America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts
Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, has written a sequel to his “Dangerous Nation” Japan to cover American
foreign policy from 1900-1941. In 1900 fresh after defeating Spain in 1898 the U.S. had
the largest economy in the world and was viewed as a non-entity as far as the
great powers of Europe were concerned. Domestically there was a strong
anti-imperialist lobby against the American occupation of the Philippines, but
Kagan reminds us that the freeing Cuba from Spanish colonialism was highly popular
across the political spectrum. Using terms of today, it was viewed as a
“humanitarian intervention.” Further the takeover of the Philippines was
accidental in that Admiral George Dewey was following a decade old plan to
steam to Manila to engage the Spanish fleet where he won a resounding victory.
Kagan argues that absent the U.S. intervention, sooner or later the Philippines
would have been taken over by either Germany or Japan.
Kagan covers the Platt Amendment to the Monroe
Doctrine which unilaterally granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Latin
America which it does many times. Initially to keep the Europeans out and to
maintain the peace, but later with less than benign motives. He spends less
than time than he should have around the politics of building the Panama Canal
and President Roosevelt’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War. By 1914 the
U.S. has no army to speak of and has modern, but small Navy.
When the war in Europe broke out the U.S. position was
to stay out of it, despite strong support from banking interests to weigh in on
the side of the allies. There was great support for the Central Powers coming
from Irish, German and Jewish Americans for their own unique reasons. Despite
the sinking of the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson, though indirectly
supporting the allies, struggles to keep the U.S. out of the war. The pressure
for U.S. entry is led by former
president Theodore Roosevelt. Ultimately as Germany resorts to unrestricted
submarine warfare the U.S. enters the war as an associated power with an
inflated sense of morality coming from “peace without victory” and his Fourteen
Points.
Wilson enters the Versailles negotiations as a giant.
American power is supreme, yet he gets sucked into the vortex of European power
politics doing whatever he can to bring forth the League of Nations. However,
while in Paris, the once internationalist Republican Party, does a 180-degree
shift. The party once lead by Elihu Root, Henry Stimson and Charles Evans
Hughes is now lead by the anti-league Theodore Roosevelt and Senate foreign
relations chair Henry Cabot Lodge. They are backed up by “the irreconcilables”
led by Senator’s William Borah and Hiram Johnson. When Wilson fails to seek a
compromise, the League fails and the U.S. returns to its pre-war isolation. In
a footnote three young idealist, William Bullitt, John Maynard Keynes, and
Walter Lippmann become disillusioned on the shoals of European reality.
It is here where Kagan argues that the U.S. should
have stayed in the game. Without U.S. backing both France and Britain became
paranoid about future German power and therefore were less willing to
compromise on reparations, something that would plague the continent for a
decade. In the terms of the British diplomat Harold Nicholson, the U.S. became
“the ghost at the feast.” To be sure the U.S. was present financially with both the
Dawes and Young Plans, it was not really in the game.
With the onset of the Great Depression the world order
begins to collapse, first economically and the politically. Japan invades
Manchuria making a mockery of the League. Further, its naval build-up threatens
the American presence in the Pacific and we have the rise of Hitler.
What is the newly elected President Roosevelt’s
response to the deteriorating international situation? More isolation. Kagan,
in my opinion underplays Roosevelt’s blowing up the July 1933 World Economic
Conference where it is understood in no uncertain terms the U.S. will focus on
domestic recovery. This did not go unnoticed by Mussolini and Hitler. To me one
failing of the book is that is lacks an economic context, particularly on the
role of the gold standard and the collapse in world trade.
Later in the decade Roosevelt has to fight off the
isolationists to deal with the growing challenges coming from Japan and
Germany. He highlights the trigger for the change as the September 1938 Munich
Conference and the November 1938 Kristallnacht explosion in Germany. Kagan
reasons, correctly in my opinion, that the reason France and Germany caved into
Hitler is that they rightfully believed that the U.S. did not have their backs.
Thus had the U.S. been more involved with Europe in the 1930’s the horrors to
come might just have been avoided. And if the war in Europe did not start,
Japan might not have embarked on its aggression in Southeast Asia.
Kagan’s conclusion is that there is a straight line
from America’s holiday from international affairs in the 1920’s and 1930’s to
the agony of the 1940’s. It is a lesson that should be remembered by those today
who see few reasons for America’s involvement on the world stage.
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