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11 - Explaining the Rise to Global Power

U.S. Policy toward Asia and Africa since 1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Mark Atwood Lawrence
Affiliation:
University of Texas
Frank Costigliola
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Michael J. Hogan
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Springfield
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Summary

A central feature of American history since 1941 is the nation’s transformation from a peripheral power into the most dominant geopolitical force in world history. One of the most revealing indicators of this transformation is the extension of U.S. power into Asia and Africa, the two continents that had in previous eras lain farthest from the American consciousness. From the founding of the United States, Americans had focused their overseas ambitions on Europe and Latin America, regions that lay closest to the eastern seaboard of the United States and formed the boundaries of the “Atlantic world” within which the nation developed. To be sure, Americans encountered Africans through the slave trade and fantasized about extending their reach into Asia to display national greatness, win converts, and capture markets. Unquestionably, too, Asia’s eastern rim became a focus of geostrategic anxieties as early as the 1890s. Still, Asia and Africa were comparatively far away, geographically but also conceptually, lands mostly dominated by European colonial powers and known to Americans more through folklore, movies, and racial stereotypes than actual experience.

Type
Chapter
Information
America in the World
The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941
, pp. 236 - 259
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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