Just that week in Washington, pan american union conferenceRoosevelt and his advisors talked with hundreds of geologists and other representatives from Latin America. Latin America is a resource-rich region that the United States sees as the answer to its strategic material shortages.
Some Latin Americans are nervous about U.S. imperialism’s history of domination in the region and believe their countries should seal off their resources to outside control, as Mexico does Nationalize U.S. and European oil assets 1938.
As European empires collapsed, Roosevelt faced a delicate diplomatic dance with Greenland. He hoped to maintain a veneer of neutrality, prevent skeptical isolationists in Congress from rebelling, and not provoke Latin American anti-imperialists to cut off resources. Crucially, he also needed to avoid causing trouble for the resource-poor Japanese. The legal basis for seizing the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.now Indonesia – another European colony orphaned by the Nazi invasion.
Roosevelt’s solution: Recruiting Coast Guard “volunteers” Guard Ivitut. By late summer, long before the United States officially entered the war, 15 sailors Resigned from the ship and settled near the mines.
Considers Greenland vital to U.S. security
Roosevelt was also quite creative in geography.
At a press conference on April 12, 1940, just days after the Nazi invasion, he began Emphasize that Greenland is part of the Western Hemispheremore American than European, and thus protected by the Monroe Doctrine. To calm fears in Latin America, U.S. officials recast doctrine as a development orientation hemispheric unity.
In a speech at the Army Industrial Institute in the fall of 1940, Major William S. Culbertson, a former U.S. trade official, pointed out how competition for resources had left the United States in trouble. a form of non-military warfare: “We are currently engaged in an economic war with a totalitarian state. Publicly, our politicians do not express this so bluntly, but it is true.” For the rest of the century, the front lines will be as likely to be distant landmines as they are real battlefields.
On April 9, 1941, exactly one year after the Nazis occupied Denmark, Kaufman Meet the United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull An agreement was signed “on behalf of the King of Denmark” to place Greenland and its mines under U.S. security protection. At Nashasuaq on the southern tip of the island, the United States began construction of a facility called “blue west one“.
Greenland would house several important places during the remainder of World War II and throughout the Cold War U.S. military installationincluding some forced inuit family arrive move. What happened in Greenland 18 months before Pearl Harbor fit a larger emerging pattern. As the United States ascended to global leadership and realized that it could not maintain military dominance without widespread access to foreign materials, it began to redesign the global system of resource flows and the rules of this new international order. It rejected the Axis power’s “might makes right” territorial conquest of resources but found other ways to guarantee U.S. access to critical resources, including easing trade restrictions on European colonies. America offers British lifeline Destroyer-for-base agreement September 1940 and Lend-Lease Law In March 1941, it also acquired strategic military bases around the world. It also uses aid as leverage Prying open the markets of the British Empire. The result was a postwar world interconnected through trade and low tariffs, but also a global network of U.S. bases and alliances whose legality was sometimes questionable and whose purpose was partly to Protect U.S. access to strategic resources. During the Cold War, these global resources helped defeat the Soviet Union. However, these security needs also give the United States license to support authoritarian regimes. places like iranCongo and Indonesia. America’s voracious demand for resources also often results in the displacement of local residents and indigenous communities. justified by old claims They misused the resources around them. It has wreaked havoc on environments from the Arctic to the Amazon. For decades, strategic resources have been at the heart of the U.S.-led global system. But America’s actions today are different. Cryolite was an ongoing mine, rarer than the critical mines proposed in Greenland today, and the Nazi threat loomed. Most importantly, Roosevelt knew how to get what America needed without a military takeover that was “what the world wanted.” thomas robertsonVisiting Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Macalester College This article is reproduced from dialogue Licensed under Creative Commons. read Original article.
Today’s key minerals
