Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
America was the shining city on a hill. It was the country at the forefront of the world democratic order, the global policeman, the might of its military matched only by the depth of its financial reserves. America was the one the world listened to, whether it wanted to or not. So, what happened? Well, a lot of things. In this searing account, Alan Friedman shows how, from the disastrous Vietnam War to Barack Obama's bungled response to the Arab Spring, American intervention has ceased to be the decisive action it once was. And now, with the rise of China and Russia, coupled with America's prostration of itself following the election of Donald Trump, the decline of its authority is only hastening. We move now, Friedman argues, into the New World Disorder. In this dangerous and unstable world, the Washington-enforced liberal order is receding, and a new set of alliances and anxieties are in ascendence. What is America's place in this? Which powers are going to emerge as the leaders? Will the European Union count at all? One thing is for sure: the effects of the New World Disorder will challenge our Western values to breaking point.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 373
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
iii
v
For Gabriella
vi
vii
‘An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?’ (‘Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?’)
Axel Oxenstierna, 1648viii
Contents
x
Prologue
I remember listening to Gore Vidal talking passionately about the similarities between America today and the declining days of the Roman Empire. It was a humid summer evening in Rome, July 1998, and we were at a cocktail party and dinner reception for the former US presidential candidate George McGovern. Vidal was clearly delighted to see McGovern, the man who lost the election to Richard Nixon back in 1972 and a fellow former critic of the Vietnam War. McGovern was enjoying his role as the guest of honour, and he was being fawned over by the smart set in Rome. Then aged seventy-six, McGovern had just been appointed by President Bill Clinton as the new American ambassador to the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Vidal held aloft a glass of chilled Vermentino as he stood on the terrace of Rome’s most aristocratic club, the Circolo della Caccia, and spoke scornfully of America. The main difference between Imperial Rome and twentieth-century America, he snarled, was the extraordinary brevity of the American empire, which had xiigone from global hegemony to decadence in less than half a century. Vidal’s vision was that of a fairly rapid trajectory for an empire that had reached its pinnacle of strength and global power in the decades after the Second World War.
There was no greater champion of Washington’s imperial destiny than Henry Luce, the media mogul who in 1941 published a famous editorial in Life magazine. Luce proclaimed the dawning of ‘The American Century’ and emphasised the idea that in the twentieth century, the United States was poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the political, economic and cultural landscape of the world. He believed that American values and influence would guide the course of history and would ultimately ‘make the world safe for democracy’.* Vidal was famously pessimistic about America, as were other critics of so-called American imperialism, such as left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. Yet one need not employ an ideological framework of the left in order to understand the parabola of American power. It is the story of the rise and fall of a great power. Empires come and go; just look at world history. And some, like Rome, eventually collapse xiiior implode because of poor leadership, mismanagement or strained resources and imperial overreach. Other downfalls include assassinations, insurrections, civil wars and other internal divisions. These are, by the way, the kind of divisions and existential challenges that were prevalent during 2024. At the time of writing, America is in the wake of a turbulent presidential election season. With Donald Trump back in the White House, the future is more uncertain than ever. Washington is in upheaval, autocrats everywhere are encouraged and America’s traditional allies wait anxiously to see the mercurial tycoon’s next move. But the trajectory of America’s decline will not change; it may even be accelerated.
