During the end of the 1990s, globalism for most Americans meant an exhilarating combination of political security and economic prosperity. The Cold War had dissipated, while wages and profits seemed on an endless uptick. Intervention in a new outbreak of the Balkan wars came in association with some of the major western European states and partly under the aegis of NATO, but the reaction against the U.S. bombing of Belgrade illustrated just how tenuous alliance policy really was. For the administration of President Bill Clinton and most Americans, globalism did not mean becoming the world's police officer, or even joining a police force with worldwide responsibilities. The United Nations was not an alliance.
But on 11 September 2001, globalism took on a new meaning. The suicide attacks by nineteen Muslim terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in the District of Columbia demonstrated that America's comfort zone, that sense of political security originally fostered by time and distance across oceans, no longer existed—not even as wishful thinking. The long-held belief in American invulnerability, enhanced by modern technology and dreams of Star War–like defenses that could not be breached, collapsed along with the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The initial response by the administration of George W. Bush was to seek revenge under the guise of "infinite justice." But that quickly gave way to the realities of identifying, locating, and either capturing or executing those who planned the hijacking of the commercial aircraft that flew into the towers and the Pentagon and their use as fuel-laden missiles. The implications of what could appear to be a "crusade" against Islam, particularly for U.S. oil policy in the Middle East, had a chastening influence, and American opinion seemed to move slowly but firmly against rash action. The administration acknowledged the difficulties and began the process of preparing the public for a long-term "war against terrorism."
Diplomats, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, fanned out around the globe in an attempt to persuade, cajole, and even bribe (with foreign aid) other states to join the war effort as allies. Two old Cold War alliances, NATO and ANZUS, each formally declared the terrorist actions an attack on the entire alliance—invoking for the first time the "an attack on one is an attack on all" clause in each treaty. Even France, seen so often as hypercritical of the United States, praised President Bush for acting in a measured, responsible fashion. The Russian Federation, with its own history of concern about Islamic political influence (Afghanistan, Chechnya), led the way for new partners in the alliance against terrorism. And the United Nations Security Council passed an emergency resolution mandating that all members assist in the international effort against such terrorist attacks. Even China agreed. Islamic nations likewise condemned the attacks but backed away from allowing the United States to launch military operations from their territory against terrorists, while in Indonesia and Pakistan there were organized public demonstrations against the United States. Clearly, nearly all states recognized that terrorism posed a deep and frightening threat to the nation-state. The immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was history's most remarkable example of global cooperation. But for how long? During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that the Soviet Union was indispensable to victory, but that alliance did not survive the end of the common crisis. How the United States came to the point of making its twenty-first-century decision on globalism is buried, but not hidden, in the past.
The Traditional View
American reluctance to participate in alliances, coalitions, and ententes was traditional until World War II. According to the conventional wisdom, in 1778, out of sheer necessity, but remembering the colonial experience of being dragged into European wars, the revolutionary leaders unhappily agreed to sign a political alliance with France. Some twenty years later, when that treaty seemingly forced the young American nation to choose between the two great antagonists in the Anglo-French conflict in Europe, the United States repudiated that alliance, fought a brief and undeclared war to make that repudiation stick, and then, embittered by the brief experience with "European-style" alliances, swore off such political activity forever. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned against "permanent alliances," and in an inaugural address Thomas Jefferson provided the slogan that Americans seem always to need for a policy—"entangling alliances with none."
For a hundred and fifteen years, until World War I, the American nation refused to indulge in the kind of international alliance politics that characterized European diplomacy. Even then, once propelled into the Great War, the United States took the moral high ground and refused to accept full membership as an ally in the coalition against the Central Powers, opting instead for the label "associated power." Disillusioned and angered by the selfishness that the European powers exhibited during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the United States attempted to withdraw from the international arena during the interwar period, only to be forced by Japanese and German aggression to come again to the rescue of the civilized world. The events of World War II forced the United States into what became a long-term alliance with Great Britain and a very short-term one with the Soviet Union. Then, as Cold War tensions mounted, the U.S. government negotiated a series of defensive mutual security alliances aimed at protecting the "free" world against Russian (communist) aggression.
Reluctant participation is clearly the tone of the entire story. Perhaps the thrust of generally accepted interpretations was best summarized by Thomas A. Bailey in his extraordinarily popular text A Diplomatic History of the American People: "The United States cannot afford to leave the world alone because the world will not leave it alone." In other words, historians have treated coalition and alliance diplomacy as part and parcel of the story of America's traditional isolationism.
Terminology
Although the American public has never drawn sharp distinctions between alliances, coalitions, and ententes, its leaders have frequently acted in a way that indicated that they understood the differences. Alliances are properly formal agreements between nations that call for specific joint action and responses to given political situations. They can be outlined verbally, but they are normally committed to paper and are, therefore, recognized in international law. Although alliances relate to wartime situations, they are usually concluded in times of peace and last for significant periods of time.
Coalitions bring to mind the various European joint efforts against France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Those wars saw various nations unite in military action against France frequently only after the fighting had actually begun. Short term and often not defined by written agreements, coalitions aim simply at the military defeat of a common enemy and do not relate to postwar considerations. Although the term is rarely applied, Russo-American cooperation during World War II against Nazi Germany was a coalition rather than an alliance. The only common ground was military victory over the enemy, and attempts by both nations to expand that limited relationship met with failure.
Entente, properly used, describes a far deeper relationship between nations than either alliance or coalition. An entente becomes possible only when two or more nations share a set of political goals and perceptions. The most obvious entente in American history has been the one that began to develop between Great Britain and the United States after the War of 1812. Frequently subjected to great strains, that entente was formalized as an alliance during World War II and the Cold War era. Such an entente is more a friendship than an alliance or coalition stimulated by sheer power politics, although the realities of international relations are never completely ignored.
Revolutionary Diplomacy: the Necessary Alliance
Historians have frequently argued that America's antipathy to political involvement with Europe originated with the colonial experiences, when European wars spread to the Western Hemisphere. Yet even a cursory glance at colonial newspapers indicates that the English settlers in America viewed the wars with France and Spain as their own. Historians agree that the colonials considered themselves Englishmen right up until the American Revolution began, and there is no evidence to show that this feeling did not extend to England's wars as well. Reluctance to pay war taxes proves nothing; taxes are generally unpopular at any time. The peace settlements negotiated by the English may have angered the colonists, but only because the treaties seemed to give more benefits to the French or Spanish than the American colonists thought necessary. Even after the revolutionary war had begun in earnest, many American leaders could not bring themselves to negotiate any sort of alliance with their traditional enemy—France.
