Unit 2 Foreign Policy through the Great War

Unit 2 Foreign Policy through the Great War

Vocabulary Flashcards

Imperialism

• The policy, or practice of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas.

• EXAMPLE: The US claiming territory or influence over no fewer than five islands outside its territorial boundaries (Cuba, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines).

 "Ten Thousand Miles from Tip to Tip"

• 1898 political cartoon: "Ten Thousand Miles From Tip to Tip" meaning the extension of U.S. domination (symbolized by a bald eagle) from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. The cartoon contrasts this with a map of the smaller United States 100 years earlier in 1798

Annex

• to incorporate territory into the domain of a city, country, or state:

  Germany annexed part of Czechoslovakia.

Nationalism

1: Nationalism is the belief that your own country is better than all others. Sometimes nationalism makes people not want to work with other countries to solve shared problems.

2: Nationalism is a political ideology where individuals identify with a particular national identity. In Europe, various groups identified themselves as being part of a particular national entity, each trying to prove their dominance over the other. Nationalism increased the desire for major economic powers to establish themselves as economic and military powers within Europe. 

Banana Republics

1: a small, poor country, often reliant on a single export or limited resource, governed by an authoritarian regime and characterized by corruption and economic exploitation by foreign corporations conspiring with local government officials.

2: any exploitative government that functions poorly for its citizenry while disproportionately benefiting a corrupt elite group or individual.

Spanish-American War

The Spanish-American War was the first significant international military conflict for the United States since its war against Mexico in 1846; it came to represent a critical milestone in the country’s development as an empire.

 

The Spanish-American War was notable not only because the United States succeeded in seizing territory from another empire, but also because it caused the global community to recognize that the United States was a formidable military power.

Open Door Policy

Secretary of State John Hay first articulated the concept of the “Open Door” in China in a series of notes in 1899–1900. These Open Door Notes aimed to secure international agreement to the U.S. policy of promoting equal opportunity for international trade and commerce in China.

Boxer Rebellion

Boxer Rebellion, officially supported peasant uprising of 1900 that attempted to drive all foreigners from China. 

Righteous and Harmonious Fists

Figure 2. The Boxer Rebellion in China sought to expel all western influences, including Christian missionaries and trade partners. The Chinese government appreciated the American, British, and German troops that helped suppress the rebellion.

Roosevelt Corollary

The Roosevelt Corollary was a United States foreign policy established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. It stated that the U.S. would intervene in Latin American countries where European powers sought to collect debts or whose governments were thought to be unstable.

Dollar Diplomacy

Dollar diplomacy of the United States—particularly during President William Howard Taft's presidential term—was a form of American foreign policy to minimize the use or threat of military force and instead further its aims in Latin America and East Asia through the use of its money by guaranteeing loans made to foreign countries

Moral Diplomacy

Moral diplomacy is a form of diplomacy proposed by President Woodrow Wilson in his 1912 United States presidential election. Moral diplomacy is the system in which support is given only to countries whose beliefs are very similar to that of the nation.

Panama Canal

Following the failure of a French construction team in the 1880s, the United States commenced building a canal across a 50-mile stretch of the Panama isthmus in 1904. 

Jingoism

The term jingoism refers to a nation's aggressive foreign policy which has been propelled by public opinion. The word was coined in the 1870s, during an episode in Britain's perennial conflicts with the Russian Empire, when a popular music hall song urging military action contained the phrase, “by Jingo.”

Racism

1: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

 2: The systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

militarism

1. The belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests.

2.The 20th century saw a great increase in army training and equipping. Most of the countries in Europe sought to increase their military power and reserves by forced enlistment of young men into the army and the training of more soldiers. The countries developed new and more capable weapons, each competing to outdo one another. The arms race is linked to the emergence of the First World War. By the time of the war, the countries had gathered piles of weapons and other military resources, indicating that the countries were ready for a bigger war.

Central Powers

In World War I, Germany and Austria-Hungary, often with their allies Turkey and Bulgaria.

Allies

In World War I, the powers of the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, Russia), with the nations allied with them (Belgium, Serbia, Japan, Italy, etc., not including the United States), or, loosely, with all the nations (including the United States) allied or associated.

Stalemate

A situation in which no progress can be made or no advancement is possible. Trench Warfare. Fighting with trenches, mines, and barbed wire. Horrible living conditions, great slaughter, no gains, stalemate, used in WWI.

Trench warfare

A type of land warfare using occupied fighting lines largely comprising military trenches, in which troops are well-protected from the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery

Propaganda

Information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a  person, group, movement, institution, or nation. From the beginning of World War One, both sides of the conflict used propaganda to shape international opinion. 

During World War One, propaganda was employed on a global scale. Unlike previous wars, this was the first total war in which whole nations and not just professional armies were locked in mortal combat. This and subsequent modern wars required propaganda to mobilise hatred against the enemy; to convince the population of the justness of the cause; to enlist the active support and cooperation of neutral countries; and to strengthen the support of allies.

U-boat

U-boat, German U-boot, abbreviation of Unterseeboot, (“undersea boat”), a German submarine. The destruction of enemy shipping by German U-boats was a spectacular feature of both World Wars I and II.

By early 1915, in an effort to break the British naval blockade of Germany and turn the tide of the war, the Germans dispatched a fleet of these submarines around Great Britain to attack both merchant and military ships. The U-boats acted in direct violation of international law, attacking without warning from beneath the water instead of surfacing and permitting the surrender of civilians or crew. 

