Diplomacy & Statecraft, 19: 639657, 2008 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN 0959-2296 print/1557-301X

X online DOI: 10.1080/09592290802564379

Diplomacy 1557-301X & Statecraft 0959-2296 and Statecraft, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2008: pp. 129 FDPS

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: IMPERIALIST OR GLOBAL STRATEGIST IN THE NEW EXPANSIONIST AGE?

Serge Ricard Theodore Roosevelt: Imperialist or Global Strategist?

Serge Ricard

This article argues that as the first modern US president and an innovative shaper of American foreign relations, Theodore Roosevelt launched the rising United States on the world stage as a major actor in power politics, that American diplomacy came of age with him and not with Woodrow Wilson, and that the secular pragmatist who succeeded because he was abreast of the times should not be begrudged the laurels that are so often bestowed on the religious-minded visionary who failed because he was ahead of his time. In American historiography Wilson has often eclipsedunfairly and erroneouslythe geopolitical and diplomatic skills, professionalism and expertise in foreign policy of Roosevelt. Even as ex-president, Roosevelt would be a force to be reckoned with. The use and misuse of a misconstrued legacy that some have tried to confiscate for their own benefit is perhaps best illustrated by presidential candidate John McCains reverential claim that he is a Teddy Roosevelt Republican rather than a neo-Wilsonian.

US relations with the European Powers during Theodore Roosevelts lifetime involved a great many issues in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and not a few trans-Pacific problems, all of which affected the balance of power in the Old World and influenced transatlantic intercourse as the United States made its presence felt in the world arena. But how to assess Roosevelts legacy in 2008? I shall take my cue for this article from John B. Judiss The Folly of Empire and Tony Smiths A Pact with the Devil, two devastating indictments of the betrayal of Wilsonianism and of todays new tragedy of American diplomacy.1 I regard Judiss brief evaluation of Theodore Roosevelts record, along with Stephen Graubards in The Presidents,2 as partaking of a long-due celebration, if not rehabilitation, of the first modern US president, a remarkably innovative shaper of American foreign relations who launched the rising United States on the world stage as a major actor in power politics. One historian has argued erroneously and most unfairlythat [his] reputation as the first modern American statesman is based . . . on a macho diplomatic style and an almost indecent enthusiasm for US participation in a world organized by

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force and power; that his balance-of-power approach was archaic; that his geostrategic sensibility was nonmodern and belonged to the nineteenth century; that he was something of an anachronism, yet recognizes that he contributed to the emergence of the liberal internationalism that dominated the policymaking of his successors; and admits grudgingly that the present generation has been more receptive to Roosevelts views.3 Twenty-five years ago, John Milton Cooper, Jr.s characterization of TR and Wilson as Warrior and Priest received well-deserved scholarly praise for its balanced portrayal of the two most outstanding statesmen of the first third of the new century, the principal architects of modern American politics. He not incorrectly reversed the standard depictiona half-truthof Roosevelt as a realist and Wilson as an idealist.4 Although Roosevelt has been given his due more decisively in recent historiography,5 TR was a secular pragmatist, who succeeded because he was abreast of the times, and should not be begrudged the laurels that are so often bestowed on Wilson as religious-minded visionary who failed because he was ahead of his time. American diplomacy came of age with TR, not with Woodrow Wilson, who tried to emulate his predecessor as peacemaker and failed in a large measure. And since American imperialism has become fashionable in the last fifteen years or so, and is once more at issue in political and historiographical debateswith the term Empire becoming a somewhat nobler label among analysts and proponentsI would like to give a brief reassessment of the twenty-sixth presidents principles and praxis in international affairs so as to better apprehend the contours of his legacy and the illegitimacy of his would-be inheritors credentials. To state that TR was a many-sided politician is a truism. Yet, the conflicting interpretations of his personality and achievements stem from his undeniable complexity and the consequent need to adopt a multi-focus approach. When I first read his writings years ago, I was appalled and fascinated by the forthright affirmation of his imperialist creed, until I realized that it was all a question of focus and emphasisseparating the diplomatic wheat from the expansionist chaff, as it were, to see which side of the balance the overall record tipped. Beyond Manichean postures which called to mind the Archangel Michael rather than the Good Samaritan, beyond his moralistic platitudinising and the continuous hammering of simple truths (which made him the apostle of the obvious6 and somewhat disconcerted his Sorbonne audience in 1910), there was a clear vision of the world order and its evolution and a readiness to apply to diplomacy his practical philosophy of realizable ideals. Today, when his Big Stick has seemingly become an inspiration for latter-day imperialists, I tend to view him as a master diplomatist, a brilliant geopolitician, and a wise peacemaker. If Sumner Welles was FDRs global strategist,7

