To: Maurice Winn who wrote (125402 ) 3/2/2004 11:59:41 AM From: carranza2 Respond to In an increasingly interconnected world, politics won't stop at the water's edge. Senator Arthur Vandenberg delivered a celebrated "speech heard round the world" in the Senate chamber on January 10, 1945, announcing his conversion from isolationism to internationalism. He called on America to assume the responsibilities of world leadership and endorsed the creation of the United Nations. Previously, Vandenberg had been a leading proponent of isolationism, determined to keep the United States out of another world war, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caused him to reassess his position. During the Second World War, he grappled with the potential international role for the United States in the postwar world. In 1947, at the start of the Cold War, Vandenberg became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In that position, he cooperated with the Truman administration in forging bipartisan support for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO – the first mutual defense treaty that the United States had entered since its alliance with France during the American Revolution. Asserting that "politics stops at the water's edge," Vandenberg's Senate career stands as a monument to the benefits of bipartisanship in American foreign policy.
