Pax Americana Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The term Pax Americana (Latin: "American Peace"), denoting the period of relative peace in the Western world since World War II, places the United States of America in the role of a modern-day Roman Empire or British Empire (based on Pax Romana and Pax Britannica, respectively).During this period the United States has been involved to a greater or lesser extent in various regional wars (probably most notably, the Vietnam War), and has maintained espionage and covert operations in many other areas.
The term Pax Americana is used by critics of U.S. policy to describe an alleged effort to suppress countries that do not cooperate with U.S. policy. Yet, some supporters of American foreign policy also use the term, so it is not necessarily a derogatory term.
Even so, some point out a long history of "isolationism" in the United States, which subsided only after major shocks associated with the Spanish American War, World War I, and World War II, the Cold War, and various post-Cold War conflicts with non-state actors. Many people believe that the United States has sought, or has found itself forced into, a quasi-imperialist role by its status as the world's sole superpower. However, the term "isolationist" in this context applies to the global stage; the United States has never been isolationist with respect to the Western Hemisphere, which it has considered to fall within its sphere of influence, and has a long history of military intervention within this region of the world, in the spirit of the Monroe and Truman Doctrines.
The fiercest debates between isolationist and imperialist factions occurred at the end of the 19th century, when those who favored U.S. control of Hawaii and the Philippines, the "jingoes," including Theodore Roosevelt, debated hotly those who favored traditional American policies of avoiding foreign entanglements, including Samuel Gompers, Andrew Carnegie, and others (who came from a very wide variety of backgrounds and were opposed on almost every other issue). At that time, the term "imperial" was indeed used as a positive goal by jingoes and as a negative term by opponents. When Theodore Roosevelt became president following the assassination of William McKinley in 1900 U.S. foreign policy began to undergo its first major shift away from isolationism towards a policy of foreign intervention.
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