Foreign Relations OverviewThe Economic DimensionThe Cultural DimensionU.S. Relations with EuropeU.S. Relations with AsiaU.S. Relations with AfricaU.S. Relations with the Middle EastU.S. Relations with CanadaU.S. Relations with Latin America
Overview Although America's relations with other nations have varied according to specific regions and eras, certain themes often recur. These themes—including free trade, democracy, continental expansion, and internationalism—have not always been intellectually consistent or gone uncontested. Still, their recurrent invocation suggests ongoing patterns in American foreign policy.

American leaders of the Revolutionary and early national periods sought to free their international trade from mercantile regulations. As colonials heavily dependent upon foreign commerce, Americans had resented British trade laws passed in a Parliament that accorded them no representation. After independence, American policy‐makers continued to assert the right to trade freely with other nations, a policy that helped bring on the Quasi‐War with France and the War of 1812 with Britain. In the 1820s and 1830s the United States officially recognized the new nations in Latin America, where independence movements similarly embraced free trade and sought to escape Spain's imperial restrictions.

American leaders viewed republicanism and democracy as the political forms that logically accompanied free trade. Both free government and free trade arose from a liberal philosophy that opposed special privileges for entrenched or hereditary elites. Thomas Jefferson expressed the popular view of America as a beacon of liberty for the world, although he, like most white Americans of his day, discussed liberty in the context of racial and gender ideologies that effectively excluded nonwhites and women from citizenship.

Twentieth‐century American leaders continued to advocate free‐trading policies and the spread of democracy. Secretary of State John Hay championed the “Open Door” policy in China and elsewhere. Woodrow Wilson's insistence on the trading rights of neutral nations helped bring the United States into World War I against Germany in 1917, and Wilson then pledged that the war would “save the world for democracy”. His Fourteen Points enshrined both the principles of “freedom of the seas” and political “self‐determination”. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the country into a second great conflict, World War II, this time opposing Japanese and German fascism and the threat that these nations might build exclusive trading spheres. Roosevelt even pressured Britain, America's wartime ally, to end its system of imperial preference and embrace free trade, an expectation that ultimately shaped the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1948.

During the Cold War Era, free trade, once an ideology of the underdog in a mercantilist world, became a powerful tool for the global spread of U.S. capitalism. Supporting open markets and opposing state ownership of economic enterprises, the United States created trade and investment opportunities for its business enterprises. The collapse of the communist bloc after 1989 signaled the triumph of American policy, and the first post–Cold War president, Bill Clinton, worked strenuously for global trade, especially through the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.

The goal of spreading democracy played a prominent rhetorical role in Cold War policy‐making. American leaders could support pro‐U.S. dictators, especially in the Third World, on the claim that noncommunist regimes, whatever their character, strengthened the “Free World” and thus bolstered “democracy”. The Korean and Vietnam Wars, and indeed Cold War rivalries throughout the world, were all justified within the “democracy‐versus‐communism” framework. President Ronald Reagan and his successors even more explicitly promoted “democratization,” particularly through the use of elections to transfer political power. Like free trade, this agenda received a boost with the collapse of Soviet power.

Continental expansionism represents another powerful theme in early American foreign policy. Many colonists had supported the independence movement to avoid Britain's Proclamation of 1763, restricting settlement west of the Appalachians. Once independent, Americans zealously pushed westward. Where European nations blocked their way, Washington successfully negotiated, concluding the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, gaining East Florida from Spain in 1819, annexing Texas in 1845, and settling northern boundary controversies with England (the largest over Oregon in 1846). Victory in the Mexican War (1848) brought a huge cession of land, including California, and fulfilled the dreams of empire‐builders who had proclaimed America's “Manifest Destiny” to reach the Pacific. Through wars and treaties, and invoking an ideology of racial superiority, white Americans also took lands occupied by Indian nations. In the 1890s the last of the Indian resistance was quelled, and the continental empire secured.

In the twentieth century, the ideology of continental expansion evolved into the imperial acquisitions associated with the Spanish‐American War of 1898 and Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting U.S. police power over the Western Hemisphere. Entrenched beliefs about continental security also emerged, however, particularly after World War I, in the form of isolationism—that is, the desire to avoid entanglements in foreign conflicts and to concentrate instead on domestic development.

In the twentieth century, the theme of internationalism modified or eclipsed the nineteenth century's emphasis on continental destiny. Woodrow Wilson provided the most powerful articulation of American internationalism: the view that peace for all nations could be achieved through “collective security”. Although the United States never joined Wilson's League of Nations, his internationalist vision underlay the later creation of the United Nations and other international bodies. Regional collective‐security pacts, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), also expressed this internationalist policy.

Although differences over how to define and promote free trade, democracy, continental expansion, and internationalism engendered ongoing debates, these broad themes nonetheless shaped much of U.S. foreign policy.
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

Robert Dallek , The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs, 1983.
Michael H. Hunt , Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1987.
Walter LaFeber , The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad, 1750–the Present, 1996.
Walter A. McDougall , Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, 1997.

Emily S. Rosenberg

The Economic Dimension From the time of Thomas Jefferson to the present, U.S. policymakers and private interest groups have viewed economic ties with the rest of the world as vital to the nation's well‐being. The definition of U.S. economic objectives and their impact on foreign relations, however, have been hotly debated. U.S. foreign economic relations may be organized into three periods: the preindustrial era, roughly 1790–1850; the era of the industrial revolution, 1850–1920; and the era of U.S. economic preeminence, 1920 to the present.

Preindustrial America was not extensively involved in world affairs. Preoccupied with continental expansion and the issue of slavery, the nation focused inward. Yet the founders recognized the connections between internal development and overseas commerce. America's first foreign treaty, signed with France in 1778, included a section promising trade reciprocity. From George Washington to James Madison, U.S. presidents defended American commercial shipping and “neutral rights” from the Barbary pirates, Napoleonic conquest, and Great Britain's confiscation of ships and impressment of sailors. Presidents Jefferson and Madison tried to use trade as a diplomatic weapon, only to be disappointed when U.S. embargo acts led to domestic unrest and the War of 1812.

America's early economic diplomacy did not serve defensive ends alone. The effort to secure rights to warehouse agricultural products in New Orleans for transshipment elsewhere led Jefferson to conclude the 1803 Louisiana Purchase with France, which ushered in a new era of territorial expansion. Indeed, land, rather than overseas markets, constituted the most alluring economic prize during the agrarian, preindustrial period.

The controversy over slavery expansion and the Civil War temporarily interrupted U.S. expansion, but Gilded Age industrialization reinvigorated and reshaped the expansionist urge. Marxist analysts trace the late nineteenth‐century imperialism of western powers and Japan to the rise of monopoly capitalism and the need to find investment opportunities for surplus capital. “Revisionist” U.S. scholars, following the lead of historian William Appleman Williams, advanced an alternative thesis: that America's extremely competitive industrial economy necessitated the export of surplus goods rather than capital. Therefore, the United States sought an informal overseas empire based on the principle of liberal trade. The depression‐plagued 1890s, these scholars point out, ended with the Spanish‐American War (leading to U.S. acquisition of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines), the enunciation of the “Open Door” policy toward China, the construction of the Panama Canal, and military interventions in the Caribbean. All these developments enhanced America's foreign‐trade and investment prospects. The safeguarding of U.S. trade and loans to Britain and its allies also influenced the U.S. decision in 1917 to enter World War I. Both these schools, the Marxist and the revisionist, saw economics as paramount in driving foreign policy.

Other historians, however, have contested the centrality of economics to U.S. foreign policy, and have emphasized instead the nation's security needs, journalistic jingoism, the influence of an imperialist‐minded elite, and ideological ethnocentrism. These historians stress that the export of U.S. products was accompanied by the equally important export of U.S. culture. Popular entertainers, Christian missionaries, and philanthropic organizations, often acting independently of Washington, spearheaded the drive to spread American tastes, ideas, and values.

By 1920, when the United States had replaced Great Britain as the world's leading creditor nation and industrial power, America entered a new era of economic preeminence. Washington's failure to adjust to these new realities by lowering protective tariffs and easing Europe's postwar debt, however, helped spark the global depression of the 1930s and World War II. Last‐minute economic sanctions against Japan, including revocation of petroleum‐export licenses, only heightened Japan's long‐festering grievances about global inequalities, and its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor soon followed.

