The New American Empire?
Americans have an enduring aversion to planting the flag on foreign soil. Is that attitude changing?
Expansionism. The 19th-century journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase "manifest destiny" in an 1839 article. It conveyed the belief in the divinely conferred right of the republic to expand westward and bring more of the continent into "the great experiment of Liberty and federated self-government." But Americans had been acting upon that conviction much earlier, starting with their insistence that Britain cede all lands east of the Mississippi at the end of the Revolutionary War. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and Jefferson's 1803 Louisiana Purchase confirmed that expansionist ambition. President James Polk saw Manifest Destiny as clear justification of the war he provoked with Mexico (1846-48). That struggle secured favorable borders for the new state of Texas and wrested California and much of the southwest from a defeated Mexico, but it also elicited an unprecedented wave of criticism from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other writers of the day. The spread of slavery into the new territories was certainly a great concern, but another was the conviction that imperial acquisitions violated the spirit of the nation's republican ideals.
Progressive imperialism. Had those luminaries lived until 1898, they would have seen their worst fears confirmed. In seizing foreign lands, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and other progressive imperialists proved to be unique in American history. But in their blend of self-interested pragmatism and idealism, these men, Zimmermann says, "set the course for American foreign policy for a century." The little-remembered naval officer and writer Alfred Mahan gave strategic shape to the progressives' vision. He firmly believed that island outposts in the Caribbean and the Pacific and a canal through Central America were essential to linking the two coasts of the continental nation and to establishing and protecting sea lanes for the emerging world power. With them, America could project its muscle abroad and become an even more confident player in the markets of the world. But just as important to this religious moralist, command of the seas would allow Western--and particularly Christian--civilization to extend its influence to "ancient and different civilizations." Roosevelt expressed the soaring idealism of his cohort with characteristically muscular prose: "Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose."
Liberal internationalism. President Woodrow Wilson carried idealism a step further by breaking with George Washington's prime dictum against entangling alliances. He announced in a 1916 address that the "United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objects [peace, national self-determination] and make them safe against violation . . . ." The story of his failure to bring the United States into the League of Nations is well known: Unyielding self-righteousness and arrogance prevented him from compromising with key Republican politicians, including Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who did not want to limit U.S. sovereignty. Insisting that only Congress could send the U.S. military into war, Lodge and others proposed modifications to the charter. Wilson's disastrous refusal to bend would later serve as a cautionary lesson to Franklin Roosevelt. Working with politicians from both parties, FDR saw to it that the United Nations charter included a mechanism for limiting the will of the majority: the Security Council, any of whose permanent members could veto a war resolution. Roosevelt succeeded where Wilson had failed by tempering idealism with realism, unilateralism with multilateralism.
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