What American leaders sought was not isolation but rather situations that clearly benefited national interests. Born into a world of traditional alliances and coalitions, the new American nation chose to avoid such associations not out of any moral or philosophical judgments, although such rhetoric abounded, but because, at least temporarily, an independent policy seemed to promise greater rewards. Thomas Paine, often misinterpreted as recommending isolation, made his point clear in the pamphlet Common Sense (1776):
Any submission to, or dependence on Great Britain, tends directly to involve this Continent in European wars and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship, and against whom we have neither anger nor complaint. As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions, which she can never do, while, by her dependence on Britain, she is made the make-weight in the scale of British politics.
Paine, who soon became impatient with the Revolution's conservatism, argued not for isolation but for a policy of impartiality designed to open all of Europe's markets to American trade. That policy, which soon stimulated America's strong support of neutral rights, hardly represented a new departure in foreign policy. The smaller nations of the world have always attempted to avoid choosing sides in struggles between the greater powers, although sheer geographic gravity made that rarely possible in Europe's history.
The debates among the revolutionary leaders over broad guidelines for American diplomats, discussions that culminated in the Model Treaty of 1776, illustrate the distinctions made by Paine. Despite the precarious military situation, some argued for only a commercial connection with France. Led by John Adams, these men obviously feared that the presence of French troops in America would mean merely swapping one imperial master for another. Although Adams's statements were couched in the broad, sweeping terms so popular with Enlightenment thinkers, his objections stemmed from two factors: his practical appraisal of America's political weakness and economic needs and his intense distrust of French motives—a distrust he held in common with his fellow New Englanders. Despite Americans' claims that they stood for a new approach to world politics—a novus ordo seculorum—they had adopted policies that were merely variations of the realistic power politics of the Europe they professed to scorn. When military necessity forced the Continental Congress to seek a military alliance with France in 1778, the terms of that treaty were not fundamentally different from alliances negotiated by European nations. The French intended the United States to become a permanent client-state of His Christian Majesty, a sentiment embodied in a clause stating that the alliance would last "from the present time and forever." A plea from the United States to Spain for a similar treaty of alliance was ignored.
Nor did the United States go about alliance diplomacy any differently than its European predecessors. The peace negotiations aimed at ending the revolutionary war found the Americans as deceptive as France. Interpreting the alliance with France as selectively binding, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay negotiated an effective and separate treaty of peace with the British—a violation of their agreement with France. Although they justified their actions by pointing out that France had intended to betray the United States, their argument contrasts sharply with the self-righteous claims that America would practice a new diplomacy in which, to quote Adams, "the dignity of North America … consists solely in reason, justice, truth, the rights of mankind, and the interests of the nations of Europe." Ironically, Franklin—a man with long experience in the world of eighteenth-century diplomacy— opposed such a violation of treaty obligations, while Adams demanded that they open negotiations with the British.
Although the treaties of alliance and commerce with France represented no breakthrough into some sort of new diplomacy, American leaders, particularly the New Englanders, viewed the new nation's diplomacy as somehow flowing from values and purposes different from those of Europe. Distracted by the social implications that went with their repudiation of an aristocratic class, many Americans confused diplomatic forms with substance. Refusal to dress like European diplomats became equated with a refusal to indulge in European-style power politics.
That image proved to be longer lasting than the alliance with France. The rhetoric of America's uniqueness and exceptionalism, something common among young, intensely nationalistic nations, meshed neatly with the notion that the United States practiced a new form of diplomacy. In reality, the only thing new about America's diplomacy was that geography permitted it to remain aloof from the constantly shifting balance of power in Europe. Hence, the decision not to join the League of Armed Neutrality was made because it was thought that the league offered no benefits to America, not because of any ideological opposition to taking sides.
By the mid-1790s, the French Alliance had become a detriment to the young republic. With the outbreak of the wars of the French Revolution, soon to merge into the Napoleonic wars, Presidents George Washington and John Adams feared that the United States would be drawn into a conflict in which it had no interest. Again myth overtook reality. French restrictions on American naval freedom appeared to be a direct retaliation for the refusal of the United States to live up to its treaty obligations, whereas the reality was that the French Directory believed that the recently negotiated commercial treaty between Britain and America (Jay's Treaty) contained secret clauses that amounted to a political alliance. The treaty contained no such political commitments, but the French argument struck home. When great powers go to war, neutrals can maintain their trade only at the risk of losing any claim to impartial economic policies. Although the United States did not sign Jay's Treaty as part of an anti-French policy, the French quite logically believed the opposite. Historians have argued that Washington's famous Farewell Address sprang primarily from domestic political considerations, but it was the awkward confrontation with France—including attempts by the French directly to influence American elections—that clearly stimulated his warning against alliances. Washington included a caveat that Americans soon forgot; he warned only against "artificial" connections with Europe, not ones that were natural and in the national interest. Since the Quasi-War with France followed soon after Washington's warning, Americans tended to view the address as an accurate prediction of the outcome of U.S. involvement in European alliances. The economic consequences that might have followed any American attempt to maintain real impartiality—something that would have required economic isolation—were forgotten.
Jeffersonian Realism
Thomas Jefferson obviously understood the difference between artificial and natural connections with Europe. His condemnation of "entangling" alliances referred to involvements in European politics, not to the defense of American interests. When, in 1802, France seemed about to occupy the Louisiana Territory, striking a wedge between the United States and land that many Americans assumed was destined to become part of the United States, Jefferson's thoughts turned to plans of alliance with Great Britain. The Louisiana Purchase made that unnecessary, and Jefferson then followed policies that subtly favored France in its conflict with the British. His reasoning was simple and logical: only the English had a fleet large enough to pose a military threat to the United States, and, hence, they were America's only potential enemy of substance. But none of his talk of alliance or his attempts to play at a timid and small form of alliance politics came to public attention. With "no entangling alliances" already a tradition, domestic political considerations made Jefferson keep such thoughts to himself and his closest advisers.
