The rise of the West

The world on the eve of the Great War was European-dominated. As we trace the history of American foreign relations from 1913 to 1945, it is important to recall that the United States had come into existence and conducted its external affairs in a world system in which European military power, economic pursuits, and cultural activities predominated. This had not always been the case. Before the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Chinese Empire in East Asia had been equal contenders for power and influence. In fact, as the European nation-states had fought one another almost without interruption throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a dispassionate observer might have predicted that those states would soon exhaust themselves and that the more unified empires of the Middle East and East Asia – collectively known as “Asia,” the “Orient,” or the “East” – might in the long run prove much more important determinants of world affairs.

As Paul Kennedy and others have argued, however, it was the very divided nature of European affairs that proved decisive in the ascendance of the region in the international community. Because the nation-state was in a virtually constant state of war or of war preparedness, it had to develop a centralized administrative structure for mobilizing armed forces and collecting taxes to pay for them. These, which John Brewer has termed the “sinews of power,” were systematically developed by the European monarchies throughout the seventeenth century, and during the following century the struggle for power among the nation-states came to define the basic nature of European international relations.