ABSTRACT
The wars discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, from the American Civil War to the Russo-Japanese War, represent the bookends of change wrought by major military conict to the international system between the 1860s and 1914. The American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War brought forth two reconstituted and powerful nation-states, each destined to become major antagonists of the global conicts of the twentieth century. Whereas the unication of Germany under Prussia at direct cost to France was felt immediately as a fundamental shift in the balance of power, geographic distance and the domestic preoccupations of the Gilded Age kept the United States from an assertive role in international affairs for a quarter of a century after 1865.1
More important than the delay in the realisation of American military power, however, was the specic form of its initial iteration and its contribution to competition among the established and emerging powers after 1890. The post-Civil War U.S. Army enjoyed none of the prestige accorded the German military after 1871; its numbers were reduced, its commands decentralised, its mission redirected toward the pacication of the tribes of the Great Plains, until the army “seemed never to have left the simpler past.”2 By contrast, the naval profession was comparatively free of the social stigma inicted on standing armies in the United States since the Revolution. It had no role in constabulary duty on the frontier, suffered no opprobrium for occupation in the South, and bore no tarnish from deployment in labour disputes. Although it was no more immune from American cultural suspicion of the uniformed services, in the expansive and optimistic commercial atmosphere of the second half of the century the U.S. Navy articulated a mission for itself in the furthering and protection of overseas trade that by 1898 made it the primary agent of American power abroad with an embryonic military-industrial political economy to support it. In the process, American naval thought exerted a profound inuence on the strategic reasoning of other powers that accelerated the pace and raised the stakes of great power competition with the onset of the New Imperialism.3
