AMERİKAN DIŞ POLİTİKASI - Deneme Sınavı - 9

These four founding beliefs shaped how the United States pursued its foreign policy in the first hundred years of its existence. They operated within a broad social-political ideology that is generally referred to as “American exceptionalism”.

Fighting against England required a set of allies to help the fledgling republic to achieve independence. This means particularly alliance with France, the biggest rival of England on the continent. Therefore, from the very beginning, the United States pursued a political alliance with a European power.

Jefferson was very suspicious and skeptical of an alliance of industry and commerce and an alliance with England to support that. Such alliances, Jefferson believed, riskedtheidealisticnatureoftheAmericanproject. Jefferson engaged in one of the most important land deals in the US history when he purchased the Louisiana territory in 1803 from France, which effectively doubled the size of the United States. It also ensured that no rival power would emerge on the North American continent unlike in Europe.

The war of 1812 was militarily a draw and Washington D.C. was burned down in 1814, but politically it created many advantages for the United States. In other words, the US did not win the war, but it won the peace. No territories changed hands. The Treaty of Ghent in 1815 ratified the border before the war. The relations between Britain and the United States remained peaceful afterwards, with the exception of occasional tensions and minor border disputes. As a result of the peace agreement after the War of 1812, Native American threat from the north and west was eliminated as Britain stopped supporting Native Americans against the United States.

The Civil War was not confined to the American territories as the Great Britain sided with the South and embarked on providing the Confederacy forces with military and economic aid. Also, the crises over the British-flagged warships (e.g., the Trent, the Alabama, and the Florida) complicated Unionists’ diplomatic efforts, which could lead to a British- Union war as well as to Britain’s swift recognition of the Confederacy government in the south.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 is crucial and it is a turning point in American foreign policy. First, it led to the establishment of a formal colonial empire with the purchase of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain. It led to the annexation of Hawaii. It also led to the creation of protectorates in the Caribbean, most importantly in Cuba. The Spanish-American War also led the way for the informal empire of Theodore Roosevelt. This informal empire was based on trade and American economic might particularly in Central America and in the Caribbean. Both the formal and informal empire enabled the United States to have military bases in the Pacific to be able to play a significant role in opening up the Chinese market, which led to the open door policy of 1899, and argue against the creation of exclusive spheres of influence in Asia.

Following the assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt assumed the highest office in the United States. Distinct from most of his predecessors, Roosevelt had imperialist tendencies. Historian Severine Antigone Marin (2012:122) compares President Roosevelt to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm because both leaders had domineering personalities and were obsessed with big armies and believed in strong state both at home and abroad.

Mowry (1946) argues that President Roosevelt led the mediation masterfully and did an “excellent job of balancing Russian and Japanese power in the Orient, where the supremacy of either constituted a threat to growing America.” His personal efforts to mediate the end of the Russo-Japanese War made Roosevelt the recipient of the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt furthered his arbitration efforts when he played a key role in ending the war between France and Germany in 1906 by convening the Algeciras Conference following the First Moroccan Crisis. Given his famous “big stick diplomacy” and avowed imperial ambitions towards Latin America, President Roosevelt’s late mediation efforts and his reception of the Nobel Peace Prize present an irony of American foreign policy under the Roosevelt administration.

Paradoxically, though, it was his vice president and then successor, Theodore Roosevelt (1901- 1909), who would be identified with American imperialism. The reason was Roosevelt’s explicit choice of Realpolitik over Moralpolitik. He indeed believed that the United States ought to be a great power rather than a messianic one. Skeptical about international law and the newly emerging concept of disarmament, he developed what came to be known as the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, proclaiming the right of the United States to intervene in the Western Hemisphere, against the interference of outside – meaning European colonial- powers as well as to protect US interests.

