CHAPTER 7
NO COUNTRY HAS PLAYED such a decisive role in shaping contemporary world order as the United States, nor professed such ambivalence about participation in it. Imbued with the conviction that its course would shape the destiny of mankind, America has, over its history, played a paradoxical role in world order: it expanded across a continent in the name of Manifest Destiny while abjuring any imperial designs; exerted a decisive influence on momentous events while disclaiming any motivation of national interest; and became a superpower while disavowing any intention to conduct power politics. America’s foreign policy has reflected the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary; that the real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all other peoples aspired to replicate.
Inherent in this doctrine was a vision of extraordinary originality and allure. While the Old World considered the New an arena for conquest to amass wealth and power, in America a new nation arose affirming freedom of belief, expression, and action as the essence of its national experience and character.
In Europe, a system of order had been founded on the careful sequestration of moral absolutes from political endeavors—if only because attempts to impose one faith or system of morality on the Continent’s diverse peoples had ended so disastrously. In America, the proselytizing spirit was infused with an ingrained distrust of established institutions and hierarchies. Thus the British philosopher and Member of Parliament Edmund Burke would recall to his colleagues that the colonists had exported “liberty according to English ideas” along with diverse dissenting religious sects constrained in Europe (“the protestantism of the protestant religion”) and “agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty.” These forces, intermingling across an ocean, had produced a distinct national outlook: “In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who came to the United States in 1831 and wrote what remains one of the most perceptive books about the spirit and attitudes of its people, traced the American character similarly to what he called its “point of departure.” In New England, “we see the birth and growth of that local independence which is still the mainspring and life blood of American freedom.” Puritanism, he wrote, “was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects it shared the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” This, he concluded, was the product “of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate with each other, forming a marvelous combination. I mean the Spirit of Religion and the Spirit of Freedom.”
The openness of American culture and its democratic principles made the United States a model and a refuge for millions. At the same time, the conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate. This tenet—so ingrained in American thinking that it is only occasionally put forward as official policy—suggests that a significant portion of the world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day be redeemed; in the meantime, their relations with the world’s strongest power must have some latent adversarial element to them.
These tensions have been inherent since the beginning of the American experience. For Thomas Jefferson, America was not only a great power in the making but an “empire for liberty”—an ever-expanding force acting on behalf of all humanity to vindicate principles of good governance. As Jefferson wrote during his presidency:
We feel that we are acting under obligations not confined to the limits of our own society. It is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind; that circumstances denied to others, but indulged to us, have imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.
So defined, the spread of the United States and the success of its endeavors was coterminous with the interests of humanity. Having doubled the size of the new country through his shrewd engineering of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, in retirement Jefferson “candidly confess[ed]” to President Monroe, “I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” And to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “We should then have only to include the North [Canada] in our confederacy … and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.” The empire envisaged by Jefferson and his colleagues differed, in their minds, from the European empires, which they considered based on the subjugation and oppression of foreign peoples. The empire imagined by Jefferson was in essence North American and conceived as the extension of liberty. (And, in fact, whatever may be said about the contradictions in this project or of the personal lives of its Founders, as the United States expanded and thrived, so too did democracy, and the aspiration toward it spread and took root across the hemisphere and the world.)
Despite such soaring ambitions, America’s favorable geography and vast resources facilitated a perception that foreign policy was an optional activity. Secure behind two great oceans, the United States was in a position to treat foreign policy as a series of episodic challenges rather than as a permanent enterprise. Diplomacy and force, in this conception, were distinct stages of activity, each following its own autonomous rules. A doctrine of universal sweep was paired with an ambivalent attitude toward countries—necessarily less fortunate than the United States—that felt the compulsion to conduct foreign policy as a permanent exercise based on the elaboration of the national interest and the balance of power.
