A reflection on the early stages of the so-called American Century is timely and instructive as we approach the end of this international order. Both the sources of the rise of the Pax Americana and the seeds of its ultimate demise were deeply embedded in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. His global outreach, emphasis on a broad conception of national security, and application of U.S. power and influence to the creation of a stable international system contributed decisively to the imperial nation’s central role in global affairs in the unfolding century. But nationalist self-aggrandizement, aggressive empire-building, the rise of power contenders abroad, and the polarization and fracturing of the polity at home also contributed to the decline of the United States and the slow collapse of its international order. While Roosevelt feared this confluence of domestic and international forces and hoped to contain their influence, his policies ironically also contributed much to their rise in the first place.
What then was the hallmark of Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy? This is the key question of Howard Jones’s final book. Jones taught history at the University of Alabama and was one of his generation’s most distinguished historians of the United States in the world. He published sixteen books, among them Mutiny on the Amistad (1987) which provided the basis for Steven Spielberg’s famous 1997 movie Amistad. In addition, he also wrote on nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations, Civil War diplomacy, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, and the Kennedy Administration. Many historians will have made use of his excellent history of U.S. foreign relations, Crucible of Power (first edition 2001). At the time of his death in 2022, Jones had completed the draft manuscript for his seventeenth book, which explores the foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt. The book was finished by Jones’s former student and co-author, Donald A. Rakestraw, who taught history at Winthrop University. Rakestraw has done an impeccable job, and the book provides insights for seasoned students of Roosevelt as well as an accessible introduction for a general audience. The analysis is grounded in a wide range of primary sources and a good selection of secondary literature. Somewhat surprisingly, much of Serge Ricard’s extensive writings on Roosevelt, including his path-breaking Théodore Roosevelt Et L’Amérique Impériale (second edition 2016) as well as the important Blackwell Companion to Theodore Roosevelt (2011), are missing from the bibliography.
The book’s fine-grained analysis of diplomatic interaction between the United States and other great powers aims to replace simplistic, or cartoonish, depictions of Roosevelt, “who strode across the landscape wielding a big stick and clubbing all who dared oppose him,” with a nuanced narrative (x). In its eight chapters, the book examines the Roosevelt Administration and the Panama Canal, the Venezuela Crisis, Roosevelt’s peace brokerage in the Russo-Japanese War, Anglo-American rapprochement, and U.S. navalism and empire-building.
The analysis foregrounds the idea that Roosevelt’s foreign policy matured during a transformative period for the United States, a period characterized by both opportunity and danger. The opportunities were driven by U.S. industrial, commercial, and technological expansion, while the dangers were fueled by the global imperial competition for colonies, outposts, and resources. From Venezuela to Morocco to Manchuria, the fault lines of these conflicts were global and interconnected, and produced a highly volatile international order.
For Roosevelt, any effective and sustainable order required the active involvement of the United States. Three chapters describe Roosevelt’s lead role in the peace negotiations which ended the Russo-Japanese War (and for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906), as well as his government’s influential role during the Algeciras Conference in 1906 that defused the Moroccan Crisis. This involvement of the U.S. in stabilization efforts abroad reflected a theme foregrounded by Jones and Rakestraw, namely, the development of a stable international order guaranteed by its great powers. Support for white supremacy, the belief in the purported civilizational benefits of empire, and the advancement of hierarchies in international relations all informed Roosevelt’s search for order.
The study does not gloss over those tensions in Roosevelt’s approach to world affairs. The epilogue clearly addresses the powerful grip of racism on his understanding of the world, which “raised questions about his character and his presidency” (242). The book also acknowledges the frequently heavy-handed approach of Roosevelt’s administration in the Western Hemisphere. In this context, Washington’s treatment of Colombia before, during, and after the instigation of an independence movement in Panama and the acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone are discussed in great detail.
And yet, at times, the analysis remains uncomfortably close to the carefully crafted narratives Roosevelt disseminated himself about the parameters and characteristics of his administration’s grand strategy: duty, morality, order, peace, righteousness, and the rule of law. As a consequence, the study affirms Roosevelt’s claim that no shots were fired during his presidency: “True, the United States did not fire a shot against a foreign enemy during his tenure as president; nor did a single American soldier die in a foreign war” (1). Such a statement raises questions about the Philippine-American War and the related Moro War, which raged for much of Roosevelt’s presidency and killed thousands of U.S. and Filipino soldiers as well as an estimated 250,000 civilians. These colonial wars also resulted in frequent violations of the rules of war, Congressional investigations into the conduct of U.S. troops, and one of the largest anti-imperial movements in U.S. history.
Jones acknowledges that “a large number of uniformed Americans perished while putting down a tragic and bloody insurrection led by Emilio Aguinaldo” (1). The curious description of soldiers as “uniformed Americans” follows the parlance of the time when the U.S. government tried to deny its opponent regular combatant status, describing them instead as bandits and thereby downgrading this war to an insurrection. Reflecting imperial narratives in the United States, the term bandits connotes an illegal uprising against a legitimate order; it overlooks the notion that the Philippine Republic fought a war of decolonization and liberation against the United States. The Library of Congress acknowledged this semantic obfuscation in the late 1990s when it replaced Philippine Insurrection with Philippine American War in its classification scheme. By insisting on this ideologically charged imperial terminology, the study undermines some of its analytical claims to the avoidance of cartoonish simplifications.
Despite those reservations, Jones and Rakestraw have cleverly unpacked some of the key contradictions in Roosevelt’s approach to foreign relations, between unilateralism and global order, between nationalism and imperialism, between militarized interventionism and sustainable peace, between aspirations and realities. One of the timeliest insights into Roosevelt’s foreign policy is certainly the deep interconnection between the need for domestic cohesion and credible foreign policy. For example, the president’s acquiescent and, at times, supportive attitude toward domestic racial violence clearly eroded Roosevelt’s moral reputation as an advocate for a national and international Square Deal. In addition, socio-economic, environmental, and political tensions and crises at home often produced contradictory foreign policy outcomes which oscillated between efforts to ensure peace and stability and the imperial advancement of resource-extractive practices in the Western hemisphere and beyond. In many ways, Roosevelt’s contradictory policies and outlooks reflected much deeper strategic tensions embedded in the Pax Americana which initially enabled its rise but would ultimately predicate its demise.
