The Rhineland Catalyst: British Colonialism and the Development of US Strategies for Military Occupation after World War I

The cross-Atlantic tensions between the British and American militaries throughout the nineteenth century resulted in their cultures being defined in opposition to each other. For the United States, it was the American experiences of frontier conflict, the Civil War, and republican-style imperialism that inspired the nation's military strategy, induding the principles of foreign occupation. This article asserts that, on the contrary, the U.S. approach to occupation governance was greatly informed by a British model from the early twentieth century on. We contend that American failures in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I prompted the interwar development of new strategies based on the British example. While this strategy may have been borrowed from the British, it was also subject to a retrospective mythbuilding that selected examples from American history that conformed to the new model, affording it a greater degree of subcultural legitimacy.