Conclusion

As the Second World War drew to a close, the Western Hemisphere was firmly under the hegemony of the United States. In fact, notwithstanding the ‘rebellious’ attitude of some countries (e.g.

While this may have been the case, 1945 did signify the dawn of a new age in the Western Hemisphere. As the debates over regionalism and universalism showed, the United States was undergoing a fundamental change in its position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. This had important consequences for the structure and meaning of the US-dominated inter-American system. If at the end of the First World War the Monroe Doctrine had been one of the tools that Woodrow Wilson’s opponents had used to defeat his aim of taking the United States into the League of Nations, at the end of the Second World War the Monroe Doctrine and the regionalism it represented were under serious threat of becoming a relic.

In the midst of the debates over internationalism and regionalism — the UN versus the Monroe Doctrine — one aspect of inter-American relations was strangely absent: Latin American nationalism. Perhaps it was from force of habit, perhaps because Allied victory in the Second World War had seemingly dealt a death-blow to ultra-nationalism of the German, Italian and Japanese variety, but American planners seemed to have little time for considering the possibility that, say, Cuban, Guatemalan, Chilean or Argentinean nationalism could possibly emerge as a significant obstacle to its continued domination over the Western Hemisphere. But, as future events would show, it was just such nationalism, coupled with deep- rooted anti-Americanism, which was to forge the most significant changes in the Western Hemisphere and pose the toughest challenges yet to the colossus of the north after 1945.

Recommended reading

The best general work on American foreign policy during the twentieth century is Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Policy: A History since 1900 (New York, 1999). For an even more general survey, see Walter LaFeber, The American Age (New York, 1989). For a general study on the early twentieth century, see Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York, 1982). One of the most insightful studies of inter-war American foreign policy is Warren I. Cohen, Empire without Tears (New York, 1987).

The best general overview of the Western Hemisphere is Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York, 2002). For general works on the United States and Latin America, see Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of US—Latin American Relations (New York, 2000), John H.

Works on the Spanish-American War and the rise of the American empire include David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York, 1981), David Healy, US Expansionism (Madison, WI, 1970), Walter LaFeber, The New Empire (Ithaca, NY, 1969), Ernest R. May, The Imperial Democracy (New York, 1961), Goran Rystad, Ambiguous Imperialism (Stockholm, 1982) and Robert L. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New (Arlington Heights, IL, 1986).

The classic account of Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy is Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise ofAmerica to World Power (Baltimore, MD, 1956); for different interpretations see Richard Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion (Baton Rouge, LA, 1985), Thomas Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980) and William H. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York, 1999). Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are contrasted in John M. Cooper’s The Warrior and the Priest (Cambridge, MA, 1983), while Wilson himself is analysed in Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson, Revolution, War, and Peace (Arlington Heights, IL, 1979), Lloyd Gardner, Safe for Democracy (New York, 1984) and Fredrick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, OH, 1986). The Wilson administration's intervention in Mexico is detailed in Mark T.

Gunboat diplomacy and the ‘Good Neighbor' Policy in the Caribbean are detailed in Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy (Baltimore, MD, 1979), William Kamman, A Search for Stability: United States Diplomacy toward Nicaragua (Notre Dame, IN, 1968), Michael Grow, The Good Neighbor Policy in Paraguay (Lawrence, KS, 1981), Stephen J. Randall, The Diplomacy of Modernization: Colombian-American Relations, 1920—1940 (Toronto, 1977), Dana G. Munro, The United States and the Caribbean Republics, 1921—1933 (Princeton, NJ, 1974), G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, The United States and the Trujillo Regime (New Brunswick, NJ, 1972) and Randall B. Woods, The Roosevelt Foreign Policy Establishment and the ‘Good Neighbor’ (Lawrence, KS, 1980).

Franklin Roosevelt and the Second World War are the subject of numerous accounts of which the most detailed are Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932—1945 (New York, 1979), Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore, MD, 1969) and Warren Kimball, The Juggler (Princeton, NJ, 1992). For the role of Latin American countries in the Second World War and American policy, see Michael J. Francis, The Limits of Hegemony (Notre Dame, IN, 1977), Frank D. McCann, The Brazilian-American Alliance (Princeton, NJ, 1973) and Stanley Hilton, Hitler’s Secret War in South America, 1939—1945 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981).