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American Foreign Policy: The Interventionist Debate
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A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with American foreign policy. Onto lecture number four today, the interventionist debate.
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In the last lecture, we saw how progressive theory began to change the ideas of American foreign policy just as it did American domestic policy. Now those thinkers, those idea men, that includes academics like Woodrow Wilson, are beginning to take political power. They're actually in office. And so ideas start coming into practice. We start seeing the results of those ideas.
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And one of those ways that we see that is in the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles following World War I and how we start getting involved into the affairs of other nations, into the internal affairs of other nations.
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If we think back to lecture one and Washington's Farewell Address, he recommends that Americans enjoy diplomatic and commercial relations with other nations, but avoid, as far as possible, entangling ourselves in the politics of other nations. But the League of Nations represents a perpetual and extensive entanglement of nations in the business of others. It's the beginning of the idea that there will be a world government. Nations won't be governed any longer by the law of nations, which is the law of nature applied to nations. And that instructs nations to not rule others without consent. It instructs nations to use their own resources to protect their own citizens. That's replaced by the idea of a government run by the civilized nations of the world. And government is a loose term. It's not a formal government, but it's an idea that instead of taking cues from nature and natural rights, we'll come up with expert consensus on how other nations should be governed.
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Here is why I love that we started the course with the principles of the Founding and what the founders thought was the right way to guide foreign policy. Because now you start thinking, okay, what are those principles that we talked about? Right. It was to protect the rights of American citizens. That should be the guiding principle for our foreign policy. So now you start seeing this entanglement in the affairs of other nations, and then you have to start thinking to yourself, okay, how is this protecting the rights of American citizens?
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The American people themselves, to their credit, were reluctant to abandon the principles of the Founding and after World War I. And it should be said that the Senate rejected inclusion into the League of Nations. The people's representatives rejected Wilson's attempt to include America in that quasi world government, because the American people, contra the elites, still believed in the principles of the founding and wanted to preserve that. So there was what Professor Anton calls A return to normalcy after World War I, in the 20s and 30s, when foreign policy more or less resembled the first century of American government.
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And I love thinking about foreign policy and going through this course because it is a topic that occupies the news cycle so much these days. In fact, I think we overemphasize it. But you just talked about the American people rejecting that Treaty of Versailles and the American spirit going back to the Founding. And what I love about what we do at the online courses is that there's different ways to look at the American spirit. And we have a new course that does that by looking at it through the lens of the fine arts. And the course is American Paintings.
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In this course, Professor Sam Knecht helps us understand the American spirit not through documents and argumentation, but. But through beautiful paintings, beautiful works of art that reveal to us how Americans saw themselves and what we should. It helps us have a more full picture of what Americans were and are.
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And this is, you know, we've been developing these courses now for quite some time, and they're quite beautiful now. And obviously this course, because of the nature of this course, is particularly beautiful. So I really encourage you to go to our site to take this course. It's a short course, but it is visually stunning. And you can do that by going to Hillsdale. Edu course. That's Hillsdale. Edu course and enrolling in American Paintings.
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Now let's turn to professor anton with Lecture 4 of American Foreign Policy, the Interventionist Debate.