Ultimately Gore Vidal got it right: there are few periods of imperial predominance that have been as short-lived as the parabola of US leadership between the 1940s and the 2020s. At the end of the Second World War, America was not prepared to step into the role of global policeman. Yet the United States would take up the mantle anyway, and it would do so with a mixture of altruistic-sounding rhetoric, naive and self-righteous promises of freedom and democracy on the one hand and cynical self-interest on the other. This contrast between utopian and moralistic US rhetoric, proclamations about the right of all peoples to self-determination and a post-war period filled with CIA machinations and regime change policies remains the greatest paradox in American foreign policy. In a rapidly changing world, American exceptionalism is no longer defensible. xiv
It never was. Indeed, the very system of Western liberal democracy that America designed is currently under attack, with a motley crew of autocrats, terrorists, authoritarian and illiberal elected leaders on the one hand and the Global South plus the BRICS crowd on the other, all proposing an alternative vision of how to manage the world.†
We have kept the flag flying for nearly eighty years now, but the current phase is one of visible decline in American influence and the emergence of alliances that break with the old norms and practices of the post-war period. This is the price of the globalisation that created greater income inequalities, the effect of Putin’s war in the Ukraine, of the pandemic, of the disruption of supply chains, of the rise of China, and it is also the result of deep fissures in US society. America, sadly, is broken. As the rockstar hedge fund manager Ray Dalio will tell you, every big cycle has a phase when you are on the way up and a phase when you are on the way down.‡ This book is the chronicle of the slippery slide down the big cycle and of how we are now living in a period of upheaval and realignment. America is weakened and distracted by an existential battle that is raging within its own borders. This is the story of the failure of American leadership at key moments in post-war history, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and a glimpse at xvthe increasingly dangerous and uncertain world that is now taking shape. There is no Big Bang moment in which America’s influence comes to an abrupt end. It is more a question of the long arc of history, the inexorable and multiple forces that together are like kryptonite for the unruly giant. After a relatively brief period of Pax Americana, less than a full century, we now are entering a phase that future historians may one day call ‘the New World Disorder’. In this period of history, early 21st-century America is on the defensive, riven by deep internal conflict and steadily ceding influence to China and other rivals. Trump is the ultimate manifestation of a full-blown societal crisis in America, and his xenophobia and isolationism appear to accurately mirror his nation’s mood.
Gore Vidal would not be surprised. The truth is that we Americans have never been very good at managing empire. It is not really one of our skillsets. Most Americans would probably say the term should be applied only to the Roman Empire, or the British Empire, or to the empires of France or Spain and other European colonising nations. But not to America. We are not an empire! Perish the thought. After all, we were once a colony. We rebelled and secured our independence from the British Empire. We were told by Benjamin Franklin that we had created a republic, if we could keep it. We are not an imperial power. We have always seen ourselves as the Good Guys. We are idealists. We are America. We are that city upon a hill. We are the defenders of democracy. That is who we are. At least, that is what we were taught in school for the past century. xvi
History, of course, is generally written by the winners, or by their acolytes; so many of America’s history texts were written, until quite recently, by middle-aged white male historians. The telling of American history has been left largely in the hands of men who came of age in the past century, who learned the Pledge of Allegiance at school, whose Weltanschauung was formed by the Cold War. Fashions change, in history as in real life. These historians have tended to skip over some of the more awkward issues, like nearly 300 years of slave labour and a century of recurring genocide against indigenous peoples. Instead, we Americans have told ourselves a far more heroic story about ‘manifest destiny’ and the frontier crucible.§ It is the Disney version of American history. We have pretty much convinced ourselves that we Americans have never had anything to do with imperialism or with imperialist behaviour.
‘America has never been an empire,’ George W. Bush proclaimed with vigour, and typically exaggerated swagger, during the 2000 presidential campaign. ‘We may be the only great power in history that had the chance and xviirefused, preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.’¶ The reality is that we have been in collective denial for a very long time. We have also been the victims of selective storytelling. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that nothing would ever change, that America and the American way of life would reign supreme until the end of time. Today, with the known American-led world order disintegrating, and with at least half of America retreating into a primordial isolationism, it is time to look at how we got here, and why America’s de facto global empire is being displaced by the uncertainty of a New World Disorder. In order to understand why the Pax Americana is entering a twilight period and what may come next, we need first to examine the illusions and fairy tales we have lived with for such a very long time. What began as the colonisation of America’s eastern seaboard by settlers and religious refugees from the Dutch and British Empires in the early 1600s, and then morphed into a republic by the late 1700s, would soon be transformed into a United States of America that for more than a century would press forth with a huge and unprecedented territorial expansion, a massive continental land grab, through petition, purchase, treaty, war, invasion and annexation. The phenomenon would continue throughout the 1800s and well into the 1900s. Today, in xviiithe 2020s, American democracy is more fragile than at any time since the Civil War of the 1860s. And as the republic is torn asunder by deep social and political divisions, American power on the world stage is being weakened. America’s de facto empire is in decline. This is the story of the failure of American foreign policy since 1945. It is time to admit the hypocrisy, the incompetence, the mismanagement of US power at times by so many American Presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Not to mention Donald Trump. It is time to imagine a world without any order, a world in which the United Nations and the World Bank are no longer relevant, a world where NATO faces a terrifying threat in Vladimir Putin, a world of disorder in which multilateralism has been replaced by new cross-cutting alliances, a New World Disorder where the laws of the jungle replace the International Court of Justice.
