From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (63 page)

Wilson's early forays into the world of diplomacy suggest much about the ideas and ideals he brought to office. His naming of William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state was politic in light of the Great Commoner's stature in the Democratic Party and crucial role in the 1912 campaign. It followed a long tradition of appointing the party leader to that important post. Bryan had traveled widely, including an around-the-world jaunt in 1906. In this respect, at least, he was better qualified than Wilson to shape U.S. foreign policy. Even more than Wilson, Bryan believed that Christian principles should animate foreign policy. A longtime temperance
advocate, he set the diplomatic community abuzz by refusing to serve alcohol at official functions (the Russian ambassador claimed not to have tasted water for years and to have survived one event only by loading up on claret before he arrived).
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Wilson and Bryan negotiated a treaty with Colombia apologizing and offering monetary compensation for the U.S. role in the Panamanian revolution. This well-intentioned and truly remarkable move quite naturally provoked cries of rage from the Rough Rider, Theodore Roosevelt, and sufficient opposition in the Senate that it was not ratified. It won warm applause in Latin America. In a major speech at Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913, Wilson explicitly disavowed U.S. economic imperialism and gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, linking the exploitative interests that victimized other peoples to the bankers and corporate interests he was fighting at home and promising to replace those old "degrading policies" with a new policy of "sympathy and friendship."
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As war enveloped Europe, Wilson and Bryan sought to implement ideas long advocated by the peace movement. Bryan's agreement to serve had been conditioned on freedom to pursue "cooling off treaties." During 1913–14, ironically as Europe was rushing headlong toward war, he negotiated with twenty nations—Britain and France included—treaties designed to prevent such crises from escalating to military conflict. When diplomacy failed, nations would submit their disputes for study by an international commission and refrain from war until its work was completed. Dismissed by critics then and since as useless or worse, the treaties were indeed shot through with exceptions and qualifications. Bryan nevertheless considered them the crowning achievement of his career. Wilson took them more seriously after the Great War began, even concluding that they might have prevented it. The Bryan treaties marked Wilson's initial move toward an internationalist foreign policy.
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The quest for a Pan-American Pact reveals in microcosm Wilson's larger designs and the obstacles they encountered abroad. Originally proposed by Bryan in late 1913, the idea was embraced by the president after the outbreak of war in Europe. Viewing it as a means to preserve peace following the war, he rewrote it on his own typewriter. It called for mutual guarantees among hemispheric nations of political independence and territorial integrity "under republican government" and for member governments to
take control of the production and distribution of arms and munitions. He later linked the pact with U.S. efforts to expand trade in Latin America. Presented first to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, it drew suspicion. Chile especially feared that its consent would affect its ongoing border dispute with Peru. More important, politicians were alarmed by the huge expansion of U.S. trade and feared that, despite his soothing words, Wilson no less than his predecessors wished to dominate the hemisphere economically and might use the provision calling for republican government to impose U.S. values. Chilean objections delayed consideration of the treaty; U.S. military intervention in Mexico doomed it. It became the basis of Wilson's later proposals for a League of Nations
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From the outset, Wilson grappled with the complex issues raised by revolution. These early twentieth-century upheavals erupted first in East Asia and Latin America. Although they shared the aim of overthrowing established orders, they were as diverse as the nations in which they occurred. In China, reformers inspired by Japan and the West sought to replace a monarchical, feudal order with a modern nation-state. In Mexico, middle- and lower-class revolutionaries challenged the power of entrenched economic and political interests and the Catholic Church. In each case, nationalists sought to eliminate or at least curb the power of foreign interests that had undermined their country's sovereignty and economic independence.

Wilson's response to these revolutions revealed his good intentions and the difficulties of their implementation. Traditionally, the United States had sympathized with revolutions at least in principle, but when they turned violent or radical or threatened U.S. interests, it had called for order or sought to channel them in moderate directions.
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With China and Mexico, Wilson plainly sympathized with the forces of revolution. He understood better than most Americans the way in which they expressed the desire of people for economic and political progress. Even in Central America, he hoped to seize the opportunity to improve the lot of the peoples involved. Wilson's "ethnocentric humanitarianism" failed to recognize that in seeking to direct the future of these nations he limited their ability to work out their own destiny. His presumptuous interference overlooked their own national pride and aspirations.
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After a decade of agitation, nationalist reformers in late 1911 overthrew the moribund Qing regime. Upon taking office, Wilson responded enthusiastically and optimistically to the Chinese Revolution. True to his reformist instincts and taking his cues mainly from missionaries, he concluded that China was "plastic" in the hands of "strong and capable Westerners." He and Bryan believed that the United States should serve as a "friend and exemplar" in moving China toward Christianity and democracy. They also agreed that "men of pronounced Christian character" should be sent there.
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Wilson took bold steps to help China. In March 1913, without consulting the State Department, he withdrew the United States from the international bankers' consortium formed by Taft and Knox to underwrite loans to China. Certain that the Europeans preferred a weak and divided China, a week later and without consulting them he recognized strongman Yüan Shih-k'ai's Republic of China. The open door, he proclaimed, was a "door of friendship and mutual advantage . . . the only door we care to enter."
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Wilson's gestures did nothing to alter the harsh realities in China. In its early stages, the revolution brought little substantive change. The masses were not involved. Leaders sought to advance their own power rather than build a modern state. Reformers fought with each other; Yüan's government was shaky at best. The powers sought to exploit China's weakness to expand their influence. Continued U.S. involvement in the consortium might have helped check Japanese and European ambitions. Wilson's well-intentioned withdrawal thus did as much harm as good. He subsequently rejected China's request for loans, making clear the limits of American support.

