saw the United States as potentially the greatest power—called by its fortuitous political, geographic, and cultural inheritance to an essential world role. He pursued a foreign policy concept that, unprecedentedly for America, based itself largely on geopolitical considerations. According to it, America as the twentieth century progressed would play a global version of the role Britain had performed in Europe in the nineteenth century: maintaining peace by guaranteeing equilibrium, hovering offshore of Eurasia, and tilting the balance against any power threatening to dominate a strategic
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