Posted 14 November 2005

The original version of US Diplomacy Since 1900 was published in 1984, and it is a testimony to the quality of the book that it has now reached its fifth edition. Modern American diplomacy, Schulzinger argues, dates from the defeat of Spain in 1898, which in addition to leading to the acquisition of territories such as Cuba, enabled the United States to compete equally with the European powers in the race for international pre-eminence. Entry into the First World War in 1917 indicated that the United States had become a great power like all the others. President Wilson’s self-designated mission at the Versailles conference of 1919 to create a more moral international order left him a broken man and led to the more introspective American foreign policies of the 1920s and 1930s. Participation in the Second World War from 1941 and triumphant victory four years later finally saw the United States become the world’s foremost power, although the subsequent ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union necessitated abandoning the traditional approach of avoiding peacetime alliances. The debacle of Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s imbued the United States with a greater reluctance to take up arms to maintain the global balance of power, but the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 vindicated the broad thrust of American Cold War policies.

As the twentieth century drew to an end, however, US foreign policy lacked the clarity of purpose it had shown at the height of the East-West conflict, and the very complexity of American attempts to navigate the post-Cold War environment demonstrated the complexity of this new terrain. The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC led to a widespread view that a further transformation had been wrought in international affairs. In addressing issues such as these, Schulzinger pays due attention to historiographical debates, examines the making of US foreign policy, discusses public ideas about foreign relations, and places US foreign relations in the context of the growing interdependence and globalisation of international affairs. US Diplomacy Since 1900 is a lucid, accessible and compelling work, and remains the leading introduction to the history of American foreign policy for A-level, Access to HE and for undergraduate level study.

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