Sense of Power

John A. Thompson is Emeritus Reader in American History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War and Woodrow Wilson: A Profile in Power.

• Introduction: The ProblemPower as an ExplanationSecurity as an ExplanationEconomic Interests as an ExplanationMissionary Ideology as an ExplanationSeeking an AnswerChapter 1. A New Sense of PowerThe Expansion of Foreign PolicyThe Limits of ExpansionExplaining the LimitationsThe Sense of PowerChapter 2. Advance and Retreat, 1914–1920The European War and American OpinionWilson's Initial PolicyThe Impact of the U-BoatIncreasing Involvement and CommitmentsGoing to WarFighting the War and Preparing for PeaceThe Limits of Power: The Paris Peace ConferenceThe Failure to Join the League of NationsChapter 3. A Restrained Superpower, 1920–1938The Character of U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1920sThe Apogee of IsolationismChapter 4. Lessening Restraint, 1938–1941The Erosion of NeutralityThe Impact of the Fall of FranceExplaining the Move toward InvolvementChapter 5. Full-Scale Involvement, 1941–1945Wielding Global PowerThe Discrediting of "Isolationism"What Kind of Internationalism?Chapter 6. Assuming "the Responsibilities of Power," 1945–1952The Commitment to Western EuropeDoing More with MoreConclusionNotesIndex

A Sense of Power is a deft, literary, and persuasive analysis of America's twentieth-century evolution from the world's largest neutral nation to its most interventionist. Coming from a British observer and a historian of the Progressive Era who brings a fresh eye to foreign policy, it is more piquant and original than the title suggests.- Elizabeth Cobbs (Passport) As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly based on domestic growth and consumption. The chief motive behind America's entry into the war, Thompson argues persuasively, was that its leaders realised that it would cost them relatively little to bend the world in the political direction they wanted.- Thomas Meaney (London Review of Books) For readers unacquainted with the history of American foreign policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Thompson's work will serve as a deeply informative introduction, one that successfully walks the fine line between dry academic reportage and trivia-based 'popular' history.... As a historian rather than a political scientist, Thompson is perhaps ideologically predisposed towards demonstrating the complexity of the world through the lens of individual events rather than concerned with objective, generalizable relationships between larger, transhistorical variables. Were this to be Thompson's true, unstated goal, then the value of his historical explanation would only increase, even as the value of his theoretical edifice would recede even further.- Alexander Kirss (The National Interest) Thompson has written a provocative, thoughtful overview of U.S. foreign policy from the 1890s to the 1950s. In a non-polemical manner, Thompson vividly outlines many shortcomings in the realist and revisionist critiques of American foreign policy. He cogently and skillfully reviews the literature, raises the level of debate, and offers a wise and thoughtful analysis of his own.- Melvyn P. Leffler (H-Diplo) This argument—based as it is on shared understandings and social relations among the American and trans-Atlantic elite—is far more specific and persuasive than the vague "consciousness" or "a sense of power" animating American actions to which Thompson alludes repeatedly throughout the work. Yet even this claim, central to his thesis, is weakly identfied.(International Studies Review)