From Manifest Destiny to Global Co-Hegemony:
Presidential Foreign Policy Ideologies in the Early 20th Century

Contents

The Changing Position of the U.S. in the Global System in the 19th Century
    Percentage of World Manufactures of the 3 Largest Industrial Nations
Manifest Destiny
    Manifest Destiny: Its Religous, Racial, and Liberal Origins
    Parallels between Manifest Destiny and Liberal Internationalism
Foreign Policy Ideologies in the early 20th century
Isolationism in the 19th Century
    Washington's Farewell Address Warning of Foreign Entaglements
Teddy Roosevelt's Expansionism and Realism at the Turn of the Century
    McKinley Justifying American Colonization of the Philippines
    Teddy Roosevelt on White Civilized Expansion and Non-white Barbarism
    Teddy Roosevelt on American Interventionism
A New Global American Destiny: Woodrow Wilson and World War I
    Woodrow Wilson on the New Role of the U.S. in the World
    Key Elements of Wilson's 14 Points for Ending World War I
    Europe before World War I
    Territories that Changed Hands after World War I
    Map of Europe after World War I
    The Division of the Hungarian Empire
    The Ottoman Turk Empire before World War I
    The Divison of the Turkish Empire after World War I
    Woodrow Wilson on America's Special Role in the World
The Interwar Period: Pseudo-Isolationism
     Harding on American National Sovereignty in its Foreign Policy
Links to my other pages
 

Presidents from 1896-1932
 

1896-1901	McKinley
1901-1908	Teddy Roosevelt
1909-1912	Taft
1913-1920	Wilson
1921-1922	Harding
1924-1928	Coolidge
1929-1932	Hoover

Republicans in red, Democrats in blue   return to top
 

The Changing Position of the U.S. in the Global System in the 19th Century return to top

In the early 21st century, it is hard for both Americans and non-Americans to conceive that at its inception the U.S. was a small, weak country.  In the late 18th and early 19th century the U.S. was a marginal nation on the periphery of the global system, what during the Cold War was called a third world country.  For most of the first century after independence the U.S. was a classic peripheral economy, exporting raw materials to Europe, importing finished manufactured goods, dependent on foreign investment, and not coincidentally, protecting its infant industries under high tariff walls.  It was not until around the time of its Civil War in the 1860s that the U.S. began to take off as an industrial power.  In the second half of the 19th century American industry grew at a phenomenal rate, until by the early 20th century the U.S. had surpassed all the European powers to become the largest industrial economy in the world, larger than former leader Britain combined with new number two Germany.

Percentage of World Manufactures of the 3 Largest Industrial Nations
 

Country	1870	1881-1885	1896-1900	1913
United States	23	29	31	37
Great Britain	32	27	20	14
Germany	13	14	17	16

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As the U.S. emerged as a major industrial power, it began to take on other characteristics of a great power.  For most of the 19th century America had been focused on expanding on the North American continent.  Its major international wars, the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War of 1848 had been focused on territorial issues in North America, as had its military clashes with Spain over Florida and the various campaigns to take lands from the Native Americans.  But by 1898 the U.S. was acting on a global scale, provoking a war with Spain over control of Cuba and the Caribbean Sea and in victory claiming not only control over Cuba, but its first overseas colony, the Philippines.

However, a confluence of America's unique historical development and global conditions in the early 20th century determined that the U.S. was to be much more than an ordinary great power.
 