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In the previous lecture, we talked about the rise of Capital P, progressive foreign policy, Capital P, because progressivism was both an intellectual movement and, briefly, a political party, but then a political movement that found its home in both parties. In this lecture, we're going to talk some more about where progressive foreign policy led, but also about some resistance and opposition to progressive foreign policy, both among the American people and. And among American political elites. Now, among the many rationales for intervention, American intervention into World War I that we talked about, perhaps the most famous was Woodrow Wilson's comment, usually rendered as that he wants to make the world safe for democracy. What he actually said in the speech in question is that the world must be made safe for democracy. But it amounts to the same thing, the use of American power, American military power in particular, to change the political complexion of the world, ostensibly in ways favorable to U.S. interests. Now, I talked about Wilson's famous 14 points. I'm not going to list them all here. And in fact, many of them are very specific to the particular circumstance he was talking about he mentions specific countries and specific disputes that he's going to resolve. In general though, they revolved around three fundamental principles. And I would say that those are the promotion of democracy in Europe. Now remember, Europe was well behind America in terms of democratic development. Not that I want to give this lecture a progressive cast and assume that there is an arc to history and it all points to democracy. But the nations of Europe were much less likely to be democratic than the United States. And Wilson sought to remedy that through the 14 points. In his view, no regime ultimately was legitimate unless it was democratic. Another key principle was free trade. Wilson was an ardent free trader. He thought that trade disputes led to conflict. And so one way to reduce the potential for conflict was to reduce the probability of trade disputes by simply opening trade barriers and hoping that the free flow of commerce would integrate nations and make them less likely to go to war with one another. In fact, this is a fairly common theory that many people still hold to today. I just want to throw one wrench in the gears. That is to say it was commonly believed Pre World War I that the European countries economies were more integrated than they had ever been. And I think that's undoubtedly true. But it was also believed that that integration would make war impossible. And we know as a historical fact that that's false since the war happened. So I think more study at a minimum needs to be done on this alleged linkage between free trade and perpetual peace. And the final major theme of Wilson's 14 points was so called self determination. That is the right of each individual people to determine its own fate as a nation. Well, it gets complicated however, when you have to then define what constitutes a people. Is it simply the same language? Are all people who speak German Germans? Well that's not so. Today we have German speakers obviously in Austria and in Switzerland. Are all people who live within a certain territory over a certain amount of time, one people that deserve the right to self determination? That's also difficult to say how much time are we talking about which particular borders? In other words, all this gets very complicated. And the practice of political life in Europe had been for centuries that peoples of all different faiths, different languages, different customs, different ethnic backgrounds had lived together in the same political unit with a sovereign. That was the basis for instance of the Austro Hungarian Empire which was a successor state of the Holy Roman Empire. Yes, the capital was in Vienna and the Emperor spoke German, but he ruled over many subjects who didn't speak German or who didn't consider themselves Germans. So it's all well and good to say that you're for self determination. And it sounds like a reasonable principle. And I am not disputing that it's a reasonable principle. I just want to point out to you the complications of trying to sort out centuries of, of complicated politics in Europe with differing peoples ruled in differing states by different sovereigns and suddenly in the course of six months or a year, draw a new map of Europe where every people has self determination. And this is one of the ways that Wilson frustrated his colleagues at the Versailles peace conference and one of the ways that I would argue the map of Europe got only further complicated and perhaps contributed to, to later strife. The outcome of the peace conference was the Versailles Treaty. The one thing everyone knows, or thinks they know about the Versailles Treaty is that it led directly to World War II. In fact, in one of the most prescient comments of all time, Ferdinand Foch, a hero marshal of the French army, the man who arguably saved France at the Battle of the Marne in the late summer, early fall of 1914. When he saw the treaty, he said, this is not peace, it is an Armistice for 20 years. Well, he said that in 1919 and World War II broke out in 1939. So you do the math. What most people remember about the Versailles Treaty is that it imposed war guilt on Germany. It accused Germany of having been responsible for the war, and it imposed very harsh reparations payments that led to, among other things, the decay of the Weimar Republic. This was a democratic government in Germany that was founded after the fall of Wilhelmin, or Imperial Germany. And the ouster of Kaiser Wilhelm, who lived out the rest of his days in Belgium, led to