The Imperial Mantle: The United States, Decolonization, and the Third (repost)

Many Americans are bewildered by the hostilities and even hatred toward the United States on the part of newly independent Third World nations. Are we not the country of freedom and hope? Doesn't almost everybody want to come here and share in the benefits of our great system, the American way of life? Are we not the leader of the world democratic movement? Why are we so often seen as repressive and anti-democratic? Why does it matter? These are the questions that experienced diplomat and scholar David D. Newsom seeks to understand in this thoughtful review of US relations with the

Third World since World War II. Newsom traces the upheavals in the post-war era as the peoples of British, Dutch, Belgium, and Portuguese empires demanded and gained independence. The new nations had a sense of shared heritage and pressed the industrial world for assistance in trade and financial concessions. They were especially strident in the United Nations General Assembly. As the most powerful leader of the free world, despite its anti-colonial heritage, the United States tended to inherit the imperial mantle in this period, becoming the focus both of expectations and demands from the new nations. How the United States lived up to these expectations, and how it responded to the challenge of world leadership and the burdens of being number one constitute the central issues engaged by this book. It is must reading for anyone who wants to understand the foreign policy challenges that America will face in the twenty-first century.