Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions
- 2 The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions
- 3 The revolutionaries: anticolonial politics and transformations
- 4 Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution
- 5 The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges
- 6 The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa
- 7 The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn
- 8 The Islamist defiance: Iran and Afghanistan
- 9 The 1980s: the Reagan offensive
- 10 The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War
- Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions, and great power collapse
- Notes
- Index
1 - The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions
- 2 The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions
- 3 The revolutionaries: anticolonial politics and transformations
- 4 Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution
- 5 The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges
- 6 The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa
- 7 The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn
- 8 The Islamist defiance: Iran and Afghanistan
- 9 The 1980s: the Reagan offensive
- 10 The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War
- Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions, and great power collapse
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the 1890s, as the United States for the first time prepared to colonize peoples outside the North American continent, the debate over whether a republic could also be an empire raged intensely. When accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1900, William Jennings Bryan castigated the American colonization of the Philippines, claiming that such policies undermined the essence of republicanism: “Our whole history,” Bryan said, “has been an encouragement not only to the Filipinos, but to all who are denied a voice in their own government …
While our sphere of activity has been limited to the Western hemisphere, our sympathies have not been bounded by the seas. We have felt it due to ourselves and to the world, as well as those who were struggling for the right to govern themselves, to proclaim the interest which our people have, from the date of their own independence, felt in every contest between human rights and arbitrary power.
In the century that followed Bryan's doomed battles for the presidency the complexity of his sentiments was to be often repeated at key moments of making decisions in US foreign policy: could Americans, jealous of their own freedoms, govern others? And, if not, what form should that “interest” in the world that Bryan proclaimed take? Was liberty for Americans enough to satisfy the promise of America, or was the agenda of American liberty the world?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Global Cold WarThird World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, pp. 8 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005