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a course of conduct substantially followed by former colonial countries (for example, India) after their independence a century and a half later.
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
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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.
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.
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,
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
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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,
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.
the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine,
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
“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.
League members would implement “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, ...
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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.”
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.
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.
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
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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.
the failure of Wilson’s vision was not due to America’s insufficient commitment to Wilsonianism.
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.
And yet Woodrow Wilson,
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
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 c...
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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.
Amidst another world war, America turned once more to the challenge of building a new world order essentially on Wilsonian principles.
eight “common principles”—all
“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.”
Winston Churchill,
would he have accepted it had he not thought it essential to win an American partnership that was Britain’s best, pe...
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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 unassa...
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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.
if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige,
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?
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,
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.
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.