Eager to avoid a repetition of the mistakes of the interwar years, the United States in 1944 took the lead in establishing the Bretton Woods system, which stabilized global finances through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and liberalized trade through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Marshall Plan, the reconstruction of Japan, assistance to industrializing East Asia, and development aid to recently decolonized areas—coinciding with the Cold War and Washington's anticommunist security policies—deepened America's embrace of economic internationalism and global Keynesianism. International trade, the growth of U.S.–based multinational enterprises, and the activities of nongovernmental organizations such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations further enhanced America's worldwide presence.

Revisionist historians, informed by “world systems” theory, see in America's recent economic expansion an effort by government and business to achieve global hegemony for a capitalist elite. According to this view, U.S. economic power relegated less industrialized states to an inferior, “dependent” status within the world capitalist system as producers of raw materials and food stuffs. Others, invoking corporatist theory, stress that a variety of organized elements in the United States and abroad—business, labor, farmers, and government— forged a transnational postwar consensus in support of liberal internationalism. Still other “modernization” theorists conclude that America's economic dominance has confirmed capitalism's modernizing impact throughout the world.

The end of the Cold War highlighted the economic dimension of American foreign policy. Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton emphasized the global liberalization of trade and investment and tried to address new problems: How could the United States assist the conversion of former communist societies to capitalism? How would regional trading blocs such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) affect the world economy? How did America's global commercial activity relate to the nation's desire to protect the environment, improve exploitive labor conditions, and advance human rights?

In summary, the economic dimension of American foreign relations has historically been multidimensional and subject to varied interpretations by historians. But all agree that as the twenty‐first century unfolds, the U.S. economy is increasingly interconnected with the world economy, and the economic dimension of foreign relations overlaps an array of global issues.
See also Bretton Woods Conference; Corporatism; Depressions, Economic; Economic Development; Expansionism; Ford Foundation; Foreign Trade, U.S; Missionary Movement; Post–Cold War Era.

Bibliography

William Appleman Williams , The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959.
Gabriel Kolko , The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose, 1969.
Emily Rosenberg , Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945, 1982.
Robert L. Beisner , From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 1986.
Michael J. Hogan , The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, 1987.
Thomas J. McCormick , America's Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, 1989.
Michael J. Hogan and and Thomas G. Paterson , Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 1991.
Diane B. Kunz , Guns and Butter: America's Cold War Economic Diplomacy, 1997.

Dennis Merrill

The Cultural Dimension The nineteenth‐century Protestant missionary movement constituted the first significant attempt to spread American culture internationally. Inspired by Evangelical impulses and notions of racial destiny, American missionaries promoted their religious and cultural values in “heathen” countries. Although conversion rates proved disappointing and religious enthusiasm gradually waned, many foreign missionaries continued to play important roles as social reformers abroad, shifting their emphasis from saving souls to improving education, agriculture, and living standards.

In the early twentieth century, American mass entertainment also began to spread globally. Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and Hollywood's silent films played on all continents, erasing boundaries of language and culture. During World War I, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), charged with selling America's ideals, vigorously promoted American films. Taking advantage of government support and the popularity of such films as D.W. Griffith's Civilization and Birth of a Nation, Hollywood captured foreign film markets. In the 1920s, when some foreign governments enacted quotas to protect their film industries from U.S. competitors, pressure from Washington and evasive action by the American film industry overcame the barriers. Before 1930, American films constituted 95 percent of those shown in Britain and Canada, 70 percent in France, 80 percent in South America.

America's radio industry also received a jump‐start during World War I, when the U.S. government nationalized it and expanded its capacity. The Radio Corporation of America was founded by Owen D. Young in 1919 at President Woodrow Wilson's urging, and the products of American broadcasters and radio manufacturers soon enjoyed a global reach.

During the 1920s, social reform movements also spread American values. Rotary clubs, the YMCA and YWCA, the American Boy Scouts, the American Federation of Labor, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, among many others, internationalized their organizations. John Dewey tried to bring educational change to China; the economist Edwin Kemmerer promoted American‐style reserve banks and currency systems worldwide; and Elizabeth Washburn Wright crusaded internationally against narcotics. Political reformers even spread the American game of baseball as a bulwark against instability. The Rockefeller Foundation launched global health programs and established colleges throughout Asia. Though these varied efforts projected no single cultural message or set of values, they did represent a quintessentially American faith in voluntarism.

The outpouring of U.S.‐made cars and appliances during the 1920s further extended American cultural influence. Woolworth, A&P, Safeway, and Montgomery Ward opened stores worldwide; Coca‐Cola expanded its bottling; American jazz won fans abroad; and mass tourism brought throngs of Americans to Europe and to such resort destinations as Cuba. Meanwhile, American Studies became a respected academic field in major foreign universities.

These trends stirred a backlash among some groups of cultural nationalists, who assailed the “threat” of American culture. The Depression of the 1930s accentuated this cultural nationalism. In Germany, Adolf Hitler's National Socialists, charging that American popular culture was dominated by Jews, banned U.S. films and jazz. Japan similarly restricted American film and news services. Left‐leaning Mexico, embroiled in an oil controversy with the United States, embargoed films considered offensive and built its own highly successful film industry.

World War II, however, brought new opportunities for American cultural expansion. The Office of Inter‐American Affairs and the Office of War Information distributed American magazines and films. U.S. troops spread a taste for American chewing gum, blue jeans, T‐shirts, jazz, Coke, and cigarettes worldwide. In postwar Germany, Austria, and Japan, U.S. agencies developed programs to introduce American values into education, journalism, and films.

After the war, anticommunism became the central rationale for an assertive “cultural policy”. Congress funded educational exchanges under the the Smith‐Mundt Act of 1948, which created the Fulbright program. In 1950 the Harry S. Truman administration increased funding for the Voice of America and established information offices, libraries, and mass‐media products in many countries. The American film industry's Motion Picture Export Association worked with Washington to extend Hollywood's dominance in foreign markets. The United States Information Agency (1953) institutionalized and enlarged these cultural initiatives.

Consumer products continued to promote the American way of life. U.S.‐style supermarkets, hotel and retail chains, and installment buying expanded globally in the postwar period. In western Europe, the Marshall Plan's promise of consumer abundance and high wages constituted a powerful Cold War cultural weapon. American‐based nongovernmental organizations also flourished internationally.

American cultural power remained controversial, however. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Nation's Economic and Social Council promoted a “New World Information Order” to help developing nations break the American media's dominance. But in the late 1980s, U.S. cultural expansion benefited from the decline of state‐owned broadcasting systems and the collapse of communist governments in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (with their controlled media). The proliferation of privately owned media outlets especially affected television. As new networks sought to fill airtime, they turned to low‐cost American producers, and U.S. entainment programs such as Dallas and Baywatch became global hits.

While most Americans assumed that their cultural influence was benevolent, critics spoke of “cultural imperialism,” charging that Americanization “colonized” the minds of other peoples. Other observers argued that people in cultural “contact zones” quickly learn to borrow selectively and adapt cultural meanings to suit themselves. However interpreted, twentieth‐century American‐style culture clearly became a significant world force.
See also Foreign Trade, U.S.; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations.

Bibliography

Merle Curti , American Philanthropy Abroad: A History, 1963.
Emily S. Rosenberg , Spreading the American Dream: American Cultural and Economic Expansion, 1890–1945, 1982.
Frank Costigliola , Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933, 1984.
Akira Iriye , The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945, 1993.
Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, 1998.

Emily S. Rosenberg

U.S. Relations with Europe John Winthrop's image of a “city upon a hill,” the biblical motif identifying America as a divinely inspired corrective of the ills of the Old World, had been secularized by the time of the Revolutionary War. But its essence was expressed in Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), which represented the colonies as victims of an alien and exploitive British imperialism that endangered the freedoms and prosperity of Americans.

Independence and the Early Republic: No “Entangling Alliances”.

