The canvass of 1800 broke Federalist power, ushering in a quarter century of Republican rule. In March 1801 Thomas Jefferson became president. In 1809 he handed the presidency to his closest collaborator, and Madison, in turn, passed the office to James Monroe in 1817. During all but the first few years of the “Virginia dynasty,” contrary to Jefferson’s hopes when he was inaugurated, problems of foreign policy predominated. Jefferson expanded the national domain by acquiring the Louisiana country, a magnificent gain. Otherwise he and Madison were failures. Their inept diplomacy produced national disgrace and then a war with England, which, but for good fortune, might well have destroyed the union. Both deservedly left the White House with tarnished reputations. Their continuing fame rests upon earlier accomplishments.

Jefferson, Madison, and the World

The Central failure of the two men was an inability to understand the psychology of wartime. Frustrated by America’s treatment at the hands of the European belligerents, angered by their failure to react rationally, as he saw it, to his complaints and his menaces, Jefferson railed against their stupidity and even their mental instability. “I consider Europe a great madhouse,” he wrote in 1808. Madison was little different. His biographer has written, as if to condone that leader’s failures, “President Madison to be successful in his diplomatic strategy needed to deal with men whose understanding matched his own.” This is precisely the point: Neither man recognized that “understanding” is often among the first casualties of war; their obtuseness is a heavy charge against them.

President William Howard Taft and Secretary of State Philander C. Knox were responsible for conducting U.S. foreign policy when, between 1909 and 1913, two generations of American diplomatic history climaxed in Canada, Central America, Mexico, and Asia. Viewed by many scholars, not incorrectly, as sometimes lethargic and often unimaginative, Taft and Knox shared a love for the law, and the respect for property, precedent, compromise, peaceful settlements, and the power of money that are common to many lawyers. Taft was happiest not as president but later when he served as chief justice of the Supreme Court. “The truth is,” he said then, “that in my present life I don’t remember that I ever was President.”

Taft had a superb legal mind. Knox, like his predecessor, Elihu Root, ranked at the top of the best corporate lawyers in a nation dominated by corporations. Taft, moreover, sported a résumé that included being governor-general of the Philippines, secretary of war, Theodore Roosevelt’s diplomatic troubleshooter, and the successor handpicked by TR himself. The Rough Rider quickly regretted his selection, although he probably would have been disappointed regardless of whom he had chosen to succeed him. Roosevelt, moreover, along with his several predecessors in the White House, had bequeathed to Taft and Knox foreign policies that finally triggered a series of disorders, indeed revolutions in several instances, that neither Taft nor anyone else could understand and resolve. The uprisings over the tariff and in Central America, Mexico, and China were fitting conclusions to the previous half century. Taft and Knox had the misfortune to be in the White House and the State Department when many of those deeply rooted policies bore bitter fruit for the United States.

1913-1921

On the origins of World War I, the best summary of various factors and interpretations is offered by James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London, 1984). On United States neutrality during 1914-17, the standard work is Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). There is a voluminous amount of writings on President Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy both during the period of neutrality and after the decision for war. The most detailed and reliable study is the multivolume biography by Arthur S. Link, of which two volumes are particularly relevant: Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality (Princeton, I960), and Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace (Princeton, 1965). For a more compact survey, see Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I (New York, 1985). An extremely interesting contrast between Wilson and former president Theodore Roosevelt is drawn in John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest (New York, 1983). See also the same author’s The Vanity of Power (Westport, Conn., 1969) for a discussion of antiinterventionism during the war.

Perhaps the most important point to be apprehended by the student of the history of international relations in the Cold War era is that the documentary record is incomplete, that American and British archival material is being released thirty years after the events at best. Moreover, there is evidence indicating that the integrity of the American record has been compromised. Other materials, Chinese and Soviet for example, are being released very selectively, often to privileged nationals. Little was seen by Western scholars before the mid-1980s — and not much more has been seen since. Finally, most of what we know about the late 1960s and thereafter is provided by participants who are never disinterested, journalists, and those who write "contemporary history," an oxymoron if there ever was one.

