by Tim Marshall
But to achieve this rare geographical position of near invulnerability from conventional attack, first the space had to be acquired and unified, which, considering the continent is 3,000 miles from coast to coast, was achieved astonishingly quickly.
When the Europeans first began to land and stay in the early seventeenth century, they quickly realised that the east coast of this ‘virgin’ territory was packed with natural harbours and fertile soil. Here was a place where they could live and, unlike their home countries, a place where they hoped they could live freely. Their descendants would go on to deny the native inhabitants their freedom, but that was not the intention of the first settlers. Geography pulled them across the Atlantic in ever greater numbers.
The last of the original thirteen colonies to be established was Georgia in 1732. The thirteen became increasingly independently minded all the way up to the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). At the beginning of this period the colonies, which gradually began to connect to each other, stretched 1,000 miles from Massachusetts in the north, down to Georgia, and had an estimated combined population of about 2.5 million people. They were bounded by the Atlantic to their east, and the Appalachian Mountains to their west. The Appalachians, 1,500 miles long, are impressive, but compared to the Rockies, not particularly high. Nevertheless, they still formed a formidable barrier to westward movement for the early settlers, who were busy consolidating what territory they had subdued and preparing to govern it themselves. The colonists had another barrier, this one political. The British government forbade settlement west of the Appalachians as it wanted to ensure that trade, and taxes, remained on the Eastern seaboard.
The Declaration of Independence (1776) states: ‘When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’ It goes on to outline at some length those causes, and to state (with no hint of slave-owning irony) that it was self-evident that all men were created equal. These noble sentiments helped to fuel the victory in the War of Independence, which in turn gave birth to a new nation state.
In the early 1800s this new country’s leadership still had little idea that it was thousands of miles from the ‘South Sea’ or Pacific. Using Indian trails, a few explorers, for whom the word intrepid could have been coined, had pushed through the Appalachians and reached the Mississippi. There they thought they might find a waterway leading to the ocean and thus joining up with the vast tracts of lands the Spanish had explored across the south-western and Pacific coastal regions, including what are now Texas and California.
At this point the fledgling USA was far from secure, and if it had been restricted to its then boundaries, would have struggled to become a great power. Its citizens already had access to the Ohio River, just west of the Appalachians, but that led to the Mississippi, whose western bank was controlled by the French all the way down to the city of New Orleans. This gave the French command of American trade heading out to the Old World from the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the vast territory to the west in what is now the American heartland. In 1802, a year after Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency, he wrote: ‘There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.’
So France was the possessor and the problem; but the solution, unusually, was not warfare.
In 1803 the United States simply bought control of the entire Louisiana Territory from France. The land stretched from the Gulf of Mexico north-west up to the headwaters of the tributaries of the Mississippi River in the Rocky Mountains. It was an area equivalent in size to modern-day Spain, Italy, France, the UK and Germany combined. With it came the Mississippi basin, from which flowed America’s route to greatness.
At the stroke of a pen, and the handing over of $15 million, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the size of the USA and gave it mastery over the greatest inland water transport route in the world. As the American historian Henry Adams wrote, ‘Never did the United States get so much for so little.’
The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else are there so many rivers whose source is not in high land, and whose waters run smoothly all the way to the ocean across vast distances. The Mississippi, fed by much of the basin river system, begins near Minneapolis and ends 1,800 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. So the rivers were the natural conduit for ever-increasing trade, leading to a great port and all using waterborne craft which was, and is, many times cheaper than road travel.
The Americans now had strategic geographical depth, a massive fertile land and an alternative to the Atlantic ports with which to conduct business. They also had ever-expanding routes east to west linking the East Coast to the new territory, and then the river systems flowing north to south to connect the then sparsely populated lands with each other, thus encouraging America to form as a single entity.
There was now a sense that the nation would become a colossus, a continental power. They pushed onwards, ever westwards, but with an eye on the south and the security of the jewel in the crown – the Mississippi.
By 1814 the British had gone, and the French had given up on Louisiana. The trick now was to get the Spanish to go. It wasn’t too difficult. The Spanish were exhausted by the war in Europe against Napoleon; the Americans were pushing the Seminole Indian nation into Spanish Florida, and Madrid knew that waves of settlers would be following. In 1819 the Spanish ceded Florida to the USA and with it a massive amount of territory.
The Louisiana Purchase had given the USA the heartland, but the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819 gave them something almost as valuable. The Spanish accepted that the USA would have jurisdiction in the far west above the 42nd parallel, on what is now the border of California and Oregon, while Spain would control what lay below, west of the American territories. The USA had reached the Pacific.
At the time most Americans thought the great victory of 1819 was getting Florida, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: ‘The acquisition of a definite line of boundary to the [Pacific] forms a great epoch in our history.’
