Copyright 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The new world power : American foreign policy, 18981917 / Robert E. Hannigan.
p. c.m.
ISBN 0-8122-3666-1 (acid-free paper)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. United StatesForeign relations18651921. I. Title
E744 .H353 2002
The New World PowerFor Irene and TedPreface
My principal purpose in this book is to try to explain the trajectory (or fundamental course, objectives, and methods) of American foreign policy in the era running from the late 1890s to 1917 (the year the United States became a military participant in World War I). Although commonly referred to, and accorded significance, as the age of Americas emergence as a world powera label correctly connoting that it was in this period that Washington began to involve itself as never before in developments beyond the continent of North Americamost studies of American diplomacy in the early twentieth century have either been organized around the boundaries of particular presidential administrations or focused on one particular geographical region of U.S. external activity (normally the Caribbean or the Far East, the two regions of highest profile activity).
Historians have now attained sufficient distance from, as well as knowledge of, the turn-of-the-century era, however, to enable us to probe beyond these boundaries and to try to reveal more about the direction and methods of this extra-continental involvement. The potential exists to identify and discuss in detail more fundamental patterns running both through this whole period and through the different U.S. global engagements. Some useful efforts to go beyond the basic theme of emergence have been undertaken in essay form, especially in several articles that have tried to find a correspondence between progressivism and early twentieth-century foreign policy.
Attempts to discern patterns and continuities (without denying that each administration in this era had its own distinctive qualities and style) must also contend with the commonly held idea that Woodrow Wilsons foreign policy constituted a rejection in substance of the diplomacy of his predecessors. That notion stems mostly, I think, from the simple fact that scholars have tended to be far too accepting of Wilsons own descriptions of what he and the Republicans who came before him were all about. The result, inevitably, has been for Wilson, who is so often considered the fount of Americas subsequent twentieth-century diplomacy, to be inadequately understood himself. I would contend that even Wilsons rhetoric, which clearly was more sophisticated than that of his predecessors, can be better comprehended against the backdrop of debates and dialogues that had been going on within domestic American politics since at least 1898.
Precisely in order to bring such patterns to light, I have avoided a strict chronological organization and have instead (at least in Chapters 27) structured the book around discussions of the development of policy in each of the eras most significant areas of (essentially regional) American involvement and interest. My object throughout, however, has been to use these separate studies as a way of both identifying and illuminating themes and approaches that are fundamental to U.S. foreign policy as a whole in these years.
Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, but not only to the books discussion of concrete strategies and engagements. It is also designed to introduce important ideological concepts that informed the thought and behavior of virtually all of the policy makers in this eranot least because of their similar backgroundsand to elucidate certain recurring key words and terms that are best understood within this ideological context.
The following three chapters discuss in turn the areas of the extracontinental underdeveloped world that were of most concern to Washington. Although Caribbean and China policies have been discussed extensively elsewhere, our understanding of American activity in both regions is, I think, enhanced by examining those involvements side by side and by trying to view them within the framework of U.S. policy overall. This is especially the case with the Caribbean, whose enormous significance in the minds of policy makers cannot be understood except by reference to the strategic ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan and others who held that U.S. control there would be absolutely pivotal to the countrys international posture in the future. Similarly important initiatives toward South America, as suggested, have heretofore received little systematic attention at all.
As the United States assumed a higher profile in such more distant regions at the turn of the twentieth century, that inevitably also had an impact on its relations with its immediate neighbors in North America. Canadian-American relations in this period (or any other) have constituted another area of scholarly neglect (at least from the U.S. side), but they were clearly accorded importance then. At different times, developments in both Canada and Mexico came to be seen as central to the working out of Washingtons relations with other powers (especially Britain) or regions (the Caribbean). The resources of both countries came increasingly to be appreciated for their potential impact on the global U.S. economic position. And all North America came to be viewed strategically as a kind of giant analog of the British Isles. From both a strategic and an economic standpoint, Canada and Mexico appear increasingly to have come to be thought of as part of an extended home base for this new global power. These issues are addressed in Chapter 5.
The last two chapters take up the issue of world order. Chapter 6 contains a more wide-ranging discussion of the U.S. relationship to British power in the period up to 1914. While Washington was eager to reduce Britains political and military role in the Western Hemisphere, a theme addressed in several of the early chapters, it wanted to see that power upheld in other regions. This chapter also analyzes American efforts (often in conjunction with London) in these same years to promote new mechanisms for the settlement of international disputes.
Chapter 7 deals with the years after the outbreak of World War I. Our understanding of American diplomacy in that time frame has been limited, I believe, by the tendency of historians to focus too narrowly on the question of how Washington eventually became a military participant in that conflict, to look backwards, in other words, from 1917. I have instead tried to examine more broadly the objectives and concerns of American foreign policy and to explore how these were seen as threatened by the disruptions of the war and by the activities and ambitions of the other powers.
Briefly put, what I argue American leaders were seeking to do throughout this era was to ensure a framework within which, as they saw it, the U.S. might successfully realize wealth and greatness in the coming twentieth-century world. This seemed to them not only desirable, but, given Americas growing economic might (the U.S. had already become the globes leading industrial, though not as yet financial, power by the turn of the century), well nigh inevitable, so long that is as the U.S. was able to neutralize current worrisome developments in the international system.
