Uses of Force and Wilsonian Foreign Policy

Frederick S. Calhoun

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612770666
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

" Frederick S. Calhoun's new book makes a timely and important contribution to examining one of the most serious questions confronting the nation's foreign relations: When and how to use military force. By citing numerous examples from the past, Calhoun is able to show that there is an infinite variety of reasons behind, justification for, and consequences of, each decision to employ force abroad. The subject is of real contemporary significance as the United States and other nations in the post—Cold War age grapple with the question of under what circumstances the employment of military force may become necessary. At bottom is the question of the relationship between foreign policy and military power in a democratic society, between what the nation stands for and the military power at its disposal. Anyone interested in current world issues as well as the future of American democracy would be well advised to turn to this book for a careful, thoughtful examination of such questions."-- Akira Iriye, Professor of History, Harvard University"

Uses of Force is solidly based on archival research. More than that, it presents this material, including some that is familiar, in a novel context. The originality of this book is the construction of categories to analyze the uses of force in Wilsonian diplomacy. Calhoun has re-examined President Wilson's employment of military force in various settings around the world. This treatment will stimulate thinking about the subject even if other specialists do not always agree with Calhoun's conclusions. The book is a welcome addition to the literature."-- Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Professor of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

1

The Uses of
FORCE

in Wilsonian Diplomacy

Force achieves many international goals. Nations turn to arms to defend their territories or to steal more; to protect their citizens or to punish others; to exert their independence or to subdue it in others; to resolve disputes or to impose their views. Wars have been fought over God and women, gold and land, glory and status. The Greeks fought for a decade to rescue Helen of Troy; the crusaders battled for two centuries to reclaim the Holy Land. Throughout history, national leaders have accepted force as a convenient method to express their will, whether toward their own peoples or toward the peoples of foreign lands.

In a previous book, I suggested that international power assumes many forms—diplomatic, economic, moral, military (the threat of force), and armed power (the actual use of force). To examine the subject of power, the study used force as the example, policy as the theme. The presidency of Woodrow Wilson provided the setting. Wilson repeatedly relied on force to implement his foreign policies. Between April 1914 and July 1918, he embarked on seven armed interventions, a record unsurpassed by any other American president. Wilson dispatched military expeditions twice into Mexico, into Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the battlefields of World War I, northern Russia, and Siberia. In Wilsonian foreign policy, force was an adjunct to diplomacy.

After analyzing each of Wilson’s military interventions, I concluded that Wilson turned to force to promote American ideology, enforce international law, encourage international cooperation, and effect collective security. During each intervention, Wilson maintained strict command over the military to ensure that his policies—and his alone—were implemented. In the Wilsonian way of war, civilian control over the military was the method used to employ force. American democratic ideology defined the goals for armed power, international law described the rationale, and cooperation among nations provided the conceptual framework for international relations.¹

Force was ancillary to Wilsonian internationalism. Wilson insisted that the same principles and moral scruples that shaped his internationalism also guided his use of armed power. “The force of America is the force of moral principle,” Wilson proclaimed to the graduating class of the U.S. Naval Academy shortly after the navy occupied Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. “Is that not something to be proud of,” he asked the new graduates, “that you know how to use force like men of conscience and like gentlemen, serving your fellow men and not trying to overcome them?” America was unique, Wilson argued, because it directed its power toward the greater good of mankind, not toward aggrandizement and oppression.²

In investing American power with internationalism and ideology, Wilson insisted on absolute control over armed power. He imposed stringent limitations on his uses of force and the men who implemented them. Wilson depended on the American military to determine the tactical approach to occupying a city or country or engaging in a war (provided those tactics closely coincided with his policies), but he gave the military little say about the strategy and policies behind his interventions. That determination was his. The president jealously guarded his prerogative to establish the goals and define the objectives for using force.

Wilson limited his first intervention to the occupation of Veracruz, Mexico, despite the military’s dire warnings that invading the city would lead to war. In taking the port, Wilson originally intended to punish the government of Victoriano Huerta, the Mexican dictator who offended Wilson’s concept of democracy. In the spring of 1914, soldiers loyal to Huerta arrested a handful of U.S. sailors in Tampico, forcing them at gunpoint from a whaleboat flying the American flag fore and aft, then parading them through the city streets. This insult outraged Wilson and his military advisers. After the navy took Veracruz, however, Wilson saw an opportunity to initiate negotiations with all the parties to the Mexican Revolution. During the subsequent conference, the insult was forgotten; instead, Wilson sought not merely to rid Mexico of Huerta, but to solve the social, political, and economic problems causing the revolution. His strategy depended on limiting the intervention to the occupation of Veracruz.³

