Father of Globalization

William McKinley was the reluctant begetter of American global engagement when, under pressure from press and popular opinion, he made the explosion (undoubtedly accidental) of the battleship Maine in 1898 the occasion to conquer Cuba. Then, because it seemed logical, he took Spanish Puerto Rico, Wake Island and the Philippines, and for good measure Hawaii, which had nothing to do with Spain.

That romantic nationalist Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, was the cabinet officer who most enthusiastically promoted the war with Spain. Roosevelt believed the sea power theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who held that colonies were essential to the commercial power of a modern nation.

But Roosevelt also simply liked war, which he thought brought out the best in a nation. He would have preferred a war with Germany but, as he wrote to a friend, “I am not particular, and I’d even take Spain if nothing better offered.”

He was an expansionist. As president, he invented Panama by appropriating a piece of Colombia in order to build the Atlantic-Pacific Canal. However, he did not confuse manifest destiny and the American nation’s day in the sun with global uplift. He did not argue that the United States had some peculiar benediction to confer upon mankind. Imperialism was the work of civilizing the benighted races of the world, the white man’s burden, incumbent on all the advanced nations, and the United States, he held, should not leave the British and French alone in this good work but should take up its share. That was the moral and “manly” thing to do.

His was a model of foreign policy that failed to outlive him. The campaign to suppress native Philippine resistance lasted until 1901, and the campaign against the insurrectionist Muslim Moros of Mindanao continued until a quarter of a million Americans and Filipinos had died. It became the Vietnam of its day. By 1916, the United States had pledged to give the Philippines back to the Filipinos.

Woodrow Wilson provided a second model for the United States as global power, although, elected in 1912, he began as a splendid isolationist, apologizing to Colombia for having stolen Panama, appointing the pacifist William Jennings Bryan his secretary of state and naming political hacks to ambassadorships. He was not a man for the strenuous life. He ate raw eggs and oatmeal for breakfast and took an automobile ride every afternoon.

The successes of his first term were creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, antitrust legislation with tariff reform to reduce the power of the “trusts” and passage of the 16th Amendment, authorizing the income tax. He was a great domestic reformer.

His initial foreign policy concern was to cope with the consequences of revolution in Mexico. He ordered Veracruz occupied after some American sailors were arrested in Tampico. He sent a punitive expedition under Gen. John J. (Black Jack) Pershing to chase the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa back into Mexico after his intrusion into the United States.

Wilson regarded the outbreak of World War I as a fit of madness among the Europeans. He sent his confidant and advisor, Col. (a courtesy title, bestowed by the state of Texas) Edward House, to search for a compromise settlement, although House, strongly pro-Allies but anticipating a German victory, worked on a plan that Germany would be expected to reject, provoking American intervention.

Wilson at the same time was saying, “There is such a thing as a man too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” The latter proved to be untrue. In January 1917, he appealed for a “peace without victory,” but after extension of the German submarine campaign, he went to war in April. He did so, he said, in order to fight a war to end wars, to make the world safe for democracy and to end “power politics,” after which the United States would lead the way into a new international order in which war would be abolished.

When victory arrived and with it the opportunity to realize his vision, he said that America’s role in the war had come about “by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. . . . It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way.” He was confirmed in his faith by the response of the exhausted Europeans to his peace proposals. When he arrived in Paris to take part in the Versailles negotiations, the crowds greeted him with what one observer called “inhuman . . . superhuman” cheers.

He said that the world turned “to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the base of all freedom . . . that . . . all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America, but of humanity.” He thanked God that Americans were not like other men. This conviction of national righteousness was unfortunately linked to an equivalent belief by Wilson in the correctness of his personal judgments, as the distinguished novelist Louis Auchincloss notes in this eloquent and brief biographical essay.

When, in 1902, the future occupant of the White House became president of Princeton and met opposition to his plan to reform the university by establishing a plan of residential colleges, thus reducing the influence of the eating clubs that dominated the school’s social life, he “could hardly conceive, much less admit, that he could be wrong in judging matters that he deemed within his peculiar sphere of expertise: the education of young men, the upholding of moral values, and [eventually] . . . the establishment of world peace. This Wilson, with God and his angels presumably ranked behind him, tended to regard opposition as malicious betrayal.”

