The following is a comparative study of the foreign policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Between the two of them, they shaped the basic goals and instruments of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. Frequently they are presented as opposites, the ruthless opportunist and the sometimes ineffectual idealist. In fact, however, the foreign policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had much in common, and can be seen as one policy with different aspects emphasized by the differing character of the Presidents and the differing circumstances they encountered.
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 Spanish American War, such contemporary seeming features of American foreign policy as global declarations on the one hand to interventions in Central American on the other hand declarations and actions hardly imaginable in the 1870s or 1880s became regular facts of life for American leaders. To review the foreign policy ideas and initiatives of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow is to examine the underlying attitudes and principles from which American foreign policy is likely to be reformulated in the post Cold War era.
In popular historical imagination, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson tend ...