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

Серия:

isbn: 9781781687024

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СКАЧАТЬ collapse of the Creditanstalt in Austria in 1931, and its knock-on effects across Europe. The crisis brought home that, however relatively insulated American factories—farms less so—might still be from world trade, American deposits were not from international financial markets, in a signal that with the passing of London’s role as pivot of the system, and the default of New York as successor, the order of capital as a whole was at risk in the absence of a stabilizing centre. The immediate concerns of Roosevelt’s first term lay in domestic measures to overcome the crisis, prompting unceremonious abandonment of the gold standard and brusque rejection of any coordinated international attempt to manage exchange rates. But by previous standards the New Deal was not protectionist. The Smoot–Hawley Act was dismantled, tariffs selectively lowered, and an impassioned champion of free trade—to American specifications—put in charge of foreign policy: Cordell Hull, the ‘Tennessee Cobden’, becoming the longest-serving secretary of state in US history.

      Towards the end of Roosevelt’s second term, as war raged in East Asia and threatened in Europe, rearmament started to make good the weaknesses (highlighted by the recession in 1937) of domestic recovery, giving the New Deal a second wind. The internal fortunes of the American economy and external postures of the American state were henceforward joined as they had never been before. But though the White House was increasingly on the qui vive to developments abroad, and military readiness stepped up, public opinion remained averse to any prospect of a rerun of 1917–1920, and within the administration there was little or no conception of what the American role or priorities might be, should one materialize. Roosevelt had become increasingly alarmed at German and to a lesser extent Japanese belligerence. Hull was concerned above all by the retreat of national economies behind tariff walls, and the erection of trade blocs. At the War Department, Woodring resisted any thought of involvement in a new round of great power conflicts. Beyond conflicting negative apprehensions, there was not yet much positive sense of the place of American power in the world ahead.

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