This sense of independence from the ways of the Old World, which some scholars call “American exceptionalism,” manifested itself in the first American effort to win support of Britain's European rivals in the struggle for independence. After the Declaration of Independence, the colonies were convinced that France would be the instrument to secure their freedom without any entangling obligations on their part. Such was the reasoning behind John Adams's Plan of 1776, which was based on an assumption that Europe would promote America's break with Britain both to open markets formerly monopolized by the mother country and to weaken Britain's economic power. France was a vital cog in the plan that would serve the war effort without reciprocal American commitments. Adams's language could not have been plainer: “I am not for soliciting any political connection, or military assistance from France. I wish for nothing but commerce, a mere marine treaty with them”.

American military setbacks on the field and France's hesitations about abetting rebellion against a monarchy, however, forced the new nation to settle for the Treaty of Paris in 1778. This treaty brought France into the war as an ally but at the price of assuming the entanglements that Paine and Adams had felt would be unnecessary as well as undesirable. The subsequent twenty‐two years of experience with the French alliance confirmed for Americans the wisdom of abstaining from alliances with any nation of the Old World. It was not that France was more dangerous than the other two powers the United States had to confront: Britain and Spain. Rather, Americans under the weak Confederation and the somewhat stronger Federal Union recognized that their independence was not secure and that they needed maximum flexibility in negotiating the various threats posed by European rivalries. Thomas Jefferson offered the definitive statement of this view in his first inaugural address in 1801, when he expressed America's goal: “Peace, Commerce, and honest friendship with all nations— entangling alliances with none”.

Britain was the major problem for the United States in its first generation. British acceptance of American independence was accompanied by efforts to substitute economic for political dominance. The former mother country also nourished the idea that the United States would not long endure, and used America's unwillingness or inability to fulfill certain articles of the peace treaty as a pretext for retaining bases in the Northwest, promoting unrest among Indian nations, and encouraging an Anglophile American mercantile class to support British interests.

The replacement of the weak Confederation with a potentially stronger Federal Union in 1789 did not end the nation's problems with the Old World. Spain intrigued to separate western territories from the Union. Britain identified itself with a Federalist party dependent on the British economy for the prosperity of mercantile interests. France, enmeshed in revolution, sought to exploit its alliance with the United States to promote its aggressive foreign policy. In brief, the administrations of George Washington and John Adams in the 1790s were embroiled in foreign relations that threatened the stability, if not the survival, of the new nation. In this decade the United States managed to keep Spain at bay, win limited access to the British economy, and conclude a naval war with France by terminating the Treaty of Paris in the Convention of Mortefontaine (1800).

Disengagement from Europe did not follow immediately, however. The United States under presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could not escape the long reach of the Napoleonic wars. The wars led to disputes with both Britain and France over neutral rights, and ultimately to war with Britain in 1812. Not until the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 did the United States feel free from the political power of Europe. The trauma attending Britain's impressment of American sailors and France's seizure of American ships had underscored the principle of freedom of the seas, which lingered on in attenuated forms into the twentieth century. Even more significant was the legacy of political nonentanglement with Europe that lasted well into the twentieth century. Not until 1949 when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created did the United States formally reenter “entangling alliances” with nations of the Old World.

The Monroe Doctrine and Beyond

. America's pride in surmounting challenges from the three European powers found expression in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the most notable symbol of American isolationism in the nineteenth century. It had been presaged by American success in forcing Britain to accept a joint occupation of the Oregon territory in 1818 and Spain to cede Florida in the Adams‐Onís Treaty the following year. Additionally, Spain was forced to accept an American interpretation of the boundary between Mexico and Louisiana. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, perhaps the greatest statesman in American history, was the prime mover in these diplomatic victories, and even he might have achieved more in Texas had he pressed his advantage. In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was an anticlimax, an American challenge to France and Spain to abandon ideas of reconquering Latin America and to Russia to desist from its push down the west coast of North America. Adams knew that it was in Britain's interest to support these challenges, even as its leaders resented America's triumphalism.

But the Monroe Doctrine's significance lay less in its specific warnings against European interference in the Americas than in its insistence on America's intention to refrain from involvement with Europe. This abstention from European affairs was visible when the United States gave only sympathy to Greeks seeking the freedoms Americans enjoyed, and, a generation later, when Hungary won only America's good wishes in its revolution against Austria in 1848. Despite the emotional appeal of many of its causes, the Old World remained out of bounds for American intervention.

Having made its case for aloofness, the Monroe Doctrine essentially disappeared from American consciousness until the end of the nineteenth century. The nation turned inward to develop what Jefferson called “the empire of liberty” that would extend from coast to coast. Such was the concept of “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined in 1845 but expressive of America's aggressive westward expansion throughout its history. There was hostility to Manifest Destiny from the familiar adversary, Great Britain; from Canada to the north; and from the new nation of Mexico to the south. Britain no longer threatened U.S. security, but it was able to restrain American ambitions along the Maine–New Brunswick border and limit America's more expansive claims in the Oregon country, summed up in the rallying cry “54°40′ or fight”. Mexico proved less able to contain American expansionists, as the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War in the 1840s demonstrated. But the measure of American power was less its acquisition of Mexican territory than in the deference Great Britain paid to the growing strength of the United States. Britain's willingness to accept compromise in the Pacific Northwest and to back off from support of Mexico resulted partly from the increasing contrast between a thinly populated Canada and a rapidly growing American population, and partly from an awareness of a need to keep the American market open to British manufacturers.

America at midcentury was not wholly absorbed in its own backyard. Isolation from the larger world was rarely equivalent to complete nonentanglement. While Latin America was neglected—aside from southern interest in Central America and the Caribbean—and Europe still held in suspicion, Americans looked to East Asia for economic opportunities and competed with Europeans in this arena. Nor did Europe, particularly Britain, hesitate to intervene again in America when opportunities arose. The slavery controversy and a destructive Civil War offered chances for Britain to consider recognizing the Confederacy and for France to establish a satellite empire in Mexico. The Confederacy's military setbacks aborted Britain's hopes in 1863, and the Union victory in 1865 extinguished Emperor Maximilian's pro‐French reign in Mexico.

The Gilded Age through World War I: Deepening Engagement

. Although an increasingly industrialized post–Civil War America found itself in closer proximity to Europe than ever before, the negative image of the Old World endured. Europe was still considered a continent of monarchs and tyrants, dangerous to American values. But on at least two levels close ties bound the two worlds. One was the continuing flow of European immigration that swelled the population of the United States and kept transatlantic links alive. This did not signify pressure for intimate relations, however; indeed, refugees fleeing poverty or repression in Ireland or Germany in the mid–nineteenth century, and Russia and Italy at the end of the century, probably reinforced isolationist prejudices. The other factor linking the two worlds was rising U.S. competition with Europe, particularly Britain, for new territories and new markets for agricultural and industrial products. As Manifest Destiny evolved into imperialist dreams, the United States built a navy to serve an overseas empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean, European imperialism having preempted Africa and Asia.

Spain once again was the primary victim of American expansion, in the Spanish‐American War of 1898, but Germany displaced Britain as potentially the more serious adversary. British challenges to America's conception of the Monroe Doctrine faded by the end of the century, as reflected in British support of the United States at Manila Bay during the Spanish‐American War and in Britain's concern over the challenge of imperial Germany to its supremacy on the high seas. Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy involved an informal collaboration with Britain. The common ground of Anglo‐Saxon kinship became more visible both to Britons witnessing the decline of their imperial power and to American leaders who identified their newfound sense of world power with their British cousins.

Anglophilia was clearly an element driving Woodrow Wilson's outlook on Europe in 1914. Britain and France represented a democratic culture far closer to America's than that of Germany and Austria. Long before the United States entered World War I in 1917, the nation under Wilson's leadership had tilted toward the Allies. But this sentiment did not mean an abandonment of the tradition of nonentanglement. From the onset of war in 1914, the president and nation looked upon it as a typical expression of Old World behavior. Sympathy for Britain did not preclude objections to its maritime practices, similar to those of the Napoleonic period. Pressure for neutrality was increased by Irish Americans and German Americans, who countered the eastern establishment's pro‐Allied sentiments.

