US Foreign Relations Under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover: Power and Constraint

In the aftermath of World War II, scholarly studies of interwar US foreign relations described an era of isolationism and insularity, a time when the United States failed to rise to its emerging global responsibilities. If this view still retains a degree of purchase in the public mind, half a century later contemporary historians can draw upon several generations of detailed research to offer a more nuanced synthesis of events. Unilateralism, anti-interventionism, and the pursuit of peace were influential forces in American life, but they competed and interacted with a variety of other internationalist, expansionist and transnational tendencies. US foreign relations in the 1920s were shaped by both the tremendous cultural, economic, and political power accrued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the constraints of domestic politics and a comparatively weak apparatus for overseas power projection. Republican leaders focused on various forms of indirect politics to promote their interests overseas. Relying on bankers, businessmen, and other private groups, they enjoyed no small success, enlarging the global economic and cultural influence of the United States even as other Americans sought to challenge these developments through activism and transnational affiliations of their own. Nevertheless, despite this increasingly complex picture of US interwar engagement with the world, in at least one respect the traditionalists were right: absent any sustained politico-military commitment to restrain rival Great Power aggression, the United States was unable to respond to the crises of the early Depression years, and this failure ultimately set the scene for the larger catastrophes of the decade to come