America’s changing national interest

Americans had a national interest even before they became a nation. As the 13 colonies evolved, they saw their interests differently from those of Britain.

London wanted cheap raw materials, a closed market for British products, and colonial taxes to pay the defense and administrative costs of the colonies.

The Colonist wanted to sell their products to anyone, not just Britain. They wanted to manufacture their own goods, not just buy British goods, free security, and they didn’t want to pay taxes.

Years before 1776, American and British national interest had begun to diverge, leading straight to the Declaration of Independence.

Independence The unlikely assistance of France helped

the United States gain their independence. France had an interest in weakening Britain

and gaining an American ally and a trading partner.

The colonies sought both military and diplomatic support from France, Spain, and any other European power that might have a grudge against Britain.

Independence The colonial war cost Britain too much, so

London settled in 1782. To clinch the deal, Benjamin Franklin told London that the U.S. really sought no alliance with France.

All in all, early American foreign policy was brilliant: A weak new country gained independence and recognition by the major European powers.

Manifest Destiny A weak Articles of Confederation left the

U.S. open to European powers attacks.

The Articles of Confederation had to scrapped and the U.S. Constitution got adopted.

Manifest Destiny: Fear of Conquer The Constitution provided for the common

defense which provided and maintained an army and a navy.

The U.S. felt threatened by the Spaniards in FL, the French in LA, the British in Canada, the Russians in AK, and revolutionaries in Mexico.

The U.S. gained most of these territories (except for Canada) with force and/or cash.

Manifest Destiny By the 1840s Americans were convinced

that they had a manifest destiny determined by God to claim and populate most of North America.

With most of the continent populated by Americans, we would have little to fear.

Manifest destiny was in the best interest of the United States.

Imperialism Imperialism: Spreading nation’s power over

other lands. In 1894, the U.S. faced a sharp economic

depression, prompting some to see imperial expansion as a way to gain new markets for American goods.

Social Darwinism encouraged Americans, including Teddy Roosevelt, to think of themselves as the “fittest” who were destined for world leadership over lesser peoples.

Imperialism

By the time of President McKinley, imperialists were defining the U.S. national interest as overseas expansion, a kind of new manifest destiny.

The sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor brought the cry, “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” The sinking of the ship might have been

intentionally done by the U.S.

Imperialism In one year, 1898, the U.S. took Cuba

(independent but a U.S. protectorate), Puerto, and the Philippines, plus Guam, Hawaii, Wake Islands, and American Samoa (in 1899).

Suddenly, America was an empire (The U.S. had claimed Midway in 1867).

The expansion to east Asia was the building block to war with Japan 42 years later.

Imperialism The new U.S. Navy and merchant fleet had

to be able to get quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

When Colombia hesitated to build a canal through its Isthmus in Panama, Washington set up an independent Panama in 1903, held of Colombia with gunboats, and bought canal rights from Panama.

Imperialism

Is imperialism worth all the deaths around the world?

Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie were anti-imperialist that bitterly denounced U.S. expansion overseas.

Was it truly a U.S. national interest to expand into East Asia? Or was it in the interest of a few?

World War I After war broke out in Europe in 1914,

Germany tried to keep America out while Britain tried to get America in.

German submarine warfare threatened U.S. shipping.

By early 1917, however, Germany submarine warfare pushed president Wilson into the Great War. We had tried to stay neutral but could not.

World War I An intercepted German telegram

suggested to Mexico that it could recover lands lost to the United States in 1848.

Wilson sold the war to the American public by making it a war “to make the world safe for democracy”.

He also stated that the German conquest of Europe would threaten U.S. national interest.

World War I The U.S. entered the war when it was two-

thirds over and they tipped the balance against Germany.

After the war, Britain and France didn’t share Wilson’s idealistic vision of a new League of Nation to keep peace. They wanted revenge on Germany for their terrible losses.

World War I London and Paris accepted Wilson’s League

as part of the Versailles peace treaty but went on to strip Germany of territory and squeeze it for impossible reparations (leads to WWII).

The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Versailles treaty, and America, fed up with Wilson’s idealism, went into isolationism

Isolationism Americans felt that they had fought World

War I for nothing and must never do it again.

Between the two wars the army and navy shrank to almost nothing.

The Great Depression focused Americas’ attention on domestic economic recovery.

Isolationism Neutrality Acts of 1935-1937 were

designed to keep the U.S. from ever being drawn into another war.

Interwar isolationism failed to recognize that the Axis powers threatened to create a closed, hostile world in which the United States was militarily and economically isolated.

Isolationism U.S. national interest were massively

threatened, but interwar isolationism blinded many Americans to this fact until Pearl Harbor.

World War II FDR’s strategy was to aid Britain without

alarming American isolationists, who thought that Britain in 1940 was defeated and the war was none of our business.

Lend Lease Act: War supplies given to Britain and France.

World War II In getting these goods across the Atlantic,

U.S. ships, including warships, became targets for German U-boats.

The U.S. charged German ships in an undeclared war with Germany in the North Atlantic several months before Pearl Harbor.

World War II

The Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 allowed the U.S. to come out of isolationism.

The United Nations would be formed after the war.

The Cold War The Cold War began when the Soviets

quickly began breaking the agreements made at the 1945 Yalta Conference.

They did not hold free, democratic elections in East Europe but installed Communist regimes subservient to Moscow and kept many troops in East Europe.

Cold War Truman Doctrine: established that the

United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.

Cold War Marshall Plan: an American initiative to aid

Western Europe, in which the United States gave $13 billion (approximately $130 billion in current dollar value as of August 2015) in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War

Cold War Containment: U.S. policy of blocking

expansion of Soviet power. NATO forms in 1949. The Soviets also explode their first atomic

bomb in 1949. China fell to communist in 1949 and the

Korean conflict began in 1950.

Cold War McCarthyism took center stage in the

United Stated during the 1950s. McCarthyism: The witch hunt for infiltrated

communist in the United States. (Led by republican senator Joseph McCarthy)

Cold War Bay of Pigs in 1961 (under JFK): The failure of

the CIA-sponsored invasion of Castro’s Cuba by anti-communist exiles.

By 1962, the U.S. was ahead by a ratio of 7 to 1 in strategic missiles. Khrushchev, desperate to redress the imbalance, ordered medium range missiles to be placed in Cuba.

This leads to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.

Cold War

The biggest battle of the Cold War was the Vietnam War. That officially took place between 1955 to 1975.