American Foreign Relations Reconsidered

1890-1993

Gordon Martel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134847242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This major new textbook brings together twelve of the leading scholars of U.S. foreign relations. Each contributor provides a clear, concise summary of an important period or theme in US diplomatic and strategic affairs since the Spanish-American War. Michael Hunt and Joan Hoff provide an overview of the traditions behind US policy and a preview of things to come. Together, the contributors offer a succinct explanation of the controversies and questions that historians have grappled with throughout the twentieth century. Students will find these essays a reliable and useful guide to the various schools of thought which have emerged. Although each of the scholars is well known for their detailed and original work, these essays are new and have been specially commissioned for this book. The articles follow the chronological development of the emergence of the United States as a world power, but special themes such as the American policy process, economic interests, relations with the Third World, and the dynamics of the nuclear arms race have been singled out for separate treatment. American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993 represents essential reading for upper level undergraduates studying modern American history. The book has been designed and written exclusively to meet the needs of students, either as a major course text, or as a set of supplementary readings to support other texts.

1
Traditions of American diplomacy: from colony to great power

Michael H.Hunt

The foreign policy of the United States between independence and World War I has attracted the attention of several generations of historians, each intent on relating that early era to the policy of their own time. At first historians saw a predestined, triumphal march toward world power by a virtuous people. Accounts shifted for a time to a decidedly less celebratory mode, stressing the lapse into national isolation and passivity after the heroic era of the struggle for independence. Long free-loaders, dependent on the British fleet for their security, Americans entered the twentieth century (so this version of the rise to world power went) unprepared for its challenges. Most recently, historians have drawn attention to the strains of arrogance and anxiety that ran through the first century and a half of American foreign relations. Oppression of native Americans, deceit and manipulation by political leaders, and a seemingly insatiable hunger for land and foreign markets top a long list of disagreeable features defining nineteenth-century expansion.¹

Today the whiff of decline is in the air. The American military giant faces distracting, perhaps even disabling, social and economic problems at home as well as uncertainties about its future role in the world.² Now more awake to the fact that great powers cannot forever sustain their predominance, we are perhaps ready to look afresh at the beginnings of the great cycle—the period during which the United States rose with astonishing swiftness from vulnerable new nation to a place of international prominence. In our fin de siècle mood, this extraordinary transformation invites sober contemplation and serious analysis for what it may tell us about how we have reached our present, problematic position and where we may go from here.

THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN POWER

The obvious starting point for explaining the rise of the United States as a great power is the base of material wealth that Americans were able to build in a relatively short time. Seizing the opportunities created by the British-dominated international economy. Americans profited from a flourishing foreign trade, primarily in agricultural products and raw materials. Accumulated capital went into a domestic industry whose growth had by 1830 established the United States in sixth place among industrial powers. By the 1890s American industrial output was second to none. In 1900, for example, iron and steel production roughly equalled the combined figure for Britain and Germany.³

By the early twentieth century the United States had, judging by the usual indices, largely completed its ascent. A population of only three million in 1783 and thirty-two million in 1860 had climbed to ninety-eight million by 1914. The people of the United States by then occupied a continent secure from any proximate military threat and rich in natural wealth. By 1914 the United States had far outstripped all the major powers in national as well as per capita income: Britain, the closest competitor, had only one-third the national income ($11 billion vs $37 billion) and two-thirds the per capita income ($244 vs $377). Indeed, on the eve of World War I the national incomes of all the European powers combined (including Russia) exceeded that of the United States by only a small margin ($4 billion).⁴ By then the US navy stood third in the world, just behind the British and the German fleets.

While internal developments were critical to the American success story, changes in the international setting were also important. The prolonged Anglo-French struggle for international hegemony placed major obstacles in the way of American expansion between 1776 and 1815. First as a colony, then as a nominally independent state, Americans sought to make good on their claim to independence, protect their commerce, and secure their territorial control in the face of British imperial pretensions and recurrent international crises. Even after abandoning formal control of the Thirteen Colonies, British policymakers tried to keep the new state weak by containing the United States within a narrow coastal strip, by maintaining its commercial dependence on the British Isles, and by monopolizing its maritime and natural resources during wartime.

Even so, from the beginning Americans were able (in the memorable and telling phrase of Samuel Flagg Bemis) to draw advantage from Europe’s distress.⁵ Locked in competition with each other, the European powers were constrained in their dealings with the United States by the broad Atlantic, limited budgets, and war-weary populations. If American policy-makers exercised patience, they would find the moment when those powers, distracted by problems close to home, could be driven to settle on terms advantageous to the United States. Where diplomacy failed, even when backed by a growing population of Americans in disputed territories, policy-makers could try stronger medicine: threatening an alliance with one European power against its rival, grabbing weakly defended territories of distant European antagonists or, in extremity, resorting to armed force—and thereby exploiting the advantage of fighting on home ground.

