Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson:  The Feud that Defined a Century Before 1898, the United States sought to keep America out of European affairs and Europe out of American affairs.    In the meantime, the United States did not stand still.  It singlemindedly pursued an imperial foreign policy, annexing much of North America. Simultaneously, the United States reduced the only major threat to its national security, Mexico, to the level of a vassal state. But the Spanish-American War and the United States' consequent emergence as a global power, combined with the closing of the frontier a mere half-decade earlier, propelled America into a role it had never before played. Four generations of American leaders had ruled their country while being able to ignore foreign affairs, but now the United States' colonial and mercantile interests required a more aggressive foreign policy.  It is perhaps fortunate that the Republican Party machine in New York forced Governor Theodore Roosevelt onto President McKinley's ticket in 1900; when McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901, America's new president was one of the few men in the nation with a solid grasp of international relations, the balance of power, and the importance of the United States' new global responsibilities. Yet within a generation, the United States would become isolationist once more, save for the occasional quixotic conference to outlaw war and, more significantly, the first major international arms limitation treaty.  When America reemerged during the Second World War to play an active role once more in international affairs, it justified its actions not upon traditional European notions of the balance of power, but on moral and legal grounds.  Clearly, the basis for American foreign policy had been decisively altered between the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and his second cousin Franklin. The man whose policies would provide that basis was Woodrow Wilson, the moralistic Gladstone to Roosevelt's calculating Disraeli.  While Roosevelt's policies were more in keeping with the history of the nation-state system and could be traced in a direct intellectual lineage from Richelieu, only one president since his time has adopted a similar view of the world: Richard Nixon.  And even Nixon would have denied that he subordinated the Wilsonian conceit that American democracy and innate morality provided the basis for his actions; his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger noted that Nixon chose a portrait of Wilson to hang in the Cabinet Room during his presidency. To understand why Wilsonism has been the dominant strain of American foreign policy thinking in this century and what consequences this ideology has caused, the origins and beliefs of both Roosevelt's balance-of-power thinking and Wilson's American exceptionalism must be explored. Roosevelt: The exception to the rule Roosevelt was the first president to take an active role in foreign relations practically since the Revolution.  The country's mood as a whole was still predominantly isolationist; its attitude toward the rest of the world was closer to the ideal of "a city on a hill" than today's activist policy of spreading democracy and capitalism.  But Roosevelt rejected isolationism in favor of the balance of power.  He maintained that the United States had a vital stake in world affairs and devoted much of his presidency to enhancing America's status and protecting American interests. The actual incidents in which Roosevelt applied his beliefs are elsewhere on this website.  But it is not necessary to examine each one to realize that Roosevelt's policies were markedly different from previous presidents'.  Where they had preached dependence, he exhorted America to take up the burdens incumbent upon it as a first-rate power. However, his exhortations fell on deaf ears.  The United States of the early 1900s was hardly ready to abandon a generations-long policy of isolation immediately.  Roosevelt remarked bitterly after the outbreak of the First World War that Americans "are shortsighted, and they do not understand international matters." Wilson and the politics of American exceptionalism While Roosevelt's clinical assessment of the balance of power could not spur Americans to action abroad, a Princeton professor's appeal to America's moral instincts did.  Woodrow Wilson's policies were as different from Roosevelt's as Roosevelt's had been from isolationism.  Wilson did not ignore the outside world, as Americans had for generations, but neither did he seek to follow Roosevelt in the former president's calculations of American national interests.  Instead Wilson proposed a third way: spreading American ideals overseas. This was a remarkable policy.  No contemporary power proclaimed that their institutions and beliefs were universally applicable.  Britain did not declare war on Germany to further truth, justice and the English way; the Kaiser never justified the war by asserting that German morality demanded it.  But Wilson explained the necessity of war to the American people by stating that the world had to be made "safe for democracy." A key tenet of Wilson's policy was the essential pacifism of democratic nations.  A cynical observer might have noted with some irony that the bloodiest conflict of the mid-nineteenth century, the American Civil War, had taken place between two democratic nations, or pointed out that Athens, the forerunner of all modern democratic states, had been almost constantly at war.  Americans in the early twentieth century, however, did not question that a world order based upon American ideals would be peaceful.  They pointed to the war in Europe as proof of the innate belligerency of the Old World. The effects of Wilsonism After the war's end, Wilson traveled to Versailles with his Fourteen Points to secure the "peace without victory" he thought would be necessary to prevent another war.  Wilson's key to securing a lasting peace would be an international organziation dedicated to resolving conflicts and promoting collective security, the League of Nations, a "community of nations" the likes of which had never been seen before in human history.  The Allies accepted the League grudgingly as they extracted reparations from Germany. Back home, however, Wilson could not even secure grudging acceptance of the League.  A coalition of isolationist and anti-Wilsonist senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, a close friend of the late Roosevelt's, managed to prevent ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, dooming the League to ultimate irrelevance. Although the Senate had rejected the treaty, a generation of Americans had been inspired by Wilson's ideals.  Among those inspired were men like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and others who would later find themselves in positions where they could follow in Wilson's footsteps.  Hence Franklin Roosevelt's desire to establish a postwar coalition of the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and China to police the world and carry out joint efforts to maintain security, and the continuing justification of American strategy in the Cold War as a way to free other nations and promote democracy. American policy in the 21st century: Wilson or Roosevelt? Today, there is a broad agreement among the major political parties in the United States that the United States should remain involved in the world.  But strains in the Wilsonian consensus are growing.  During the Kosovo air war, much commentary focused on whether America had the strength and the resources to promote its ideals in every corner of the world.  Some even questioned whether doing so was morally justified. Wilsonism was based upon the premise that American values are both superior and universally applicable.  These values have been expressed most forcefully in the three periods this century when the United States found itself without major opposition on the world stage: after World War I, World War II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  A policy designed to reshape the entire world requires that there be no powerful rivals to contest it.  But as Henry Kissinger points out, "The United States is actually in no better position to dictate the global agenda unilaterally than it was at the beginning of the Cold War.  America is more preponderant than it was ten years ago, yet, ironically, power has also become more diffuse.  Thus, America's ability to employ it to shape the rest of the world has actually decreased." In the coming decades, as China, India, and other nations (possibly including Brazil, the European Union, and Russia) grow more powerful, Wilsonism will be less and less applicable to the situation.  Already, critics charge that the United States will only intervene on humanitarian grounds in cases like Kosovo, where the stakes are relatively low and the opposing forces weak, while the Russians are free to conduct brutality on a far larger scale in Chechnya.  Thus, while Wilsonism has been the dominant school of foreign policy for the better part of a century, circumstances and the relatively weaker position of the United States internationally in the coming years may force American leaders to follow the precedent of Theodore Roosevelt. Sources Kissinger, Henry.  Diplomacy.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.