This was an astonishingly ambitious vision for a country that had heretofore viewed its isolation as its defining characteristic and that had conceived of its navy as primarily an instrument of coastal defense. But through a remarkable foreign policy performance, Roosevelt succeeded—at least temporarily—in redefining America’s international role. In the Americas, he went beyond the Monroe Doctrine’s well-established opposition to foreign intervention. He pledged the United States not only to repel foreign colonial designs in the Western Hemisphere—personally threatening war to deter an impending German encroachment on Venezuela—but also, in effect, to preempt them. Thus he proclaimed the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, to the effect that the United States had the right to intervene preemptively in the domestic affairs of other Western Hemisphere nations to remedy flagrant cases of “wrongdoing or impotence.” Roosevelt described the principle as follows:
All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
As in the original Monroe Doctrine, no Latin American countries were consulted. The corollary also amounted to a U.S. security umbrella for the Western Hemisphere. Henceforth no outside power would be able to use force to redress its grievances in the Americas; it would be obliged to work through the United States, which assigned itself the task of maintaining order.
Backing up this ambitious concept was the new Panama Canal, which enabled the United States to shift its navy between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans without the long circumnavigations of Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Begun in 1904 with American funds and engineering expertise on territory seized from Colombia by means of a local rebellion supported by the United States, and controlled by a long-term American lease of the Canal Zone, the Panama Canal, officially opened in 1914, would stimulate trade while affording the United States a decisive advantage in any military conflict in the region. (It would also bar any foreign navy from using a similar route except with U.S. permission.) Hemispheric security was to be the linchpin of an American world role based on the muscular assertion of America’s national interest.
So long as Britain’s naval power remained dominant, it would see to the equilibrium in Europe. During the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904–5, Roosevelt demonstrated how he would apply his concept of diplomacy to the Asian equilibrium and, if necessary, globally. For Roosevelt, the issue was the balance of power in the Pacific, not flaws in Russia’s czarist autocracy (though he had no illusions about these). Because the unchecked eastward advance into Manchuria and Korea of Russia—a country that, in Roosevelt’s words, “pursued a policy of consistent opposition to us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity”—was inimical to American interests, Roosevelt at first welcomed the Japanese military victories. He described the total destruction of the Russian fleet, which had sailed around the world to its demise in the Battle of Tsushima, as Japan “playing our game.” But when the scale of Japan’s victories threatened to overwhelm the Russian position in Asia entirely, Roosevelt had second thoughts. Though he admired Japan’s modernization—and perhaps because of it—he began to treat an expansionist Japanese Empire as a potential threat to the American position in Southeast Asia and concluded that it might someday “make demands on [the] Hawaiian Islands.”
Roosevelt, though in essence a partisan of Russia, undertook a mediation of a conflict in distant Asia underlining America’s role as an Asian power. The Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 was a quintessential expression of Roosevelt’s balance-of-power diplomacy. It limited Japanese expansion, prevented a Russian collapse, and achieved an outcome in which Russia, as he described it, “should be left face to face with Japan so that each may have a moderative action on the other.” For his mediation, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American to be so honored.
Roosevelt treated the achievement not as ushering in a static condition of peace but as the beginning of an American role in managing the Asia-Pacific equilibrium. When Roosevelt began to receive threatening intelligence about Japan’s “war party,” he set out to bring America’s resolve to its attention, but with exquisite subtlety. He dispatched sixteen battleships painted white to signify a peaceful mission—called the Great White Fleet—on a “practice cruise around the world,” paying friendly visits to foreign ports and serving as a reminder that the United States could now deploy overwhelming naval power to any region. As he wrote to his son, the show of force was intended to warn the aggressive faction in Japan, thus achieving peace through strength: “I do not believe there will be war with Japan, but I do believe that there is enough chance of war to make it eminently wise to insure against it by building such a navy as to forbid Japan’s hoping for success.”
