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Diplomacy Since Reviews " U. Table of Contents Preface 1. The Setting of U. Foreign Policy 2. The United States as a World Power, 3. The Diplomacy of the Dollar, 4. Some other countries also envied, resented, or feared American power and preeminence. Friends, competitors, rivals, and foes all acknowledged, howeveras Americans had done since that the United States exercised great influence over the shape of international relations. The brief, four-month passage of arms between a major new imperial power and a decrepit empire left the United States in possession of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific.
More important than the specific territorial acquisitions, the war permitted the United States to compete equally with the Europeans in the race for pre- eminence in world politics. The war with Spain did not occur accidentally. Both the immediate aim of the warthe eviction of the Spanish from Cubaand its long-term implicationscatapulting the United States into the first rank of world powershad roots of more than half a century. Cuba remained an is- land of desire even after slavery was eliminated.
Ulysses S. Grants secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, cast longing glances in that direction. Grant even tried to buy outright the country of Santo Domingo in Yet the reasons for insular expansion changed in the late nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, the justification for seizing the islands of the Caribbean was the need for more slave territory.
In the years after the Civil War, Americans looked outward in order to trade more effectively abroad. Much argument has gone on over whether Americans wanted to trade with the islands they eventually acquired from Spain. After all, some critics of the idea of a foreigh policy based upon trade expansion have argued, there re- ally was very little the Cubans or Puerto Ricans could buy from the United 15 States. Even the overseas investment by Americans went other places than Cuba.
But the islands of the Caribbean were important for the navy, the pro- tection of a proposed canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and to show that the United States was a power to be reckoned with. The modern American navy, the forerunner of the military establishment of the twentieth century, came to life in the s.
From then until the end of the century, the United States built capital ships while naval officers developed the theories of mod- ern warfare. Luce became the two most notable advocates of a strong navy. Mahan developed the idea that whichever nation controlled the seas controlled the course of world pol- itics. He saw strong links between the navy and overseas trade. Each required the other: a flourishing trade made a large navy necessary, while the larger the fleet, the more trade was possible.
Advocates of a grand navy found allies among traders who wanted ships to carry goods abroad. Joseph C. Hendrix, president of the American Bankers Association, expressed the view of many businessmen when he ob- served that we have the Anglo-Saxon thirst for wide markets growing upon us.
Demands to rid the United States of surplus production grew in the af- termath of the Panic of A strike at the Pullman Sleeping Car Company near Chicago, a march by veterans demanding payment of a Civil War bonus, and mass demonstrations by unemployed workers sent shivers down the spines of the business community.
The New York Tribune anguished over so- cial restlessness. As Brooks Adams, a disillusioned scion of a distinguished fam- ily, mourned, there was a law of civilization and decay: societies either ex- panded or they died. Josiah Strong, a popular commentator on current events, pointed the way out: Overproduction compels a quest for ultimate supremacy in the markets of the world.
The United States is to become the mighty workshop of the world and our people the hands of mankind. An expansionist desire to look outward coincided with urges to convert others to what came to be known as the American way of life. The most numerous groups of Americans who wanted to spread the word about the United States overseas were, of course, missionaries.
By , some seven thousand Americans were teaching the gospel and, incidentally, the bene- fits of American republicanism, in over thirty countries around the world. Missionaries helped get the message across in the Far East, especially China. Americans had been trading with the Chinese since the Empress of China had sailed into Guangzhou Canton in Since the Treaty of Wangxia of , the United States had been one of the non-Chinese pow- ers permitted to open trade with ports on the mainland.
Over the remain- 16 U. Together they sent home word of developments abroad, and they encouraged the American government to take a greater interest in the competition for advantage in China. Closer to home, in the Western Hemisphere, Americans had less to worry about from the competition of the European powers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Europeans had all quit the New World at the prod- ding of the United States, and because the Latins themselves had evicted them.