But first we need to understand the origins of American imperialism in the late eighteenth century. The idea of an American empire was first mentioned innocently by George Washington, but it would become a strategic reality under President Thomas Jefferson.
* Henry R. Luce (1898–1967), journalist and founder of Time and Life magazines, in ‘The American Century’, published by Life magazine on 17 February 1941, urged Washington to enter the Second World War to defend democratic values and ‘create the first great American century’. Luce’s editorial echoed the words used by President Wilson in his message to Congress delivered on 2 April 1917, when he called for a declaration of war against Germany, saying that not only had America’s rights as a neutral been violated but that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’. Americans must fight ‘for the rights and liberties of small nations’ and to ‘bring peace and safety to make the world itself at last free’. See President Wilson’s Declaration of War Message to Congress, 2 April 1917; Records of the United States Senate; Group 46; National Archives. Also quoted by Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Penguin Press, 2009, pp. 65–6; and Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, Penguin Publishing Group, 1997, p. 14.
† BRICS is an intergovernmental organisation comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
‡ Ray Dalio, also known as ‘the Super Trader’, is the founder of successful hedge fund Bridgewater and a very high-profile financial guru. His success in online trading was also a result of his approach to investment strategies based on a particular combination of finance and philosophy.
§ The belief in the necessary expansion of the nation westward was called ‘manifest destiny’, a kind of faith in the American duty to settle the continent, conquer and prosper. The settlers were said to have overcome hazardous terrain and death to reach their ‘promised land’, the American West. American journalist John L. O’Sullivan is known for being the first to use the phrase ‘manifest destiny’ in his essay titled ‘Annexation’ in the Democratic Review to advocate in 1845 the annexation of Texas and Oregon, not only because Texas desired this – he wrote – but because it was ‘our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. Also, artists helped the American dream to strengthen. The fresco cycles for the Dome, for instance, served as propaganda to celebrate the greatness of the young nation and motivate many Americans seeking a brighter future. See Philip Kennicott, ‘In 1898, the US was entranced by empire. The legacy lingers’, Washington Post, 2 June 2023.
¶ In a speech delivered on 19 November 1999 at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, George W. Bush also stated that ‘all the aims I’ve described today are important. But they are not imperial. America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.’ See Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Penguin Press, 2009, pp 6–7 and p. 170, and Ferguson, ‘The “E” Word: Admit it – America is an Empire’, WSJ Opinion, 7 June 2003.
Chapter One
The Infant Empire
The word ‘empire’ was not always taboo.
George Washington, with eloquent humility, would describe his country as ‘an infant empire’.* Back in 1780, during the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson would use the phrase ‘Empire of Liberty’ to describe his vision of a confederation of equal American states, based on a forceful westward expansion, as a kind of ‘democratic’ empire that could stand up to the powerful British Empire at the time. In Jefferson’s vision, this ‘Empire of Liberty’ would be based on acquiring new lands and guaranteeing access to overseas markets. He specifically expressed the desire to add to his ‘Empire of Liberty’ the British-held colony of Canada.† So 2while his rhetoric referred to an empire of liberty, Jefferson and other expansionists coveted an empire that would include the conquest of British-held Canada, Spanish-owned Florida and the French-owned Louisiana Territory. Indeed, Jefferson’s unhappy relationship with the British would in part lead to the War of 1812, during which America would fight the British and fail miserably in its attempt to conquer Canada.‡ Jefferson, who also wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, was at pains to stress that his was not really an imperialist vision but simply a vision of an American confederation that could stand tall next to European empires. His actions would fall short of his rhetoric, as was also the case in the Declaration of Independence. In that document, Jefferson wrote these famous words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’1 At the time of writing that ‘all men are created equal’, Jefferson actually meant only white, property-owning men. One fifth of the colony’s total population was enslaved in 1776, so their rights to life and liberty did not exist. In his public life, Jefferson made statements describing black people as biologically inferior and claiming that a biracial American 3society was impossible. Jefferson had 600 slaves himself and it is highly likely that he fathered six children with one of his slaves, his mistress Sally Hemings. To his credit, he freed ten of his slaves, five during his lifetime and five in his last will and testament. They were all members of the Hemings family.§ Jefferson did try to insert a ban on slavery into the Declaration of Independence, but he was voted down by the majority of the Congress in Philadelphia during that sweltering summer of 1776. Later on, he would try to prevent the spread of slavery in the new western territories, but with little success. The settlers wanted the low-cost benefits of slave labour as they pushed westward, just as they wanted the lands of the indigenous peoples they came across. When it came to the treatment of Native Americans, Thomas Jefferson was ruthless. Despite his moderate rhetoric, he would lay the foundations for a century of ‘Indian removal’, an American form of ethnic cleansing of the original inhabitants of North America. During the Revolutionary War, Jefferson himself gave orders to exterminate a number of native tribes that were allied with the British.2 From their point of view, they were fighting for their homeland. Little did they know that their destiny was to be near extermination of their lives and their culture and removal to reservations.
