The eagle triumphant

"Though many Americans are reluctant to admit it, the United States has long been an imperial power - a fact that has become increasingly evident since the war in Iraq. Now, in this book, historian Robert Smith Thompson examines the origins of the American empire in the period spanning the two world wars. Confounding the conventional view of early-twentieth-century America - an idealistic, isolationist nation only reluctantly drawn into world affairs - he shows how the United States deliberately set out to dismantle the British Empire and take over its spheres of influence." "Capturing the personalities and events that precipitated the American imperium - from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill to the sinking of the Lusitania, the advent of Lend-Lease, and the conference at Yalta - Thompson argues that U.S. ascendence began with Britain's decision to enter World War I. Though Britain helped engineer America's subsequent entry into that war, President Wilson's Fourteen Points called not only for the defeat of Germany, but for the dissolution of British and French colonial empires - a goal that persisted in succeeding American administrations, and not me