In , however, the Mexicans expelled the French and executed an ineffectual Hapsburg prince, Maximilian, whom the French had made emperor. In the late nineties, it was Spains turn to lose its final foothold in the New World. The Spanish empire was the first one to be established in the Western Hemisphere. It was outlived by the British, French, Dutch, and even Danish empires, but the demise of New Spain was far more spectacular than the fall of other European colonial societies.
The end came quickly in a day land and sea fight which ended with American ownership of the Philip- pine Islands, taken because President McKinley thought he heard Gods voice. The revolution in Cuba, which had gone on intermittently since , was the proximate cause of the American decision to fight.
For people alive in as well as for historians, the question of why President William McKin- ley asked Congress to declare war against Spain on April 11, , provoked argument. On the one side were those who saw the burst of imperialism of the war as somehow accidental.
According to this view, put forward by Mar- garet Leech in her biography In the Days of McKinley , the president was an unwitting participant in the movement to expand the power of the United States abroad. He opted for war only to preserve the unity of his party in the face of a clamor for a strong policy on the part of the sensational yel- low press led by Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York American.
McKinley also was supposed to have listened to the voices raised by American businessmen who dreaded the prospect of the Cuban revolution endangering their belongings in the islands. This ac- cidental view of the war with Spain sees McKinley as essentially a weak-willed politician responding to demands inside the country to do something, any- thing, in order to stanch the hemorrhage in Cuba.
A more sinister view of the origins of the war with Spain, expressed by such historians as Julius W. Pratt and Walter Millis in the twenties and thir- ties and by leftists like Philip Foner in the sixties, holds that the war with Spain marked the culmination of the traditional American policy of expan- sion.
Even if he only re- sponded to the pressure brought to bear by elements within the Republican party and the business community, that was enough to set the United States on a course devoted to imperial expansion. A third interpretation is that the imperialism of the late s was both accidental and conscious. In a phrase made famous by a respected historian of American diplomacy, Samuel Flagg Bemis, who taught at Yale University for over thirty years, the three years after the Spanish-American War were a great aberration in American history.
He implied that the United States took leave of its traditional values in foreign policy when it embarked on its imperial adventure with Spain. Bemis suggested that the excursion into ri- valry with the Europeans was short-lived, however, and by , when the Senate passed the Platt Amendment Orville H. Platt, [R.
The notion of a great aber- ration has few adherents nowadays, but Bemiss insistence that the United States had a gentler, more humanitarian foreign policy than Europeans has dominated the thinking of American diplomats over the years. In Europe and in America, then, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a growing awareness that the pace of international relations had quickened recently.
Another, more ominous sense also gripped diplomats. Thoughtful observers of international politics like Elihu Root, a lawyer who became secretary of state in , believed that if things were left to take their course, war might erupt. This fear even penetrated the mind of the czar of Russia, Nicholas II. He called a meeting of the diplomats of Europe and America at the Hague on his birthday, May 18, , to discuss ways to make the world a more peaceable kingdom.
The Hague Conference of attracted delegates from twenty-six coun- tries, all of the civilized world at the time. Along with its successor confer- ence in the Dutch city eight years later, the meeting at the Hague set the pattern for schemes of reform of international politics in the twentieth cen- tury. At the Hague, delegates sipped tea and wrote plans to make modern warfare less horrible. They wrote rules for the use of such weapons as bal- loons, explained how prisoners should be treated, and provided some lim- ited protection for civilians during times of war.
The conference did noth- ing at all to prevent the outbreak of war, its ostensible purpose. This pattern remained for the rest of the twentieth centuryinternational meetings which began with high hopes for a revolutionary change in the way in which diplo- macy was done ended in acrimony with few of their original goals achieved.
This, then, was the world of international relations at the turn of the cen- tury. They de- pended to one degree or another upon the support of their newly franchised populations.
These governments competed far from home in nonindustrial lands inhabited by nonwhite peoples. New Yorkers recalled the glories of Rome and Napoleon by erecting a triumphal arch in Central Park through which passed Adm. George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay. Across the country, editorials praised the new empire.
Englishmen discovered some new virtues in an America they once had scorned. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain pro- posed an alliance between the United States and Great Britain in terms that would have brought calls for his examination by a psychiatrist ten years be- fore.
