• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1536 0

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 self-determination 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 as Wilson’s stubborn unwillingness to compromise, the Senate refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League.

For the next twenty years, America turned resolutely inward—reducing its army and navy, refusing to join the World Court, standing idly by as Italy, Japan, and Nazi Germany built up their military machines. The Senate became a hotbed of isolationism, passing a Neutrality Act that prevented the United States from lending assistance to countries invaded by the Axis powers, and repeatedly ignoring the President’s appeals as Hitler’s armies marched across Europe. Not until the bombing of Pearl Harbor would America realize its terrible mistake. “There is no such thing as security for any nation—or any individual—in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism,” FDR would say in his national address after the attack. “We cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map any more.”

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States would have a chance to apply these lessons to its foreign policy. With Europe and Japan in ruins, the Soviet Union bled white by its battles on the Eastern Front but already signaling its intentions to spread its brand of totalitarian communism as far as it could, America faced a choice. There were those on the right who argued that only a unilateral foreign policy and an immediate invasion of the Soviet Union could disable the emerging communist threat. And although isolationism of the sort that prevailed in the thirties was now thoroughly discredited, there were those on the left who downplayed Soviet aggression, arguing that given Soviet losses and the country’s critical role in the Allied victory, Stalin should be accommodated.

America took neither path. Instead, the postwar leadership of President Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and George Kennan crafted the architecture of a new, postwar order that married Wilson’s idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of America’s power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control