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 materials needed for success in modern war showed that Latin America, for all its valuable raw materials, could not supply every critical item missing from North America.3 Nor was it realistic to imagine unaffected support for the United States to the south. The record of Washington in the region, where ‘our so-called painless imperialism has seemed painless only to us’, precluded that. Nothing like the ‘modern, capitalistic credit economy’ of the United States, with its highly developed industrial system, giant corporations, militant union struggles and strikebreaker vigilantes existed in the still largely feudal societies of Latin America, while the ABC states of its far south lay ‘too far from the centre of our power to be easily intimidated by measures short of war’.4 Any purely hemispheric defence was an illusion; still more so, quarter-sphere defence confined to North America alone, if the US was to avoid becoming a mere buffer state between German and Japanese empires. American strategy would have to be offensive, striking out across the seas at the two powers now at war—by the time the book came out—against the US on the other side of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

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      For here was not just an alternative form but a negation of capitalism, intending nothing less than its overthrow across the planet. Communism was an enemy far more radical than fascism had ever been: not an aberrant member of the family of polities respecting private ownership of the means of production, but an alien force dedicated to destroying it. American rulers had, of course, always been aware of the evils of Bolshevism, which Wilson had tried to stamp out at their inception by dispatching an expedition to help the Whites in 1919. But though foreign intervention had not succeeded in strangling it at birth, the USSR of the interwar years remained an isolated, and looked a weak, power. Soviet victories over the Wehrmacht, long before there was an Anglo-American foot on European soil, abruptly altered its position in the postwar calculus. So long as fighting lasted, Moscow remained an ally to be prudently assisted, and where necessary humoured. But once it was over, a reckoning would come.

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