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TR was his own forty years earlier. This accidental president was one of the most cosmopolitan and erudite statesmen of his age, a historian whose scholarly work had equipped him to ponder over the use of power and the rise and fall of civilizations. He had a clear vision of what he called the world movement and displayed unusual intuition in foreseeing a number of upheavals that were eventually witnessed in his lifetime or after his death. This is quite in contrast with the one-track-minded US foreign-policy leadership of the past decade. A LEARNED DIPLOMAT? It can be argued that there are at least two Roosevelts, the expansionist of the 1890s and the sobered post-1898 statesman, as Judis views his evolution, or, as I perceive the duality of the twenty-sixth president, the staid Dr. Jekyll of international power politics and the strident Mr. Hyde of the EuroAmerican civilizing mission. For Roosevelt did not treat the Filipinos, Latin Americans, and Chinese as he did the English, Germans, French, Russians, or Japanese. His attitude towards Colombia or his response to the Chinese boycott of American goods contrasted with his reaction to the RussoJapanese War or his handling of the Moroccan Crisis. Many Roosevelt scholars have noted, like Cooper, both his adventuristic tendencies and the restraining effect of the exercise of power, particularly in dealing with other strong nations on a plane of equality.8 For all his histrionics Roosevelt in fact proved to be a shrewd, measured diplomatist. Yet, the iron hand is better remembered than the velvet glove inasmuch as many of his public pronouncements on foreign policy often lacked the sophistication of his behind-thescenes manoeuvrings. Nevertheless, despite his realistic adaptation to changing world conditions, he evinced remarkable consistency and displayed all his life a cogent set of principles from which he never deviated significantlymany-sided but whole, as it were. His own unabashed self-righteousness was actually a powerful antidote against doubt or remorse, as his Autobiography of 1913 makes abundantly clear. Yet unlike Wilsons amour-propre and self-righteous vanity, it did not inhibit compromise.9 Despite a recent attempt to portray him as a theoretician,10 the apostle of the Strenuous Life was no profound thinker; he was basically a man of action, though he was not pure act, as Henry Adams quipped; he preached extensively on race, expansion, preparedness, and power politics, but there was no refinement about his political creed, mostly bold assertions. Penned five months after William McKinleys death, Alfred Thayer Mahans view of the new White House incumbent was singularly at variance with Mark Hannas famous madman comment:

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As regards the nation, the feeling of security was no more affected than it would be by the killing of the Emperor of Austria. I think there is a general feeling that Roosevelt is even a better man for the immediate future.11

Undeniably, when TR entered the White House on 14 September 1901, he was ideally equipped to become his countrys chief diplomat. As evidenced by such works as his biographies of Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Hart Benton, or Oliver Cromwell, he had early developed, much as Woodrow Wilson did, a personal philosophy of government that rested on an unshakable belief in the pre-eminence of executive authority, attested to by his stewardship theory. Hence an eventful presidency ensued, rich in conflicts with Congress. He liked to say he belonged to the Jackson-Lincoln school of presidents, not to that of Buchanan. Roosevelts conduct of home and especially foreign policies very simply reflected his lifelong principle that in a crisis the duty of a leader is to lead and not to take refuge behind the generally timid wisdom of a multitude of councillors.12 Furthermore, his cosmopolitanism strikingly distinguished him from the prevailing parochialism of a great many late nineteenth century US politiciansand, indeed, of twentieth and twenty-first century ones as well. He knew more about the people of Europe and Asia than most of his contemporaries. Unlike the equally cultivated but bookish Wilson, he had in addition an international network of friends and acquaintances in American and foreign diplomatic circles who would serve as invaluable informants and keep him apprised of political conditions and diplomatic moves in both hemispheres. Besides, few chief executives in American history have, like him, consistently been their own secretaries of state and few have shown that [their] political sophistication was superior to that of [their] Army and Navy advisers.13 Interestingly, Roosevelts lifelong preoccupation with security was remarkably attuned to the concerns of the General Board of the Navy and the General Staff of the Army from the end of the nineteenth century to the Great War regarding Anglo American relations, German designs in the Caribbean, the defence of the Panamanian lifeline, and the protection of the Philippines from Japanese aggression. One cannot fail to notice that the main diplomatic episodes that he personally handled as presidentthe Venezuelan and Moroccan crises, and the RussoJapanese Wardirectly concerned the two powers that he always considered as Americas potential enemies, Germany and Japan.14 Roosevelts professionalism and expertise in foreign policy came as no surprise to those who knew him well, like his close friend Henry Cabot Lodge or the coterie of expansionists and navalists with whom he met regularly. They could not but instinctively feel that his accidental accession

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to the presidency would turn out to be the grasping of chance authority by a man with a daring and a program.15 His schooling in such matters dated back to the 1880s and 1890s. The future presidents early correspondence, along with his articles and addresses, not only abound with expressions of his expansionist creedexpansion as Americas historic policy16but also reveal his interest in geopolitics and his concern for the security of the United States, particularly after he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The young Roosevelt frequently discussed the future of the world in terms of balance of power and some of his insights in the 1890s were amazingly prophetic, to wit his predictions about the likelihood of a future clash with Germany, and, possibly, Japan too, a danger to which he was fully alive,17 or his prescient comment on an eventual red terror in Russia which [would] make the French Revolution pale.18 Evidence is indeed plentiful to illustrate his keen awareness of geopolitical forces and his ethnocentric conviction that the English-speaking peoples were destined to play a great part. He would always feel the need for and strive for AngloAmerican solidarity and cooperation. His vision encompassed the future of the English race, or English-speaking race, as he preferred to call the AngloSaxons,19 among whom the Americans were to feature prominently. He perceived England as an Asiatic power challenged by the Russian advance, yet in his eyes the Anglicization of Australia and Africa mattered more in the long run than Englands hold on India.20 He shared Mahans vision of a great future for the United States as a Pacific power: Our future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe.21 THE IMPERIALIST Roosevelts actions and statements at the turn of the century would earn him first place in the historiography of US imperialism. When appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in April 1897, he characteristically lost no time in impressing respectfully upon Secretary John D. Long the urgent need for a naval build-up: In my opinion our Pacific fleet should constantly be kept above that of Japan, and our naval strength as a whole superior to that of Germany.22 Of course, the SpanishAmerican War was then looming; he could not wait for the United States to oust Spain from the Western Hemisphere and was doing his utmost to hasten the declaration of hostilities. He busied himself buying ships, appointing the right commanders to the right vessels, and getting adequate appropriations. The Battle of Santiago would eventually be the Rough Riders crowded hour and laid the path open for the governorship of New York. The 1898 Treaty of Paris would be a watershed for all imperialists who