A second point worth noting is that enormously important work, much of it theoretical, has been done by political scientists and political economists. In particular the work of Robert Gilpin, Robert Jervis, Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane, Stephen D. Krasner, and Jack Snyder provides valuable guides to an understanding of what happened and why — and what is likely to happen tomorrow. See, for example, Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987); Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, 1976); Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison, 1978); Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, 1984); Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, 1983); Snyder, Myths of Empire (Ithaca, 1991).

Distinguished scholarly work on Theodore Roosevelt has concluded that his conservatism, moralism, and keen sense of balance-of-power international politics are the keys to understanding this highly popular and influential president. On the centennial of his birth, he was celebrated with a Time magazine cover story in March 1958, at the nadir of the Cold War. Time applauded his use of “a new kind of power – deterrence” to “promote the U.S. self-interest in …. world order.” One biographer notes “that a deep-seated conservatism formed his basic political outlook.” Another concludes that “he believed in change, but gradual change; change within established institutions.” A third argues that it was not TR’s blustering and quick use of force that marked his diplomacy as much as careful balance-of-power calculations. A fourth, taking a cultural approach, believes that “TR’s willingness to use civilization as a political guideline marked him as a major figure in the rise of American internationalism,” and his view of “civilization,” which belonged to a simpler past, made him “the last traditional American statesman.” One of the first analysts of his statecraft, Alfred L. P. Denis, who remains one of the best, observed that “his apparent impulsiveness … obscured in some ways the essentially conservative quality of his statesmanship.”

If these arguments are correct, two questions arise: Why did TR’s conservative diplomacy time and again result in upheaval, imbalance, and even revolution, and why did he interpret his presidential powers in foreign affairs so radically that he would probably have upset his great conservative hero, Alexander Hamilton? If the argument, as some advance it, is that the context of his time drove this conservation to extremes, then that context has to be carefully and fully developed.

Wars in Asia and Europe

Until 1936, totalitarianism in Asia and Europe had not been directly connected. Japanese militarism had developed its own agenda on the Asian continent, while Italian fascism and German Nazism had pursued their respective strategies, the former seeking to conquer Ethiopia and the latter focusing on asserting the right to rearm and to repudiate the Versailles restrictions. The three offered piecemeal challenges to the world order, but their interests and orientations were sufficiently divergent that their separate actions had not added up to a combined threat to global peace and security.

The picture began to change in 1936. In July a civil war broke out in Spain, the Fascists led by General Francisco Franco challenging the authority of the republican government in Madrid. Almost immediately, Germany and Italy began assisting the insurgents, while the Soviet Union took sides with the Republic. Britain and France desperately sought to prevent the civil war from turning into an international war and succeeded, at least on paper, in establishing an international committee of nonintervention. But the civil war continued, and during 1937–9 Franco’s forces steadily gained ground with the help of German arms, particularly aircraft as well as aviators.

In November 1936 Germany, Italy, and Japan signed an anti-Comintern pact. Ostensibly an agreement to cooperate in order to combat Comintern-led subversive activities in the wake of the newly promulgated popular-front strategy, the pact contained a secret clause in which the signatories pledged to come to each other’s aid should one of them become involved in a war against the Soviet Union.

The new peace

The Paris peace conference was convened on January 18, 1919, and lasted until June 28, when a peace treaty with Germany was signed at the Versailles palace. During these five months, the leaders of the victorious nations sat together and discussed not only the peace terms to be imposed upon the former enemy but also the shape of the postwar world. President Woodrow Wilson personally participated, as did the leaders of the European cobelligerents: David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France), Vittorio Orlando (Italy). Two Asian countries that had been involved in the war, China and Japan, were also represented at the Paris Conference, although they did not send their respective heads of government. The participation of these countries as well as the United States in a conference to settle a war that had originated in Europe was a clear indication of the passing of the European-dominated world order.