But there was another Spanish-speaking problem – Mexico.
Because the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the USA, when Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 its border was just 200 miles from the port of New Orleans. In the twenty-first century Mexico poses no territorial threat to the USA, although its proximity causes America problems, as it feeds its northern neighbour’s appetite for illegal labour and drugs.
In 1821 that was different. Mexico controlled land all the way up to northern California, which the USA could live with, but it also stretched out east, including what is now Texas which, then as now, borders Louisiana. Mexico’s population at the time was 6.2 million, the USA’s 9.6 million. The US army may have been able to see off the mighty British, but they had been fighting 3,000 miles from home with supply lines across an ocean. The Mexicans were next door.
Quietly, Washington encouraged Americans and new arrivals to begin to settle on both sides of the US–Mexican border. Waves of immigrants came and spread west and south-west. There was little chance of them putting down roots in the region we now know as modern Mexico, thus assimilating, and boosting the population numbers there. Mexico is not blessed in the American way. It has poor-quality agricultural land, no river system to use for transport, and was wholly undemocratic, with new arrivals having little chance of ever being granted land.
While the infiltration of Texas was going on, Washington issued the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ (named after President James Monroe) in 1823. This boiled down to warning the European powers that they could no longer seek land in the Western Hemisphere, and that if they lost a
ny parts of their existing territory they could not reclaim them. Or else.
By the mid-1830s there were enough white settlers in Texas to force the Mexican issue. The Mexican, Catholic, Spanish-speaking population numbered in the low thousands, but there were about 20,000 white Protestant settlers. The Texas Revolution of 1835–6 drove the Mexicans out, but it was a close-run thing, and had the settlers lost then the Mexican army would have been in a position to march on New Orleans and control the southern end of the Mississippi. It is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of modern history.
However, history turned the other way and Texas became independent via American money, arms and ideas. The territory went on to join the Union in 1845 and together they fought the 1846–8 Mexican War, in which they crushed their southern neighbour, which was required to accept that Mexico ended in the sands of the southern bank of the Rio Grande.
With California, New Mexico and land which is now Arizona, Nevada, Utah and part of Colorado included, the borders of continental USA then looked similar to those of today, and they are in many ways natural borders. In the south, the Rio Grande runs through desert; to the north are great lakes and rocky land with few people close to the border, especially in the eastern half of the continent; and to the east and west – the great oceans. However, in the twenty-first century, in the south-west the cultural historical memory of the region as Hispanic land is likely to resurface, as the demographics are changing rapidly and Hispanics will be the majority population within a few decades.
But back to 1848. The Europeans had gone, the Mississippi basin was secure from land attack, the Pacific was reached and it was obvious that the remaining Indian nations would be subdued: there was no threat to the USA. It was time to make some money, and then venture out across the seas to secure the approaches to the three coastlines of the superpower-to-be.
The California Gold Rush of 1848–9 helped, but the immigrants were heading west anyway. After all, there was a continental empire to build, and as it developed, more immigrants followed. The Homestead Act of 1862 awarded 160 acres of federally owned land to anyone who farmed it for five years and paid a small fee. If you were a poor man from Germany, Scandinavia, or Italy, why go to Latin America and be a serf, when you could go to the USA and be a free land-owning man?
In 1867 Alaska was bought from Russia. At the time it was known as ‘Seward’s folly’ after the Secretary of State, William Seward, who agreed the deal. He paid $7.2 million, or 2 cents an acre. The press accused him of purchasing snow, but minds were changed with the discovery of major gold deposits in 1896. Decades later huge reserves of oil were also found.
Two years on, in 1869, came the opening of the transcontinental railroad. Now you could cross the country in a week, whereas it had previously taken several hazardous months.
As the country grew, and grew wealthy, it began to develop a Blue Water navy. For most of the nineteenth century foreign policy was dominated by expanding trade and avoiding entanglements outside the neighbourhood, but it was time to push out and protect the approaches to the coastlines. The only real threat was from Spain – it may have been persuaded to leave the mainland but it still controlled the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico and part of what is now the Dominican Republic.
Cuba in particular kept American presidents awake at night, as it would again in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The island sits just off Florida, giving it access to and potential control of the Florida Straits and the Yucatan Channel in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exit and entry route for the port of New Orleans.
Spain’s power may have been diminishing towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it was still a formidable military force. In 1898 the USA declared war on Spain, routed its military and gained control of Cuba, with Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines thrown in for good measure. They would all come in useful, but Guam in particular is a vital strategic asset and Cuba a strategic threat if controlled by a major power.
