Tag: Theodore Roosevelt

General, Politics

Preserving Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy in the Modern Arena

Bob Claude |

[We] have the right to express our pride in what our forefathers did, and our joy in the abundant greatness of this people.  We have the right to express those feelings, but we must not treat greatness achieved in the past as an excuse for our failing to do decent work in the present, instead of a spur to make us strive in our turn to do the work that lies right at hand. If we so treat it, we show ourselves unworthy to come here and celebrate the historic past of the nation.

Theodore Roosevelt, Fourth of July speech at Huntington, New York, July 4, 1903

The quest for national American unity animated Theodore Roosevelt for his entire life. Growing up during the Civil War, the six million dead of that war and the sectional divides that led to it were always on his mind and those of his fellow Americans during the generation afterwards.  TR was well aware of the racial and ethnic divides that also existed and, as “the man in the arena”, tried to keep those divides from creating similar divisions as much as the arena of his times allowed. Today, those racial and ethnic divisions pose the greatest threat to national unity.  The removal of the equestrian statue in front of the American Natural History Museum in New York City needs to be viewed as a gesture toward healing these divisions and achieving a modern national unity.

As shown in the above picture, the statue features Roosevelt on a horse flanked by standing American Indian and African-American figures.   It has been a flashpoint with black and Native Americans for years because the two figures at the side appear to be subservient.  The museum cited this depiction of Roosevelt as the issue and recognized his contributions as a natural historian and conservationist by renaming their Hall of Biodiversity after him. Even the Roosevelt family agrees with the decision, saying that the statue does not represent his true legacy. 

The quotation above better reflects that legacy. While TR’s personal views on race were unfortunately common during his era, he also acted to promote and protect racial equality as much as a Congress made up of segregationist Southerners and conservatives would allow.  He supported the Lodge Federal Elections Act of 1890, an early form of the modern Voting Rights Act that would have protected African-American voting rights in federal elections.   As New York governor, he pushed through legislation banning racial segregation in public schools. These stands, and many similar ones, were significant accomplishments for that era. 

At the same time, each generation has the right to determine who and what will be celebrated in the public domain. The removal of Confederate statues and names from majority African-American cities and military bases represents this natural transition.  However, these decisions come during a frightening time when mobs attack the legacies of not only TR, but also George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other authors of the very rights in which those mobs claim to believe.   It is a mark of mindless extremism born of a failure to appreciate the historical context – the “arena” – that these figures lived in. The concept of equal opportunity, human rights and democratic government espoused by our founding fathers were dangerous to the elites of their time and, but for their courage, might not exist today.  We must avoid flushing those memories and accomplishments down a modern-day Orwellian “memory hole”, for that way leads to the totalitarian world we all oppose.

In a statement released today, the chairman of the congressionally-chartered Theodore Roosevelt Association put it well when he said “Theodore Roosevelt’s contributions to the United States and legacy is more enduring than any statue”.  If we concentrate on the positive aspects of that legacy and those of other American heroes, we will continue our common national march to the more perfect achievement of those great ideals.     

Foreign Policy, History and Future of Nationalism, Realist Theory

The Historical Myths of Globalism

Bob Claude |

Nationalist Foreign Relations – A History, Part 2

Our duty is to the United States…We should be friendly to all nations, and in any crisis we should judge each nation by its conduct in that crisis. We should condemn the misconduct of any nation, we should oppose its encroachments upon our rights with equal vigor…..according to what it actually does on the given occasion with which we have to deal.

Theodore Roosevelt, America for Americans, Afternoon Speech in St. Louis, MO; May 31, 1916

In November of 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered what was billed as a stinging indictment of nationalism.  In lofty poetic language, Macron expressed the European elitist view that the two world wars were caused by the pursuit of nationalism and implied that only transnational global institutions such as the European Union could keep the peace and preserve “universal values”.  At the same time, the speech betrayed this theme by arrogantly claiming these values were uniquely French in origin. Indeed, it was a speech Napoleon himself, a past advocate of spreading “superior” French values, could easily have given to justify the wars of conquest France unleashed on Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, President Trump did not have the appreciation of history and international relations theory to effectively defend nationalism from Macron’s globalist stereotype. This defense could have started with a recitation of the wartime horrors of the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, both waged in the name of values claimed to be universal at the time.  It then would have pointed out that it was the realistic preservation of the basic national goal of sovereignty that kept the peace after Napoleon and then highlighted the real reason for the breakdown of this peace by 1914. 

