World War II shaped conversations on the future of service including universal military training and conscription.
Jazz in the late s moved away from big band jazz and morphed into a new expressive form that reflected social developments and post-war realities. During World War II, 4-H members contributed to the war effort in many ways—through military service, as well as efforts on the home front.
Robert Riskin, head of the Bureau of Motion Pictures, was responsible for creating Projections of America , a documentary film series that became one of the most important propaganda initiatives of World War II.
While the war provided opportunities for soldiers to foster their sense of manhood, the postwar years and peacetime preferred the husband and father ideal while also finding ways to deal with injured or psychologically traumatized veterans. The Great Debate. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Like this article? Read more in our online classroom. Home Front. From the Collection to the Classroom. The Pacific Century, we are told ad nauseam, has dawned. This transformation also means a shift in the international distribution of political and military power. In a typical evaluation of East Asia's strategic future the foreign-policy expert Aaron Friedberg states darkly in the journal International Security ,.
Friedberg's assertion nicely illustrates the ambivalence with which the U. He both prophesies an exhilarating Pacific Century and warns the West that the East may once again be up to no good. East Asia has never been a terribly successful field for American diplomacy.
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this, and surely that shortcoming for which the United States is continually indicted--cultural and historical myopia--has contributed enormously to its failures in the region. Americans have always seen East Asia not for what it is but for what it can do to them or for them: the region is either danger or opportunity--either a new "ground war in Asia" or a new China market.
American understanding of Japan, for instance, is, in the words of the historian Bruce Cumings, caught within the conflicting views of Japan as "miracle and menace, docile and aggressive, fragile blossom and Tokyo Rose. This is misleading, because it starts at the wrong place. First, the shift of economic activity has not been sudden. Although Vietnam, China, and North Korea were for forty years able to contain America's Cold War ambition to "roll back" communism, they are proving utterly unable to contain the juggernaut of East Asia's capitalist political economy.
Most important, to imply that the end of the Cold War is of primary significance to U. That same year one of Vandenberg's colleagues, the fervently anti-Communist Senator Robert Taft, expressed a strong suspicion that the supposed dangers to the nation from the USSR failed to explain America's new foreign policy. He complained that he was "more than a bit tired of having the Russian menace invoked as a reason for doing any--and every--thing that might or might not be desirable or necessary on its own merits.
After the Second World War, American statesmen believed that the United States, standing alone and strong in a world of weary nations, had a remarkable opportunity, as Acheson said, to "grab hold of history and make it conform.
Washington envisioned a world economy in which trade and capital would flow across national boundaries in response to the laws of comparative advantage and supply and demand--an economy in which production and finance would be integrated on a global scale. The constricted national markets that were emerging in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Europe and East Asia would be combined, eliminating the inefficiencies of statism and self-sufficiency.
Large-scale regional economies would in turn be integrated into an interdependent world economy. They also knew that an open world economy demanded an even more ambitious American project: transforming international relations. The greatest danger to U. Without a flourishing international economy, Under Secretary of State Will Clayton warned in , "our democratic free enterprise system" could not function. As late as exports accounted for only 3. The health of the international economy, in this disputable view, depended on Germany's and Japan's economic revitalization.
Germany, if its economy was resurrected, would once again be Europe's most efficient producer and most avid consumer. Its very economic potential, however, made Germany a threat to the other Western European states, which, as the future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained to a closed Senate panel in , were "afraid to bring that strong, powerful, highly concentrated group of people into unity with them. The problem lay in the inherent contradiction between capitalism and international politics.
Capitalist economies prosper most when labor, technology, and capital are fluid, so that they are driven toward international integration and interdependence. But whereas all states benefit absolutely in an open international economy, some states benefit more than others. In the normal course of world politics, in which states are driven to compete for their security, the relative distribution of power is a country's principal concern, discouraging economic interdependence.
Thus years ago the philosopher David Hume bemoaned the lack of economic cooperation among countries, blaming the "narrow malignity and envy of nations, which can never bear to see their neighbors thriving, but continually repine at any new efforts towards industry made by any other nation. This circumscribes both production factors and markets, and thereby fragments an international economy.
A truly global economy is probably impossible to achieve. In fact, as the Princeton political economist Robert Gilpin has said, "what today we call international economic interdependence runs so counter to the great bulk of human experience that only extraordinary changes and novel circumstances could have led to its innovation and triumph over other means of economic exchange.