In 1898 that threat was removed by war with Spain. In 1962 it was removed by the threat of war with the Soviet Union after they blinked first. Today no great power sponsors Cuba and it appears destined to come under the cultural, and probably political, influence of the USA again.
America was moving quickly. In the same year it secured Cuba, the Florida Straits and to a great extent the Caribbean, it also annexed the Pacific island of Hawaii, thus protecting the approaches to its own west coast. In 1903 America signed a treaty leasing it exclusive rights to the Panama Canal. Trade was booming.
The time was right for the USA to show it had more than arrived on the world stage, and what better way to demonstrate that than a show of force circumnavigating the globe.
President Theodore Roosevelt was speaking relatively softly – but in essence he sailed a large stick around the world. Sixteen navy battleships from the Atlantic force set out from the USA in December 1907. Their hulls were painted white, the Navy’s peacetime colour, and this impressive example of diplomatic signalling became known as ‘the Great White Fleet’. Over the following fourteen months the fleet called in on twenty ports, including ones in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Italy and Egypt. Of these the most important was Japan, which was put on notice that, in extremis, America’s Atlantic fleet could be deployed to the Pacific. The voyage, a mixture of hard and soft power, preceded the military term ‘force projection’ but that is what it was, and it was duly noted by every major power in the world.
Most subsequent presidents bore in mind George Washington’s advice in his farewell address in 1796 not to get involved in ‘inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others’, and to ‘steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world’.
Apart from a late – albeit crucial – entry into the First World War, twentieth-century America did manage, mostly, to avoid entanglements and alliances until 1941.
The Second World War changed everything. The USA was attacked by an increasingly militaristic Japan after Washington imposed economic sanctions on Tokyo which would have brought the country to its knees. The Americans came out swinging. They projected their now vast power around the world, and in order to keep things that way, this time they didn’t go home.
As the world’s greatest economic and military post-war power, America now needed to control the world’s sea lanes, to keep the peace and get the goods to market.
They were the ‘last man standing’. The Europeans had exhausted themselves, and their economies, like their towns and cities, were in ruins. The Japanese were crushed, the Chinese devastated and at war with each other, the Russians weren’t even in the capitalist game.
A century earlier, the British had learnt they needed forward bases and coaling stations from which to project and protect their naval power. Now, with Britain in decline, the Americans looked lasciviously at the British assets and said, ‘Nice bases – we’ll have them.’
The price was right. In the autumn of 1940 the British had desperately needed more warships. The Americans had fifty spare and so, with what was called the ‘Destroyers for Bases Agreement’, the British swapped their ability to be a global power for help in remaining in the war. Almost every British naval base in the Western Hemisphere was handed over.
This was, and is still, for all countries, about concrete. Concrete in the building of ports, runways, hardened aircraft hangars, fuel depots, dry docks and Special Forces training areas. In the East, after the defeat of Japan, America seized the opportunity to build these all over the Pacific. Guam, halfway across, they already had; now they had bases right up to the Japanese island of Okinawa in the East China Sea.
The Americans also looked to the land. If they were going to pay to reconstruct Europe through the Marshall Plan of 1948–51, they had to ensure that the Soviet Union wouldn’t wreck the place and reach the Atlantic coast. The Doughboys didn’t go home. Instead they set up shop in Germany and faced down the Red Arm
y across the North European Plain.
In 1949 Washington led the formation of NATO and with it effectively assumed command of the Western world’s surviving military might. The civilian head of NATO might well be a Belgian one year, a Brit the next, but the military commander is always an American, and by far the greatest firepower within NATO is American.
No matter what the treaty says, NATO’s Supreme Commander ultimately answers to Washington. The UK and France would learn to their cost during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when they were compelled by American pressure to cease their occupation of the canal zone, losing most of their influence in the Middle East as a result, that a NATO country does not hold a strategic naval policy without first asking Washington.
With Iceland, Norway, Britain and Italy (all founding members of NATO) having granted the USA access and rights to their bases, it now dominated the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean as well as the Pacific. In 1951 it extended its domination there down to the south by forming an alliance with Australia and New Zealand, and also to the north following the Korean War of 1950–53.
There were now two maps of the United States: the familiar one stretching diagonally down from Seattle on the Pacific coast to the panhandle in the Sargasso Sea, and the one demonstrating America’s geopolitical power footprint. This latter map showed the bases, ports and runways – the real things you could mark on the page. But it was also a conceptual map, one which told you that in the event of situation A happening in region B, country C could be relied on to be a US ally and vice versa. If a major power wanted to play anywhere in the world, it knew that if the USA chose to, it could have dog in the fight. A superpower had arrived. In the 1960s the USA’s failure in Vietnam damaged its confidence, and made it more cautious about foreign entanglements. However, what was effectively a defeat did not substantially alter America’s global strategy.