Curated category
History of the foreign relations of the United States
- Restatement of Policy on GermanyIn 1946, American Occupation General Lucius D. Clay observed that Germans faced a stark choice between starvation and ideology.
- Reykjavík SummitThe Reykjavík Summit, held on the 11th and the 12th of October 1986, came within a single word of ending the nuclear age.
- Reagan DoctrinePresident James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 to establish a new boundary for American foreign policy. Theodore Roosevelt followed with his own…
- Truman DoctrineThe Truman Doctrine began with an eighteen-minute speech. On the 12th of March 1947, President Harry S. Truman stood before a joint session of Congress and…
- Evil Empire speechAnthony R. Dolan, Ronald Reagan's chief speechwriter in 1983, coined the phrase evil empire for the president to use. Dolan had included similar language in…
- Monroe DoctrineThe Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy position that has shaped the fate of nations across two continents for more than two centuries.
- American imperialismAmerican imperialism is the exercise of power by the United States outside its borders. In 1786, then-private citizen George Washington described his new…
- William H. SewardWilliam Henry Seward spent eight months traveling Europe and the Middle East in 1859, trying to project the calm of a statesman.
- Trent AffairIn the early 1840s, a boundary dispute between the United States and Great Britain over Oregon nearly sparked war. British leaders in London grew…
- ContrasIn July 1979, the FSLN took control of the capital Managua after weeks of heavy fighting. The president at the time, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, fled the…
- Tear down this wall!At 2:00 p.m. on the 12th of June 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, shielded from East Berlin by two panes of bulletproof…
- 1953 Iranian coup d'étatOn the 19th of August 1953, a tank fired a single shell into the home of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the elected prime minister of Iran.
- Domino theoryIn 1945, the Soviet Union brought most of the countries of eastern Europe and Central Europe into its influence as part of the post-World War II new…
- National Security ArchiveThe National Security Archive holds the distinction of being the largest repository of declassified U.S. government documents outside the federal government…