Two years later, Wilson dispatched the Punitive Expedition across the border to punish the Mexican marauders who had attacked Columbus, New Mexico. He again ignored the military’s contention that the chase would result in war. As he had during the occupation of Veracruz, Wilson used the presence of American forces on Mexican soil to open discussions with Mexican authorities on ending the revolution. Once again, he believed that the negotiations depended on limiting the intervention, not expanding it. As a direct result of the intervention, American officials conferred with representatives of the Mexican government, but neither Wilson’s force nor his persuasion proved effective in resolving the Mexican Revolution.⁴

In 1915 Wilson ordered the navy to take over Haiti and, a year later, to impose a military government on the Dominican Republic. The chronic breakdown of organized government in Haiti convinced him to protect foreign residents and to prevent some other nation—France or Germany in particular—from acting first. When, a year later, the Dominican Republic seemed to slip into Haitian-style chaos, Wilson again ordered the navy to take over the country. Throughout each occupation, the president insisted that the navy carefully restrict itself to the minimum force necessary. He intended to teach the Haitians and Dominicans American principles of democracy and self-government.⁵

Wilson timed America’s entry into World War I, even to the extent of discouraging the military from preparing for it until the last moment. German transgressions on American neutral rights convinced Wilson of the necessity of war. Once he committed the country to the fight, however, Wilson hoped to reorganize international relations to avoid future wars. The reorganization depended on cooperation among nations. Throughout the war, Wilson generally allowed the military to fight as it thought best, but he reserved all authority to address the political issues of the war’s resolution.⁶

Later Wilson, again overruling the military, agreed to the joint Allied interventions in Siberia and northern Russia in mid-1918. Although he concurred with his military subordinates that the interventions would offer little of military value, Wilson saw in each a way to underscore his commitment to collective action with those nations allied against Germany. In Wilson’s mind, the interventions portended a future international system in which collective security would protect the peace and solve international problems. The twin interventions in Russia were the test cases for Wilson’s commitment to collective action.⁷

The military never understood. “There seems to be almost a determination to deny the fact that the military ingredient exists in our national and international life,” Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske, the aide for operations to the secretary of the navy, complained privately in the fall of 1914 at the conclusion of the occupation of Veracruz. Five years later, General William S. Graves, who commanded the American military expedition into Siberia—the last of Wilson’s interventions—admitted that he had “never been able to come to any satisfactory conclusion as to why the United States ever engaged in such intervention.” During the interventions that took place between Veracruz and Siberia, other soldiers expressed strikingly similar confusion over Wilson’s policies and plans.⁸

Tasker H. Bliss, one of the few military men whose judgement Wilson respected, eventually came to share his colleagues’ disillusionment with the Wilsonian approach. Bliss prayed that World War I would lead to the complete destruction of militarism and the disarmament of all nations. “It is European militarism, world militarism, that is the curse of the world,” he declared firmly in October 1918. His solution to the war was to dump all armaments into the sea. “The cause,” he wrote of the war, “was good because we believed that we were forever putting an end to the cruel business.” Unfortunately, the Paris Peace Conference convinced him that Wilson and the other diplomats had failed to destroy militarism.⁹

As a member of the American commission to the peace conference, Bliss embraced the Wilsonian vision, even as he witnessed first hand its failure. By midpoint in the negotiations, he retained little hope that the peace settlement would achieve the Wilsonian goals. As he wrote his wife on 25 March 1919:

Things here seem to me to grow blacker and blacker every day. Two months ago I offered to bet … that the Peace Conference would end in nothing. Now I am ready to bet more. To me there does not seem to be any honesty or common sense in political men over here. I don’t wonder that the world is going Bolshevik. It is the last despairing cry of people who have lost all faith in their government.

“Civilization,” Bliss wrote a friend, “cannot endure such another war.” Unfortunately, the terms of the Versailles peace treaty, and the subsequent unwillingness of the victorious nations, including the United States, to disarm, convinced him that another war was unavoidable.¹⁰

Yet Admiral Fiske and his uniformed colleagues were wrong. Far from denying the importance of the military ingredient, Wilson understood it all too well. Wilson instead vehemently denied the importance of generals and admirals in determining when and why to use force, what to achieve, and when and why to quit. Wilson sought the military’s advice only on how best to achieve goals that he defined. To the bitter disappointment of the leading soldiers of the day, he wanted nothing more of them.

