Thematic Essay: The History of American Foreign Policy

X

Latin America: The Roosevelt Corollary

Roosevelt enjoyed enormous popularity at home, but his expansionist policies in Latin America created tensions in much of the Western Hemisphere. In his annual message to Congress in 1904, the president introduced the Roosevelt Corollary, which updated and strengthened the Monroe Doctrine’s rejection of possible European claims to territory in the Americas. Roosevelt vowed that the United States would maintain stability in the region even if it required an exercise of international police power. With an eye on the potential of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by means of a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, Roosevelt openly involved the United States in a partly contrived revolution against the government of Colombia, whose territory included the future site of the canal. Roosevelt bragged that he “took the Canal Zone, and let Congress debate,” noting that “while the debate goes on the canal does also.” The one-sided terms of the treaty ceded to the U.S. a 16-km (10-mi) strip of land through newly independent Panama and gave the owners “all the rights, power and authority [as] if it were the sovereign of the territory.” Despite such expansion, the United States cautiously continued to avoid alliances with other powers.

Subsequent administrations found themselves drawn into Latin American affairs. Taking office in 1909, President William Howard Taft continued intervention in Latin America through what he termed “dollar diplomacy,” policies that aggressively promoted investment in the region. The Taft administration provided military protection for U.S. commercial activity. His successor Woodrow Wilson criticized these policies in Latin America, but after becoming president in 1912 Wilson found himself involved in a war against Mexico’s popular revolutionary heroes. Elsewhere in Latin America, Wilson vowed to promote democracy and legitimate government, and he compiled a substantial history of interventionism in places such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

United States diplomacy was nowhere as bold and tied to domestic commercial interests as in Latin America. The region became an important source of commodities and a market for manufactured goods. Whether it acted for reasons of commerce or for protection of the Panama Canal, the United States came to be viewed as the colossus of the north. Imperialistic policies planted the seeds for the troubled relationships with Latin American countries that continued through the 20th century. Resentment of the United States grew over several decades and came to a head during the Cold War, when anti-American figures such as Fidel Castro of Cuba and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua denounced “Yankee imperialism” to the delight of their supporters.

XI

Involvement in European Affairs

While the United States focused on Latin America and its interests in the Pacific, affairs in Europe reached a crisis level. Despite its expanding presence overseas, in the early 20th century the United States remained a relative newcomer in international affairs, especially in places where national interest was not clearly apparent. Even prominent Americans displayed their inexperience. “Where are the Balkans?” William Jennings Bryan asked an American diplomat when he stopped by the U.S. embassy in Turkey in 1906. Bryan, despite his eminence as a two-time presidential candidate and future secretary of state, revealed a common American ignorance of crises in Europe.

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Only eight years later, the century’s first great war started in the Balkans, the powder keg of Europe, but few of Bryan’s contemporaries knew or cared about places such as Serbia or Montenegro, which seemed inconsequential to the vital interests of the United States. Brand Whitlock, then the U.S. minister to Belgium, later wrote that he “had never heard of Sarajevo” and “had not the least idea of where it was in the world, if it was in this world.” When World War I began in Europe, most Americans were puzzled and just wanted to stay out of it, but the growing prominence of American power made involvement in major conflicts almost inevitable.

XII

Wilson Attempts to Maintain Neutrality

When fighting broke out in Europe after the 1914 assassination of Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bryan’s generation reacted with disgust. Two decades of imperialistic competition among the major powers ultimately led to the kind of opposing alliances that the United States had attempted to avoid since the presidency of Washington. Although it was clear from the outset that Wilson’s sympathies were with Britain and its allies and against the Central Powers—Germany and Austria-Hungary—the president immediately urged the public to remain neutral “in fact as well as in name.” Wilson’s diplomatic efforts to negotiate a cease-fire, although futile, underscored his idealism and desire to maintain neutrality. Wilson hoped to safeguard freedom of trade and to maintain the open door policy.

XIII

The United States Enters World War I

Although the United States remained neutral until three years into the war, it provided Britain with crucial military supplies. United States relations with Germany worsened in 1915, when a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. In 1917 Germany concluded that engaging the United States in the war might be less harmful than allowing it to trade freely with Britain. Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson realized that participation in the war was now inevitable and that entry would give the United States a prominent role in shaping the peace process after the war’s end. Wilson asked for a declaration of war, which Congress granted on April 6, 1917.

Unprepared, the United States was slow to make a significant military contribution in the war but succeeded in swiftly reopening essential supply lines. Not until the last months of the fighting did the doughboys, as the U.S. soldiers were called, become decisive in the final land offensive that defeated Germany. The war effort resulted in an enormous increase in American military power. By the end of the war a selective service system, established just a year before in 1917, managed to induct 2.8 million men between the ages of 21 and 35 into the military. With a force of about five million, the nation’s fighting manpower had increased nearly twenty-fold since the beginning of the war. The Spanish-American War had established an international foothold for the United States. World War I raised it to another tier.

XIV

Postwar Wilsonian Idealism

Although Wilson did not make World War I the “war to end all wars” as he had hoped, his idealism played a significant part in finally bringing peace to Europe. The Fourteen Points he delivered in a January 1918 speech outlined his blueprint for settlement and ultimately helped lead to the armistice, signaling to the Germans that they would be spared a humiliating surrender. Wilson’s vision of a just peace encouraged German military leaders, who had suffered an accumulation of battlefield setbacks, to press their government to stop the fighting.

In his proposals Wilson envisioned a world in which freedom and self-determination would eliminate imperialism and colonialism. The president faced serious obstacles. Nationalism and politics drove the postwar negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, and Germany was hit with a penalty far more severe than Wilson had proposed in the Fourteen Points. However, the last of the points, the creation of an international alliance called the League of Nations, remained intact. At home in the United States, Wilson waged a noble battle for U.S. acceptance of the League. In September 1919, during an extensive speaking tour of the American West, Wilson collapsed from a massive stroke. By this time the tide of isolationism was rising in the United States. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts seized on the League of Nations as a threat to “the vital principles of American foreign policy,” and Congress killed the drive for American membership.