In George Washington’s famous farewell address, our first president warned his successors to avoid entangling alliances. For the first hundred years of the new nation’s existence his advice was heeded and we were protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from foreign involvement. Our isolation was strengthened by President James Monroe’s doctrine placing the new world off limits to European colonialism. One hundred twenty-five years ago, everything changed. The yellow journalism of the Hearst and Pulitzer presses egged the United States into an imperialist adventure, namely the Spanish-American War. Following the mysterious explosion and sinking in Havana harbor of the United States Battleship Maine, our imperialist phase began. It was glorious and romantic as Teddy Roosevelt’s rough riders stormed up San Juan Hill and Admiral George Dewey seized the Philippine Islands. Overnight, the US became a colonial power with ownership of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and control of Cuba. A jungle war was fought in the Philippines for several years until American dominance was achieved. Teddy Roosevelt became Vice President to President William McKinley in1900 and after McKinley’s assassination succeeded to the Presidency. He was an internationalist of the highest order, and he won the Nobel Peace prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese war. America had entered the world. The isolationist phase of American history was over.
The war that no one wanted, the “Great War”, erupted in Europe in August 1914. The United States, under President Woodrow Wilson pursued a policy of neutrality. In 1916, Wilson was reelected with the campaign slogan of “He kept us out of the war”. Despite this slogan, German unrestricted submarine warfare led the US into the war in 1917 on the side of Great Britain and France (by then, the third member of the Triple Entente-czarist Russia was out of the war and was in the midst of a civil war). At the insistence of Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Germany capitulated. The Treaty of Versailles was imposed on the losers. Despite America’s entering the war on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which included peace without victors, an ill President Wilson could not stand up to the revanchist tiger, Georges Clemenceau and the map of Europe was redrawn. As the treaty was signed, Marshal Foch, the French commander-in-chief remarked “they will be back in twenty years”. He was right. They were.
Diplomacy during the 1920s led to various efforts to promote peace, especially the Washington Naval Treaty and the Kellogg- Briand Pact (1928) which outlawed war. The 1920s were marked by European indebtedness to the US. German war reparations caused great resentment; Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (NAZI) Party arose, and with the onset of the Great Depression became the dominant party in Weimar Germany, finally legally “seizing“ power in January 1933. The League of Nations, created by the Versailles Treaty was ineffective for various reasons, but one that is most frequently cited is America’s refusal to join. In 1919-20 Wilson was out of commission with a series of strokes; his wife basically ran the country as Wilson’s illness was kept secret and the US Senate rejected the treaty. Democracy died in Europe as dictatorships of various orientations took power, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Corporative Portugal, authoritarian Poland and the list goes on. Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in November 1932, and maintained an isolationist policy outside of the western hemisphere. War started in Europe on September 1, 1939, and the western democracies fared poorly. France fell in June 1940 and Britain stood alone. In the 1940 election campaign, FDR, running for an unprecedented third term pledged to not “send American boys into a foreign war”. Again, it was not to be. The US supported Britain with lend lease and finally entered the war after the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan (Dec. 7, 1941). Four days later, Germany declared war on the United States. American declarations of war were voted by the Congress against the two axis powers. (War was never declared against Italy). Since December 1941, the United States has not declared war against any other nation.
The two world wars changed America forever. World War I changed America from a debtor to a creditor nation for the first time in its history. America expected the European nations to repay their war debts. The Europeans bitterly objected feeling that they had sacrificed enough. President Calvin Coolidge didn’t agree, saying ‘they hired the money, didn’t they?”. Numerous plans were proposed to allow Germany to pay reparations owed to France, Great Britain and other countries, as that was the key to the debts to the US being repaid. The Young and Dawes plans were proposed, radically reducing German payments, but everything became moot with the Great Depression and President Herbert Hoover declared a moratorium on debt repayments. In the end, only tiny Finland paid its debts. The other countries defaulted. Isolation was still strong in the US, even into the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Only later in his second term did America become more involved in world affairs outside the western hemisphere. To a very great extent, America became a world industrial and financial power and importantly, American men and boys who served in the war became aware that there was a big world out there. American writers of the “lost generation” flocked to Paris, Harry Truman of Independence, Missouri began a political career that would lead to the White House and Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth personified the new American industrial class and its international tastes.