A good source for this defense can be found in former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1954 book “A World Restored”, which recounts how the eventual victors in the Napoleonic Wars crafted a system that avoided continental war in Europe for almost a century.  Kissinger believed in the realist theory of international relations, which says all nation-states, whether democratic or autocratic, are naturally driven to maximize their power to preserve their sovereignty and survive in an essentially anarchic world. In contrast, the policy of liberal hegemony followed since the end of the Cold War is the Macron and Napoleonic dream of developing transnational institutions to reduce national sovereignty by spreading and, if necessary, imposing by force, the democratic capitalist model throughout the world.

For a brief periods of time, the French Empire of Napoleon and his coerced allies seemed to produce peace, but could not completely stamp out the national dreams of the different ethnicities and cultures of Europe. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the foreign ministers of Britain, Austria-Hungary and France set out to construct a realist international system that preserved this diversity.  They did so by creating a balance of power among their nations in Europe that controlled the drive to maximize power and risk war. During that period, the main continental powers of France, Russia, Austria and later Germany would all enter into shifting alliances with and against each other while Britain remained in “splendid isolation” from these rivalries.  If one alliance grew too powerful to the point of risking conflict, Britain would intervene to balance the relative power and prevent a conflict.  It was an elegant diplomatic waltz that succeeded in avoiding all-out war during the rest of the nineteenth century.

The rise of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany and decline of Austria-Hungary upset this balance and forced Britain to expressly ally with France and Russia in response to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy. The balancer was now gone, and Europe experienced a series of crises provoked by Germany. Enter Theodore Roosevelt and the United States, which briefly acted as a balancer and brokered a peace in a 1905 crisis involving Morocco, as shown in the above cartoon from the time.  Historians still wonder whether the First World War might have been avoided if TR had won the 1912 election and America had continued to serve the role of a balancing power.  Instead, Woodrow Wilson won and appointed the isolationist William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State, who strongly opposed any involvement in Europe. In the end, the US could not remain aloof, but entered the fray only after war had raged for three bloody years. Wilson’s League of Nations was supposed to prevent another war, but it’s globalist dreams proved to be useless against the expansionism of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Thus, the lessons of 1815 –  1945 are quite the opposite of Pres. Macron’s florid rhetoric. Peace is possible in a nationalist system so long as states avoid being trapped in rigid alliances that are not flexible enough to account for changes in relative national power. As TR said above, America and all nations must be free to identify and pursue their national interests and preserve their own culture according to the particular circumstances. Instead, alliances like the European Union (and NATO as well) freeze the international system into outdated alliances that do not adjust to the times and then try to justify their continued existence by exalting the alliance over its members.  This creates tension between nations instead of alleviating it. The only sustainable route to peace is to accept the diversity of nations and insure there is a balancing nation that can intervene and prevent conflict.

Wilson’s mistake also proves that nationalism is also not the same as isolationism.  Macron attempts to conflate the two to buttress his argument when, in fact, the balance of power system of the nineteenth century depended on Britain and then America becoming involved with other nations when necessary. In the modern age of ICBMS, climate change and pandemics, isolationism has never been an option and no one, including Trump, has seriously said otherwise. A nationalist system can address transnational problems so long as each nation’s sovereignty and interests are respected.  The next post will show how this can be successfully done.

Foreign Policy, History and Future of Nationalism, Realist Theory

Dysfunctionalism

Bob Claude |

OR HOW A GOOD PEACE STRATEGY WENT HORRIBLY WRONG

Nationalist Foreign Relations – A History, Part 3

As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and on certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind

Theodore Roosevelt, Nobel Prize Lecture, May 5, 1910

Theodore Roosevelt’s quest for peace has been a goal of mankind since the beginning of time. Three different theories have been proposed to achieve it. The first is the simplest and most radical – world government. This is the globalist solution and springs from old memories of the Roman Empire’s rule of what in Westerner’s minds was the “known world“. The second is the more practical balance of power approach described in my previous post and followed by the European powers in the 19th century.

