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  • The modern United States is the most powerful country in human history.

  • With over 800 military bases and 37% of global military spending,

  • the US has become the leader of a vast interconnected global system

  • that has helped usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity and low levels of conflict.

  • To understand America's position in the world, and why it's so pivotal for world

  • politics as we know it, you have to go back to the country's foundingback to when

  • America wasn't a global power in any sense of the word.

  • During the first 70 years of its existence, the United States expanded in both territory

  • and influence in North America eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean in a wave of expansionism

  • that resulted in the wholesale slaughter of the indigenous people who populated the continent.

  • But early Americans were deeply divided as to whether the country should expand beyond the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

  • This became a major debate after the civil war, when some leaders, like post-war Secretary of State Seward, argued that America should push to become a global power.

  • Seward succeeded in pushing a plan to purchase Alaska from Russia, but his attempts to buy

  • Greenland and Iceland, as well as annex territory in the Caribbean, were all blocked by Congress.

  • That's because some Americans, including many on Capitol Hill, had a strong anti-imperialist bent.

  • These people worried about America getting more involved in global politics, as well as having to integrate populations from "inferior" races.

  • And this opposition applied major checks on the imperialist urge to expand.

  • But something was happening in the late 1800s that would change the debate about American expansionism.

  • The industrial revolution produced explosive economic growth, and the bigger US economy

  • required a more centralized state and bureaucracy to manage the growing economy.

  • Power became concentrated in the federal government, making it easier for expansionist presidents,

  • like William Mckinley, to unilaterally push United States influence abroad.

  • The key turning point came in 1898, when President McKinley dragged the country into war with

  • Spain over the island of Cuba despite intense opposition.

  • The rising US easily defeated the moribund Spanish empire, acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the process (1898).

  • Over the next two years, the US would annex the Kingdom of Hawaii (1898), Wake Island (1899), and American Samoa (1900).

  • A few years later the US took control of the Panama Canal Zone (1903) and sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic (1916), it also purchased the American Virgin Islands (1917).

  • This period of rapid acquisition of far flung territories put the US on the map as a truly global power.

  • During this time, America also began using its influence to protect its growing commercial

  • and military interests abroad, installing pro-American regimes in places like Nicaragua

  • and playing a major role in international diplomacy regarding the Western presence in China.

  • World War I showed how just how much America's influence had grown.

  • Not only was American intervention a decisive factor in the war's end,

  • but President Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference which ended the war and attempted to set the terms of the peace.

  • He spearheaded America's most ambitious foreign policy initiative, yet, an international

  • organization, called the League of Nations, designed to promote peace and cooperation globally.

  • The League, a wholesale effort to remake global politics, showed just how ambitious American foreign policy had become.

  • Yet isolationism was still a major force in the United States.

  • Congress blocked the United States from joining the League of Nations, dooming Wilson's project.

  • During the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, the US was was much more focused on

  • its own region than on European affairs Ultimately, though, America's ever-growing

  • entanglements abroad made it impossible for it to stay out of global affairs entirely.

  • In East Asia, the growing Japanese empire posed a the direct threat to American possessions

  • and troops bringing the United States and Japan into conflict.

  • This culminated in the Pearl Harbor attack bringing the United States into World War II.

  • World War Two would transform America's global presence forever.

  • The United States was the only major power to avoid economic ruin during the war, and

  • it was the sole country equipped with atomic weapons.

  • As such, it was in unique position to set the terms of the peaceand, with the aim

  • of preventing another war in mind, it took advantage.

  • The most famous example of this is the creation of the United Nations.

  • The UN charter set up a system of international law prohibiting wars of conquest, like the

  • ones waged by the Nazis and the Japanese.

  • It also served as a forum in which the international community could weigh in on disputes, and help resolve them.

  • This way, the Americans hoped, great powers could resolve their differences through compromise and law rather than war.

  • But while the UN is the most famous of the post-war institutions, it isn't the only one.

  • 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations came together in a small vacation haven in New Hampshire.

  • Their goal? To establish a global financial system that would prevent another Great Depression and World War.

  • The resulting agreement, called the Bretton Woods Agreement, ultimately became backbone of the global financial system.

  • Resulting in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

  • By creating these institutions, the United States committed itself to being deeply involved in the world’s problems.

  • The issue, though, is that the world's second-largest powerThe Soviet Unionsaw things differently.

  • World War II had made allies out of the democratic West and communist East in the fight against Hitler, but that couldn't last.

  • The United States saw Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and elsewhere as a direct threat to its vision of a free-trading world.

  • "To a substantial degree, in one form or another"

  • Socialism has spread the shadow of human regimentation over most of the nations of the earth

  • And... the shadow is encroaching on our own liberty."

  • Fearful of Soviet intentions towards Western Europe, the US and other European nations created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,

  • a military alliance meant to stop Russia from invading other countries in Europe.

  • Globally, the US committed to a strategy called "containment" — so called because it

  • was aimed at containing the spread of Communism everywhere on the globe.

  • This new global struggle meant that the US had to exert influence everywhere, all the time.

  • Instead of disbanding the massive military machine created for World War II, its wheels mostly kept turning.

  • This had two main results: first, the US was pulled into unlikely alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and South Korea,

  • seeing each of them as bulwarks against communist influence in their region.

  • Secondly, the US began intervening, often secretly, in dozens of countries to contain Soviet influence.

  • Sometimes this meant propping up sympathetic dictators like in Iran, other times

  • supplying rebels with arms and money like in Afghanistan in 1979 and Nicaragua in 1985.

  • Over the course of the Cold War, the US intervened in hundreds of disputes around the globe,

  • ending up with a complicated set of alliances, tensions, and relationships in basically every corner of the earth.

  • After the Berlin wall fell, the US could have withdrawn from this system,

  • severing ties with its allies and drawing down the size of its military.

  • And while the US did decrease military spending, much of the military infrastructure and alliances from the Cold War remained.

  • Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton decided that it was in both America and the world's interests for the United States,

  • now the sole superpower on earth, to continue actively managing global affairs.

  • " We should be and we must be Peacemakers"

  • NATO, created solely as a tool for countering the Soviets, stayed together and even expanded,

  • a way of keeping European nations united in the absence of the Soviet threat.

  • Washington's support for countries like Israel and Japan stayed intact, ostensibly as a means of preventing war in those regions.

  • The global system of alliances and institutions created to keep the peace during the Cold War became permanent

  • as did the American military and political commitments needed to keep them running.

  • This system remains in operation today, and no leading American politician since the Cold War has seriously called for dismantling themexcept, perhaps for Donald Trump.

  • Trump has said contradictory things about these commitments.

  • But he's consistently argued that American allies are not paying America enough for its protection, and questioned the value of free trade.

  • That calls NATO and even the World Trade Organization into question.

  • At some point, we have to say, you know what, we're better off if Japan protects itself against this maniac in North Korea.

  • We're better off if South Korea is going to start to protect itself

  • -- and Saudi Arabia?-- Saudi Arabia? Absolutely.

  • This is a sharp divergence from the consensus that has dominated US foreign policy since 1945,

  • and something closer to the isolationism that came before it.

  • So will President Trump act on some of candidate Trump's ideas, and reverse decades worth of institution building and alliances?

  • We'll find out, soon enough.

The modern United States is the most powerful country in human history.

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アメリカが超大国になった経緯 (How America became a superpower)

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    jie に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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