The Allure of Independence

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-59
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
World War ◽  
British Experience ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
War Aims ◽  
Oil Company

This chapter discusses the origins of Britain’s postwar oil strategy, which aimed at making Britain independent of imports from other great powers, especially the United States. It begins by reviewing Whitehall’s increasing preoccupation with oil as a matter of national security before 1914, including the Royal Navy’s shift to oil and the government’s purchase of a majority of shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It then examines the British experience during and immediately after World War I, when officials began pursuing two of the key objectives of British strategy—securing British majority ownership of Shell and the oilfields of Mesopotamia. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how oil influenced Britain’s war aims in the Middle East and Anglo-American competition over the region’s oil.

Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn P Leffler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
National Security Policy ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Global War

This book gathers together decades of writing by the author, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans' understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? The wide-ranging chapters explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. The book stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, the author also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, the author's work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities.

The Sound of Distant Thunder

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Layne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Rapid Ascent ◽  
Rising China

The chapter compares the pre-1914 Anglo-German antagonism with the current Sino-American relationship to address two issues. First, does the rise of new great powers lead to war? Second, are rising great powers prone to challenge the existing international order into which they emerge—that is, are rising great powers “revisionists”? China’s rapid ascent has pushed these two questions to the top of the agendas of both international relations scholars and policy makers alike. This chapter shows that the United States and China are on a collision course. Like Britain and Germany before World War I, the United States and China seem fated, at best, to engage in an intense security competition; at worst, war between them is a real possibility. One reason the Sino-American rivalry is intensifying is because a rising China inevitably will seek to revise the current international order that the United States established after World War II.

scholarly journals Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Visualization of Subversion in Mainline Protestantism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-54
Author(s):  
Michael J. McVicar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
Information Management ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
Security Surveillance ◽  
Mainline Protestantism

ABSTRACT This essay explores how some Americans came to view the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and, more broadly, ecumenical mainline Protestantism as a threat to the national security interests of the United States. By focusing on the efforts of various elements in the federal bureaucracy—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chemical Warfare Service, and Military Intelligence—and the work of average Americans to investigate the FCC, the essay examines how techniques of surveillance and information management helped shape the way Americans came to understand religion in the twentieth century. The essay develops three interconnected themes: first, the rise of America's national security surveillance establishment in the United States after World War I; second, the development of new methods of information management and visualization in corporate and state bureaucracies; and, third, the rise of voluntary, private surveillance in the wake of World War I. Through these three themes, the essay highlights how a network of federal bureaucrats, business leaders, and average citizens used graphs, indexes, and files to interpret mainline, ecumenical Christianity as a threat to domestic security in the United States. Ultimately, the project suggests that scholarly efforts to assess fissures in U.S. Protestantism have focused too much on controversies over belief and theology—especially those related to evolutionary theory, eschatology, and scriptural inerrancy—and paid far too little attention to the emerging bureaucratic systems of state and corporate surveillance that helped to document, visualize, and disseminate these accusations in the first place.

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

International Aviation Rivalry in Latin America, 1919-1927

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Phillips Newton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World War I ◽  
Transportation Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Panama Canal ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Pan American

In Latin America, international rivalry over aviation followed World War I. In its early form, it consisted of a commercial scramble among several Western European nations and the United States to sell airplanes and aviation products and to establish airlines in Latin America. Somewhat later, expanding European aviation activities posed an implicit threat to the Panama Canal.Before World War I, certain aerophiles had sought to advance the airplane as the panacea for the transportation problem in Latin America. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and the Aero Club of America, an influential private United States association, were in the van. In 1916, efforts by these enthusiasts led to the formation of the Pan American Aviation Federation, which they envisioned as the means of promoting and publicizing aviation throughout the Western Hemisphere.

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