From Colony to Superpower IX: Teddy

[ 0 ]January 30, 2009 | Robert Farley

Some kind, anonymous soul picked up my bag off the street and delivered it to
my office, meaning that I didnt have to buy another copy of Herrings From
Colony to Superpower. Thank you! And so we return to the series at chapter 9,
which covers the Roosevelt and Taft administrations, the Great White Fleet, the
Roosevelt Corollary, and so forth. See Eriks commentary first.
Imperial consolidation is the motivating concept of the chapter; the United States
consolidated control over both its formal empire (Philippines, Caribbean, South
Pacific), and its informal imperial interests in Latin America and Asia. The United
States also undertook the modernization and professionalization of its diplomatic
corps. This helped the United States achieve a number of notable diplomatic
successes, including Roosevelts brokering of the Russo-Japanese War. I think it
could be argued that the United States achieved full membership in the
European Great Power system under Roosevelt, completing a process that had
been initiated nearly a century before.
Herring continues to give short shrift to the independent influence of Alfred
Thayer Mahan. I think I would have preferred this account to pay greater
attention to the intersections between a foreign policy history of the United
States and a military history of the United States. By this I dont mean more
detailed attention to the wars that the United States has undertaken, but rather
closer scrutiny on the history of the military organizations, and there
relationships both foreign and domestic. They are key foreign policy organs, after
all, and the popularity of Mahan (and other figures like him) is important, I think,
to analysis of US foreign relations during the Roosevelt period. But then the book
is still only half over, and Ill be particularly curious to see how Herring treats the
globalization of US military power after 1945.
US intervention in the Russo-Japanese War is interesting for several reasons. As
discussed earlier, the United States and Imperial Russia maintained unusually
cordial relations in the nineteenth century. These relations began to deteriorate
as US foreign policy took a more overtly ideological tint, and as American Jews
became increasingly concerned with the plight of Eastern European Jews living
under Russian governance. While it would be wrong to suggest that Roosevelt
and the larger elite foreign policy establishment were unmoved by the plight of
Russian Jewry, the primary concerns werent precisely altruistic; Americans
worried that continued repression of Russian Jews would lead to mass
emigration to the United States. Nevertheless, its kind of interesting that, given
the hysteria that greeted the possibility of Japanese Pacific expansion, US policy

on the war was relatively even-handed. Herring suggests that Roosevelt may
have been more personally impressed by the Japanese than by the Russians.
More soon.