A Useful Category of Analysis?

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.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Foreign Relations

More than 111 scholarly articles The study of US foreign relations is one of the most dynamic fields of American history. The availability of new sources in recent years has opened new opportunities for examining US behavior through the lenses of other nations. Meanwhile, historians of international affairs have increasingly borrowed the methods, questions, and insights of cultural and social history, enlivening their field and opening bold new lines of interpretation. Some scholars have moved away from the traditional focus on presidents, diplomats, intelligence chiefs, and military officers to examine the roles of activists, experts, journalists, athletes, and others in American foreign relations. This collection captures all these trends in a fully up-to-date, authoritative survey of US foreign relations across almost 250 years. More than 100 entries on topics ranging from the American Revolution to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq provide basic background well-suited to readers approaching their topics for the first time. But the entries, written by a remarkable array of expert authors, also offer a valuable tool for experienced researchers and advanced scholars. Authors provide surveys of the scholarly literature related to each topic, along with guides to primary sources, including a rapidly growing number of online collections. The collection covers traditional topics like Anglo-American relations or the role of nuclear weapons in US diplomacy, while also considering newer themes like gender, LGBTQ issues, and environmental diplomacy.

Harry S. Truman and US Foreign Relations

Sworn in as the 33rd President of the United States following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Harry S. Truman faced the daunting tasks of winning the war and ensuring future peace and stability. Chided by critics for his lack of foreign policy experience but championed by supporters for his straightforward decision-making, Truman guided the United States from World War to Cold War. The Truman presidency marked a new era in American foreign relations, with the United States emerging from World War II unmatched in economic strength and military power. The country assumed a leadership position in a postwar world primarily shaped by growing antagonism with the Soviet Union. Truman pursued an interventionist foreign policy that took measures to contain Soviet influence in Europe and stem the spread of communism in Asia. Under his leadership, the United States witnessed the dawn of the atomic age, approved billions of dollars in economic aid to rebuild Europe, supported the creation of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, recognized the state of Israel, and intervened in the Korean peninsula. The challenges Truman confronted and the policies he implemented laid the foundation for 20th-century US foreign relations throughout the Cold War and beyond.

Technology and US Foreign Relations

Technology is ubiquitous in the history of US foreign relations. Throughout US history, technology has played an essential role in how a wide array of Americans have traveled to and from, learned about, understood, recorded and conveyed information about, and attempted to influence, benefit from, and exert power over other lands and peoples. The challenge for the historian is not to find where technology intersects with the history of US foreign relations, but how to place a focus on technology without falling prey to deterministic assumptions about the inevitability of the global power and influence—or lack thereof—the United States has exerted through the technology it has wielded. “Foreign relations” and “technology” are, in fact, two terms with extraordinarily broad connotations. “Foreign relations” is not synonymous with “diplomacy,” but encompasses all aspects and arenas of American engagement with the world. “Technology” is itself “an unusually slippery term,” notes prominent technology historian David Nye, and can refer to simple tools, more complex machines, and even more complicated and expansive systems on which the functionality of many other innovations depends. Furthermore, processes of technological innovation, proliferation, and patterns of use are shaped by a dizzying array of influences embedded within the larger surrounding context, including but by no means limited to politics, economics, laws, culture, international exchanges, and environment. While some of the variables that have shaped how the United States has deployed its technological capacities were indeed distinctly American, others arose outside the United States and lay beyond any American ability to control. A technology-focused rendering of US foreign relations and global ascendancy is not, therefore, a narrative of uninterrupted progress and achievement, but an accounting of both successes and failures that illuminate how surrounding contexts and decisions have variably shaped, encouraged, and limited the technology and power Americans have wielded.