A Sense of Power

John A. Thompson's title echoes two of many explanations of the global reach of the United States: the realist and the materialist. The author names many progenitors of the former, with the latter's forebears being essentially Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams. Another name suggests itself—Robert Endicott Osgood. For it is Osgood's work of sixty-plus years ago that appears to set the basic question for Thompson: What is the relationship between “self [national] interest” and “ideals,” which appear as the twin drivers of U.S. foreign policy making? Thompson blends these two factors in his account of the “great transformation” (Osgood's phrase from Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century [1953]) from the late nineteenth century to the early 1950s. In this period, policy makers (followed by the opinion-polled public) decided to exploit the huge and diverse resources of the United States to create a world—if not quite in the American image, at least adaptable to U.S. goals. There were three key moments in this transformation: the turn-of-the-century debate on imperialism; entry into World War I and the rejection of the League of Nations; and the building of multilateral institutions and alliances (the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the North American Treaty Organization) during and after World War II—the grim lessons of interwar isolationism having been learned

Economic history · Foreign policy · Isolationism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Treaty · World War II · History · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law