Whether Allied propaganda, America's economic ties, or revulsion against German submarine warfare were individually or collectively responsible for the decision for war in 1917, America's entry into the conflict was not as an ally but as an “associated power,” with the avowed aim of ending for all time the nationalistic conflicts that created war. The United States may have fought alongside Britain and France, but not for the same objectives, any more than the United States in 1812 shared the objectives of its cobelligerent, Napoleonic France. The cynical Old World remained as dangerous to idealistic Americans as it had been in the eighteenth century. The difference was that in the twentieth century, Wilson believed, the New World had the power to change Europe's habits through a League of Nations to end all wars.

Since 1920: Isolationism; Military Alliances; Post–Cold War Uncertainty

. Disillusionment over the failure of Wilson's vision to transform world politics plunged the nation more deeply into isolationism than it had been in the nineteenth century. Revulsion took the form of high tariffs, restrictive immigration laws, and debt‐management policies that increased tensions between Europe and America, helped to bring on the Great Depression of the 1930s, and accounted for America's initial passivity as fascism and Nazism gained strength in Europe. Congress in the 1930s passed a series of neutrality acts designed to avoid a repeat of the experience of World War I. Consequently, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 found the United States officially in the same neutral stance that it had held at the beginning of World War I in 1914.

Neutrality was of shorter duration in World War II, however. While it took a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to elicit a U.S. declaration of war, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, supported by public opinion, had a greater awareness of the stakes than in the past. The administration's judgment that a Nazi victory in Europe would imperil America's security carried greater weight than had Wilson's idealistic vision of a world without war. Despite the efforts of an isolationist America First Committee, the United States abandoned its neutrality laws before Pearl Harbor. It became a de facto cobelligerent against Hitler's Germany through a lend‐lease program—extended to the Soviet Union in 1941— and through antisubmarine patrols serving Great Britain in the Atlantic. Unlike the situation in World War I, the United States was now the dominant Western partner, leading a successful invasion of Europe in 1944 and providing supplies to help Russia defeat Germany in the East.

As the war drew to a close, the United States intended to use its role as a superpower to correct the mistakes of 1919. America would not only join the new league of nations, the United Nations (UN), but would take the lead in maintaining a new world order. Any assumption that Soviet communism would easily coexist with democratic capitalism was quickly dispelled. Less than two years after the war's end, Europe still despaired of its future, fearing that it might fall under communist control through subversion or the electoral process. Recognizing the errors of the interwar period, a bipartisan foreign policy resolved to rebuild Europe through economic aid via the Marshall Plan, and ultimately through the creation of NATO, linking America's fate with Europe's in an alliance with eleven European nations, including Britain and France. The intention was to contain communist expansion and in the process strengthen America's own economy, while fashioning a United States of Europe in the American image.

Fifty years later, the linkage remained in place. The Soviet Union and its communist system collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a united Europe appeared to be emerging. But with the end of the communist menace, centrifugal forces inevitably arose. Isolationist voices called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe; Europeans chafed over American domination of the alliance; questions about the wisdom of enlarging the membership of NATO as well as about its role in dealing with civil wars on its periphery gave rise to larger questions about the future of European‐American relations. Without the centripetal pressures that the Soviet challenge had presented, the fifty‐year alliance could collapse. A unified Europe in the future could be less reliant upon the American connection, and an America looking to the Pacific might become more aloof from Europe.

The strains deepened in the early twenty‐first century, as the European Union emerged as a potent political force and trading bloc, and as Washington under President George W. Bush pursued its own course in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. produced an initial wave of sympathy in Europe and broad support for the Bush administration's attack on the Al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan and the Taliban regime that had harbored it. But the subsequent U.S.‐led Iraq War of 2003 proved deeply divisive, with France and Germany expressing strong opposition. Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland, and newly independent Eastern European nations, by contrast, supported the U.S. action. (However, in 2004 a newly elected Socialist government in Spain withdrew from the pro‐U.S. coalition, insisting that Washington yield authority in Iraq to the United Nations.)While concerned about terrorism, European nations declined to rubber stamp Washington's ideas about how best to combat it. The Bush administration's preoccupation with Iraq as relations between Israel and the Palestinians deteriorated alienated still further European leaders who saw Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a continuing provocation to Muslim extremists. With America and Europe menaced by shadowy terrorist threats rather than by a common foe, as in the Cold War era, their relations grew increasingly testy and precarious, despite the ties of history and culture linking the two regions.
See also Cold War; Expansionism; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Neutrality Acts; Post–Cold War Era; Quasi‐War with France; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

Samuel Flagg Bemis , John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 1949.
Jean‐Baptiste Duroselle , From Wilson to Roosevelt: Foreign Policy of the United States, 1913–1945, 1963.
Philip Van Doren Stern , When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War, 1965.
Max Savelle , The International History of Angloamerica, 1492–1763, 1967.
Robert L. Beisner , From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 1975.
Melvyn L. Leffler , A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 1992.
Bradford Perkins , The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865, vol. 1, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, 1993.
Lawrence S. Kaplan , NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance, rev. ed., 1994.
Walter McDougall , Promised Land, Crusader State: America's Encounter with the World since 1776, 1997.

Lawrence S. Kaplan

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer

U.S. Relations with Asia Since 1784, when the Empress of China set sail from Boston for the Middle Kingdom, U.S. relations with Asia have revolved around four principal themes: economic factors, immigration, strategic interests, and war. The particular shape, texture, and importance of these themes have depended on the specific circumstances of different time periods, but all four have always been present to some degree.

From the Early Republic through 1945: Trade; Expansionism; War

. From 1784 to 1898, American interests focused on developing trade opportunities, initially with China, but later with Japan and other Asian nations. Of enormous assistance to American designs was Great Britain's use of military force during the first Opium War (1839–1842), resulting in greater British access to Chinese ports. By the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844, the U.S. negotiated the same concession. Trade with Japan grew steadily after Commodore Matthew Perry opened some commercial ties with Japan in 1854.

Immigration developed alongside trade relations as a major issue in the nineteenth century. Chinese laborers traveled to the United States, settled on the West Coast, and played a critical role in the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Their growing presence—over 110,000 by the 1870s— raised concerns with organized labor and politicians, leading to the first of several exclusion acts in 1882. From then until 1943, U.S. immigration policy focused on barring Asians. Chinese were targeted first, but Filipinos and Japanese were also later restricted.

Economic and strategic interests converged in 1898 when the United States defeated Spain and, amid a chorus of imperialist arguments, took possession of the Philippines rather than grant the islands independence. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipinos fought back, dragging America into the first of four major wars in Asia over the next seventy‐five years. Not until 1946 did the United States grant the Philippines full independence and for decades after the U.S. military maintained a major presence on the island.

Concern over European and Japanese efforts to carve out exclusive spheres of influence in China led Secretary of State John Hay to issue the “Open Door” notes at the turn of the twentieth century. Eager to expand outlets for America's agricultural and manufacturing surpluses, Hay sought access to China, which meant, endorsing its territorial integrity and opposing exclusive spheres of influence in China by other powers. Antiforeign violence broke out in China in 1901 as a group called the Boxers rose up. European, Japanese, and American troops intervened to protect their citizens and restore order, but “Open Door” principles generally prevailed. From then until 1931, American interests in Asia were expressed largely through government‐encouraged, but privately sponsored, loans, business initiatives, and Christian missionary efforts.

Japan, meanwhile, demonstrated its growing economic, military, and political vitality, first by defeating Chinese forces in 1894–1895 and more importantly by defeating Russia, especially its navy, in 1904–1905. Japan's development as a regional power raised fears in Europe and the United States. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 temporarily diverted attention from Asia, but the Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1921–1922 sought not only to prevent a naval arms race but also to curb Japan's power. This effort collapsed, however, along with the world economy in 1929. Economic depression reinforced Japanese militarism and fueled Japan's desire to create an exclusive sphere of influence in Asia. Japan embarked on the military occupation of China, starting with Manchuria in 1931 and expanding in 1937 into the central provinces. The U.S. reaction was rhetorical at first, but as the fascist danger grew, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration came to see the problems of Asia and Europe as interrelated.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 officially brought the United States into World War II. Despite the Europe‐first strategy, the United States committed large forces to the Pacific. In a strategic move designed to prepare for the postwar world, President Roosevelt elevated the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai‐shek (Jiang Jieshi) to a position of equality with himself, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The Pacific war ended abruptly and decisively in August 1945 with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Cold War and Vietnam

. After 1945 the United States sought to build a nonmilitaristic Japan and to revive Japanese industry as the focal point for Asian economic growth. The new alliance with Japan became critical after the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tsetung (Mao Zedong) seized power on the mainland in 1949, forcing Chiang and his government to flee to the island of Formosa (Taiwan), where they proclaimed the Republic of China.

