Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Into this increasingly violent fray stepped a man too good to be true: Theodore Roosevelt. Born of a Northern father and a Southern mother three years before the Civil War, Roosevelt would barely survive the fragile health of his childhood and, upon suffering the deaths of his mother and first wife on the same night, would retreat into America’s baddest frontier lands and, in that healing place, transform himself into the quintessential Western man—the rough-and-tough cowboy. At a time when the world’s growing complexity seemed to know no bounds, Roosevelt’s capacity for self-education seemed equally limitless. He was master of numerous foreign languages and the author of dozens of scholarly books. His stunning rise through state and national political circles across the 1880s and 1890s made his ascendancy to the White House in 1901, after yet another presidential assassination, almost anticlimactic. Roosevelt the progressive crusader had already led reform efforts at virtually every level of American government, from the lowest post office and most dingy police station to, as assistant secretary of the Navy, the grand strategic aspirations of global seapower. He also organized and presided over the world’s first environmental organization and led what can be legitimately described as a special operations unit into battle. It was almost as if America’s destiny in the first decade of the twentieth century had manifested itself, in all its glories and contradictions, inside a single man. When TR was sworn into office, he was arguably the most broadly accomplished and experienced individual ever to serve as president. He was also the youngest. Neither feat has since been replicated.

  Roosevelt transformed the office in a way no other president had since Andrew Jackson. “Theodore the Sudden” would launch a massive legal assault against the business “combinations” of the day, filing forty-four pioneering lawsuits that ultimately led to his “busting” of more than three dozen trusts in industries such as railroads, banking, and oil. His handpicked successor, William Taft, would go on to disassemble more than twice that. Between them, they regraded America’s corporate landscape through these revolutionary executive-branch interventions into private business. But Roosevelt’s meddling streak exhibited itself in many other ways, likewise establishing stunning precedents. His personal intervention into a threatened coal strike in 1902 averted a national emergency, and his personal diplomacy in negotiating an end to the 1905 Russo-Japanese War won him a Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever awarded to an American and the only one ever granted to a sitting president. Roosevelt appointed the first Jew to a cabinet-level office and hosted the first African-American in the White House—Booker T. Washington. Among his many legislative accomplishments were the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

  Roosevelt’s most farsighted accomplishments had to do with elevating a budding, grassroots conservation movement in America into the political mainstream. The first president to raise environmental issues, he doubled the number of national parks to ten, exploited the just-passed Antiquities Act to designate the Grand Canyon and fifteen other natural sites as National Monuments, started the National Forest Service and established fifteen new national forests, created the forerunner of the National Wildlife Refuge System by designating sixteen federal bird refuges, and initiated twenty federal irrigation projects under the National Reclamation Act that he signed into law. In all, Roosevelt set aside more park-land and preserves than all his predecessors combined. The sum total rivals the land transfer triggered by the Homestead Act and is equal to 7 percent of the entire U.S. territory, meaning TR created almost as much public land as Honest Abe gave away.

  Despite all those domestic accomplishments that did much to house-break American capitalism, Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishment, from our perspective here, came in effectively pivoting America’s ambition for system creation from the continental scale to that of the Western hemisphere and beyond. Despite his reputation as a “cowboy” president and international gunslinger, he started no wars, and if not for the ongoing U.S. military occupation of the Philippines, begun under his predecessor McKinley, TR would have suffered no military combat casualties across his seven-plus years as president. In Roosevelt’s own opinion, his greatest foreign policy accomplishment came in concluding the treaty with newly independent Panama that allowed American construction and leased ownership of the Panama Canal, in effect giving the growing U.S. Navy the capacity to move ships far more quickly between America’s coasts. While that strategic capacity never proved decisive in either of the twentieth century’s world wars, the United States did consider the canal a strategic enough asset to deploy almost 70,000 troops to defend it in WWII, and the canal’s impact on maritime commerce was profound across the twentieth century.