The outbreak of war in Europe exposed even more starkly the limits of U.S. helpfulness. "When there is a fire in a jeweler's shop the neighbours cannot be expected to refrain from helping themselves," a Japanese diplomat candidly admitted.
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Japan immediately joined the Allies and took advantage of Europe's preoccupation to drive the Germans from Shandong province. In early 1915, Tokyo presented the embattled Chinese government with its Twenty-One Demands, which sought mainly to legitimize gains made at Germany's expense and expand Japanese influence in Manchuria and along the coast. Even more intrusively, Tokyo demanded that China accept Japanese "advisers" and share responsibility for maintaining order in key areas.

The Chinese sought U.S. support in resisting Japan. Some nationalists saw the United States as little different than other imperial powers; others admired and hoped to emulate it. Still others viewed it as the least menacing of the powers and hoped to use it to counter more aggressive nations. Yüan hired an American to promote his cause and used missionaries and diplomats to gain support from Washington. Working through the U.S. minister, he appealed to the United States to hold off Japanese pressures.

Although deeply concerned with Japanese actions, Wilson and his advisers were not inclined to intercede. State Department counselor Robert Lansing concluded that it would be "quixotic in the extreme to allow the question of China's territorial integrity to entangle the United States in international difficulties."
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True to his pacifist principles, Bryan gave higher priority to avoiding war with Japan than to upholding the independence of China. He made clear the United States would do nothing. Preoccupied with the European war and the death of his beloved wife, Ellen, Wilson at first did not dissent. He continued to sympathize with China, however, informing Bryan that "we should be as active as the circumstances permit" in championing its "sovereign rights."
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Wilson's firmer stance combined with British protests and divisions within the Tokyo government led Japan to moderate its demands.

Wilson continued to take limited measures to help China. In 1916, he encouraged private bankers to extend loans, both to preserve U.S. economic interests and to counter Japanese influence. Soon after, he retreated from his 1913 position by authorizing a new international consortium of bankers to provide loans, even agreeing to help them collect if the Chinese defaulted. Alarmed by America's more assertive stance, Japan sent a special emissary to Washington in the summer of 1917. Kikujiro Ishii's discussions with Lansing, who was by this time secretary of state, revealed major differences, but the two nations eventually got around them by agreeing that Japan's geographical propinquity gave it special but not paramount interests in China. In a secret protocol, the United States again pushed for the open door. The two nations agreed not to exploit the war to gain exclusive privileges. Wilson's position revealed his continuing concern for the Chinese Revolution and Japanese intrusion but made clear to both nations his unwillingness to act.
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Closer to home, the United States had no such compunctions. In Central America and the Caribbean, revolution was an established part of the political process, its aims, at least in U.S. eyes, less about democracy and progress than power and spoils. The growing U.S. economic and diplomatic presence had further destabilized an already volatile region while the opening of the Panama Canal and the outbreak of war in Europe heightened U.S. anxiety about the area. The United States had vital interests there. It also had the power and was willing to use it to contain revolutions and maintain hegemony over small, weak states whose people were deemed inferior. "We are, in spite of ourselves, the guardians of order and justice and decency on this Continent," a Wilson confidant wrote in 1913. "[We] are providentially, naturally, and inescapably, charged with maintenance of humanity's interest here."
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During the campaign and the early days of his presidency, Wilson had denounced Taft's dollar diplomacy and military interventionism and spoken eloquently of treating Latin American nations "on terms of equality and honor."
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He and Bryan genuinely hoped to guide these peoples—"our political children," Bryan called them—to democracy and freedom. They sought to understand their interests even when they conflicted with those of the United States. However they packaged it, the two men ended up behaving much like their predecessors. Wilson deemed it "reprehensible" to permit foreign nations to secure financial control of "these weak and unfortunate republics." But he endorsed a form of dollar diplomacy to control their finances.
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He and Bryan looked upon them with the same sort of paternalism with which they regarded African Americans at home. They assumed that U.S. help would be welcomed. When it was not, they fell back on diplomatic pressure and military force.
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The result was a period of military interventionism exceeding that of Roosevelt and Taft. During its two terms in office, the administration sent troops to Cuba once, Panama twice, and Honduras five times. Wilson and Bryan added Nicaragua to an already long list of protectorates. Despite his anti-imperialist record, Bryan sought to end a long period of instability there with a treaty like the Platt Amendment that would have given the United States the right to intervene. When the Senate rejected this provision, the administration negotiated a treaty giving the United States exclusive rights to the Nicaraguan canal route, a preemptive move

depriving Nicaragua of a vital bargaining lever, and providing for a Dominican-type customs receivership that facilitated U.S. economic control and reduced Nicaragua to protectorate status.
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Because of its position astride the Windward Passage, the island of Hispaniola was considered especially important. Dollar diplomat Jacob Hollander boasted in 1914 that the U.S. protectorate had accomplished in the Dominican Republic "little short of a revolution . . . in the arts of peace, industry and civilization."
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It had not produced stability. Efforts by the United States in 1913 to impose order through supervised elections, the so-called Wilson Plan, provoked the threat of a new revolution and civil war. Dominicans ignored Bryan's subsequent order for a moratorium on revolution. All else failing, Wilson ordered military intervention in 1915 and full-scale military occupation the next year.
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