From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (3 page)

This sense of a special destiny has at times also spawned arrogance. Disdain for native peoples and Mexicans fueled America's rush across the continent, pushing the Indians steadily westward to the verge of extinction and wresting from Mexico one-third of its territory. Similar sentiments led to the imposition of colonial rule on Filipinos and Puerto Ricans and to the establishment of protectorates throughout much of the Caribbean. From an ill-fated incursion into Canada in 1775 to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, America's sense of its grand historical mission has even justified spreading the blessings of liberty by force. Certain of their righteousness,
Americans have confidently expected to be welcomed as liberators. The ironic result, in many cases, has been to invigorate nationalist opposition.

Attitudes about race have reinforced this sense of cultural superiority. The United States came into existence as a slaveholding nation, and slavery exerted a potent impact on its foreign policy until its abolition after the Civil War. Slavery was supported by pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century ideas about a hierarchy of race that assigned the top rank to white Anglo-Saxons and lower positions to other races based on darkness of skin color.
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Americans' views on race along with their sense of cultural superiority made it easy to justify expansion and empire. In their dealings with "barbarous" Mediterranean and Malay "pirates," "bigoted" and "indolent" people of Spanish descent, and "inscrutable" Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese, nineteenth-century Americans often adopted a highhanded approach based on a sense of racial superiority. Scientific racism was discredited in the twentieth century, but more subtle forms have exerted persisting influence over U.S. interactions with other peoples and nations.

The ideological fervor and messianic streak that have stamped U.S. foreign policy have been balanced by offsetting tendencies. Pragmatism is basic to the American character, and in diplomacy U.S. officials have often manifested a willingness to compromise to achieve vital goals. Indeed, diplomats and policymakers such as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt went further by developing a uniquely American brand of practical idealism, conforming to the nation's professed principles while vigorously pursuing important interests. When they have clung to ideological positions and refused to compromise, as with Jefferson and James Madison in responding to British trade restrictions between 1805 and 1812 and Wilson with the League of Nations in 1919–20, they have met defeat.

United States policymakers have also been swayed by what Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence called a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Their determination to live up to their ideals and concern for their standing before at least some other nations have at times put checks on the nation's more aggressive tendencies. Wars and military occupations have produced revelations of atrocities and torture, provoking political backlashes that forced changes in policy. As Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's amoral "realism" demonstrated, policies can not survive
indefinitely without some foundation in the nation's most cherished principles. "The American conscience is a reality," columnist Walter Lippmann wrote at the height of the Cold War. "It will make hesitant and ineffectual, even if it does not prevent, an un-American policy."
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Unilateralism, often mistakenly called isolationism, has also formed a powerful and enduring strain in U.S. foreign policy. From the outset, Americans chose
not
to isolate themselves from the world, preferring to reap the wealth offered by commerce with other countries. The term
isolationism
did not come into common usage until World War I. But a unilateralist approach seemed natural and essential to people who saw themselves as morally superior and understandably feared entanglement in Europe's wars and contamination from its cancerous politics. The turbulent experience of the infant republic in fending off foreign threats underscored the urgency of abstaining from Europe's alliances and wars. Unilateralism also derived from geography. The United States was "blessed among nations," French ambassador Jules Jusserand observed in the early 1900s: "On the north she had a weak neighbor; on the south, another weak neighbor; on the east, fish, and on the west, fish."
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Indeed, through much of the nineteenth century and beyond, geography conferred upon the United States an advantage few nations have enjoyed—the absence of major foreign threat—permitting it to avoid binding foreign commitments and to expand and prosper with minimal distraction from abroad. This free security has made the nation highly sensitive to threats, so that when they occur Americans have sometimes exaggerated them.

As early as the turn of the twentieth century, some Americans began to argue that a world reduced in size and made more dangerous by advances in military technology rendered traditional policies outdated. But it would take the Second World War and especially the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to shatter the notion that the United States was safe from foreign threat. During the Cold War era, an embattled nation turned unilateralist ideas on their head. The historical experience of free security helped to generate an exaggerated sense that the United States might be threatened by events anywhere. During the heyday of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy could even declare tiny Guyana in northern South America vital to U.S. security. The United States took on
commitments to scores of nations, established military bases throughout the world, and provided billions of dollars in economic and military assistance to allies. Such was the power of the unilateralist tradition, however, that even after a half century of global commitments, it resurfaced in the radically altered international environment of the post–Cold War era.

Unilateralism served the United States well during its first century and a half, but it also bred a certain smug parochialism and a suspicion of international institutions, as well as indifference and even hostility toward other cultures and peoples. In part as a result of their historical separation from the mainstream of world affairs, historian Fredrik Logevall has observed, Americans were spared the necessity of negotiating and making concessions to survive and prosper. They have never been "wholly comfortable in the messy world of European style politics and diplomacy, with its emphasis on pragmatic give and take leading to imperfect solutions."
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America's democratic political system has also given a distinctive cast to its foreign policy. Political parties originated from the bitter internal struggle over ratification of the Jay Treaty with Britain in 1794. Since that time, foreign policy has often been the object of fierce partisan dispute. Party differences have sparked vigorous debates over the nation's role in the world. At times, partisan politics have obstructed effective diplomacy. On other occasions, opposition parties have put needed constraints on policymakers and helped rein in ill-advised policies.