When America and Britain finally made peace, and the 4Treaty of Paris was signed in September 1783, the British not only recognised the independence of the thirteen colonies but also ceded to America all land west to the Mississippi River and as far north as the Great Lakes.¶ This was a swathe of nearly half a million square miles that would double the size of America and eventually be divided into the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. All that was needed now was to clear the land of the ‘merciless Indian savages’, as Jefferson described the indigenous people whose land the British had just handed them.|| Jefferson’s denigration of the natives showed that the war for independence from Great Britain was also a war to seize indigenous lands. From 1776 to 1783, US troops and colonial militias destroyed more than seventy Cherokee towns, fifty Haudenosaunee towns and at least ten multiethnic towns in the Ohio Valley, killing several hundred people (including civilians) and subjecting refugees to starvation, disease and death. In the decades to come, both Washington and Jefferson would call for the extermination of Native Americans who fought against dispossession. Several US armies would 5try to do precisely that.** The term ‘imperialism’ would not be used in American politics again until a century later, in the 1890s, when the explicit promotion of the policy would enjoy a sudden and widespread political appeal.†† But there can be little doubt that the original thirteen colonies had, within a few years of declaring their independence, already become the colonisers, and rebel America had begat its own continental empire. By the irony of history, the original Americans who had declared independence from the British monarchy, and thus the British Empire, would forge their very own empire. And it would be far more powerful than anything Britannia had ever known. In his farewell address in 1796, George Washington had been quite explicit in counselling the fledgling nation against getting involved in the affairs of warring European powers. But Thomas Jefferson was an avid diplomat and a savvy operator, and he was always looking for ways that America could benefit from Europe’s Napoleonic Wars. As the President, in 1803, 6he literally doubled the size of the United States by making a deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-proclaimed Emperor of France, to purchase the Louisiana Territory. Napoleon, who was warring with England, needed the money. Jefferson saw an opportunity, and he took it. He rationalised it as part of his ‘Empire of Liberty’ strategy.3 In any case this was good business, and the huge territory would provide vast resources for America’s westward expansion. The diplomat who had helped to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase in Paris was James Monroe; he would a few years later serve as Secretary of State under James Madison and then, starting in 1817, as the fifth President of the United States. With huge expansionary ambitions, Monroe would acquire Florida from Spain in 1819, and then four years later, in 1823, he would proclaim the famed ‘Monroe Doctrine’. This declaration became a cornerstone of American foreign policy for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. It was a warning to European countries against any further colonisation in the western hemisphere. Any attempt by a European power to intervene or control any nation in the western hemisphere would now be viewed by the United States as a hostile act. Monroe had essentially claimed American dominion, or suzerainty, over half the globe. By the 1840s, amid the waves of westward movement of hundreds of thousands of European and American settlers, the philosophical pretext or justification for the expansion would be found in the idea of a natural right to conquer the continent, known as ‘manifest destiny’. This 7was a right supposedly granted directly by God, by Divine Providence, by the superiority of American democratic values and institutions, by the need to spread Christianity and above all by the need for economic growth and expansion. Take your pick. All these arguments were considered valid at the time in polite society. These justifications were of course framed by the dominant white Euro-American elites. Until recently, many historians have ignored or understated the fact that America’s glorious manifest destiny was achieved by a push westward that also resulted in the slaughter of millions of Native Americans, in what could be called a slow-motion and rolling genocide. They have also made little of the fact that the economy’s business model was based in large part on the slave labour of millions of Africans who were being brought to America in shackles. The lure of manifest destiny, and the personal ambitions of President James K. Polk, would soon take America into war with Mexico, a war that was decried at the time by its critics as imperialistic and incompatible with democratic ideals. It was Polk, a pro-slavery firebrand from Tennessee, a man who never expected to be President, who did the dirty work. Polk was elected in 