When Kim Il Sung's North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, communist aggression appeared to be spreading by military force. Under the aegis of the United Nations, the Harry S. Truman administration committed U.S. troops to South Korea's defense. The dramatic success of General Douglas MacArthur's Inchon landing in September and drive into North Korea was followed two months later by an equally dramatic retreat as Chinese communist troops crossed the border and joined the war. For the next two and half years, both sides fought bitterly back and forth over the thirty‐eighth parallel, which became the dividing line when a ceasefire was agreed to in July 1953.

During the Korean War, the United States began a military commitment to Southeast Asia as well, helping to finance and supply the French effort to restore its colonial presence in Vietnam and to defeat Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietnamese communists, who proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945. He appealed to the United States for assistance, but from Washington's perspective, his allegiance to communism meant that he was part of an effort to undermine American interests around the world; that he was also a nationalist appeared irrelevant. When French troops were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration intervened, providing military and economic assistance to Ngo Dinh Diem's government in Saigon, as part of a general strategy to divide Vietnam and create a viable anticommunist government in the south. Although the United States was reluctant to commit itself to yet another land war in Asia, its engagement in Vietnam gradually deepened as Southeast Asia became important both as a symbol of America's anticommunist commitment to the region and as part of a regional economic structure with Japan serving as the hub.

The centrality of anticommunism in America's post–1945 Asian policy found further expression in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), created in 1954 at the initiative of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. It brought together Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Great Britain, France, and the United States in an association pledged to resist “communist aggression”; a separate protocol extended SEATO protection to South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

The revitalization of Japan, anticommunism, the isolation of communist China, and military engagement in Korea and Vietnam shaped American policy in Asia from 1949 to 1972. What finally modified this strategy was a combination of economic considerations and the failure of the U.S. military effort in Vietnam. Beginning with President Truman, and continuing with presidents Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, the United States committed itself, first indirectly and gradually, then directly and rapidly, to supporting South Vietnam. In 1965, Johnson significantly escalated a bombing campaign and sent U.S. combat troops. At its peak, the United States had more than 540,000 soldiers fighting in Vietnam, all in the hope of convincing the North Vietnam leadership that the United States was serious about its commitment to stopping communism. But stalemate was the best that could be achieved.

Beyond the Cold War: New Opportunities, New Issues.

President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 signaled a change in American Asian strategy. Marking an end of the goal of isolating China in the hope of undermining Beijing's communist government, this visit signaled America's desire for access to new markets to help a sagging U.S. economy. Nixon also sought Mao's help in negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. The United States reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese in January 1973 on the withdrawal of all American combat personnel, but the fighting did not end until Vietnam's unification under communist control in April 1975.

As the twenty-first century began, U.S. relations with Asia increasingly involved economic issues, including engaging and expanding the China market (while simultaneously pushing for democratic change), increasing U.S. exports and curbing Asian nations’ trading practices considered unfair by the United States, and building free‐market capitalism in Southeast Asia. Immigration returned as a major issue after the Immigration Act of 1965 and with it a new wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Strategic concerns included forestalling the development of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea, normalizing relations between the two Koreas, preventing a regional nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, and avoiding a military conflict with China over the status of Taiwan.

The War on Terrorism launched by the George W. * Bush administration following the attacks of September 11, 2001 extended to Asia, as U.S. military personnel assisted the government of the Philippines in combating an Islamist guerrilla insurgency. Washington closely monitored events in Indonesia, where in 2002 an Islamic extremist group orchestrated a bombing at a nightclub in Bali that killed more than 200, mostly young Australian tourists, and a subsequent bombing at a Marriott Hotel in the capital, Jakarta, that claimed 12 lives. Washington's post‐9/11 concern with weapons of mass destruction focused attention on North Korea as that isolated communist regime tested long‐range missiles and boastfully repudiated earlier pledges to halt its nuclear-weapons program. Relations worsened after President Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union address linked North Korea with Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil.” U.S. relations with China continued to be strained by trade disputes, concerns about China's human‐rights record, and controversy sparked by an aggressive independence movement in Taiwan, which Beijing claimed as a part of China.In 2004 Vice President Dick Cheney addressed all these problems on a visit to Japan, South Korea, and China. In Japan he sought to shore up Tokyo's shaky support for the American‐led Iraq War and the problem‐plagued occupation of that country.
See also Asian Americans; Business; Capitalism; Cold War; Expansionism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Foreign Trade, U.S.; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; Immigration Law; Missionary Movement; Nuclear Weapons; “Open Door” Policy; Perry, Matthew and Oliver Hazard; Post–Cold War Era; Spanish‐American War; Tet Offensive.

Bibliography

Akira Iriye , Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American‐East Asian Relations, 1967.
Emily Rosenberg , Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945, 1982.
Michael Hunt , The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914, 1983.
George C. Herring , America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 2nd ed., 1986.
Arthur Power Dudden , The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present, 1992.
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker , Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 1994.
Walter LaFeber , The Clash: U.S.‐Japanese Relations Throughout History, 1997.
Don Oberdorfer , The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, 1997.
Michael Schaller , Altered States: The United States and Japan Since the Occupation, 1997.

T. Christopher Jespersen

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer

U.S. Relations with Africa America's ties with Africa are rooted in the violent hemorrhaging of the slave trade. Beginning in 1618 and continuing for almost two centuries, an estimated two million slaves were wrenched from the West African coast and shipped to the Caribbean and North America. Discomfort with these reluctant immigrants led to the American Colonization Society's failed efforts in the 1820s to “repatriate” freed slaves to Liberia, which became a virtual U.S. protectorate. For the next century, only explorers’ tales, missionary reports, and Theodore Roosevelt's hunting safaris piqued Americans’ interest in the “Dark Continent”.

Severed from their ethnic roots, eager to prove their patriotism, and embarrassed by the prevailing stereotypes of Africa, African Americans shunned identification with the continent. By the early twentieth century, however, pushed by virulent racism at home and pulled by Ethiopia's defeat of Italy in 1896, some U.S. blacks reconsidered. Identification with Africa, they argued, would deepen black Americans’ pride and political power. W.E.B. Du Bois led a Pan‐African delegation to the 1919 Versailles peace conference, and Marcus Garvey promoted a back‐to‐Africa movement in the early 1920s. Black churches, especially the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, sponsored missionaries in Africa, and in the 1940s Paul Robeson chaired the militant Council on African Affairs.

World War II highlighted North Africa's strategic and South Africa's economic importance, but the United States, confident that Europeans would maintain control of the continent, remained on the sidelines, and African Americans, bowing to the superpatriotism of the early Cold War, again distanced themselves from Africa. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, Washington, caught off guard as decolonization swept through the continent, finally turned its attention to Africa. Its policy, while influenced by the domestic politics of race, was determined by the exigencies of the Cold War. President John F. Kennedy offered rhetorical support for the newly independent nations, more than doubled U.S. aid (to $460 million in 1961), and dispatched Peace Corps volunteers.

The traffic was, for the first time, two‐way: African students and diplomats came to the United States, where they encountered racism and segregation. “African diplomats consider the United States the most difficult post,” the Malian embassy commented in 1961. Two years later, the Organization of African Unity formally expressed “deep concern over racial discrimination in the United States”. Fear that African outrage at U.S. racism would give the Soviets a powerful propaganda weapon spurred Kennedy to support the civil rights movement at home, while Cold War fears led him and President Lyndon B. Johnson to quash revolts they considered pro‐communist in Africa. In the Congo, Johnson relied on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and white mercenary troops to maintain the pro‐American regime—a policy that generated virtually no debate in the United States.

Washington's interest was short‐lived. By 1968, the fall of leading African leftists, such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Algeria's Ben Bella, and Mali's Modibo Keita, and the frailty of anticolonialist guerrilla movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Rhodesia, lulled Washington back to complacency. The Richard M. Nixon administration considered Africa's minority white regimes to be America's most reliable allies on the continent.

