Many felt, as did the fiery William Jennings Bryan, that to annex foreign territory in the Far East would be a profitless burden and pose the threat of cheap labor to already disconted American workers. But in1897, Germany took over kiaochow and Theodore Roosevelt began to push the strategy finally adopted-- Philippine annexation-- to protect U.S. interests in the area.

The solution to the Far East dilemma emerged in the form of the "Open Door" strategy, a plan to protect prospective U.S. commercial expansion while renouncing any intention of formally occupying Chinese territory. Through a series of notes to England, France, Germany and Russia, Secretary of State John Hay proposed in 1899 that no power discriminate against the others in trade within each country's own sphere of influence. Hay's request seemed so minimal and the balance of power so uncertain that no country dared provoke a war upon itself by refusing to comply.

The Open Door notes symbolized the non-inverventionest impulse of modern U.S. foreign policy--the establishment of relations among the major industrial powers of insure, under American leadership, the maximum guarantee of future investment opportunities in underdeveloped areas at the least possible cost to the capitalist powers.

American foreign policy from 1905 to the present day has been geared toward maintaining U.S. leadership in the partnership of industrial nations through a series of treaties, international legal agreements and institutionalized economic arrangements. Pioneered by Woodrow Wilson and Bryan, his secretary of state, this policy was neither anti-expansionist nor anti-imperialist in any real sense.

By 1929, it did seem that the new world order was complete. Despite incursions into such countries as Haiti, Nicaragua, and, almost, into Mexico, a series of international conferences in the 1920s appeared to have kept even truly prospective threats such as Japan in line. The Depression drastically intensified governments' awareness of the economic imperatives of foreign policy, producing the struggle which led to World War II and eventually to the current structure of international capitalism.

In the 1930s, the United States finally faced a struggle over foreign outlets for investments which earlier arrangements with other countries, particularly with Japan and Germany, could no longer resolve. Consumer good purchases dropped 19 per cent between 1929 and 1933, but it was the 71 per cent drop in non-residential fixed investment that left the economy with an impossible contradiction: Underdeveloped areas abroad were the likely targets for idle capital, but no markets existed for whatever consumer goods could be produced.

Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to incorporate the expansion of foreign markets into his plans for recovery. A trade agreement program was developed to improve the American position in foreign markets relative to the other powers. The Export-Import Bank was created for loans to foreign countries which usually had to purchase U.S. goods only. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was authorized to help the foreign operations of domestic corporations.

Nothing worked. Although some sectors of U.S. business with interests in Germany saw National Socialism as the means to establish economic rationalization and stability in central Europe, Hitler's threat to America's main allies in trade, Britain and France, was too great to stand. America finally entered the war in 1941 after squeezing as many concessions as possible from Great Britain in return for land-lease aid.

World War II consequently sparked America's recovery, leaving behind a legacy which has shaped the contours of U.S. foreign policy since then. First, a stronger system of institutional relationships was immediately deemed necessary to prevent the recurrence of such costly conflict among industrial powers.

Second, the advantages of a large military establishment for economic planning became clear. Not only would the government underwrite military-related research and proved long-term contracts necessary for economic stability, but the product--a well-armed military-- could protect foreign sources of raw materials for America as well as U.S. foreign investments.

Third, the United States concluded that, as profitable as this country might find independent arrangements with the nationalist governments of underdeveloped countries, America could not support anti-colonial revolt: anti-imperialist victories in the Third World would dangerously strengthen the European left.

Finally, and most important, the outbreak of World War II transformed the United States into a net importer of raw materials. Given, as Galbraith has established, the need of large corporations in non-competitive markets for long-term planning to insure stability, raw materials are likely to be a firm's prime source of concern--especially in "strategic metals" and oil-related industries.

American domination of South Vietnam, which continues now, is the outgrowth of these conditions. Major U.S. multinational investor-- particularly those associated with the Rockefeller-Chase Manhattan-Standard Oil circle-- have taken over or dominate regional trade associations, supra-national companies or allegedly neutral international development agencies which promote capitalist investment by resolving intra-capitalist conflicts, preparing feasability studies, and urging local ruling classes to provide incentives for investment.

Ultimately, this is the great contradiction: As American capitalism's genuine need for foreign resources grows, the cost of containing revolutions abroad multiplies. Not only must a complex network of relations with other industrial powers (including the USSR) be maintained, but the United States must confront its ultimate inability to offer any program of social reform as adequate as socialism to meet the desperate material and social needs of Third World nations.

To survive, the "independent empire" has relied increasingly on a war of industrial nations against the revolutionary aspirations of the "underdeveloped" countries. Vietnam's refusal to submit to American control may mark a turning point in the history of freedom as irrevocable as Britain's loss two centuries ago.