U.S. Foreign Policy

The Rise and Maturation of a World Power, 1860вЂ"1941

The Civil War inspired a vigorous diplomacy. The Confederacy tried to translate British and French establishment sympathy (not shared by the European working classes, which favored the Union) into recognition and support. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward successfully prevented this. Northern wheat and sea power trumped Southern cotton in European calculations.

The rapid industrialization of the late-nineteenth-century United States produced at first a self-absorbed politics. Seward, a visionary, Pacific-focused expansionist, acquired Alaska and Midway Island. He called for an isthmian canal, but various executive initiatives in the Caribbean failed to gain support. In the early 1890s, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's propagation of an imperial vision based on sea power heralded a revived expansionary mood. But it took the triumphant 1898 war with Spain, arising more directly out of the long Cuban rebellion, to propel the United States into world politics with subsequent control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, new positions in the Caribbean, and the formal acquisition of Hawaii. Substantial domestic opposition to this new American "empire" was overcome, and Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door notes to other powers in 1899вЂ"1900 signified a fresh American determination to share commercial opportunities and, by implication, political influence in China (see Open Door Policy).

President Theodore Roosevelt (1901вЂ"1909), an ardent nationalist, embodied the new activist tendency. In the Caribbean region, always a primary American interest, he created political conditions for the future Panama Canal at Columbia's expense, and closed the area to European military action by undertaking in the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to be their self-appointed debt collector. He sent marines to quell various regional disturbances. More widely he mediated the Russo-Japanese peace settlement of 1905 and the Franco-German dispute over Morocco in 1907. His advocacy of a stronger navy and of an extended international law signified a commitment to both power and