The story of Wilson’s public life, as Auchincloss recounts it, was that of an idealist with remarkable political talent, promoted by professional politicians who thought they would exploit his innocence but found themselves used by him. His remarkable ascension from Princeton’s presidency to governorship of New Jersey and then to the presidency nourished the vanity and self-righteousness that were his weaknesses, so that in the end, he himself destroyed what he had most wanted to establish: a league of the world’s nations to impose perpetual peace.

The conventional American account of Wilson and the league holds him to have been betrayed by a reactionary Senate. The Senate’s refusal to ratify the treaty that would have made America a member of the league was held responsible for that organization’s eventual failure, contributing to the arrival of World War II.

This is substantially untrue, as Auchincloss explains. The issue was Article 10 of the covenant of the league, which would have mandated the United States (and the league’s other members) to take part in any military action against aggression voted by the member nations. The Senate balked (as it would balk today at an equivalent United Nations clause and as the Pentagon and the Clinton administration did balk in 1998 when they refused to sign the United Nations treaty meant to create a permanent war crimes tribunal, to whose jurisdiction American troops might have been subjected).

*

However, there was a compromise available in 1919, proposed by former Secretary of State Elihu Root and drafted by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, that the Senate attach a “reservation” to its ratification, which would say that as the Congress possessed the sole constitutional power to declare war or authorize the employment of military force, the United States would not act under Article 10 without the authority of an act or joint resolution of Congress.

Wilson refused this compromise, Auchincloss says, because this reservation “would wreck the whole concept of world government.” But world government (on an American model) was Wilson’s private vision. One may be sure that Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Vittorio Orlando and the other Allied war leaders had no such ambition.

It is hard to explain why Wilson’s fundamentally sentimental, megalomaniacal and historically unsound vision of world democracy organized on the American model and led by the United States should continue today to set the general course of American foreign policy, under both Democrats and Republicans.

The disastrous consequences of Wilsonian sentimentality during the last 80 years seem to have left no trace on most American policy-makers’ minds. His naivete about universal self-determination contributed to creating the conditions in Central and Eastern Europe that invited Hitlerian intervention.

His influence on Franklin Roosevelt led the latter to oppose Winston Churchill’s efforts to exercise “power politics” in Central Europe so as to secure it from postwar Soviet control. Wilson’s influence was responsible for the faith FDR placed in the organization of the United Nations to solve geopolitical problems.

Even U.S. Vietnam policy was a confused amalgam of anti-Communism and Wilsonian sentimentality: Lyndon Johnson justified his foreign policy as one meant only to give others what they “want for themselves--liberty, justice, dignity, a better life for all.”

Nobody in Washington, then or now, has seemed interested in speaking softly while carrying the big stick, as the first Roosevelt recommended. Both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates this year promise to make “strategic partners” of Russia and China, sort out “rogue states,” discipline laggard allies and impose American-style democracy under American supervision everywhere within America’s reach. Whether public opinion accompanies them in these extravagant ambitions may be doubted, but the rhetoric is automatic. They know no other.

Washington policy analysts today divide among those who claim Wilson’s name and want a crusade for world democracy; self-identified “benevolent hegemonists”; managers of the commerce-driven Bush-Clintonian New World Order; and neo-isolationists.

Even the hegemonists insist they are Wilsonians. They are unwilling to justify American domination in terms of mere power and interest. The current issue of the The National Interest includes an article by two self-proclaimed hegemonists, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, insisting that American rule of the world serves a “higher purpose” and is rooted in “universal principles.”

“It is precisely because the United States infuses its foreign policy,” they write, “with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.”

Another advocate of benevolent hegemony, Joshua Murachik, suggests that only the French might object, since the rest of the world knows that America is a righteous nation.

In this contribution to the “Penguin Lives” series, Auchincloss adds to our understanding of how the country has come from the robust and simple imperialism of 1898 to the febrile globalism of the present day. It is still, after 80 years, in the thrall of the megalomaniacal and self-righteous clergyman-president who gave to the American nation the blasphemous conviction that it, like he himself, had been created by God “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”