World War II was different. It was long and more destructive, both of human life and material destruction. Thankfully, the war was not fought on American soil (a small battle was fought in the Aleutian Islands) and the US emerged as the sole superpower of the world and had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Europe and much of Asia was devastated; Communism became attractive to many and the Soviet Union became a geopolitical competitor of the United States. Soon, with the benefit of espionage, America’s nuclear monopoly ended. Something had to be done to rehabilitate Europe and Secretary of State George Marshall, in a speech at Harvard University proposed the plan which would rebuild Europe. The Soviet bloc did not participate and the USSR became increasingly aggressive. In 1949, China fell to the Communists led by Mao Zedong and Asia was now a new arena of conflict. Secretary of State Dean Acheson drew lines on a map purporting to delineate American interests in Asia. The Korean peninsula, split in half by competing regimes after its liberation from Japan in 1945 was excluded from the area of American concern. The North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, with Stalin’s permission, attacked the South. President Truman ordered American troops to defend the South, the UN backed Truman’s “Police Action” as the USSR was boycotting the Security Council and thus did not veto UN intervention. China (PRC) intervened and after three bloody years, the new President, Dwight Eisenhower ended the war in the summer of 1953. To this day, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea remains the most dangerous spot on earth.
To counter the Soviet and Chinese threats, the US sponsored various treaty organizations, namely NATO, CENTO and SEATO. The latter two were never of any great significance and both died natural deaths after very short t lives. NATO has been expanded and remains an important focus of American interest and influence. Whether it still is of value to the US is questionable. President Franklin Roosevelt made it clear at the end of his presidency that he opposed colonialism and favored the granting of independence to European colonies. He was particularly interested in ending the colonial status of French Indo-China which consisted of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Provisional French President, Charles de Gaulle was insistent on promoting French “gloire” and rejected any change in status for those colonies. The French Indo-Chinese war ended with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. A conference at Geneva split Vietnam into two with the prospect of early elections to unify that nation. Those elections never took place, the US replaced a weakened France as the protector of southeast Asia and the result was the Vietnam war which cost over 50,000 American lives, destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, his presidency, and himself. The country was divided and a case can be made that we have not yet recovered from the trauma of that war. That war was fought under the authority of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The incident leading to that resolution remains unclear to this day. Ultimately, the Congress acted by passing the War Powers Act which has been virtually useless in prevention of American adventures, The USSR controlled its East European satellites; China, Indo-China, North Korea and Mongolia were in the Communist camp, Cuba was Communist and the Communist challenge was greater than ever in the emerging third world. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger laid the groundwork for detente with the USSR and President Nixon visited the PRC and the USSR. Both sides remained armed to the teeth with tremendous nuclear overkill on both sides. Several arms limitation treaties were negotiated. Despite the idea of “peaceful coexistence” the world was still a very dangerous place.
Conditions did not improve during the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, President Carter confessed in a televised address that until that moment he did not realize the threat of the USSR. He was finished after Iranian “students” seized the American embassy and held the American staff hostage for 444 days. They were released when Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency on January 20, 1981. President Reagan engaged in a massive military buildup which the USSR was incapable of matching. Many volumes describe the military and diplomatic steps taken during the Reagan presidency and the reader is referred to these texts. What is important is that by the end of the Reagan presidency, Communism was on the ropes. It was finished by the end of 1991, when the USSR collapsed and was replaced by Russia and other successor states of the USSR. The world was again unipolar with one super- power, the United States. The Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping had a successful visit to the US, trade relations bloomed and it appears that the world was entering a Pax Americana.
To this point, in a very brief and condensed form, American history has been described and there can be no question that the two world wars led to the emergence of the US as a world power and with that power came responsibilities. Francis Fukuyama has proposed that with the collapse of the USSR, we had reached the end of history, the final triumph of democracy and a period of peace and prosperity for all. This has not happened. The US is more involved in the world than at any time in its history. American interference in the internal affairs of other nations is a daily occurrence. This is what we must look at now as we try to determine just what are American interests.