Manifest Destiny return to top

So much has changed since the days when the U.S. was a small, weak nation on the global periphery, so it is easy to assume that that early period of American history has little to do with the ways of thinking and policies that drive today's global hegemon.  But at least one concept from early American history is crucial to understanding how the contemporary American way of thinking about the world evolved--Manifest Destiny.  Manifest Destiny was an ideology that developed soon after American independence and became perhaps the central idea of American foreign policy in the 19th century.  Simply put, Manifest Destiny was the idea that God had chosen the United States to rule over the entire North American continent.  It was the ideological justification for a small, marginal, internally divided group of former colonies to expand its territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Manifest Destiny had its roots in a bizarre interpretation of Christianity.  To many American theologians and politicians, the Americans were the "chosen people" of the Bible.  According to this theory, when the Jews rejected Christ they lost their claim to be the chosen people of God.  In this theory, the seemingly open land of the New World represented the Promised Land (the several million Indians living on that land were thought of as savages, and thus not worthy of Biblical consideration).  Americans, if they had the courage and rectitude to claim this promised land, would replace the Jews as God's chosen people.  The tough migration of Europeans, especially Anglo-Saxons, and the hardships of taming the new frontier were seen as the Exodus referred to in the Bible.  Just as the Jews were promised Canaan if they kept God's law, the Americans saw as their reward for keeping to God's word the entire continent of North America.  This was their covenant with God.  The key duty of this covenant was to Christianize the heathan people's of North America, especially the Indians and the Africans brought over as slaves.
 

Manifest Destiny: Its Religous, Racial, and Liberal Origins
 

	The Jews	The Americans (Religious version of Manifest Destiny)	The Americans (Racial version of Manifest Destiny)	The Americans (Liberal version of  Manifest Destiny)
A Special People	Chosen by God	Chosen by God	The white race is biologically superior (especially Anglo-Saxons)	The American People (chosen by history)
A Special Hardship	Slavery in Egypt the Exodus	Settling and Developing North America	Settling and Developing North America	Developing the first democracy and truly free market
A Special Land	The Promised Land of Canaan	The Promised Land of the North America	North America as a chance for purification of the white race	The first real democracy and truly free market
A Special Contract	Covenant with God	Covenant with God	To separate the races + put the white man on top	The social contract of democracy + the economic contract of the free market
A Special Mission	To Remain God's People	To Christianize North America	To advance the white race + to develop the ideal racial hierarchy	To bring the benefits of democracy and free markets to the world

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The Christian origins of Manifest Destiny got mixed together with other ideologies of 19th century America.  Racism played a crucial role in Manifest Destiny.  Americans could only claim an already populated continent if the Indians, Africans, and later the Catholic Mexicans could be seen as ungodly, inferior peoples who did not deserve their title to North American lands or even dignity as human beings.  Especially in the second half of the 19th century as Darwin's theories of evolution gained credence, the idea grew that the white race was biologically superior to non-white races, as did the corrollary that the more purely white northern Protestant Europeans were biologically and religiously superior to darker skinned southern European Cathlics.  This gave a more secular justification to pushing aside Indians and Mexicans and keeping African-Americans from citizenship.  In the racial version of Manifest Destiny it was the special duty of the white race to develop the ideal racial hierarchy on the North American continent; which of course would mean that white Protestant northern European peoples would rule and other races would either be suboridnated or eliminated.

The idea of Manifest Destiny might be seen as a quaint, bizarre ideological construct of the 19th century.  But in fact it has had a massive influence on American foreign policy in the 20th and early 21st century.  The Christian and racist versions of Manifest Destiny still hold sway in a large minority of conservative political circles, although the more successful conservative political leaders rarely articulate them directly in the electoral process or international fora.  But the key reason why Manifest Destiny is still important in American foreign policy is that as the ideas of liberalism and democracy emerged in 19th and 20th century America, they also got mixed together with the older Christian and racial ideas to eventually form a 20th century version of America's global destiny.  In the liberal version of American destiny, the American people are a special, chosen people not because of their religion or their race, but because of their superior political system.  Because of the unique political and economic conditions of the New World, Americans were able to develop the most nearly perfect free market economy and political democracy.  It is now their duty to bring the benefits of these perfected economic and political systems to the rest of the world.  Just as earlier Christianity was seen as a universal value system that must be spread around the world, now free market economics and political democracy are seen as universal values that American foreign policy must spread around the world.  Secular liberals thus appropriated the originally religious concept of a special American destiny.
 

