US foreign Policy after WWI until Detente Period

1. U.S. Foreign Policy
World War II
I. American Foreign Policy (1920s)
US Economic Power and Cooperation with Japan and
Germany.
Washington Conference (1921-1922)
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes played a key role in
the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference (1921-22), and
Secretary of State Frank Kellogg was instrumental in the
creation of the Paris Peace Pact (1928), a multilateral agreement
outlawing offensive warfare.

2. Economic Depression
In 1933, Hoover was replaced in the White House by
New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–45).
The new President spent his first six years in office trying to end
the economic depression at home. Conditions seemed slowly to
improve, but for some months in 1938 the nation suddenly
suffered one of the steepest economic downturns in its history.
Within a year, however, Roosevelt’s greatest concern was not
the economy but the outbreak of the Second World War in
Europe. Indeed, new military spending after 1939 finally lifted
the nation out of the depression.

3. Appeasement
The desire of Americans to stay free of overseas commitments
intensified as Hitler’s Germany began a series of military
aggressions which seized Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia in
1937–8, and as Japanese militarists renewed their invasion of
China in 1937.
In 1938, the British and French weakly went along in an
international conference at Munich to allow Hitler to seize parts
of Czechoslovakia which contained large German populations.
Roosevelt agreed with this policy of appeasement.
Hitler, however, absorbed the slice of territory granted by the
British and French, then, to the shock of Americans and the rest
of the world, also seized the remainder of defenceless
Czechoslovakia. Appeasement and ‘Munich’ became dirty
words in US and international politics, then and after 1945.

4. Suspicious to Deal with Communists
By the summer of 1939, Hitler was prepared to attack
other parts of Europe. But he first wanted to neutralize his most
important military opponent, the Soviet Union headed by
dictator Josef Stalin. Throughout the 1933 to 1935 era, Stalin,
deeply frightened of Hitler, had asked Roosevelt, along with
British and French leaders, to cooperate in stopping the German
aggression.
The Westerners were not prepared to do so. They also
doubted whether it was possible to work with a communist such
as Stalin. In August 1939 the Soviet dictator stunned the West
by making a deal with Hitler to stand aside while Germany
attacked Poland. The Soviets and Germans then divided Poland
between themselves.

5. Perl Harbor and Midway Islands
Throughout 1940, Japan had moved into China and South-East Asia in a
quest for regional domination and, especially, badly needed oil fields. In
a series of talks, no settlement could be reached between Japan and the
United States in regard to the oil or—more importantly—China.
Roosevelt refused to recognize Japanese domination of parts of China.
Such recognition would have surrendered the historic US open door
policy in that country.
Japan’s military-dominated government secretly decided to launch a
surprise attack on the American naval base in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor.
Japanese officials hoped to destroy enough of the US Pacific fleet so
Roosevelt, also faced with possible war in Europe, would be willing to
meet most of Tokyo’s demands in Asia. Japanese planes devastated
Pearl Harbor on Sunday 7 December 1941. The attack stunned
Americans, but instead of considering a settlement, as the Japanese
hoped, Congress, at Roosevelt’s request, declared war against Japan.

6. US becoming World’s Greatest Power
British, Russian, Japanese, and western European industries and
cities were largely reduced to smoking ashes between 1941 and
1945. But untouched US industrial production shot up by 90 per
cent. Americans came to understand what this meant: they no
longer needed to fear becoming politically involved with the world
because now, they believed, they finally held the raw power to
control and run that world.
For example, in 1942, when Roosevelt announced a new United
Nations organization which was to replace the failed League of
Nations, most Americans immediately accepted the UN because they
believed they (unlike Wilson with the League in 1919)
would be able to control it. (And they did—until the 1960s and
1970s when membership in the UN of many new African and Asian
nations threatened US control. Then Americans cooled considerably
toward the UN.)

7. Cold WAr
By 1947, efforts to maintain cooperation between Washington and
Moscow had broken down completely. President Truman,
working closely with two assertive Secretaries of State—George
C. Marshall (1947-1949) and Dean G. Acheson (1949-1953)—
took decisive steps to contain Soviet expansion in regions in
which the United States had vital interests. The United States was
about to enter a new kind of war: the “Cold War.”

8. Cold WAr
Few in the West had experience with the communist
state and even fewer understood what motivated the
Soviets. One man who had first hand knowledge was a
Foreign Service officer, George F. Kennan. In 1946,
while he was Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow, Kennan
sent an 8,000-word telegram to the Department—the
now-famous “long telegram”—on the aggressive nature
of Stalin’s foreign policy. Kennan, writing as “Mr. X,”
published an outline of his philosophy in the
prestigious journal Foreign Affairs in 1947. His
conclusion was that “the main element of any United
States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a
long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of
Russian expansive tendencies.” Containment provided
a conceptual framework for a series of successful
initiatives undertaken from 1947 to 1950 to blunt
Soviet expansion.
George Kennan

9. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan
The first step was the “Truman Doctrine” of March 1947, which reflected
the combativeness of President Harry Truman. Truman wanted to “scare the
hell” out of Congress. Arguing that Greece and Turkey could fall victim to
subversion without support from friendly nations, Truman asked Congress
to authorize $400-million in emergency assistance. To justify this course,
he said: “I believe we must assist free peoples to work out their destinies in
their own way.” The key to preventing the overthrow of free nations was to
attack the conditions of “misery” that nurtured totalitarianism.
Soon this general principle was applied to Western Europe as a whole. In
June 1947, Secretary George C. Marshall proposed the extension of
massive economic assistance to the devastated nations of Europe, saying
that the policy of the US was not directed “against any country or doctrine
but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be
the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the existence
of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