Each participating nation had its own agenda. The United States had already articulated what it considered to be desirable terms of peace in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The president and his entourage in Paris were determined to define a peace that reflected those terms as much as possible. That was also the German delegation’s expectation; having agreed to a cease-fire on the basis of the Fourteen Points, Berlin’s representatives believed only a peace along those lines would be acceptable to the nation that was reeling from a post-cease-fire chaos; the military was refusing to admit defeat, while radicals, under Bolshevik influence, were threatening to seize control of government.

Stalin died. Slowly the terror eased within the Soviet Union, especially after those competing for primacy within the leadership rid themselves of Lavrenti Beria, dreaded head of the secret police. Georgii Malenkov, who, in 1953, seemed to be Stalin’s likely successor, sought to reduce international tensions as well. He called for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world, held out his hand to Tito in Yugoslavia, and offered assurances of Soviet goodwill to Turkey, Iran, and Greece. Israel, India, and Japan similarly received indications that Stalin’s death might mean improved relations with the Soviet Union. But Malenkov’s hold on power was tenuous and those who vied with him were critical of his efforts to redirect foreign policy. It was not until after he was shunted aside, and Nikita Khrushchev continued his initiatives while providing a few of his own, that the main outlines of post-Stalinist policy were manifest.

The new Soviet leadership inherited a world in which the dominant power, the United States, had just undertaken a rapid military buildup and had demonstrated its ability to project its power many thousands of miles from its shores. Only weeks before Stalin’s death, a new administration had arrived in Washington, led by men who called for a more aggressive anti-Soviet policy, for the liberation of Eastern Europe, and for the “unleashing” of Chiang Kai-shek. These were people who would deny the Soviet Union the fruits of victory in World War II, deny the Soviets the influence and respect to which the world’s second most powerful nation was entitled.

Peace as an ideology

Peace as a dominant idea was a distinctive feature of the postwar decade. This is not to say that there had been no forceful movements for peace or effective presentations of ideas of peace before then. Before the Great War, there had developed various strands of pacifism, ranging from traditional Christian conceptions to the more recent socialist formulations. In the United States, scores of peace societies had been established to organize the international community better to promote a stable, interdependent world order. And then, during the war, Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin had emerged as spokesmen for two contrasting ideas about international affairs and propounded their respective visions of a world without war.

It was after 1919, however, that the idea of peace, of whatever shade of meaning, came to hold center stage in discussions about international affairs. We have already seen how potent were the drives for disarmament, outlawry of war, economic stabilization, and American capital movements, which together created an environment more conducive to peaceful interconnections among nations than to war and military preparedness. But the phenomenon had deep cultural roots as well and was sustained by intellectual developments in the 1920s. One might think of the ideology of peace at that time as a “hegemonic ideology” – the term Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, began to use as he penned his thoughts in prison. According to him, a society was held together through a set of ideas produced, refined, and manipulated by its elites in order to maintain some sort of order and cohesiveness.

Almost from their beginnings as an independent people, Americans used the oceans not as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe but as a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. In the 1780s, as a century later, merchants were driven abroad by the exigencies of economic depression at home, as well as by the attraction of profits (and settlements) overseas. By the 1830s, colonizers of both the white and black races had, with the help of several presidential administrations, established an American settlement for freed African-American slaves in Liberia. A decade later, driven again in part by the economic bad times of 1837 to 1841, U.S. officials signed their first treaty with China. In the next decade of the 1850s they sent Matthew Perry to open Japan to U.S. interests, both secular and religious. After 1865, the United States rapidly became one of the six great powers fighting over the remains of China’s Manchu dynasty and, for a time, even was an unlikely participant in the great colonial struggle over Africa’s riches.

Africa, Kasson, and African Americans

Africa burst into American (and much of the world’s) attention in 1870 when the New York Herald sent Henry M. Stanley to find the supposedly lost missionary David Livingstone in the interior of Africa. Stanley’s alleged greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” became famous, but Stanley’s discovery of the Congo’s rich mineral wealth received more attention at the time. In 1878 one of the great U.S. explorers, Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt, sailed along the West African coast and into several of its rivers.

