: it
could force its preferences on potential markets, as German monopolists
did, or it could “study the tastes and needs of the countries where the mar-
kets were being sought and suit [its] goods to those tastes and needs.” That,
insisted the president, was the American way, in statecraft as well as com-
merce (1). And that, suggests de Grazia, was the fundamental approach of
what she terms the “market empire,” a “great imperium with the outlook of
a great emporium,” a US enterprise commanded more by Rotary Club mem-
bers, advertising executives, chain store magnates, and Hollywood produc-
FDR’s desire to prolong the phony war as long as possible so as to maxi-
mize America’s options in an uncertain geopolitical climate, Rofe argues
that one of Welles’s key tasks was to prod Mussolini to continue keeping
Italy out of the war. Rofe also demonstrates that Welles acted as much as a
collector of information as he did an advocate for peace. Most intriguing,
though, is Rofe’s assertion that Roosevelt knew full well that the Welles mis-
sion faced insurmountable obstacles but that it proceeded anyway because
“the Roosevelt Administration had become accustomed to working in the
margins of diplomacy, developing policies that were extremely unlikely to
succeed outright but, critically, might be able to advance other objectives”
(12). In classic Rooseveltian fashion, then, the president used whatever
means were at his disposal to carve some desperately needed breathing
room for the United States. By deftly linking domestic opinion and politics
to foreign policy and by bringing a transatlantic scope to Europe’s phony
war of 1939-40, Rofe succeeds in casting the Welles mission in a new,
important light.
Andrew Preston/Cambridge University
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