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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.
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
Full Transcript
- 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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