United States
The peripheral republic that became the dominant Western state in the twentieth century
Also known as: United States, America, U.S., USA, America's
The United States is the dominant peripheral state of Western Civilization in Quigley's twentieth-century narrative — late-developing, geographically protected, and bound by the Anglo-American institutional architecture documented in The Anglo-American Establishment and Tragedy and Hope (T&H 14).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley treats the United States as a Western periphery that inherited the leadership role vacated by the British Empire after 1945. Throughout Tragedy and Hope he traces the slow drawing-in of American elites — through the Council on Foreign Relations, the personal networks around Colonel House, and the philanthropic foundations — into the orbit of the The Milner Group and its successors. The U.S. case is the proof of his core thesis: that an apparently autonomous great power can in fact be steered by a comparatively small informal network sitting astride finance, government, and the press (T&H 950). At the same time, Quigley insists the U.S. retains a genuinely distinct political culture, rooted in its constitutional structure, its frontier history, and its religious and educational pluralism — features he develops in The Evolution of Civilizations and in his Georgetown lectures.
Strategic Role
By 1945 the United States is, in Quigley's account, the indispensable power of the post-war order: the issuer of the reserve currency, the architect of Bretton Woods, the underwriter of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the principal antagonist of the Soviet Union in the The Cold War. Quigley's twentieth-century chapters give particular attention to the rise of the national-security state — the U.S. Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Atomic Energy Commission — and to the way the Cold War accelerated the concentration of foreign-policy authority in a small Eastern-Establishment elite (T&H 1247). He is sharply critical of what he reads as a drift from constitutional government toward a managerial-imperial mode, but he is not a declinist: for Quigley the American experiment is still recoverable, and the final chapters of T&H are addressed to the citizens who might recover it.
Place in the Anglo-American Architecture
The Anglo-American Establishment reads as a prequel to the American story: it documents how the The Milner Group deliberately cultivated American counterparts — Lamont, Lothian, Curtis on the British side; House, Lippmann, the Dulles brothers on the American — and how the joint Royal Institute of International Affairs / Council on Foreign Relations structure formalized the linkage after 1919. Quigley's claim is not that the United States was secretly governed from London, but that on a narrow band of strategic questions — currency, war and peace, the architecture of international institutions — the policy-shaping elites on both sides of the Atlantic operated as a single transatlantic community (AAE Preface).
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 14 Quigley
The United States, late-developing and geographically protected, moved into the dominant position the British Empire had vacated.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 950 Quigley
The drawing-in of American elites through the Council on Foreign Relations and the personal networks around Colonel House.
- anglo-american-establishment Quigley
On a narrow band of strategic questions the policy-shaping elites on both sides of the Atlantic operated as a single transatlantic community.