Cormac Kelly (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
cormac.1.kelly@kcl.ac.uk

The United States State Department and the American Turn to Europe, 1939-1946

My research examines how, between 1939 and 1946, the State Department helped make the United States into a hegemon in Europe. In those years, American diplomatic officials shed their country’s historic commitment to non-intervention in Europe, planned in detail their desired futures for states on that continent and then committed to “defending” Europe when their vision led to confrontation with the Soviet Union. Through this case study, I argue for the importance of researching foreign policy bureaucracies since it enables historians to better understand the creation and execution of foreign policy in liberal democracies. Considerable scholarship has been produced on individual American ambassadors in this period, often in meticulous biographical studies. Yet there is no comparable corpus on the State Department’s historic contributions to policymaking in Washington, leading to a lopsided focus on the Department’s eyes at the expense of its brain. Our understanding of how modern foreign policy bureaucracies originated, the rise of the United States as a global superpower and why the Allied alliance broke down into cold war benefits from studying the State Department in this crucial period. To do so, I draw upon archival material from across the United States, especially the State Department’s own files, as well as the recorded impressions of non-American diplomatic officials to gain a more nuanced understanding of State Department decision-making.

Primary supervisor: Professor Greg Kennedy