1844 on an expansionist platform that advocated the annexation of Texas and the acquisition from the British of the Oregon Territory. It was during his years in the White House that the term ‘manifest destiny’ became popular. Polk didn’t waste any time in office. He annexed Texas in 1845. Then he wanted to lay claim to California and New Mexico, and so he started out 8by trying to buy the land from the Mexican government. He sent an American diplomat, John Slidell, to Mexico City, to offer $30 million for the land. When the Mexicans declined, Polk provoked an incident with Mexico and got the Congress to declare war. After two years of bloodshed, by 1848 Mexico was forced to cede to the United States the land that would become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Among those opposed to the war with Mexico was a newly elected congressman named Abraham Lincoln, who declared Polk’s actions as ‘immoral’ and as being contrary to the values of the American republic. Another critic, the author Henry David Thoreau, refused to pay taxes that would support the war with Mexico and was subsequently jailed. From prison he wrote his essay Civil Disobedience, in which he expressed his opposition to both the territorial expansion of the Mexican–American War and to the practice of slavery. In just one four-year term in office, the hard-driving Polk acquired more than 1 million square miles of western territory and pushed America’s western boundary all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The aggressive and violent expansionary tactics of James K. Polk had fulfilled manifest destiny. It was not considered empire-building, but rather a natural and preordained outcome.
The enlargement of the United States was made possible in part by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a law signed by President Andrew Jackson that gave rise to a dark chapter in American history. The law authorised the forced removal 9of Native American tribes including the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations, to lands west of the Mississippi River. The main goal of the Indian Removal Act was to open up valuable lands for white settlement and to facilitate the expansion of the United States. Many white settlers coveted the fertile lands of the indigenous tribes. The removal of the Native American tribes, known as the ‘Trail of Tears’, was a period in the late 1830s when the United States government forcibly removed the south-eastern Native Americans from their homelands and relocated them to lands in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate away from their home. Approximately 16,000 Cherokee men, women and children were forced to leave their homes and embark on a perilous journey, covering several hundred miles on foot, with some groups travelling by boat along rivers.
The conditions during the Trail of Tears were deplorable. The Cherokee tribe faced extreme weather conditions, inadequate clothing and meagre rations. Many were ill and weakened, having been exposed to diseases such as smallpox and measles that had been introduced by European settlers. An estimated 5,000 people died of disease, exposure, malnutrition and exhaustion during this journey. This episode alas was emblematic of the times; we could call it the rotten underside of American expansionism in 10the nineteenth century. It has usually been treated as a footnote, alongside the issue of slavery. The fact that half of America’s westward expansion was powered by slave labour is not a trivial detail. The very taking of human beings and trafficking them from Africa to North America as slaves is something, of course, that empires tended to do. But there was no talk of empire and little mention of slavery as a tool for economic growth and expansion. We were a democracy. Our narrative has been sanitised. It was in the late 1890s, as America was recovering from a major economic crisis, the Depression of 1893, that American political leaders were finally ready to speak openly about their imperial ambitions. The economy was booming by the end of the 1890s. It was the Gilded Age of American prosperity, the age of the Rockefellers and Morgans, the Astors and Vanderbilts. It was a wondrous moment of globalisation, free trade, open borders and mass immigration from Europe to the United States, and there was excitement at the newly introduced technologies, such as horseless carriages, electric streetcars, undersea communications cables, the telegraph, the telephone and other inventions, all of which provided faster communications and transportation, which in turn made the world smaller and more colonially accessible.
It was also the age of the warmongering William Randolph Hearst and other practitioners of yellow journalism. More than a century before Rupert Murdoch, Hearst was America’s most unscrupulous media mogul. He teamed up with ambitious and openly imperialist politicians like 11Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt and his best friend Henry Cabot Lodge, the hawkish senator, and together they pushed for empire-building as a top priority for the United States.
