Walter LaFeber

The great transition : American-Soviet relations and the end of the Cold War

This volume features a detailed examination of the perspectives and actions of both the United States and the Soviet Union and their interactions, including the inter-relationships of domestic factors with foreign and security policies in both countries, and the involvement of both powers with allies and other countries around the world, that infringed on their direct relationship. Besides analyzing the turn from confrontation to detente and beyond, over the years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, and from Brezhnev through Gorbachev, it reflects on the significance of the great transition from the Cold War to a new era. It thus illuminates the very relevant history that underlines and informs American-Russian relations and the new situation of a post-Soviet, post-Cold War world.

The American age : United States foreign policy at home and abroad since 1750

In this leading text, Walter LaFeber offers a comprehensive history of American foreign relations from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. His narrative account features several major themes: the connections between U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics; the impact of American economic development on foreign policy interests; popular culture, particularly film, as a filter for public opinion on American commitments abroad; the roles of public opinion, leadership, and bureaucracy in the formation of policy.

The Post September 11 Debate Over Empire, Globalization, and Fragmentation

Months before the September 11 attacks, a few observers, working almost entirely within the Washington, DC beltway, argued that the United States was an empire and its people the fortunate Chosen who were to spread an imperialism beneficial to all, apparently whether already stable and functioning parts of the world wanted it or not. Americans, these observers elaborated, were imperial not in the old sense of wanting to hold territory, but in their determination to expand globally American ideas based on capitalism and democracy-two concepts that actually have often been at cross-purposes throughout most of the post-1900 so-called American Century. The new imperialists rightly noted that earlier U.S. imperialism had been linked to American Progressivism and especially to the international, supposedly progressive ideals of Woodrow Wilson and the big-stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. The twenty-first-century imperialists, however, who defined themselves as Reagan conservatives, concluded that large political payoffs could bless their wing of Republicanism if they could sell the idea of an imperial foreign policy that combined American political and economic principles, unilateralism, a McDonalds-Disney culture, and-the necessary accompaniment-a military that absorbed nearly as much of the gross national product as it did during the height of the cold war, when the GNP was considerably smaller.1 Such military costs were nevertheless logical, given the ambition.

Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71.

Introduction - Intimidating Seniority Into the Fray against John Foster Dulles A Democrat Looks at His Party at Eisenhowers Foreign Policy The Changing Political Climate in Europe, 1957-60 JFK, NATO Review and the Berlin Crisis of 1961 The Cuban Missile Crisis Strains in the Atlantic Alliance, 1962-3 Repairing Cracks in Nato, 1964-7 The Vietnam War, 1961-8 Reconciled with Nixon Southern Africa Policy, 1961-71 Epilogue - Death at Harewood.

The Background of Cleveland's Venezuelan Policy: A Reinterpretation

THE policy that Grover Clevelands second administration formulated in the Venezuelan controversy of I895-I896 was a direct answer to British encroachments on United States interests in Latin America. Political and business leaders believed these American interests to be economic, strategic, and political. The economic influence on the shaping of Clevelands policy in this dispute has not received sufficient attention. After the I893 depression paralyzed the domestic economy, United States attention focused increasingly on Latin America; indeed, it is significant that the controversy occurred during the depths of that business crisis. American interests, both economic and strategic, were threatened during the I893-I895 period by ominous British moves in Brazil, Nicaragua, the disputed area in Venezuela itself, and the small island of Trinidad off the Brazilian coast. During the same years Germany and France menaced United States advantages in Brazil and the Caribbean. Gravely concerned, the State Department finally forced a showdown struggle on the issue of the Venezuelan boundary. By successfully limiting British claims in this incident, the United States won explicit recognition of its dominant position in the Western Hemisphere. This essay attempts to trace two developments: that international dangers motivated the Cleveland administration in formulating its Venezuelan policy; that the economic crisis arising out of the i893 depression provided the context and played an important role in this policy formulation. ITis is not to say that the economic influence was the only motivating force, but that this factor, relatively overlooked by previous writers on the subject, greatly shaped the thinking of both the Cleveland administration and key segments of American society. Five considerations should serve to establish the validity of this interpretation: timing played a key role in that the year I895 witnessed a convergence of forces which brought the United States into the controversy (after the argument had simmered over half a century) and led it to assert control over the nations of the Western Hemisphere; the Cleveland administration

The 1865–1913 Era Restated

The success of U.S. drive after the Spanish-American War of 1898 had been long in forming, but the catalyst was the 1873-97 depression and economic downturn, which transformed a long era of deflation into an economic crisis in the United States. In 1890s, farmers had been bludgeoned by falling crop prices, harsh winters, expensive transportation, and massive foreclosures. Richard Olney placed the American crisis within a larger, indeed global, crisis of capitalism. Americans try to escape the crises by being constantly in motion or becoming attracted to those who were. Many debtors in the country and the city turned to silver as a panacea. The importance of the 1896 election is that it was determined by the long depression, especially by the 1893-96 crisis. Thayer Mahan and William McKinley were prepared to take the leap from the chaos of the mid-1890s to an overseas empire of the twentieth century.