In 1866, an English magazine, the Spectator, grudgingly observed, “Nobody doubts any more that the United States is a power of the first class, a nation which it is very dangerous to offend and almost impossible to attack.” In the immediate sense, this observation reflected the confirmation of nationhood through Union success in the Civil War. In larger perspective, it reflected an amazing growth of power since the republic’s birth ninety years earlier, little more than the lifetime of John Quincy Adams’s generation.

At the end of the Civil War, the nation’s population exceeded 35 million; Britain and France had fewer people. Although still far behind Great Britain, Americas industrial output nearly equaled that of France and exceeded that of other countries. American agriculture was the world’s most productive. Territory had swelled from fewer than a million square miles in 1783 to exceed 3 million square miles. The arbitrament of war had confirmed the viability of republican government.

The success of the United States owed much to achievements – some earned, some not – in relations with foreign powers. Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” is supposed to have said that God seemed to have a special place in his heart for drunkards, idiots, and Americans. Good fortune did seem to fall on the young Republic, perhaps most notably in its escape from the consequences of mismanagement by Jefferson and Madison, but also in such things as the fortuitous dominance over British policy by Shelburne and Aberdeen at critical times.

America goes to war

Few countries had been as well prepared to go to war as the United States in 1917. Not that the nation had made specific preparations to enter the European conflict on the side of Britain and its allies against Germany and other “central” powers. Officials in Washington as well as the American people would have welcomed a peace if it had been arranged by the combatants without their military intervention. Yet if intervention were to come, the United States was in an excellent position to make a decisive difference. It had strengthened itself economically and militarily during the years of neutrality, the people had had ample time to educate themselves about world affairs and their country’s potential role in them, and American foreign policy had been so conducted as to ensure the nation’s leadership position once it entered the war.

In the military sphere, President Woodrow Wilson had, in 1916, begun calling for preparedness – at first in order to keep the nation so prepared militarily that no power would dare challenge its security and interests. After 1917, of course, the purpose changed to creating a strong armed force to fight a war. The Selective Service Act of May 1917 established a system for registering Americans for military service, and within a year the army was able to send over two million “doughboys” to Europe. The navy would in the meantime be augmented, and the naval building program of 1918 envisaged making the U.S. Navy the most powerful in the world.

The American population is a mosaic, a people whose makeup can resemble the world with which it deals in foreign policy. Between the Civil War and World War I the mosaic became so pronounced, and the number of immigrants so enormous, that a historic turn was reached in the 1880s when, for the first time in the nation’s life, legislation excluded certain immigrants (in this case, Chinese). The exclusionary act was shaped by the economic downturn, but also by a deep-seated racism that, while it excluded some Asians, led to the lynching of numbers of Asians and African Americans in the 1880s and 1890s. It also melded with chaotic and tragic economic conditions in the West to produce a series of wars waged by the U.S. Army against Indians. With the ending of those wars, force had succeeded in consolidating non-Indian control of the continent. Militant laborers and angry farmers only remained to pose a domestic threat to order after 1890. This consolidation of the continent, training of military force, contradictory feelings about immigrants, and, above all, racism not only characterized these late nineteenth-century decades but were central in shaping U.S. foreign policy then and in the new century.

Allied forces returned to France in June 1944 and were soon battling their way inland from the Normandy beaches. In Washington, President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the defeat of Germany was on the horizon, the fall of Japan not far beyond. His thoughts and those of other American leaders, in and out of government, turned increasingly to the postwar world: What legacy would he leave the American people? How could he and his associates ensure an enduring peace and a prosperous America? What lessons could be learned from past failures, especially those that had followed World War I, the inability to stop the economic misery and aggressive violence of the 1930s?