After a brief period of peace beginning with the Treaty of Amiens (1802), the Napoleonic wars started anew in 1803. Again the United States found itself caught between two great powers. As both England and France turned increasingly to economic warfare, American attempts to maintain business as usual were less and less successful. Frustrated in his attempts to negotiate arrangements that would permit American foreign trade to continue without harassment, Jefferson overestimated the value of that trade to the European powers and also turned to economic coercion. An embargo prevented all American ships from sailing to foreign destinations but drove home the lesson of America's economic dependence upon trade with Europe—a lesson statesmen have never forgotten.
In England's Wake: the Nineteenth Century
The United States eventually became involved in the Napoleonic wars. Logic demanded that the nation choose one side or the other, but tradition, past experience, and the intense national division over the foreign policies of Jefferson and his successor, James Madison, made the decision difficult. George Washington had already become the nation's father figure, and no leader could ignore such pronouncements as the Farewell Address with impunity. Moreover, the unhappy experience with the French alliance made both politicians and the public cautious. More important, however, was the domestic political tug-of-war regarding foreign policy. Although President Madison and his supporters had strong sympathies for France, to have suggested an alliance with Napoleon would have confirmed the accusations of the Federalists, who claimed that the president had called for war to aid France, not to defend American interests. Since French violations of neutral rights had been as flagrant as those committed by England, that argument seemed plausible. So the United States entered the war against Britain, but without any alliance with France—a technique that the nation followed again in World War I a hundred years later.
The combination of luck and domestic politics that kept the United States out of a formal alliance with France in 1812 also made it possible for war-weary England to extend remarkably generous peace terms to the Americans. Despite an almost unbroken string of military defeats, the American public viewed the war as a great victory, thus adding to the tradition and myth that the United States need not and should not enter into alliances.
In the years immediately after the Treaty of Ghent (1815), the United States followed a foreign policy that took advantage of the European political situation. Designed and implemented primarily by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the policy took shrewd advantage of Europe's economic and psychological exhaustion following the defeat of Napoleon, of the Latin American revolts against Spain, of geography, and of the British desire to keep European power politics restricted to Europe. When the Latin American colonies revolted against Spain, the threat of intervention by the Holy Alliance (Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France) made Adams reconsider his earlier rejection of a British offer of an alliance. Nevertheless, Adams finally concluded, correctly, that England would act to keep other European countries out of the Western Hemisphere with or without an alliance with the United States, and he again spurned the offer. The British obtained a commitment from the French that they would not permit their fleet to be used for any transfer of Holy Alliance troops to Latin America. Once again American leaders had examined the possibility of entering into an alliance but had rejected that move; not because of tradition, but because a careful appraisal of the situation convinced them that such an alliance was simply unnecessary.
But it is out of such stuff that traditions are made. President James Monroe's Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere (1823) made British policy appear to be a function of American diplomacy. John Quincy Adams knew full well the emptiness of any threat from the Holy Alliance, but the American public treated the entire episode as proof of their nation's ability to solve its international problems without help. And so the United States proceeded through the nineteenth century armed with Washington's advice and a conviction that there was no need to play balance-of-power politics with the European nations.
British foreign policy continued to make such beliefs come true. Great Britain, busy in Europe and Asia, hoped to see the United States restricted in size and power, but never did the potential gains of such desires warrant the use of military force to ensure that they materialized. British leaders encouraged the Texans to remain independent after 1836, tried to hold onto the Oregon country, and hoped for a Confederate victory during the American Civil War, but whenever the U.S. government threatened to respond with force, the British backed away from the confrontation. Unwilling to fight the Americans, British statesmen repeatedly, if reluctantly, chose policies designed to make a friend of the United States.
At the same time two events served to fortify America's opposition to alliance diplomacy. The bloody and inconclusive Crimean War during the late 1850s seemed to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the European alliances, and the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico in 1867 indicated once again that the United States could itself deal with the "untrustworthy" European powers. The alliance system developed after 1871 by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck only led American statesmen to condemn further such power politics.
Theodore Roosevelt and America's Destiny
By the end of the nineteenth century, American policymakers and political writers were convinced that alliances, coalitions, and ententes were all part of a dangerous concept of international relations. Convinced that alliances caused wars rather than prevented them, Americans looked upon the European political scene with contempt. Yet, at the same time, a small group of statesmen-politicians led by such ultranationalists as Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, and Theodore Roosevelt concluded that its size and economic power made it necessary for the United States to play an active role in international politics. As Theodore Roosevelt put it: "We have no choice, we the people of the United States, as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world. That has been decided for us by fate, by the march of events. We have to play that part. All that we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill."
With Roosevelt as president from 1901 through 1909, the United States had, for the first time as chief executive, a man who saw the nation's mission as much more than merely an example to others. Roosevelt—taking his cue from the social Darwinists, but adding an optimism based on the American experience—saw America's role in the world as unique and tinged with messianic destiny. He not only believed the United States was a nation with international responsibilities, he also unquestioningly embraced the idea that the fate of mankind depended upon America's willingness to accept those responsibilities. Roosevelt saw no need for anything less than American superiority in the Western Hemisphere, but he sought to avoid antagonizing Great Britain in the process. The community of Anglo-American interests had been growing since 1815, but not until Roosevelt's presidency did the government establish a strong, if unofficial, entente with Great Britain. Roosevelt's prejudice in favor of Anglo-Saxon "civilization" as well as his realistic appraisal of America's economic and military interests resulted in American influence invariably buttressing British goals in Europe. Roosevelt was not alone, as can be seen by such editorials as appeared in Harper's Weekly openly advocating American participation in the Anglo-French entente. Although Roosevelt, largely because of domestic politics, did not heed such advice, he supported various British attempts to dominate the European balance of power, the best example being his secret diplomacy during the Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906.
The political situation in Asia concerned Roosevelt deeply. Convinced that the United States had to act like a Pacific Ocean power, he even expressed a vague desire for America to join the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which was designed to delineate British and Japanese interests in China and to halt Russian expansion in the area. Although such active participation in an alliance seemed politically impossible, Roosevelt attained that goal in part without any domestic struggle. His role as peacemaker during the Russo-Japanese War found him privately applying diplomatic pressure; yet the American public, still committed to nonentanglement, approved what appeared to be a role of disinterested and uninvolved organizer of a successful peace conference. From 1905 through 1908, American and Japanese representatives held almost continuous talks about other mutual problems. Although the discussions were frequently unpleasant, a special relationship developed between the two nations. Roosevelt firmly believed that Japanese-American cooperation—the beginnings of entente—would bring peace, order, and stability to East Asia; and, as part of that policy, he recognized Japanese spheres of influence in Korea and northern China.
