Introduction

Americans lived in dangerous times, he declared. The danger was not communism; the danger was America’s failure to reform. James Baldwin proclaimed a domestic message, but he fastened it to United States (US) foreign relations. The study of US foreign relations uncovers the breadth and contradictions of American history mentioned by Baldwin. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement exposes the difficulty of finding coherence in US foreign policy and relations. US involvement in the Paris accord has advanced in fits and starts due to the vagaries of domestic politics. The centuries-long history of US foreign relations exponentiates those promises and difficulties. The pre-World War I period is more than an interesting backstory leading to the main event when the United States assumed its role as a global power after World War II.