Even war itself would be cheaply purchased, he said, if in a great and noble cause the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack were to wave to- gether over an Anglo-Saxon Alliance. In Latin America, newspapers voiced concern over the colossus of the North, while across the Pacific, too, Chi- nese and Japanese diplomats acknowledged that the United States had be- come a world power.
What did it mean to be a world power in ? World pow- ers had empires around the globe, and they demanded to be consulted wher- ever boundaries changed. Their merchants and bankers could be found in the remotest regions, and citizens of less fortunate lands paid them timid respect. Its merchants were just as active as those of Europe. While debate raged in Congress and the coun- try at large over whether the United States should keep its new acquisitions, Massachusetts Republican Henry Cabot Lodge put the case for empire and world power to his colleagues in the Senate.
He likened a nation to an ath- lete who does not win a race by habitually sitting in an armchair. To anti- imperialists like Andrew Carnegie or Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who wondered why enter the race in the first place, Lodge replied that it built character: This necessity for watching over the welfare of another people will improve our civil service, raise the tone of public life, and make broader and better our politics. Across the Pacific in China was one place where the athletic American empire joined the race.
We believe our interests in the Pacific Ocean are as great as those of any power, Secretary of State John Hay observed. China opened to the Americans the same ports it had allowed the British to enter two years before at the end of the Opium War.
Americans and British- ers also won the right of extraterritoriality, or exemption from Chinese law. The Chinese had not wanted to trade with Britain, but having lost the war they had no choice. Nor did the Chinese consider the Americans to be any more civilized than the barbarous British, who had forced opium upon China. Cushings demand to receive equal treatment with the British was scorned as jackal diplomacy by the Chinese, who taunted the Ameri- cans for arriving after the fight to demand the spoils of war.
For the re- mainder of the nineteenth century, Americans managed to ignore the jibe. Out of the natural tendency of people to think well of themselves, Ameri- can merchants, missionaries, and diplomats in China thought that they had come there to protect the Chinese from the designs of greedy Europeans. Charles Denby, the American minister in China, predicted to Ohio Repub- lican senator John Sherman in that the statesmen of China will un- derstand that in our case foreign control does not mean territorial absorp- tion nor governmental interference, while both these results are possible, or even probable, in dealing with European powers.
Chaos ruled China in the s. The Chinese shocked everyone, in- cluding themselves, by losing a war with Japan in Europeans and Amer- icans who watched the speedy collapse of the Chinese armed forces felt noth- ing but disgust. One English expert on China, Lord Charles Beresford, crisscrossed America in early promoting his book, The Break-Up of China, which predicted that the Asian nation would soon fall to the European empires the way Africa had done in the last two decades.
If China were to be sliced like a water- melon, he informed his audiences, Americans must be prepared to take their share. They should be especially wary of the designs of the Russians. Surprisingly, Americans did not rush to carve China. Harriman re- membered the bitter debate in before taking the Philippines. Although they longed for the riches of the East, they recalled how President William McKinley had been forced to promise that the United States eventually would offer independence to the Philippines.
If the American public had to be fooled in this way into accepting the responsibilities of empire, then the future of imperial America seemed dim. There was one way, however, that the United States matched the other world powers. Economically, the United States held its own with anyone, and the ports on the west coast placed it closer to China than was Europe.
If taking colonies held political risks in the United States, an informal empire based on the principles of free trade gave Americans a leg up on their rivals. Without consulting the Chinese government, Secretary of State John Hay sent notes to all other imperial powers asking them to maintain an Open Door for traders of all nations inside their Chinese spheres of influence.
Hay had been persuaded by an American diplomat in China, W. Rockhill, that since American goods could be sold more cheaply in China than those of any other power, the Open Door policy would work to the advantage of the United States.
Receiving no answer from Europe and Japan, Hay took silence for assent and proclaimed China open to trade. The next year, , Hay again wrote notes to the major European pow- ers when China erupted in the Boxer Rebellion. This popular rising against foreign domination of China initially won the support of Chinas empress dowager, Cixi, who hoped the Boxers the Society of the Righteous Fists could rid her country of the humiliating presence of the Europeans, Japan- ese, and Americans.