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clamoured for the annexation of the Philippine archipelago and subsequently shouldered in all righteousness the burden of pacification. The PhilippineAmerican War received Roosevelts unqualified support and he made no bones about suppressing the rebellion. The most ultimately righteous of all wars, he had written in The Winning of the West, is a war with savages, and Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipino patriots, was the typical representative of savagery.23 America had found new Indians, but he disingenuously rejected the charge of imperialism and militarism, as in his letter of acceptance of the Republican vice-presidential nomination.24 He could actually in the same breath advocate the uplifting of the barbarians and their elimination. Roosevelt always had a way of escaping contradictions by simply ignoring them. He similarly denied the charge of colonialism and despotism: We are not trying to subjugate a people; we are trying to develop them and make them a law-abiding, industrious and educated people.25 Transposed into twenty-first century foreign-policy terms, this was the first instance of American overseas nation-building. Oratorical excess in the politician concealed and often eclipsed the diplomatic subtleness of the statesman. Yet such statements as those above have been given respectability by many international relations historians and since the 1980s have fed into a great many interpretations of the US role in the world. Given the vastness of the historiography of American imperialism, let me select, arbitrarily, two representative samples from the literature of the 1980s. One historian derides standard treatments of US imperialismthe worst chapter in almost any bookand undertakes to refute what he regards as a conventional and distorted vision of American foreign policy at the turn of the century.26 Another denounces the legend of imperialism, admits of nothing but the budding in Roosevelts America of a powerful cultural nationalism, and sees US interventionist policies as so many revealing instances of philanthropic action by an overgenerous nation.27 According to this authors objectivist approach, the United States was bound to dominate its southern neighbours because it was a dynamic, modern nation when the Latin American republics were still paralyzed by their quasi-medieval backwardness. In other words, what many historians for years mistakenly identified as imperialism was merely modernism and the tensions between the United States and Latin America simply resulted from a clash of cultures.28 Such views are actually strikingly reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelts; they closely parallel, if not espouse, the twenty-sixth presidents own self-righteous justifications at the turn of the nineteenth century and rest on the same ethnocentric cultural assumptions. Just as context was the catchword of what I would call counterrevisionism in the 1980s, civilization and modernity have of late become the new mantra in post-modern historiography. In that line of thinking

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imperialism was an element of the geopolitics of modernity, a form of internationalism, civilization was the central ideological theme behind all of American foreign policy in the 20th century, anti-imperialism was a basic feature of Americas experience with imperialism, and US encounter with the diplomacy of imperialism was the beginning of Americas opposition to power politics.29 However, the fact that Theodore Roosevelt backed away from imperialist heavy-handedness towards China, unlike his successor, William H. Taft, does not make him an antiimperialist, of course. For the twenty-sixth president, great power cooperation in the world civilizing process worked best with a regional division of civilizing duties and police powers within recognized zones of influence: the United States in the Americas, Britain in Asia and southern Africa, Russia in the Caucasus and barbarous Asia, France in North Africa, and Japan in Korea. Problems arose when, failing a multi-partite consensus, competing imperialisms clashed in any part of the world. Each time the balance of power was thus imperilled, Roosevelt, a multilateralist of sorts, endeavoured to preserve it, except in the Western Hemisphere, where the United States was in a position of strength, hostile to continued European interference, and could afford to adopt what today would be labelled a unilateral approach. That is what the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine basically embodied, an Americanized version of the White Mans Burden, implemented on behalf of Europe so as to avoid further European meddling in the Caribbean.30 Roosevelts imperialism partook after all (like Wilsons for that matter) of the nationalist-imperialist ideologies of the times, of the great powers belief in their civilizing duty, be it termed White Mans Burden, Nordic supremacy, mission civilisatrice, or sacro egoismo. THE IMPERIALISM DEBATE The issue of imperialism repetitiously hovers over, underlies or undermines every analysis of US foreign policy between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, bringing up now and again the perennial division between realists and idealists and their respective international relations paradigms.31 The critical views, which have not been uncommon among foreign scholars, stress American self-interest and immorality, and received a boost in the United States from the Wisconsin School revisionists in the 1960s and 1970s. The uninhibited, sympathetic defences have of late adopted anew the time-honoured benevolent, missionary approach, with the US hegemon portrayed as the unwilling, disinterested, duty-bound vanguard agent of civilization, modernity, and democracy.32 By that token Woodrow Wilson was an anti-imperialist. Andrew Bacevich sees todays advocates of an open world as Wilsons heirs,

