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Foreign policy of the us prior to the 1900s
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Second World War
My generation has already witnessed a day of infamy, less than two short years ago (or so CNN tells us). My grandfather would remember a different day, a morning marked by another surprise attack on America. That ambush, said Japanese General Yamamoto, awakened a “sleeping giant.” Analysis of American foreign policy begs the question: what if the giant had spurned its peaceful slumber? Instead, the behemoth could have chosen to lumber about. Odds are that the footsteps would not have fallen lightly, the reverberations spreading across the globe- all this, only had Wilsonians been at the helm of American foreign policy.
The Jacksonian tradition steered the United States to victory in the Second World War. Once lulled from the comfort of its isolationism, the Americans sealed the fate of the Axis powers. But had the Wilsonian tradition, a formidable current here at Swarthmore and among today’s democrats, directed American foreign policy leading up to and during the war, it seems likely that history would tell a different tale. As it stood in 1941, the United States was undoubtedly entrenched in the Jacksonian camp (here at Swarthmore, I can count their sympathizers on one hand). Jacksonian policies of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s proved decisive for the Allied victory, yet reflection on a reorientation of these policies toward the Wilsonian camp reveals that the Second World War could have been avoided. In this context, German domestic and foreign policy- a brutish, perverted mix of the Jacksonian and Wilsonian traditions- will then be discussed.
An understanding of the Jacksonian doctrine clarifies the reasoning of the United States leading up to the war. This tradition was, and remains, stron...
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...h: do we really want to provoke the Jacksonians of this world?
Works Cited
Bell, P.M.H. The Origins of the Second World War in Europe. 2nd edition. NewYork: Longman, 1997.
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Kindleberger, Charles P. The World in Depression 1929-1939. 1973.
Kurth, James. "The American Way of Victory: A Twentieth-Century Trilogy," The National Interest, Summer 2000, pp. 5-16.
Kurth, James. “War, Peace, and the Ideologies of the Twentieth Century,” Current History, January 1999, pp.3-8.
Mead, Walter Russell. "The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy," The National Interest, Winter 1999/2000, pp. 5-29.
Zieger, Robert H. (2000). America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.
The United States has a long history of great leaders who, collectively, have possessed an even wider range of religious and political convictions. Perhaps not unexpectedly, their beliefs have often been in conflict with one another, both during coinciding eras, as well as over compared generations. The individual philosophies of William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, with regard to America’s roles in world affairs and foreign diplomacy; are both varied and conflicted. Despite those conflicts however, each leader has left his own legacy behind, in terms of how the U.S. continues to engage in world affairs today.
Stephen Ambrose speaks much on wars that America was directly or indirectly involved in. In one chapter, The Legacy of World War Two, he saw war, for the US and the Allies, in World War Two, as “not to conquer, not to enslave, not to destroy, but to liberate” (Ambrose 120) He goes on to say that “the Marshall Plan was the most generous act in human history.” (Ambrose 121) The Marshall Plan created NATO, the Berlin Air Lift and Ambrose swimming in patriotism claimed it was “the American spirit, more than American productive power, that made it so.” (Ambrose 121) He continues h...
22 Brinkley, Alan An Uneasy Peace 1988-, Vol. 10 of 20th Century America, 10 vols. (New York: Grolier 1995):22
Bard, Mitchell G. The Complete Idiot's Guide to world War II, Macmillan Publishing, New York, New York, 1999
Vasquez, John A. "The Probability of War, 1816-1992. Presidential Address to the International Studies Association, March 25, 2002, New Orleans." International Studies Quarterly 48.1 (2004): 1-27. Print.
...eandt, Dennis. "The American Miracle." The New American, 16 Dec. 2002: 27. Bigchalk Library. Proquest. Centreville Hs Lib.; Clifton, Va. 14 May. 2005 www.library.bigchalk.com.
As we approach the next Presidential election the topic of American foreign policy is once again in the spotlight. In this paper, I will examine four major objectives of U.S. foreign policy that have persisted throughout the twentieth century and will discuss the effect of each on our nation’s recent history, with particular focus on key leaders who espoused each objective at various times. In addition, I will relate the effects of American foreign policy objectives, with special attention to their impact on the American middle class. Most importantly, this paper will discuss America’s involvement in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War to the anticipated fulfillment of these objectives—democracy, manifest destiny, humanitarianism, and economic expansion.
America’s involvement in World War II has often been equated to the Japanese waking the “sleeping giant”, and is often thought of as an invincible superpower. The reality is that the United States’ invincibility has never been really tested. The United States’ is separated from the rest of the Western world by an ocean on either side of its borders and has therefore only had two attacks on native soil. While America’s invincibility is not easily tested, and therefore not easily discredited, whether or not the Japanese awoke the “sleeping giant” by bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is, however, debatable. The American public before the attack on Pearl Harbor were isolationists, they may have felt sympathy for the victims of Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini, but did not in fact care enough to get involved in another war. The congressmen they elected into office from the late 1930’s to the early 1940’s respected the wishes of their constituents and therefore did everything in their power to prevent U.S involvement in World War II even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In fact one of the only Americans to appear at all concerned with the horrific events occurring across the ocean was President Franklin Roosevelt, however, despite pleas from the heads of the allied forces, even President Roosevelt could not entirely commit to the need for U.S involvement and remained a wishy-washy figure up until the late 1930’s. It was not until 1940, that President Roosevelt was able to take a stand and begin the attempts to talk the American people into actively supporting the allied forces against Nazi forces. The Japanese may get the credit for waking the “sleeping giant”, however, it is in fact President Roosevelt and a small portion of t...
In the History of the world, human race, there have been many wars between different societies, Cultures, and Countries. Massive blood shed in many of these wars did not stop the coming of new conflicts of interest, peaking to battle. World War Two, one of the biggest war of history brought several countries to battle against each other (1939-1945). The catalyst of this war was one man whom discriminated against other cultures for no reason but to exterminate the Jewish race, known as Adolf Hitler.
George Browm Tindall, David Emory Shi. American History: 5th Brief edition, W. W. Norton & Company; November 1999
World War 1 World War 1 was called “The Great War”, “The war to end all wars”, and “The first modern war”. It has many causes and a few repercussions and I will describe them in detail. The most widely known reason for the start of World War 1 was the assassination of the Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in the Serbian capital of Sarajevo. The ArchDuke was there to talk to the Serbian leaders about peace on the Balkan Peninsula. After a Serbian was arrested for the assassination, Austria-Hungary pulled out of the peace talks and declared war on Serbia.
Stroebel, Jeffrey T. World War II. Part I: Between the Wars. The Sycamore School, 1995. Revised 1998.
Barringer, Mark, Tom Wells. “The Anti-War Movement in the United States.” www.english.illinois.edu. Oxford UP. 1999. Web. 14 Nov. 2013.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to protect the national security of the United States. At first, Roosevelt felt that it was in the best interest of the United States to avoid involvement in the war. However, he knew “sooner or later, the threat to the European balance of power would have forced the United States to intervene in order to stop Germany’s drive for world domination” (Kissinger 369-370). But this was not Roosevelt’s main problem; Roosevelt had to prove to the American people that unlike World War I, US involvement was necessary. He had to “[transform] the nation’s concept of national interest and [lead] ‘a staunchly isolationist people’ into yet another global war” (handout).