More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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 wrong-doing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
“More and more, the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.”
Roosevelt commands a unique historical position in America’s approach to international relations. No other president defined America’s world role so completely in terms of national interest, or identified the national interest so comprehensively with the balance of power. Roosevelt shared the view of his countrymen, that America was the best hope for the world. But unlike most of them, he did not believe that it could preserve the peace or fulfill its destiny simply by practicing civic virtues. In his perception of the nature of world order, he was much closer to Palmerston or Disraeli than to
...more
To him, international life meant struggle, and Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest was a better guide to history than personal morality.
He disavowed the efficacy of international law. What a nation could not protect by its own power could not be safeguarded by the international community.
A milk-and-water righteousness unbacked by force is to the full as wicked as and even more mischievous than force divorced from righteousness.
He wanted Russia to be weakened rather than altogether eliminated from the balance of power—for, according to the maxims of balance-of-power diplomacy, an excessive weakening of Russia would have merely substituted a Japanese for the Russian threat.
Wilson, on the other hand, tapped his people’s emotions with arguments that were as morally elevated as they were largely incomprehensible to foreign leaders.
In Wilson’s first State of the Union Address, on December 2, 1913, he laid down the outline of what later came to be known as Wilsonianism. Universal law and not equilibrium, national trustworthiness and not national self-assertion were, in Wilson’s view, the foundations of international order.
America’s influence, in Wilson’s view, depended on its unselfishness; it had to preserve itself so that, in the end, it could step forward as a credible arbiter between the warring parties. Roosevelt had asserted that the war in Europe, and especially a German victory, would ultimately threaten American security. Wilson maintained that America was essentially disinterested, hence should emerge as mediator.
In fact, the thrust of Wilson’s policy was quite the opposite of isolationism. What Wilson was proclaiming was not America’s withdrawal from the world but the universal applicability of its values and, in time, America’s commitment to spreading them.
America’s special mission transcends day-to-day diplomacy and obliges it to serve as a beacon of liberty for the rest of mankind. • The foreign policies of democracies are morally superior because the people are inherently peace-loving. • Foreign policy should reflect the same moral standards as personal ethics. • The state has no right to claim a separate morality for itself. Wilson endowed these assertions of American moral exceptionalism with a universal dimension: Dread of the power of any other nation we are incapable of. We are not jealous of rivalry in the fields of commerce or of any
...more
All other nations have sought to be judged by the compatibility of their national interests with those of other societies.
Neither Wilson nor his later disciples, through the present, have been willing to face the fact that, to foreign leaders imbued with less elevated maxims, America’s claim to altruism evokes a certain aura of unpredictability; whereas the national interest can be calculated, altruism depends on the definition of its practitioner.
In Roosevelt’s conception, America would have been one nation among many—more powerful than most and part of an elite group of great powers—but still subject to the historic ground rules of equilibrium. Wilson moved America onto a plane entirely remote from such considerations. Disdaining the balance of power, he insisted that America’s role was “not to prove… our selfishness, but our greatness.”40 If that was true, America had no right to hoard its values for itself. As early as 1915, Wilson put forward the unprecedented doctrine that the security of America was inseparable from the security
...more
Statesmen, even warriors, focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the “real” world is the one they want to bring into being.
America knew no such limitations, boldly proclaiming, if not the end of history, then surely its irrelevance, as it moved to transform values heretofore considered unique to America into universal principles applicable to all.
In another speech, Wilson went even further by saying that America’s power would atrophy unless the United States spread freedom around the globe: We set this Nation up to make men free, and we did not confine our conception and purpose to America, and now we will make men free. If we did not do that, all the fame of America would be gone, and all her power would be dissipated.
Wilson’s historic achievement lies in his recognition that Americans cannot sustain major international engagements that are not justified by their moral faith. His downfall was in treating the tragedies of history as aberrations, or as due to the shortsightedness and the evil of individual leaders, and in his rejection of any objective basis for peace other than the force of public opinion and the worldwide spread of democratic institutions.
However, such an Old World approach ran counter to the wellspring of American emotions being tapped by Wilson—as it does to this day.
Convinced that all the nations of the world had an equal interest in peace and would therefore unite to punish those who disturbed it, Wilson proposed to defend the international order by the moral consensus of the peace-loving: …this age is 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?”52
For three generations, critics have savaged Wilson’s analysis and conclusions; and yet, in all this time, Wilson’s principles have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy thinking.
But in the vast majority of cases—and in nearly all of the difficult ones—the nations of the world tend to disagree either about the nature of the threat or about the type of sacrifice they are prepared to make to meet it.
Did America have any security interests it needed to defend regardless of the methods by which they were challenged? Or should America resist only changes which could fairly be described as illegal? Was it the fact or the method of international transformation that concerned America?
In Roosevelt’s estimation, only mystics, dreamers, and intellectuals held the view that peace was man’s natural condition and that it could be maintained by disinterested consensus. To him, peace was inherently fragile and could be preserved only by eternal vigilance, by the arms of the strong, and by alliances among the like-minded.
Tending to turn foreign-policy issues into a struggle between good and evil, Americans have generally felt ill at ease with compromise, as they have with partial or inconclusive outcomes.
Trusting in the rule of law, it has found it difficult to reconcile its faith in peaceful change with the historical fact that almost all significant changes in history have involved violence and upheaval.
For most of the medieval period, however, the Holy Roman Emperor never achieved that degree of central control.
The balance of power replaced the nostalgia for universal monarchy with the consolation that each state, in pursuing its own selfish interests, would somehow contribute to the safety and progress of all the others.