Roosevelt committed the United States to an active role in international affairs—a commitment that had been growing out of American power as well as his actions—and put the nation on a path that could not be reversed regardless of the rhetoric of isolation and the natural desire to avoid the responsibilities that accompanied the thrill of world power. His successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, reversed his policies toward Japan (with dire consequences), but the commitment to an active international role remained.
The Trauma of World War I
On 6 April 1917 the United States formally joined a wartime coalition for the first time in its history. In refusing actually to join the Anglo-French-Russian alliance, President Woodrow Wilson hoped to avoid even an implied commitment to the many secret treaties that provided for the division of the spoils among the Allied Powers, although he also realized that American public opinion would support the idea of continuing some measure of aloofness from European political systems.
American entry into World War I supported Theodore Roosevelt's contention. Whether the cause was German submarine warfare, American national security, business investments in Europe, or a desire to control events, the United States obviously if unknowingly had accepted his argument that it had to "play a great part in the world." Inspired by Wilson's rhetoric about a world safe for democracy, Americans set out upon their own "Great Crusade." After the defeat of Germany and its allies, the United States hoped to reform Europe and establish a permanent peace. Frustrated by the slow pace of reform at home, many Progressive Era reformers looked to Europe and the world for new opportunities. Coalition diplomacy during the war reflected American distrust of Europe. It took the pressure of a German offensive to get U.S. generals to coordinate their actions with a newly created Allied commander in chief, and even then the United States refused to permit its troops to come under foreign command.
Woodrow Wilson's historic proposal for the League of Nations has rightfully dominated the history of the postwar period. Wilson's concept of collective security, however incompletely developed, clearly represents one of the few attempts by a major world statesman to find a workable substitute for the diplomacy of power politics—alliance, coalition, and entente. Wilson's proposal had a fatal flaw: it rested upon the creation of a homogeneous world economic-political system. The collective security approach required a remarkable degree of cooperation and trust among the major world powers, but such trust could develop only when they shared similar political and economic creeds, and that was not to be.
Instead, the peace settlements that followed World War I created a system of alliances and ententes by which the victors hoped to preserve the status quo. Although the United States refused a role in Europe when it rejected membership in the League of Nations, a proposed alliance with France against Germany might well have received Senate approval, but the Wilson administration lost interest in it following the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. It soon became "traditional" again for Americans to speak disdainfully of Europe's power politics, never realizing that their government continued to display a strong interest in European events. In fact, American "observers" at the league's meetings frequently attempted to influence the deliberations, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s American policy paralleled that of Britain and France.
The peacekeeping system in Europe operated without overt American support, but the system for Asia sprang primarily from the efforts of the United States. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, called by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, resulted in a series of treaties, each of which involved the United States in Asian power politics. The Five-Power Naval Disarmament Treaty was aimed directly at ending the naval arms race between Japan, Britain, and the United States. The Four-Power Treaty between Britain, Japan, France, and the United States replaced the old Anglo-Japanese alliance with one that promised only consultations. Both agreements clearly implied American support for the status quo in the Pacific. The Nine-Power Treaty, which merely endorsed the Open Door in China, served to distract critics from the realities of the power relationships being established. American participation in this informal system had one limitation: there could be no prior commitments (entangling alliances?) requiring the use of either economic or military coercion.
The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 eliminated whatever slim chance there might have been of that system developing into a meaningful and long-term entente. Moreover, Germany, China, and the Soviet Union, all excluded from the power structure, soon mounted challenges that spelled the demise of the informal system that had spurned them. The 1930s saw most nations withdraw into themselves, but none more so than the United States. Embittered and cynical about their experience in Europe and the international community following the Great Crusade, Americans indulged in self-recrimination and vowed never again to try to "save" Europe from itself.
Despite the rising tension caused by Nazi Germany during the early and mid-1930s, Americans opposed any participation by their government in European politics. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, although concerned about the actions of Adolf Hitler, chose to follow the lead of Britain and France. Those nations, eager to avoid a military confrontation, repeatedly asked the United States for firm commitments. The pattern held for all of Hitler's and Benito Mussolini's aggressive moves right up until war began. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1935, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, the intervention in the Spanish Civil War beginning in 1936, German Anschluss with Austria in 1938, and the takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939, all saw the United States draw away from Anglo-French requests for some sort of alliance. Inaction resulted as each blamed the other for a lack of leadership. Whether an alliance would have prevented a conflict with Germany is questionable; so is the claim that American support would have made the British and the French more courageous in their diplomacy. What is not questionable was the American attitude toward an alliance. The general public, Congress, and most public leaders believed that alliances caused wars instead of preventing them, and they opposed any such arrangements for the United States.
The Rude Awakening: World War Ii
Hitler's violation of the Munich Pact of 1938 opened the eyes of French and British leaders, and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, following Germany's invasion of Poland, forced Americans to reconsider. Still, while they supported the Roosevelt administration's decision to permit the Allies to buy military supplies in the United States, few seriously considered an alliance and intervention. Memories of World War I were too strong. Despite later claims that public opinion had limited his freedom of action, Roosevelt apparently agreed with the majority of Americans. He understood that Britain and France were fighting America's war but saw no need for the United States to be anything except what he later labeled "the arsenal of democracy." The collapse of French resistance in June 1940 made the president willing to lend money, equipment, and technical aid to Britain (which culminated in the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941), but he remained convinced, even until early 1941, that a military alliance, and the shedding of American blood, might be avoided.
Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union made Roosevelt less optimistic, for it raised the specter of a level of German strength that would necessitate U.S. armed intervention, and by the fall of 1941 he had concluded that American intervention was necessary. But it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to bring the United States into the war. Only then did Americans begin to understand the degree to which an Anglo-American alliance—based upon firm entente—already existed. During 1941 the United States and Great Britain developed a remarkably close relationship at the level of military and logistical planning, based on the probability of an alliance.
Even with such close cooperation, the Anglo-American entente, like almost all other ententes and alliances, was not an equal partnership. The British found themselves repeatedly in the position of the pleader, while the United States, with its vast economic strength, soon began to act like a senior partner. Only during the early stages of the war, when the overriding concern was the prevention of a defeat at the hands of Germany and Japan, did the two nations meet on equal ground. After it had become clear that victory was certain—roughly about the time of the Tehran Conference in December 1943—the United States more and more frequently forced the British to accept American decisions, particularly with regard to matters affecting the postwar situation.