  Roosevelt’s desire to extend the logic of the American System hemispherically was equal parts offensive and defensive. The offensive impulse was internal. Following Frederick Jackson Turner’s notion that the “closed frontier” represented a stagnating threat to the further development of American character, Roosevelt, who spoke publicly with ease of the “wealthy criminal class” and the divide between “haves and have-nots,” evinced similar fears of a “stationary state” that, if boxed in by circumstances, would become hypercompetitive and consume itself to the point where the only alternative to chaos would be authoritarianism.

  The defensive impulse was external: Roosevelt saw, as he put it, a present where “the globe’s waste spaces are being settled and seeded.” If America was going to retain enough competitive space in the global landscape, it would have to move fast. That “new and dark power” within American society, which threatened its competitive landscape and thus spoiled its social environment, found its global corollary in Eurasia’s colonial empires—the trusts and combinations of the imperial age. If anything, TR was a committed anti-imperialist who wanted to keep the competitive environment as natural as possible. When a younger Teddy declared to a military audience in 1883 his dream “to see the day when not a foot of American soil will be held by any European power,” he was rather expansively suggesting that the same benefits of liberty afforded to citizens of the United States should be made available to all Americans—north and south.

  Roosevelt’s Fair Deal, thus translated to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, presages his young cousin’s attempt, four decades later, to extrapolate his own New Deal logic throughout the world. Far from being what most people understand as “imperial” ambition, this was an instinct for System Administration that must be taken at face value. TR’s “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine simply extended America’s guarantee of protection from the baseline of military protection from foreign domination to economic protection from foreign domination. Is that not what the International Monetary Fund has sought to accomplish over the past several decades? Buying the “little guy” economic breathing space during periods of great economic duress? In this light, is it not fair to view the “dollar diplomacy” of TR’s successor, William Taft, as simply extending the same “rescue package” logic of the Fed’s “open-market operations” (pioneered, by the way, by Alexander Hamilton) but on a hemispheric scale? In other words, these were baby steps toward the international liberal trade order we later imposed, not rote imitations of European colonialism.

  Outside of the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt’s instinct was, in John Hay’s phrase, to maintain an “open door.” In that way, TR’s attempts to keep Asia in play presaged our successful efforts during the Cold War to both establish and defend market beachheads in places like Japan and South Korea, paving the way for capitalism’s ultimate and pervasive triumph throughout the region. It’s interesting to note, especially now that we find ourselves making similar efforts throughout a poorly marketized Middle East, just who popularized the open door as a strategic concept—Alfred Mahan (who also popularized the term “Middle East”). Mahan’s notion of sea commerce “pressure points” nicely predicts the ship-rotational “hubs” that the U.S. Navy, once it achieved its two-ocean fleet during World War II, actively maintained throughout mo
st of the Cold War. By progressively extending that “cop on the beat” naval presence across the world’s oceans, America’s military assumed the same function as Britain’s had in the previous era of glo-colonialization: keeping sea lanes open for everyone’s trade. When President Jimmy Carter finally extended that promise into the Persian Gulf with his Carter Doctrine (the promise to prevent any outside great power from dominating the region militarily), he simply made universal the Monroe Doctrine/Open Door, resulting in our blood now being spilled to preserve the world’s stable access to the region’s energy. The best proof of our good intentions? America consumes about one-tenth of the Persian Gulf’s oil; the rest goes elsewhere.

  If anything, Roosevelt’s global ambitions were wildly premature. As the saying goes, America in that era—much like China today—was all hat and no cattle. Then again, as Iraq proves today, the definition of “cattle” changes with time. In Roosevelt’s time, though, the definition was clear: seapower. While America was decades away from achieving Mahan’s naval force-structure requirements, that didn’t stop TR from projecting a show of force such as the world had never before seen mounted by a Western Hemispheric power: the Great White Fleet’s globe-circling tour from December 1907 through February 1909, when those sixteen great battleships came home to mark Roosevelt’s farewell from office. As he himself declared, “I could not ask a finer concluding scene for my administrations.”