This suspension of international politics through hegemony has been the fundamental aim of U. The real story of that policy is not the thwarting of and triumph over the Soviet threat but the effort to impose an ambitious economic vision on a recalcitrant world.
THE overriding objective of U. To be sure, this would help to immunize the region against Communist expansion; but Acheson and the other creators of the American Century thought the goal itself vital, regardless of the Soviet threat. If Japan was to help fuel the world economy, it would have to be, in Acheson's words, "the workshop of Asia. As Japan advanced in the product cycle, climbing up the technological ladder, it spun off its low-technology and low-wage industries to its neighbors.
In the late s and the s the United States essentially restored this system; but the machine could not run by itself. Washington had to ensure that Japan's neighbors would feel secure politically in the regional hierarchy atop which Japan stood.
Washington also had to ensure that the hierarchy did not develop--as it had in the past--into a Japanese-led closed economic bloc, which would threaten the world economy. NSC 48, the National Security Council's blueprint for America's Cold War strategy in East Asia, summed up the chief difficulty facing Washington's economic goals in the region--and around the globe.
Starting with the premise that "the economic life of the modern world is geared to expansion," requiring "the establishment of conditions favorable to the export of technology and capital and to a liberal trade policy throughout the world," NSC 48's authors went on to warn that "the complexity of international trade makes it well to bear in mind that such ephemeral matters as national pride and ambition can inhibit or prevent the necessary degree of international cooperation, or the development of a favorable atmosphere and conditions to promote economic expansion.
The distinguished historian and diplomat George Kennan, then the head of the State Department's policy-planning staff, saw only one solution to what he described as the "terrible dilemma" confronting U. Forty-seven years later Washington continues to pursue that course.
If we really in the Western world could work out controls, I suppose, adept enough and foolproof enough and cleverly enough exercised really to have power over what Japan imports in the way of oil and such other things as she has got to get from overseas, we would have veto power on what she does need in the military and industrial field. By providing for Japan's security and by enmeshing its foreign and military policies in a U. By restraining its powerful ally, Washington has, to use a euphemism favored in policymaking circles, "reassured" Japan's neighbors and stabilized relations among the states of East Asia.
The United States played the decisive role in promoting Tokyo's integration with its former colonies in Japan-centered regional trade networks that have been the foundation of East Asia's economic "miracle.
In a series of revealing interviews published in the former undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow was pressed to explain the motivations underlying U. In doing so he betrayed the lingering and profound distrust that U. How can an electorate that seemed sick of war in watch passively while one war escalates in and another one gets launched in ?
What is going on here? Because We Can. The most obvious reason that the United States keeps doing these things is the fact that it has a remarkably powerful military, especially when facing a minor power like Libya. President, but if you push that button, you can stop it. It might cost a few hundred million dollars, maybe even a few billion by the time we are done, but we can always float a bit more debt.
The choice is yours, Mr. It would take a very tough and resolute president — or one with a clear set of national priorities and a deep understanding of the uncertainties of warfare — to resist that siren song. But the truly exceptional thing about America today is not our values and certainly not our dazzling infrastructure, high educational standards, rising middle-class prosperity, etc.
The U. Has No Serious Enemies. A second factor that permits the United States to keep waging these optional wars is the fact that the end of the Cold War left the United States in a remarkably safe position.
We do face a vexing terrorism problem, but that danger is probably exaggerated, is partly a reaction to our tendency to meddle in other countries, and is best managed in other ways. A third enabling factor behind our addiction to adventurism is the all-volunteer force. By limiting military service only to those individuals who volunteer to do it, public opposition to wars of choice is more easily contained.
I very much doubt it. By the way, I am not saying that the AVF is a bad idea that should be chucked, as there are a number of good arguments in its favor.
Nonetheless, the AVF is one of those features of the contemporary U. In short, our foreign policy is shaped by a bipartisan class of foreign policy do-gooders who spend years out of power maneuvering to get in, and spend their time in office trying to advance whatever their own pet project s might be.
Having scratched and clawed to get themselves on the inside, the people who run our foreign policy are not likely to counsel restraint, or to suggest that the United States and the rest of the world might be better off if Washington did a bit less.
Compared with most Americans, this is a wealthy, privileged, highly educated group of people and most of them are personally insulated from the consequences of the policies they advocate i. By the way, lurking underneath the Establishment consensus on foreign-policy activism is the most successful Jedi mind trick that the American right ever pulled.
Since the mids, American conservatism has waged a relentless and successful campaign to convince U.
0コメント