The British were the first to give way, conceding independence in 1783 after discovering that their rebellious subjects, backed by the French, were difficult to defeat on their own soil. But London persisted in its bullying after 1783, setting off a second war with the Americans in 1812. This time the British were forced to recognize that even their vaunted sea power was not enough to overcome the formidable difficulties of waging war across the Atlantic, and that they would have to accept Canada’s status as a hostage to American good will. Slowly, the British were forced to concede the dominance of the American republic on the continent. In 1846 London accepted a compromise division of the Pacific Northwest (the Oregon territory) and showed a general deference through the balance of the century in handling a series of potentially explosive maritime cases and disputes over the US-Canadian border. Indeed, so formidable had the United States become that, even when Americans found themselves engaged in a civil war between 1861 and 1865, neither Britain nor any other major European power dared risk the lasting American enmity that intervention would bring.⁶

Other powers also gave ground. Napoleon sold France’s Louisiana territory in 1803 to make ready for a renewal of his struggle against Britain. A weakened Spain gave up Florida under duress in 1819, a prelude to its expulsion from all but a fragment of its holdings in the Americas. Mexico failed to pacify expatriate Americans who had taken control of its northern territory (Texas), and then watched helplessly as they joined their land to the United States in 1845. With the American army occupying its capital in 1848, Mexico again had to submit, this time surrendering almost half of its territory as the price of peace. In 1867 Russia liquidated the last of its holdings in the Americas by selling Alaska. In 1898 Spain’s turn came again, giving up Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to American control.⁷

The resistance from native Americans entrenched in pockets across the continent proved even easier to overcome than the imperialism of the Europeans. Diminished by diseases borne by the European intruders, outmatched by their technology, and overwhelmed by their burgeoning population, native Americans put up a long and stubborn resistance. But the resulting battles ended ever more frequently in defeat of native forces, while alliances with Britain or France against their common enemy repeatedly collapsed as the European powers staged their own reluctant but inexorable retreat. Native attempts at accommodation with Washington ended in political betrayals that were no less disastrous. Whatever their choice, the ultimate outcome was a loss of land and relocation to distant, barren “reservations.”⁸

The turning points in the subjugation of native Americans roughly coincided with the European withdrawal. By 1815 the United States had begun to establish military dominance over indigenous peoples, and the last spark of their resistance flickered out in the 1890s, just as Spain surrendered the final vestiges of its empire and British policymakers came to terms with US supremacy in the hemisphere as a whole. Approximately two to ten million people lived north of the Rio Grande before the first European settlements; by 1900 they were a defeated, dispirited remnant.⁹ No longer a troublesome foreign policy problem, native Americans could now be quietly set aside as wards of the federal government.

The cumulative effect of these developments on American expansion was impressive. The territorial extent of the United States had quadrupled in the first half century of independence. The settlements hugging the Atlantic coast, augmented by lands acquired in the 1783 peace, carried the country to the Mississippi River. The Louisiana purchase doubled American territory by adding a vast expanse west of the Mississippi. The succession of acquisitions between 1845 and 1853 rounded out the continental base. The total cost of expansion was three wars and the payment of $48 million.

From this position of continental strength and security, the United States advanced additional claims which, before long, became global. In 1823 President Monroe had decreed limits on the European role in the Americas, and in the latter third of the century American presidents enforced those limits. In 1898 the McKinley administration humbled Spain in war and seized its remaining Caribbean possessions. Washington annexed Puerto Rico, imposed a protectorate over Cuba, and proceeded to make the Caribbean an American lake, launching repeated interventions over the following two decades in order to block European interlopers or keep order among the “natives.”¹⁰

At the same time that Americans were establishing hegemony in the Caribbean they were extending their influence across the Pacific, which they thought of both as a road to Asia and as a moat guarding the United States. This thinking prompted naval expeditions to open Japan and Korea to trade, the acquisition of Midway Island in 1867, and the seizure of Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island, as well as portions of Samoa and the Philippines at the close of the century. With these Pacific way-stations in place, Washington demanded of the other powers a voice in the economic and political future of China, and backed those demands in 1900 by sending troops to restore order in north China.

Just as the United States was becoming a Pacific power, it was also taking the first tentative steps toward involvement in European politics. The seizure of colonies and the creation of dependencies set Americans on the same imperial road on which the Europeans were already well embarked, and began to entangle the United States in European rivalries and alliances through the colonial periphery. With earlier reservations concerning involvement in European affairs partially compromised already, President Theodore Roosevelt took the next cautious step in 1905 when he offered himself as a mediator in a crisis between France and Germany over Morocco and in Russia’s losing war against Japan. This interest in European diplomacy, however roundabout or tentative, had by the turn of the century begun to create a commonality of outlook between Washington and London just as it injected tensions into dealings between Washington and Berlin.¹¹ While Washington consistently disavowed any step that might directly implicate the country in an alliance system, the United States had nevertheless become a factor in the thinking of European foreign offices. They well knew that to ignore or alienate the United States would be at their own peril.