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who, like Wilson, categorically reject the notion that others might construe U.S. aspirations as imperialistic and who insist that the United States, uniquely among the great powers of history, employs its power to act on behalf of the common good.33 Judiss reflection on the imperial folly perceptively concludes that the age of empire time frame (18701914) misses the essential continuity such that imperialism in general formed the subtext of the Cold War until 1989, and that today the age of empire lingers in the Mideast, South Asia, the Far East, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Balkans, as well as Chechnya, Tibet, or the Persian Gulf.34 Of course, conservative (or shall we say orthodox?) historians will continue to take issue with the critique of imperialism, either by pointing to the absence of a viable alternative to US supervision or by blaming local conditions or mindsets for its failure. Thus, apropos of the Caribbean, Ninkovich finds morality a poor substitute for complex and often nuanced historical judgments. . . . One example of simplistic reasoning is the tendency to blame the US for built-in problems in the region. He goes on to say it takes a stretch of the imagination to suppose that the Latin American republics would have been free and prosperous without American intervention. He agrees with Ernest May that, most probably, without the American presence the region would have been like Africa, undeveloped rather than underdeveloped.35 Tony Smith, for his part, considers that since Wilsons time, the most consistent tradition in American foreign policy . . . has been the belief that the nations security is best protected by the expansion of democracy worldwide, and that American policy enjoyed its greatest success in Europe and Japan. He continues by bitterly indicting the early twenty-first century pact with the Devil and betrayal of the American promise, meaning the drift by neoconservatives and neo-liberals, or neo-Wilsonians, from liberal democratic internationalism to liberal democratic imperialism and ultimately liberal fundamentalist jihadism.36 The promotion of liberal democracy, like Ninkovichs politics of modernity, began in the Philippines to which Smith devotes a whole chapter in Americas Mission, wherein he offers an interesting comparison of Americas mixed results in civilizing and democratizing the archipelago with the success of British rule in India, and concludes that the British approach was superior, but the local context was more favourable.37 In all this the Wilsonian image always fares better than the Rooseveltian, if one excludes its perversion today by the Bush administration into militarized democratization and gunboat democracy. Interestingly, Smith admits that there is scarcely a writer on Wilsons efforts to promote democracy in Central America and the Caribbean who does not openly mock the effort; he points out about World War One that between 1940 and the early 1950s, the most influential thinkers

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in this country on the proper conduct of American foreign policy . . . took special pains to use Wilson as a negative example, a textbook study of how foreign policy should not be formulated; and he berates the unreconstructed advocates of balance of power thinking who do not demonstrate how they would have handled European affairs better.38 The inference is that realpolitik is pass diplomacy, extolled by dinosaurs of the fading realist school, of which Henry Kissinger is one of the few surviving specimens. The hitch is what to make of the failures of utopian idealism. The answer is simple: Unlike most statesmen, then, Wilson deserves to be measured not on the basis of achieving the ends of his policy in their time, but by the magnitude of his efforts and the influence they continued to have in later years.39 But what of Theodore Roosevelt the realistic geopolitician, the global strategist, in the context of the incipient globalism that then characterized international relations in the new expansionist age? First, it should be noted that he by and large lived up to his ideals and that there never was any deviousness or equivocation about his policies, nor reversal as in Wilsons case. Civilization was equated with peace, of which preparedness and the balance of power were the surest guarantors. Many of his pronouncements for public consumption were of the muscular variety and not the subdued, sophisticated communications of the diplomat. The Rooseveltian touch and savvy in his oft-personal conduct of foreign policy are best illustrated by the peace-making achievements of his second term. His successful dealings with the great European powers and his influence in the international arena may be accounted for by an approach that Richard H. Collin has thus insightfully summed up:
Europe felt more comfortable dealing with an American leader who was not only conversant with the style of European diplomacyWeltpolitik and Realpolitikbut effectively practiced a personal diplomacy many European diplomatic leaders favored, including Wilhelm II, King Edward VII, French Foreign Minister Thophile Delcass, Blow, and Tsar Nicholas II.40

Likewise, the Allies in 1918 would feel most uncomfortable negotiating with the very different approach of Woodrow Wilson. The resolution of the relatively little-researched Venezuelan affair of 19021903 was the first application of the Rooseveltian style and method.41 His views on the question of debt collection and the Monroe Doctrine had been stated clearly long before and put to Germany as strongly as it [had] ever been put to a foreign power.42 The likelihood of a similar situation in Santo Domingo, following the acquisition of the Panama canal zone a year later, would prompt Roosevelt to enunciate in

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his Annual Message of 6 December 1904, a corollary to Monroes dictum. His proclamation, which historians, curiously, never labelled the Roosevelt Doctrine, actually turned the Caribbean into an American lake.43 With its imperialist underpinnings this new foreign policy tenet invoked an originally defensive principle, designed to prevent interference by the European powers, and used itthereby perverting itto legitimize intervention, and therefore, aggression, by the United States.44 Under his leadership a number of defence measures were implemented at that time. In the fall of 1902, shortly before the AngloGerman blockade of Venezuela, the Navy Department created a permanent Caribbean squadron for policing the region. In the summer of 1903, when the crisis was over, the Joint Board was created with a view to bringing about some cooperation between admirals and generals. In 1904 the Navy devised the HaitiSanto Domingo plan on the assumption that the Reich would be the enemy. The same year the Army and Navy began their first formal efforts to draft joint war plans. In 1906 the General Board voiced the gravest suspicions about Berlins ambitions.45 Considering that the twenty-sixth president was among the few Americans who then realized that US security could be threatened by events occurring far from the countrys shores, one could go further and regard his mediation of the RussoJapanese War and Moroccan Crisis as early extensions of the Corollary to the Far East and North Africa. This was the exercise of an international police power by the United States outside the Western Hemisphere, in anticipation of Franklin D. Roosevelts globalizing of the Monroe Doctrine in the 1930s and 1940s.46 PEACEMAKING AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION The best-known and most impressive episode for Roosevelt is undoubtedly his mediation of the RussoJapanese War of 19041905, which resulted from Russias hegemonic attitude in Manchuria and its hostility towards Japanese influence in that area.47 Roosevelt instantly perceived that the conflict was a severe blow to the Open Door and a serious threat to the integrity of China, and that the predictable outcome of the confrontation would be the likely substitution of Japanese influence in the region, and therefore a possible setback for the white race.48 In his eyes a Japanese victory bode ill for the balance of power in the Far East for Tokyo might get the big head, even though he believed Japan might be able to perform useful civilizing work in China.49 A number of factors led ultimately to Roosevelts consensual mediation of August 1905, so personal a diplomatic feat that it would win him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.50 Despite his distrust of Germany, Roosevelt the realist then made the most of a convergence of interests with Berlin to preserve the balance of power