Problems with what Winston Churchill called the Grand Alliance fell into three categories: military strategy, politics, and economics. Disputes over military strategy found the Americans stubborn and rarely willing to compromise. Exhibiting a strong distaste for consistent British attempts to make war serve politics, particularly the preservation of the empire, American military leaders refused to consider any alternatives that did not combine the quickest and least costly path to victory. Except for the invasion of North Africa, Roosevelt refused to overrule his military chiefs of staff, and that one exception came more from his desire to get American troops into action than because he accepted Churchill's grand strategy. The Normandy invasion, the daylight bombing of Germany, and the invasion of southern France are only the most striking examples of America's insistence upon implementing its own military strategy.
As ever, economics and politics interacted. Economic diplomacy between Britain and the United States, at least as it related to the critically important questions of the structure of the postwar world, found the Americans rigid in their views. That rigidity was modified by the American desire for a postwar political alliance with Britain. Thus, the United States could and did demand that Britain eliminate the imperial preference system, which gave special trading benefits to members of the British Empire. The British realized that the system itself had outlived its usefulness; but when the Americans pressed Britain to give up its colonies, the Churchill government dug in its heels. Faced with that response, Roosevelt backed off, partly in order to preserve the wartime alliance, but more and more in the later stages of the war because of his commitment to an Anglo-American political alliance in the postwar world.
A good example of this interplay between economic and political desires is in the case of atomic energy. Early in the war, the United States and Great Britain had agreed to work together to develop an atomic bomb. Initially, that cooperation was stimulated by fears that the Germans would develop the bomb first. But midway through the war, once the British had no more to offer, Roosevelt, at the instigation of his advisers, cut off the flow of information on atomic energy to England. They argued that Britain wanted to be privy to the secret in order to use atomic energy for commercial purposes after the war and that sharing nuclear knowledge would tie the United States to England politically—a reference to Britain's colonial problems. When Churchill protested vigorously, Roosevelt changed his mind. Not only had the president begun to worry about Britain's economic problems following the war, but he had come to assume Anglo-American alliance—and their atomic monopoly after the war.
The Anglo-American entente was the deepest commitment made by the United States during World War II, but the coalition with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics proved the most important—and the most difficult. Even during the early 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt's attitude toward the Soviet Union had been one of practicality and persuasion, and once Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, the president's nonideological stance made it easy to welcome the Russians as a military partner. Although Roosevelt has frequently been criticized as a political "fixer" rather than a man with an organized grand strategy, he clearly recognized the cardinal fact of the Russo-American coalition: if it defeated Germany and Japan (a certainty after the battles of Kursk, Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Midway—all by mid-1943), the Soviet Union would pose the major barrier to Anglo-American predominance in the postwar world. That left Roosevelt three simple but critical alternatives. First, he could include the Russians in the postwar power structure, hoping they would moderate their political and economic demands. Second, he could begin to confront Soviet power during the war by shaping military planning to meet postwar political needs. Third, he could firmly confront Soviet power late in the war, but only after military victory over Germany and Japan had been assured.
Despite advice from many, including Churchill, Roosevelt based his policy on the principle that the United States was not fighting one war in order to lay the groundwork for the next. Roosevelt refused to follow the path of confrontation; but cooperation, during and after the war, did not mean simple compliance with every Russian political demand nor did it mean that Roosevelt expected postwar Soviet-American relations to be without serious tensions. He merely emphasized the positive approach in the hope that it would engender a similar response. Nor was the dire warning given Roosevelt about Soviet intentions timely, for most came late in the war and well after most of the basic military strategies had been carried out.
Roosevelt's strategy failed to take into account the magnitude of the Soviet Union's distrust of the capitalist nations as well as his own advisers' intense fear of communism. He was by inclination a believer in personal diplomacy, and the general lack of enthusiasm within the U.S. State Department for a cooperative policy toward the Soviet Union forced Roosevelt to rely even more heavily on his own power and ability to shape events. More significantly, his conciliatory policies were not faithfully reflected by the American bureaucracy. Major changes in foreign policy can occur only when they generate the kind of national support that ensures that subordinates in the executive branch are actually thinking like the leadership. American policy toward the Soviet Union prior to World War II and the anticommunism of the Cold War show that Franklin Roosevelt's cooperative approach—a policy that foreshadowed the idea of "peaceful coexistence"—deviated from the norm of American foreign policy.
How the Soviet leaders, given their own ideological commitments and revolutionary experiences, would have responded to a totally candid and open Anglo-American policy during the war is uncertain. What is clear is that whenever Roosevelt hedged his bets—on the opening of a Second Front, on the Russian role in the occupation of Italy, on aid to left-wing partisan groups in Europe—Soviet leaders invariably accused the Anglo-Americans of playing political games. Although American policy toward Great Britain was frequently characterized by the same level of distrust as with the Russians, for example on the question of the imperial preference system, Soviet-American relations did not possess that community of interests that made it possible to transcend the differences. That, in essence, sums up the difference between an entente and a coalition.
The lesser partners in the Grand Alliance of World War II varied from such potential giants as China, to the small Central American states, to latecomers such as the newly constituted Provisional Government of the French Republic, which signed the Declaration of the United Nations in 1945. Intentionally vague, the declaration called only for mutual aid against the Axis nations and promised that no signatory would agree to a separate peace. Convinced that postwar questions were best left to personal diplomacy, Roosevelt refused to consider anything more substantial. American diplomacy during the war centered on the military defeat of the Axis, and relations with the less-important members of the United Nations were largely reserved to integrating their economic resources into the overall war production effort. Individual bureaucrats occasionally initiated and implemented policies that concerned America's postwar economic and political interests, particularly in Latin America, but such actions reflected traditional American attitudes, not any overall plan approved by the president.
Although Roosevelt's conception of a global balance of power—the Soviet Union, the Anglo-American alliance, an Anglo-French association in western Europe, and eventually China—seems reflected in the Cold War power structure that soon developed, the president's vague ideas possessed a crucial difference: they emphasized cooperation, not distrust.
By the end of World War II the United States seemed on the verge of a radical departure from past policies. With Harry S. Truman replacing Roosevelt in the White House, alliance diplomacy aimed increasingly at containing and defeating what appeared to be the new enemy, the Soviet Union. The nature of that Cold War determined part of the structure of America's alliance system, but other aspects of alliance diplomacy stemmed from traditional American attitudes.
