The new millenium is upon us. As we enter a new century, we find that it will be a century that is distinctly Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in terms of foreign policy and international relations. In 1940, there was a good chance the then future of today might have been the reality of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich or Joseph Stalin’s brutal tyranny. Instead, because of his foreign policy, the international order today resembles the reality Franklin Delano Roosevelt imagined. Roosevelt’s foreign policy ideology was influence by two presidents who served before him, Theodore Roosevelt, his fifth cousin, and Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt learned foreign policy from these two men and his own foreign policy was a distilled version of them which kept the best aspects of them and added some elements of Roosevelt’s own ideas, such as the League of Nations “Theodore Roosevelt taught him national-interest, balance-of-power geopolitics. Woodrow Wilson, whom he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, gave him the vision of a world beyond balances of power, an international order founded on the collective maintenance of the peace. F.D.R.’s internationalism used Teddy Roosevelt’s realism as the heart of Wilson’s idealism” (Schlesinger 3-4).
The scope of this paper cannot do justice to all aspects of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, therefore the analysis will focus on key points and legislation of the policy that best demonstrate Roosevelt’s ideology. Roosevelt long held the belief that the collective security notion fostered by Wilson was a key to international and American security. Upon taking office, Roosevelt upheld the Stimson Doctrine which refused to recognize the capture of Manchuria by Japan. China had been exploited for most of the 19th and early 20th century by outside forces and Roosevelt was pro-China as much as he would later remain pro-British during World War II. Roosevelt also instituted the Good Neighbor...