Parallels between American Ideologies of
Manifest Destiny and Liberal Internationalism
 

Manifest Destiny (19th Century)	Liberal Internationalism (20th-21st Century)
Christianity is a universal value system	Capitalism and Democracy are universal value systems
The U.S. is special because it is the perfect Christian nation	The U.S. is special because it is the perfect capitalist economy and democratic polity
The U.S. has a special mission to Christianize North America	The U.S. has a special mission to make the world capitalist and democratic

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The objective of the original philosphy of Manifest Destiny was for the U.S. to gain control of the North American continent.  Thus, the continuing utility of the concept might have been undermined by American success at subduing the continent.  It might be validly asked, once this objective had been largely attained at the end of the 19th century, why did the U.S. not stop and enjoy the achievement of its historical destiny?  Why did the American foreign policymakers go on to internationalize the concept of America's special destiny to cover the entire globe.  Certainly one key similarity between the 19th century Christian concept of Manifest Destiny and the 21st century version of America's global destiny is expansionism.  Like the European empires in the age of imperialism, the underlying dynamic of American history has been expansion.  From a few small, disunited, peripheral former colonies to a continental nation, and then from a rising international power to global hegemon, the U.S. always been driven by a confluence of economic and ideological forces to expand its territory and when territorial expansion was no longer feasible, to expand its economic, political, and ideological reach.
 

Foreign Policy Ideologies in the early 20th century

Presidential Foreign Policy Ideologies in the Early 20th Century
 

Should the U.S. play a global role?	Internationalism	Internationalism	Pseudo-Isolationism
What kind of U.S. global role?	Hegemonism* (Idealism)	Imperialism (Realism)	Economic but not Political
20th century president most associated with the ideology	Wilson	Teddy Roosevelt	Harding
Model for 20th century American foreign policy	Manifest destiny on a global scale	European empires	19th century American foreign policy
Example of the ideology in practice	The Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations	The Spanish-American War	Senate rejection of the League of Nations

* click here for a detailed description of the concept of hegemony

Isolationism in the 19th Century return to top

For most of the 19th century American foreign policy was guided by the admonitions that its first and most revered president George Washington made in his farewell address--to avoid involvement in overseas politics and eschew entangling alliances with the corrupt empires of the Old World.  In the 20th century this philosophy came to be labelled "isolationism" in contrast to "internationalism" that sought a large global role for growing American power.
 
 

Washington's Farewell Address Warning of Foreign Entaglements The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible...  Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. .. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course...  Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world... Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand. return to top

As discussed above, American energies were centered on the conquest of the North American continent, on fulfilling America's "manifest destiny."  The conflicts of Europe and Asia seemed far away and irrelevant to Americans for most of the 19th century, and in any case the U.S. lacked to the power to significantly influence events overseas.  But as American industrial and trading power grew to a global scale, American  involvements in Europe and Asia and perceptions of its interests grew apace.
 

Teddy Roosevelt's Expansionism and Realism at the Turn of the Century

A turning point in the U.S. emergence on the global scene came at the end of the 19th century when the U.S. acquired its first overseas colonies in the Spanish-American War in 1898.  From this war that the U.S. instigated the U.S. acquired the Phillipines and Puerto Rico as colonies, and took control over Cuba although maintaining a fiction that Cuba was independent.  Becoming an imperial power was a little tricky for the U.S., with its own history of rebelling against British colonialism, but Republican President McKinley balanced realism with idealism in his justification of America's new venture into empire:
 

McKinley on American Colonization of the Philippines The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them...I walked the floor of the White House night after night...I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night.  And then one night it came to me... 1. That we could not give them back to Spain--that would be cowardly and dishonorable. 2. That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient--that would be bad business and discreditable. 3. That we could not leave them to themselves--they were unfit for self-government--an would soon have anarchy and misrule... 4. That there was nothing left for us to do but take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.