All of this occurred on the very cusp of the twentieth century, with an ambivalent President William McKinley sitting in the White House and his arch-rival William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat, accusing him of warmongering and imperialist ambition. In 1898, the idea of keeping European powers out of the western hemisphere was in vogue once more. The focus was on Cuba. There was widespread American support for the Cuban revolutionaries who had been fighting for their independence from Spanish colonial rule. Hearst was using his newspapers to whip up popular sentiment against Spain. They had been fighting for more than three years, and the Spanish had been brutal in suppressing the Cuban independence fighters, but the issue had only now become topical, as often occurs in Washington. By early 1898, tensions between the United States and Spain were running high over the Cuban situation. When the US battleship USS Maine suddenly exploded and sank in Havana Harbor under mysterious circumstances on 15 February 1898, Hearst, Lodge and others unfairly accused Spain of the attack. The accusation stuck, even though it was probably false. The battle cry in Hearst’s newspapers became ‘Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!’ The Hearst newspapers were so influential that the magnate used to brag to his dinner guests, ‘This is my war.’ President 12McKinley, taken along by the flow of public opinion, then moved, almost reluctantly, to declare war on Spain. He justified it to the American people largely as a matter of humanitarian aid and spreading civilisation and Christianity. There would of course be no real contest. By 1898, American naval power was far superior to Spain’s. Admiral George Dewey was dispatched to the Philippines and he destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in no time at all. In Cuba, the US Navy blockaded the Spaniards and cut them off quite efficiently. After less than three months of what future Secretary of State John Hay would describe as a ‘splendid little war’, the Spanish were begging for peace. Hearst was meanwhile busy making his fortune and claiming credit for pushing the country into war. Roosevelt was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy but was effectively running the war much of the time.
The Spanish–American War of 1898 ended Spain’s colonial empire in the western hemisphere. The US victory in the war produced a peace treaty that compelled the Spanish to relinquish claims on Cuba and to cede sovereignty over Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States. Alas, the question of what to do with the Philippines was a complicated matter for Washington, and in the end, President McKinley decided to annex it, which would trigger another war, this time with America’s own allies against Spain, the independence fighters.
The British poet Rudyard Kipling would describe the US effort to colonise the Philippines and teach the natives 13about American democracy and manners as ‘the white man’s burden’.‡‡ Indeed that was the idea that Lodge and Roosevelt and even McKinley began preaching in public appearances, that it was America’s responsibility to assist others in becoming more ‘Americanised’.
Meanwhile, in 1898 the United States also annexed and Americanised the independent state of Hawaii (having previously sent the US Marines to the home of Queen Liliuokalani, to arrest at gunpoint the indigenous sovereign of Hawaii). At the time, the white population of American settlers in Hawaii amounted to 3 per cent of the inhabitants of Hawaii. The others would be, in the best imperial tradition, subjugated to the white man’s will. Thus, the war with Spain and the Hawaiian and Philippine annexations enabled the United States to expand further and to establish its predominance in the Caribbean region and to pursue its strategic and economic interests in the Pacific. The Monroe Doctrine was once again vindicated. And then some.
Indeed, it was now quite politically correct and acceptable to speak openly of empire. Economists and newspaper columnists argued that it was necessary to annex new territories and open new markets for American industrial products. There was indeed a great debate about expansion across the nation, and the topic would arise during the presidential election campaign of 1900, when 14McKinley won re-election as a conquering hero. He defeated the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, who had denounced the policy of American expansionism as wrong-minded imperialism and argued that the United States should focus instead on domestic issues. Bryan was popular with those American voters who viewed the acquisition of new colonies and protectorates like the Philippines as a wrongheaded departure from America’s founding principles. He repeatedly denounced the views of Republican Teddy Roosevelt, who on 1 July 1898 created an early twentieth-century selfie by staging a photograph of himself mounted on a horse in Cuba. The headstrong Roosevelt had resigned his post as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and was now Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Roosevelt, leading a volunteer cavalry regiment of 1,250 horsemen known as the ‘Rough Riders’.
