The Conundrum of American Power in the Age of World War I

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-365
Author(s):  
Katherine C. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Power Projection ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Moment

Reports of the rise of the United States to a lead role on the global stage in the early twentieth century have been greatly exaggerated. As many Americans at the time recognized, the United States continued to have less capacity for overseas power projection and remained far more dependent on the world's reigning hegemon, Great Britain, than is generally now realized. The United States, it is true, acquired an overseas empire in 1898. But it lacked the basic attributes of a great power, such as economic sovereignty, naval power, and domestic consensus on the desirability of global great-power status. Even after World War I, which was a better candidate than the Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States became a leading global power, both the material and the cultural basis of that power remained fragile.

The Unraveling

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
David Bosco
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
World War ◽  
Labor Regulations ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
The World

The world wars of the 20th century saw the collapse of pre-war rules designed to protect merchant shipping from interference. In both wars, combatants engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare and imposed vast ocean exclusion zones, leading to unprecedented interference with ocean commerce. After World War I, the United States began to supplant Britain as the leading naval power, and it feuded with Britain over maritime rights. Other developments in the interwar period included significant state-sponsored ocean research, including activity by Germany in the Atlantic and the Soviets in the Arctic. Maritime commerce was buffeted by the shocks of the world wars. Eager to trim costs, US shipping companies experimented with “flags of convenience” to avoid new national safety and labor regulations. The question of the breadth of the territorial sea remained unresolved, as governments bickered about the appropriate outer limit of sovereign control.

Progressivism and US Power

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Policy Objective ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Progressive Movement

Between the Spanish-American war of 1898 and World War I, a progressive movement, in which Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were rival leaders, greatly extended the authority of the federal government in the nation’s domestic life, and also to some extent equipped it better to conduct foreign relations. Conscious that its economic growth had made the United States a great power, policymakers sought to expand the scope of its influence, but their ability to do so was limited by the difficulty of obtaining domestic support for actions involving significant costs. In practice, the extent to which the United States was able to affect the course of events beyond its borders varied in different regions. It established its hegemony over the Caribbean and Central America, and strengthened its political as well as economic links with the other countries in the western hemisphere. In East Asia, where it fought a brutal three-year war in the Philippines to suppress native resistance to its rule, the principal policy objective was to establish equal access for all foreign interests in China. But Washington found it difficult to uphold this Open Door principle in the face of challenges from Russia and Japan. With regard to Europe, the traditional posture of non-involvement in its great power politics was maintained, although Theodore Roosevelt and other leaders did come to see the relations of the European powers as affecting US interests, which they defined in a way that brought their perspective close to Britain’s. The establishment of peaceful methods of resolving international disputes was a goal of successive administrations, but the arbitration treaties that were negotiated won Senate approval only with reservations that severely limited their scope and authority.

A Useful Category of Analysis?

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Katherine C. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Us Foreign Relations

This chapter examines the transformation of US foreign relations in the period from 1865 to 1918. Some historians have explicitly analyzed this transformation in terms of “grand strategy.” Others who have not used the concept as an analytical tool have nevertheless offered interpretations that can be easily assimilated by the concept's enthusiasts and, if so desired, given a different ideological edge. Whether the emergence of the United States as a great power is to be welcomed or lamented, both celebrants and critics can agree that it happened, and that it happened largely as a result of the deliberate peacetime melding of industrial and naval power. Although the concept of grand strategy cannot be blamed for creating the problems with the existing literature on US foreign relations from the Civil War through World War I, it tends to worsen them, in two related ways. First, the concept of grand strategy privileges the nation-state as the unit of analysis, when no less important units in this case are the sub-national and the global. Second, the “grandness” of grand strategy encourages scholars to neglect critically important details of US economic and naval power. These details are more than isolated anomalies: taken together, they compel a new explanatory paradigm.

Grand Strategies (or Ascendant Ideas) since 1919

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-172
Author(s):  
David Milne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Grand Strategies

This chapter investigates the most ascendant ideas at work in America's rise to become a global power and then a superpower after the end of World War I. Segmenting US foreign policy since 1919 by “grand strategy” would seem to require grand simplification. Even those administrations commonly identified as practicing quintessential grand strategy appear more inchoate when approached from the protagonists’ perspectives at the time. To give one such example, the sequence of foreign policy innovations that the United States spearheaded from 1945 to 1949 were collectively possessed of considerable foresight. But they were also a series of strategies advocated by various actors at different times with motives that do not necessarily reduce to a mono-strategic essence. Even in regard to post-1945 US foreign policy, a period that has been sub-divided by many distinguished scholars, it is difficult to identify clearly demarcated grand strategies that provide overarching clarity. The chapter focuses on the ascendant ideas that have informed policymaking, shaped public discourse, forced other ideas into decline, and that can perhaps even be identified as “representative” of particular eras.

Where Great Powers Meet

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Shambaugh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Stable Region ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War

After the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if Southeast Asia would remain a geopolitically stable region within the American imperious for the foreseeable future. In the last two decades, however, the re-emergence of China as a major great power has called into question the geopolitical future of the region and raised the specter of renewed great power competition. As this book shows, the United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia, and here this text focuses on the ten countries that comprise Southeast Asia. The United States and China constantly vie for position and influence in this enormously significant region, and the outcome of this contest will do much to determine whether Asia leaves the American orbit after seven decades and falls into a new Chinese sphere of influence. Just as important, to the extent that there is a global “power transition” occurring from the United States to China, the fate of Southeast Asia will be a good indicator. Presently, both powers bring important assets to bear. The United States continues to possess a depth and breadth of security ties, soft power, and direct investment across the region that empirically outweigh China’s. For its part, China has more diplomatic influence, much greater trade, and geographic proximity. In assessing the likelihood of a regional power transition, the book looks at how ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the countries within it maneuver between the United States and China and the degree to which they align with one or the other power.

World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States

1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Link ◽  
Paul L. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War
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