What Was The Role Of American Foreign Policy In The 18th Century

From the very beginning, the United States has always striven to hold a predominant position in the Western Hemisphere and as Alfred Vagts (Morgenthau, Thompson, 1950:178-209) stated that it has been "the guiding principle of American foreign policy". The early American leaders soon came to know that since any American nation or nations was not strong enough to challenge the United States, it could keep its supremacy as long as the Western Hemisphere was successfully isolated from non-American nations. (Morgenthau, 1967:56). A danger to the Unites States could only come from outside the Western Hemisphere, that is, traditionally from Europe. So the United States had always tried to deter the growth of circumstances in Europe which would have very likely encouraged European nations to interfere in American affairs. Such circumstances would come to being if the "balance of power had been broken in Europe". It is for this reason that the United States has consistently pursued policies aiming at the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. (Morgenthau, 1950: 834-5). For example, the United States intervened in the Second World War as well

Stalin's domestic policy was driven by his intense suspicions of the West. There were several reasons for this: the long time it took for the Allies to open the second front in Normandy, American possession and use of the atomic bomb at the end of the war, and the deep ideological differences between communism and capitalism. For these reasons, he decided to establish a buffer zone in Eastern Europe to forestall any future aggression. As a result, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, fell under Soviet domination with Soviet troops occupying their territories. Only Yugoslavia escaped Soviet occupation and kept some measure of independence. For the rest of Eastern Europe, in Churchill's words, an "iron curtain" had