When the rebels laid siege in June to the German em- bassy, capturing the foreign diplomats, the empress dowager distanced her- self from the Boxers.
For fifty-five days the diplomats were prisoners of angry nationalists while a joint expedition of Japanese, Russian, British, and Amer- ican marines marched from the coast to rescue them. As the diplomats and their families languished under house arrest, the secretary of state sent his second Open Door notes to the powers on July 2, asking them not to dis- mantle China in their anger over the envoys capture. The respondents coolly acknowledged his notes and made vague promises to respect Chinas terri- torial integrity if the others followed suit.
That was enough for the Ameri- can secretary of state, who publicly proclaimed Chinas safety. Privately, he approved a contingency plan to seize a Chinese port for the United States in case the other powers broke their word. Hay has been called naive, moralistic, and easily gulled by histori- ans. His cavalier assurance that the other powers had accepted the Open Door policy when in fact they had made polite murmurings was seen by for- mer diplomat George Kennan in American Diplomacy as a flagrant ex- ample of American misunderstanding of how diplomacy is done.
Thomas McCormick, writing from a radical revisionist perspective in The China Mar- ket , however, argues that Hays critics underestimated him. The sec- retary had a weak diplomatic hand since he knew that the United States would not use force in China.
Still he wanted an informal empire. Making the most of a bad situation, he maneuvered the other imperial states into taking account of what Americans had to say.
For Europeans his diplomacy seemed hypocritical and self-serving. The British liked the Open Door, but for different reasons than did the Ameri- cans. For British merchants, the new policy meant that they, the worlds pre- mier traders, would sweep the field. The Open Door notes suggested to them that the United States had in charge of its foreign affairs a man who did not fully appreciate the vast changes which were occurring in China.
The powers might agree to humor him, but they would pursue their own ends in China without taking orders from the United States. The Europeans knew that the United States was engaged in the bloody suppression of a nationalist movement in its newly conquered Asian terri- tory of the Philippines. This was one explanation of their failure to take se- riously American demands that they forgo territorial ambitions in China.
From until his capture in , Emilio Aguinaldo led two hundred thousand independence fighters against the American occupiers of the is- lands. Aguinaldos forces had fought the Spanish before the American ar- rival, and he was puzzled that the new colonial masters did not seem to want immediately to offer national freedom.
The United States sent , troops, who engaged in a fierce guerrilla war against the nationalists. Four thousand American soldiers and about five times that many Filipinos lost their lives in battle. The Springfield Republican, an antiimperialist newspaper, published reports of American officers order- 22 U. National Archives ing the murder of unarmed women, children, and infirm men. Filipino in- surrectos complained of being subjected to a slow, painful water torture.
One American officer who served in the war told a reporter, We must bury all qualms. Two com- missions, headed respectively by Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cor- nell University, and William Howard Taft, an Ohio Republican politician, investigated conditions in the Philippines in and They heard an American anthropologist assert that the great mass of the people here are ignorant. They have a very vague idea of either independence or liberty as such.
Taft privately complained to his boss, President Theodore Roosevelt, that stories of atrocities ruined the morale of the American soldiers.
Suspicious of busi- nessmen, he sometimes advanced their interests because he thought that might project American power. He divided the world according to race and culture. Civilized states could expect courteous treatment from the United States while backwards ones had to watch their step. As a Progressive, Roosevelt believed in the power of the government to regulate at home and abroad.
As a nationalist, he thought the United States superior to its rivals. In the nineties, he had joined Henry Cabot Lodge and Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the architect of the modern American navy, in demanding a large American fleet, a war with Spain, and a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. As Howard Beale writes, Though he valued the bless- ings of peace, he craved the excitement of war.
The prospect of leading troops against Spain made him leave his comfortable job as assistant secre- tary of the navy to join the army in He had more fun charging up San Juan Hill at the head of his Rough Riders than he had at any time in his life since he left his ranch in North Dakota in his twenties.