Consensus be Damned!@@@The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations.@@@The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776-1865.@@@The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913.@@@The Globalizing of America, 1913-1945.@@@America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991.

Acknowledgments Prelude Part I. At Wars End: Visions of a New World Order Part II. Origins of the Cold War Part III. The Korean War and its Consequences Part IV. New Leaders and New Arenas in the Cold War Part V. Crisis Resolution Part VI. Americas Longest War Part VII. The Rise and Fall of Detente Part VIII. In Gods Country Conclusion: America and the World, 1945-1991 Bibliographic Essay Index.

The Second Industrial Revolution at Home and Abroad

The basis of U.S. global power in the early twentieth century was economic. From the 1890s on, the nation had emerged as the world’s greatest and most competitive player in the marketplace. Fearful Europeans warned of an “American invasion” (an overwhelming offensive of U.S.-made goods and multinationals), long before they worried about the challenge of U.S. military, political, or cultural power. The invasion, moreover, proved deadly not only because of its magnitude but also because it was fueled by a growing crisis inside the United States, which was, ironically, caused by that very economic success. The crisis’s depth and disorder marked a historic turning point in the development of both American capitalism and the American empire. The imperial visions of Seward and others who followed the New Yorker were primarily made real not by “large-policy” officials, bureaucratic processes, public opinion, or frustrated Progressive reformers. Those visions were realized by the architects of the Second Industrial Revolution, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cyrus McCormick, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman, who redesigned the productive system. The first Industrial Revolution occurred in late eighteenth-century England, depended on coal, and remained dependent on the old craft system in many respects. The Second Industrial Revolution emerged from new technology produced by inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Edison. Certainly electricity profoundly changed the economy’s structure. Until the immediate pre–Civil War years, U.S. producers had only three alternatives for turning out more goods: adding more laborers (difficult because of labor scarcity), redistributing work into area homes (difficult over long distances because of primitive communications), or producing more power by finding more water, wood, animal, coal, or wind sources.

Springboards and Strategies

The Civil War created the beginnings of a new world for United States foreign policy, but it was another generation before that future could be realized. Out of the deaths of 600,000 Americans emerged, slowly but with certainty, a different nation, which replaced Jacksonian decentralization with centralization, the presidencies of James Buchanan and Rutherford B. Hayes with those of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the Jeffersonian agrarian-ideal commercial farmer with the Andrew Carnegie–J. P. Morgan ideal of the billion-dollar U.S. Steel Corporation, and the 1840s laissez-faire capitalism of James K. Polk’s Democrats with the late 1890s corporate capitalism of Senator Mark Hanna’s Republicans. Of special importance, the nation built on these four domestic transformations to construct a foreign policy that replaced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 with the Open Door policy of 1899–1900; that is, Americans were finished with land expansion from sea to sea. They were confident now in their supremacy over much of the Western Hemisphere and embarked on an imperialist course in parts of Asia and Africa. These historic changes, of course, did not start cleanly in the 1860s. Jefferson and Polk, for example, had demonstrated the incredible potential for presidential power long before Theodore Roosevelt’s birth. The faith that supplying China’s market could put depression-ridden Americans to work dated back to the mid-1780s, not the mid-1890s. Even the once firmly held belief that the Civil War gave birth to the industrialized United States has been disproved. The annual growth rate of U.S. manufactures was 7.8 percent between 1840 and 1860, but 6 percent between 1870 and 1900. Between 1860 and 1870, the value added by manufacturing increased by only 2.3 percent annually, the lowest rate of increase in the nineteenth century.

Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America.

This book explains the history of US/Central American relations, explaining why these countries have remained so overpopulated, illiterate and violent; and why US government notions of economic and military security combine to keep in place a system of Central American dependency. This second edition is updated to include new material covering the Reagan and Bush years, and the Iran/Contra affair.