Great Rapprochement

The Great Rapprochement was the convergence of diplomatic, political, military, and economic objectives of the United States and Great Britain from 1895 to 1915, the two decades before American entry into World War I as an ally against Germany. In the Venezuelan crisis of 1895 President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, escalated a boundary dispute in South America into a confrontation with Britain. Relations were calmed under President William McKinley (1897–1901). Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican president from 1901 to 1909, played a central role through his close contacts with British intellectuals and politicians and in his diplomatic work regarding the Panama Canal in 1901 and the Alaska boundary dispute of 1903. From 1914 to 1917, he was the leading proponent of America entering into the war on the side of Great Britain.

The convergence was noted by statesmen and scholars of the time, but the term "Great Rapprochement" may have been coined by American historian Bradford Perkins in his 1968 study of the period The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States 1895–1914. Perkins attributes the convergence to growing imperial ambitions in the United States, British withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere to focus on preservation of its African colonies and naval threat from the German Empire, and rapid industrialization and integration into the British global financial system by the United States.

American sentiment towards Britain was harshly negative for much of the 19th century. Enmity between the two nations, largely driven from the American side, peaked during the American Civil War and the Trent affair. After 1872 and the settlement of the Alabama claims, direct hostility declined. However, other incidents, such as the Murchison letter and disputes over borders and fishing rights between the U.S. and Canada (then a dominion of the British Empire), stoked continued American hostility toward the British. A large segment of the American public considered Britain their "natural enemy", though many Americans acknowledged closer cultural and political affinity with Britain than with those of Continental Europe.

The fundamental socioeconomic distinctions between the agrarian and isolationist United States and the industrialized British Empire rapidly diminished after 1865. The United States emerged from the Civil War as a major industrial power with a renewed commitment to a stronger federal government as opposed to one ruled by individual states, permitting engagement in imperial expansion and economic globalization. The post-war Reconstruction era therefore generated or expanded Anglo-American geopolitical and commercial networks.

In 1895, former United States ambassador to Venezuela William Lindsay Scruggs, working as a lobbyist for the Venezuelan government, published British Aggressions in Venezuela: The Monroe Doctrine on Trial, claiming that Britain sought to expand their territorial claim in British Guiana to incorporate the Orinoco River watershed. Congress, led by a Republican majority under Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, called for a vigorous American enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. President Grover Cleveland and Secretary of State Richard Olney acquiesced, adopting the Olney interpretation of the Doctrine and asserting American authority to arbitrate all boundary disputes in the Western Hemisphere. Cleveland's acquiescence may also have been influenced by his Democratic Party's reliance on Irish-American voters.

Guided by Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, the British cabinet of Lord Salisbury rejected both the applicability and legal validity of the Monroe doctrine and asserted that Britain remained an imperial power in the Americas. Cleveland responded in kind, establishing an investigatory commission to determine the true boundary and publicly stating that his administration would use "every means in its power" to prevent British expansion into Venezuelan territory.

Partly due to the influence of business interests, who feared war between the powers, tensions were defused. The British cabinet agreed to approach the Americans diplomatically, and Great Britain and Venezuela signed an arbitration agreement in 1896. In 1899, the arbitration committee ultimately awarded Britain ninety percent of the disputed territory. The resolution of the crisis through arbitration (rather than war) and its establishment of the United States' free hand in the Americas served to ease British-American tensions.

The British acquiescence to negotiation and arbitration in the Venezuelan crisis may have been influenced by a desire to avoid negotiation with William Jennings Bryan, a leading candidate for President of the United States in 1896.