Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [40]

Sally __________________________ th e office when her boss asked her to type up a report.

EAP CORNER

BRUSHING UP READING SKILLS

TASK 1

Read the text and divide it into logical parts matching the subtitles below. The first is done for you.

Pair work

Compare your choice with that of your partner. Discuss what prompted your decision.

AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

There is one more element of the American dynamic that we must cover: the grand strategy that drives American foreign policy.

A country's grand strategy is so deeply embedded in that nation's DNA, and appears so natural and obvious, that politicians and generals are not always aware of it. Their logic is so constrained by it that it is an almost unconscious reality. But from a geopolitical perspective, both the grand strategy of a country and the logic driving a country's leaders become obvious.

Grand strategy is not always about war. It is about all of the processes that constitute national power. But in the case of the United States, perhaps more than for other countries, grand strategy is about war, and the interaction between war and economic life. The United States is, historically, a warlike country.

The United States has been at war for about 10 percent of its existence. This statistic includes only major wars — the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam. It does not include minor conflicts like the Spanish-American War or Desert Storm. During the twentieth century, the United States was at war 15 percent of the time. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was at war 22 percent of the time. And since the beginning of the twenty-first century, in 2001, the United States has been constantly at war. War is central to the American experience, and its frequency is constantly increasing. It is built into American culture and deeply rooted in American geopolitics. Its purpose must be clearly understood.

America was born out of war and has continued to fight to this day at an ever increasing pace. Norway's grand strategy might be more about economics than warfare, but U.S. strategic goals, and U.S. grand strategy, originate in fear. The same is true of many nations. Rome did not set out to conquer the world. It set out to defend itself, and in the course of that effort it became an empire. The United States would have been quite content at first not to have been attacked and defeated by the British, as it was in the War of 1812. Each fear, however, once alleviated, creates new vulnerabilities and new fears. Nations are driven by fear of losing what they have. Consider the following in terms of this fear.

The United States has five geopolitical goals that drive its grand strategy. Note that these goals increase in magnitude, ambition, and difficulty as you go down the list

C.THE COMPLETE DOMINATION OF NORTH AMERICA BY THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Had the United States remained a nation of discrete states existing between the Atlantic coast and the Allegheny Mountains, it is extremely unlikely that it would have survived. It not only had to unite but had to spread into the vast territory between the Alleghenies and the Rocky

Unit II. US: from Democracy to Empire?

Unit II. US: from Democracy to Empire?

Mountains. This gave the United States not only strategic depth but also some of the richest agricultural land in the world. Even more important, it was land with a superb system of navigable rivers that allowed the country's agricultural surplus to be shipped to world markets, creating a class of businessmen-farmers that is unique in history.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the United States title to this land. But it was the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, in which Andrew Jackson defeated the British, that gave the nation real control of the region, since New Orleans was the single choke point of the entire river system. If Yorktown founded the nation, the Battle of New Orleans founded its economy. And what secured this in turn was the Battle of San Jacinto, a few hundred miles west of New Orleans, where the Mexican army was defeated by Texans and thus could never pose a threat to the Mississippi River basin again. The defeat of the Mexican army was not inevitable. Mexico was in many ways a more developed and powerful country than the United States. Its defeat made the U.S. Army the dominant power in North America and secured the continent for the United States — a vast and rich country that no one could challenge.

With North America secured, the only other immediate threat came from Latin America. In reality, North and South America are islands, not really connected: Panama and Central America are impassable by large armies. South America's unification into a single entity is remote. When you look at a map of South America, leaving out impassable terrain, you see that there can be no transcontinental power: the continent is sliced in two (see map, page 43). So there is no chance of a native threat to the United States emerging from South America.