Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
'ajm i\J
1909
1
CI.A257 2H
PREFACE
It is no unmixed evil that the feeling
of confidence in the limitless extent of the
country's resources and in its economic
self-sufficiency should lately have been
shaken. So long as an apparently bound-
less horizon extended before us, we moved
on a plane different from the rest of the
world and indifferent thereto. To-day,
when for the first time we are beginning
to understand that our natural resources are
limited, that the end of the nation's possi-
bilities for internal development is almost
within sight, and that its capacity of con-
sumption has been unable to keep pace with
its production, the necessity of providing
foreign markets for our industry is increas-
ingly felL Accompanying this has come
the realization of the need for a navy suf-
ficiently powerful to protect our over-sea
vi PREFACE
commerce and our coast line, our policies
in Latin America and our distant depend-
encies in the Pacific. The country has at
last realized the importance of a fleet as
an insurance against war. It has still to
be aroused to the necessity of an efficient
assertion.
The Author.
June, 1909.
CONTENTS
I. The Policy of Understandings . 1
CHAPTER I
acute analysis ^
of the Farewell Address
that, correctly interpreted, it holds as true
to-day as when delivered. Washington
had founded on our then
his reasoning
feebleness as a nation and on our remote-
* Atlantic Monthly May, 1898, pp. 578
y et seq.
THE POLICY OF UNDERSTANDINGS 5
our policy.
We can hardly suppose, however, that
the extension unavoidably taken by our
diplomacy will not encounter resistance.
No power can hope to be successful with-
out incurring the antagonism of others,
even though our own peaceful proclivities
should preclude us from the former rapa-
cious ambitions of Old World states. But
whatever future struggles await us, we can-
not forget that diplomacy, like war, may
achieve for us victories or defeats. How-
ever powerful we may become, a combina-
tion may array against us power as great.
The burden of our weight, on whichever
we incline, will inevitably
side of the scales
be counterpoised. Even more it will lead
22 AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
almost inevitably to fresh distributions of
strength. While the present grouping of
triple "entente" and triple alliance, each
reenforced by subsidiary aids, may not
prove everlasting, it is likely to provide the
nations.
With the remaining continental powers,
apart from the extensive commercial rela-
RELATIONS WITH EUROPE 45
cannot be presupposed.
The fear of Italian interference is fortu-
nately very remote, and Italy's recent arbi-
American enterprise.
Europe has long since awakened to the
importance of Spanish America as a neutral
market that will not soon be closed to the
82 AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
products of manufacturing countries. We,
too, need anticipate there no discriminating
tariff to bar our exports, while the increase
of trade relations should be of mutual ad-
vantage. Our political interests can there-
fore be confined to the grateful task of
assuming obligations without demanding
corresponding equivalents. Our fleet is the
pledge we extend to exclude the possibility
I
sition of territory, or single responsibility,
America.
A case in point occurred in 1906 in the P
'
cient and frequently corrupt bureaucracy,
were all elements to be reckoned with ; and
the fact that as each problem had been
the product of years, it was impossible to
I
attention from our trade. The European
nations have better understood this advan-
tage in the Levant, where they have strained
every effort to secure the concession of
public franchises. In the Orient, where
commercial enterprise invariably passes
through official channels, diplomacy has to
concern itself with questions it elsewhere
ignores. German diplomacy was the first
,^
Railroad had been planned to pass through
this region. But Russia, unwilling to see
n the interests of a powerful nation perma-
nently established close to her own Cauca-
sian frontiers, and in a district over which
she was supposed to cherish ultimate ambi-
,
tions, demanded the immediate repayment
functions.
182 AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
While the remedy for this condition rests
ultimately with the nation, which has not
yet realized the importance of foreign ques-
tions, the Department of State through the
proposed press bureau ought to aim as well
*
E. Boutmy, Psychologie du Peuple Amdricain, Paris,
1902, p. 337.
OUR INTERNATIONAL POSITION 191
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