ABSTRACT
In 1940, four major geopolitical developments dominated traditional US foreign policy. First, the strategic structure of the three regions of the Western Hemisphere had to be redrawn with new and more suitable parameters and standards. Second, it was accepted as fact that the nation's security was inextricably entwined with the security and control of the Arctic sea-lanes, in accordance with the new doctrine of air power. Third, the internationalists were growing in number and political leverage. Fourth, there was an increasingly horizontal emphasis on the east-west axis and hence a shift of the center of the security system, and its underlying "philosophy," to the north and to the Atlantic. One of the major issues in which the work of the Council on Foreign Relations study groups influenced the decisions of the administration—and perhaps those of the president himself—was the inclusion of Greenland and Iceland in the Western Hemisphere's zone of defense.
