Corporate Power and Foreign Policy: Efforts of American Oil Companies to Influence United States Relations With Mexico, 1921?1928

Abstract

The view that large business corporations in the United States dominate the nation's polity and economy has been a persistent theme in social science literature since the end of the nineteenth century.1 Those who hold this view perceive corporations as virtual empires, deriving their power from economic concentration, which have managed over the past decades to subvert most social institutions to their purposes and to attain a near monopoly over decisions affecting the domestic and foreign policies of the United States. In the field of foreign policy, according to this thesis, the fundamental objectives of the corporations–expansion and profit–have become identical with the national interest. Consequently, the corporations have been able to exert effective influence on foreign policy, and to reap substantial private benefits from their intimate relationship with government. The petroleum industry is frequently cited as an example of effective corporate influence on foreign policy.2 This is in part the result of the high visibility of this industry, whose operations and products have affected the lives of an increasing number of Americans since the turn of the century. It also reflects the image created by a long series of congressional investigations designed to expose the economic power and political machinations of oil companies. Whatever the validity of these charges, they are considerably easier to assert than to prove. Many of the works purporting to document the influential role of oil companies within the foreign-policy decision-making process often contain little more than unwarranted assumptions and dubious inferences.