Sussex Pledge

In May 1916, the German government issued a pledge to the United States that the Imperial navy would not attack passenger ships and would further allow the crew of merchant ships which carried war material to exit their vessels before they would be sunk.

Zimmerman Note

In January 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico in return for joining the German cause. This message helped draw the United States into the war and thus changed the course of history. 

Bolshevik Revolution

The Russian Revolution took place in 1917 when the peasants and working class people of Russia revolted against the government of Tsar Nicholas II. They were led by Vladimir Lenin and a group of revolutionaries called the Bolsheviks. The new communist government created the country of the Soviet Union.

Selective Service Act

On May 18, 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which authorized the Federal Government to temporarily expand the military through forced enlistment. The act eventually required all men between the ages of 21 to 45 to register for military service.

Through a campaign of patriotic appeals, as well as an administrative system that allowed men to register at their local draft boards rather than directly with the federal government, over ten million men registered for the draft on the very first day. By the war’s end, twenty-two million men had registered for the U.S. Army draft. Five million of these men were actually drafted, another 1.5 million volunteered, and over 500,000 additional men signed up for the navy or marines. In all, two million men participated in combat operations overseas. Among the volunteers were also twenty thousand women, a quarter of whom went to France to serve as nurses or in clerical positions.

American Expeditionary Force

The American Expeditionary Forces was a formation of the United States Army on the Western Front of World War I. The AEF was established on July 5, 1917, in France under the command of Gen. John J. Pershing.

Convoy

Ships sailing under the protection of an armed escort.

Convoys were to serve a totally different purpose during World War I—the protection of British merchant shipping against German surface raiders and submarines. The German practice of proclaiming as war zones large areas of the high seas and waging unrestricted submarine war on belligerent and neutral commercial shipping left the British no alternative to the practice of consolidating merchant vessels into large, protected groups, or convoys. The advantage of using convoys was that defenseless merchant vessels no longer need traverse the high seas alone and unprotected, but could travel in groups large enough to justify the allocation of scarce destroyers and other patrol vessels to escort them across the Atlantic. 

Liberty Bonds

A Liberty bond was a war bond that was sold in the United States to support the Allied cause in World War I. Subscribing to the bonds became a symbol of patriotic duty in the United States and introduced the idea of financial securities to many citizens for the first time.

The government ultimately raised $23 billion through liberty bonds.

Rationing

Rationing is carefully controlling the amount of something that people use. Rationing during the war meant that people had a specific amount of food they could buy each week, and once an item was used up, they had to wait until they got a new ration book to buy more. Ration means "hand out in fixed amounts."

Price Controls

The first time price controls were enacted nationally was in 1906 as a part of the Hepburn Act. In World War I the War Industries Board was established to set priorities, fix prices, and standardize products to support the war efforts of the United States.

Daylight Saving Time

In America, daylight saving time first became official on March 19, 1918, when the Standard Time Act was signed into law. It allowed for additional daylight hours to be added into the day to help save energy costs during World War I.

The Fuel Administration, run by Harry Garfield, created the concept of “fuel holidays,” encouraging civilian Americans to do their part for the war effort by rationing fuel on certain days. Garfield also implemented “daylight saving time” for the first time in American history, shifting the clocks to allow more productive daylight hours.

Espionage Act

The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.

Under this act, the government could impose fines and imprisonment of up to twenty years. 

Sedition Act

The Sedition Act, passed in 1918, prohibited any criticism or disloyal language against the federal government and its policies, the U.S. Constitution, the military uniform, or the American flag . More than two thousand persons were charged with violating these laws, and many received prison sentences of up to twenty years. Immigrants faced deportation as punishment for their dissent. 

Woodrow Wilson

Was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Fourteen Points

The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations in order to end World War I. The principles were outlined in a January 8, 1918, speech on war aims and peace terms to the United States Congress by President Woodrow Wilson.

Self Determination

During World War I, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson promoted the concept of "self-determination," meaning that a nation—a group of people with similar political ambitions—can seek to create its own independent government or state.

In World War I the Allies accepted self-determination as a peace aim. In his Fourteen Points—the essential terms for peace—U.S. Pres.Woodrow Wilson listed self-determination as an important objective for the postwar world; the result was the fragmentation of the old Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Russia’s former Baltic territories into a number of new states.

League of Nations

The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Founded on 10 January 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War.

The League was composed of a General Assembly, which included delegations from all member states, a permanent secretariat that oversaw administrative functions, and an Executive Council, the membership of which was restricted to the great powers. The Council consisted of four permanent members (Great Britain, France, Japan, and Italy) and four non-permanent members.

Reparations

A fine on a defeated country forcing it to pay some of the war costs of the winning countries. Reparations were levied on the Central Powers after World War I to compensate the Allies for some of their war costs. They were meant to replace war debts and were a form of punishment. 

Great Britain and France in particular sought substantial monetary reparations, as well as territorial gains, at Germany’s expense. Japan also desired concessions in Asia, whereas Italy sought new territory in Europe. Finally, the threat posed by a Bolshevik Russia under Vladimir Lenin, and more importantly, the danger of revolutions elsewhere, further spurred on these allies to use the treaty negotiations to expand their territories and secure their strategic interests, rather than strive towards world peace.

Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles was the most important of the peace treaties that brought World War I to an end. The Treaty ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers.

Communism

Communism is an economic ideology that advocates for a classless society in which all property and wealth are communally-owned, instead of by individuals. A prominent example of communism is the Soviet Union.

Isolationism

Avoiding alliances and international intrigue as best it could.

After WW1, the USA returned to its policy of isolationism.