Continuity in American Foreign Policy: Part One: Manifest Imperialism
Charles W. King
Only after being attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and very reluctantly the United States took its place on the world stage. Having retreated back to isolation on its own side of the Atlantic after the World War One; American involvement in World War Two and after marked a watershed moment in the popular conception of American history. For most America the superpower is fundamentally different in its approach to the world than America the isolationist. On the contrary, America the isolationist is a fiction, and American foreign policy has been consistent across its entire history. American foreign policy as a superpower in the twentieth century continued the priorities and methods of the United States not only during the nineteenth century, but also the eighteenth, including prior to the American Revolution.
In the decades before the turn of the twentieth century an increasing number of Americans advocated that the United States should pursue a policy of imperialism, acquiring overseas possessions like the British, French, and Germans. Theodore Roosevelt was one of imperialism’s advocates, but Alfred Thayer Mahan was its most important. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History convinced Roosevelt and others that the United States needed a strong navy to ensure its continued prosperity, and a global network of coaling stations was an essential part of that plan. In 1898 the United States declared war on Spain, under the pretext of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The war was swift and decisive, and as a result the US took the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and Cuba became an American protectorate. For some the acquisition of overseas colonies after the Spanish-American War marks the change in American foreign policy, heralding how the US will engage with the world after World War Two.
The acquisition of overseas colonies was not a change in method for the United States but a change in target. The United States had been steadily expanding its territory for more than a hundred years. British prohibitions against the Thirteen Colonies expanding past the Appalachian Mountains were a major cause of the American Revolution. The Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush all continued the US’s westward expansion. In the eighteenth centuries while the British, French, and Germans sent their colonial settlers by boat to Africa, India, Asia, and Australia the US sent theirs West in covered wagons. Manifest Destiny was imperialism by another name. Westward expansion was an important engine of American prosperity, after reaching the Pacific continued prosperity demanded that American policy-makers look abroad.
From the establishment of Jamestown until the Spanish-American War the US’s mode of expansion was settler colonialism, the hallmark of European imperialism. Comparing American westward expansion with European colonization of Africa, India, Asia, and Australia runs counter to the idea of American exeptionalism. It is essential to recognize the long standing continuities of American foreign policy, of which expansion is only one. The United States continues its expansion today, no longer through settler colonialism, or imperial administration but through market access. This sobering assessment of American foreign policy and understanding of how the US continues to expand its influence today will help policy-makers to better understand why foreign nations are wary of American influence and produce better strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Further Reading
Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, (New York, NY: Little, Brown, & Co.: 1890).
Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).