Nor did Wilson believe, as Bliss did, that war could be eradicated simply by disarming nations and relying on international cooperation or comity. Rather, armed power undergirded the Wilsonian international system. Wilson sought limited disarmament and collective security to dissuade nations from turning to arms, but collective security meant, ultimately, collective, forceful action against renegade nations. “Armed force is in the background in this program,” Wilson readily admitted about the League of Nations, “but it is in the background, and if the moral force of the world will not suffice, the physical force of the world shall. But that is the last resort, because this is intended as a constitution of peace, not as a league of war.”¹¹

Indeed, despite his reputation as a man of peace, Wilson never decried the resort to arms, only those selfish purposes over which other nations too often went to war. If the cause was right and the purposes enlightened, Wilson readily enlisted in the battle. “There is nothing noble or admirable in war itself,” he maintained, “but there is something very noble and admirable occasionally in the causes for which war is undertaken.” Americans, Wilson repeatedly asserted, were “the champions of free government and national sovereignty.” As he explained in January 1916:

There is something that the American people love better than they love peace. They love the principles upon which their political life is founded. They are ready at any time to fight for the vindication of their character and of their honor… . there is one thing that the individual ought to fight for, and that the Nation ought to fight for, it is the integrity of its own convictions. We can not surrender our convictions.

Although force was a “clumsy and brutal method,” Wilson refused to advocate its abolishment until just wars were no longer necessary. “I will not cry ‘peace,’” he proclaimed in 1911, “so long as there is sin and wrong in the world.”¹²

In a speech to the National Press Club in May 1916, Wilson admitted that, “If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down. If a man will not listen to you quietly in a seat, sit on his neck and make him listen.” The power of America, Wilson believed, was “the might of righteous purpose and of a sincere love for the freedom of mankind.” Force, for Wilson, was not inherently wrong or evil, it was the motives, purposes, and goals of force that were either wrong or laudable.¹³

In fact, Wilson promised that America “would lend her moral influence not only, but her physical force, if other nations will join her, to see to it that no nation and no group of nations tries to take advantage of another nation or group of nations, and that the only thing ever fought for is the common rights of humanity.” To accomplish this, Wilson pledged “the full force of this nation, moral and physical, to a league of nations which shall see to it that nobody disturbs the peace of the world without submitting his case first to the opinion of mankind.”¹⁴

Because he so strongly believed that force took its morality from the policies that controlled it, Wilson as president held firmly to his authority as commander in chief to control the military. He brooked neither quarrels nor interference from his uniformed subordinates. Nor did he allow them much control over any of the interventions conducted during his administration. By protecting his authority, Wilson ensured that each intervention, each resort to force, was confined to the purposes and policies he embraced.¹⁵

In the Wilsonian way of war, the limits of force were equal in importance to the power of force.

Consequently, the interventions undertaken by Wilson bore his stamp more than anyone else’s. In the Wilsonian way of war, Wilson was the principal warrior. For this reason, studying his seven military interventions revealed much about Wilson, his policies, and his purposes. Those I analyzed in Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy. But Wilson’s reliance on armed power also illustrated how force could be used to achieve international goals. As I examined each intervention, it became clear that the general policies Wilson pursued—fostering American ideology, sustaining international law and cooperation, and establishing collective security—compelled him to alter, even during the course of a single intervention, the ways in which he applied force. Circumstances, too, changed, which also required Wilson to refocus the immediate purpose of the intervention on new or different objectives. The cumulative effect of studying all the interventions was to derive specific definitions or categories of how force was applied during each intervention. For my purposes, I called these applications uses of force.

Originally, for example, Wilson intended the occupation of Veracruz as a punishment for an insult to the American flag. As Wilson and his military advisers plotted this punishment, however, they learned that a large shipment of arms consigned to Huerta was due to arrive at Veracruz. These arms posed a serious threat to the American naval troops about to land in Mexico. Wilson hastened the intervention in order to intercept the munitions. Immediately after the occupation of Veracruz, Wilson privately arranged for the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to offer to mediate the dispute between the United States and Mexico. Wilson used that mediation to discuss the far broader issue of ending the Mexican Revolution. Months later, as he prepared to withdraw American forces from Veracruz, Wilson delayed the evacuation until the new Mexican government promised not to harm those Mexicans who had helped the American military administer the city.

Thus within the single intervention at Veracruz, Wilson changed the tactical purposes for employing force four times. The strategical goal of settling the Mexican Revolution along democratic lines remained essentially the same throughout Wilson’s eight years as president. But during the course of the occupation of Veracruz, as with the Punitive Expedition two years later, the direct or immediate objectives he sought with force changed a number of times. Wilson moved quickly from punishing the Mexican governme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Uses of Force in Wilsonian Diplomacy
• 2. Force for Protection
• 3. Force for Retribution
• 4. Force for Solution
• 5. Force for Introduction
• 6. Force for Association
• 7. The Abuses of Force
• Notes
• Note on Sources
• Index