H. The Changing Role of America in the World
The place of America in the world has changed dramatically since European explorers confirmed the existence of the American continents. America has been a potent and complex symbol -- of the possibilities of wealth and power; of the promise of freedom; of a haven for the persecuted, the homeless, and the stateless. The founding of new societies in the Americas has also helped to expand the world's intellectual horizons, to transform the economic life of the human race and create a truly global economy, and to provide a new and vigorous force in every aspect of world culture. But these profound American influences on world civilization have taken place (since 1776) through the world's framework of nation-states. And, in the modern era, efforts to come to grips with world problems most take account of concepts and doctrines of national sovereignty -- however outmoded such doctrines might appear to be in an era of global warming and environmental crisis. In this section, therefore, we find it necessary to emphasize the evolution of American foreign policy.
Americans always have been ambivalent about their nation's place in the world, veering between the desire to preach their own virtue as a model for the rest of the world and the equally strong desire to tell the rest of the world to go hang itself and leave the United States alone. As noted above, this complex and contradictory approach to America's place in the community of nations was shaped, in part, by geography -- the insulation of the Americas by two great oceans from the concerns of Europe and Asia. In part, as George Washington pointed out in his 1796 Farewell Address, it also was a matter of necessity, even of self-preservation -- a consequence of the initial exceptional status of the United States as a fledgling democratic republic in a world of hostile, monarchic world powers.
Thus, for much of American history before the twentieth century, the American republic was serenely indifferent to the rest of the world, except when the rest of the world impinged on American interests (as with Thomas Jefferson's disastrous embargo against European belligerents in 1807 or the equally disastrous War of 1812) or when an American neighbor possessed something that the American people wanted (for example, Great Britain possessing Canada [1812]; Mexico possessing Texas and California [1845-1848]; Spain possessing Puerto Rico and Cuba [1898]). Even when the United States "opened" Japan in 1853, the effort was undertaken largely because of American resentment that Japan would not offer port privileges to American whalers cruising the Pacific, or aid to whalers and commercial vessels experiencing difficulties near Japanese waters. The one great exception was the Monroe Doctrine (1823), and that was still a reassertion of the insulation of the New World from the greed and depredations of the Old, however much later Administrations sought to distort it into a blank check authorizing the United States to dictate to its Latin American neighbors how they should govern themselves and how they should deal with their powerful American neighbor.
In the twentieth century, as European powers set out to carve empires for themselves in Africa and Asia, the United States at first decided to join the fray, albeit in the posture of a fair arbiter seeking to restrain European greed. The classic example was Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door policy for China (1900). And yet the arm's-length, idealistic component of American thinking about world affairs was alive and well. Thus, when President Woodrow Wilson sought to dictate to the rest of the world how the victorious and vanquished powers of the First World War should behave toward one another, he was drawing on a diplomatic tradition as old as the Republic.
With the collapse of the Wilsonian initiative to rewrite the rules of world politics, the United States returned to its posture of serene indifference to the world beyond the Western Hemisphere. Only the development by Germany and Japan of the capacity to bring military power to bear across the previously impregnable shields of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans persuaded the American people that they had to take a hand in world affairs.
In many ways, the Second World War was the high point of American participation in the community of nations. The United States, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, resurrected the Wilsonian ideals of a transformed world politics, to be purged of wars of aggression and colonial empires. Even the development of the Cold War (1945-1991) between the democratic West and the Communist East{8} fitted well within the Wilsonian model of what the United States should do as a world power. The development of nuclear and thermonuclear arsenals created a new category on the international scene -- the superpower, a nation possessing the might to affect the lives of virtually every inhabitant of the planet. At first, the concept was used only in military terms, limiting the "superpower club" to two members, the United States and the U.S.S.R. In the 1980s, the idea of an economic superpower emerged, with Japan and Germany as leading exemplars.
The difficulty during the Cold War was that the United States soon discovered the limits of being a superpower. The risks of nuclear war made a titanic struggle to destroy the power of world Communism at best unpalatable. The inability to use conventional military power to foster democracy or to combat indigenous revolution (either under the banner of Communism or stigmatized as such by its adversaries) brought increasing frustration in its wake. If the Second World War became the model for Americans of a "good war," and a good foreign policy, the ambiguous Korean Conflict and the failed Vietnam Conflict became models for how not to conduct foreign policy.
Finally, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the principal adversary of the United States and the "free world" from the arena of world politics, and in the process brought the Cold War to an end. The end of the Cold War also brought the promise of an end to many local and regional conflicts, such as the piecemeal efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland. The great challenge facing the United States in particular, and the world in general, was to devise a new shape for world politics -- and a new role for the last remaining global superpower within the community of nations. The collapse of governments in Somalia and the Balkans suggested the gravity of this challenge, and the hesitant and uncertain responses of the Western nations to these challenges -- in particular, to the ongoing tragedy in Bosnia -- suggests just how difficult these challenges are, and the lack of any real answers to them.