Book contents
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume IV
- General Introduction: What is America and the World?
- Introduction to Volume IV
- Part I Ordering a World of States
- 1 Global Capitalist Infrastructure and US Power
- 2 Overseas Bases and the Expansion of US Military Presence
- 3 The Consolidation of the Nuclear Age
- 4 American Knowledge of the World
- 5 The American Construction of the Communist Threat
- 6 The Fractured World of the Cold War
- 7 The US and the United Nations System
- 8 American Development Aid, Decolonization, and the Cold War
- 9 Decolonization and US Intervention in Asia
- Part II Challenging a World of States
- Part III New World Disorder?
- Index
2 - Overseas Bases and the Expansion of US Military Presence
from Part I - Ordering a World of States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2021
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- The Cambridge History of America and the World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume IV
- General Introduction: What is America and the World?
- Introduction to Volume IV
- Part I Ordering a World of States
- 1 Global Capitalist Infrastructure and US Power
- 2 Overseas Bases and the Expansion of US Military Presence
- 3 The Consolidation of the Nuclear Age
- 4 American Knowledge of the World
- 5 The American Construction of the Communist Threat
- 6 The Fractured World of the Cold War
- 7 The US and the United Nations System
- 8 American Development Aid, Decolonization, and the Cold War
- 9 Decolonization and US Intervention in Asia
- Part II Challenging a World of States
- Part III New World Disorder?
- Index
Summary
On August 9, 1945, President Harry S. Truman alerted the country to a change in US relations with the rest of the world. That night, in his radio address, Truman began not with recent negotiations at Potsdam or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with his plans to secure postwar overseas military bases. Truman had just returned from Berlin where the devastation of war was everywhere apparent. “It is a ghost city,” he informed his audience. To spare Americans such a fate, and to protect the world from “the ravages of any future breach of the peace,” Truman continued, the United States had to “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.”
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- The Cambridge History of America and the World , pp. 55 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022