A New World Disorder

In the war against Yugoslavia, the U.S. president spearheads a European coalition, commanded by an American general, that has resulted in U.S. prisoners. Why is the United States still taking the role of global policeman? Is the nation addicted to the thrill of throwing its weight around? Or are we “exaggeratedly moral,” as a British foreign secretary once observed, and unable to perceive our self-interest as clearly as our European allies, who often seem to take less heat? In other words, are we knaves or fools?

Critics as well as supporters of U.S. interventionism often look to the messianic democratic ideology of the nation to explain its foreign policy. This ideology shapes the “how” of U.S. interventionism, but the “why” has more to do with the nation’s geopolitical and economic position. Typically, Washington intervenes in defense of principles the nation believes in, because America’s size and power make its decisions determinative compared to the influence of others. We intervene both because we can, and because our sheer weight compels us to make choices weaker countries are waiting for us to make. This is a position the United States has occupied since almost the beginning of the century, and, as of 1999, no other country or organization has replaced the nation as the leader of what was once called “the free world.”

History shows that U.S. foreign-policy ideals and choices became important to the rest of the world only after Washington acquired the power to implement them. At the start of this century, Secretary of State John M. Hay sent a brief note to the rulers of Europe and Asia. In one paragraph, Hay announced the opposition of the United States to any attempt to colonize collapsing imperial China. In effect, he announced the arrival of a new great power, prepared to help police the globe in times of conflict, according to rules of its own invention. In its preceding 124-year history, the United States had issued only one other declaration to the powers of the world: Stay out of the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine lacked force, however. The United States, at the time of its fifth president, James Monroe, had all the scare power of a 98-pound weakling defending his towel on the beach.

The United States that strode into the 20th century, however, had the build of a Mark McGwire, born during the Civil War that concentrated power in the federal government and nurtured by the Industrial Revolution. The younger members of Hay’s generation were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Together, they committed the politically mature United States to a police role in defense of an international system largely of our own making. That international system took form in fits and starts during the 20th century, and Washington still defends it today because it is our best guarantee of a mostly peaceful modus vivendi critical to our own, and the world’s, physical safety and economic well-being. In other words, Roosevelt and Wilson set the course leading from China in 1900 to Kosovo today.

As president, Roosevelt established the new character of U.S. foreign policy when he declared in 1904 that henceforth the United States would “police” the Western hemisphere and punish any nation that dared cause trouble. Any great power that claimed a sphere of influence, as the United States did in Latin America, bore a corresponding responsibility to maintain law and order, Roosevelt asserted. This Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was a heavily muscled beat cop whose practice was to “walk softly and carry a big stick.”

Wilson further widened the nation’s responsibility. He insisted that a nation great in both its political power and moral character had the obligation to defend not simply the status quo, but also the dictates of justice. In Latin America, this meant a preference for democracy over despotism. In Europe, it meant a commitment to the self-determination of small nations like Serbia, as expressed in the “14 points” that laid the basis for U.S. intervention in World War I. The Allied powers welcomed U.S. troops and machines because they knew the nations Wilson sided with would win the war. They did not care terribly for the larger principles Wilson brought with them.

Historian John Milton Cooper Jr. has dubbed Roosevelt the “warrior” and Wilson the “priest.” But the warrior and the priest represent two sides of the personality of U.S. foreign policy in this century, brought together decisively, in 1947, by the man from Missouri, President Harry S. Truman. The path to World War II demonstrated the heavy price to be paid if the United States did not stay the course but instead chose to watch the parade of world politics from the sidelines. America’s failure to join the League of Nations, created by Wilson, and its unwillingness to participate in policing the peace after World War I, contributed to the downward spiral into chaos in the 1930s. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 irrevocably committed the nation’s men and might to international, not just Western Hemisphere, police duties in the defense of all “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” It is on the basis of that Cold War-era doctrine that U.S. planes now streak through the stormy skies of Yugoslavia.

Why did the United States adopt this role? Was it an unavoidable choice made by prescient leaders who had survived World War II, the greatest calamity of the century? The policies of Hay, Roosevelt and Wilson suggest otherwise. Truman followed the trajectory set by these men, who saw the end of the 100-year Pax Britannica and the dawn of a Pax Americana. Their generation had been schooled when Britannia ruled the waves and came into leadership convinced that great power conferred the duty of maintaining world order. For these men, a failure to embrace the challenge would be to renounce, in effect, the position the country had earned. The time had come.

Of course, “world order” is an oxymoron if ever there was one. With the innovations of Wilson, the new world order became a New World Order, which meant ensuring some measure of justice as defined by the United States, not simply strong-arming troublemakers to maintain the peace. Wilsonian standards of economic, military and political fair play gradually became world norms. The kinds of aggression perfectly acceptable in the 19th century became verboten. International agreements and understandings prohibited grabbing other peoples’ territories for colonization. In the structure of diplomatic relations today, might does not make right. Poor Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. They were born in the wrong century under the wrong international system.

Thus, the project of “world order” became far more complicated than in the good old days of British imperialism. The difficulties of policing the world today, U.S.-style, are most acutely reflected in the concept of “limited war,” painfully on display in the current conflict. The limitations are mostly those the United States itself has created or sought since 1900. Washington and its allies are limited by democratic systems of governance that compel attention to popular will. Their diplomats are constrained by the multilateral alliances they built after 1945 to prevent arbitrary uses of force. Their governments are accountable to the postwar Geneva Convention guarantees of civilian safety. Their militaries are curbed by catastrophic weapons that make vast destruction so easy their use requires constant restraint. The fetters on war are those we forged. A result is that our government and people are often ambivalent about how, when and where to fight.

But fight we must. Why? Certainly not for the prestige of world-power status that tempted Roosevelt. Nor for the promise of refashioning civilization that attracted Wilson. The United States needs to bear arms when and where it sensibly can because it must defend the structure of international law created in the 20th century. This accomplishment is one of the few in which the denizens of our bloody century can take pride.

The United States still bears an exceptional responsibility as the nation that did the most to establish the safeguards of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and still has the world’s greatest military and economic capacity. It would be nice to pass the baton to a well-intentioned superpower of the future or to a collective entity in which every member contributes equally. But that day is not yet here.*