Great Rapprochement

The Great Rapprochement was the convergence of diplomatic, political, military, and economic objectives of the United States and Great Britain from 1895 to 1915, the two decades before American entry into World War I as an ally against Germany. In the Venezuelan crisis of 1895 President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, escalated a boundary dispute in South America into an angry confrontation with Britain. Relations were calmed under President William McKinley (1897-1901). Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican president 1901-1909, played a central role through his close contacts with British intellectuals and politicians and in his diplomatic work regarding the Panama Canal in 1901 and the Alaska boundary dispute of 1903. In 1914 to 1917 he was the leading proponent of American entering into the war on the side of Great Britain.

The convergence was noted by statesmen and scholars of the time, but the term "Great Rapprochement" may have been coined by American historian Bradford Perkins in his 1968 study of the period The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States 1895–1914. Perkins attributes the convergence to growing imperial ambitions in the United States, British withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere to focus on preservation of its African colonies and naval threat from the German Empire, and rapid industrialization and integration into the British global financial system by the United States.