Foreign Policies of T. Roosevelt & Wilson

In few features of American public life has the twentieth century been so great a departure from the past as in foreign policy. In the nineteenth century, American foreign policy as we know it today hardly existed. The Monroe Doctrine was declared, but could not be enforced by American power. Isolationism was not an ideology but a fact of life. In world affairs the U.S. was a looming presence for the future but of no account in the present.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, through the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, "American foreign policy" as a tradition of action and a framework of policy, came into being in roughly the form we know it today. By 1918, just two decades after the SpanishAmerican War, such contemporaryseeming features of American foreign policy as global declarations on the one hand to interventions in Cent

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tood well the importance of conveying purpose to the American people, In actions such as dispatching the Great White Fleet, he admitted that "my main purpose was to impress the American people."7 However, the language he expressed himself in, that of progressive imperialism, is now almost wholly obsolete. Progressive imperialism held that "backwards" peoples would eventually be ready for selfgovernment, but for now required the tutelage of more advanced nations.8 This is, more or less, the doctrine implicit in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the early twentieth century, it was a doctrine with considerable appeal to the American public. Because it is now unfashionable, we tend to miss the intellectual and idealistic wellsprings of TR's foreign policy, while seeing only the muscular visible consequences. The muscular quality of TR's foreign policy was also encouraged by his concern with a problem unfamiliar to us: that of asserting American power in a world which was not accustomed to it. Today we argue over whether American power is declining, or reviving, or affordable, but it is something whose existence we take for granted. Statesmen of TR's day by no means took for granted
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Approximate Word count = 5304
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)