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U.S. History 1877-Present 7: U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1920s 115 Views


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Description:

Turns out the U.S. was kind of a player in the 1920s, and you know what happens to players? They end up pretty depressed.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

Thank you Some say that harding and coolidge where major

00:06

isolationist like they popped a blindfold on a pair of

00:09

noise canceling headphones on america just of the nation didn't

00:12

have to deal with all the annoying things going on

00:14

in the rest of the world and this is kind

00:16

of true After world war one americans were definitely sick

00:19

of conflict sick of europe and sick of the continual

00:22

turmoil and tensions between nations that people wanted to things

00:26

to never have to fight another foreign war and to

00:28

stay out of foreign entanglements all together in a lot

00:31

of ways harding coolidge delivered what the people ordered they

00:35

could have had second careers as pizza guys The thing

00:37

is though that just because american foreign policy was generally

00:41

isolationist that doesn't mean that the u s was totally

00:44

isolated Sure we didn't want to get wrangled in any

00:47

political alliances since those kind of alliances are what made

00:50

world war one so massive but still industry was booming

00:53

and booming industries need markets no sell their stuff too

00:57

even america's stuff hungry consumer population couldn't consume everything the

01:01

factories here we're making our industries needed to sell stuff

01:04

To foreigners or else risk the horrors of not expanding

01:07

their business But this is where the whole political isolationism

01:11

thing gets stickier than the floor of a cheap movie

01:13

theater Country can work hard to avoid creating political alliances

01:17

with other nations and then have it all fall apart

01:19

when trade agreements become necessary These kind of agreements come

01:23

with promises There are promises about the volume of goods

01:26

that will be sold to the other nation How much

01:29

will be thought and how much everybody's going to charge

01:32

for all this stuff And when promises air made that

01:34

means that a relationship has formed So even though america

01:37

was a total commitment phobe back in the twenties we

01:40

were still going steady with plenty of other countries It's

01:43

true america was you know player Yeah cool But eventually

01:47

all this playing around ended up coming back to bite

01:49

us Us tried to skew all these economic alliance is

01:52

too much in its favour In the twenties the deck

01:54

was seriously stacked We basically exported all over the world

01:58

without doing much importing from other countries Eventually foreign trading

02:02

partners got sick of lopsided deals and retaliated All of

02:06

which helped to make the great depression even more depressing

02:09

like half of america eating shoes for dinner wasn't depressing

02:13

enough

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