The Audacity of Hope

With the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of what’s now the continental
United States, that power could not be denied. Intent on expanding markets for its
goods, securing raw materials for its industry, and keeping sea lanes open for its
commerce, the nation turned its attention overseas. Hawaii was annexed, giving
America a foothold in the Pacific. The Spanish-American War delivered Puerto Rico,
Guam, and the Philippines into U.S. control; when some members of the Senate
objected to the military occupation of an archipelago seven thousand miles away—an
occupation that would involve thousands of U.S. troops crushing a Philippine
independence movement—one senator argued that the acquisition would provide the
United States with access to the China market and mean “a vast trade and wealth and
power.” America would never pursue the systematic colonization practiced by European
nations, but it shed all inhibitions about meddling in the affairs of countries it deemed
strategically important. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, added a corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the United States would intervene in any Latin
American or Caribbean country whose government it deemed not to America’s liking.
“The United States of America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play
a great part in the world,” Roosevelt would argue. “It must play a great part. All that it
can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.”
By the start of the twentieth century, then, the motives that drove U.S. foreign policy
seemed barely distinguishable from those of the other great powers, driven by
realpolitik and commercial interests. Isolationist sentiment in the population at large
remained strong, particularly when it came to conflicts in Europe, and when vital U.S.
interests did not seem directly at stake. But technology and trade were shrinking the
globe; determining which interests were vital and which ones were not became
increasingly difficult. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson avoided American
involvement until the repeated sinking of American vessels by German U-boats and the
imminent collapse of the European continent made neutrality untenable. When the war
was over, America had emerged as the world’s dominant power—but a power whose
prosperity Wilson now understood to be linked to peace and prosperity in faraway
lands.
It was in an effort to address this new reality that Wilson sought to reinterpret the idea
of America’s manifest destiny. Making “the world safe for democracy” didn’t just
involve winning a war, he argued; it was in America’s interest to encourage the selfdetermination
of all peoples and provide the world a legal framework that could help
avoid future conflicts. As part of the Treaty of Versailles, which detailed the terms of
German surrender, Wilson proposed a League of Nations to mediate conflicts between
nations, along with an international court and a set of international laws that would bind
not just the weak but also the strong. “This is the time of all others when Democracy
should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail,” Wilson said. “It is surely the
manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.”
Wilson’s proposals were initially greeted with enthusiasm in the United States and
around the world. The U.S. Senate, however, was less impressed. Republican Senate
Leader Henry Cabot Lodge considered the League of Nations—and the very concept of
international law—as an encroachment on American sovereignty, a foolish constraint on
America’s ability to impose its will around the world. Aided by traditional isolationists
in both parties (many of whom had opposed American entry into World War I), as well