Japan, while afforded a massive display of American naval power, was at the same time to be treated with utmost courtesy. Roosevelt cautioned the Admiral leading the fleet that he was to go to the limit to avoid offending the sensibilities of the country he was deterring:
I wish to impress upon you, what I do not suppose is necessary, to see to it that none of our men does anything out of the way while in Japan. If you give the enlisted men leave while at Tokyo or anywhere else in Japan be careful to choose only those upon whom you can absolutely depend. There must be no suspicion of insolence or rudeness on our part … Aside from the loss of a ship I had far rather that we were insulted than that we insult anybody under these peculiar conditions.
America would, in the words of Roosevelt’s favorite proverb, “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
In the Atlantic, Roosevelt’s apprehensions were primarily directed at Germany’s increasing power and ambitions, especially its large naval building program. If British command of the seas was upset, so would be Britain’s ability to maintain the European equilibrium. He saw Germany as gradually overwhelming its neighbors’ countervailing force. At the outbreak of World War I, Roosevelt from his retirement called on America to increase its military spending and enter the conflict early on the side of the Triple Entente—Britain, France, and Russia—lest the threat spread to the Western Hemisphere. As he wrote in 1914 to an American German sympathizer:
Do you not believe that if Germany won in this war, smashed the English Fleet and destroyed the British Empire, within a year or two she would insist upon taking a dominant position in South America …? I believe so. Indeed I know so. For the Germans with whom I have talked, when once we could talk intimately, accepted this view with a frankness that bordered on the cynical.
It was through the contending ambitions of major powers, Roosevelt believed, that the ultimate nature of world order would be decided. Humane values would be best preserved by the geopolitical success of liberal countries in pursuing their interests and maintaining the credibility of their threats. Where they prevailed in the strife of international competition, civilization would spread and be strengthened, with salutary effects.
Roosevelt adopted a generally skeptical view of abstract invocations of international goodwill. He averred that it did no good, and often active harm, for America to make grand pronouncements of principle if it was not in a position to enforce them against determined opposition. “Our words must be judged by our deeds.” When the industrialist Andrew Carnegie urged Roosevelt to commit the United States more fully to disarmament and internat
ional human rights, Roosevelt replied, invoking some principles of which Kautilya would have approved,
We must always remember that it would be a fatal thing for the great free peoples to reduce themselves to impotence and leave the despotisms and barbarisms armed. It would be safe to do so if there was some system of international police; but there is now no such system … The one thing I won’t do is to bluff when I cannot make good; to bluster and threaten and then fail to take the action if my words need to be backed up.
Had Roosevelt been succeeded by a disciple—or perhaps had he won the election of 1912—he might have introduced America into the Westphalian system of world order or an adaptation of it. In this course of events, America almost certainly would have sought an earlier conclusion to World War I compatible with the European balance of power—along the lines of the Russo-Japanese Treaty—that left Germany defeated but indebted to American restraint and surrounded by sufficient force to deter future adventurism. Such an outcome, before the bloodletting had assumed nihilistic dimensions, would have changed the course of history and forestalled the devastation of Europe’s culture and political self-confidence.
In the event, Roosevelt died a respected statesman and conservationist but founded no foreign policy school of thought. He had no major disciple, among either the public or his successors as President. And Roosevelt did not win the 1912 election, because he split the conservative vote with William Howard Taft, the incumbent President.
It was probably inevitable that Roosevelt’s attempt to preserve his legacy by running for a third term would destroy any chance for it. Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. They may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. The great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. If they fall short, the society stagnates. If they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity. Theodore Roosevelt was operating at the absolute margin of his society’s capabilities. Without him, American foreign policy returned to the vision of the shining city on a hill—not participation in, much less domination of, a geopolitical equilibrium. Nevertheless, America paradoxically fulfilled the leading role Roosevelt had envisioned for it, and within his lifetime. But it did so on behalf of principles Roosevelt derided and under the guidance of a president whom Roosevelt despised.
WOODROW WILSON: AMERICA AS THE WORLD’S CONSCIENCE
Emerging victorious in the 1912 election with just 42 percent of the popular vote and only two years after his transition from academia to national politics, Woodrow Wilson turned the vision America had asserted largely for itself into an operational program applicable to the entire world. The world was sometimes inspired, occasionally puzzled, yet always obliged to pay attention, both by the power of America and by the scope of his vision.
