History of American Foreign Policy, Volume 2

From 1895

Jerald A Combs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315497273
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

First Published in 2017. Now thoroughly updated, this respected text provides a clear, concise, and affordable narrative and analytical history of American foreign policy from the revolutionary period to the present. This is Volume II and is from 1895. The historiographical essays at the end of each chapter have been revised to reflect the most recent scholarship. The History of American Foreign Policy chronicles events and policies with emphasis on the international setting and constraints within which American policy-makers had to operate; the domestic pressures on those policy-makers; and the ideologies, preferences, and personal idiosyncrasies of the leaders themselves.

Chapter 1
Europe, America, and World War I

Germany Disrupts the European Balance of Power

The rise of the United States and Japan at the end of the nineteenth century challenged the stability of the international system and resulted in three potentially disruptive conflicts: the Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, and Spanish-American wars. But at least the United States and Japan intruded into areas relatively remote from the existing major powers of Europe. No similar power vacuums cushioned the rise of Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Germany joined the roster of world powers, it threatened the heart of Europe and disturbed the precarious balance that had been the basis of peace since the defeat of Napoleon.

In 1860, Germany had been little more than a geographical expression, thirty-nine principalities sharing a heritage of German language and culture but little sense of political or economic unity. The central plain of Europe offered few natural boundaries, and Germans were mixed liberally into surrounding areas such as Schleswig-Holstein (Denmark), Alsace-Lorraine (France), Luxembourg (Holland), Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and the Baltic fringes of Russia.

The architect of modem Germany was the chancellor of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. Using the small but efficient Prussian army, he combined with Austria to seize Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. Then he turned on his Austrian ally in a contest for influence over the numerous principalities that lay between the two Germanic rivals. Bismarck won this war at the Battle of Sadowa in 1866, but he refrained from occupying Vienna and managed to avoid alienating Austria permanently.

Five years later, Bismarck’s rising Germany shocked Europe by attacking and defeating France. Bismarck was not as successful in reconciling France to its defeat as he had been in pacifying Austria. His military commander, the great Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke, refused to accept the easily defended Rhine River as Germany’s western border. Instead, he insisted on annexing Alsace-Lorraine, with its large French population, in order to secure the province’s resources of iron ore and a defensive perimeter in the Vosges Mountains. The annexation all but guaranteed permanent Franco-German enmity. To sustain the memory of its lost territory, France draped black veils over the statues in Paris’s Place de la Concorde that represented the capital cities of Alsace and Lorraine.

Following the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck set out to protect his new Germany by juggling the balance of power among the major European states. After winning an alliance with Austria in 1879, he lured Russia into the arrangement by emphasizing the common interest of the emperors of Germany, Austria, and Russia in resisting France. Although France had lost most of its revolutionary fervor domestically, it continued to advocate liberalism and nationalism in the rest of Europe. The nationalism that France encouraged in Poland worried the three empires especially, since they had divided Poland among them in the previous century.

Bismarck had to work mightily to hold the Three Emperor Alliance together. Russia and Austria could agree on Poland and France, but they were bitter antagonists in the Balkans. There Russia encouraged the rebellions of its kindred Orthodox Slavs against the rule of Ottoman Turkey, “the sick man of Europe,” in order to extend the czar’s sway through the Balkan Slavs to the Dardanelles. These straits would give the Russian navy access from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. Austria feared that the independence movements Russia was encouraging would spread to Slavic groups within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and rip that multiethnic state to shreds. Bismarck dampened some of this Balkan rivalry between his allies by acting as an “honest broker” in the area and by encouraging Russia to direct its expansion toward China and India, where it would not conflict with the interests of Austria or Germany.

Bismarck’s convoluted policy began to unravel when Kaiser Wilhelm II came to the German throne in 1888. Wilhelm found Bismarck’s policy too conservative and constraining. He dismissed the Iron Chancellor and permitted the treaty of alliance with Russia to lapse. France leaped at the chance to end its isolation in Europe, loaned money to the czar, and in 1898 began a series of contracts and agreements that led to a military entente. Europe looked on aghast as the autocratic czar of Russia bared his head at the playing of the “Marseillaise,” the anthem of revolutionary France. Kaiser Wilhelm naturally drew closer to Austria. Then both Germany and France began casting half-apprehensive, half-inviting glances at Great Britain.

Great Britain stood aloof from most of this maneuvering. So long as no European nation threatened the British Isles directly, Great Britain preferred to concentrate on its overseas imperial interests, especially the Suez Canal, India, China, and southern Africa. These interests brought the British more frequently into conflict with France and Russia than with Germany or Austria. France, whose citizens had built the Suez Canal, challenged Britain for control of Egypt and the Mediterranean, Britain’s lifeline to India. France and Great Britain came dangerously close to war in 1898 when rival military expeditions confronted each other at the small Egyptian-Sudanese outpost of Fashoda. France, finding itself at a military disadvantage, withdrew, but the Fashoda Incident was almost enough to make France forget Alsace-Lorraine and turn to Germany for help against Britain. France’s ally Russia also posed a major threat to Britain. Its push toward the Dardenelles made Britain fear for its control of the Mediterranean and Suez. Russian pressure on Persia and Afghanistan threatened the British colony of India. Russian movement into Manchuria, Korea, and northern China challenged the British position in southern China as well.