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in the Far East and safeguard the Open Door, and thereby achieved a surprisingly harmonious relationship with the Emperor at the executive level. Bill the Kaiser, as he sometimes called him facetiously,51 who shared his preoccupations and whom the conflict made nervous, would prove a most useful ally throughout the crisis and the peace-making process. William II influenced his cousin Czar Nicholas II decisively. Paradoxically, whereas Roosevelt obtained invaluable assistance from Berlin and Paris in pressing the Russians, he was disappointed and continuously irritated by Londons reluctance to similarly advise Japan to be reasonable. Characteristically, Roosevelt acted as his own Secretary of State and did not even inform the State Department or the members of his cabinet, to say nothing of Congress. Signed on 5 September 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth, a laborious work of compromise, froze the new power equilibrium that had resulted from the battle of Mukden six months earlier. On the whole, Russia did not lose as much as expected; she retained a foothold in China and remained an Asiatic power that could still act as a counterpoise to Japanese influence and ambitions. The preservation of the Rooseveltian balance of power and of the Open Door, however, would be short-lived since, ironically, the former enemies would connive, in 1907 and 1910, with Great Britains approval, to exclude other nations from such spheres of influence as North China, Mongolia, and Korea (an outcome which Roosevelt had actually anticipated).52 It took the United States some time to identify a natural enemy in the Far East. Until the aftermath of the RussoJapanese War, Japan was regarded as a friendly power rather than an enemy. It was thought that Great Britain, the United States, and Japan might naturally line up against likely troublemakers such as Russia and Germany, and possibly France. After Portsmouth, and the ensuing JapaneseAmerican crisis of 1906, the change in US attitudes was swift: the Island Empire became Washingtons only potential enemy in Asia. The defence of the Philippines then became the uppermost preoccupation. Acting on Roosevelts instructions, the General Board in 1906 began to work on the Orange Plan, which was completed in 1911. The security of the archipelago was of course the weakest point in any confrontation with Japan; its obvious vulnerability as our Achilles heel came to be recognized as early as 1907 by both the Navy and the President.53 The Portsmouth negotiations were still going on when Roosevelt became secretly involved in another bout of world diplomacy, unbeknown to Congress and the American public: Southern Europe and North Africa. This infuriated the isolationists in Congress when it was disclosed. The Moroccan question was one more instance of the confrontation of European colonialisms at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1904 it

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looked as if the FrancoGerman rivalry in the Sharifian Empire might threaten world peace. Frances dominant position was unexpectedly challenged by Emperor William II on March 31, 1905, during a Mediterranean cruise. His aggressive Tangiers speech asserted Germanys commitment both to the Open Door principle and to Moroccan sovereignty, a diplomatic bombshell that targeted the newly sealed Entente Cordiale, since the AngloFrench rapprochement of April 8, 1904 had upset the delicate power game in Europe. At first, Roosevelt [did] not care to take sides in the matter for he felt the US government had other fish to fry and no real interest in Morocco. He was to change his mind in late May/early June 1905. German belligerency made him overcome his qualms. It so happened that the Kaiser, from the start, saw in Theodore Roosevelt a potential ally, if not a mediator, and insistently appealed to him. Roosevelt received these effusive signs of friendship cordially but was not taken in, suspicious as he was of the Emperors irrational zigzags.54 Meanwhile the French only belatedly looked across the Atlantic for help, until it dawned upon them that their Washington ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, had a privileged relationship with the president who himself was apparently pro-French and wary of German designs. In the last days of June 1905 (and later during the Algeciras Conference) Roosevelt acted discreetly as intermediary between Paris and Berlin, indulging in triangular diplomacy. The impact of his interference is hard to gauge. Many historians have exaggerated his influence on French Premier Maurice Rouviers eventual decision to compromise, neglecting the impact of the bilateral FrancoGerman talks.55 But Roosevelt was worried about the Kaisers sudden vagaries. It really did look, he then felt, as if there might be a war, which added to the ongoing RussoJapanese conflict might turn into a world conflagration.56 Rarely acknowledged by French historiography,57 Roosevelts subsequent covert influence was definitely decisive during the Algeciras Conference, which opened on January 16, 1906, particularly on two crucial occasions when the situation looked inextricable. Even though the agreement signed on 7 April 1906 was no resounding diplomatic victory, the French, by and large, owed the preservation of their interests to the American presidents exceptional finesse at negotiating from a distance. Roosevelts intervention in European affairs was dubbed meddling by his numerous detractors in the Senate and the press. The prestige and moral stature conferred upon him as head of the executivethat bully pulpit which he enjoyed so thoroughlyhelped to protect him from the senators wrath and contributed to mollifying his severest critics. In resorting to secrecy and personal diplomacy he was working once more with the tools at hand58 and bypassing an isolationist Congress that he refrained from consulting whenever he was not legally constrained to do so.

