The United States soon set out to expand this maxim to all of the Americas. A tacit accommodation with Britain, the premier naval power, allowed the United States to declare in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 its entire hemisphere off-limits for foreign colonization, decades before it had anything close to the power to enforce so sweeping a pronouncement. In the United States, the Monroe Doctrine was interpreted as the extension of the War of Independence, sheltering the Western Hemisphere from the operation of the European balance of power. No Latin American countries were consulted (not least because few existed at the time). As the frontiers of the nation crept across the continent, the expansion of America was seen as the operation of a kind of law of nature. When the United States practiced what elsewhere was defined as imperialism, Americans gave it another name: “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The acquisition of vast tracts of territory was treated as a commercial transaction in the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France and as the inevitable consequence of this Manifest Destiny in the case of Mexico. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century, in the Spanish-American War of 1898, that the United States engaged in full-scale hostilities overseas with another major power.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States had the good fortune of being able to address its challenges sequentially, and frequently to the point of definitive resolution. The drive to the Pacific and the establishment of favorable northern and southern borders; the vindication of the Union in the Civil War; the projection of power against the Spanish Empire and the inheritance of many of its possessions: each took place as a discrete phase of activity, after which Americans returned to the task of building prosperity and refining democracy. The American experience supported the assumption that peace was the natural condition of humanity, prevented only by other countries’ unreasonableness or ill will. The European style of statecraft, with its shifting alliances and elastic maneuvers on the spectrum between peace and hostility, seemed to the American mind a perverse departure from common sense. In this view, the Old World’s entire system of foreign policy and international order was an outgrowth of despotic caprice or a malignant cultural penchant for aristocratic ceremony and secretive maneuver. America would forgo these practices, disclaiming colonial interests, remaining warily at arm’s length from the European-designed international system, and relating to other countries on the basis of mutual interests and fair dealing.
John Quincy Adams summed up these sentiments in 1821, in a tone verging on exasperation at other countries’ determination to pursue more complicated and devious courses:
America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Because America sought “not dominion, but liberty,” it should avoid, Adams argued, involvement in all the contests of the European world. America would maintain its uniquely reasonable and disinterested stance, seeking freedom and human dignity by offering moral sympathy from afar. The assertion of the universality of American principles was coupled with the refusal to vindicate them outside the Western (that is, American) Hemisphere:
[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
In the Western Hemisphere, no such restraint prevailed. As early as 1792, the Massachusetts minister and geographer Jedidiah Morse argued that the United States—whose existence had been internationally recognized for less than a decade and whose Constitution was only four years old—marked the apogee of history. The new country, he predicted, would expand westward, spread principles of liberty throughout the Americas, and become the crowning achievement of human civilization:
Besides, it is well known that empire has been travelling from east to west. Probably her last and broadest feat will be America … [W]e cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.
All the while America ardently maintained that the endeavor was not territorial expansion in the traditional sense but the divinely ordained spread of principles of liberty. In 1839, as the official United States Exploring Expedition reconnoitered the far reaches of the hemisphere and the South Pacific, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review published an article heralding the United States as “the great nation of futurity,” disconnected from and superior to everything in history that had preceded it:
The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history.
The success of the United States, the author confidently predicted, would serve as a standing rebuke to all other forms of government, ushering in a future democratic age. A great, free union, divinely sanctioned and towering above all other states, would spread its principles throughout the Western Hemisphere—a power destined to become greater in scope and in moral purpose than any previous human endeavor:
We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can.
The United States was thus not simply a country but an engine of God’s plan and the epitome of world order.
In 1845, when American westward expansion embroiled the country in a dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory and with Mexico over the Republic of Texas (which had seceded from Mexico and declared its intent to join the United States), the magazine concluded that the annexation of Texas was a defensive measure against the foes of liberty. The author reasoned that “California will probably, next fall away” from Mexico, and an American sweep north into Canada would likely follow. The continental force of America, he reasoned, would eventually render Europe’s balance of power inconsequential by its sheer countervailing weight. Indeed the author of the Democratic Review article foresaw a day, one hundred years hence—that is, 1945—when the United States would outweigh even a unified, hostile Europe:
Though they should cast into the opposite scale all the bayonets and cannon, not only of France and England, but of Europe entire, how would it kick the beam against the simple, solid weight of the two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!
This is, in fact, what transpired (except that the Canadian border was peacefully demarcated, and England was not part of a hostile Europe in 1945, but rather an ally). Bombastic and prophetic, the vision of America transcending and counterbalancing the harsh doctrines of the Old World would inspire a nation—often while being largely ignored elsewhere or prompting consternation—and reshape the course of history.
As the United States experienced total war—unseen in Europe for half a century—in the Civil War, with stakes so desperate that both North and South breached the principle of hemispheric isolation to involve especially France and Britain in their war efforts, Americans interpreted their conflict as a singular eve
nt of transcendent moral significance. Reflecting the view of that conflict as a terminal endeavor, the vindication of “the last best hope of earth,” the United States built up by far the world’s largest and most formidable army and used it to wage total war, then, within a year and a half of the end of the war, all but disbanded it, reducing a force of more than one million men to roughly 65,000. In 1890, the American army ranked fourteenth in the world, after Bulgaria’s, and the American navy was smaller than Italy’s, a country with one-thirteenth of America’s industrial strength. As late as the presidential inaugural of 1885, President Grover Cleveland described American foreign policy in terms of detached neutrality and as entirely different from the self-interested policies pursued by older, less enlightened states. He rejected
any departure from that foreign policy commended by the history, the traditions, and the prosperity of our Republic. It is the policy of independence, favored by our position and defended by our known love of justice and by our power. It is the policy of peace suitable to our interests. It is the policy of neutrality, rejecting any share in foreign broils and ambitions upon other continents and repelling their intrusion here.
