Foreign policy of the Republican administrations of the USA

Lecture №7

Foreign policy of the Republican administrations of the USA

(1920-1933)

Despite the growing popularity of isolationism, President Warren G. Harding and his Secretary of State Charles Hughes understood that the strengthened international authority of the United States opens up new opportunities for American diplomacy. In 1921-1922, representatives of nine powers gathered in Washington for a conference on naval armaments, the result of which was the completion of the formation of the post-war system of international relations (it is commonly called the Versailles-Washington system).

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Several agreements were signed: on the limitation of the naval arms race (it was the first time the US naval parity with the UK was officially recorded), on territorial demarcation in the Asia-Pacific region (the US, Great Britain, France and Japan agreed not to encroach on each other's island possessions), on respect for national sovereignty and respect for the principle of “open doors” in relations with China (the last treaty was directed mainly against Japan's claims).

After the Washington Conference, US foreign policy activity remained low for many years, and was mainly directed towards Latin America. Troops were deployed to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua to protect American business interests, and serious diplomatic pressure was exerted on other countries in the region.

In relations with Europe, the dominant theme remained the payment of war debts: Republican presidents, especially Coolidge, categorically refused to accept the arguments of the Europeans and write off these debts as military expenditures. In 1924 , the Dawes Plan was developed as a compromise measure: The United States agreed to issue new loans to Germany, which of these loans had to pay reparations to France and Great Britain, and they, in turn, gradually repay the debt to the United States.

Perhaps this scheme would have helped war-torn Europe to get out of the financial impasse, but the general course of economic policy of the republican administrations of the United States contributed little to this: the government imposed ever higher import duties, and the booming American economy absorbed the lion's share of free private capital, which under other circumstances could have been invested in European projects.

In the early 1930s, the Great Depression completely destroyed the chances of settling transatlantic financial disputes, all European debtors of the United States, except Finland, defaulted. For most Americans at that time, this was evidence of the correctness of the course of isolationism: it seemed to them that it was the rejection of it during the First World War that led to all these unpleasant consequences in relations with the outside world.

In addition to economic problems, the Great Depression brought with it serious foreign policy challenges. In September 1931, in violation of all existing agreements, Japan occupied Chinese Manchuria. One of the factors that prompted her to do this was the sharp decline in international demand for silk, the main Japanese export product, during the crisis. The Japanese government, in which the military was gaining more and more weight, considered external military expansion necessary not only to raise the national spirit, but also to solve economic problems (Manchuria was a rich province with large reserves of minerals).

The United States tried to assemble an international coalition to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Japan, and when these attempts ended in failure, it unilaterally proclaimed the so–called “Stimson doctrine” (named after the Secretary of State in the Hoover administration, Henry Stimson). In accordance with this doctrine, the United States refused to recognize any changes to state borders made with the use of force and contrary to the norms of international law. Of course, Japan was not impressed by such a “toothless” doctrine, especially since the economic development of Manchuria, coupled with the accelerated militarization of its own industry, allowed it to quickly get rid of the negative impact of the American Great Depression.

American Society in the 1920s

In the decade since the end of World War I, American society has changed beyond recognition (at least, its urban part). According to the 1920 census, the urban population of the United States for the first time in history was higher than the number of rural residents. American cities were transformed not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively. Cars were rapidly displacing horse-drawn vehicles from the streets. The central districts were actively built up with skyscrapers. Constantly cheaper electricity illuminated the streets more and more brightly, turning night into day, changing the daily rhythms of work and rest.

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The growth of family incomes allowed an increasing number of young people to devote time to study and entertainment, collective pastime. The youth turned into a serious social force, began to actively fight for a “place in the sun”, to rebel against “archaic” social foundations. None of the politicians of the past, neither the workers' nor the farmers' movement, nor the populists or progressives could do what the American youth did in the 1920s: they created a new mass culture.

Of course, not only young people were interested in jazz, cinema, dancing, new professional sports at that time, not only they wrote and read books, came up with new styles of clothing — but it was to the generation of 20-30-year-old American citizens of the 1920s that we owe the emergence of most of the new cultural phenomena, which then spread throughout to the world.

America's entry into the era of mass consumption took place against the background of the revival of isolationism and political conservatism in the country. These multidirectional vectors of social development created in the 1920s a unique environment, beautifully described in the great novels of F. Fitzgerald, T. Dreiser, S. Lewis, W. Faulkner, E. Hemingway and other classics of American literature.

An integral element of the “roaring twenties” was the Negro culture — hundreds of thousands of blacks migrated to the North during the First World War and brought with them a powerful cultural enzyme that blossomed in the form of new jazz, literature, theater and other manifestations of the so-called “Harlem Renaissance".

At the same time, the “old”, conservative America still firmly held the threads of political control and tried to isolate itself from the outside world with the help of immigration bans, to stop the “decline of morals” with the help of a new emphasis on religious education. However, the famous “monkey trial” of 1925-1926, directed against the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools, although it ended in a formal victory for fundamentalists, only led to further discrediting of the conservative religious worldview.