Creating the American Century
The Ideas and Legacies of America's Twentieth-Century Foreign Policy Founders

Late historian Martin J. Sklar's analysis of how modernizing worldwide development has been the focus of US foreign policy.

Martin J. Sklar (Author), Nao Hauser (Prepared for publication by)

9781108409247, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 October 2017

270 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

'In this provocative book, the late Martin J. Sklar urges us to put aside the simplistic debates over unilateral versus multilateral, realist versus idealist, isolationist versus globalist, and to recover the more subtle understandings of the 'founders' of US foreign policy who emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Far from a nation with a short-term memory, America, in Sklar's telling, pursued a consistent policy that at first sought a dominant world position so as to bring about decolonization and, later, a world without a dominant hegemon. Creating the American Century will challenge students of American foreign policy and those who wish to understand the US's role in the world today.' John Yoo, University of California, Berkeley

In his last work before his death in 2014, American historian Martin J. Sklar analyzes the influence of early twentieth-century foreign policy makers, focusing on modernization, global development, and the meaning of the 'American Century'. Calling this group of government officials and their advisors, including business leaders and economists, the 'founders of US foreign policy', Sklar examines their perspective on America's role in shaping human progress from cycles of empires to transnational post-imperialism. Sklar traces how this thinking both anticipated and generated the course of history from the Spanish-American War to World War II, through the Cold War and its outcome, and to post-9/11 global conflicts. The 'founders' legacy is interpreted in Wilson's Fourteen Points, Henry Luce's 1941 'American Century' Life editorial, and foreign policy formulation to the present. Showing how modernization has evolved, Sklar discusses capitalism and socialism in relation to modern democracy in the US and to emergent globalizing forces.

Preface
Part I. Origins: 1. The Philippines, China, and US global objects (the conant factor)
2. A panel at the AEA
Part II. THE FOUNDERS' AMERICAN CENTURY: THE TALE ONCE-Told: 3. World history: evolving cycles of empires
4. US history: in the evolving cycle
5. 20th-Century world politics and the US role: moving beyond the cycle to universal evolution
Part III. HISTORY'S AMERICAN CENTURY: THE TALE TWICE-Told: 6. 1898 to 1941: American century-birth and awkward youth
7. World War and Cold War: American century – young adulthood
8. Post-Cold War and 9/11: American century arrived
9. American century fulfilled and revoked, or nullified: from empires to a universal humanity? Or, cycles forever?
Part IV. Bringing History Back In: 10. History in the US, the US in history.

Subject Areas: Diplomacy [JPSD], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]