American approach to foreign policy

Perkins, Dexter

American approach to foreign policy C.1 - Cambridge Harvard University Press 1954 - 203 p.

The United States in the nineteenth century was a provincial nation that rarely looked be yond the New World. Its military forces were small and its influence in European affairs negligible. Today the United States owns one of the largest armed establishments in the world and has interests and power in every quarter of the globe. What produced this striking change? What events transformed a traditionally isolationist people into a nation of unparalleled international influence? What are the implications for the future? These are some of the questions which Dexter Perkins considers in this survey of the major events in United States foreign policy since World War II.

The volume presents close analyses of sev eral areas of international affairs. In clarifying the pattern of Soviet-American relations, Mr. Perkins examines the key sources of conflict: the disposition of Germany after the war, the creation of Russian satellites in eastern Eu rope, the sending of military aid to Greece, and the West Berlin blockade and airlift. He notes that the Marshall Plan, described by Winston Churchill as "the most unsordid act" in his tory, owes its existence to the spread of Key nesian economic theory and new international monetary systems. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the first peacetime alliance ex plicitly committing the United States to the use of armed force, is, in Mr. Perkins' view, "one of the many auguries of a more inte grated Western society."


United States - Foreign relations

327.73 PER

Powered by Koha