| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

US Economic Statecraft for Survival, 1933–1991: Of Sanctions, Embargoes, and Economic Warfare. By Alan P. Dobson. (New York: Routledge, 2002. viii, 376 pp. $95.00, ISBN 0-415-28184-9.)
Scholars of U.S. economic statecraft inevitably have to address a puzzling question. Why would the country that championed the Open Door world economy and the principle of neutral trading rights in war become the world's most prolific employer of economic sanctions? Alan P. Dobson explains this paradox by meticulously reconstructing policy-making debates as to the relationship between trade and the threats posed to national survival vis-à-vis rival imperial powers.	1
The origins of the U.S. sanctions policy are traced to World War II, during which Washington not only practiced economic warfare; the pressures of total war led it to use extraterritorial coercion against neutral trade with the Axis, contrary to the principles it propounded from the early years of the Republic. After World War II, it simultaneously created a liberal trading order and waged "cold economic warfare" (p. 291) against the Soviet Union once Washington was convinced that there was a security threat comparable to that of the Axis. In contrast to its wartime practice, it abjured coercion when confronted with allies who were unwilling to go as far as Washington preferred because "the alliance would have experienced severe rupture and ... American power would have diminished, not expanded" (p. 3).	. . .

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