Blindsided in 1974 when a coup in Lisbon led to the decolonization of Portugal's African colonies, Washington colluded with South Africa's white government to prevent a leftist victory in Angola—a policy that was foiled by the intervention of thirty thousand Cuban troops in 1975–1976. As the Cubans moved on to Ethiopia in 1977 to repel an invasion from Somalia and Nigeria gained economic clout as a major oil exporter, Washington's concern increased. Heightened Cold War fears led the Ronald Reagan administration to assist anticommunist insurgents in Angola. Meanwhile, TransAfrica, an activist organization founded in 1976 by African Americans, successfully challenged the administration's accommodationist policy toward South Africa's apartheid regime. In 1986, over Reagan's veto, Congress imposed economic sanctions on South Africa.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and of white African regimes, U.S. interest in Africa subsided. President George Bush sent U.S. troops to Somalia to assist in famine relief, but he withdrew them as factional fighting flared in the capital. Numbed by television images of famine, war, and the epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS); confused about humanitarian intevention; loath to join multilateral efforts; and convinced that Africa's problems were both intractable and marginal to U.S. interests, the United States at the end of the twentieth century lapsed back toward the indifference that had long characterized its stance toward Africa.
See also African American Religion; Colonization Movement, African; Missionary Movement; Slavery: The Slave Trade.

Bibliography

Richard D. Mahoney , JFK: Ordeal in Africa, 1983.
Gerald J. Bender, James S. Coleman, Richard L. Sklar, eds., African Crisis Areas and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1985.
Zaki Laïdi , The Superpowers and Africa: The Constraints of a Rivalry, 1960–1990, trans. Patricia Baudoin, 1990.
Thomas Borstelmann , Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War, 1993.
Peter J. Schraeder , United States Foreign Policy toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis, and Change, 1996.
Brenda Gayle Plummer , Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960, 1996.

Nancy Mitchell

U.S. Relations With the Middle East From the early nineteenth century, rivalry between the Russian and British empires unfolded in an arena extending from the Balkans to India. America's minor interests in the region up to World War I involved mainly commerce and missionary work. After the United States entered the war in 1917, the Ottoman Empire broke relations, but the two powers did not engage in hostilities. As U.S. commercial interests expanded in the oil‐rich Middle East, the “buffer” states that had emerged between the British and Soviet empires tried to balance great‐power ambitions and allied among themselves against external threats.

Waging the Cold War in the Middle East

. After 1945, America's dominant concerns in the Middle East were containing Soviet influence and resolving the Arab‐Israeli conflict. As British power in the region waned, the potential Soviet threat preoccupied Washington planners. The Cold War brought a series of presidential pronouncements, or “doctrines,” asserting America's determination to resist Soviet threats to influence the region. While most Arab states welcomed Britain's departure, Turkey and Iran, bordering the Soviet Union, sought U.S. assistance. The Truman Doctrine, enunciated in March 1947 by President Harry S. Truman in response to Britain's withdrawal from Greece, marked a growing U.S. commitment to maintaining the balance of power in the region. Washington increasingly linked America's vital concerns in Europe and the Middle East, which supplied 75 percent of Europe's oil requirements. The Joint Chiefs of Staff stressed Turkey's crucial role in both regions, and the Truman administration supported the admission of Turkey (and Greece) into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The gradual departure of the British (and the French from the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa) encouraged nationalist movements in the Middle East. In Arab eyes, the United States, initially free of colonialist taint, became identified with imperialism. Two factors reinforced this link: U.S. support for a Jewish state in Palestine and America's continued collaboration with the British. To U.S. strategists, containment of the Soviet threat, even at the cost of association with the vestiges of colonialism, outranked better relations with the region's emerging nationalist forces.

The implications of these choices emerged starkly in Iran. The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, worried about Iran's drift toward neutrality, carried out in 1953 a British‐sponsored plan to overthrow the nationalist Mohammed Mossadeq and reinstall the pro‐Western Shah Reza Pahlavi. In supporting this policy, Washington violated the principle of sovereignty, with long‐lasting consequences.

As the Soviet Union gained influence with Egypt, Iraq, and Syria (in part because of U.S. support for Israel), U.S. administrations redoubled their containment efforts. The 1956 Suez Crisis (see below) gave rise to the Eisenhower Doctrine, which pledged the United States to defend the Middle East against a perceived Soviet threat. After a nationalist revolution in Iraq in 1958, Washington negotiated executive agreements with Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan (in the Central Treaty Organization) institutionalizing U.S. military support to these countries.

In 1968, Britain announced plans to withdraw entirely from the area east of Suez by 1971. The Richard M. Nixon administration, fearing a power vacuum in the Persian Gulf at a time when the United States was preoccupied in Vietnam, proclaimed the Nixon Doctrine (1969) pledging support and military aid to key regional powers who assumed responsibility for their own defense. Under Nixon's “twin‐pillar” policy, the United States relied primarily on Iran and Saudi Arabia. But the Shah's ability to protect U.S. interests in the Gulf proved short‐lived. Enriched by oil price hikes organized by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) following the 1973 Arab‐Israeli war, the Shah purchased nine billion dollars of western arms and developed a ruthless secret police. The 1979 Iranian revolution that brought to power a fundamentalist Islamic regime under the Ayatollah Khomeini, scholars believe, derived less from what Khomeini stood for than from what he opposed: the Shah's regime and U.S. control and cultural domination.

The Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later in the year underminded the security framework premised on the Nixon Doctrine. President Jimmy Carter's response, the Carter Doctrine (1980), emphasized the U.S. stake in the Persian Gulf, asserted America's ultimate responsibility for regional defense, and developed a Rapid Deployment Force to deal with crises in the region. The Ronald Reagan administration consolidated this security framework but also revived the policy of supporting “regional influentials,” bolstering assistance to Turkey and Pakistan and strengthening relations with Saudi Arabia.

Revolutionary Ferment and the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict

. After the Shah's fall, the foremost challenge to U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf came not from the Soviet Union but from revolutionary Iran and especially Iraq, whose leader, Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran in 1980, launching a war that cost a million lives. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, launching the Persian Gulf War, the George Bush administration coordinated a multination military operation to expel his army and deter him from intimidating Saudi Arabia. Saddam's subsequent defiance of the ceasefire conditions, persecution of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish minorities, and secret chemical and biological weapons programs resulted in a continuing embargo on Iraqi oil, restrictions on Saddam's military activities within Iraq, and United Nations inspections of weapons sites.

While pursuing the policy of containment (first of the Soviet Union, then of Iran and Iraq), Washington also confronted the Palestinian question. From the early Cold War on, regional specialists at the State Department worried that U.S. support for the partition of Palestine and the Zionist goal of a Jewish state would violate the principle of self‐determination, alienate the Arabs, make them more receptive to the Soviets, and undermine the policy of containment. Truman, however, for political and humanitarian reasons, supported the desire of many Jews to build a new life after the Holocaust, and he did not believe that this position jeopardized U.S. interests. Truman recognized the new state of Israel in 1948. The conflict between Israel's search for security and the Palestinian quest for self‐determination and a homeland was at the root of all subsequent Arab‐Israeli wars. The State Department's fears, meanwhile, were borne out in February 1955, when an Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip triggered events that led Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to seek Soviet assistance. The Eisenhower administration, in turn, cancelled a proposed loan to Egypt to build a dam at Aswan on the Nile. In 1956, after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal to pay for the dam, British, French, and Israeli forces colluded in an attack on Egypt. U.S. pressure and Soviet threats to intervene led to a ceasefire, but the episode increased Nasser's regional influence. The 1956 war, followed by U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958 and France's colonial war in Algeria, helps explain why Arab states, with firsthand knowledge of Western intervention but little direct experience with Soviet expansionism, embraced Soviet assistance. Following the 1967 war, in which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, the U.S.–Israeli relationship developed into a virtual alliance, while Palestinians who had looked to Nasser now took the nationalist movement into their own hands.

