Changing Attitudes Timeline

Key change in attitude - Spanish-America War 1898

• Involvement - USS Maine

• Public slant - against empire building but thinking it is their divine right to showcase American power

• First imperialistic involvement with imperialistic outcomes

Key Change in Attitude - 1917

• Entry into the first world war

• involvement on the basis that their interests are threatened

  • Lusitania/Zimmerman telegram

Key change in attitude - 1918

• experience of the war and being involved - did not want to get involved in other countries’ conflicts

• focus back on economic power and isolationism

• diplomacy/world policing but not wanting to make allies or ties

Key change in attitude - 1941

• fastest attitude change

• mobilised rapidly

• USS Panay - 1937 - not a huge reaction compared to 1898 and 1915

• Pearl Harbour - turning point

Key change in attitude - 1945

• attitudes getting more negative towards Communism from 1944-45 over divisions over the capitulation of Germany

• drastic change - ideology becoming the new foreign policy focus

• using economic power to flex ideological power

• shift into the bipolar cold war

Key change in attitude - 1950-53

• Korean War - rearmament after demobilisation

• some of the biggest militaristic shifts in attitude which influences containment, later involvement

• less long term/drastic turning point

Key attitude change - 1963

• brinkmanship becoming an ideological fear

• realisations of the dangers of nuclear war

• less long term

Key change in attitude - 1972

• SALT treaties

• move into detente which, despite the breaking of it, influences the end of the cold war

Key change in attitude - 1964-73

• American interests becoming much more narrow eg. oil

• more humble involvement

• very difficult period economically

• end of the Vietnam War shifts the character of American involvement - more justification needed

• Increased covert operations instead of public ‘US boots on the ground’ ideas

Key change in attitude - 1979

• breaking from detente

• influences Reagan’s hard line

• makes the attitude towards USSR, space race, armaments more in line with the Truman Doctrine

Key change in attitude - 1983

• Korean airliner bringing down

• cynicism and worries about the end of the world

• Reagan realises that to pursue peace is more worthy

• Gorbachev 1985

Key change in attitude - 1989

• bringing down of the USSR

• fall of the Berlin Wall

• bipolar conflict back to unipolar conflict under Bush