  Roosevelt was a depressed, volatile ex-president who almost immediately grew unhappy with his handpicked successor’s performance and ran against him in the 1912 election as a third-party (Progressive) candidate, finishing a distant second to the Democrats’ Woodrow Wilson, who had once described TR as “the most dangerous man of the age.” In terms of TR’s legacy as a grand strategist, it is arguably more illuminating to track the seeds of his long-term influence on the “speak softly” side of his most famous foreign policy formulation, not simply because it would be a long time before America truly wielded a “big stick,” but also because Roosevelt’s focus on dampening self-destructive competition through the extension of new, protective rule sets nicely rounds out a global extrapolation of his Fair Deal philosophy. Plus, quite frankly, given his seven years of starting no wars but rather ending them or preventing new ones, I have to agree with Edmund Morris’s verdict that Roosevelt’s surest legacy was proving that “it is the availability of raw power, not the use of it, that makes for effective diplomacy.”

  If John Hay connects Theodore Roosevelt back to America’s bloody Civil War, then his onetime secretary of war and then Secretary of State (replacing the deceased Hay) Elihu Root logically connects him forward to America’s twentieth-century championing of good global governance (e.g., post-WWI League of Nations, post-WWII United Nations). I don’t pretend that Roosevelt was anything but an ardent nationalist, but rather suggest that, much as he did in his stated position on the League of Nations (he called it “an addition to” American power but not “a substitute for” a strong America), he positively viewed such international forums as rule-set adjudicators that kept the game fair. As such, it’s most worthy to celebrate Root’s long list of career achievements, including extensively reforming the U.S. Army into its modern institutional form as secretary of war and so championing the cause of international arbitration during his subsequent stint as Roosevelt’s secretary of state that he became the second American, following TR himself, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Root also helped launch the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations and served on a commission of jurists that established the League of Nations’ Permanent Court of International Justice.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency marks the great tipping point between America-the-potential and America-the-power. His success in creating a “fair-play” competitive landscape inside the United States, leveraging the middle-class ideology born of the nation’s post-Civil War reconstruction and westward tilt, emboldened him to project that most American model onto a global environment still dominated by Eurasian imperial projects. As such, Roosevelt’s grand strategic instincts were roughly a half-century ahead of their time, for Eurasia’s imperial powers would have to destroy one another, and the uncompetitive model of globalization they had erected, before TR’s global dream would once again be chased by another president named Roosevelt.

  A GLOBAL AMERICAN SYSTEM, AN AMERICAN CENTURY

  As we move deeper into the twentieth century, we leave behind an America that did whatever it had to do on its continent and then across its hemisphere to preserve its sense of limitless opportunity, and meet an America that sensed its grand experiment could not survive globally unless certain threats were addressed. Gone were the territorial designs, but the economic demands for free access and fair play continued unabated, just levied with far less hypocrisy as we began to lower our own protectionist stance, which had nurtured Clay’s “home market” throughout the nineteenth century. This push was not “messianic” or the product of American exceptionalism. Rather, it was our natural instinct for survival, born of decades of frontier integration. We Americans can’t help being who we are—the original castoffs who inevitably return to homelands intent on spreading our definition of happiness pursued. We don’t, in our historical insouciance, project our globalization model upon the world out of hubris or sheer ambition. Like any revolutionary regime, we see our ideals as universal and needing to be spread. But given our geographic isolation and our natural impulse to always seek freedom from authority, we need to feel cornered by history before we’ll strike out. We need to feel the walls closing in before taking action because we fear opportunities lost more than responsibilities undertaken.

  Growing our peculiar version of “states-uniting” globalization in the historic shadow of the Eurasian imperial model of glo-colonialization, we were noticed by other great powers and somewhat feared for our meteoric rise. The world was not quite sure what to make of an imperial power that eschewed traditional colonies and instead trumpeted the spread of its laws and argued that others should adjust to these principles by arbitration—as though lawyers could manage a great power’s rise! Remember that when today’s neocon hardliners dismiss all talk of negotiation as “appeasement.”