The American Alliance System: an Unamerican Tradition
Much has been made of the shift in 1945 and 1946 of some key Republicans, particularly Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, from apparent isolationism to internationalism. Their approach toward alliance diplomacy demonstrates why that shift was really a logical progression. Isolationism had never argued against alliances per se, only against "entangling" ones. The atomic bomb, when added to America's conventional military strength and to the nation's demonstrable economic might, seemed to guarantee that any participation in alliances would be on American terms. Only the other nations would be entangled. Even the British, rhetorically an equal partner because of the sharing of nuclear weapons, quickly found that economics put them in a secondary role. Participation in the United Nations organization posed no problems, since pro-American states could dominate all voting. Moreover, the United Nations made internationalism appear somehow different from and more moral than balance-of-power politics. Alliances, however, appeared unnecessary until 1947, when clumsy Soviet attempts to influence domestic developments in Greece and Turkey caused the president to announce the Truman Doctrine. A unilateral pronouncement rather than a negotiated alliance, the results were the same. The United States had committed itself to defend two distant nations— and by implication many more.
Those implications became fact in September 1947, when the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, the first of many so-called mutual security agreements, came into being. The very label given such treaties—mutual security agreements—testifies to the long-lasting antipathy to the very word "alliance," although it was also a means of making such arrangements seem to fit the United Nations Charter. Although such a Western Hemisphere arrangement, dominated by the power of the United States, was part and parcel of the historic Monroe Doctrine, this particular treaty aimed primarily at preventing internal communist subversion—a concern that related directly to the Cold War.
At the same time that formal alliances became part of American foreign policy, the United States used its entente with Great Britain to retain and expand the invaluable security assets of the British Empire. Reading the British a lesson in "informal" empire, the Americans continued to argue for independence for British colonies but then quietly provided financial and military incentives that would allow Britain to hang on to its military bases in those same colonies. Those bases would allow the United States to project its power and influence throughout the world.
As Cold War tensions increased, the United States resorted more and more to traditional balance-of-power politics in an attempt to maintain complete control. President Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, have usually been pictured as the architects of the American alliance system, but the bulk of those alliances came into being during the administration of Harry Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Following the Berlin airlift and the establishment of Russian hegemony in Czechoslovakia, the keystone of what was to become a worldwide structure of alliances came in April 1949, when, at the instigation of the United States, eleven other nations in the North Atlantic area joined the United States in signing the North Atlantic Treaty. The role played by that treaty in the Cold War is told elsewhere in this volume; but much of America's conception of its own role within that treaty structure existed separately from Soviet-American tension. From the inception of the treaty, the United States used the North Atlantic alliance to pursue two frequently contradictory goals. The treaty was primarily aimed at the military and political containment of the Soviet Union, a function in which the United States, by virtue of its overwhelming military power, dominated all strategic planning. Since the conventional and small nuclear forces of western Europe depended upon American nuclear weapons to act as the ultimate deterrent against any Russian aggression, the crucial decisions always lay with American leaders. Accordingly, the major NATO commands fell to Americans.
Yet that role as the military leader of the alliance became increasingly offset by American insistence upon western European unity. At the time that the United States initiated the North Atlantic Treaty it had already begun implementing the Marshall Plan. Although ostensibly designed to promote European economic recovery, the Marshall Plan also added an economic facet to NATO. The long-term program supported by the United States called for economic and political unity among the western European nations. In a transparent attempt to transfer their own federal system to Europe, Americans consistently demanded that western Europe work together; first at the economic level and then, it was hoped, at the political level. American leaders spoke jejunely of a "United States of Europe" and frequently seemed to assume that, once European unification had occurred, the United States could pull back into the Western Hemisphere. This new reform movement—reminiscent of the Grand Crusade of three decades earlier—frequently clashed with American images of an evil and fanatical Soviet Russia, so powerful that only American military strength could defend the "free world." Just as an economically stable western Europe would eventually be able to compete with American business interests on an even basis, so the political and military strengthening of those nations inevitably meant that the United States would lose the total control of the North Atlantic Alliance that characterized the late 1940s and 1950s.
Initially, the North Atlantic Alliance exhibited great unity and strength under America's leadership, but only when the crisis was in Europe. As long as the Europeans feared Soviet expansion, either by force or subversion, they found NATO useful. But the Korean War, and American attempts to involve all its allies, found the western Europeans reluctant to translate a regional defense agreement into a worldwide crusade against communism. Despite a UN resolution that sanctified America's "police action" in Korea, the contribution made by the other members of the North Atlantic Alliance was a token one.
Asia posed special problems for the United States. The victory of the communist forces in China in 1949 stimulated an immediate attempt by the Truman administration to contain communism in Asia. In 1951 the United States signed a peace treaty with Japan that provided bases and similar methods of integrating that nation into the American alliance system, even if the Japanese constitution—written by the U.S. government— prohibited the development of any large-scale military forces. Less hypocritical were the mutual defense treaties the United States signed with its ex-colony, the Philippines, and with Australia and New Zealand (the Pacific Security Treaty or, more usually, the ANZUS Pact). Yet those alliances too were a disappointment during the Korean War. Japan had no choice but to provide bases and similar logistical support, but the ANZUS Pact brought little in the way of concrete assistance to American forces.
By 1952 it should have been clear to American leaders that their conception of alliances against worldwide communism differed significantly from that of most of their allies. But the Eisenhower administration refused to reexamine the alliance system, choosing instead to expand it in two areas where the collapse of the European and Japanese colonial empires had left political chaos behind—Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Although specific events frequently stimulated the negotiation of specific alliances, the overarching purpose of the system was geographically obvious. The North Atlantic Treaty, which included Canada, Greece, and Turkey in addition to the United States and western Europe, blocked any Soviet expansion to the west, southwest, or north. The Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, prompted by the collapse of French rule in Indochina and fear of the People's Republic of China, completed another portion of the cordon sanitaire, which also included Japan, South Korea, and the Republic of China on Taiwan (the last two each signed bilateral alliances with the United States shortly after the Korean Armistice of 1953). The containment ring around Russia and its supposed satellite, China, was nearly completed with the Baghdad Pact of 1955, which brought Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and Great Britain into alliance together. The United States never formally joined the alliance (renamed the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO, after Iraq dropped out in 1959 following a coup d'état against the pro-British Hashimite monarchy). But Congress and the president publicly committed America to aid the members in the event of aggression or externally supported subversion. There were large gaps in the geographic encirclement; India and Afghanistan, for example, refused all blandishments from the United States. Nevertheless, American schoolchildren during the 1950s and 1960s, their teachers, and their leaders all reveled in the illusory security of world maps, which imitated the ones that so delighted the English in the nineteenth century.
