In the Beginning: A Fresh Look at the Early Years of American Empire

Richard Holbrooke

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002

Summary:  Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph shows that a century ago Americans were already confronting many of the foreign policy issues on today's agenda.

First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. By Warren Zimmermann. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002, 544 pp. $30.00.

Richard Holbrooke is former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

During the Cold War, political scientists and foreign policy theorists largely ignored historical events before 1945 when searching for the underlying roots of American foreign policy. Those earlier periods, with the occasional exception of the failed foreign policy efforts of Woodrow Wilson, were ignored or treated as colorful sideshows. Analysis was focused on the Cold War, which often was presented as if it had sprung without historical context directly out of the Truman administration's response to the Soviet challenge right after World War II. American foreign policy was viewed simply as the sum of its Cold War components. Events before World War II were reserved for specialists and historians, something that hardly existed for most Americans -- without relevance to the modern era.

As it turns out -- and as many historians knew all along -- the United States always had a foreign policy, with underlying themes and motives that grew organically out of the domestic American experience. American foreign policy did not start in 1945, or even 1917. A central political struggle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson concerned relations with Britain and France, as both David McCullough and Joseph Ellis reminded us. There had been the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War, several near-wars with the British, the annexation of Hawaii, the conquest of the Philippines, the Open Door policy toward China, and much more. To be sure, these events were all part of any basic American history course. But too few Americans study history, and in any case, these events were usually presented merely as a sideshow to the grand sweep of America's domestic history.

Now a number of new books and studies have started to reexamine American foreign policy within a more historical framework. By looking at American history and events prior to and outside the mainstream of the Cold War, these works are beginning to help Americans rethink the complexity of the national experience outside their own borders. Freed from the intellectual straitjacket of the Cold War, they look beyond such sterile labels as "realists" and "idealists," or hawks and doves, to reveal enduring trends and strains in America's relationship with the world. Any serious student of American foreign policy should look carefully at these books -- and hope for more in the near future.

Max Boot, for example, has shown recently in The Savage Wars of Peace that, contrary to the "Powell Doctrine" and the views of the current leaders of the American military, the United States has conducted endless small military interventions with success throughout its history. Walter Russell Mead, in Special Providence, has identified four different themes in American foreign policy and found continuity stretching back to

the founding of the republic. Looking at events that straddled the Cold War but from a wholly post-Cold War perspective, Samantha Power has offered up "A Problem from Hell," her wholly original examination of consistent American failure to act in the face of recurring cases of genocide. And Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command

is a somewhat different sort of book: a study of four historical events designed to prove the indisputable thesis that war is still too important to leave to the generals. In the present phase of history, however, when the American military has acquired an unprecedented role in the conduct of foreign policy, it also carries a contemporary relevance. And in Paris 1919, already published to much acclaim in the United Kingdom, Margaret MacMillan has produced the most detailed study in decades of the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath, including a masterful portrait of Woodrow Wilson. She shows how many of the roots of modern crises (Yugoslavia, Iraq, the Kurdish question, and others) came out of the messy "peace to end all wars." (MacMillan's book is best read in conjunction with an earlier entry in this field, David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace, which is indispensable.)

THE GROUP

The books by Boot, Power, Mead, and Cohen all appeared over the past year; MacMillan's will be published in November. Now Warren Zimmermann joins this distinguished list with First Great Triumph, a riveting reexamination of the period between 1898 and 1903, when America became an imperial power, acquiring Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone, and, for a while, Cuba. Much of this story was once well known to Americans, who viewed the period and its central figure, Theodore Roosevelt, as heroic. Revisiting it through modern eyes gives it new importance. With knowledge of how history would later unfold, these events take on different meaning.

Zimmermann's device is to retell this story through the eyes of five men who often worked together and were, by and large, unabashed imperialists. He freely acknowledges that he was inspired by The Wise Men, the 1989 account by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas of the Cold War, as told through the interrelationship between six of its major figures. At the center of Zimmermann's story is Theodore Roosevelt -- the man, in Zimmermann's view, even more important than Woodrow Wilson for starting America on the path toward global engagement.