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We disparaged power even as we grew strong; we saw our successes as the product not of fortunate circumstances and considerable effort, but of virtue and purity of motive. The preoccupation of other nations with security only reinforced our sense of uniqueness. Arms and alliances were seen as immoral and reactionary. Our native inclination for straightforwardness brought increasing impatience with diplomacy, which often calls for ambiguity and compromise.
In this atmosphere even the purchase of Alaska−which excluded Russia from our continent−was regarded in its day as a folly. Congress was prevailed upon only with the greatest difficulty to provide the $7 million to complete the deal. The mythology of American ineptitude in its diplomatic pursuits carried into the 20th century. Will Rogers always got a laugh when he cracked, "America never lost a war and never won a conference."
THE 20TH CENTURY
Forgetful of the wisdom and skilled statecraft by which the founding fathers won our independence and secured our safety, and disdainful of the techniques by which all nations−even the U.S.−must preserve their interests, we entered the 20th century largely unprepared for the part we would be called upon to play.
As our power grew, we became uncomfortable with its uses and responsibilities, and impatient with the compromises of day-to-day diplomacy. Our rise to great power status was feared and resisted by many Americans who foresaw a process of deepening involvement in a morally questionable world. In the early decades of this century, we sought to reconcile the tension between ideals and interests by confining ourselves to humanitarian efforts and resorting to our belief in the pre-eminence of law. We pioneered in relief programs; we championed free trade and the cause of foreign investment. We attempted to legislate solutions to international conflicts.
These efforts to banish the reality of power were aborted by our involvement in two world wars.
While we had a clear security interest in a Europe free from domination by any one power. Woodrow Wilson argued the case for intervention in wholly idealistic terms. He described it in 1917 as "the opportunity for which the American people have sought to prepare themselves ever since the days when they set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope that it might, in all that it was and did, show mankind the way to liberty." Thus we would do battle for universal moral objectives, not for a new equilibrium−a war to end all wars, not a peace in which victors and vanquished sought a balance of their interests.
Disillusionment set in as the outcome of the war necessarily fell short of expectations, and indeed as the one-sided nature of the peace required ever greater efforts to maintain it against countries with no stake in the settlement. A tide of isolationist sentiment rose, in which moral proclamations were coupled with an unwillingness to undertake concrete commitments. We were loath to face a world of imperfect security, alliances of convenience, recurrent crises and the need for a political structure that would secure the peace.