You have to understand that the remarkable thing about the United States in the 19th century is that it was not an imperial power, in the classic European sense. It did not have to be, because it was its own empire. What happens is that over the course of the 19th century, our empire's the West. We drive railroads into it. We look for mines. We open up factories. We develop cattle farms and ranches. It's very similar and very much the same time that the British and the French and the Germans are invading Africa, are moving into the Far East. We were moving into our own continent. There's a lot of blood shed... spilled, and Indian wars are, you know, enormous and incessant, but it's within the continental boundaries.

It's only really by the end of that 19th century that there's the sense, overstated somewhat, but that markets are closing up, that access to raw materials is being limited, that the great game of global imperialism is going on. People like Teddy Roosevelt, here in New York City, are saying, we've got to get into the game. That means getting outside of our border. That means getting territory. That in fact is involved with what we do in our first little gambit which is, we peep out onto the planet and knock off the weakest remaining European empire, which is Spain, and we get Puerto Rico, and we get Cuba, and we get the Philippines.

There's a tremendous backlash, because many Americans think this is for a republic. We are not an empire. We don't do things like this. But we did. And they were footholds for an expansion of navy. Navy would expand beyond and facilitate our fleets emergence, because in the real world, but American bankers and American businessmen went down to Latin America, they found ahead of them, ensconced in all the big capitals, it was the British, the British banks, the British traders, they were squeezing us out. They didn't want to let us in, even if it didn't have an official colony, they had better goods, they had more money, they had more expertise. We bumped up against them. We bumped up against them in Asia, and for the longest time, the Brits, of course, wouldn't allow us in at all. And then when they had big colonies, I mean, India and the like, it was off limits. So there was this sense of impatience and concern and desire to sort of get in on the great game. And that meant expanding beyond our physical borders. But it was a matter of debate.

This is moot through the 1920s and the 1930s, but it's at the end of the Second World War, and for a whole variety of reasons, there's a renewed concern now to look abroad, to begin to figure out ways of making money that transcend the still enormous national, domestic market, which we can still rely on and still focus on, but we need more, the critical balance is increasingly overseas.