Introduction

The Cold War had unleashed powerful ethno-national and economic forces in the African Horn that proved to be uncontrollable. Academic tradition suggests that American foreign policy may best be understood in terms of two contradictory orientations: isolationism and internationalism. The internationalization of American commercial interests was enormously facilitated by the rise in mergers after 1897, which gradually led to the birth of the modern corporation. Beginning in 1897, the Republican administration argued in favor of tariff reduction as a requisite condition for international economic growth, claiming that the interests of internationalism in general and of the United States in particular would be best served by producing for a global market rather than for fragmented national markets. The United States encouraged a gradual, orderly transition within the colonies; while these new states were no longer formally controlled by others, they be came increasingly controlled informally through the application of economic domination.