Compared to Britain’s problems with France and Russia, Bismarck’s cautious probes for colonies in Africa and the Pacific (such as Samoa) seemed minor, temporary irritants. Neither Bismarck nor Kaiser Wilhelm looked on Great Britain with any special enmity, although both German statesmen found it necessary to protect the imperial throne and the aristocratic class structure against rising German liberalism by appealing to German nationalism with bold foreign policy adventures that challenged the position of Britain and its empire.

Bismarck had managed to limit his expansionist initiatives enough to avoid provoking a permanent alliance of offended powers against him. The kaiser did not. He angered London by demanding that it leave railroad concessions in Turkey to Germany, and he began to build a railroad to Baghdad. He sent his flamboyant Jameson telegram of support to the Boers of South Africa, denying British claims to the Transvaal. To support his push for overseas colonies, he began a huge naval building program in 1897 and extended it in 1900. The fleet he built in his North Sea ports seemed aimed particularly at Great Britain’s traditional naval supremacy. At the instigation of the kaiser’s chief naval adviser, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany constructed battleships capable of taking on the British fleet, rather than fast cruisers that might raid colonial commerce. The kaiser and Tirpitz drummed up domestic support for their heavy naval expenditures with shrill anti-British rhetoric.

A surge of German industrial and military growth accompanied all these developments. For two centuries France had been the major continental power, but by 1910 Germany towered over its rival. Germany led France in population by 65 to 39 million, in coal production by 222 to 38 million tons, in steel by 14 to 3 million tons. The German army also replaced that of France as the most powerful in Europe. Germany pioneered the efficient general staff system, the development of elaborate contingency war plans, and the use of masses of trained civilian reserves to supplement professional troops. After 1910, Germany sought to improve on its advantages by doubling its military appropriation. None of its neighbors could afford to match this expenditure.

Even before 1910, the British began to fear that Germany could overrun France and the Low Countries, which would make possible a successful invasion of England. Since Germany’s industrial output surpassed that of Great Britain as well as France and since Germany’s navy seemed intent on challenging British supremacy, Britain grew nervous about its policy of “splendid isolation” and its emphasis on imperial affairs. To counter Germany’s threat to the European balance of power, the British sought to resolve their conflicts with the United States. Great Britain accepted a secondary status in the American sphere and returned its Western Hemisphere fleet to home waters to guard against the German threat from the continent. It concluded an alliance with Japan in 1902 to protect British interests in East Asia, thus enabling it to bring home major elements of its Asian fleet as well. It began a bitter internal debate over the possibility of abandoning its open market policy in the British Empire to protect British commerce from the rising economic power of Germany. Finally, in 1904, Great Britain and France determined to put aside the bitterness of the Fashoda Incident and move toward a closer understanding. France traded its claims in Egypt for British support of the French colonial position in the rest of North Africa.

The United States and the European Balance of Power: The Algeciras Conference

The reconciliation between Great Britain and France shocked Germany. Leading German diplomats wanted to disrupt the Anglo-French entente before it could be extended from a minor colonial agreement to a continental alliance aimed against Germany. They believed that if they challenged French control of Morocco, where Germany also had some treaty claims, Great Britain would back away, exposing the hollowness of its support for France. The German army approved the timing of this challenge because France’s ally, Russia, had been at least temporarily shattered by its humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the subsequent abortive revolution of 1905. The German navy, however, opposed the Moroccan maneuver because its fleet was not ready to confront Great Britain. Even the kaiser was reluctant to trigger a crisis at that moment. Nevertheless, his foreign policy advisers bullied him into a visit to Morocco, where he delivered a speech encouraging the sultan to resist French supervision and make an independent agreement with Germany. Caught between the great powers, the sultan appealed for an international conference to resolve the issue.

Although the United States had stood apart from these European struggles, Kaiser Wilhelm sought the support of Theodore Roosevelt for the German position on Morocco. Wilhelm appealed to America’s time-honored dislike of European colonialism and desire for open doors for trade by insisting that Germany sought nothing more than equality of treatment for all nations in Morocco. He warned that war might result if France disregarded German rights and interests in North Africa and that the victors might then partition China to America’s disadvantage. The German ambassador to the United States, Roosevelt’s personal friend Speck von Sternburg, tried to give further emphasis to the kaiser’s goodwill toward the United States by writing Roosevelt that the kaiser would accept any advice Roosevelt chose to give him for a settlement. (Sternburg had been authorized only to say that the foreign ministry would urge the kaiser to abide by Roosevelt’s suggestions.)

Roosevelt responded to this extraordinary expression of Germany’s respect with much flattery and words of sympathy. But after the Venezuela crisis, Roosevelt harbored some concern about the growth of German power and intentions in the Western Hemisphere. He was more favorably disposed toward Great Britain because the British had removed the last barrier to Anglo-American friendship in 1903 by accepting the decision of an American-stacked commission on the disputed border between Canada and Alaska. So Roosevelt determined to use the influence Sternburg’s indiscreet letter had given him to back France and preserve the Anglo-French entente in the face of German threats. He persuaded France to accept the call for a conference by promising that the United States would participate and support France against any German demands that Roosevelt considered unreasonable. Roosevelt hoped the conference would avoid war and at the same time maintain the balance of power against Germany’s growing strength.

