American Pendulum

Recurring Debates in U.S. Grand Strategy

Christopher Hemmer

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501701184
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As new presidential administrations come into power, they each bring their own approach to foreign policy. No grand strategy, however, is going to be completely novel. New administrations never start with a blank slate, so it is always possible to see similarities between an administration and its predecessors. Conversely, since each administration faces novel problems and operates in a unique context, no foreign policy strategy is going to be an exact replica of its predecessors. In American Pendulum, Christopher Hemmer examines America's grand strategic choices between 1914 and 2014 using four recurring debates in American foreign policy as lenses. First, how should the United States balance the trade-offs between working alone versus working with other states and international organizations? Second, what is the proper place of American values in foreign policy? Third, where does the strategic perimeter of the United States lie? And fourth, is time on the side of the United States or of its enemies?Offering new readings of debates within the Wilson, Truman, Nixon, Bush, and Obama administrations, Hemmer asserts that heated debates, disagreements, and even confusions over U.S. grand strategy are not only normal but also beneficial. He challenges the claim that uncertainties or inconsistences about the nation's role in the world or approach to security issues betray strategic confusion or the absence of a grand strategy. American foreign policy, he states, is most in danger not when debates are at their most pointed but when the weight of opinion crushes dissent. As the United States looks ahead to an increasingly multipolar world with increasing complicated security issues, Hemmer concludes, developing an effective grand strategy requires ongoing contestation and compromises between competing visions and policies.

CHAPTER 1

Finding a Place on the World Stage

From Roosevelt to Roosevelt

At the outset of the twentieth century, following the economic growth of the United States as well as the strengthening of the federal government as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the United States was poised to take its place as a major power on the global stage. No longer just a regional power, the United States now had to approach its grand strategy as a world power. Using the four debates discussed in the introduction as a framework, this chapter explores the evolution of initial attempts by the United States to construct a grand strategy as a great power, tracing developments from Theodore Roosevelt, through Woodrow Wilson and the Republican presidents of the 1920s, to Franklin Roosevelt.

This approach to the study of American grand strategy cuts against some traditionally offered accounts of the country’s early experiences as a great power. For instance, a stark divide between a purportedly realist Teddy Roosevelt and the liberal Woodrow Wilson is a conventional way of discussing early debates over the proper role of the United States as a world power.1 By widening the focus to include the four debates used in this book, however, these two central figures are seen less as polar opposites and more as allies in the effort to find a place for the United States on a global stage. Both favored greatly expanding America’s conception of its security perimeter and both shared a strong conviction that time was on America’s side. Although they differed on the proper place of values in U.S. foreign policy, their positions even on this issue, as will be argued below, contain an important amount of overlap. The one area where the two disagreed most sharply was on the relative merits of unilateral versus multilateral approaches to U.S. foreign policy.

Another bit of conventional wisdom regarding the early years of the United States as a great power is that disappointment stemming from the meager results of World War I led the United States to turn inward and adopt an isolationist grand strategy. Using the four debates outlined in the introduction as a lens, however, a more varied and richer story emerges. The Republican presidents of the 1920s pursued a global strategy to advance U.S. values and interests, but contrary to Wilson, they attempted to privatize America’s crusade rather than multilateralize it. This strategy collapsed with the onset of the Great Depression because economic collapse undermined a key component of that strategy, which was the conviction that time was on America’s side. Rather than accept this historical pessimism, however, Franklin Roosevelt attempted a new synthesis of the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that put a concert of great powers at its center, rather than the unilateralism of his familial ancestor, or the more egalitarian international institutions favored by his political ancestor, Woodrow Wilson. This chapter explores the successes and failures of these attempts at constructing U.S. grand strategy, attempts that should not be reduced to a single debate between idealism and realism or dismissed as a misguided turn to isolationism.

