The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [133]
Moreover, while America’s revolutionary origins and republican form of government might make it sympathetic toward those seeking freedom elsewhere, America’s early leaders cautioned against idealistic attempts to export our way of life; according to John Quincy Adams, America should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” nor “become the dictatress of the world.” Providence had charged America with the task of making a new world, not reforming the old; protected by an ocean and with the bounty of a continent, America could best serve the cause of freedom by concentrating on its own development, becoming a beacon of hope for other nations and people around the globe.
But if suspicion of foreign entanglements is stamped into our DNA, then so is the impulse to expand—geographically, commercially, and ideologically. Thomas Jefferson expressed early on the inevitability of expansion beyond the boundaries of the original thirteen states, and his timetable for such expansion was greatly accelerated with the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. The same John Quincy Adams who warned against U.S. adventurism abroad became a tireless advocate of continental expansion and served as the chief architect of the Monroe Doctrine—a warning to European powers to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. As American soldiers and settlers moved steadily west and southwest, successive administrations described the annexation of territory in terms of “manifest destiny”—the conviction that such expansion was preordained, part of God’s plan to extend what Andrew Jackson called “the area of freedom” across the continent.
Of course, manifest destiny also meant bloody and violent conquest—of Native American tribes forcibly removed from their lands and of the Mexican army defending its territory. It was a conquest that, like slavery, contradicted America’s founding principles and tended to be justified in explicitly racist terms, a conquest that American mythology has always had difficulty fully absorbing but that other countries recognized for what it was—an exercise in raw power.
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