America’s interests were first tested on Aug. 2, 1990 when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s army invaded and occupied oil rich Kuwait. Within days, President George Bush (41) started forming an international coalition to oppose that move and the UN Security Council passed Resolutions 660 and 661 authorizing military action to reverse Iraq’s move. A brief war led to the liberation of Kuwait. Interestingly, the dying USSR, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, supported the US led action. The US intervened to make clear that aggression against smaller states would not be tolerated. At this point, America had near universal support for its intervention. The situation changed radically with the election of Bill Clinton as President in November 1992. Clinton espoused the idea of liberal hegemony. Briefly, and some may disagree with my interpretation of this doctrine, it was a policy that would seek to remake the world in the image of the United States. From this point onward, things started to go badly. Clinton, a master politician, was inexperienced in foreign affairs. His Secretary of State, Warren Christopher in his first term and Madeline Albright in his second, were forgettable in their lack of achievements. Failed efforts at nation building in Somalia led to the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in which the body of an American serviceman was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia devolved into their constituent states, ugly nationalism, no longer restrained by totalitarian dictatorships in the former Eastern bloc led to ethnic tensions and a bloody war in Bosnia, involving Croatia and Serbia. Ignominiously, the US had the distinction of bombing Belgrade, the first nation to do so since Nazi Germany in 1941. Albright, a protege of former Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, led the expansion of NATO to the Russian border and rejected Russian interests in joining NATO; She promoted something nebulous called the Partnership for Peace. The result of this was that NATO was no longer north nor Atlantic. Ultimately, American troops would be stationed in Poland and Romania, the American defense umbrella now encompassed virtually all of Europe, and it became questionable what NATO’s purpose was and why any American troops should be stationed in Europe. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but was found not guilty by the Senate. He spent most of the last year of his presidency in a wild effort to broker a Middle Eastern peace accord as he futilely sought to enhance his tarnished reputation and win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Clinton’s successor, Governor of Texas George W. Bush was also inexperienced in foreign affairs. Unfortunately for the nation and his presidency, September 11, 2001 is another date which will live in infamy. Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes that morning. Two crashed into the World Trade Center twin towers in NYC, one crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The nation was stunned by this horrific attack, thousands died and the US moved into a war footing. Bush declared that Al Qaeda’s refuge in Afghanistan was to be eliminated and Iraq had to be liberated from Saddam Hussein’s rule as he was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Of particular interest is the National Security Strategy of the United States, issued by the Bush administration in 2002. Though Bush was a Republican and Clinton was a Democrat, the National Security Strategy enunciated by Bush was not inconsistent with Clinton’s policy of liberal hegemony. Just reading the title of sections of Bush’s strategy is sufficient to understand how the policy of American global intervention was now expanding. Examples include: champion human dignity, strengthen alliances, work with others to defuse regional conflicts, prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies and our friends, ignite global economic growth through free markets and free trade, expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy. The list continues but it is clear that there was now to be no limit to America’s involvement in every country in the world. Though this strategy was in reaction to the attacks of Sep.11, 2001, it is important to understand that in the Bush-Gore debates during the 2000 election campaign, it was clear that the national debt would be extinguished during the new president’s first term. The national debt today is over $32 trillion and debt service alone is 663 billion dollars in 2023 and rising. It is understood that a nation’s military strength is related to its economic strength and we are now faltering badly. The result of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was thousands of Americans dead and wounded and ultimately the near bankruptcy of the nation due to prolonged unrestrained spending. Furthermore, despite George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence pronouncing war with Iraq as a “slam dunk” no weapons of mass destruction were ever found there. The war with Iraq in now open to question as to why it ever occurred.
The presidency of Barack Obama saw further meddling in international affairs and an attempt to dissuade Iran from producing nuclear weapons through an understanding that didn’t require senate approval. Billions of dollars were released to Iran which continued to develop such capability despite US demands. Finally, Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement with Iran. Noteworthy is that budget busting spending continued unabated. The accession to the Presidency by Joe Biden in January 2021 led to further micromanaging of the world. A day doesn’t go by without State Department comment on what America doesn’t approve of. Criticism of Israel, Uganda, Mexico, Japan, Hungary etc. is endless as the President and his subordinates have comments about the internal affairs of every country in the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars in aid have been given to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Russia’s brutal invasion. Yet where are our so-called European allies and the powerful rich European Union? Just recently, President Biden activated 3000 US Army reservists and flew them to Europe. Helping Ukraine may be desirable, but where and what is Europe doing? precious little. Similar challenges are now facing us in the Far East where we have made it clear that the South China Sea is an American interest. 6000 miles from the American mainland, we now have commitments to defend practically every Asian country. The situation is extremely dangerous, and we cannot afford to bear this burden ourselves. Uncontrolled massive immigration across our southern border has led to further American intervention as we seek to make every country in the world more accommodating to its own citizens and we spend billions toward the end.
It is obvious that the time has come for a clear delineation of just what is the national interest of the United States. We cannot be all things to all nations, we cannot shed our citizen’s blood for the whole world. A national discussion of this is imperative.
Garry S. Sklar
On the Ohio River
August 7, 2023
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