ABSTRACT
The United States had come a long way by the dawn of the twentieth century. Territorial expansion had given it possession of land stretching from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing a vast expanse of North America. Immigration and fertility had taken its population from four million in 1790 to more than 76 million in 1900.2 The expansion of industry and commerce had transformed the primarily agricultural nation of early independence into one of the economic powerhouses of the developed world. All the ingredients were in place for the United States to play a major role in the global balance of power. This chapter and the next cover the presidencies and ideas of Theodore
Roosevelt (1901-9) and Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), which in terms of the book’s portrait of ideological evolution form an interlinked pair. In so doing, they describe the process by which America reasoned its way towards embracing the desire to translate this potential for power into concrete global influence. Realist logic can tell us that the huge growth in America’s power capabilities by 1900 naturally led it to expand the scope of its definition of the national interest.3 Structural analysis of events in the external environment during this period, especially during Wilson’s presidency, can highlight in addition the pressures for increased US activism brought to bear by the international system. The destructive operation of the European balance of power, which once again brought about global war, created circumstances in which US leaders felt pushed to pursue a more globally engaged foreign policy. While accepting the merits of both these analyses, these chapters seek to
argue the importance of a parallel ideological dimension to events. Roosevelt and Wilson did not exist in a political vacuum, free to change the established course of US foreign policy by fiat. They needed to offer coherent strategic explanation of the need for a change in national course. In doing so, they were significantly constrained by the established ideological tradition of US foreign policy. In other words, they needed to contend, even as they broke new ground, with the deeply rooted consensus dating from the Founders’ Era. To paraphrase a later president, they needed to build a bridge to the twentieth century. These chapters seek to argue that the nature of the American
internationalism constructed in this period was significantly shaped by this need to fashion a traversable ideological path between the prevailing tradition of ‘non-entangled’ aversion to the balance-of-power system and the new necessity of engaging with the global international system. The result – as set out in detail in the body of this chapter and the next –
was an American internationalism that emphasized liberal universalism, concerned itself inextricably with the internal politics of other states, and considered the price of US engagement to be the pursuit of a cooperative new order among nations. The ‘road not taken’ was a self-conscious realist strategic perspective, conceiving of the United States as an ordinary participant in the global balance of power and seeking to advance its interests, narrowly defined, in competitive coexistence with that system’s other states. Even Theodore Roosevelt – the focus of this chapter – who was among the most ‘realistic’ of America’s historical leaders, characterized the expansion of America’s international role in highly moralistic terms, justifying a new militarism and internationalism by reference to the progress of ‘civilization’ and liberal imperialist assumptions regarding relations with other nations. The chapter first describes the national and international context in which
America was operating in this turn-of-the-century period. It then sets out, over several sections, the ways in which Roosevelt’s bold internationalist ideology sought to push back the limits imposed by the inherited tradition of detachment, hoping to gain favour for a more globally active US policy. In the course of doing so, it acknowledges the realist aspect of his thought, but also emphasizes the equal if not greater importance of the elements of moralism and liberal imperialism in his contribution to American political ideology. Further, it shows how his deepening of the Monroe Doctrine, combined with his civilizational imperialism, prefigured Wilsonianism in laying a template for the universalist and interventionist American internationalism of later decades. The importance attributed by Roosevelt to military strength even in peacetime is also highlighted. This was out of step with the traditions of American thought prior to, and indeed during, Roosevelt’s time, but his views would become established as mainstream after the Second World War. In providing this detailed portrayal of Rooseveltian thinking on foreign
policy, the aim of the chapter is to show that even as the shifting circumstances of the nation, internal and external, pushed it towards a new global engagement, the ideology that began to take shape was not balance-of-power realism, but something more universalist, perhaps even imperialist, in character. In the past, the realism of American leaders had led them, based on their reading of America’s capabilities and circumstances, to shun the global balance of power. Now that the imperative was instead to engage with the global system, America’s embedded ideology of detachment faced a challenge. The ideological visions that contended to displace the Founders’ Era consensus, however, were themselves inheritors of that era’s aversion to balance-of-power thinking, and the result was a new American internationalism significantly at odds with realism’s recommended attitudinal approach to foreign policy.