Blood was part of the thrill. Did I tell you, he wrote Lodge, that I killed a Spaniard with my own hands? How to assess such a man? Some recent historians, writing in a complex era, long for Roosevelts panacea. In Velvet on Iron , Frederick Marks calls him a peacemaker in a bellicose age.
Beale acknowledges Roosevelts grasp, energy, and intelligence but admits that the trouble lay not in his abilities but in his values. He was a bom- bastic nationalist who influenced Americas course that by mid-century was to bring her face to face with grave dangers. For all of his strutting, however, Roosevelt had a strategy. He wanted the United States to act as a great power, fully the equal of the imperial states of Europe. Consequently, he created the Panama Canal, policed the West- ern Hemisphere, built up the navy, mediated the war between Russia and Japan in , called for the Second Peace Conference at the Hague in , and took a seat at the Algeciras Conference which decided the fate of Morocco.
While maintaining that the United States was fully the equal of the other great powers of the world, TR sought to maintain good personal re- lationships with all of the European diplomats in Washington. The French am- bassador, Jules Jusserand, had a forbidding presence that rebuffed nick- names, but Roosevelt included him on his rambles through Rock Creek Park.
Roosevelt, a racist and social Darwinist, thought it obvious that the fiercest competition in the modern world took place between different races.
He spoke of an English-speaking race, comparing it favorably to backward Chinese, Latins whose day is over, or blacks kept down by their own vice and criminality and their shiftlessness and laziness.
Shortly before he be- came president, he thrilled a crowd in Minnesota with, It is our duty peo- ple living people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself. Exactly as it is the duty of a civilized power scrupulously to respect the rights of weaker civilized powers. Consider his maneuverings to have the United States build and fortify a canal across the Isthmus of Panama.
In , the United States and Great Britain had agreed that neither power would build such a canal on its own. Ever since that Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, American diplomats and politicians had kicked themselves for having yielded such an important right to the British government. Not that it mattered very much before the technology of digging a lock-type canal of some thirty miles in length had been developed. But in the postCivil War era, it became possible for the first time to create a canal with locks across the Isthmus.
Ferdinand de Lesseps, the creator of the Suez Canal, lost his money and his sanity in the effort to dig across the northern Colombian province of Panama. The bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company became a major scandal in France in , and it also pro- vided the United States with an opportunity to annul the Clayton-Bulwer agreement and cut its own canal.
After the war with Spain, the United States was firmly committed to a canal, but the question was whether the ditch would be dug across Panama, where it would be shorter but would require locks, or across Nicaragua, where it would be longer but use a sea-level path. For the reorganized French com- pany, which had been digging for fifteen years in Panama, the only way to recover at least part of its investment was for the Americans to select a route through Panama.
If the Americans chose Panama, then they would buy the equipment left by the French. While a special commission under Adm. Walker studied the pre- ferred route, Secretary Hay negotiated with the British to allow the United States a free hand in digging a ditch between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Hay worked out two treaties with the British ambassador in Washington, Ju- lian Pauncefote.
In the first Hay-Pauncefote agreement, initialed in Febru- ary , the British agreed to an American canal but insisted that the wa- terway be neutral and unfortified. When Roosevelt became president, he refused to submit this treaty to the Senate and sent Hay back to Pauncefote with instructions to get a treaty which allowed the Americans to construct a canal and protect it with its own navies.
Faced with the obvious determina- tion on the part of Roosevelt to have a canal with or without British agree- ment, Pauncefote capitulated in US Diplomacy Since is a lucid, accessible and compelling work, and remains the leading introduction to the history of American foreign policy for A-level, Access to HE and for undergraduate level study.
ISBN Schulzinger, Robert D.. Commentaries on engagement, interoperability and the forging of friendships are largely conspicuous by their absence. This book considers how all these strands of international politics can be better understood for use in the 21st century. The book explains and defines naval diplomacy, with existing theoretical frameworks being critically analysed. It reviews over incidents from the post-Cold War era, drawing on this empirical evidence to determine that naval diplomacy remains a potent means of 21st century statecraft.