The enormous disparity in economic and military power between the United States and its Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern allies meant that their relationship was that of patron and client. Although Americans claimed to prefer liberal democracies as allies, they did not become involved in the domestic affairs of their clients unless there was communist subversion or aggression. The only criterion for an alliance with the United States became anticommunism. The liberal community in America justified actual or inferred alliances with dictatorships such as those in South Korea, Taiwan, Iran, and Spain because of the greater danger posed by militant, expansionist communism. Such nations had little choice but to accept American leadership, since American military and economic aid provided important props for their regimes.
The System Changes
Two events and two long-term developments in the late 1950s and in the 1960s forced major changes in America's alliance system. The events were the Suez crisis of 1956 and the Vietnam War; the developments were the steady relaxation of European fears of Russian aggression and the rise of mainland China as an effective world power.
The Suez crisis of 1956 found Great Britain and France, with Israel joining in for its own reasons, invading Egypt following that nation's nationalization of the Suez Canal. Ostensibly a fight to protect property, the Anglo-French action aimed at the restoration of their influence in the Middle East—influence that had begun to diminish rapidly in the face of rising Arab nationalism. Since the Middle East had not yet become a zone of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, American leaders and the public viewed the Anglo-French action through their traditional prism of anticolonialism. Secretary of State Dulles publicly condemned the two European countries, and, in an ironically cooperative move, joined the Russians in applying intense pressure to force Britain and France to withdraw. Faced with such superpower unity, the two western European nations had little choice; but the diplomatic defeat at the hands of their longtime ally rankled. British conservatives had nowhere else to go, but a few years later, under the leadership of newly elected president Charles de Gaulle, the French redefined their relationship to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Arguing that Korea and Suez had proven that the United States cared only about its own interests and could never be counted on to defend western Europe (or anyone else), De Gaulle eventually pulled France out of virtually all the political aspects of NATO and withdrew French forces from the NATO military pool. Although the French promised to consider reintegrating their military forces if the need arose, the North Atlantic Alliance had obviously begun to deteriorate.
Still, the NATO alliance would have survived Suez and similar crises intact had the western European nations continued to fear either massive subversion or outright military attack by the Soviet Union. But those fears, at their height between 1948 and the end of the Korean War, had steadily subsided. Russian-instigated subversion seemed less likely in the wake of the remarkable economic redevelopment of western Europe, and all the members of the alliance simply assumed that the United States would retaliate with all necessary force in the unlikely event of open aggression. In short, the NATO alliance, like others, possessed a strength directly proportional to the size and immediacy of the jointly perceived threat to its members.
Another foundation of the North Atlantic Alliance, the Anglo-American entente, also changed drastically in the twenty years following the end of World War II. The outward signs of that change came in such episodes as the Skybolt missile debacle. The United States forced the British to accept an American missile system over strong protests from the British military establishment and then failed to put the system into production. But the real problem was the increasing American contempt for the deterioration of the British economy. Although Americans and the English continued to view the world through the same spectacles, the United States no longer looked for Britain to carry its share of the burden. Indeed, Britain appeared to be on the verge of economic and political collapse. Although fears of Britain's complete collapse were exaggerated, the United States refused to treat Britain as even a major partner, equal partnership having disappeared during World War II. Even the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom was thus forced to rethink its relationship with Europe. The result— and the apparent end of the Anglo-American entente—was Britain's decision, reaffirmed in 1975, to join the European Common Market. But that decision, however clear-cut it seemed in the mid-1970s, did not eliminate the Anglo-American entente. Despite De Gaulle's insistence that Britain had to choose between Europe and the United States, as the twenty-first century dawned, British policymakers still assumed that they were best suited to act as the honest broker between the United States and Europe.
The 1970s and After
The North Atlantic Alliance had, by the 1970s, changed significantly from what it had begun as in 1949, but it still remained an important part of international power politics. The curious combination of historical experience, liberal political institutions, and varying but compatible combinations of capitalism, socialism, and the welfare state that characterize western Europe, Canada, and the United States provided a vague sort of entente—even though many rejected the proposition that Russia and world communism posed a military threat.
In Asia the situation was far different. Although American leaders tended to believe, at least until the late 1960s, that the People's Republic of China took instructions from Moscow, U.S. policy still had to react to the reality of increasing Chinese power. Fears of another confrontation with China such as had occurred during the Korean War directed American efforts toward alliances that would guarantee that only Asians would confront Asians. Supporters and opponents both likened such policies to that of the Roman Empire, which relied upon mercenaries to guard its frontiers. American troops remained in South Korea, but a massive military aid program made the Republic of Korea forces the first line of defense. The Japanese had proven surprisingly reluctant to rearm themselves, and the United States retained military bases in Japan.
The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization of 1954 (SEATO) represented an attempt by the United States to stabilize the political situation in that area by bringing Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the United States together after the collapse of French rule in Indochina. With Malaysia, the Philippines, and the nations of Indochina all struggling against communist-led guerrillas, America's alliance diplomacy sought to bolster the existing governments with military and economic aid. Although such aid helped maintain the status quo in Malaysia and the Philippines, the situation in Vietnam seemed to leave the United States no choice between direct military intervention and a communist victory. Working on the assumption that the entire alliance structure in Southeast Asia would collapse one country at a time—like "dominoes"—if Indochina came under communist domination, the United States guaranteed that very result by intervening unsuccessfully. Although the Southeast Asia Treaty remained in force, by the mid-1970s it had lost its effectiveness. Moreover, American requests to the SEATO and NATO nations for military or diplomatic support in Vietnam had met with even less success than during the Korean War. Clearly western Europe saw no connection between their security and the spread of communism in Asia, particularly since they no longer had colonies to protect.
