全屏显示专题章节

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was not completely unexpected. The U.S. had tremendous resources to fight the world war, but it took some time for the War Production Board, a government agency set up to oversee key industries, to mobilise these resources. Within two years, however, U.S. output was enough to give the Allies a decisive advantage against the Axis powers.

The first priority for the U.S. was the Pacific, where Japan initially conquered most of Southeast Asia and the Philippines. The U.S. did not inflict a defeat upon Japan until the Battle of Midway in June 1942, but further victories followed, and by June 1944 the U.S. was launching successful air attacks on Japan itself.

The partnership of the U.S., USSR and Britain during 1941 to 1945 was known as “The Grand Alliance”. The Tehran conference in November 1943 was a success and relations between Roosevelt and Stalin were cordial. Roosevelt was re-elected in the 1944 Presidential election and the Yalta Conference of February 1945 was another exercise in goodwill, including an agreement to set up the United Nations. The issue of post-war Europe was not resolved properly, however, with Germany （and Berlin） split into four military occupation zones and no decision beyond that made. Roosevelt died in April and Truman, his successor, was less accommodating to Stalin. More decisions on Europe were made at Potsdam in July,but the conference lacked goodwill. The U.S. “Manhattan Project”, a secret programme set up in 1939 to develop an atom bomb, was now complete. Two atom bombs were dropped on Japan in August, forcing immediate Japanese surrender: the war had been won, but already there were obstacles to post-war peace.

The second half of 1945 and early part of 1946 were characterised by increasing frustration and anger for the Truman government as the USSR entrenched itself in Eastern Europe and refused to hold genuinely free elections. Stalin imposed communist governments upon Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and, soon afterwards, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Despite these actions, the USSR, for all its oddities, had been a strong ally during the Second World War and it was widely thought that the U.S. should now concern itself with domestic affairs and reduce its military commitment to Europe. Congress was prepared to criticise the USSR, but reluctant to make America put its money where its mouth was. For this reason, when Churchill toured the U.S. in 1946 and warned of Soviet aggression, it was not initially well received. Churchill warned that an “Iron Curtain” had descended upon Europe, with all countries to the east of the “Curtain” subject to repression and control by the USSR. Truman was inclined to agree and was hostile in dealings with the USSR’s foreign minister, Molotov. The USSR was unmoved, however, and when Greece looked under threat in 1947, Truman decided to act. What followed set the tone for U.S. foreign policy for the next 40 years. Truman declared that the world faced a conflict between freedom and repression, and that the U.S. must protect freedom wherever it was challenged. This “Truman Doctrine” led initially to U.S. aid for Greece and Turkey, granted by Congress after a struggle. Many billions of dollars worth of U.S. financial and military aid would be poured into other countries in the decades to come. The Truman Doctrine introduced the theory of “containment”: The U.S. might not be able to overthrow existing communist governments, but it could work to prevent communist revolutions elsewhere.

Closely following the Truman Doctrine was the “Marshall Plan”, a programme of economic aid to rebuild war-torn Europe. Congress only agreed to grant this financial aid （and far less than Marshall had proposed） after the USSR imposed control over Czechoslovakia in early 1948. The USSR then refused to allow countries under its influence to accept the Marshall Plan. This was used by Truman as evidence of Soviet repression, and stirred up public opinion against the USSR. It was around this time that the term “Cold War” was used todescribe the hostile superpower relations. Truman secured the U.S.’s commitment to Western Europe through the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization （NATO） in 1949. The USSR’s response was to reveal it had developed its own atom bomb, and it later went on to form the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance designed to counter NATO. The Cold War had frozen into a permanent stand-off in Europe.

At home anti-communist opinion was starting to get out of hand. Truman had previously encouraged this. However, the early 1950s saw an increasing number of accusations and investigations against government figures, educators, artists and scientists who were suspected of having spied for and spread communism. Leading figures in the Truman government, Marshall and Acheson, found themselves under scrutiny. A Security Act was passed, against Truman’s wishes, to clamp down on troublemakers and the labour movement was purged of communists.

The Truman Doctrine of “containment” also met its first test outside Europe in 1950. China had been “lost” to communism the previous year, as McCarthy and others angrily pointed out. After a four-year civil war, Chairman Mao’s communists had defeated Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists, who had been forced to retreat to Taiwan. The U.S. refused to recognise the new communist government and supported Chiang instead. Then, in June 1950, communist North Korea invaded the non-communist South. A policy of containment required the U.S. to protect South Korea, and once United Nations blessing had been sought （with the USSR conveniently absent in protest against the U.N.’s refusal to recognise Mao’s government）, U.S. troops intervened. South Korea was quickly liberated but, on the advice of General MacArthur, Truman decided to conquer North Korea as well. China then intervened and the war settled into a long and destructive stalemate. The U.S. had extended the Cold War to East Asia as well as Europe, and would pay the price in later decades.