It finds that existing understanding of naval diplomacy is insufficient and offers an alternative model, drawing on basic communication and stakeholder theories. The implications of the book relate directly to national security: naval deployments could be more effectively targeted; foreign activity at sea could be better understood and, if necessary, countered; finally, the ability of non-state actors to support national interests from the sea could, potentially, be better harnessed.
This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, maritime security, strategic studies and International Relations. Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since is a path-breaking work that uses biographical techniques to test one of the most important and widely debated questions in international politics: Did the advent of the nuclear bomb prevent the Third World War?
Many scholars and much conventional wisdom assumes that nuclear deterrence has prevented major power war since the end of the Second World War; this remains a principal tenet of US strategic policy today. Eisenhower; John F. The book'sauthors argue almost unanimously that nuclear weapons did have a significant effect on the thinking of these leading statesmen of the nuclear age, but a dissenting epilogue from John Mueller challenges this thesis.
How do adversaries communicate? How do diplomatic encounters shape international orders and determine whether states go to war? Through rich history and analyses of diplomatic network data from the Confidential Print of the British Empire, Trager demonstrates the lasting effects that diplomatic encounters have on international affairs. Diplomacy explains how closed-door conversations create stable orders and violent wars. A new account of Elizabethan diplomacy with an original archival foundation, this book examines the world of letters underlying diplomacy and political administration by exploring a material text never before studied in its own right: the diplomatic letter-book.
Author Elizabeth R. Williamson argues that a new focus on the central activity of information gathering allows us to situate diplomacy in its natural context as one of several intertwined areas of crown service, and as one of the several sites of production of political information under Elizabeth I.
Close attention to the material features of these letter-books elucidates the environment in which they were produced, copied, and kept, and exposes the shared skills and practices of diplomatic activity, domestic governance, and early modern archiving. Extending this discussion to our own conditions of access, a new parallel is drawn across two ages of information obsession as Williamson argues that the digital has a natural place in this textual history that we can no longer ignore.
This study makes significant contributions to epistolary culture, diplomatic history, and early modern studies more widely, by showing that understanding Elizabethan diplomacy takes us far beyond any single ambassador or agent defined as such: it is a way into an entire administrative landscape and political culture.
This book analyses digital diplomacy as a form of change management in international politics. The recent spread of digital initiatives in foreign ministries is often argued to be nothing less than a revolution in the practice of diplomacy. In some respects this revolution is long overdue. Digital technology has changed the ways firms conduct business, individuals conduct social relations, and states conduct governance internally, but states are only just realizing its potential to change the ways all aspects of interstate interactions are conducted.
In particular, the adoption of digital diplomacy i. Despite these significant changes and the promise that digital diplomacy offers, little is known, from an analytical perspective, about how digital diplomacy works. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together established scholars and experienced policy-makers to bridge this analytical gap.
The objective of the book is to theorize what digital diplomacy is, assess its relationship to traditional forms of diplomacy, examine the latent power dynamics inherent in digital diplomacy, and assess the conditions under which digital diplomacy informs, regulates, or constrains foreign policy. Organized around a common theme of investigating digital diplomacy as a form of change management in the international system, it combines diverse theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented chapters centered on international change.
This book will be of much interest to students of diplomatic studies, public diplomacy, foreign policy, social media and international relations. In a field dominated by the history and practices of Western states, Global Diplomacy expands the mainstream discourse on diplomacy to include non-Western states and states in all stages of development.
By presenting a broader view of this crucial institution, this exciting text cultivates a more global understanding of the ways in which diplomacy is conducted in the world today and offers a new perspective on the ways it may continue to develop in the future. This book presents; a brief introduction to diplomatic practice, the classic diplomatic narrative, and different theories of diplomacy; an exploration of diplomacy over time and place through four types of diplomacy-political, cultural, economic, and military-discussed by guest authors who are experts in their respective fields; three new models of diplomatic interaction-Community, Transatlantic, and Relational-illustrated through the examples of the European Union, UK and US relations, and the rising powers of India and China.
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