As in most other countries, U.S. foreign policy has normally remained the province of elites, but leaders must pay heed to the democratic process. On occasion, an aroused public has pushed the government to act. Interest groups focusing on issues like armament or disarmament, human rights, and trade issues have relentlessly promoted their agendas. Huge influxes of immigrants have flooded the United States at various times in its history and produced ethnic constituencies that, from the Irish in the late nineteenth century to the modern-day Cuban and Israeli lobbies, have sought to sway the government to adopt policies favoring their countries of origin, sometimes producing initiatives that run counter to broader U.S. interests. More often, public indifference or apathy has created impediments for policymakers, bringing about in the twentieth century sustained and increasingly sophisticated efforts to inform, "educate," and manipulate public opinion. At times, policymakers have resorted to
distortions and lies to sell their programs. They have exaggerated foreign threats to gain public and congressional support. Having done so, they sometimes boxed themselves in, forcing a vigorous response to perceived dangers to avoid the risk of domestic political backlash.

By dividing foreign policy powers between the executive and legislative branches of government, the U.S. Constitution added another level of confusion and conflict. The executive branch is obviously better suited to conduct foreign policy than a larger, inherently divided legislature whose members often represent local interests. George Washington set early precedents establishing presidential predominance. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the growing importance of foreign policy and the existence of major foreign threats have vastly expanded executive power, producing what has been called the imperial presidency. Congress from time to time has asserted itself and sought to regain some measure of control over foreign policy. Sometimes, as in the 1930s and 1970s, it has exerted decisive influence on crucial policy issues. For the most part and especially in the realm of war powers, the president has reigned supreme. Sometimes, chief executives have found it expedient to seek congressional endorsement of their decisions for war if not an outright declaration. Other times and especially in periods of danger, Congress has witlessly rallied behind the president, neglecting to ask crucial questions about policy decisions that turned out to be badly flawed.

America's peculiar approach to foreign policy has long bemused and befuddled foreign observers. Referring specifically to the United States, that often astute nineteenth-century French observer Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracies "obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence." They "abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice."
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In the early years, European diplomats tried to exploit the chaos that was American politics by bribing members of Congress and even interfering in the electoral process. More recently, other nations have hired lobbyists and even public relations experts to promote their interests and images in the United States.

Despite claims to moral superiority and disdain for Old World diplomacy, the United States throughout its history has behaved more like a traditional great power than Americans have realized or might care to admit. United States policymakers have often been shrewd analysts of world politics. They have energetically pursued and zealously protected interests
deemed vital. In terms of commerce and territory, they have been aggressively and relentlessly expansionist. They exploited rivalries among the Europeans to secure their independence, favorable boundaries, and vast territorial acquisitions. From Louisiana to the Floridas, Texas, California, and eventually Hawaii, they fashioned the process of infiltration and subversion into a finely tuned instrument of expansion, using the presence of restless Americans in nominally foreign lands to establish claims and take over additional territory. When the hunger for land was sated, they extended American economic and political influence across the world. During the Cold War, when the nation's survival seemed threatened, they scrapped old notions of fair play, intervening in the affairs of other nations, overthrowing governments, even plotting the assassination of foreign leaders. From the founders of the eighteenth century to the Cold Warriors two hundred years later, they played the great game of world politics with some measure of skill.

Popular notions to the contrary, the United States has been spectacularly successful in its foreign policy. To be sure, like all countries, it has made huge mistakes and suffered major failures, sometimes with tragic consequences for Americans—and other peoples as well. At the same time, it has sustained an overall record of achievement with little precedent in history. In the space of a little more than two hundred years, it conquered a continent, came to dominate the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean areas, helped win two world wars, prevailed in a half-century Cold War, and extended its economic influence, military might, popular culture, and "soft power" through much of the world. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had attained that "strength of a Giant" that Washington longed for.

Ironically, as the nation grew more powerful, the limits to its power became more palpable, a harsh reality for which Americans were not prepared by history. The nation's unprecedented success spawned what a British commentator called the "illusion of American omnipotence," the notion that the United States could do anything it set its mind to, or, as one wag put it, the difficult we do tomorrow, the impossible may take a while.
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Success came to be taken for granted. Failure caused great frustration. When it occurred, many Americans preferred to pin it on villains at home rather than admit there were things their nation could not do. Despite its vast wealth and awesome military power, the United States had to settle for a stalemate in the Korean War. It could not work its will
in Vietnam or Iraq, nations whose complex societies and idiosyncratic histories defied its efforts to reshape them.

The emergence of a new twenty-first-century threat in the form of international terrorism and the devastating September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon underscored another hard reality: that power does not guarantee security. On the contrary, the greater a nation's global influence, the greater its capacity to provoke envy and anger; the more overseas interests it has, the more targets it presents to foes, and the more it has to lose. Weaker nations can deal with a hegemonic nation by combining with each other or simply by obstructing its moves.
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Even America's unparalleled power could not fully assure the freedom from fear that George Washington longed for.

"We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, and purest constitution on the face of the earth," revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine wrote in late 1775. Paine's words came at a time when the American colonists in their struggle with Great Britain suffered military defeat and economic distress. They were bitterly divided between those who sought independence and those who preferred accommodation. Only thirty-seven years old when he arrived in the United States in 1774, Paine had been a corset maker and minor British government functionary. His best-selling pamphlet
Common Sense
made an impassioned appeal for independence. It was "absurd," he insisted, for a "continent to be perpetually governed by an island." A declaration of independence would gain for America assistance from England's enemies, France and Spain. It would secure for an independent America peace and prosperity. The colonists had been dragged into Europe's wars by their connection with England. Without such ties, there would be no cause for European hostility. Freed of British restrictions, commerce would "secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe because it is in the interest of all Europe to have America as a free port."
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