McKinley begins by mischaracterizing how the U.S. gained control of the Philippines.  The Philippines were not an unasked " gift from the gods," but rather booty from a war the U.S. clearly wanted.  McKinley reveals the American self-interest in seizing the Philippines when he refers to the "commerical rivals" of the U.S. who also coveted the Philippines.  It would be "bad business" not to claim this footfold in the Orient.  Then McKinley turns to mystification, claiming the Filipinos were "unfit for self-government" and that the U.S. was simply protecting them from "anarchy and misrule."  The fact that thousands of Filipinos died fighting the U.S. occupation is certainly one sign that many Filipinos felt they were in fact entitled to the same self-rule that Americans and Europeans claimed for themselves.  Note the implicit racism and Eurocentrism in McKinley's final point.  He characterizes the Filipinos like brown children, who must be "uplifted, civilized, and Christianized."  This cultural arrogance is captured even more purely in McKinley's successor, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt.

Republican president Teddy Roosevelt (TR) was one of the pre-eminent spokesmen for America's desire for a new global role to match its new economic power and interests.  In a journal article in 1899, while serving as Governor of New York, TR laid out his view of America's role in world politics.
 
 

Teddy Roosevelt on White Civilized Expansion and Non-white Barbarism The growth of peacefulness between nations...has been confined strictly to those that are civilized...With a barbarous nation peace is the exceptional condition. On the border between civilization and barbarism war is generally normal because it must be under the conditions of barbarism. Whether the barbarian be the Red Indian on the frontier of the United States, the Afghan on the border of British India, or the Turkoman who confronts the Siberian Cossack, the result is the same. In the long run civilized man finds he can keep the peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbor; for the barbarian will yield only to force.  Every expansion of civilization makes for peace. In other words, every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law, order, and righteousness. This has been the case in every instance of expansion during the present century, whether the expanding power were France or England, Russia or America. In every instance the expansion has been of benefit, not so much to the power nominally benefited, as to the whole world. In every instance the result proved that the expanding power was doing a duty to civilization far greater and more important than could have been done by any stationary power. So it has been in the history of our own country. Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion...While we had a frontier the chief feature of frontier life was the endless war between the settlers and the red men...The ultimate cause was simply that we were in contact with a country held by savages or half-savages...War had to continue until we expanded over the country. Then it was succeeded at once by a peace which has remained unbroken to the present day. In North America, as elsewhere throughout the entire world, the expansion of a civilized nation has invariably meant the growth of the area in which peace is normal throughout the world.  The same will be true of the Philippines...one more fair spot of the world's surface...snatched from the forces of darkness. Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace.  It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world. The Arab wrecked the civilization of the Mediterranean coasts, the Turk wrecked the civilization of southeastern Europe, and the Tatar desolated from China to Russia and to Persia, setting back the progress of the world for centuries, solely because the civilized nations opposed to them had lost the great fighting qualities. (T)he fact that nowadays the reverse takes place, and that the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway. return to top

http://www.bartleby.com/58/2.html

The misreadings of history in this article are staggering, even for an ambitious American politician.  Both North American and global history are totally distorted.  Although war was certainly not unknown between Native Americans before the Europeans arrived, Native Americans had seen nothing like the concentrated brutality of the Europeans and their American descendants as they gobbled up the North American continent and practiced systematic genocide against the native peoples.  Historians estimate the Native American population of the Americas at perhaps 20-40 million before the Europeans arrived.  After the impact of the "civilized" Europeans and their descendants, pure-blood Native American populations are perhaps 10% of their former level as a consequence of being exposed to "civilization."  Relations between the new North American nations had been sorted out by TR's time, but certainly not without massive violence.  In the early 19th century the U.S. tried to invade Canada and the British burned Washington to the ground.  In the middle of the 19th century the U.S. stole 40% of the territory of Mexico in a war of aggression, a fact that seems to have escaped TR.

TR's understanding of the place of Europeans in world civilization is similarly distorted.  While Europe was still in the Dark Ages, the Arabs enjoyed one of the most developed civilizations on the planet, with great achievements in science, the arts, and culture.  Similarly, the Ottoman Turk empire had a flourishing civilization centuries before the European nations began to carve up their territories.  The expansion of the European empires around the globe was a series of aggressive armed conquests with millions of deaths and casualties and disastrous consequences for the subjugated peoples, in no way an advance of either peace or civilized behavior.  TR's belief in the European expansion as an advance of peace was soon to be belied by two world wars instigated by European rivalries that cost a hundred million lives and devastated not only Europe but large parts of East Asia.

