Opinion

Connecting history

Imperialism may be coming back in a big way

By Matt Shaer

Posted on March 31, 2003, at 12:00 a.m.

In the spring of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, pressured by a public German repudiation of the Sussex convention, issued a singular, plaintive plea to the two houses of Congress: “Neutrality,” he said, “is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments, backed by organized force, which is controlled wholly by their will, not the will of their people.”

At stake was U.S. involvement in a war largely seen by Americans as an intrinsically European conflict. Fewer than four months before, Wilson had delivered his famous “Peace Without Victory” speech, which presented an idealistic resolution to the war on the axis of international consensus. By that year, though, Wilson had effectively dismissed the pleas of Congress hawks, who saw American trade interests abroad as dangerously jeopardized. Now the president stood before Congress to ask for a unilateralist approval of war, under the pretenses of the fracture of a diplomatic agreement by the Germans to leave American trade vessels unharmed. Wilson, a gifted orator, knew that if he trained the focus of his request on the direct threat represented by German submarines on American lives, approval would be all but guaranteed. He was right. But in his speech to Congress, critics saw a refusal to reveal Wilson’s underlying motivation for war: the protection and propagation of a complex tangle of American trade interests abroad, and perhaps more importantly, a desire to have a stake in the shaping of European politics. The truth behind the president’s plea was, as is the case with most political bids today, probably a combination of the unsaid and the avowed.

Although little has been made of the similarities between the tactics of the executive branch in 1918 and today’s executive branch – most likely because no media pundit, liberal or conservative, wishes to be the one to associate post-war Iraq with post-World War I Germany – an underlying political correspondence does exist. Torn between his anti-imperialist pretensions, and his occasionally inherently imperialist actions, Wilson infamously said of Mexican politics before he sent troops to the area: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Wilson struggled to adapt an American policy guide that would straddle the line between anti-colonialism and foreign interest, all the while preserving American ideals of freedom. Although I doubt George W. Bush has spent any considerable amount of time considering these issues at any depth, his is a presidency rife with the implications of imperialism. From Europe to Asia, America’s flagrant disregard for international politics has brought the “I” word back in rhetorical fashion for the first time since World War II.

The specter of American imperialism has long haunted U.S. policy, from the Western expansion, to the Monroe doctrine, to the aggressive and ill-justified experimentation with South American colonialism. This is America’s dirty little secret.

Of course, it is only relatively recently that the United States has had the unrivaled strength to do as we wish on the global scale, and correspondingly, it is only recently that we have been forced to face the problems of political over-extension – the Republicans chipped away at Clinton’s Kosovo policy, as the liberals chip away at Bush. It is inevitable that a country as powerful as America will extend some degree of influence, be it social or political, on foreign affairs. Yet it is America’s job, as self-decreed tender of democracy to use judgment abroad, to be even-handed and fair, and perhaps most importantly, to be reserved.

As Henry Cabot Lodge said to Wilson after the conclusion of WWI: “Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.”

Matt Shaer is a junior English major.

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