By positioning himself alongside the regular US military forces, Teddy managed to claim credit for the taking of San Juan Hill near Santiago de Cuba. He even donned a dapper blue polka-dot handkerchief and tied it to his felt cowboy hat, presumably so it could shield his neck from the hot sunshine. But the effect of the bandana streaming behind the figure of Roosevelt, mounted on his horse, proved spectacularly photogenic. The legendary photograph shows Teddy and the Rough Riders atop the conquered hill. After this premeditated stunt he became, as planned, a national war hero. The ambitious Roosevelt milked the photo for all it was worth, and he rode it all the way to the Governor’s 15mansion in Albany, New York, just six months later. On his return from Cuba, the Republican Party bosses in New York pushed Roosevelt to run for Governor, despite their doubts about his political loyalty. Elected in November 1898, he became an energetic reformer, removing corrupt officials and enacting legislation to regulate corporations. His actions so angered the party bosses that they decided to get rid of him by drafting him for the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1900, on the assumption that this would be a largely ceremonial role where he could do no harm. Less than a month into his presidency, however, in April 1901, McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist with a pistol at close range. With Roosevelt as the new President, the battle in the Philippines quickly escalated; he pitched American forces against Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo, who was seeking independence for his country, as the Americans had previously promised, rather than simply a handover between colonial rulers, from Spain to the United States. Over the three years it lasted, the Philippine–American War claimed the lives of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants. As many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine and disease. It was the first truly imperial war of the United States, at the dawn of the twentieth century. America did not acquit itself with honour or distinction; on the contrary, the US military committed multiple atrocities and massacres while they subdued the locals. Teddy Roosevelt, who was the most openly imperialist American President, was also a distant 16cousin of the more benevolent Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would lead America through the Great Depression in the 1930s and throughout most of the Second World War, until 1945. But the two men came from different parties, lived at dramatically different times and rose to power in starkly different moments in American history. ‘TR’ was, among other things, the President who from 1901 to 1903 tried to persuade Colombia to give him the land to build what is now the Panama Canal. When they refused, he sent in the US Marines. The US military backed Panamanian rebels who took over the swathe of land between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of what was then an isthmus of Colombia and rechristened it as Panama. The US President immediately recognised the new nation of Panama, which promptly ceded the right to construct and operate the canal to the United States. The Marines would remain deployed in Panama until 1914, when the canal was completed. In December 1904, a month after being re-elected to a full term, Roosevelt offered his most lasting contribution to the lexicon of American foreign policy: he described America as the ‘world’s policeman’. Historians call it the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, which back in 1823 had warned European colonial powers to stay out of the western hemisphere. Now Roosevelt broadened the scope. There is condescension and glaring arrogance in Roosevelt’s imperialist rhetoric: ‘If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it 17need fear no interference from the United States,’ said the man also known for his motto ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. He went on to warn, however, that
chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society may … ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the western hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.§§
There it was: the first official presidential declaration of America’s self-appointed role as the world’s policeman, the ‘exercise of international police power’ to protect US interests. The Roosevelt Corollary would be used over and over again in the following decades, and in the first decade of the twentieth century alone the United States intervened to achieve regime change or to protect US economic interests no fewer than six times: in Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico and Colombia. The second decade of the twentieth century saw the rise of Woodrow Wilson, the historically controversial US President who was known for his utopian (‘Wilsonian’) vision of the League of Nations 18and a world of peace and multilateral co-operation. But Wilson was actually one of America’s fiercest interventionists, a man who wielded imperial power throughout his time in office, from 1913 to 1921. The morally high-minded historian from Princeton was also a fervent segregationist, whose southern upbringing had made him a racist politician who was popular with white supremacists at the time.