Even after the United States assumed great-power status in the course of the nineteenth century, these habits endured. Three times in as many generations, in the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States took decisive action to shore up international order against hostile and potentially terminal threats. In each case, America preserved the Westphalian state system and the balance of power while blaming the very institutions of that system for the outbreak of hostilities and proclaiming a desire to construct an entirely new world. For much of this period, the implicit goal of American strategy beyond the Western Hemisphere was to transform the world in a manner that would make an American strategic role unnecessary.
From the beginning, America’s intrusion into European consciousness had forced a reexamination of received wisdom; its settlement would open new vistas for individuals promising to fundamentally reinvent world order. For the early settlers of the New World, the Americas were a frontier of a Western civilization whose unity was fracturing, a new stage on which to dramatize the possibility of a moral order. These settlers left Europe not because they no longer believed in its centrality but because they thought it had fallen short of its calling. As religious disputes and bloody wars drove Europe in the Peace of Westphalia to the painful conclusion that its ideal of a continent unified by a single divine governance would never be achieved, America provided a place to do so on distant shores. Where Europe reconciled itself to achieving security through equilibrium, Americans (as they began to think of themselves) entertained dreams of unity and governance enabling a redeemed purpose. The early Puritans spoke of demonstrating their virtue on the new continent as the way to transform the lands of which they had taken leave. As John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer who left East Anglia to escape religious suppression, preached aboard the Arbella in 1630, bound for New England, God intended America as an example for “all people”:
We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
None doubted that humanity and its purpose would in some way be revealed and fulfilled in America.
AMERICA ON THE WORLD STAGE
Setting out to affirm its independence, the United States defined itself as a new kind of power. The Declaration of Independence put forth its principles and assumed as its audience “the opinions of mankind.” In the opening essay of The Federalist Papers,published in 1787, Alexander Hamilton described the new republic as “an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world” whose success or failure would prove the viability of self-governance anywhere. He treated this proposition not as a novel interpretation but as a matter of common knowledge that “has been frequently remarked”—an assertion all the more notable considering that the United States at the time comprised only the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Georgia.
Even while propounding these doctrines, the Founders were sophisticated men who understood the European balance of power and manipulated it to the new country’s advantage. An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address—delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars—counseled that the United States “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and instead “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies,” he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America’s comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. It joined alliances not to protect a concept of international order but simply to serve its national interests strictly defined. As long as the European balance held, America was better served by a strategy of preserving its freedom of maneuver and consolidating at home—a course of conduct substantially followed by former colonial countries (for example, India) after their independence a century and a half later.
This strategy prevailed for a century, following the last short war with Britain in 1812, allowing the United States to accomplish what no other country was in a position to conceive: it became a great power and a nation of continental scope through the sheer accumulation of domestic power, with a foreign policy focused almost entirely on the negative goal of keeping foreign developments as far at bay as possible.
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 event 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.
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 international 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 behind 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.”
The spread of democracy, in Wilson’s view, would be an automatic consequence of implementing the principle of self-determination. Since the Congress of Vienna, wars had ended with an agreement on the restoration of the balance of power by territorial adjustments. Wilson’s concept of world order called instead for “self-determination”—for each nation, defined by ethnic and linguistic unity, to be given a state. Only through self-government, he assessed, could peoples express their underlying will toward international harmony. And once they had achieved independence and national unity, Wilson argued, they would no longer have an incentive to practice aggressive or self-interested policies. Statesmen following the principle of self-determination would not “dare … attempting any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna,” where elite representatives of the great powers had redrawn international borders in secret, favoring equilibrium over popular aspirations. The world would thus enter
an age … which rejects the standards of national selfishness that once governed the counsels of nations and demands that they shall give way to a new order of things in which the only questions will be: “Is it right?” “Is it just?” “Is it in the interest of mankind?”