After World War II, a new strategy known as functionalism concentrated on developing international arrangements to share discrete public sector responsibilities such as collecting meteorological data, coordinating air traffic control and similar uncontroversial areas.   Sometimes referred to as “peace by pieces“, the central feature of this approach was the creation of international agencies with limited and specific powers. Functional agencies could operate only within the territories of states that choose to join them and therefore would not directly threaten state sovereignty. In theory, the web of agreements would eventually become so strong that nations would wake up one day and realize that they could not afford to go to war against each other.

Even in the midst of the Cold War, functionalism became the primary working theory of international relations and created useful mechanisms for nations and the public. For example, the Universal Postal Union enables you to send a letter to any member nation for the price of a first class stamp in your home country. I previously highlighted the work of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation as a good example of how transnational efforts can complement rather than threaten national sovereignty.  In their early days, United Nations specialized agencies such as UNICEF, the World Meteorological Organization and even the World Health Organization performed useful functions.  The original European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in the 1950s stretched the bounds of the functionalist model, but found early success because of its limited goal of reviving the European steel industry and the jobs that came with it.

An ardent American nationalist, Theodore Roosevelt arguably helped develop the tenets of a successful functionalism.  As the above quote indicates, TR  favored international arbitration and agencies, but believed their jurisdiction should be limited and confined to disputes among great powers who had the strength to insure the limits were respected and the results properly enforced. For example, he signed treaties to submit future disputes with Canada and Great Britain to arbitration, but specifically excluded territorial disputes from their reach.  He was furious when Woodrow Wilson abolished this exception. TR also opposed the League of Nations not because of a belief in isolationism, but because he believed it would be either impotent or would submit the United States to the whims of smaller, less important nations. History would eventually exonerate his assessment.

The concept of functionalism began to be abused in the 1970s when international agreements were no longer confined to discrete subjects that were openly negotiated and narrowly defined. Instead, broad grants of power were made to multilateral organizations run by elite bureaucracies unresponsive to the public who made rules with little notice or opportunity for meaningful public input.  It was not surprising when these bureaucracies succumbed to the institutional imperative. Instead of simply solving the original problem, they worked to identify new problems in order to perpetuate the organization or ideal.  Thus, the limited goals of the ECSC were slowly and deliberately expanded over the decades until it became the European Union with the goal of creating a United States of Europe. Similarly, the process of bilateral negotiation of specified tariff reductions metastasized to become the World Trade Organization with a new goal of eliminating non-tariff barriers. This eventually led to the creation of private dispute resolution courts in agreements like NAFTA.  The result was a globalist’s dream – transnational organizations run by fellow elitists with the power to impose rules locally. Conversely, it was TR’s nightmare – talking shops that allowed small states to dictate to the great powers. 

How do we escape the straitjacket that functionalism has become?  First, current agreements must be revised or, if necessary, abrogated to narrow the scope of delegation, reduce bureaucratic power and recognize great power interests. Instead of being vehicles to achieve a fragmented form of world government, international agreements and agencies could return to the kind of transparency and limited goals that found public support in the past.  Free trade pacts should drop private dispute resolution tribunals and any rules or decisions should be subject to prior public notice and comment before becoming final. The World Trade Organization should be converted into simply a arbitral body for resolving trade disputes voluntarily submitted to it by member states. In the alternative, the US should consider withdrawing to develop Its own tariff and trade treaties that preserve national security. Since the euro is one of the EU’s most popular programs, the EU should consider shrinking to become simply a monetary and customs union.

Reviving functionalism’s methodical and limited mechanisms would find favor not only in the US and the Western world, but also among the newly developed nations guarding their own recently- won sovereignty. The next post will show how their nationalism is driving international relations in the 21st century.