ABSTRACT
During the first great age of European imperialism (1492-1763), the European impulse to conquer the Americas evolved from the initial RenaissanceReformation motives grounded in missionary Christianity and the quest for wealth to a competition for empire among the nation-states of Europe. In the era of the American wars for independence (1775-1824) almost all American mainland territories south of Canada became independent of Europe, and in the Monroe Doctrine (1823) the United States assumed the role of their selfappointed protector against European reconquest. Initially a rhetorical stand by an emerging power, the Monroe Doctrine assumed real significance with the growth of American military might. Dramatic developments in the 1860s saw the unity of the United States preserved, the last European attempts at reconquest in Latin America defeated, and Canada granted self-government within the British Empire. While so many aspects of life in the Americas bore the stamp of Europe – the languages, religion, culture, political concepts, and economic organization – their intrastate relationships did not. The independent American states did not form competing alliances within a balance of power along Westphalian lines, as realist theory would have predicted. Instead, the post-colonial strategic history of the Western Hemisphere witnessed a gradual process by which the other countries of North and South America came to terms with the hegemony of the United States. By the early 1900s Canada had accepted that the United States, not Britain, was the guarantor of its security; US relations with Latin America were far stormier, but ultimately the result was the same. After two world wars and the onset of the Cold War, resistance to American hegemony became unthinkable. With various degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance – reflected in their own strategic cultures – the other American states formally joined the US bandwagon, Latin America through the Rio Treaty (1947) and Canada in the establishment of NATO (1949). Only Fidel Castro’s Cuba dared align itself with the Cold War enemies of the United States.