By 1976 the American system of alliances so painstakingly constructed after World War II lay in disarray. Arab nationalism, focused on the problems of the Palestinian refugees and the existence of the state of Israel, had effectively destroyed the Middle East treaty. Although the ANZUS Pact remained, the defeat of American efforts in Vietnam and the rise of the People's Republic of China brought about American recognition of the communist Chinese government and a scramble by nations from Australia to Japan to establish friendly relations with the Chinese. Latin America, once so obediently pro–United States in international affairs outside the hemisphere, now shifted to an increasingly anti–United States position as both the political left and right vied for public support. Outside of NATO, America's most entangling alliances were with the kinds of governments that the United States had condemned during World War II. Totalitarian regimes in Nationalist China, South Korea, Spain, and Greece all offered bases and staunch anticommunism in return for American economic and military aid. The key alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, still functioned, but the integration of Britain into Europe, the development of détente between the Soviet Union and the United States, the rise to prominence in many western European countries of seemingly moderate and democratic communist parties, and the reestablishment of the West German army as the most powerful in Europe outside the Soviet Union promised to force major alterations in the North Atlantic alliance as well.
On paper the Cold War alliance system appeared to be a radical departure from the early American proscription against entangling alliances. Actually those alliances had never "entangled" the United States. Rather, such agreements, whether explicit or implicit, had supposedly served American interests. George Washington might have disputed the argument that America's national interest demanded the worldwide containment of communism, but he would not have rejected on principle a system of alliances as the best way to achieve that goal. Like most American presidents, he was at home in the world of alliance diplomacy and power politics.
America's feeling of comfort with its post–World War II alliance system allowed that structure to survive the demise of its putative rationale—the Cold War. But the Cold War had only been the front man, so to speak, for a deeper, more fundamental motive. Because the Western alliance system was so dependent on U.S. economic and military strength, it served as a vehicle for a unilateral globalism that allowed America to extend its hegemony—its influence and power— throughout the world. But because that globalism was largely on American terms, it did not break the traditional rule against "entangling" alliances.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s and NATO lost its enemy, the United States led the movement to preserve and expand the NATO Alliance. The western Europeans, their historical memories sharply focused on recent history, sought to prevent another German problem by perpetuating Franco-German collaboration (entanglement?). But for U.S. policymakers NATO expansion offered an opportunity to extend their nation's influence by fostering "democracy," both political and economic. Expanding the free marketplace for commerce and ideas replaced the "containment" of communism and the Soviet Union as the justification for retaining and expanding the NATO alliance and its extensive infrastructure. This was no new idea—it had been a basic element in the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and his administration during the 1980s. But once the Soviet threat disappeared, a debate ensued over whether or not the United States should continue to play the same extensive leadership role it had assumed during the Cold War. Was NATO even needed?
The administration of William Jefferson Clinton, fearful of losing its leverage in Europe, effectively ended the debate when it supported NATO expansion and then sent American military forces to the former Yugoslavia in an attempt to help end the bloodletting that had broken out along ethnic and religious lines. Democratic Party rhetoric may have referred more to political democracy than to the free market, but that was a matter of emphasis, not design. The epithet "isolationist" came to be applied to those who advocated anything but global involvement on American terms—not a new use of the term, but one that demonstrated the persistence of the desire, and ability, of the United States to follow a unilateral, my-way-or-the-highway style in foreign policy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Republican administration of George W. Bush had confirmed U.S. involvement in the southern Balkans and expanded the American commitment in Macedonia.
American policymakers managed to square the circle, making a holy pretense of noninvolvement in the world while trying to shape that world in their own interests. Convinced that their nation offered a novus ordo seclorum—a new and better world order—they used alliances, coalitions, and ententes to extend the nation's reach. In 1776 that reach was limited by the practicalities of distance, wealth, and population. Two hundred twenty-five years later, those practicalities had disappeared, but the reach had not.
Bibliography
Barnet, Richard J., and Marcus G. Raskin. After 20 Years. New York, 1965. Argues that the alliance has outlived its usefulness and was, by the mid-1960s, contributing to increased world tension.
Beale, Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. Baltimore, 1956.
Coolidge, Archibald C. The United States as a World Power. New York, 1912.
DeConde, Alexander. Entangling Alliance. Durham, N.C., 1958. Investigates the French Alliance and its role in both foreign and domestic American politics during the 1790s.
——. The Quasi-War. New York, 1966.
Esthus, Raymond A. Theodore Roosevelt and Japan. Seattle, 1966.
——. Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries. Waltham, Mass., 1970. Both Esthus works amply illustrate the president's search for closer relationships with the other world powers.
Gilbert, Felix. To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy. Princeton, N.J., 1961. Stimulating group of essays that emphasize the intellectual and ideological attitudes of the Founders.
Goetzmann, William H. When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Expansionism, 1800–1860. New York, 2000. Short but stimulating essay dealing with nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations.
Goldgeier, James. Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO. Washington, D.C., 1999.
Graebner, Norman. "Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality." In David Herbert Donald, ed. Why the North Won the Civil War. Baton Rouge, La., 1960.
Hinton, Harold C. Three and a Half Powers: The New Balance in Asia. Bloomington, Ind., 1975. Studies the Sino-Soviet rift as it relates to American foreign policy.
Iriye, Akira. After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931. Cambridge, Mass., 1965. Puts forth the concept of an informal system.
Kaplan, Lawrence S. Jefferson and France. New Haven, Conn., 1967. Imaginative discussion of Thomas Jefferson's willingness to consider alliances as well as his overall efforts to work within a world dominated by European power politics.
Kimball, Warren F. Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War. New York and London, 1997. Examines the wartime Anglo-American alliance.
Kissinger, Henry. The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. New York, 1965. Defends the continued utility of a revamped NATO and is helpful for understanding the later policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Louis, William Roger, and Ronald Robinson. "The Imperialism of Decolonization." Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (September 1994): 462–511. Discusses U.S. support for British military bases.
McNeill, William H. America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941–1946. London, 1953; New York, 1970. A remarkably perceptive study of the anti-Hitler coalition, only slightly outdated by the vast amount of documentation that has become available since it first appeared.
Neustadt, Richard E. Alliance Politics. New York, 1970.
Osgood, Robert E. NATO: The Entangling Alliance. Chicago, 1962. The standard historical study of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, although it must be supplemented by more recent studies.
Perkins, Bradford. Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812. Berkeley, Calif., 1961. Explains how the United States managed to enter the Napoleonic wars without joining either side.
Sherwood, Robert E. Roosevelt and Hopkins. New York, 1950. Perhaps the best study of Anglo-American relations during World War II.
Wolfers, Arnold, ed. Alliance Policy in the Cold War. Baltimore, 1959. Essays examining the broad sweep of alliance diplomacy.
— Warren F. Kimball