  Nonetheless, as the Eurasian imperial powers found themselves inexorably drawn into conflict, it quickly became clear that America’s path would consist of more than just pushing legalisms on the international order; in the decline of the Old World imperial order, America would step into the role of global balancer and decisive swing vote in times of great conflict. Worse for the Old World, the price of our involvement would be their acceptance of our globalization model of free trade, free markets, collective security, and transparency. Oh, and democracy where it could be managed or at least reasonably faked.

  With the collapse of the Old World globalization order, there stood only two alternatives: America’s free markets versus the Soviets’ planned markets. Since the latter always required far more resources to impose and maintain control, and because it trapped ambition and talent instead of unleashing those creative spirits, the outcome of the resulting worldwide struggle was never really in doubt—just occasionally threatened by the illogic of great-power war in a nuclear age.

  But what was always in doubt, across the first half of the twentieth century, was whether America would transform itself sufficiently at home. Would we become a mature model of multinational economic and political union? And could we project that model on the international stage?

  The imperial model of globalization-through-colonization was limiting for reasons that are obvious; eventually all the world’s “waste spaces” would be conquered and the competing “mini-world” economies would be forced into violent conflict as they bumped up against one another, fighting over resources in a zero-sum manner. Unlike America’s domestic economy in the late nineteenth century, no global version of trust-busting would be required. The two world wars would accomplish that feat quite nicely, f
atally wounding all of Eurasia’s great empires. But the great antithesis to this exploitation-from-above model was also brewing in its shadow: the Left’s answer of class dictatorship-from-below, found first in Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution and later extended over the bulk of Eurasia by the combined terror of Stalin and Mao. Theodore Roosevelt had feared that an America left ungovernable by untamed capitalism might head down a similar path, and so he did his best to defuse the “stationary state” conditions he feared could enable the Left’s radicalization here. But after America had tamed its own capitalism, the question remained, Could it export that middle-class progressivism to the world amid all these brewing great-power conflicts, or were those titanic clashes inevitable?

  The answer is, America tried and failed following the First World War, and in that failure we withdrew from the world, yielding the initiative to others. Eventually, others filled the void, but instead of America’s model of self-rule from the middle it was fascism’s dictatorship from the right.

  Why did we fail?

  On one level, Europe’s centuries-in-the-making imperial model of globalization, especially once its implied challenge was picked up by competitors in the East (Russia, Japan), was simply too pervasive and too entrenched for America’s rather idealistic counternarrative to dislodge it. Vladimir Lenin’s corollary to Karl Marx’s diagnosis was essentially correct: European-style predatory capitalism could stave off its demise at home by extending its life span through overseas empires that shifted unfair exploitation to distant populations, but eventually those empires would bump up against one another on a global scale, resulting in global war. America’s alternative model of tamed competition at home (TR’s “fair deal”) extrapolated to fair competition abroad (Hay’s “open door”) was simply too far ahead of its time in its embrace of postnationalist, secularist, non-zero-sum progressivism. Neither Europe nor Asia could aspire to such modern logic, because neither region had been forced to engineer a synthetic identity such as America had been forced to achieve. Our mid-nineteenth-century Civil War and the subsequent integration of the Western frontier would yield that synthesis. Europe’s violent internal struggle would continue for a century longer, extinguishing itself only in a post-WWII final treaty known as détente. Asia’s own version of wars of identity would likewise continue through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the conflicts of Southeast Asia, achieving stability only after Deng Xiaoping’s development model, which mirrored America’s own “peacefully rising” period of the late nineteenth century, was put in place across China’s vast population, triggering the regional economic integration process we now witness. Simply put, America had to wait for the rest of the world’s great powers to come to the same self-evident truths about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we had radically proposed in the late eighteenth century and had largely—but not completely—achieved by the start of the twentieth century.