The Expanding Security Perimeter of a Confident and Growing Power

The central question that both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson attempted to answer was: What should the overall foreign policy of the United States be now that it was a growing world power? This common question ensured an important degree of overlap in their grand strategies because the question itself contained certain assumptions that had important implications for U.S. foreign policy. That the United States was now a world power meant that its security perimeter had to be defined more broadly than it had been in the past. This expanding security perimeter took institutional form in 1898 when President William McKinley created a “war room” in the White House equipped with global maps and telegraph connections to oversee expanded U.S. activities overseas. These activities included the annexation of Hawaii; the acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico in the war with Spain; a treaty splitting Samoa with Germany; and military participation in putting down the Boxer Rebellion in China.2 Whereas the U.S. Navy prior to 1890 was focused on issues of coastal defense and contained not a single battleship, by 1905 the fleet had twenty-five blue-water battleships.3 Looking to the future, as long as America’s economic expansion continued, time was on America’s side as a growing power.

Whereas most of the founders would have shared the latter assumption that time was on America’s side (provided the issue of slavery did not permanently divide the Union), the move to a global rather than a regional security perimeter marks an important break in U.S. grand strategy, although that break was probably more seamless in the Pacific than in the Atlantic. As Walter McDougall noted regarding the Monroe Doctrine, “the watery boundary where America stopped and Asia began was never defined.” 4 Greater involvement in European politics, however, required a more direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine. Although he declared that the growing American republic considered the entire Western hemisphere to be its sphere of influence, President Monroe had also pledged that “In the Wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so.”5

Theodore Roosevelt later added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that furthered the proclaimed U.S. role in the Western Hemisphere, arrogating for the United States the right to exercise what he called “international policy power” throughout the region.6 As it grew in power, however, did the United States want to keep the second half of Monroe’s pledge, forswearing U.S. involvement with issues outside the hemisphere? Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Elihu Root, in justifying the continued inclusion of South America within the ambit of the Monroe Doctrine, did so in expansive terms that implied that America’s strategic perimeter had no logical geographical endpoint. According to Root, “Undoubtedly as one passes to the south and the distance from the Caribbean increases, the necessity of maintaining the rule of Monroe becomes less immediate and apparent. But who is competent to draw the line? Who will say, ‘To this point the rule of Monroe should apply; beyond this point, it should not’? Who will say that a new national force created beyond any line that can be drawn will stay beyond it and will not in the long course of time extend itself indefinitely?”7

Root was quick to affirm his commitment to keeping the separation between Europe and the Americas “as absolute and complete as possible,”8 but the logic of his argument provided no basis for such a separation. Instead, the security perimeter of the United States, a rising power, was likely to “extend itself indefinitely.” Moreover, as Frank Ninkovich notes, the Roosevelt Corollary fundamentally altered the nature of the Monroe doctrine. The United States was no longer pledging to protect the states of Latin America against the Europeans; instead, it was pledging to police the area in the interest of both the United States and the Europeans.9

Wilson too believed that the U.S. security perimeter had expanded, and by the coming of World War I he was explicitly speaking of America’s interests in global terms. As a result of the Spanish-American war, the United States had “stepped forth into the open arena of the world” in Wilson’s estimation. No matter how much the United States may have historically preferred to stay aloof from European wars, Wilson maintained that “nothing that concerns the whole world can be indifferent to us” and that “the interests of all nations are our own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind is inevitably our affair.”10 In short, the security perimeter of the United States had been universalized.

Does Can Imply Ought? Values in American Foreign Policy

The increasing power of the United States also raised questions about the proper place of American values in its foreign policy. When John Quincy Adams warned his country about the dangers of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, he was speaking as the representative of a young and weak nation. Even if the United States had wanted to do more to help independence movements in Latin America or democratic movements in Greece, the country Adams spoke for lacked the capabilities to make a significant contribution. Was Adams’s course still the right one for a stronger American republic? As early as 1851, Senator Robert Stockton argued that the policy of husbanding the resources of “the infant Hercules” was sound only to the point where “he should be able to encounter, on more equal terms, the monsters he was destined to overthrow.”11 That impulse was stronger at the start of the twentieth century. As President William McKinley confidently assessed the situation, “It is not possible that 75 millions of American free-men are unable to establish liberty and justice and good government in our new possessions.”12 In the even more expansive language of Senator Albert Beveridge in 1898:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No. He has made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigned. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile people. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world.13

If, in moral reasoning, ought implies can, the growing power of the United States raised the question of whether, politically, can implies ought. Did the greater power possessed by the United States at the outset of the twentieth century mean that the United States had a greater responsibility to see the spread of its values overseas? Woodrow Wilson’s answer has often led to his classification as the epitome of an idealist in American foreign policy. Consider the following excerpt from a speech Wilson made after returning from the Versailles Peace Conference:

America is the hope of the world. And if she does not justify that hope, the results are unthinkable. . . . All nations will be set up as hostile camps again; . . . We set up this nation to make men free, and we did not confine our conception to America, and now we will make men free. If we did not do that, all the fame of America would be gone, and all her power dissipated. She would then have to keep her power for those narrow, selfish, provincial purposes which seem so dear to some minds that have no sweep beyond the nearest horizon. . . . Think of the picture, think of the utter blackness that would fall upon the world. America has failed. . . . America said, “Here is our power to vindicate right,” and then the next day said, “Let right take care of itself and we will take care of ourselves.” . . . Think of the world that we would leave.14

With the emphasis on American ideals and the rejection of “narrow, selfish, [and] provincial” interests, Wilson’s classification as an idealist is certainly justified. Leaving the issue there, however, misses a great deal about Wilson’s grand strategy. What it misses, moreover, is indicative of the drawbacks of using the lens of realism versus idealism to study U.S. foreign policy.15 The divide between pursuing values or pursuing interests that is at the heart of the realist/idealist debate is a dichotomy that does not exist for Wilson. As he put it, if America did not actively fight for the spread of its values overseas, “all the fame of America would be gone, and all her power dissipated.” To abandon the active pursuit of American values would not protect American power, for Wilson; it would destroy it.

Wilson certainly believed that the United States had a unique role to play in the world in advancing its values. Wilson rejected any simple dichotomy between realism and idealism, and believed that the United States could most effectively play that historical role by attempting to advance its interests and its values at the same time. Neither of these beliefs, moreover, distinguishes Wilson from many of his predecessors, including some, like John Quincy Adams, who would probably reject much of Wilson’s foreign policy agenda. Woodrow Wilson does not see his policy as unrealistic any more than John Quincy Adams saw his policy as contrary to the advancement of American values. The debate between John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson is not one between interests and values. Both support policies that they believe jointly advance the material and ideological interests of the United States. Both reject the trade-off at the center of the realist/idealist schism. For Wilson, actively encouraging the spread of American values is one key way to ensure that the material interests of the United States are protected. Similarly, John Quincy Adams did not see his admonition against “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy” as undermining the potential spread of American values in favor of the country’s more material national interests. Instead, he too believed he was advancing American values along with more particular national interests.

The core of the debate between Wilson and Adams, therefore, is not about interests versus values; instead, it is a question of the best way to promote American interests and values at the same time. For understanding this debate, Walter McDougall’s distinction between America as the Promised Land and America as the Crusader State is far more enlightening than the distinction between realism and idealism.16 John Quincy Adams viewed America as the Promised Land—as an example, a magnet, a city on the hill, a light in the darkness. If the United States can serve as an example of a well-functioning and prosperous democratic society, others will gravitate to American values on their own, which would further the country’s values and interests. Trying to compel others to accept these values would be too costly, it would fail, and it would undermine those values at home. Let other states choose to join America in the Promised Land rather than attempting to force them to accept American values.

For Wilson, the United States must be more than an example. It must also be a Crusader State, actively seeking to vindicate and spread its values. As the United States would be safer and more prosperous in a world where its ideals were more widely accepted, the best way to advance U.S. interests is to act as a missionary, perhaps even a well-armed missionary, to ensure the advancement of American values. While in power Wilson acted on these impulses, famously declaring his ambition “to teach the South American Republics to elect good men,” and pursuing that policy with armed interventions in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.17 Why let monsters roam freely, vindicators like Wilson ask, if the United States has the power to defeat them?

Categories like Crusaders and Promised Landers are ideal types, and no presidency is likely to purely represent one of these endpoints on the spectrum. Wilson himself was far more likely to act as a crusader in areas where the United States had overwhelming power, such as in Latin America, than he was in Europe, when facing other great powers.18 Further, the costs and relatively meager results of America’s military forays into Mexican politics, in particular, led Wilson to better understand the limits of unilaterally seeking to export democracy through force of arms,19 even if they did not fully extinguish that impulse.20

How does Theodore Roosevelt fit within this framework? Ro...