TR's classification of the European empires and U.S. as "civilizing" powers reflected his belief that the U.S. should enter into the "great game" of global great power politics.  In TR's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, espoused in the middle of his presidency, he asserts the entire Western Hemisphere as a sphere of U.S. influence, justified by its status as a "civilized" power in contrast to the tendency toward "wrongdoing and impotence" of Latin American and Caribbean nations.  While the original Monroe Doctrine had been a negative injunction for Europeans to repsect the independence of new Western Hemisphere nations, Roosevelt's corollary asserts a positive right of the U.S. to intervene in the domestic politics of other Western Hemisphere nations.  TR makes a claim for a special role for the U.S. in the geographic domain of the Americas, but justifies it on a more general basis that the U.S. in one of a group of "civilized" (read white, Christian) nations.
 
 

All this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous...Chronic wrondoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civlized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the U.S., however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international  police power. return to top

A New Global American Destiny: Woodrow Wilson and World War I return to top

The other great early spokesman for internationalism in U.S. foreign policy was Woodrow Wilson, president from 1913-1921, including during the first world war.  Wilson's and TR's ideologies are often portrayed as opposites, but this is quite misleading.  It is true that Wilson and TR came from different political parties, that both disliked the other intensely, and that they frequently clashed in public.  It is also true that TR was more tactically skillful in the art of diplomacy, while Wilson failed at some of his grander objectives, in part from a lack of political savvy.

Wilson's ideology is often labeled idealism in contrast to TR's realism.  Wilson tended to justify his policy choices on high moral principles, often sounding like the Protestant preacher he was descended from.  On the other hand, TR was much more concerned with direct American national interest and advancing American power to match the European empires.  TR basically conceived the U.S. as one among many great powers, while Wilson had a more ambitious agenda of transforming global politics in the American image, of asserting a special moral claim of the U.S. as a new kind of world power.  While both TR and Wilson talked about world order, TR saw order as flowing from a kind of cartel of great power empires, while Wilson believed new global institutions modelled on American experience were required to transform international politics.

However, the terms "realism" and "idealism" are quite misleading, which is why I have chosen the terms "hegemonism" and "imperialism."  In fact, TR's ideology was not realism, but a kind of "unrealism" that completely misunderstood the bloody origins of European empires and the American experience.  Similarly, Wilson's idealistic high moral fervor masked an even more ambitious agenda for expanding American power than TR's.  Wilson believed the U.S. should be more than an ordinary great power, that it should set the rules for international politics based on its domestic experience with democracy and capitalism.  In today's terminology, Wilson was the first American president to clearly articulate a justification for U.S. hegemony.

Therefore the most important relationship of Wilson's hegemonism and TR's imperialism was their shared expansionism.  They both sought to project American power onto the world stage in an unprecedented manner.

Yet there are also important differences in Wilson's ideology from previous American expansionism, including
1) a greater emphasis on world order and international institutions, 2) a zeal to reform the practice of international relations, especially between the great powers, and 3) the special role that Wilson envisioned for the United States as hegemon of the new system.
 
 

The New Role of the U.S. in the World The isolation of the United States is at an end, not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because, by the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power, we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind.  And after you have become a determining factor you cannot remain isolated whether you want to or not.  Isolation ended by the processes of history, not by the processes of our independent choice, and the processes of history merely fulfilled the prediction of the men who founded our republic. (The United States is) destined to set a responsible example to all the world of what free government is and can do for the maintenance of right standards, both national and international, (to be) the light of the world (and) to lead the world in the assertion of the rights of peoples and the rights of free nations. return to top

Wilson's ideas became crucial when the U.S. entered the first world war and took a leading role at the postwar Versailles Conference.  It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide a history of the first world war or America's decision to enter the war.  Excellent histories of the war can be found at

Rather, the purpose of this work is to examine the ideological justifications given for American action in the war and compare U.S. rhetoric with the political realities of the war and the postwar settlement.