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CONCLUSION: ROOSEVELT AND WILSON I would like to end with a summarily comparative evaluation of Roosevelt and Wilson.59 As ex-president Roosevelt would loom as large on the domestic scene as he had while in the White House, so was his shadow to hang over the League debates after his death on 6 January 1919. Two divergent conceptions of neutrality, war aims, peace-making, and a new world order would enter on a collision course and consistently influence subsequent US foreign policies. Spurred by his hatred of the usurper Wilson who had stolen the presidency from him in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt waged his last political battle from 1915 till his death, first on behalf of preparedness and intervention, then, after Americas entry into the war, against Wilsons projected peace settlement. This initially lonely crusade culminated posthumously with the US Senates rejection of the Versailles Treaty, following a battle in which his alter ego, Henry Cabot Lodge, played a leading part.60 The former president, who would have liked so much to re-enter the White House, felt deprived by an impostor of the heroic role he knew he would have played so much better. For four years he was to take issue with Wilsons foreign policy moves and decisions in his strident, scathing, and often venomous indictments of the President and his administration in the Kansas City Star.61 The two men were indeed poles apart in their response to the European war. Time and again the Colonel, as he then preferred to be called, issued ringing calls for intervention in the world conflict and deplored Wilsonian neutrality and patient watching. Procrastination and unpreparedness were his main targets and he relentlessly assaulted the Wilson administration for what he regarded as criminal inefficiency on its part in dealing with Germany during the neutrality period, and then in conducting the war after April 1917. Surprisingly, in a rare display of tactical non-partisanship, he praised Woodrow Wilsons Annual Message of 4 December 1917. The pledge to a peace of complete victory satisfied him unreservedly.62 The duty of the United States lay on the side of England, France, Belgium, and Serbia. As new villains the Bolsheviks only stood second to the Germans, but Roosevelt was foremost preoccupied with the necessary destruction of German power both in Europe and Asia. A premature and inconclusive peace now would spell ruin for the world and would surely lead to Germanys military ascendancy on a scale never hitherto approached in the civilized world.63 To the optimistic and the short-sighted he ominously predicted:
perhaps within a dozen years, certainly within the lifetime of the very men now fighting this war, this country and the other free countries would have to choose between bowing their necks to the German yoke or else going into another war under conditions far more disadvantageous to them. 64

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After the armistice Roosevelt naturally stepped up his campaign for a settlement conducive to a righteous peace and a stable world order. He was glad that peace had come not on Mr. Wilsons fourteen points, but on General Fochs twenty-odd points, which had all the directness, the straightforwardness, and the unequivocal clearness which the fourteen points strikingly lacked.65 The former presidents vision of the post-war order did not deviate significantly from the one he had repeatedly expounded for months in his editorials, in stark contrast to the administrations fluctuating policies. Roosevelt rejected both isolationism and systematic entanglement in European quarrels, as well as all-out involvement in every part of the world. Certain spheres of interest should be reserved for each nation or groups of nations, everything outside those spheres of influence being decided by some species of court.66 Such an unavowedly imperialistic division of the world closely resembled, of course, the balance of power he had striven to achieve or preserve as president from 1901 to 1909, with the United States rising to prominence and sharing the civilized nations police duties with its natural allies, England and France. The Monroe doctrine, a vital point of American policy, should continue to govern the Western Hemisphere between the equator and the southern boundary of the United States.67 The outlines of Roosevelts proposal continue to resonate. John McCains intriguing proposal in 2007 for a worldwide League of Democracies destined to act when the UN fails is a direct descendent of Roosevelts armed league idea and a repudiation of Wilsonianism. Unlike Woodrow Wilsons doomed plan for the universal-membership League of Nations, it would be similar instead to what Theodore Roosevelt envisioned: like-minded nations working together for peace and liberty.68 Beyond the historiographical debate about whether Woodrow Wilsons foreign policies were idealist, realist, liberal, or ground-breaking, a couple of reminders are in order. First, by and large, his war diplomacy failed, in the short-term as well as in the long-term, and left a legacy of ill-will, both at home and abroad. Second, many sympathetic scholars feel the need to qualify their evaluation of even his most praiseworthy moves and to stress his indecisionor slowness in making up his mindand his uncompromising obstinacy. By contrast, Roosevelt on the whole was in tune with the Allied leaders, making his foreign policy suggestions retrospectively appear as realistic, workable solutions. Given his past experience of world crises and his lucid perception of the context of the times, one can make the case that the former president would have been the more effective wartime and post-war diplomat of the two. The Rooseveltian and Wilsonian solutions rested on totally different philosophies of international relations. The former president from the start believed that an Allied victory would help the cause of international

