![]() To prevent any unnecessary conflict in what they saw as a hopeless dream, Great Britain came to President James Monroe with an offer of a multi-lateral agreement to keep France and the other powers away from South America. Though very little of this land was settled with Europeans, both Britain and America had designs on the region, and both were outraged when Russia unilaterally issued the Ukase (proclamation) of 1821, claiming sovereignty over the entire Pacific Northwest. Even more worrying, by the 1820’s, reports reached Washington D.C. about Russian expeditions reaching further south and inland of the Pacific Coast of North America. After the Battle of Waterloo, the Monarchs of Prussia, Austria and Russia formed their so-called “Holy League,” symbolically uniting their three state denominations of Protestantism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy respectively against further republican or nationalist uprisings. The next moves by the European powers seemed to confirm their fears. In a grand attempt to turn back the clock and permanently suppress republicanism, liberalism and all other forms of revolutionary politics, diplomats representing most of the great powers of Europe formed the Congress of Vienna. But while the effects of the French Revolution had been temporarily suppressed in Europe, the splash it made rippled across the world, triggering a series of independence and republican movements across the former Spanish colonies of Latin America. As the European powers struggled to defeat figures such as Simon Bolivar in South America, many Americans worried that if their Southern neighbors succumbed to repression and imperialism again, the same might happen to the United States? Bourbon France, too, sought to reestablish a colonial presence in the New World in Spain’s absence, and openly discussed converting the colonies into small puppet kingdoms, each ruled by a Bourbon relative. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the restoration of the French Monarchy, both Europe and the Americas stood at a crossroads. ![]() But strict isolationism was always impossible of course, due to America’s mercantile interests in Europe, and the drastically shifting political landscape of the early 19th century was impossible for anyone to ignore. One of George Washington’s final messages to Congress during his presidency involved a warning to avoid “entangling alliances” with the Europeans powers, which provided an important precedent for early American foreign policy going forward.
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