As the U.S. made the decision to enter the war, Wilson's set forth his famous 14 points for ending the war.  The first five points and the 14th point are general principles of international relation and certainly qualify as idealistic.  Points 6-13 dealt with the territorial settlement and might also seem high-minded and neutral, but in fact they are not.  Rather, they call for the restoration of the territories the allies lost during the fighting, while demanding the dismembering of the empires of the Central Powers.  In other words, despite the apparent idealism of the first five points, when Wilson got down to specifics, he was demanding what any classical imperial power would demand--gains for itself and its allies, taken from the defeated opponents.

Key Elements of Wilson's 14 Points for Ending World War I I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.  II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants. III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance. IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety. V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined... XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.  return to top

A quick look at the maps of Europe and the Middle East before and after the war shows that in practical application Wilson's 14 points meant the complete dissolutions of two of the three opposition empires, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Turks.  Germany, the most powerful of the Central Powers lost territory, but it was recognized that if would be impossible to effectively dismember the German state, and so Germany was left largely intact.  Russia, which entered the war on the Allied side, was punished for turning communist by losing all the territories that had been seized by the Central Powers during the war.

Europe before World War I return to top

 

Territories that Changed Hands after World War I return to top

 

Map of Europe after World War I return to top

 

The Division of the Hungarian Empire after World War I return to top

 

The Ottoman Turk Empire before World War I return to top

 

The Divison of the Turkish Empire after World War I return to top

 

Austria and Hungary became two small, landlocked republics, Habsburg land was used to create two new states: Czechoslovakia in the north, and Yugoslavia in the south. Yugoslavia was formed from Austria and Serbia. Other countries gained land. Rumania got Transylvania, and roughly doubled in size. Poland gained Galicia, Italy gained the Southern Tyrol.  Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France. Posen-West Prussia went to Poland, forming a corridor to the coast. Northern Schleswig was given to Denmark. Troppau was given to Czechoslovakia. Austria and Germany were forbidden from uniting.  Russia lost land to recreate Poland, and four countries became independent.  Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lituania were new republics created from formerly Russian territory.

The dismemberment of the Ottoman Turk empire was even more complete.  Parts of Ottoman territory were ceded to the Italians and the Greeks.  What is now Syria and Lebanon became French colonies, and what is now Iraq, Israel, and Jordan became British colonies.  Even what is now modern Turkey was essentially made into a joint European protectorate, although a nationalist revolution forced the Europeans to recognize the independence of Turkey in 1923.

So what became of Wilson's idealistic fifth point--"impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon... the interests of the populations."  In dismembering Austria-Hungarian empire, interests of non-Austrian and non-Hungarian peoples were upheld.  Non-Russian peoples were also liberated from the Russian empire.  But what about the victors?  Not only did Britain and France not "adjust their colonial claims" on most of Africa and Asia, they actually gained colonies in the Middle East taken from the losing Ottoman Turks.

American scholars often blame absolve Wilson of any blame for the total abandonment of his fifth point at the Verailles peace conference and in other post-war treaties, putting responsibility for the outcome on the British and the French insistence on holding onto all of their pre-war empires and gaining territory from the defeated powers.  But there is no historical evidence that the U.S. offered to "impartially adjust" its colonial claims to the Philippines, or its neo-colonial control over Cuba and much of Central America.

Note the disjunction between Wilson's rhetoric about democracy and self-determination and the behavior of the victorious powers.  Self-determination of peoples was the justification for carving up the empires of the defeated powers and taking territory away from the new Soviet Union.  But self-determination of people's did not apply to the victors' colonial possessions.  So in a sense Wilson's comparison of World War I to the Crusades is telling.  An apparent "holy cause" serves as a mask for expansion and self-interest in both the old and new Crusades.
 
