If
Theodore Roosevelt was a ‘‘realist’’ in foreign policy, President Woodrow
Wilson was more of an ‘‘idealist.’’ With the outbreak of the First World War,
involving initially Britain, France, and Russia on one side and Germany and
Austria-Hungary on
the
other, Wilson’s initial response was to remain neutral. Public opinion strongly
opposed entry into what many Americans viewed as a European civil war and there
was solid support for the President’s policy of neutrality. After German
submarines began sinking American merchant ships, however, Wilson’s strategy
proved untenable, not least because the war threatened to do serious harm to the
US economy by shutting down transatlantic trade.
The President did not,
however, seek to win support for the war by appealing to American national
interests. Rather he sold the war to the Amer-ican public in idealist terms,
speaking of the US ‘‘making the world safe for democ-racy.’’ America was unlike
other powers pursuing narrow national interests. Wilson saw the war as an
opportunity ‘‘to end the failed balance of power system and replace it with a
community of power and an organized peace.’’
At the
President’s urging, Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, and the US
was thereafter directly involved in just the type of conflict it had avoided
success-fully since the founding of the republic. Given American military and
economic resources, the US intervention in the war was to prove decisive. Once
an allied victory appeared inevitable, Wilson devoted his presidency to
negotiating the Versailles peace treaty and designing the League of Nations,
the organization that he hoped would ensure America’s permanent involvement in
safeguarding global stability. The debate on America’s participation in the
League was revealing of attitudes toward a wider US international engagement. Wilson
made much of America’s idealist traditions setting out in 1918 ‘‘fourteen points’’
or principles that should guide US policy. These included a call for open diplomacy,
self-determination, general disarmament, and the abandonment of the bal-ance of
power principle in favor of a system of collective security. His opponents
argued that the US should look after its own interests and not become involved
in settling disputes around the world. Despite his huge personal efforts Wilson
was unable to convince the Senate, or a majority of Americans, that they should
become permanently involved in world affairs through the League of Nations. His
unwillingness to com-promise on the treaty’s provisions, as some senators
demanded, was also a serious error.
Many
senators were opposed to the automatic and binding provisions of the treaty.
The Senate’s rejection of the treaty in 1919 by fifty-five votes to thirty-five
not only dealt a fatal blow to Wilson’s hopes but also revealed the country’s
doubts about becoming a global power (Cooper 2001). Warren Harding, who won the
1920 presidential elec-tion, campaigned on an ‘‘America First’’ slogan and
rejected Wilson’s view that the US should play a prominent internationalist
role in foreign and security policy. The inter-war years saw the US retreat
into an isolationist and protectionist stance. America lar-gely turned its back
on the world and raised tariffs to protect its own industries from foreign
competition.
Twenty-five
years after rejecting the League of Nations, the US Senate ratified almost without
objection (89–2 votes) America’s entry into another global collective security organization,
the United Nations (UN). This striking turnaround in American policy was the
product of years of careful planning and shrewd political maneuvering by President
Franklin Roosevelt to build domestic support for America’s participation in a postwar
security system. The US had again remained neutral at the onset of the Second World
War but Roosevelt made clear his sympathy for Britain and its allies fighting against
Nazi Germany. It was not until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December
1941, however, that the US was able to join the hostilities. Surprisingly it was
Hitler that declared war on the US and thus made his own defeat inevitable.
As
in the First World War, American intervention was to prove the
decisive factor in secur-ing an allied victory with American forces fighting in
Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. In the latter war theater, the US
dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, thus
ensuring Japan’s defeat. For some, the use of nuclear weapons was more designed
to demonstrate American power to Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, rather than
a device to end the war with Japan (Alperovitz 1994).
President Franklin Roosevelt was determined not to make the same mistake as Wil-son in 1919. From late 1943 until the end of the war, the administration carefully mapped out detailed plans for the UN, involving a restricted Security Council of the major powers and an American veto, while working to strengthen the bipartisan con-sensus supporting US participation. The President’s clever political and public relations campaign resulted in overwhelming public and congressional support for American participation in the UN. Support for US engagement was helped by the fact that America had become such a dominant political, military, and economic force in the world. By the end of 1945, and largely as a result of the economic stimulus provided by the war, the US was by far the wealthiest nation in the world with more than half the world’s productive capacity. In global affairs, most nations now looked to Washington first, with other capitals such as London and Paris a distant second.
تعليقات: 0
إرسال تعليق