America’s official delegates to the Algeciras Conference in Spain in 1906 operated strictly as observers. Behind the scenes, however, Roosevelt persuaded a reluctant Kaiser Wilhelm to accept French dominance in Morocco by threatening to publish Sternburg’s letter, which supposedly committed the kaiser to abide by Roosevelt’s advice. Afterward, Roosevelt ingenuously congratulated the kaiser on a diplomatic triumph. Thus Roosevelt helped avert war and maintain the Anglo-French entente. But, to his great frustration, he had to keep the full extent of his role in the outcome secret because he knew he had no support from the American people for meddling in European politics.

The Issue of Neutral Rights on the Eve of War

Roosevelt did not have to be so secretive about his role in the Second Hague Peace Conference of 1907. Like the First Hague Conference of 1899, the second conference was called by the Russian czar to discuss means of preventing or limiting war, and the American public approved of such efforts. But the results were disappointing. The conferees could not agree on military budget limitations, restrictions on the size of ships, reduction of army enlistment terms, or the composition and powers of a world court. They did agree on a modified version of the Drago Doctrine prohibiting forcible debt collection unless the debtor state refused arbitration, but most Latin American nations refused to sign.

In the Second Hague Conference’s one concrete accomplishment, the conferees managed to set up an International Prize Court of Appeals to judge cases involving neutral rights on the high seas. Unfortunately, they could not agree on the neutral rights that the court was supposed to enforce. They scheduled a conference to devise such a code in London the following year, when surprisingly Britain reversed its naval policy of centuries to agree to a broad range of neutral rights. The resultant formulation of international law, embodied in the Declaration of London of 1909, seemed to eliminate the issue that had driven Great Britain and the United States to war in 1812 and had hung over Anglo-American relations ever since.

But the Declaration of London masked internal disagreements over maritime issues in both nations, disagreements that would play a vital role in America’s entry into World War I. Just as American diplomats were winning the long struggle for neutral rights at the Hague and London conferences, Alfred Thayer Mahan and some other important naval officers had changed their views of America’s interest in that struggle. Since the United States had become a major naval power, they wanted to avoid restrictions on its navy’s operations and adopt the old British view of belligerent rights. (Some of these officers had the inflated notion that the Union navy had won the Civil War for the North by invoking the doctrine of continuous voyage to prevent neutrals from trading with the Confederacy through Mexico and thus circumventing the Union blockade.) For once Theodore Roosevelt ignored such strategic balance of power arguments and nonchalantly instructed his delegates to the London conference, including Mahan, to continue their traditional advocacy of neutral rights. The other delegates, overcoming Mahan’s obstructionism, negotiated the London agreement.

The British delegation endorsed the Declaration of London amid almost equal confusion. The British navy supported the declaration’s provisions on neutral rights because the admirals no longer thought it necessary to stop all neutral trade with Europe in wartime. If war broke out with Germany, the British navy planned only a limited blockade sufficient to draw the German battle fleet out of port so it could be destroyed. Thus Great Britain would not need to invoke the doctrine of continuous voyage to stop neutral trade from reaching Germany through nonbelligerent neighbors like the Netherlands. The British navy also was willing to restrict the contraband list, for the British Isles were far more dependent on imported food than they had been in Napoleonic times, and the declaration would prohibit the confiscation of food shipments as contraband.

A number of British leaders, however, challenged this strategy. These leaders, who came to be known as Continentalists, worried that the French might abandon the entente if the navy strategy were followed because it would leave France the entire burden of fighting the Germans on land. Besides, most Continentalists assumed that any potential war would be over quickly, like the Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian, and Russo-Japanese wars. (They assumed that the only exception to the rule of short wars in the previous half-century, the American Civil War, had degenerated into a lengthy war of attrition only because American military men were inept amateurs.) In a short land war, a naval blockade, which took a long time to be effective, would be irrelevant.

Thanks to this disagreement, the naval strategists and the Continentalists never fully rationalized British strategy. The Continentalists, with their assumption that the next war would be too brief for a blockade to be effective, had little more objection to the neutral rig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Europe, America, and World War I
• 2. The United States and the Peace of Versailles
• 3. U.S. Foreign Policy Between the World Wars
• 4. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Coming of World War II
• 5. The Diplomacy of World War II and the Seeds of the Cold War
• 6. Harry Truman and the Onset of the Cold War
• 7. The New Look of Dwight D. Eisenhower
• 8. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Flexible Response
• 9. The Vietnam War
• 10. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: Manipulating the Balance of Power
• 11. Time Bombs in the Middle East
• 12. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Demise of Détente: 1976–1984
• 13. The End of the Cold War
• 14. American Foreign Policy in the Aftermath of the Cold War
• 15. George W. Bush, 9/11, and the War in Iraq
• Index
• About the Author