When on June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assasinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Hapsburg throne, and his wife, visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, no one imagined that it would trigger a chain of events drawing Europe into a world war and the United States into a new era in its foreign relations (Bagby, 1999, 18). A former Ottoman province, Bosnia had been annexed by Austria in 1909 and this had antagonized neighboring Serbia - also former Ottoman territory- that had hoped to annex it by itself, retaliating by promoting revolution among national minorities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Consequently, Austrians understandably suspected the Serbian government of conspiracy and decided to punish Serbia by invading it on July 28. Russian and French mobilization followed that with a view to defend Serbia, Germany’s declaration of war on them, Britain's entry into war as part of the Allies, and finally Ottoman Turkey’s, on the side of the Central Powers. By August 1914, World War I had begun.

Determined to stop shipments from the United States to Germany, Great Britain blockaded German coasts by 1915, ending by forbidding that “neutral” goods reach Germany through neutral ports -a practice called “continuous voyages”. This led to a dispute between Great Britain and the US, which could have led to a grave crisis in other circumstances (İriye, 2013, 24). But Germany’s reaction to British policy and superiority at sea would be radical as the German navy began sinking enemy warships and other categories of vessels by means of submarines - or U-boats as they were called.

Historians agree that German submarine warfare and idealism set aside, entry into war was as much due to the deep sympathy for the Allies and growing economic ties with them, as the interest of the United States in preventing Germany – Europe’s second most populous nation and greatest industrial force - from destroying the balance of power in Europe and expanding further. Besides, there was growing conviction among America’s intellectuals and leaders that the country should play a role in international affairs and that it was time to abandon selfish isolationism. In that sense, World War I can be considered a major turning point in the country’s foreign policy history and tradition.

The Paris Peace Conference was convened on January 18, 1919, and during five months the leaders of the victorious nations discussed the peace terms to be reached with Germany as well as other territorial arrangements in Europe and the post-war world order. Among the representatives of 27 nations who participated were the leaders of major powers such as Great Britain ( David Lloyd George), France (Georges Clémenceau), Italy ( Vittorio Orlando ), the United States (Woodrow Wilson), as well as Japan, and China. The Soviet Union, having already signed a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers in 1918, was not invited, nor were the defeated powers.

International disarmament became an important objective for the United States throughout the 1920s. It all started with President Harding who convened the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 and 1922 which the foreign ministers of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan attended. They all agreed to suspend the construction of large naval vessels and to limit the size of aircraft carriers. In addition, they agreed on a complex balance of naval power by which the size of the five navies would be fixed and strictly regulated.

All this would come to a halt with the Great Depression of 1929, the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting until 1939. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.

The clearest expression of antiwar sentiment was the enactment of three Neutrality Acts passed between August 1935 and May 1937. By this, Congress made it illegal, in the event of a war abroad, for any US ship to enter the war zone or for any American to sell arms to a belligerent, travel on its ships, or lend it money. However, after Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and Britain and France responded by declaring war, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1939 ending the munitions embargo on a “cash and carry” basis. The passage of the 1939 Neutrality Act marked the beginning of a congressional shift away from isolationism.

FDR ordered in September 1941 that the positions of German submarines be reported to the British navy. This, in turn, triggered the torpedoing by the Germans of an American destroyer, the Greer, which was signaling the location of a German submarine. The response was a presidential order to the US Navy to sink any German or Italian submarine on sight. That meant being practically at war.

When he became president, Truman knew nothing about the Manhattan Project. Once informed, he set up an advisory committee chaired by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and which recommended the bomb’s deployment against Japan as soon as it would be available. Once it was successfully tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, the top scientists involved in the project and who had pleaded with President Roosevelt to build an atomic bomb, opposed the committee’s recommendation on humanitarian grounds, joined by a handful of civilian and military officials who argued that Japan was about to collapse anyway. But President Truman held firm, willing to end the war quickly, worried about the fierce Japanese resistance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and fearing a bloodbath in case of a full-scale invasion of the Japanese islands. On August 6, 1945, planes from the 59th Composite Group dropped the first uranium bomb (known as “Little Boy”) on the city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 140,000 people. As Japan did not immediately surrender, a plutonium bomb (this one nicknamed “Fat Man”) was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killing 70,000 more. Japan capitulated on August 12.

The correct choice is A.

The correct choice is D.