10. Containment and Collective Defense
It was also inevitable that the policy of containment would
develop a political-military dimension. In June 1948,
Senator Vandenberg of Michigan sponsored a resolution in the
Senate that called for the “progressive development of regional
and other collective arrangements for individual and collective
self-defense in accordance with the purposes, principles, and
provisions of the [UN] Charter.”
President Truman had already applied the principles of
containment to Latin America. The Rio Pact, signed in
September 1947, provided that “an armed attack by any State
shall be considered as an attack against all the American States
and, consequently, each one of the said Contracting Parties
undertakes to assist in meeting the attack.” Collective security
was invoked again in the North Atlantic Treaty. Signed in
Washington in April 1949, it created the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO). The Rio Pact and the NATO Alliance
formally marked the end of Washington’s policy of no
entangling alliances. Economic assistance and collective defense
agreements became the bulwark of Western foreign policy.
Senator
Arthur H.
Vandenberg

11. NSC-68 and the Korean War
The events of 1949 made foreign policy the nation’s top priority. NATO
became a working alliance, the United States provided military assistance
to Europe, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, and the Mao
Zedong’s communist party took control of mainland China. The
Department of State ordered a complete review of American strategic and
military policy, and, in April 1950, the Department sent a paper calling
for a broad-based and reinvigorated containment policy toward the
Soviet Union, directly to the President. The paper later became known
as NSC-68. After the outbreak of fighting on the Korean peninsula, NSC-
68 was accepted throughout the government as the foundation of
American foreign policy.
When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the United States
sponsored a "police action"—a war in all but name—under the auspices
of the United Nations. The Department of State coordinated U.S.
strategic decisions with the other 16 countries contributing troops to the
fighting.

12. Changes in the Defense Policy
With US troops engaged on the ground against Soviet and Chinese-
backed communist invaders (and after the Soviets had detonated an
atomic device in August 1949 earlier than the US had anticipated) the
perception of a much more threatening global context led to momentous
changes in US foreign policy.
In the following months and years the US moved towards implementing
the recommendations of NSC 68. US troop numbers in Europe were
strengthened and NATO was to be given much greater military bite with
the decision—supported by the US—for the rearmament of western
Germany in May 1955. By 1953 US military production was seven times
that of 1950, the army grew by 50%, and the US also doubled the number
of air groups to ninety-five. Another key consequence of the Korean War
was the stepping up of US military aid to French forces in Indochina
fighting communist-led anti-colonial forces. This was the first step in
what would eventually become the Vietnam War.

13. Importance of domestic political opinion on US foreign policy
After 1965, then, the US became involved in a drawnout and bloody war in
the jungles of south-east Asia, propping up an autocratic, ineffective, and
corrupt state and—in spite of the huge and horrific levels of bombs
(and chemical weapons) dropped on the peoples of Vietnam—south and
north—and along with killing far more Vietnamese than the combined
communist forces were able to kill US troops, failed to deliver the knockout
blow to win the war. Instead, as the war went on and, particularly after the
political debacle and humiliation of the 1968 NLF Offensive—when NLF
guerrillas seized control of the US embassy in Saigon—American
domestic politics began to play a much more important role on US policy as
the campaign for withdrawal gathered pace in the US.
Although the anti-war movement did not force the US to withdraw it played
a key role in ending the policy established under Johnson, highlighting,
again, the importance of domestic political opinion on US foreign policy.
With the election of Richard Nixon in late 1968 US policy changed as it
sought an exit from Vietnam.

14. Nixon’s Foreign Policy
The election of President Richard M. Nixon in 1968 led to
important changes. As President, he fully intended to control
foreign policy and make the major decisions himself. He
created an activist NSC staff under Harvard Professor Henry
Kissinger, whom he named as his National Security Adviser.
President Nixon pursued two important policies that both
culminated in 1972. In February he visited Beijing, setting in
motion normalization of relations with the People's Republic
of China. In May, he traveled to the Soviet Union and signed
agreements that contained the results of the first Strategic
Arms Limitation Treaty talks (SALT I), and new negotiations
were begun to extend further arms control and disarmament
measures.
These developments marked the beginning of a period
of “détente” in line with a general tendency among Americans
to favor a lower profile in world affairs after the Vietnam War,
which finally ended in 1975 with the last withdrawal of U.S.
personnel.
Nixon's Visit
to China

15. Carter's Foreign Policy
The election of Democrat Jimmy Carter as President in 1976
brought a new emphasis, based on Carter’s personal ideology, to
U.S. foreign policy. Carter believed that the nation’s foreign
policy should reflect its highest moral principles. In 1977, Carter
said, “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed
and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries,
sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought
fire with fire, never thinking that fire is sometimes best quenched
with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example
of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have
now found our way back to our own principles and values, and
we have regained our lost confidence.”
In 1978, the Administration normalized relations with mainland
China. President Carter himself facilitated the Camp David Peace
Accords between Israel and Egypt. In 1979, President Carter and
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a follow-on nuclear arms
control agreement, known as SALT II.
President
Jimmy Carter