Authors: Henry Kissinger
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.
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
.”