hyperinflation which contributed mightily to the fall of the Weimar Republic, which then contributed mightily to the rise of National Socialism and Hitler, and also created great resentment in the German people that Hitler was able to use to his advantage both to seize power and to rebuild the German armed forces in violation of the treaty. And I don't dispute any of that interpretation of the Versailles Treaty, but I want to talk about its implications from the perspective of the American side. A treaty is negotiated by the executive branch, but it must be ratified by the US Senate. And the ratification is a super majority, a 2/3 vote, not a simple up or down vote. When the Wilson administration brought its treaty to the Senate, it found it difficult to get passed. The Versailles Treaty almost certainly would have passed had it needed only a simple majority vote. But finding 2/3 proved to be very difficult. A number of different coalitions were tried and they Couldn't quite get it over the line. And one of the big sticking points was over the proposed League of Nations. Some of you may have heard of the League of Nations. It's in a way, a predecessor, a trial run for the United Nations. It was an international body established in this treaty, a forum in which to resolve disputes that might otherwise lead to war. And this was a big problem for many members of the US Senate and many factions of American elites and the American public because they believed that in signing on to the League of Nations, the United States would be trading away some of its sovereignty. It would be outsourcing to a foreign body, an external body, questions of war and peace that properly constitutionally reside only with the US Congress, with the American people and their elected representatives. And another sticking point over the treaty points back to a theme that we've talked about in earlier lectures. Remember George Washington's warning that the American people developed neither passionate enmities or hatreds for other countries, but also no passionate attachments to other countries. Well, there were a lot of German Americans who felt that the treaty was too harsh on Germany, and they hated it for that reason. But there were also a lot of Irish Americans who felt that the treaty was too favorable to Britain, and they hated it for that reason. So old General Washington's warning came back to bite Woodrow Wilson on the behind, you might say. And his treaty failed to gain ratification in the United States Senate. So the League of Nations, in large part his brainchild, did come into existence, but without his own country's participation. A Republican, Warren Harding, won the 1920 election in part on the slogan Return to normalcy. And by that Harding meant, let's return to peacetime and let's lift all these wartime restrictions and provisions. He was speaking as much about a return to peacetime as he was about a lifting of all of these types of wartime measures that Americans felt, I believe, with some justice, had infringed on their liberties. So we have to think back a bit and remember the advent of progressive foreign policy in the late 1890s and new justifications for American interventionism, especially in the Western Hemisphere, because we are now in a time of extremely active American interventionism in the Western Hemisphere, especially Latin America. So remember the Monroe Doctrine from the Early Republic, 1823 pledges a policy of non intervention in Latin America, but also pledges to intervene against European states from intervening in Latin America. And this policy held true for almost 100 years until Teddy Roosevelt announced the so called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In that Corollary, he essentially restates the doctrine, but gives it a new twist or a new expansive definition toward the end. That is to say, he reserves the right of the United States to intervene in Latin America in cases of flagrant wrongdoing or in cases of Latin American states failure to uphold their obligations as sovereign states. None of this is very precisely defined, which leaves a lot of leeway for Roosevelt himself and later statesmen to justify interventions on grounds of flagrant violations or failures. What we would call today the term would be failed state, a term that didn't exist then. But the basic idea is here's a sovereign country with borders and an ostensible government, but it can't exercise the power that a sovereign state ought to be able to exercise to stop, let's say, bandits from robbing ships at the dock, or drug cartels from operating giant drug plantations and shipping their illicit wares north of the border. As I said, progressive foreign policy began to justify greater intervention in the United States neighborhood. But really, we define our neighborhood as I think I've partially indicated, as the entire Western Hemisphere. So this period at the end of the 19th century and in the first, roughly third of the 20th century, sees a number of American interventions in Latin America. We went into Cuba, Panama, Haiti, the, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico. Now, the intervention in Panama, of course, leads to the creation by American engineers we all should take some pride in, I think, of the famous canal that cuts a ship's travel time from the east to the west coast, or vice versa. But overall, these interventions in Latin America came to be referred to as the banana wars. Now, that's a phrase maybe you don't hear much anymore, but I'm sure some of you have heard the phrase banana republic, which was coined to refer to American involvement in the Honduras, where lots of fruit was grown. Many American fruit companies made a lot of money, but felt that they had economic interest in the