American Foreign Relations by Andrew Preston

Author:Andrew Preston [Preston, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190946029
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

America in the world

Despite rejecting the internationalist marriage Woodrow Wilson had arranged between the United States and the rest of the world, America was still the strongest state in the international system, and it was still as thoroughly enmeshed in globalization as ever. Americans couldn’t avoid the world any more than the rest of the world could avoid America. Even if the United States didn’t join the League of Nations (forty-two other countries did), it was still a major political, military, and economic influence on world affairs. Wilsonianism might have been a false start, but American internationalism wasn’t yet dead.

We thus need to rethink two pervasive myths about American foreign policy between the world wars. The first is isolationism. While it’s true that the United States didn’t help plan much of the formal international architecture drawn up after the Great War, it did join other states in the collaborative maintenance of postwar order. In 1921–22, for example, Washington hosted a multinational conference on naval disarmament in the Pacific; three treaties, signed by the United States, Japan, Britain, France, and several other countries, reduced great-power tensions along the Pacific Rim. Americans were active in European politics as well. By revising the payment schedule of reparations from World War I, the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan (named, respectively, for the American banker Charles Dawes and the American businessman Owen Young) refinanced Europe’s debts and alleviated tensions that could have led to another outbreak of war. And in 1928, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg signed the Pact of Paris, a formal treaty by which states agreed to the “renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy”—in essence, the abolition of war. It’s true that some of these initiatives suffered from a lack of enforcement—the wholly idealistic and unworkable Pact of Paris is a particularly egregious example. And it’s true that many of them lacked crucial backing from Washington—the refinancing of European debt was done mostly with loans from US banks, not the Treasury, which made them more unstable. But they were hardly the actions of a genuinely “isolationist” power.

The second myth, related to the first, is the supposed trend of deglobalization. Economic historians have done the most to chart the ebb and flow of historical globalization, and their work is enlightening. But it can also be misleading, for if we only measure globalization in terms of economic measurements we miss a great deal. It’s certainly true that World War I had an adverse impact on overseas trade, though some sectors of the economy saw a boost of exports to Europe. On top of that, Congress passed a series of bills, culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act, that restricted the legal flow of immigrants into the United States. The flow of goods and people—two of the benchmarks for measuring globalization—didn’t recover for another half-century. But as we’ve seen, the US government was hardly inactive in world affairs in the 1920s. Moreover, private interests and ordinary citizens were ahead of their government in forging links with the rest of the world.

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