Fed by a strong economy and strengthened by a long string of successful foreign policy exercises, the American state in the 1880s began to put on muscle as presidents sought to assert and defend extra-continental interests. From that decade can be traced the rise of a professional military and naval force trained for expeditionary duties. At the same time, the executive began to cultivate international affairs expertise (the beginnings of a foreign affairs bureaucracy) and to accumulate foreign policy powers in its own hands (the first steps toward an imperial presidency). In William McKinley the American state found the first strong chief executive bent on turning palpable national power to a variety of international ends. What McKinley began, his immediate successors, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, would continue.¹²

Rapid economic development, territorial predation on a widening scale, mounting foreign policy pretensions and capacity—all this does much to explain the rapid American ascent from a vulnerable new nation seeking to overcome its colonial dependency to a great power with its own colonies and dependencies and the means to control and defend them. But it does not tell the full story. Notably, it does not tell us why the American international position ultimately took the particular form it did: dominance on the continent and growing influence overseas. It is possible to imagine other, quite different outcomes. Americans could, at critical points, have chosen other national paths that would have carried them toward quite different destinations in foreign affairs.

Most fundamentally, Americans might have resisted the lure of industry and international commerce, counted the social costs of technological innovation, and obstructed the flow of an immigrant work force, thus holding down the overall rate of economic growth. A less rich United States might have proven a much less formidable presence in the world. However, Americans rejected this course, a decision that needs to be added to our explanation of the international ascent. Rather than maintaining a domestic environment friendly to simple republican civic values and stable communities, Americans placed their faith in the unconstrained marketplacethe most efficient arbiter for a society that they regarded as a collection of self-interested individual buyers and sellers whose economic behavior was to be only lightly fettered by social, political, or moral constraints.¹³ Individualism unleashed personal ambition and energy, encouraged the use of new technologies, helped sustain a dynamic (if crisis-prone) economic system, and fueled the relentless process of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration-driven population growth that was the concomitant of territorial expansion.

There were other, more discrete choices to be made in the realm of foreign policy. The decisions made in the first decades may have been the most consequential. The Federalist administration of George Washington might have resisted rather than accommodated British hegemony on the high seas, or the Republicans who followed might have been less prickly in their response to continuing British maritime pressure. Either way, policymakers would have paid a price. Federalist defiance would have divided the country politically, damaged trade, and enfeebled the new state, which was dependent on the revenue from trade. On the other hand, quiescent Republican leaders would have found themselves vulnerable to charges of passivity and dependence and watched their party lapse into a deadly malaise.

Subsequent policymakers also discarded alternatives that might have pointed the United States in quite a different direction. Washington might have adopted a policy of greater accommodation toward native Americans and respected the constraints embodied in treaties negotiated with them. A humane live-and-let-live approach might, in turn, have imposed a measure of restraint on national expansion toward the Pacific. Americans might have resisted presidential incitement to war against Mexico in 1845–6. In the peace that followed they might have either settled for minor territorial adjustments in Texas that were the ostensible cause of the conflict, or alternatively seized all of Mexico. Later still, some means of resolving the quarrel with Spain short of war might have been found in 1898, the quarrel avoided altogether at its inception in 1896, or the peace treaty in 1899 framed in non-territorial terms.

Certainly some voices were heard in support of each of these alternative policies at points between the 1790s and the 1890s. But they did not prevail. Why? The answer can be found in one critical element missing in the discussion to this point: the ideas that guided American policymakers as they contemplated their choices and made the decisions that carried the United States from success to success and ultimately to eminence as a global power. Those ideas constituted a powerful and enduring tradition within which US policy was made, and which linked the early era to the later.

FORMAL POLICY DOCTRINES

In thinking about the role of ideas in relation to policy, it is helpful to draw a distinction between formal policy doctrines and informal policy ideology. The formal doctrines arose as responses to particular policy probl...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• 1: TRADITIONS OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY: FROM COLONY TO GREAT POWER
• 2: “THEY DON'T COME OUT WHERE YOU EXPECT”: INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY AND THE POLICY PROCESS
• 3: ECONOMIC INTEREST AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY
• 4: IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN STYLE, 1890–1916
• 5: WILSONIAN DIPLOMACY IN WAR AND PEACE
• 6: THE TRIUMPH OF ISOLATIONISM
• 7: THE INTERPRETIVE WARS OVER THE COLD WAR, 1945–60
• 8: FROM KENNEDY TO NIXON: THE END OF CONSENSUS
• 9: FROM DÉTENTE TO THE GULF
• 10: THE UNITED STATES AND THE RISE OF THE THIRD WORLD
• 11: RECONSIDERING THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE: THE PAST AS PRELUDE?
• 12: AMERICAN DIPLOMACY: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY