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World War I constituted a milestone in the development of the United States as a world power. As the European powers exhausted themselves during the conflict, the U.S. government deployed its growing economic leverage, its military might, and its diplomacy to shape the outcome of the war and to influence the future of international relations. In The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-1924 , Robert E. Hannigan challenges the conventional belief that the United States entered World War I only because its hand was forced, and he disputes the claim that Washington was subsequently driven by a desire to make the world «safe for democracy.» Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric emphasized peace, self-determination, and international cooperation. But his foreign policy, Hannigan claims, is better understood if analyzed against the backdrop of American policy—not only toward Europe, but also toward East Asia and the rest of the western hemisphere—as it had been developing since the turn of the twentieth century. On the broadest level, Wilson sought to shore up and stabilize an international order promoted and presided over by London since the early 1800s, this in the conviction that under such conditions the United States would inevitably ascend to a global position comparable to, if not eclipsing, that of Great Britain. Hannigan argues, moreover, that these fundamental objectives continued to guide Wilson's Republican successors in their efforts to stabilize the postwar world. The book reexamines the years when the United States was ostensibly neutral (1914-17), the subsequent period of American military involvement (1917-18), the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the ensuing battle for ratification of the Treaty of Versailles (in 1919-20), and the activities of Wilson's successors—culminating with the Dawes Plan of 1924.

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From the era of the Spanish American war onward, the United States found itself increasingly involved in the affairs of countries beyond North America. The New World Power offers an interpretive framework for understanding U.S. foreign policy during the first two decades of America's emergence as a world power. Robert E. Hannigan describes the aspirations of American leaders, explores the bedrock social views and ideological framework they held in common, and shows how the approach of U.S. policymakers overseas mirrored their attitudes toward domestic progressivism. While the vast bulk of work on U.S. foreign policy has been concerned with the period from World War II to the present, this comprehensive examination of American policy at the turn of the twentieth century is of vital importance to the comprehension of subsequent events. Hannigan relates U.S. foreign policy to domestic society in ways that are new; in particular, he examines how issues of class, race, and gender were combined in the ideology held by policy makers and how this shaped their approaches to foreign affairs. His study reveals a fundamental unity to U.S. activity throughout the period, not only toward the Caribbean and China, regions that have been the traditional focus of historians, but toward the rest of North and South America as well. It also relates these regional activities to American policy toward the British Empire, European great power rivalries, and international institutions, arbitration, and law, culminating in a reinterpretation of U.S. involvement in World War I. Based on exhaustive research in the writings of presidents, secretaries of state, and key diplomats and advisers, The New World Power draws parallels between the methods by which policy makers sought to shape international society and the methods by which many of them hoped to secure the conditions they wanted within the United States. Most important, the book describes how an international search for order constituted the fundamental strategy by which American leaders sought to ensure for the United States a position of what they saw as wealth and greatness in the coming twentieth-century world.

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