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security and justice, and that pacifist and neutralist stances encouraged the American peoples isolationist tendencies and incited them to neglect their world duties. The association of nations he had in mindbriefly outlined in his Nobel Peace Prize speech of 1910was to be endowed with international police powers.69 To be efficient at all, it ought to be organized as an armed league restricted to the main civilized nations and prepared to use force if necessary. Unlike Wilsons, Roosevelts brand of internationalism did not pretend to exclude imperialism. The rightfulness of his approach is nowhere more evident than in his influence on Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest fulfillment of Theodore Roosevelts political legacy, according to John Milton Cooper, Jr.:
At heart, however, [FDR] did not subscribe to a Wilsonian model in his foreign policy. Instead, as several scholars have pointed out, his wartime diplomacy followed more traditional notions of great-power leadership, and he regarded what he considered Wilsons excessive idealism as a pitfall to be avoided. . . . Franklin Roosevelt always drew his greatest inspiration in foreign affairs from Theodore Roosevelt.70

The fundamental divergence with Wilsonianism was perhaps that Theodore Roosevelt, true to his lifelong nationalism, wanted the world to be effectively made safe for the United States rather than for democracy. No reassessment of American diplomacy can rightfully skip Roosevelts contribution before and after his presidencyto US foreign policy in the twentieth and early twenty-first century: a realistic and truthful appraisal of the forces at work in world politics and of the genuine perils faced by the nation, as well as a multilateral willingness to cooperate with Americas friends and allies.71 Till the end of his life he would remind his critics, with typical immodesty, that his advocacy of preparedness, his theory of the just man armed, of righteousness backed by force, had been wonderfully illustrated by his seven and a half years presidency, during which the United States enjoyed a sustained period of international peace. NOTES
1. John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York, 2004); Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washingtons Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York, 2007). Judiss book, a rather perceptive analysis of US foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, regrettably contains a number of faulty footnotes and unreferenced quotations.

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2. Stephen R. Graubard, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (London, 2006), pp. 39, 12425. 3. Frank Ninkovich, Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology, Diplomatic History, vol. 10 (1986), pp. 221, 222, 231, 244. 4. John M. Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. xiv, 271, 361. 5. William N. Tilchin and Charles E. Neu, eds., Artists of Power: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Their Enduring Impact on US foreign Policy, Foreword by William R. Keylor (Westport, CT, 2006). 6. Donald Richberg, Tents of the Mighty (New York, 1930), p. 31. 7. Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDRs Global Strategist (New York, 1997). 8. Cooper, Warrior and Priest, p. 75 9. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913; New York, 1985). See also Serge Ricard, Apropos of a Reprint: Theodore Roosevelts Autobiography Reconsidered, Indian Journal of American Studies, vol. 16.2 (1986), pp. 1532. 10. Joshua D. Hawley, Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness (New Haven, CT, 2008). 11. Alfred T. Mahan to Bouverie F. Clark, February 8, 1902, in R. Seager and D. D. Maguire, eds., Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Vol. III (Annapolis, MD, 1975), p. 10. 12. Roosevelt, Autobiography, pp. 372, 378380, 563. 13. Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 18981814 (Princeton, NJ, 1973), p. 256. 14. Serge Ricard, Foreign Policy Making in the White House: Rooseveltian-Style Personal Diplomacy, in Tilchin and Neu, Artists of Power, pp. 331. 15. Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956; Baltimore, MD, 1984), p. 63. 16. The Policy of Expansion is Americas Historic Policy, in H. Hagedorn, ed., Campaigns and Controversies, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. XIV (New York, 1926), p. 385. 17. TR to Alfred Thayer Mahan, 3 May 1897, in Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum, eds., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. I (Cambridge, MA, 1951), p. 607; to Bowman Hendry McCalla, 3 August 1897, Letters, I, p. 636; to George Von Lengerke Meyer, 12 April 1901, Letters, III, p. 52. 18. TR to Arthur Cecil Spring Rice, 13 August 1897, Letters, I, pp. 64647. 19. TR to Thomas St. John Gaffney, 16 March 1899, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, series 2, reel 320; to Robert J. Thompson, 30 April 1900, Letters, II, p. 1274; to Rudyard Kipling, 23 November 1918, Letters, VIII, p. 1404. 20. TR to Spring Rice, 11 August 1899, Letters, II, p. 1052. 21. TR to Benjamin Ide Wheeler, 17 June 1905. TR Papers, Library of Congress, series 2, reel 338. See also Beale, Roosevelt, pp. 172180. As early as 1897 he would declare: We cannot avoid, as a nation, the fact that on the east and west we look across the waters at Europe and Asia. Quoted in Ibid., p. 253. 22. TR to John Davis Long, 30 September 1897, Letters, I, p. 695. 23. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York, 1894), p. 45. TR gives his view of Aguinaldo and his followers, and their Democratic supporters,

