Grover Cleveland's New Foreign Policy
by Nick Cleaver /
2013 / English / PDF
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The Spanish-American War has long been viewed as a turning point in the history of American foreign relations, the moment when the United States, led by William McKinley, finally shook off its post-revolutionary isolationist principles and embarked on a new course of foreign engagement and colonial expansionism. Comparatively overlooked has been the fact that the same factors that drove the US to war in 1898 - industrial growth, commercial expansion, and increased public t in the wider world - had already powerfully influenced foreign policy in the years before the outbreak of war. As Nick Cleaver shows in this illuminating political and diplomatic history, McKinley's predecessor in the White House, Grover Cleveland, spent four years pursuing a different approach to foreign policy that acknowledged the changes taking place in American society at the end of the nineteenth century, even as it sought to harness them in very different ways.
