ABSTRACT

The interest of the United States rests on the same support. In short the United States went to war in December 1941 under a most primitive and direct national challenge, understandable and acceptable to all. The foreign policy of the United States from the onset of the Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century was concerned: with the winning of independence, in which a French alliance, temporarily accepted, played a decisive part. In Europe the United States generated consciously no major national interests; its diplomacy was designed to remove or to limit European stakes on the American Continent and in the Western Hemisphere, and to avoid, as Washington had urged, the entanglement of the American destiny ‘with that of any part of Europe’. In the Far East commercial interests led the United States into fairly elaborate diplomacy, in both China and Japan, even before the Civil War.