Roosevelt and his colleagues expected the United States to emerge from the war as the greatest power on earth. And after this war, unlike the aftermath of World War I, they were determined to assert American leadership. This time they would create a world order conducive to the interests of the United States, which would allow it to increase its wealth and power, and carry its values to every corner of the globe. There would be no shirking of the responsibilities of power. The United States would provide the leadership necessary to create a liberal international economic order, based on free trade and stable currency-exchange rates, providing a level of prosperity the peoples of the world had never known. The United States would provide the leadership necessary to prevent the resurgence of German or Japanese power or the rise of others who might emulate Hitler and the Japanese militarists.

In 1969, when Richard Nixon, Cold Warrior personified, entered the White House, it was clear that most Americans had had their fill of war and confrontation. The country was eager to end the wasting of American lives abroad, no longer persuaded that a hostile world would deny Americans their freedom if they stopped spending billions to support the appetite of the military-industrial complex. The endless war in Vietnam had changed American attitudes, led the people to question the wisdom of their leaders, eroded support for overseas military adventure. The United States had to disengage from the Vietnamese conflict. Perhaps the time to end the Cold War had arrived as well. No one was quicker to perceive the new public mood than Richard Nixon. No one was better able to free the country from the tyranny of hysterical anticommunism than the man who had contributed so much to fanning that hysteria. As one Washington wit remarked, he was the first president since the end of World War II who did not have to guard his flanks against attack by Richard Nixon.

Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, like all postwar American leaders, sought a stable world order in which American interests would be preserved. Like their predecessors, they considered the containment of Soviet influence central to that end. But they confronted a Soviet Union that had gained strategic parity with the United States and whose leaders believed their country to be on the verge of becoming the world’s preeminent power.

After 1825, the Americans resolutely turned their backs on Europe. The opportunities, and problems, lay in their own hemisphere. In 1835, confessing to an omission from his great work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that “the Union … has, properly speaking, no foreign interests to discuss.” Half a century later, another foreign analyst, James Bryce, wrote in the American Commonwealth, “The one principle to which the American people have learnt to cling in foreign affairs is that the less they have the better.”

At first sight, Bryce’s comment seems exaggerated. After all, the preceding decades had been studded by disputes with Europe, especially with his own country. Yet in a world-political sense he was right: With extremely rare exceptions, America only tangled with European powers over interests near at hand, over territory and influence in neighboring areas, or – during the Civil War – over issues emerging from that national trial.

The Pursuit of Commerce

The most persistent exception to this generalization lies in the field of foreign trade and commerce. After 1812 the American merchant marine lost the advantage – and it had been an advantage despite the depredations of preceding years – of neutral status while Europe was at war. Nevertheless, after a brief slump the marine grew rapidly, and Americans took pride in the fact. This growth reflected an explosion in international trade, vigorously shared in by the United States itself, rather than the superior competitiveness of American shipowners.

To the Declaration of Independence

Twenty-five years before the Revolution, no important person dreamed of independence. Few thought of an “American” identity in any political sense. The word itself was more often used in Britain. Even after the affrays at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, most Anglo-Americans refused to face the prospect of a breach with the mother country. As late as the spring of 1776 John Adams wrote to an impatient correspondent, “After all, my friend, I do not wonder that so much reluctance has been shown to the measure of independency. All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great and uncertain effects.” Although by this time Adams and others felt independence desirable, even inevitable, they knew that many, even among Adams’s colleagues in the Continental Congress, shrank from that step.

Of course, Americans were proudly aware of their burgeoning growth. From midcentury onward, Benjamin Franklin, the best-known colonial figure, spokesman in London for Pennsylvania and sometimes other colonies, frequently boasted of it. Franklin even talked of an American “empire.” For him, however, this was to be but an increasingly important component of the larger empire centered in London, at least until the American population outstripped that of the metropol as a result of what he called “the American multiplication table.” On the eve of the Revolution, others joined Franklin. For example, Samuel Adams, John’s cousin, wrote in 1774, “It requires but a small portion of the gift of discernment for anyone to foresee, that providence will erect a mighty empire in America.”