American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Perry Anderson
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Название: American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

Автор: Perry Anderson

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Политика, политология

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isbn: 9781781687024

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СКАЧАТЬ the two seas, and race—Anglo-Saxon breeding and solidarity—added to religion, democracy and trade in the rhetoric of the nation’s calling.

      II

      The reality was that American entry into the First World War had answered to no determinable national interest. A gratuitous decision by its president, enforced with sweeping ethnic persecution and political repression at home, it was the product of a massive excess of US power over any material goals procurable by it. The rhetoric of American expansionism had typically projected markets overseas as if they were an external frontier, with the claim that US goods and investments now required outlets abroad that only an Open Door could assure. Yet the American economy, with its abundant natural resources and vast internal market, continued to be largely autarkic. Foreign trade accounted for no more than 10 per cent of GNP down to the First World War, when most American exports still consisted of raw materials and processed foodstuffs. Nor, of course, was there any Open Door to the US market itself, traditionally protected by high tariffs with scant regard for the principles of free trade. Still less was there the remotest threat of attack or invasion from Europe. It was this disjuncture between ideology and reality that brought Wilson’s millenarian globalism to an abrupt end. The United States could afford to dictate the military outcome of war in Europe. But if the cost of its intervention was small, the gain was nil. Neither at popular nor at elite level was any pressing need felt for institutional follow-through. America could look after itself, without worrying unduly about Europe. Under the banner of a return to normalcy, in 1920 Harding buried his Democratic opponent in the largest electoral landslide of modern times.

      But within a decade, the arrival of the Depression was a signal that the pre-history of the American empire was approaching its end. If the initial Wall Street crash of 1929 was the bursting of an endogenous СКАЧАТЬ