From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (62 page)

In applying dollar diplomacy in East Asia, the Taft administration broke sharply with its predecessor. Roosevelt had little sympathy for China and no use for the Open Door policy. His major concern was protecting a vulnerable Philippines against Japan. Egged on by Willard Straight, a former consul general at Mukden and staunch partisan of China, Taft and Knox came to see China and especially Manchuria as a ripe field for U.S. trade and investment and an independent and friendly China as important to the United States. Deeply suspicious of Japan—"a Jap is first of all a Jap," Taft once proclaimed, "and would be glad to aggrandize himself at the expense of anybody"—they sought to use private U.S. capital to thwart Japanese expansion and bolster the independence of China.
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They found eager accomplices in Beijing and among Chinese officials in Manchuria who saw the United States as a useful counterweight against Russia and Japan.

A bold move to promote American investments in Chinese railroads proved counterproductive. United States officials correctly recognized that control of the railroads was the key to political and economic power. Taft personally interceded with the Chinese to secure for the United States an equal share of an international loan to fund the construction of a railroad in southern China. Chinese officials went along but refused to push other nations to agree. The powers eventually accepted U.S. participation, but the
arrangement was never completed. At about the same time, the embattled Chinese governor general of Manchuria, with the support of Beijing, devised a plan to secure U.S. funding for a trans-Manchurian railroad to counter the growing power of Russia and Japan. Knox eagerly agreed and took the scheme a giant step further by proposing the internationalization of all railroads in Manchuria, a quite unprecedented venture and an obvious attempt to check Japanese influence.
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As naive as it was ambitious, the scheme totally misfired. Hoping to divide Russia and Japan, Knox and Taft drove them together. In a July 1910 pact, they divided Manchuria into spheres of influence and agreed to cooperate to maintain the status quo. Knox's scheme depended on support from the other powers, but Britain refused to offend its new Asian ally, Japan, and France would not antagonize its ally Russia.

Undaunted, the dollar diplomats launched one last effort in East Asia. Claiming it their "moral duty" to help China, Knox finally persuaded hardheaded U.S. bankers to put up $2 million as part of an international consortium to promote economic development. He then elbowed his way into the consortium. Before the deal was consummated, revolution broke out in China. The new Chinese government sought better terms. Wary of the revolution, the great powers and indeed the United States delayed recognition for months. U.S. bankers left out of the consortium screamed in protest. By the time the deal was finally concluded in early 1913, the Taft administration was on its way out.
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F
ILLED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
, Americans took a much more active role in the world after 1901. Even in the implementation of colonial policies, they saw themselves charting a new course. Theodore Roosevelt embodied the American spirit of his era. He served in a time of peace when the United States was not threatened and there was no major crisis. He exemplified the best and worst of his country's tradition. Recognizing that the nation's new position brought responsibilities as well as benefits and that international involvement served its interests, Roosevelt took unprecedented initiatives, in the process demonstrating the president's capacity to be a world leader. He began to modernize the instruments of U.S. power. He recognized that the combination of "practical efficiency" and idealism was both necessary and rare.
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His practical idealism helped end a war in East Asia and prevent war in Europe, each of which
served U.S. needs. Recognizing limited U.S. interests in China and Korea and the vulnerability of the Philippines and even Hawaii, he was the consummate pragmatist in East Asia, refusing to take on commitments he could not uphold.

In Central America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, Roosevelt and Taft displayed the narrowness of vision and disdain for other peoples that had afflicted U.S. foreign policy from the birth of the republic. To be sure, Roosevelt launched what his predecessors had long dreamed of, the construction of an isthmian canal, by any standard a huge achievement. And some measure of U.S. influence in the region was inevitable. But the arrogant way he dealt with Colombia and its offspring Panama and the heavy-handed interventions under the Roosevelt Corollary and dollar diplomacy changed forever the way the United States was viewed in its own hemisphere. As implemented by Roosevelt and Taft, "benevolent supervision" was not benevolent for those supervised. The attempt to impose American ideas, institutions, and values upon different cultures was arrogant and offensive—and did not work. Rampant U.S. economic intervention destabilized a region where Americans professedly sought order. The almost reflexive military interventions further damaged U.S. long-term interests and left an enduring and understandable legacy of suspicion among Latin Americans of the "Colossus of the North." "A wealthy country," Latin poet Rubén Darío put it, "joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules; while Liberty, lighting the path to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York."
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Revolutions in China, Mexico, and Russia and the outbreak of war in Europe would pose even sterner challenges for Woodrow Wilson and the foreign policy of the new world power.

It was called the Great War, and its costs were horrific, its consequences profound. Between August 1914 and November 1918, the European powers fought it out across a blood-soaked continent. Harnessing modern technology to the ancient art of war, they created a ruthlessly efficient killing machine that left as many as ten million soldiers and civilians dead, countless others wounded and disfigured. The war inflicted huge economic and psychological damage on people and societies; it shattered once mighty empires. It coincided with and in important ways shaped the outbreak of revolutionary challenges to the established economic and political order. Together, the forces of war and revolution unleashed during the second decade of the twentieth century set off an era of conflict that would last nearly until the century's end.