Honduras, which entitled them to ask for US Government assistance to make sure that the governments of that country and other countries were. Were favorable to their interests. Now, just as I said in a prior lecture that the Mexican American War, which ceded to the United States, California and most of the Southwest, caused immense resentment between our two countries, to some extent resentment that lingers to this day. I'm not going to go through the history of all of those interventions, but it's worth talking about a couple of them to give you a sense of what some of them were about. In 1914, an unfriendly Mexican government seized or basically took hostage some American Sailors. When negotiations to get them freed broke down, the United States army occupied the Mexican city of Veracruz. The pressure or leverage that that gave the United States eventually convinced the Mexican government to let those sailors go. But the resentment built up from the event, the resentment I would say on both sides made relations much worse. Now Mexico has long had a revolutionary history and revolutionary fervor or activity at this period in Mexico was at a peak. And one leader of Mexican revolutionaries was a man you probably heard the name Pancho Villa. Well, among other activities Pancho Villa engaged in were border crossings into American territory and raids. Raids that resulted in the theft of American property, the death of American citizens and even the burning of some American towns. So the United States arranged the so called punitive expedition against Pancho Villa, led by General John Pershing, who would go on to great fame as the commanding general of all US forces on the Western Front in World War I. The punitive expedition succeeded in that it put down these rebellions in cross border raids. It did not succeed in that one of its objectives was to find and capture Pancho Villa. Well, they never got him. But I would say these two interventions are at least justifiable. According to the terms that we've seen the Founders laid out for what counts as a warranted intervention in a country's internal affairs. United States interests and personnel and people were being directly threatened. And in the case of the Pancho Villa raids, United States territory was being directly violated. A harder intervention to justify on the Founders grounds is is the United States long 21 year intervention in Nicaragua. This began as an expedition by the US Marines to protect American business interests in Nicaragua. And those business interests were multitudinous and complicated. I will mention only one, which is there was an attempt to build a canal through Nicaragua. That attempt was eventually abandoned with the completion of the Panama Canal. Although Nicaragua being so much farther north, the Nicaraguan Canal was considered more geographically advantageous. I just mention as an aside that in a way, even though work on the Nicaraguan Canal was abandoned at the time, no one ever gave up on the project entirely. And as of today it's still conceptually alive. That is to say, there are still engineers and shipping companies looking at it along with the Nicaraguan government who think perhaps that they can make it work. We'll see how that turns out. But whatever the origin of the intervention in Nicaragua, the Nicaraguan people, for perhaps not mysterious reasons, viewed that intervention as an invasion and occupation of their country. And it provoked a rebellion, and it provoked a rebellion that the Marines spent many years trying to put down. I think however that if we are to judge the Nicaraguan intervention by the Founders principles, it would have to come up wanting. The Founders might be somewhat sympathetic to the use of US Military power to protect business interests, but I think we might be able to make a distinction between attacking pirates who are preying on American shipping and going in and rearranging the affairs of another country so that that country's government is more friendly to US Business interests. It gets much more dubious to try to imagine the founders supporting a 21 year long intervention in in a country to stabilize it, bring it peace and bring it better government. Well, one of the outcomes of the Nicaraguan intervention is that by its end the American people really no longer supported it. They wanted the Marines well out of Nicaragua. And as often happens, it takes an election to make a policy change like that. Well, FDR was elected by a landslide in 1933 and and one of his early actions was to end that intervention and announce the so called Good Neighbor Policy. And the Good Neighbor Policy was in essence a restatement of the original Monroe Doctrine, a statement of non intervention by the United States in the Western Hemisphere with the hoped for outcome of better relations between the USA and the countries of Central and South America, which FDR realized we're very resentful of US Intervention and he wanted to tamp down that resentment and improve relations between America and the many countries to our South.
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Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this week's episode, we talk with Max Primorak, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He was on campus for a CCA lecture. We'll discuss with him the history of US Foreign aid and how the Trump administration is charting a different path. And it's nearly the end of the summer, but still time to look out for those invasive species in your yard. Christopher Haeckel from Hillsdale's biology department tells us what to look out for and what can be done about those invasive plants. All that this week on the Radio Free hillsdiggle Hour. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube.