After yet another war in 1973, prodded by rising Palestinian nationalism and an Arab oil embargo, the United States adopted a more constructive response to Palestinian concerns and grievances, including an attempt to rectify some (but not all) historical injustices. This aim was not easily implemented, however, as shown in Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy and in Carter's search for a comprehensive peace, which fell short when the 1979 Camp David Accords ended in a separate peace between Israel and Egypt. A 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, made possible by the Israeli‐Egyptian peace and motivated by Israel's desire to crush Palestinian strongholds from which attacks were mounted on Israel, again illustrated the centrality of the Palestinian question. An Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, began in the West Bank and Gaza in 1987 after twenty years of Israeli occupation.

Israeli negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, promoted by the Bush administration and facilitated by the Norwegian government, reached fruition in the 1993 Oslo Accords. This agreement (as well as subsequent interim agreements) was grounded in the concept, framed by 1967 United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of exchanging territory for peace. It provided the basis for a phased Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and increasing Palestinian self‐rule, but left in limbo the borders and final status of the Palestinian entity and the future of Jerusalem. The opposition of extremist elements in both Israel and the Palestinian territories resulted in the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a pro‐settlement activist and in terrorist attacks that reinforced hardline opposition on both sides. The Bill Clinton administration, like its predecessors, searched for a framework for further progress, and in 1999, with the election of new Israeli government under Ehud Barak, the peace process that had been suspended during the last year of the administration of Benjamin Netanyahu was once again a high priority. In July 2000, as his term wound down, President Clinton brought Arafat and Barak to Camp David for a final round of talks. Despite substantial progress, however, the two sides reached an impass over Jerusalem, and the negotiations, like so many in the past, ended inconclusively.

Post-9/11 Developments

. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States by Islamic extremists vastly complicated U.S. relations with the Middle East. While President George W. Bush insisted that the War on Terrorism was not a crusade against Islam, some prominent U.S. Christian fundamentalists interpreted it in religious terms, stirring anger among Muslims. Although Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in Iraq had few friends in the region, most Middle Eastern states, headed by autocratic regimes and confronting radical Islamist discontent internally, opposed the U.S.-led Iraq War of 2003 and the Bush administration's larger objective of spreading democracy throughout the region. The U.S. intervention in Iraq, and the subsequent turmoil, they warned, would increase rather than diminish the terrorist threat.

While Pakistan's military ruler Pervez Musharraf backed the U.S. action in Iraq, he faced opposition and even assassination attempts from Islamic militants in his own country. U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia were strained by the fact that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, as well as fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 attackers, were Saudis. U.S. intelligence also traced some terrorist funds to Saudi-based charities. Post–9/11 relations with Iran and Syria remained tense as well, as the Bush administration suspected them of harboring terrorists. However, Washington welcomed the decision of Iran (and Libya) to permit UN inspectors to verify that they were not developing nuclear weapons.

Many observers saw U.S. support for Israel, and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as crucial factors in the upsurge of Islamic terrorism. The Bush Administration in 2001 proposed a ‘road map’ for peace involving the Palestinians' renunciation of terrorism and acceptance of Israel's right to exist, in return for the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the West Bank and Gaza, an end to Israel's occupation of these territories, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. But the road map languished as Washington focused on the Iraq War, anti-terrorism efforts elsewhere, and the long-term goal of spreading democracy throughout the Arab world. Washington expressed disapproval, but otherwise did little, as Jewish settlements expanded in the West Bank and as Israel extended its control of the West Bank by checkpoints, controlled-access highways, and a security barrier that in places extended into Palestinian territory. As suicide attacks by hard-line Palestinian organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade killed many Israeli civilians, and the Israelis responded by assassinating militant leaders and conducting military operations in the West Bank and Gaza that resulted in much destruction and loss of life, the prospects for peace in this vital and turbulent region seemed more remote than ever.
See also Energy Crisis of the 1970s; Missionary Movement; Petroleum Industry.

Bibliography

Bruce Kuniholm , The Persian Gulf and United States Policy, 1984.
William Quandt , Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics, 1986.
William B. Quandt , Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab‐Israeli Conflict since 1967, 1993.
Hanan Ashrawi , This Side of Peace, 1995.
David Makovsky , Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo Accords, 1996.
Charles Smith , Palestine and the Arab‐Israeli Conflict, 3d ed., 1996.
Rashid Khalidi , Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, 1997.
Benny Morris , Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist‐Arab Conflict, 1881–1999, 1999.

Bruce Kuniholm

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer

U.S. Relations with Canada American relations with Canada began in hostility. In the Colonial Era, American colonists and their Indian allies warred regularly with French settlers on the St. Lawrence. In the Revolutionary War, American troops invaded Canada, hoping to provoke an uprising against the British, who had conquered Canada in 1759. Although Montreal fell in 1775, Quebec withstood, and Canada did not revolt. After 1783, Loyalists fleeing patriot vengeance found refuge in British North America.

The Loyalists accentuated Canada's anti‐Americanism. British North America was to be a different America, one still responsive to London, and many in the new United States viewed their northern neighbor suspiciously. The War of 1812, again pitting the United States against the British, reinforced Canada's anti‐Americanism. The Rush‐Bagot Convention of 1817, the first gesture of reconciliation, demilitarized the Great Lakes. An 1818 convention resolved most outstanding border disputes, although the Oregon boundary remained uncertain and controversies over fishing rights dragged into the twentieth century. Canadian rebellions in 1837–1838, encouraged by American expansionists, created tensions in the Northeast, and a brief border skirmish, known as the Aroostook War, flared in 1839. The Webster‐Ashburton Treaty (1842) resolved several boundary controversies, and by the 1850s relations had eased.

Tensions flared again during the American Civil War, however, fed by U.S. anger at British support for the Confederacy. The Union victory fed fears in British North America that the United States might try to restore internal harmony by an invasion northward. Such fears contributed to the unification movement that resulted in the confederation of four British colonies into the Dominion of Canada on 1 July 1867. The Canadian constitution adopted an American federal model while giving more power to the central government.

The new nation remained a colony, London nominally controlling foreign relations until 1931. Relations between Washington and Ottawa fluctuated, with periods of hostility and coolness interrupting two‐way emigration and ever‐increasing trade. When arbitration settled the turn‐of‐the‐century Alaska boundary dispute in America's favor, Ottawa pressed for creation of an International Joint Commission, the first of a web of agencies for the resolution of disputes.

In 1911, over many Canadians’ opposition, the two nations signed a free‐trade reciprocity agreement. A viciously anti‐American election in 1911 produced a new government and quickly killed reciprocity. But the outbreak of World War I and the necessity to coordinate scarce commodity supplies led Canada to establish a quasi‐diplomatic presence in Washington and to accept limited military cooperation. By 1927, when the two countries exchanged diplomatic missions, American investment in Canada far outstripped British. Increasingly, Canada was part of a continental economy, and the Depression of the 1930s, though it fostered protectionism, did not reverse the trend.

World War II confirmed Canada's southward drift, as British military and economic weakness strengthened U.S.–Canadian ties. The Permanent Joint Board on Defense (1940) marked Canada's open reliance on the U.S. military; the Hyde Park Declaration (April 1941) signalled her economic dependency. By 1945, the United States had constructed the Alaska Highway, air bases, and weather stations in northern Canada. A still‐wary Ottawa paid in full for all these installations at war's end and ushered the GIs home.

The Cold War forced renewed cooperation. Canada provided troops for the Korean War, built radar lines with the United States, and in 1957–1958 integrated its air defenses with the U.S. Air Force. While Canadians favored such measures, underlying tensions erupted in 1962–1963 over nuclear weapons deployment, and the Liberal party, which had accepted the weapons, barely survived another anti‐American election. During the Vietnam War, Canada protested U.S. bombing and admitted an estimated 100,000 draft resisters.

Increasingly, however, U.S.–Canadian relations centered on economics. American dollars amounted to more than 75 percent of the total foreign investment in Canada in the 1960s, stirring fears for Canadian independence. Canadian corporations dependent on Wall Street defeated the Liberal party's effort to curb U.S. investment. Other proposals to increase Canada's economic autonomy provoked confrontations with Washington. In 1985, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who wanted “super” relations with the United States, changed course and pressed for free trade. The resulting agreement swept away tariff barriers while supposedly protecting Canada's still‐fragile culture; Ottawa signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Canada accepted its North Americanness at last.