Reagan immediately showed his foreign policy colours. Defence and CIA budgets were increased rapidly and attention was paid to more sophisticated and accurate offensive and defensive weapons, including the cruise missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative （SDI）. This attracted controversy in both Europe and the U.S. itself, where economic problems and fear of nuclear holocaust made Reagan’s nuclear spending seem reckless. Reagan’s aggressive rhetoric, referring to the USSR as an “evil empire” at one point, also attracted criticism. U.S. intervention in Lebanon, Grenada and Nicaragua led to Congress cutting off funding forReagan’s foreign policy intrigues. Reagan then authorised the sale of arms to Iran and used the proceeds to fund illegally the Nicaraguan Contras, a scandal that almost brought him down in 1986. The bombing of Libya in April 1986, which was an attempt at regime change after a terrorist attack on U.S. servicemen, reflected the President’s strong approach to foreign affairs.

Alongside this, though, Reagan was trying to initiate talks with the USSR. The President’s genuine horror at nuclear weapons saw fruitless attempts at agreements with the USSR. A turning point came with the appointment of Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985. He was conscious of the USSR’s economic weakness and sought ways of reducing military spending. Reagan had served two terms and was not eligible for re-election in 1988. His Vice-President, George Bush, was elected instead and was more suspicious of the USSR than Reagan had eventually been. This did not delay negotiations for long and events overtook U.S. foreign policy as communism collapsed, first in Eastern Europe, then in the USSR itself in 1991. Meanwhile the end of the Cold War seemed evident in the two superpowers’ consensus on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The U.S. led a successful U.N. liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and finished the year as the world’s only superpower. The Cold War was won, but this was to pose U.S. foreign policy difficult questions in the years to come.

Through the 1990s, U.S. foreign policy was reappraised and, while Congress cut defence spending by 25 per cent and talked of a more unilateral approach to foreign policy, the Clinton administration （1993-2001） declared its commitment to active engagement in world affairs. Clinton was instinctively liberal and, in agreement with his Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright, supported and promoted democracy across the globe. Immediately he ran into problems. The U.S. led U.N. intervention in Somalia in 1993, which, after abandoning its peacekeeping brief and attempting to arrest one troublesome clan leader, saw eighteen marines killed and all U.S. troops evacuated by the end of the year. Thereafter the U.S. was reluctant to intervene in Africa and Clinton refused to send troops to Liberia or Rwanda despite the humanitarian atrocities being committed there. Relations between the U.S. and the U.N., rarely in total harmony, cooled and by 1996 the U.S. was failing to pay $1.4 billion owed to the U.N..

More successful were U.S. attempts to reorientate NATO, an organisation that had lost direction since the end of the Cold War. Central and Eastern European states, newly free of communist rule, were encouraged to apply for NATO membership and thus stabilise Europe, without aggravating Russian hostility. A sign of NATO’s new role was its intervention in the former Yugoslavia, working alongside the U.N. to enforce peace. The U.S. was also successful,in a period of economic boom, in strengthening its worldwide economic influence. Canada and Mexico were brought together into the North American Free Trade Association （NAFTA） in 1994, China was encouraged to embrace the global economy and the U.S. successfully blocked a Japanese initiative to create an Asian Monetary Fund in 1998, which would have undermined the U.S.-dominated IMF.

Clinton’s Presidential successor, George W. Bush, initially spoke of a wish to build on Clinton’s internationalism. This was quickly forgotten as a more aggressive and unilateral foreign policy was implemented. The U.S. withdrew from the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, which had sought to reduce world pollution and began, to the consternation of Russia, China and fellow NATO members, to develop a “son of Star Wars” National Missile Defense initiative （NMD）. The September 11 atrocity in 2001 shocked the U.S., but won worldwide sympathy and popularised Bush’s Presidency. However, it was not long before support for Bush’s foreign policy would fade outside the U.S.. The U.N. Security Council and many NATO members would refuse to support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. was voted off U.N. panels on drug control and human rights and the long-term future direction of U.S. involvement in world affairs would seem less clear than at any time since the 1930s.