Sublime

In the post-war period, much of the non-communist world was opened up to US domination by tactics of this sort. This became the method of choice to fight off the threat of communist insurgencies and revolution, entailing an anti-democratic (and even more emphatically anti-populist and anti-socialist/communist) strategy on the part of the US that pu

These included la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission) in French colonialism and Manifest Destiny in North America—concepts central to knowledge production and political organization from before the Enlightenment right through the Modern period.

The American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tried to navigate a middle course of doing enough to keep Great Britain in the war and Germany from prevailing but not so much that he would encounter massive resistance from isolationists at home, who argued the country could and should resist involvement in Europe’s conflicts. Meanwhile, the Unit

The United States entered the war on the British side in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson declared that the principle of self-determination should govern any postwar reorganization of territories that were formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

The Truman Doctrine articulated a willingness to provide economic and military aid to Western European countries under pressure; Greece and Turkey were early recipients. The Marshall Plan, named for President Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall and announced at Harvard in June 1947, in what is arguably the most significant commencement spee

Today, the idea that the United States might have annexed France or claimed Europe’s Asian colonies in 1945 seems like an absurd counterfactual. But it wasn’t unthinkable. That was, in fact, precisely what Germany and Japan had just done. And it wasn’t too different from what the United States had itself done, repeatedly, to formerly Spanish lands

What won the war, for the Americans, was a Machiavellian insight: that a constitutional monarchy’s humiliation of an absolute monarchy could cause the latter, years later, to rescue a republican revolutionary upstart. Still bitter over France’s loss of North America to the British in 1763, Louis XVI welcomed rebel emissaries to Paris in 1776. The A