Still, Canadian anti‐Americanism remained powerful. American legislation against foreign companies doing business in Cuba irritated Canadians, as did U.S. objections to protective cultural measures. Increasingly, however, such disputes were resolved in bilateral or multilateral trade panels, and relations remained close as the twentieth century ended. The two governments consulted regularly, Washington fully supported Ottawa in its dealings with Quebec separatists, citizens crossed the borders freely, and the two nations were each other's biggest trading partners. The superpower inevitably overshadows the smaller country, but Canadians’ national survival rests in their own hands.
See also Expansionism; Foreign Trade, U.S.; French Settlements in North America; Multinational Enterprises.

Bibliography

Seymour Martin Lipset , Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada, 1990.
Robert Bothwell , Canada and the United States: The Politics of Partnership, 1992.
J.L. Granatstein and and Norman Hillmer , For Better or for Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s, 1992.
Gordon T. Stewart , The American Response to Canada since 1776, 1992.
John H. Thompson and and Stephen J. Randall , Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies, 1994.
J.L. Granatstein , Yankee Go Home? Canadians and Anti‐Americanism, 1996.

J.L. Granatstein

U.S. Relations with Latin America The first independent republics arose in the Americas during “the age of democratic revolution” between 1775 and 1825. Conceived in the course of complicated revolts against European empires, the new nations professed devotion to free trade and representative government, but their actual practices varied widely. The United States, the first of these republics, presumed that they all would share common identities and purposes. In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine supported Latin American independence by warning the Europeans against reconquest. It also established a myth of hemispheric unity, according to which common experiences and beliefs supposedly linked North and South Americans in a shared commitment to “the Western Hemisphere idea”. Affirming the interconnectedness of commerce, republicanism, and political disengagement from Europe, this claim served useful rhetorical purposes. In actual practice, national interests based on disparities of wealth, power, and culture functioned as the primary determinants of international behavior.

Following formal recognition of their independence in the 1820s and 1830s, Latin American governments typically cultivated European connections. The United States, in contrast, engaged in westward expansion, conquering territory to the Pacific Ocean. In 1848, Mexico lost half of its territory to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended a war between the two countries. The United States then suffered the effects of the Civil War, the outcome of which focused attention more on the pursuit of commercial than territorial gain. During the latter third of the nineteenth century, U.S. elites developed compelling interests in overseas markets to serve burgeoning industry and agriculture.

The Spanish‐American War in 1898 marked an important transition. As a consequence of this three‐month struggle, the United States obtained hegemonic status in the New World and something very much like an empire. Since the Teller Amendment (introduced by Colorado senator Henry M. Teller) blocked outright annexation of Cuba, Washington devised other means of control. Cuba became a protectorate under the terms of the Platt Amendment, an administration measure sponsored by Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut. The United States then expanded its protectorate system, which enabled U.S. officials to sustain order by working with indigenous elites when possible and to intervene administratively and militarily when necessary, to Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. As justified by President Theodore Roosevelt's “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, “the exercise of an international police power” by the United States served the nation's basic interests in preventing “chronic wrongdoing” in the Caribbean regions, keeping away European nations, and safeguarding the Panama Canal.

U.S. hegemony came under challenge in Mexico after the revolution of 1910. Threatened by violence and revolution, U.S. corporations operating in Mexico demanded strong measures. President Woodrow Wilson intervened twice with military forces. Nevertheless, the Mexican Constitution of 1917 presented long‐term dangers to U.S. propertyholders under authority of Article 27, which endorsed the principles of nationalization and expropriation. In Mexico, henceforth, foreign ownership of property would be a privilege, not a right. Meanwhile, the consequences of World War I strengthened the U.S. economic position by cutting off Latin Americans from European consumers and investors and increasing dependence on the United States. Before the war, U.S. trading and strategic interests focused mainly on the Central American–Caribbean region; after the war, ties rapidly increased with South American nations.

Following Germany's defeat in 1918, the absence of European threats in the Western Hemisphere deprived U.S. interventionist policies of urgency and justification. Under Republican administrations in the 1920s, a shift away from these practices produced a new orientation, culminating in the 1930s with the Good Neighbor Policy. Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this approach accomplished a turnabout. The United States stopped intervening in Latin America and dismantled most of the remnants of the protectorate system. The incentives emanated from the Great Depression. Seeking markets and resources, Washington gave up obsolete forms of military activity in hopes of cultivating Latin American cooperation. The change paid off. During World War II, most of Latin America lined up in support of the United States, assuring a high degree of “hemispheric solidarity” against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

World War II further strengthened Latin America's economic dependence on the United States. Needing a market for their products, Latin American countries courted favor with Washington by declaring war on the Axis powers or severing relations with them. The exceptions, Argentina and Chile, preferred neutrality for their own reasons. The United States, meanwhile, rewarded its Latin American allies with promises of economic aid and assistance in future industrialization and modernization.

During the Cold War, U.S. priorities shifted away from Latin America, regarded as peripheral to the main contest with the Soviet Union. International relations in the Western Hemisphere featured military and political collaboration through the Rio Pact (1947) and the Organization of American States (1948) but demonstrated no equivalent governmental focus on economic affairs. Contrary to wartime assurances, the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations did not pursue a “Marshall Plan” for Latin America, encouraging instead time‐honored techniques for promoting growth through free trade and private investment. Latin Americans, in contrast, wanted large‐scale aid and assistance and also favored programs of state intervention in the economy. Such differences over basic strategies for economic development gave rise to Latin American charges of U.S. indifference and neglect.

The Cold War also produced reversions to intervention. Such acts usually came about when U.S. leaders linked revolutionary nationalism in Latin America with the Soviet threat. Radical regimes in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959), and Chile (1973) occasioned specific instances. U.S. leaders saw these regimes as Soviet vanguards, threatening U.S. security interests. To counter them, Washington employed clandestine means, more often than not attaining their immediate goals. Among the primary offenders, only Fidel Castro in Cuba survived the efforts to overthrow him, notably during the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. But the elected governments of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile both fell when confronted with U.S. opposition. Critics of U.S. policy, meanwhile, pointed out that right‐wing, anticommunist dictators—no matter how brutal—elicited much less impatience. As examples, they cited U.S. support for Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.

Legacies of authoritarianism, repression, and poverty colored U.S.–Latin American relations in the 1980s. To combat Marxist enthusiasms within the revolutionary Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, President Ronald Reagan's administration pursued counterrevolutionary policies by backing right‐wing opposition forces, the so‐called Contras. Reagan officials also warned of Soviet incursions. For them, revolutionary activity in Central America constituted an East‐West encounter, that is, a Cold War confrontation by proxy. This position differed from the Jimmy Carter administration's earlier view, which depicted such ferment as a North‐South issue between the “developed” and “developing” worlds. Meanwhile, “the quiet invasion”—the movement of people out of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean into the United States, often without sanction from U.S. immigration authorities—caused concern.

The end of the Cold War again altered the international context of U.S.–Latin American relations. The Soviet Union no longer served as a pretext for U.S. interventions, Marxist movements in Latin America moderated, and the United Nations became more active as a peacemaker within the hemisphere. At the same time, significant issues and sources of tension defied resolution, in part because governments lacked the capability of stopping human migrations and the flow of illicit drugs. At the same time, profound demographic and cultural changes held significant implications for the future. Census Bureau forecasts suggested that by 2050, Hispanics would constitute one‐quarter of the U.S. population, and already at the end of the twentieth century, persons of Latin American antecedents constituted an emerging majority in the southeastern and southwestern United States.
See also Depressions, Economic; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Hispanic Americans; Immigration; Immigration Law; Mexican War; Puerto Rico.

Bibliography

Arthur P. Whitaker , The Western Hemisphere Idea, 1954.
Mark T. Gilderhus , Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the Western Hemisphere, 1986.
Stephen G. Rabe , Eisenhower and Latin America, 1988.
John J. Johnson , A Hemisphere Apart: The Foundations of United States Policy toward Latin America, 1990.
Frederick B. Pike , The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature, 1992.
Walter LaFeber , The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913, vol. 2, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, 1993.
John H. Coatsworth , Central America and the United States, 1994.
Fredrick B. Pike , FDR's Good Neighbor Policy, 1995.
Peter H. Smith , Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.–Latin American Relations, 1996.

Mark T. Gilderhus