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Hillsdale College is a small, Christian classical liberal arts college that operates independently of government funding. And we want you or your son or daughter to apply. At Hillsdale, students grow in heart and mind by studying timeless truths in a supportive community dedicated to the highest things. Hillsdale College costs significantly less than other nationally ranked private liberal arts colleges and receives regular recognition as a best value. And nearly all students receive financial Aid our robust core curriculum, vibrant student life and 8 to 1 student to faculty ratio make for an education like no other. For more information or to fill out an application, visit hillsdale. Edu Info. That's Hillsdale. Edu Info.
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We talked about the rise of progressive foreign policy and progressive principles. We've seen that they had a lot of effect. They justified a number of US interventions in foreign countries in foreign affairs and foreign wars. The biggest being by far the US intervention in World War I, which saw well over 2 million Americans wear the uniform and go overseas and around 118,000 lost their lives. But by no means were progressive foreign policy principles widely accepted either among the American public or among or the American elite. Warren Harding was elected specifically on the pledge to return to normalcy, which meant a return to the pre World War I or even pre progressive understanding of America's role in the world. We just need to remember that the American people were not entirely on board with progressive foreign policy. They rallied around the flag, as the American people always do. Once the intervention in World War I was decided, even though American public opinion had grave ambivalence about it and American elites were divided. American elites, after all, stopped the League of Nations or stopped America from joining the League of Nations. Non progressive American elites dominated the cabinets of Warren Harding, his Republican successor Calvin Coolidge, and his Republican successor Herbert Hoover. Perhaps the leading non progressive American statesman and foreign policy expert of this time was Elihu Root, Senator from New York, Secretary of State and Secretary of War, among other jobs. Progressivism did however, score some other triumphs during this period and we need to mention a couple of them now. Triumphs, I mean in the sense of they got established. Having been in the national security establishment, I can tell you that sometimes just getting the document is all that you're really trying to do. So if you get the treaty signed, it's a major victory for you because as far as you're concerned, the treaty is your product. Whether the treaty works or has a good effect is a secondary consideration if it's considered at all. The two treaties that I'm about to mention don't look so good in hindsight because if we have to be honest with ourselves, they didn't accomplish what their authors said they would accomplish. The first is the so called Washington Naval Treaty. The purpose of that treaty was to limit navies to prevent a further arms race that might lead to war. Now it didn't limit the number of ships countries could build, but it did limit their size, the so called tonnage, to 10,000 gross tons. Now that sounds pretty big, but keep in mind today that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is more on the order of 120,000 tons. 10,000 wasn't even huge for the 1920s, although it was a lot larger, it was a lot closer to the upper end than 10,000 tons is today. Now, that treaty was signed by all of the Allies who won World War I, plus Japan. But when events went in a different direction, Japan was fighting on mainland China and trying to expand an empire in the south and Western Pacific. Japan bowed out of the treaty in the mid-1930s, as did Italy, which had been an ally of the United States, Britain and France in World War I, but would become a member of the Axis powers and an enemy in World War II. And Japan by the time World War II breaks out, well before World War II breaks out, even had a navy with many ships that well exceeded the size proscribed by the Washington Naval Treaty. So I think we can safely say the Washington Naval Treaty did not have its intended effect, however well meaning it was. And by the way, it's called the Washington Naval Treaty because it was negotiated and signed in Washington. So this was an American led, American sponsored effort. The second is perhaps even more fanciful. It was known as the Kellogg Bryant Pact, named after its two principal authors, another American sponsored effort. Now in theory, the Kellogg Bryant Pact outlawed war. That is to say, if you were a member of this pact, you foreswore ever going to war to resolve a dispute. Like most of these treaties, it started small with a handful of signatories and grew over time. But we know what happened. By 1939 there was another European war, and well before 1939, in the early 30s, as early as 1931 in fact, you had a major war in East Asia as Japan invaded Manchuria. So the Kellogg Bryan Pact, I'm willing to say it was well meaning. But I have to perhaps inject a little partisan judgment here and say it's just complete folly to assume that anyone can write a treaty, no matter how perfect, that will outlaw war. It's unfortunately part of human nature and part of the human condition. We should do all we can to limit war, to prevent war, to make war as rare as possible, to as little