Transcript America_s changing national interest

America’s changing
national interest
Americans had a national interest even before
they became a nation. As the 13 colonies
evolved, they saw their interests differently from
those of Britain.
London wanted cheap raw materials, a closed
market for British products, and colonial taxes to
pay the defense and administrative costs of the
colonies.
The Colonist wanted to sell their products to
anyone, not just Britain. They wanted to
manufacture their own goods, not just buy
British goods, free security, and they didn’t
want to pay taxes.
Years before 1776, American and British
national interest had begun to diverge,
leading straight to the Declaration of
Independence.
Independence
The unlikely assistance of France helped the
United States gain their independence.
France had an interest in weakening Britain
and gaining an American ally and a trading
partner.
 The colonies sought both military and
diplomatic support from France, Spain, and
any other European power that might have
a grudge against Britain.
Independence
The colonial war cost Britain too much, so
London settled in 1782. To clinch the deal,
Benjamin Franklin told London that the U.S.
really sought no alliance with France.
All in all, early American foreign policy was
brilliant: A weak new country gained
independence and recognition by the major
European powers.
Manifest Destiny
A weak Articles of Confederation left the U.S.
open to European powers attacks.
The Articles of Confederation had to
scrapped and the U.S. Constitution got
adopted.
Manifest Destiny: Fear of Conquer
The Constitution provided for the common
defense which provided and maintained an
army and a navy.
The U.S. felt threatened by the Spaniards in
FL, the French in LA, the British in Canada, the
Russians in AK, and revolutionaries in Mexico.
The U.S. gained most of these territories
(except for Canada) with force and/or cash.
Manifest Destiny
By the 1840s Americans were convinced that
they had a manifest destiny determined by
God to claim and populate most of North
America.
With most of the continent populated by
Americans, we would have little to fear.
Manifest destiny was in the best interest of
the United States.
Imperialism
Imperialism: Spreading nation’s power over
other lands.
In 1894, the U.S. faced a sharp economic
depression, prompting some to see imperial
expansion as a way to gain new markets for
American goods.
Social Darwinism encouraged Americans,
including Teddy Roosevelt, to think of
themselves as the “fittest” who were destined
for world leadership over lesser peoples.
Imperialism
By the time of President McKinley, imperialists
were defining the U.S. national interest as
overseas expansion, a kind of new manifest
destiny.
The sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana
harbor brought the cry, “Remember the
Maine, to hell with Spain!”
The sinking of the ship might have been
intentionally done by the U.S.
Imperialism
In one year, 1898, the U.S. took Cuba
(independent but a U.S. protectorate),
Puerto, and the Philippines, plus Guam,
Hawaii, Wake Islands, and American Samoa
(in 1899).
Suddenly, America was an empire (The U.S.
had claimed Midway in 1867).
The expansion to east Asia was the building
block to war with Japan 42 years later.
Imperialism
The new U.S. Navy and merchant fleet had
to be able to get quickly from the Atlantic to
the Pacific.
When Colombia hesitated to build a canal
through its Isthmus in Panama, Washington
set up an independent Panama in 1903, held
of Colombia with gunboats, and bought
canal rights from Panama.
Imperialism
Is imperialism worth all the deaths around the
world?
Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie were antiimperialist that bitterly denounced U.S.
expansion overseas.
Was it truly a U.S. national interest to expand
into East Asia? Or was it in the interest of a
few?
World War I
After war broke out in Europe in 1914,
Germany tried to keep America out while
Britain tried to get America in.
German submarine warfare threatened U.S.
shipping.
By early 1917, however, Germany submarine
warfare pushed president Wilson into the
Great War. We had tried to stay neutral but
could not.
World War I
An intercepted German telegram suggested
to Mexico that it could recover lands lost to
the United States in 1848.
Wilson sold the war to the American public
by making it a war “to make the world safe
for democracy”.
He also stated that the German conquest of
Europe would threaten U.S. national interest.
World War I
The U.S. entered the war when it was twothirds over and they tipped the balance
against Germany.
After the war, Britain and France didn’t share
Wilson’s idealistic vision of a new League of
Nation to keep peace. They wanted
revenge on Germany for their terrible losses.
World War I
London and Paris accepted Wilson’s League
as part of the Versailles peace treaty but
went on to strip Germany of territory and
squeeze it for impossible reparations (leads to
WWII).
The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Versailles
treaty, and America, fed up with Wilson’s
idealism, went into isolationism
Isolationism
Americans felt that they had fought World
War I for nothing and must never do it again.
Between the two wars the army and navy
shrank to almost nothing.
The Great Depression focused Americas’
attention on domestic economic recovery.
Isolationism
Neutrality Acts of 1935-1937 were designed
to keep the U.S. from ever being drawn into
another war.
Interwar isolationism failed to recognize that
the Axis powers threatened to create a
closed, hostile world in which the United
States was militarily and economically
isolated.
Isolationism
U.S. national interest were massively
threatened, but interwar isolationism blinded
many Americans to this fact until Pearl
Harbor.
World War II
FDR’s strategy was to aid Britain without
alarming American isolationists, who thought
that Britain in 1940 was defeated and the
war was none of our business.
Lend Lease Act: War supplies given to Britain
and France.
World War II
In getting these goods across the Atlantic,
U.S. ships, including warships, became targets
for German U-boats.
The U.S. charged German ships in an
undeclared war with Germany in the North
Atlantic several months before Pearl Harbor.
World War II
The Japanese attack on December 7, 1941
allowed the U.S. to come out of isolationism.
The United Nations would be formed after
the war.
The Cold War
The Cold War began when the Soviets
quickly began breaking the agreements
made at the 1945 Yalta Conference.
They did not hold free, democratic elections
in East Europe but installed Communist
regimes subservient to Moscow and kept
many troops in East Europe.
Cold War
Truman Doctrine: established that the
United States would provide political,
military and economic assistance to all
democratic nations under threat from
external or internal authoritarian forces.
Cold War
Marshall Plan: an American initiative to aid
Western Europe, in which the United States
gave $13 billion (approximately $130 billion in
current dollar value as of August 2015) in
economic support to help rebuild Western
European economies after the end of World
War
Cold War
Containment: U.S. policy of blocking
expansion of Soviet power.
NATO forms in 1949.
The Soviets also explode their first atomic
bomb in 1949.
China fell to communist in 1949 and the
Korean conflict began in 1950.
Cold War
McCarthyism took center stage in the United
Stated during the 1950s.
McCarthyism: The witch hunt for infiltrated
communist in the United States. (Led by
republican senator Joseph McCarthy)
Cold War
Bay of Pigs in 1961 (under JFK): The failure of
the CIA-sponsored invasion of Castro’s Cuba
by anti-communist exiles.
By 1962, the U.S. was ahead by a ratio of 7 to
1 in strategic missiles. Khrushchev, desperate
to redress the imbalance, ordered medium
range missiles to be placed in Cuba.
This leads to the Cuban Missile Crisis in
October of 1962.
Cold War
The biggest battle of the Cold War was the
Vietnam War. That officially took place
between 1955 to 1975.