When America entered World War I, a conflict which started a process that would destroy the European state system, it did so not on the basis of Roosevelt’s geopolitical vision but under a banner of moral universality not seen in Europe since the religious wars three centuries before. This new universality proclaimed by the American President sought to universalize a system of governance that existed only in the North Atlantic countries and, in the form heralded by Wilson, only in the United States. Imbued by America’s historic sense of moral mission, Wilson proclaimed that America had intervened not to restore the European balance of power but to “make the world safe for democracy”—in other words, to base world order on the compatibility of domestic institutions reflecting the American example. Though this concept ran counter to their tradition, Europe’s leaders accepted it as the price of America’s entry into the war.
Setting out his vision of the peace, Wilson denounced the balance of power for the preservation of which his new allies had originally entered the war. He rejected established diplomatic methods (decried as “secret diplomacy”) as having been a major contributing cause of the conflict. In their place he put forward, in a series of visionary speeches, a new concept of international peace based on a mixture of traditional American assumptions and a new insistence on pushing them toward a definitive and global implementation. This has been, with minor variations, the American program for world order ever since.
Like many American leaders before him, Wilson asserted that a divine dispensation had made the United States a different kind of nation. “It was as if,” Wilson told the graduating class at West Point in 1916, “in the Providence of God a continent had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful people who loved liberty and the rights of men more than they loved anything else, to come and set up an unselfish commonwealth.”
Nearly all of Wilson’s predecessors in the presidency would have subscribed to such a belief. Where Wilson differed was in his assertion that an international order based on it could be achieved within a single lifetime, even a single administration. John Quincy Adams had lauded the special American commitment to self-government and international fair play but warned his countrymen against seeking to impose these virtues outside the Western Hemisphere among other powers not similarly inclined. Wilson was playing for higher stakes and set a more urgent objective. The Great War, he told Congress, would be “the culminating and final war for human liberty.”
When Wilson took the oath of office, he had sought for America to remain neutral in international affairs, offering its services as disinterested mediator and promoting a system of international arbitration meant to forestall war. On assuming the presidency in 1913, Woodrow Wilson had launched a “new diplomacy,” authorizing his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, to negotiate an array of international arbitration treaties. Bryan’s efforts produced thirty-some such treaties in 1913 and 1914. In general, they provided that every otherwise insoluble dispute should be submitted to a disinterested commission for investigation; there would be no resort to arms until a recommendation had been submitted to the parties. A “cooling off” period was to be established in which diplomatic solutions could prevail over nationalist passions. There is no record that any such treaty was ever applied to a concrete issue. By July 1914, Europe and much of the rest of the world were at war.
When, in 1917, Wilson declared that the grave outrages of one party, Germany, had obliged the United States to join the war in “association” with the belligerents of the other side (Wilson declined to contemplate an “alliance”), he maintained that America’s purposes were not self-interested but universal:
We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.
The premise of Wilson’s grand strategy was that all peoples around the world were motivated by the same values as America:
These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community.
It was the scheming of autocracies, not any inherent contradiction between differing national interests or aspirations, that caused conflict. If all facts were made openly available and publics were offered a choice, ordinary people would opt for peace—a view also held by the Enlightenment philosopher Kant (described earlier) and by the contemporary advocates of an open Internet. As Wilson told Congress in April 1917, in his request for a declaration of war against Germany:
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behin
d the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation’s affairs.
The procedural aspect of the balance of power, its neutrality as to the moral merit of contending parties, was therefore immoral as well as dangerous. Not only was democracy the best form of governance; it was also the sole guarantee for permanent peace. As such, American intervention was intended not simply to thwart Germany’s war aims but, Wilson explained in a subsequent speech, to alter Germany’s system of government. The goal was not primarily strategic, for strategy was an expression of governance:
The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is this, that if they should still, after the war is over, continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the world could not trust, it might be impossible to admit them to the partnership of nations which must henceforth guarantee the world’s peace.
In keeping with this view, when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated. International peace required “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual impotence.” A rules-based, peaceful international order was achievable, but because “no autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants,” peace required “that autocracy must first be shown the utter futility of its claims to power or leadership in the modern world.”
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