A decade later, America’s world role having expanded, the tone had become more insistent and considerations of power loomed larger. In a border dispute in 1895 between Venezuela and British Guiana, Secretary of State Richard Olney warned Great Britain—then still considered the premier world power—of the inequality of military strength in the Western Hemisphere: “To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law.” America’s “infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”
America was now a major power, no longer a fledgling republic on the fringes of world affairs. American policy no longer limited itself to neutrality; it felt obliged to translate its long-proclaimed universal moral relevance into a broader geopolitical role. When, later that year, the Spanish Empire’s colonial subjects in Cuba rose in revolt, a reluctance to see an anti-imperial rebellion crushed on America’s doorstep mingled with the conviction that the time had come for the United States to demonstrate its ability and will to act as a great power, at a time when the importance of European nations was in part judged by the extent of their overseas empires. When the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898 under unexplained circumstances, widespread popular demand for military intervention led President McKinley to declare war on Spain, the first military engagement by the United States with another major power overseas.
Few Americans imagined how different the world order would be after this “splendid little war,” as John Hay, then the American ambassador in London, described it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, at that time a rising political reformer in New York City. After just three and a half months of military conflict, the United States had ejected the Spanish Empire from the Caribbean, occupied Cuba, and annexed Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. President McKinley stuck to established verities in justifying the enterprise. With no trace of self-consciousness, he presented the war that had established America as a great power in two oceans as a uniquely unselfish mission. “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory,” he explained in a remark emblazoned on his reelection poster of 1900, “but for humanity’s sake.”
The Spanish-American War marked America’s entry into great-power politics and into the contests it had so long disdained. The American presence was intercontinental in extent, stretching from the Caribbean to the maritime waters of Southeast Asia. By virtue of its size, its location, and its resources, the United States would be among the most consequential global players. Its actions would now be scrutinized, tested, and, on occasion, resisted by the more traditional powers already sparring over the territories and sea-lanes into which American interests now protruded.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: AMERICA AS A WORLD POWER
The first President to grapple systematically with the implications of America’s world role was Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded in 1901 upon McKinley’s assassination, after a remarkably rapid political ascent culminating in the vice presidency. Hard-driving, ferociously ambitious, highly educated, and widely read, a brilliant cosmopolitan cultivating the air of a ranch hand and subtle far beyond the estimation of his contemporaries, Roosevelt saw the United States as potentially the greatest power—called by its fortuitous political, geographic, and cultural inheritance to an essential world role. He pursued a foreign policy concept that, unprecedentedly for America, based itself largely on geopolitical considerations. According to it, America as the twentieth century progressed would play a global version of the role Britain had performed in Europe in the nineteenth century: maintaining peace by guaranteeing equilibrium, hovering offshore of Eurasia, and tilting the balance against any power threatening to dominate a strategic region. As he declared in his 1905 inaugural address,
To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent … Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.
Educated partly in Europe and knowledgeable about its history (he wrote a definitive account of the naval component of the War of 1812 while still in his twenties), Roosevelt was on cordial terms with prominent “Old World” elites and was well versed in traditional principles of strategy, including the balance of power. Roosevelt shared his compatriots’ assessment of America’s special character. Yet he was convinced that to fulfill its calling, the United States would need to enter a world in which power, and not only principle, shared in governing the course of events.
In Roosevelt’s view, the international system was in constant flux. Ambition, self-interest, and war were not simply the products of foolish misconceptions of which Americans could disabuse traditional rulers; they were a natural human condition that required purposeful American engagement in international affairs. International society was like a frontier settlement without an effective police force:
In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs.
This essentially Hobbesian analysis delivered in, of all occasions, a Nobel Peace Prize lecture, marked America’s departure from the proposition that neutrality and pacific intent were adequate to serve the peace. For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them.
Inevitably, Roosevelt was impatient with many of the pieties that dominated American thinking on foreign policy. The newly emerging extension of international law could not be efficacious unless backed by force, he concluded, and disarmament, emerging as an international topic, was an illusion:
As yet there is no likelihood of establishing any kind of international power … which can effectively check wrong-doing, and in these circumstances it would be both foolish and an evil thing for a great and free nation to deprive itself of the power to protect its own rights and even in exceptional cases to stand up for the rights of others. Nothing would more promote iniquity … than for the free and enlightened peoples … deliberately to render themselves powerless while leaving every despotism and barbarism armed.
Liberal societies, Roosevelt believed, tended to underestimate the elements of antagonism and strife in international affairs. Implying a Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest, Roosevelt wrote to the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice,
It is … a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which
are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization …
I abhor and despise that pseudo-humanitarianism which treats advance of civilization as necessarily and rightfully implying a weakening of the fighting spirit and which therefore invites destruction of the advanced civilization by some less-advanced type.
If America disclaimed strategic interests, this only meant that more aggressive powers would overrun the world, eventually undermining the foundations of American prosperity. Therefore, “we need a large navy, composed not merely of cruisers, but containing also a full proportion of powerful battle-ships, able to meet those of any other nation,” as well as a demonstrated willingness to use it.
In Roosevelt’s view, foreign policy was the art of adapting American policy to balance global power discreetly and resolutely, tilting events in the direction of the national interest. He saw the United States—economically vibrant, the only country without threatening regional competitors, and distinctively both an Atlantic and a Pacific power—as in a unique position to “grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.” Shielding the Western Hemisphere from outside powers and intervening to preserve an equilibrium of forces in every other strategic region, America would emerge as the decisive guardian of the global balance and, through this, international peace.
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