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

in The Copperheads of 1900, 21 October 1899, Campaigns and Controversies, in Works, vol. XIV, pp. 334341. TR to the Honorable Edward O. Wolcott, chairman of the Committee to Notify the Candidate for Vice-President, 15 September 1900, Campaigns and Controversies, in Works, vol. XIV, pp. 368369; Roosevelt, Letters, vol. II, pp. 14031404. Roosevelt, National Duties, 2 September 1901, The Strenuous Life, in Works, vol. XIII, pp. 478, 479. James A. Field, Jr., American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book, American Historical Review, vol. 83 (June 1978), pp. 64483. Fields essay is followed by Walter LaFebers and Robert L. Beisners disapproving comments, pp. 669672, 672678. The author has the last word, pp. 679683. Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism (Baton Rouge, LA, 1985). Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt's Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context (Baton Rouge, LA, 1990). Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism (Malden, MA, 2001), pp. 3, 5, 37, 91 201, 209, 212 (emphasis added). Cf. Serge Ricard, The Roosevelt Corollary, Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 36(1) (March 2006), pp. 1726. Cf. Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism, in Robert D. Schulzinger, ed., A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA, 2006), pp. 79102. Andrew Bacevich re-examines unsparingly the myth of the reluctant superpower and partially rehabilitates William A. Williams and Charles A. Beard in his American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 731. Ibid., p. 116. Judis, Folly of Empire, p. 202. Ninkovich, US and Imperialism, 151, 152. Cf. Ernest R. May, The Alliance for Progress in Historical Perspective, in A. Iriye, ed., Rethinking International Relations: Ernest R. May and the Study of Foreign Affair (Chicago, 1998), p. 23. See also F. Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago, 1999). Tony Smith, Americas Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1994), p. 9; Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washingtons Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York, 2007), pp. 123, 163235, passim. Smith, Americas Mission, p. 373n36; Appendix, Notes on the Study of the International Origins of Democracy, pp. 358359. Smith, Americas Mission, pp. 73, 103, 106. Ibid., p. 109. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 123. Triggered by the AngloGerman expedition on behalf of exasperated European creditors, the crisis reached a climax in late January 1903, then again in early February during the Washington negotiations, which forced the American president to step in decisively. The German archives make it clear that Kaiser William knew the United States to be ready for a naval confrontation but that he was not

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really prepared to challenge Washington in the Caribbean in defiance of the sacrosanct Monroe Doctrine. Speck von Sternburg to Auswrtiges Amt, 19 January 1903, Auswrtiges Amt [Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelsohn Bartholdy, and Friedrich Thimme], Die Grosse Politik der Europischenkabinette, 18711914: Sammlung der Diplomatischen Akten des Aswrtigen Amtes, Vol. XVII (Berlin, 1927), pp. 29192, 292 nn. 23. On this episode, see S. Ricard, The AngloGerman Intervention in Venezuela and Theodore Roosevelts Ultimatum to the Kaiser: Taking a Fresh Look at an Old Enigma, in Serge Ricard and Hlne Christol, eds., Anglo-Saxonism in US Foreign Policy: The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 18991919 (Aix-en-Provence, 1991), pp. 6577. TR to George W. Hinman, 29 December 1902, Letters, vol. III, pp. 399400. Theodore Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, vol. III (New York, 1910), pp. 17677. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 9th ed. (1940; Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974), p. 505. Challener, Admirals, Generals, pp. 22, 2829, 32, 3435, 43, 4748. S. Ricard, The Roosevelt Corollary, p. 19; Smith, Americas Mission, pp. 11345. See for example Ricard, Foreign Policy Making, pp. 1417. TR to Spring Rice, 19 March 1904, Letters, vol. IV, p. 760. TR to Spring Rice, 13 June 1904, Letters of TR, vol. IV, pp. 82931. For a rsum of the secret exchanges that led to the acceptance by both parties of the Portsmouth peace conference, see Roosevelts confidential letter to Henry Cabot Lodge, 16 June 1905, Letters, vol. IV, pp. 1221233. TR to Elihu Root, 16 February 1904, Letters, vol. IV, pp. 731. I do admire him, he once remarked, very much as I do a grizzly bear. In Wayne Andrews, ed., The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt (1913; New York, 1975), p. 310. TR to Spring Rice, 27 December 1904, Letters, vol. IV, pp. 10871088. Challener, Admirals, Generals, pp. 2931; Roosevelt to William Howard Taft, 21 August 1907, Letters of TR, vol. V, pp. 761762. TR to Spring Rice, 13 May 1905, Letters, vol. IV, p. 1178. Ricard, Foreign Policy Making in the White House, pp. 1722. Roosevelt, Letters, vol. V, p. 235. For a notable exception, see Pierre Milza, Les relations internationales de 1871 1914, 2nd rev. ed. (1990; Paris, 1995), p. 107. Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 297. See also Serge Ricard, Anti-Wilsonian Internationalism: Theodore Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, in Daniela Rossini, ed., From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy (Keele, England, 1995), pp. 2544. William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley, CA, 1980); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York, 1987). See also L. E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, in Schulzinger, A Companion; Arthur S. Link, ed., Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 19131921 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982).

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

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61. Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt in The Kansas City Star: War-Time Editorials, Introd. Ralph Stout (Boston, 1921). 62. Ibid. pp. 65, 75, 164; Wilson Papers, vol. 45, pp. 197, 463. 63. Stout, Roosevelt, pp. 116, 118119, 151, 155. 64. Ibid., pp. 151152. 65. Ibid., p. 261. For a summary of Fochs proposed military conditions for an armistice, see Wilson Papers, Volume 51, pp. 463464. 66. Stout, Roosevelt, p. 264. 67. Ibid., p. 278. 68. John McCain, An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom: Securing Americas Future, Foreign Affairs (November/December 2007). http://www.foreignaffairs.org/ 69. Roosevelt, Address before the Nobel Prize Committee, Delivered at Christiana, Norway, May 5. 1910. Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, Volume VIII, pp. 2222223. 70. Cooper, Warrior and Priest, pp. 35960. 71. See also Robert W. Sellen, Opposition Leaders in Wartime: The Case of Theodore Roosevelt and World War I, Midwest Quarterly, 9 (1968), pp. 225242.