Woodrow Wilson once declared that it would be an "irony of fate" if his presidency focused on foreign policy.
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Indeed, it seems more than a twist of fate if not quite predestination that placed him in the White House during this tumultuous era. He brought to the office an especially keen sense of his own calling to lead the nation and of America's destiny to reshape a war-torn world. From his first days as chief executive, he confronted revolutions in Mexico, China, and later Russia. Initially content to follow the traditional path of U.S. neutrality in Europe's wars, in the face of Germany's U-boat attacks he eventually—and reluctantly—concluded that intervention was necessary to defend his nation's rights and honor and assure for himself and the United States a voice in the peacemaking. Once at war, he gave urgent and eloquent expression to a liberal peace program that fully reflected American ideals dating to the beginning of the republic. He enjoined Americans to assume a leadership position in world affairs. Committing himself and his nation to little short of revolutionizing the international system, he learned through bitter experience that the world was less malleable than he had assumed. He met frustration abroad and bitter defeat at home, a failure that took
the form of grand tragedy when a new and even more destructive war broke out less than two decades hence. Yet the ideas he set forth have continued to influence U.S. foreign policy throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

Wilson towers above the landscape of modern American foreign policy like no other individual, the dominant personality, the seminal figure. Born in the South shortly before the Civil War, the son of a Presbyterian minister, from his youth he assiduously prepared himself for leadership—"I have a passion of interpreting great thoughts to the world," he wrote even as a young man.
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After studying law, he earned a doctorate in history and political science at Johns Hopkins University. He became a "public intellectual" before the phrase was coined, establishing a national reputation through his writing and speeches as a keen student of U.S. history and government. Drawn to the world of action, he shifted to university administration and then to politics, as president of Princeton University and subsequently governor of New Jersey demonstrating brilliant leadership in implementing sweeping reform programs against entrenched opposition. Much has been made of his moralism. Like many of his contemporaries, he was a deeply religious man. Religion gave a special fervor to his sense of personal and national destiny. He was also a practical person who quickly grasped the workings of complex institutions and learned how to use them to achieve his goals. Somewhat forbidding of countenance, with high cheekbones, a firm jaw, and stern eyes, he was a shy and private man who could come across as cold and arrogant. Yet among friends he was capable of great warmth; among those he loved, great passion. He was an accomplished and entertaining mimic. His practiced eloquence with the written and spoken word gave him a capacity to sway people matched by few U.S. leaders. Those who worked with him sometimes complained that his absorption in a single matter limited his capacity to deal with other issues. His greatest flaws were his difficulty working with strong people and, once his mind was made up, a reluctance to hear dissenting views.
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Wilson prevailed in 1912 mainly because Republicans were split between party regulars who supported Taft and progressives who backed the increasingly radical Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Socialist Eugene
V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote in this most radical election in U.S. history. Wilson came to power fully committed to his New Freedom reform program that sought to restore equality of opportunity and democracy through tariff and banking reform and curbing the power of big business.
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He also brought to the presidency firm convictions about America's role in the world. He fervently believed that foreign policy should serve broad human concerns rather than narrow selfish interests. He recognized business's need for new markets and investments abroad, but he saw no inherent conflict between America's ideals and its pursuit of self-interest, believing, in biographer Kendrick Clements's phrase, that the United States "would do well by doing good."
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He shared in full measure and indeed found religious justification for the traditional American belief that providence had singled out his nation to show other peoples "how they shall walk in the paths of liberty."
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He had watched with fascination his nation's emergence as a world power, and he perceived that this new status put it in a position to promote its ideals. He shared the optimism and goals of the organized peace movement. At first opposed to taking the Philippines, he went along on grounds that nations like the United States and Britain that were "organically" disposed toward democracy should educate other peoples for self-government.
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An admirer of conservative British political philosopher Edmund Burke, he feared disorder and violent change. As at home, he viewed powerful economic interests as obstacles to equal opportunity and democratic progress in other countries.
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Wilson's views were influenced by Col. Edward M. House (the title was honorific), a wealthy Texas politico who without official position remained his alter ego and closest adviser until the last years of his presidency. Small of stature, quiet and self-effacing, House was a shrewd judge of people and a skilled behind-the-scenes operator. His aspirations were revealed in his anonymously published novel,
Philip Dru: Administrator,
the tale of a Kentuckian and West Point graduate who after corralling the special interests at home launched a crusade with Britain against Germany and Japan for disarmament and the removal of trade barriers.
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Wilson's genuine and deeply felt aspirations to build a better world suffered from a certain culture-blindness. He lacked experience in diplomacy and hence an appreciation of its limits. He had not traveled widely outside the United States and knew little of other peoples and cultures beyond Britain, which he greatly admired. Especially in his first years in office, he had difficulty seeing that well-intended efforts to spread U.S. values might be viewed as interference at best, coercion at worst. His vision was further narrowed by the terrible burden of racism, common among the elite of his generation, which limited his capacity to understand and respect people of different colors. Above all, he was blinded by his certainty of America's goodness and destiny. "A new age has come which no man may forecast," he wrote in 1901. "But the past is the key to it; and the past of America lies at the center of modern history."
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As a scholar, Wilson had written that the power of the president in foreign policy was "very absolute," and he practiced what he had preached, expanding presidential authority even beyond TR's precedents. He was fascinated by the challenge of leading a great nation in tumultuous times. Early in his presidency, he wrote excitedly to a friend about the "thick bundle of despatches" he confronted each afternoon, a "miscellany of just about every sort of problem that can arise in the foreign affairs of a nation in a time of general questioning and difficulty." He distrusted and even had contempt for the State Department, complaining on one occasion that dispatches written there were not in "good and understandable English." Like the professor he had been, he corrected and returned them for resubmission. He composed much diplomatic correspondence on his own typewriter and handled some major issues without consulting either the State Department or his cabinet.
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