Scant evidence supported the Wilsonian premise that public opinion was more attuned to the overall “interest of mankind” than the traditional statesmen whom Wilson castigated. The European countries that entered the war in 1914 all had representative institutions of various influence. (The German parliament was elected by universal suffrage.) In every country, the war was greeted by universal enthusiasm with nary even token opposition in any of the elected bodies. After the war, the publics of democratic France and Britain demanded a punitive peace, ignoring their own historical experience that a stable European order had never come about except through an ultimate reconciliation of victor and defeated. Restraint was much more the attribute of the aristocrats who negotiated at the Congress of Vienna, if only because they shared common values and experiences. Leaders who had been shaped by a domestic policy of balancing a multitude of pressure groups were arguably more attuned to the moods of the moment or to the dictates of national dignity than to abstract principles of the benefit of humanity.
The concept of transcending war by giving each nation a state, similarly admirable as a general concept, faced analogous difficulties in practice. Ironically, the redrawing of Europe’s map on the new principle of linguistically based national self-determination, largely at Wilson’s behest, enhanced Germany’s geopolitical prospects. Before the war, Germany was surrounded by three major powers (France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary), constraining any territorial expansion. Now it faced a collection of small states built on the principle of self-determination—only partially applied, because in Eastern Europe and the Balkans the nationalities were so jumbled that each new state included other nationalities, compounding their strategic weakness with ideological vulnerability. On the eastern flank of Europe’s disaffected central power were no longer great masses—which at the Congress of Vienna had been deemed essential to restrain the then-aggressor France—but, as Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George ruefully assessed, “a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land.”
The implementation of Wilson’s vision was to be fostered by the construction of new international institutions and practices allowing for the peaceful resolution of disputes. The League of Nations would replace the previous concert of powers. Forswearing the traditional concept of an equilibrium of competing interests, League members would implement “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” It was understandable that after a war that had been caused by the confrontation of two rigid alliance systems, statesmen might seek a better alternative. But the “community of power” of which Wilson was speaking replaced rigidity with unpredictability.
What Wilson meant by community of power was a new concept that later became known as “collective security.” In traditional international policy, states with congruent interests or similar apprehensions might assign themselves a special role in guaranteeing the peace and form an alliance—as they had, for example, after the defeat of Napoleon. Such arrangements were always designed to deal with specific strategic threats, either named or implied: for example, a revanchist France after the Congress of Vienna. The League of Nations, by contrast, would be founded on a moral principle, the universal opposition to military aggression as such, whatever its source, its target, or its proclaimed justification. It was aimed not at a specific issue but at the violation of norms. Because the definition of norms has proved to be subject to divergent interpretations, the operation of collective security is, in that sense, unpredictable.
All states, in the League of Nations concept, would pledge themselves to the peaceful resolution of disputes and would subordinate themselves to the neutral application of a shared set of rules of fair conduct. If states differed in their view as to their rights or duties, they would submit their claims to arbitration by a panel of disinterested parties. If a country violated this principle and used force to press its claims, it would be labeled an aggressor. League members would then unite to resist the belligerent party as a violator of the general peace. No alliances, “separate interests,” secret agreements, or “plottings of inner circles” would be permitted within the League, because this would obstruct the neutral application of the system’s rules. International order would be refounded instead on “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”
The distinction Wilson made between alliances and collective security—the key element of the League of Nations system—was central to dilemmas that have followed ever since. An alliance comes about as an agreement on specific facts or expectations. It creates a formal obligation to act in a precise way in defined contingencies. It brings about a strategic obligation fulfillable in an agreed manner. It arises out of a consciousness of shared interests, and the more parallel those interests are, the more cohesive the alliance will be. Collective security, by contrast, is a legal construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are violated. In practice, action must be negotiated from case to case.
Alliances grow out of a consciousness of a defined common interest identified in advance. Collective security declares itself opposed to any aggressive conduct anywhere within the purview of the participating states that, in the proposed League of Nations, involved every recognized state. In the event of a violation, such a collective security system must distill its common purpose after the fact, out of variegated national interests. Yet the idea that in such situations countries will identify violations of peace identically and be prepared to act in common against them is belied by the experience of history. From Wilson to the present, in the League of Nations or its successor, the United Nations, the military actions that can be classed as collective security in the conceptual sense were the Korean War and the first Iraq War, and came about in both cases because the United States had made clear that it would act unilaterally if necessary (in fact, it had in both cases started deployments before there was a formal UN decision). Rather than inspire an American decision, the United Nations decision ratified it. The commitment to support the United States was more a means to gain influence over American actions—already in train—than the expression of a moral consensus.
The balance-of-power system collapsed with the outbreak of World War I because the alliances it spawned had no flexibility, and it was indiscriminately applied to peripheral issues, thereby exacerbating all conflicts. The system of collective security demonstrated the opposite failing when confronted by the initial steps toward World War II. The League of Nations was impotent in the face of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the Italian attack on Abyssinia, the German derogation of the Locarno Treaty, and the Japanese invasion of China. Its definition of aggression was so vague, the reluctance to undertake common action so deep, that it proved inoperative even against flagrant threats to peace. Collective security has repeatedly revealed itself to be unworkable in situations that most seriously threaten international peace and security. (For example, during the Middle East war of 1973, the UN Security Council did not meet, by collusion among the permanent members, until a ceasefire had been negotiated between Washington and Moscow.)
Nevertheless, Wilson’s legacy has so shaped American thinking that American leaders have conflated collective security with alliances. When explaining the nascent Atlantic Alliance system after World War II to a wary Congress, administration spokesmen insisted on describing the NATO alliance as the pure implementation of the doctrine of collective security. They submitted an analysis to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tracing the difference between historic alliances and the NATO treaty, which held that NATO was not concerned with the defense of territory (surely news to America’s European allies). Its conclusion was that the North Atlantic Treaty “is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting ‘balance of power’ but to strengthen the ‘balance of principle.’” (One can imagine the gleam in Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s eyes—an astute student of history, he knew far better—when he presented a treaty designed to get around the weaknesses of the doctrine of collective security to Congress as a measure to implement them.)
In retirement, Theodore Roosevelt deplored Wilson’s attempts at the beginning of World War I to remain aloof from the unfolding conflict in Europe. He then, at its end, questioned the claims made on behalf of the League of Nations. After armistice was declared in November 1918, Roosevelt wrote,
I am for such a League provided we don’t expect too much from it … I am not willing to play the part which even Aesop held up to derision when he wrote of how the wolves and the sheep agreed to disarm, and how the sheep as a guarantee of good faith sent away the watchdogs, and were then forthwith eaten by the wolves.
The test of Wilsonianism has never been whether the world has managed to enshrine peace through sufficiently detailed rules with a broad enough base of signatories. The essential question has been what to do when these rules were violated or, more challengingly, manipulated to ends contrary to their spirit. If international order was a legal system operating before the jury of public opinion, what if an aggressor chose conflict on an issue that the democratic publics regarded as too obscure to warrant involvement—for example, a border dispute between Italy’s colonies in East Africa and the independent Empire of Abyssinia? If two sides violated the proscription against force and the international community cut off arms shipments to both parties as a result, this would often allow the stronger party to prevail. If a party “legally” withdrew from the mechanism of peaceful international order and declared itself no longer bound by its strictures—as with Germany’s, Japan’s, and Italy’s eventual withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, or in our own day the defiance of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty by proliferating countries—were the status quo powers authorized to use force to punish this defiance, or should they attempt to coax the renegade power back into the system? Or simply ignore the challenge? And would a course of appeasement not then provide rewards for defiance? Above all, were there “legal” outcomes that should nonetheless be resisted because they violated other principles of military or political equilibrium—for example, the popularly ratified “self-determination” of Austria and the German-speaking communities of the Czechoslovak Republic to merge with Nazi Germany in 1938, or Japan’s concoction of a supposedly self-determining Manchukuo (“Manchu Country”) in 1932 carved from northeastern China? Were the rules and principles themselves the international order, or were they a scaffolding on top of a geopolitical structure capable of—indeed requiring—more sophisticated management?
THE “OLD DIPLOMACY” had sought to counterbalance the interests of rival states and the passions of antagonistic nationalisms in an equilibrium of contending forces. In that spirit, it had brought France back into the European order after the defeat of Napoleon, inviting it to participate in the Congress of Vienna even while ensuring that it would be surrounded by great masses to contain any future temptations to aggrandizement. For the new diplomacy, which promised to reorder international affairs on moral and not strategic principles, no such calculations were permissible.
This placed the statesmen of 1919 in a precarious position. Germany was not invited to the peace conference and in the resulting treaty was labeled the war’s sole aggressor and assigned the entire financial and moral burden of the conflict. To Germany’s east, however, the statesmen at Versailles struggled to mediate between the multiple peoples who claimed a right to determine themselves on the same territories. This placed a score of weak, ethnically fragmented states between two potentially great powers, Germany and Russia. In any event, there were too many nations to make independence for all realistic or secure; instead, a wavering effort to draft minority rights was begun. The nascent Soviet Union, also not represented at Versailles, was antagonized but not destroyed by an abortive Allied intervention in northern Russia and afterward isolated. And to cap these shortcomings, the U.S. Senate rejected America’s accession to the League of Nations, to Wilson’s shattering disappointment.
In the years since Wilson’s presidency, his failures have generally been ascribed not to shortcomings in his conception of international relations but to contingent circumstances—an isolationist Congress (whose reservations Wilson made little attempt to address or assuage)—or to the stroke that debilitated him during his nationwide speaking tour in support of the League.
As humanly tragic as these events were, it must be said that the failure of Wilson’s vision was not due to America’s insufficient commitment to Wilsonianism. Wilson’s successors tried to implement his visionary program through other complementary and essentially Wilsonian means. In the 1920s and 1930s, America and its democratic partners made a major commitment to a diplomacy of disarmament and peaceful arbitration. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, the United States attempted to forestall an arms race by offering to scrap thirty naval vessels in order to achieve proportionate limitations of the American, British, French, Italian, and Japanese fleets. In 1928, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State Frank Kellogg pioneered the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which purported to outlaw war entirely as “an instrument of national policy”; signatories, who included the vast majority of the world’s independent states, all of the belligerents of World War I, and all of the eventual Axis powers, promised to peacefully arbitrate “all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.” No significant element of these initiatives survived.
And yet Woodrow Wilson, whose career would appear more the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy than of foreign policy textbooks, had touched an essential chord in the American soul. Though far from being the most geopolitically astute or diplomatically skillful American foreign policy figure of the twentieth century, he consistently ranks among the “greatest” presidents in contemporary polls. It is the measure of Wilson’s intellectual triumph that even Richard Nixon, whose foreign policy in fact embodied most of Theodore Roosevelt’s precepts, considered himself a disciple of Wilson’s internationalism and hung a portrait of the wartime President in the Cabinet room.
Woodrow Wilson’s ultimate greatness must be measured by the degree to which he rallied the tradition of American exceptionalism behind a vision that outlasted these shortcomings. He has been revered as a prophet toward whose vision America has judged itself obliged to aspire. Whenever America has been tested by crisis or conflict—in World War II, the Cold War, and our own era’s upheavals in the Islamic world—it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a world order that secures peace through democracy, open diplomacy, and the cultivation of shared rules and standards.
The genius of this vision has been its ability to harness American idealism in the service of great foreign policy undertakings in peacemaking, human rights, and cooperative problem-solving, and to imbue the exercise of American power with the hope for a better and more peaceful world. Its influence has been in no small way responsible for the spread of participatory governance throughout the world in the past century and for the extraordinary conviction and optimism that America has brought to its engagement with world affairs. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Wilson’s principles were so pervasive, so deeply related to the American perception of itself, that when two decades later the issue of world order came up again, the failure of the interwar period did not obstruct their triumphal return. Amidst another world war, America turned once more to the challenge of building a new world order essentially on Wilsonian principles.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s and by now a historic third-term President) and Winston Churchill met for the first time as leaders in Newfoundland aboard HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, they expressed what they described as their common vision in the Atlantic Charter of eight “common principles”—all of which Wilson would have endorsed, while no previous British Prime Minister would have been comfortable with all of them. They included “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”; the end of territorial acquisitions against the will of subject populations; “freedom from fear and want”; and a program of international disarmament, to precede the eventual “abandonment of the use of force” and “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.” Not all of this—especially the point on decolonization—would have been initiated by Winston Churchill, nor would he have accepted it had he not thought it essential to win an American partnership that was Britain’s best, perhaps only, hope to avoid defeat.
Roosevelt even went beyond Wilson in spelling out his ideas of the foundation of international peace. Coming from the academy, Wilson had relied on building an international order on essentially philosophical principles. Having emerged from the manipulatory maelstrom of American politics, Roosevelt placed great reliance on the management of personalities.
Thus Roosevelt expressed the conviction that the new international order would be built on the basis of personal trust:
The kind of world order which we the peace-loving Nations must achieve, must depend essentially on friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on unassailable sincerity and good will and good faith.
Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945:
We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.
When Roosevelt dealt with Stalin during the war, he implemented these convictions. Confronted with evidence of the Soviet Union’s record of broken agreements and anti-Western hostility, Roosevelt is reported to have assured the former U.S. ambassador in Moscow William C. Bullitt:
Bill, I don’t dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man … I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.
During the first encounter of the two leaders at Tehran for a summit in 1943, Roosevelt’s conduct was in keeping with his pronouncements. Upon arrival, the Soviet leader warned Roosevelt that Soviet intelligence had discovered a Nazi plot threatening the President’s safety and offered him hospitality in the heavily fortified Soviet compound, arguing that the American Embassy was less secure and too distant from the projected meeting place. Roosevelt accepted the Soviet offer and rejected the nearby British Embassy to avoid the impression that the Anglo-Saxon leaders were ganging up against Stalin. Going further at joint meetings with Stalin, Roosevelt ostentatiously teased Churchill and generally sought to create the impression of dissociation from Britain’s wartime leader.
The immediate challenge was to define a concept of peace. What principles would guide the relations of the world’s powers? What contribution was required from the United States in designing and securing an international order? Should the Soviet Union be conciliated or confronted? And if these tasks were carried out successfully, what type of world would result? Would peace be a document or a process?
The geopolitical challenge in 1945 was as complex as any confronted by an American president. Even in its war-ravaged condition, the Soviet Union posed two obstacles to the construction of a postwar international order. Its size and the scope of its conquests overthrew the balance of power in Europe. And its ideological thrust challenged the legitimacy of any Western institutional structure: rejecting all existing institutions as forms of illegitimate exploitation, Communism had called for a world revolution to overthrow the ruling classes and restore power to what Karl Marx had called the “workers of the world.”
When in the 1920s the majority of the first wave of European Communist uprisings were crushed or withered for lack of support among the anointed proletariat, Joseph Stalin, implacable and ruthless, promulgated the doctrine of consolidating “socialism in one country.” He eliminated all of the other original revolutionary leaders in a decade of purges, and deployed a largely conscripted labor force to build up Russia’s industrial capacity. Seeking to deflect the Nazi storm to the west, in 1939 he entered a neutrality pact with Hitler, dividing northern and eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. When in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia anyway, Stalin recalled Russian nationalism from its ideological internment and declared the “Great Patriotic War,” imbuing Communist ideology with an opportunistic appeal to Russian imperial feeling. For the first time in Communist rule, Stalin evoked the Russian psyche that had called the Russian state into being and defended it over the centuries through domestic tyrannies and foreign invasions and depredations.