 

Woodrow Wilson on America's Special Role in the World  What we demand . . . is that the world be . . . safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life [and] determine its own institutions.  [The American troops] brought with them a great ardor for a supreme cause. . . . They saw a city not built with hands. They saw a citadel . . . where dwelt the oracles of God himself. . . . There were never crusaders that went to the Holy Land in the old ages . . . that were more truly devoted to a holy cause.  The men who . . . frame[d] this government . . . set up a standard to which they intended that the nations of the world should rally. They said to the people of the world, "Come to us, this is the home of liberty; this is the place where mankind can learn how to govern their own affairs . . . and the world did come to us. . . . They have looked to us for leadership. return to top

The Interwar Period: Pseudo-Isolationism return to top

The keystone of Wilson's reformist hegemonism was his proposal for a League of Nations to regulate postwar international relations.  Yet the League of Nations had strong opponents both overseas and in the U.S.  Wilson's greatest disappointment was the U.S. Senate which had to ratify the Versailles Treaty rejected U.S. membership in the League of Nations and thus the entire treaty.

The Senate rejection of the League of Nations is often called the reassertion of Isolationism, but that term is somewhat misleading.  At the popular level there was great war weariness and a desire to be free of international obligations.  But at the elite level no one denied the expanding role of the U.S. in the global system.  Rather, the Senate did not want to subject the ever more powerful United States to international institutions that might work against America's narrow national interest.  Wilson's successor Republican Warren Harding makes this clear.
 
 

Harding on American National Sovereignty in its Foreign Policy We recognize the new order in the world, with the closer contacts which progress has wrought...But America, our America, the America builded on the foundation laid by the inspired fathers, can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.  We are ready to associate ourselves with the nations of the world, great and small, for conference, for counsel; to seek the expressed views of world opinion; to recommend a way to approximate disarmament and relieve the crushing burdens of military and naval establishments. We elect to participate in suggesting plans for mediation, conciliation, and arbitration, and would gladly join in that expressed conscience of progress, which seeks to clarify and write the laws of international relationship, and establish a world court for the disposition of such justiciable questions as nations are agreed to submit thereto. In expressing aspirations, in seeking practical plans, in translating humanity's new concept of righteousness and justice and its hatred of war into recommended action we are ready most heartily to unite, but every commitment must be made in the exercise of our national sovereignty. Since freedom impelled, and independence inspired, and nationality exalted, a world supergovernment is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic. return to top

 Contemporary historians generally catch the general popular anachronistic wish for a simpler time of isolation, but less often see the new Republican's assertions of an even greater power and special position of the U.S. than Wilson's--that the U.S. stood above any international standards as a special power, like a divine king exempt from any mere human law.  The interwar period was less an anomalous interlude of American isolation than the time when the U.S. began to conceive itself to be above and beyond new international institutions.  Not coincidentally, this idea appears again in the Republican party in the post-cold war world.

One sign that the U.S. was not completely detached either from the international power stakes nor the hope for new institutions of international relations were a series of treaties on naval disarmament that were negotiated in Washington during Harding's presidency.  These treaties reflected Wilsonian hegemonism and idealism more than any true isolationism.    The Washington Naval Conference was the first serious attempt at arms control in the 20th century, reflecting the fourth of Wilson's 14 points.  All the great naval powers agreed to limit their overall tonnage of large ships and to scrap some of the ships they built during the great war.  Not surprisingly, during the decade when the great naval powers observed the treaty regime, an arms race on the smaller ships not covered under the treaty ensued.  But despite its limited duration and impact on overall naval armaments, the Washington Naval Conference showed that arms control could play a role in muting international tensions.

The Five Power Treaty is quite instructive on how the U.S. viewed its role in the new world order.  The U.S., Britain, Japan, France, and Italy agreed on a ratio of large ships of 10: 10: 6: 3 1/2: 3 1/2 respectively.  Thus it was codified that the U.S., the emerging hegemon, and Britain, the waning hegemon, were the naval superpowers.  Japan temporarily accepted a subordinate role as a regional Pacific power, France and Italy accepted even lesser naval roles, and the new Soviet Union and Germany, as the only World War I defeated empire left intact, were excluded altogether.  The Washington Naval Conference once more confirmed the new U.S. assertion of a special role in global affairs.  However, by the 1930s Japan's dissatisfaction with this codification of its subordinate role brought this naval arms control regime to an end.
 

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