¶¶ This is an inconvenient truth today, and it tends to clash with the rather more sanitised version of Wilson we had been spoon-fed until quite recently. When the self-righteous Wilson intervened to engage in regime change or to enforce US interests in the Caribbean, and this would be true of many American Presidents, he would always couch his reasons in the rhetoric of American moral superiority, the sense that we are the guardians of justice and democracy, of humanity itself. So when Wilson sent the US Marines into Haiti in 1915 for regime change, or into the Dominican Republic a year later for the same purpose, his language was all about ‘Pan-American brotherhood’, while the reality was a good deal more cynical.4 The Marines remained in Haiti for nineteen years, and they occupied Santo Domingo for two decades. At the time of Wilson’s intervention in Mexico in 1914, his advisers were urging him to ‘blaze the way for a new and better code of morals than the world has yet seen’.519Wilson’s Mexican adventures instead saw the US President rashly trying to take sides in the Mexican revolution and then making a hash of things. Among his other imperial adventures were the long-running ‘Banana Wars’, which saw US military interventions across the Caribbean and Central America, mainly to protect US business interests. Everything changed in 1914, as Europe’s imperial monarchs began sending millions of young people to their deaths in defence of an archaic and crumbling world order. Enter Woodrow Wilson, who for three years had tried to keep the peace and avoid involvement in the European war. He even offered himself, unsuccessfully, as a mediator between Germany and the Allied Forces of Britain and France. Wilson got himself re-elected to the White House in 1916 with the slogan ‘he kept us out of war’. But in February 1917, after the Germans declared unrestricted submarine warfare and started sinking American passenger ships, he had no choice but to enter the fray. Wilson always laced his rhetoric with moral hyperbole, and so when the President finally went before a Joint Session of Congress in April 1917 to declare war on Germany, he outlined his vision of the new world order that would emerge from the war. It would be based upon the principles of self-determination and freedom and democracy everywhere. ‘The world’, President Wilson informed the assembled senators and Congressmen, ‘must be made safe for democracy.’ 20
NOTES
1 Declaration of Independence, signed by representatives of the thirteen United States of America in the General Congress on 4 July 1776.
2 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Penguin, 2012, pp. 35–7. Also see Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Development Centre Studies OECD, 2010
3 See F. D. Cogliano, Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy, Yale University Press, 2014
4 R. Kagan, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941, Knopf, 2023, p. 76
5 Ibid., p. 78
* George Washington referred to the United States as an ‘infant empire’ in a letter sent on 28 July 1784 to French general and politician the Marquis de Lafayette, a leading figure in both the American and French Revolutions. In the letter, Washington expressed his hope for the US, ‘this infant empire’, to grow into a powerful and admired nation in the world.
† Thomas Jefferson used the phrase ‘Empire of Liberty’ on more than one occasion. It occurred first in a letter sent in 1780 to General and war hero George Rogers, while the American Revolution was still being fought. He wrote that his goal was the creation of an independent state that would be proactive in its foreign policy and whose interventionism and expansionism would always be perceived as benevolent. ‘In the event of peace … we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of Liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.’
‡ The War of 1812 originated from the trade tensions between the young United States and the British Empire, which imposed restrictions on naval trade during its war against Napoleon. British support given to Native Americans opposed to US westward expansionism, and US territorial aims over the British colony of Canada, drove a narrow majority in the US House, under the War Hawks’ pressure, to declare war on 18 June 1812. After suffering several defeats, the Americans inflicted heavy losses on the British, but the treaty ending hostilities had been signed before the news reached the battlefield. Pre-conflict situation had been restored in 1815.
§ In 1998, a DNA analysis from a sample provided by Field Jefferson, a living descendant of Jefferson’s paternal uncle, and from Easton Hemings, born in 1808, proved new biological evidence that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had at least one and probably six children between 1790 and 1808. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation accepted the DNA-based conclusions.
¶ The treaty enshrined the end of the American War of Independence and related conflicts (the Anglo-French War, the Anglo-Spanish War and the fourth Anglo-Dutch War) and, amongst others, provided for British recognition of the independence of the thirteen colonies (which became the United States of America) and for London’s relinquishment of the territories between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River, which set the new border between the US and the Spanish possessions in North America. See Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’sEmpire:TheLanguageofAmericanNationhood, University of Virginia Press, 2000.
|| Jefferson referred to ‘merciless Indian savages’ in his twenty-seventh grievance against King George, when he accused him of encouraging ‘domestic insurrection’ by indigenous people against ‘white colonists’ (Declaration of Rights and Grievances, 14 October 1765).
** Jeffrey Oster, ‘The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence’, The Atlantic, 8 February 2020. Since the 1970s, American academics have begun to use the term ‘genocide’ to denounce US policies toward Native Americans. By the 1990s, works with shocking data about crimes against these peoples had been published. See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Oxford University Press, 1993, and Ward L. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas: 1492 to the Present, City Lights Books, 1997.
††