costly as possible and as short as possible. But if we set ourselves to the utopian aim of outlawing war, I'm afraid we're always going to be disappointed. Now the rest of this period, that is to say the period covered by this lecture, because we're going to go into the immediate Pre World War II period and then the war in the next lecture is really a tug of war between progressives and non progressives in terms of the conduct of American foreign policy. The hindsight view is that America should have been more involved with the rest of the world all throughout this period. And had it been so, World War II could have been prevented. That's what historians say is a counterfactual. It can't be proved either way. It's a hypothesis often given for tendentious means to push a particular view viewpoint of the person offering the argument. What we can say with somewhat more confidence is that the Roosevelt administration, the Franklin Roosevelt administration, that is especially in its first term, was focused almost entirely on domestic matters, paid not that much attention to what was going on in the rest of the world. And to the extent that it did pay attention to what was going on in the rest of the world, it did so from an economic and trade perspective. Now we know what was going on in the rest of the world. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. As I said, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and began a campaign of imperial conquest not just on the East Asian mainland, but around the western Pacific. Hitler violated the Versailles Treaty by strengthening Germany's military beyond the limits set by that treaty. He reoccupied the Rhineland, he did the Anschluss with Austria and annexed an entire country. The munich Agreement in 1938 and so on. All this time it was alleged that America was for the most part checked out. But it also happened that as the situation, especially in Europe, but also in the Pacific, worsened, FDR and his administration shifted their focus from domestic policy and spent more and more time on. On foreign policy, on foreign affairs. And in so doing, they ran up against a fairly strong current in American public opinion that did not want the United States to get involved in another war. And the Roosevelt administration became more and more internationalist in outlook. That is to say, it wanted the United States to become more involved. But it had this major public opinion problem. And so it had to pursue a policy in effect by stealth, that is to say, to reassure the American people that it wouldn't get them into another war. It would offer help to other nations short of war. But it's important to note that resistance to this increasing American internationalism built throughout the late 1930s, culminating in the America First Committee led by Charles Lindbergh, the man who famously first crossed the Atlantic solo in an airplane in 1927. Now, the hindsight view of the America First Committee was of Course, well, they were all wrong because they didn't want the US to get involved in World War II. But the US involvement in World War II, number one, turned out to be a complete triumph for the United States of America. And number two turned out to be completely necessary because of the evil nature of the regimes in question. And Lindbergh himself said some disreputable things about Jewish people and others that have led to tarnish his reputation. But it's a mistake to dismiss the America First Committee as nothing but some kind of nativistic, xenophobic, isolationist movement. In fact, widespread throughout American public opinion was an opposition to going to being involved in any way in World War II. An opposition that ran the gamut from people very far to the right all the way to committed American socialists. Gallup, America's first and most prominent polling company for many decades, polled the American people consistently throughout this period and found them overwhelmingly, typically about 2 to 1, against further American involvement in the war. So that was the main hurdle that the Roosevelt administration had to overcome in order to fulfill its desire to to make the United States more involved internationally and ultimately to support the Allies in the war. The battle lines drawn at the time came to be seen as the so called liberal internationalists versus the neo isolationists or the isolationists. Simply anyone who didn't want the United States to get involved in the war or to take a greater international role was called an isolationist. Most often that term was used as a pejorative, as an insult. And the liberal internationalists, it's worth noting, even though you hear the word liberal, that doesn't mean they were all Democrats. There were liberal internationalists or internationalists in both parties. In the Republican Party, the split was most notably between two of its leading figures, Robert Taft of Ohio, son of the former President, who, who was at least politically, if not in popular culture, the leader of America's isolationist wing or non interventionist wing. And his great opponent in this debate was Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who was the leader of the Republican Internationalists who increasingly allied with the Democratic Roosevelt administration as war approached, offering the Roosevelt administration political support in the Senate for many of Roosevelt's initiatives to support the Allies. But I think we'll talk more about those initiatives in the next lecture.
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