Victory in the war confronted the world with a Russian challenge analogous to that at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, only more acute. How would this wounded giant—having lost at least twenty million lives and with the western third of its vast territory devastated—react to the vacuum opening before it? Attention to Stalin’s pronouncements could have provided the answer but for the conventional wartime illusion, which Stalin had carefully cultivated, that he was moderating Communist ideologues rather than instigating them.
Stalin’s global strategy was complex. He was convinced that the capitalist system inevitably produced wars; hence the end of World War II would at best be an armistice. He considered Hitler a sui generis representative of the capitalist system, not an aberration from it. The capitalist states remained adversaries after Hitler’s defeat, no matter what their leaders said or even thought. As he had said with scorn of the British and French leaders of the 1920s,
They talk about pacifism; they speak about peace among European states. Briand and Chamberlain are embracing each other … All this is nonsense. From European history we know that every time treaties envisaging a new arrangement of forces for new wars have been signed, these treaties have been called treaties of peace … [although] they were signed for the purpose of depicting new elements of the coming war.
In Stalin’s worldview, decisions were determined by objective factors, not personal relationships. Thus the goodwill of wartime alliance was “subjective” and superseded by the new circumstances of victory. The goal of Soviet strategy would be to achieve the maximum security for the inevitable showdown. This meant pushing the security borders of Russia as far west as possible and weakening the countries beyond these security borders through Communist parties and covert operations.
While the war was going on, Western leaders resisted acknowledging assessments of this kind: Churchill because of his need to stay in step with America; Roosevelt because he was advocating a “master plan” to secure a just and lasting peace, which was in effect a reversal of what had been the European international order—he would countenance neither a balance of power nor a restoration of empires. His public progam called for rules for the peaceful resolution of disputes and parallel efforts of the major powers, the so-called Four Policemen: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China. The United States and the Soviet Union especially were expected to take the lead in checking violations of peace.
Charles Bohlen, then a young Foreign Service officer working as Roosevelt’s Russian-language translator and later an architect of the Cold War U.S. policy relationship, faulted Roosevelt’s “American conviction that the other fellow is a ‘good guy’ who will respond properly and decently if you treat him right”:
He [Roosevelt] felt that Stalin viewed the world somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin’s hostility and distrust … were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other countries for years after the Revolution. What he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.
Another view holds that Roosevelt, who had demonstrated his subtlety in the often ruthless way in which he maneuvered the essentially neutralist American people toward a war that few contemporaries considered necessary, was beyond being deceived by a leader even as wily as Stalin. According to this interpretation, Roosevelt was biding his time and humoring the Soviet leader to keep him from making a separate deal with Hitler. He must have known—or would soon discover—that the Soviet view of world order was antithetical to the American one; invocations of democracy and self-determination would serve to rally the American public but must eventually prove unacceptable to Moscow. Once Germany’s unconditional surrender had been achieved and Soviet intransigence had been demonstrated, according to this view, Roosevelt would have rallied the democracies with the same determination he had shown in opposition to Hitler.
Great leaders often embody great ambiguities. When he was assassinated, was President John F. Kennedy on the verge of expanding America’s commitment to Vietnam or withdrawing from it? Naïveté was not, generally speaking, a charge Roosevelt’s critics made against him. Probably the answer is that Roosevelt, like his people, was ambivalent about the two sides of international order. He hoped for a peace based on legitimacy, that is, trust between individuals, respect for international law, humanitarian objectives, and goodwill. But confronted with the Soviet Union’s insistently power-based approach, he would likely have reverted to the Machiavellian side that had brought him to leadership and made him the dominant figure of his period. The question of what balance he would have struck was preempted by his death in the fourth month of his fourth presidential term, before his design for dealing with the Soviet Union could be completed. Harry S. Truman, excluded by Roosevelt from any decision making, was suddenly catapulted into that role.