Term Paper on "America's Rise to World Power"

Term Paper 15 pages (4627 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Boot's book, the Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, adopts the topic of a handful of recent works focusing upon the oftentimes overlooked conflicts in American history. Essentially, Boot attempts to chronicle a history of the United States' more minor conflicts, yet he does so from an unabashedly neoconservative and neo-imperial perspective. In other words, Boot claims that small conflicts, which are typically those over colonies and foreign resources, are necessary to the overall creation and survival of an empire. Boot, by documenting the success and failures of the United States' military machine over the past several centuries, attempts to generate a picture of how American power has expanded and been sustained. He writes, "If there is one theme that emerges from this book it is that, though the reasons have changed over the years, the United States has always found itself being drawn into the 'the savage wars of peace.' America's strategic situation today presents more opportunities than ever before for such entanglements," (Book xix). To Boot, these conflicts are central toward the creation of empire, and they become increasingly inevitable as the United States assumes the role of a global police force, as well as a massive economic entity, possessing vast corporate interests abroad.

Other authors, most notably Sam Sarkesian, have termed the wars Boot focuses upon "forgotten" wars. Essentially, the overlooked wars of America's past have landed in an obscure place in history specifically because they were unsuccessful and unconventional: they were not the grand, strategic battles of the First or Second World Wars. This, it would seem, is one of Boot's major motivations for focusing upon these conflicts: they are little-known and little understood. Yet, according to Boot, they provide valuable lessons militaristically and diplomatically for the present and the future; after all, Boot believes that such wars are, on the whole, unavoidable.

Nevertheless, the United States continues to approach military training, practice, policies, and implementation in preparation for another conventional war, and this has been one of the repeated mistakes made by military command over the years. The fact remains that many of America's past conflicts have been waged against vastly inferior forces and, accordingly, have followed the patterns of counterrevolutionary or insurgent warfare. Additionally, with the overwhelming current American superiority in the areas of conventional warfare, Boot argues, it should be anticipated that most of the future conflicts that the United States will find itself in will be of the counterrevolutionary variety. Recognizing this, it is almost unimaginable that the United States should continue to make the mistakes of the past. Of course, Boot hopes that this book may add to the stock of knowledge surrounding unconventional wars, and help the United States avoid the mistakes of the past. Boot writes this book in a somewhat optimistic tone; he hopes that a serious examination of America's counterrevolutionary experience can set the United States military on a different course.

Boot defines a small war as a conflict that is less involved than the large, all-out wars of American history, but more than simple strategic strikes: "Small war is necessarily an elastic, inexact term. They are not America's major conventional conflicts.... nor, at the other end of the spectrum is this a book concerned with pure shows of force," (Boot xvi). He also makes it clear that small wars, by his definition, are not necessarily short in the time span; he points out that the Vietnam War lasted for decades, but must still be considered a small war. Furthermore, these wars have typically -- and, so he says, rightly -- been termed imperial conflicts (Boot xvi). Naturally, this is because small wars, from his point-of-view, involve limited engagements of large military powers against enemies possessing inferior numbers, resources, and weapons capabilities. These circumstances generate a setting within which non-conventional methods of warfare must be employed by the conventionally outmanned forces if they have any hope of defeating the imperial forces against whom they fight.

Boot attempts to tell this story of America's rise to global power in three major steps; he characterizes three phases of American military history, and details the history of the small wars that took place in these phases. First, he describes three small wars America found itself in during it's time as a "commercial power." These occurred in the nineteenth century, during a time in which the United States' federal government, according to Boot, was not altogether powerful enough to completely cash-in, in a militaristic sense, on the growing economic might of the young nation. This changes, says Boot, in the first half of the twentieth century when America began to make its colonial interests abroad felt, largely by scooping-up many of the Central American colonies the Spanish could no longer sustain. Prior to the Second World War, Boot describes the United States as one of the "great powers." However, after World War II, and few would argue against this point, the United States emerges as a global "superpower." This portion of the book primarily handles the war in Vietnam and the lessons that the military should take away from this failed small war.

Boot is widely known as an author and historian who does not shy away from the notion that the Untied States has repeatedly gone to war for the purposes of economic prosperity, and that this is oftentimes the obligation of powerful nations to do so. In this light, he describes the United States' first small war, the Barbary Wars, as the nation's first step toward becoming the world's police force. This is because, he argues, the United States involved itself in this conflict in an effort to expand open trade in the seas, and make their economic interests felt abroad. Accordingly, the Barbary Wars were a supreme success for the United States' navy, and started to increase the nation's economic toeholds overseas.

Boot writes, "Much of the growing American role overseas needed no guidance from Washington. It was a result of the restless Yankee's inexorable progress across the North American continent and beyond, a process dubbed 'manifest destiny' by journalist John O'Sulliban in 1839," (Boot 39). In other words, Boot contends that the expansion of the United States on the North American continent -- which was, to a substantial extent, achieved by the army's actions against Native Americans and the Mexicans -- provided an exponentially growing stock of resources and wealth for the young nation. This, in turn, made it possible for the navy to start making its power felt overseas. Although the army was continually embroiled in these conflicts of expansion, and little attention was paid to the navy, America's small wars of the nineteenth century often involved overzealous admirals and other naval officials who believed they saw opportunities for expansion and exploitation.

Another obvious reason why America's wars abroad remained small wars, says Boot, is because of the general isolationist attitude that the nation came to embrace at repeated times in it's history. Essentially, it was widely believed that very little money and resources needed to be applied to defending the United States from external threats -- which would have required the creation of a large and powerful navy -- simply because the nation was so isolated geographically from any significant threats. He writes, "Congress did not want to spend much money on defense and, with wide expanses of open space on either side of the United States, did not feel that it needed to do so," (Boot 55). This mentality meant that America's efforts to become a colonial power during this time period would remain quite limited, and suffer failures because outright invasions were not realistically possible.

Still, Boot notes, a turning point in military history began with one of most bloody conflict in American history: the American Civil War. This was not merely a turning point because it resulted in a finally solidified and centralized federal government; it was also a turning point because it pushed the evolution of weapons technology and tactics closer to the modern age. In other words, the United States managed to build its armed forces into arguably the most advanced and formidable in the world -- at the grim cost of some six-hundred thousand lives. The Civil War became a grisly reminder that Napoleonic tactics and methods of warfare had officially become obsolete; and it also introduced the world to the first iron clad vessels. However, Boot argues, these advances were almost immediately followed by a drastic downsizing of the American military, and a return to a pacifist stance, as the nation focused upon the reconstruction of the South. Yet, although the military became smaller and far less formidable to the other world nations, it remained technologically far beyond most other nations of the world; thus permitting for a series of small military operations to expand the nation's imperialistic and colonial goals: "now U.S. forces were staying in foreign countries and trying to manipulate their politics, if not annex them outright.… READ MORE

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