Herbert Croly

“ We should be fighting to maintain a political system which would be in no essential respect superior to the European political system. The South and Central American states have been almost as ready to fight among themselves, and to cherish political plans which can be realized only by war, as the European states. In the course of time, as they grow in population and wealth, they also will entertain more or less desirable projects of expansion; and the resulting conflicts would, the United States permitting, be sure to involve European alliances and complications. ”

“ No one can believe more firmly than myself that the foreign policy of a democratic nation should seek by all practicable and inoffensive means the affirmation of democracy; but the challenge which the Monroe Doctrine in its popular form issues to Europe is neither an inoffensive nor a practicable means of affirmation. It is based usually upon the notion of an essential incompatibility between American and European political institutions; and the assertion of such an incompatibility at the present time can only be the result of a stupid or willful American democratic Bourbonism. ”

“ Unquestionably the geographical situation of the United States must always have a decisive effect upon the nature of its policy in foreign affairs; and undoubtedly no course of action in respect to other nations can be national without serving the interests of democracy. But precisely because an American foreign policy must be candidly and vigorously national, it will gradually bring with it an increasingly complicated group of international ties and duties. ”

“ Non-interference in European affairs is conceived, not as a policy dependent upon certain conditions, but as absolute law—derived from the sacred writings. If the issue should be raised in the near future, the American people would be certain to shirk it; and they would, perhaps, have some reason for a failure to understand their obligation, because the course of European political development has not as yet been such as to raise the question in a decisive form. ”

“ When, if ever, it is decisively raised, the system of public law, under which any organization would have to take place, may not be one which the United States could accept. But the point is that, whenever and however it is raised, the American national leaders should confront it with a sound, well-informed, and positive conception of the American national interest rather than a negative and ignorant conception. ”

“ The emancipated and nationalized European states of to-day, so far from being essentially antagonistic to the American democratic nation, are constantly tending towards a condition which invites closer and more fruitful association with the United States; and any national doctrine which proclaims a rooted antagonism lies almost at right angles athwart the road of American democratic national achievement. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century the European nations have been working towards democracy by means of a completer national organization ”

“ Indeed, the probabilities are that in America as in Europe the road to any permanent international settlement will be piled mountain high with dead bodies, and will be traveled, if at all, only after a series of abortive and costly experiments. But remote and precarious as is the establishment of any American international system, it is not for American statesmen necessarily either an impracticable, an irrelevant, or an unworthy object. ”

“ The United States would have to become a predominantly military power, armed to the teeth, to resist or forestall European attack; and our country would have to accept these consequences, for the express purpose of keeping the Americas unsullied by the complications of European politics. Obviously there is a contradiction in such a situation. The United States could fight with some show of reason a single European Power, like France in 1865, which undertook a policy of American territorial aggrandizement ”

“ Any systematic development of the foreign policy of the United States, such as proposed herewith, will seem very wild to the majority of Americans. They will not concede its desirability, because the American habit is to proclaim doctrines and policies, without considering either the implications, the machinery necessary to carry them out, or the weight of the resulting responsibilities. ”

“ The Atlantic Ocean will, in the long run, fail to offer the United States any security from the application of the same searching standards. Its democratic institutions must be justified, not merely by the prosperity which they bestow upon its own citizens, but by its ability to meet the standards of efficiency imposed by other nations. Its standing as a nation is determined precisely by its ability to conquer and to hold a dignified and important place in the society of nations. ”

“ Canada would feel secure in her independence, and would be emancipated from irrelevant European complications. The United States would gain support, which is absolutely essential for the proper pacification of the American continent, and would pay for that support only by an engagement consonant with her interest as a food-exporting power. Great Britain would exchange a costly responsibility for an assurance of food in the one event, which Britons must fear—viz., a general European war with strong maritime powers on the other side. ”

“ If Europe and the Americas are as much divided in political interest as the Monroe Doctrine seems to assert, the time will inevitably arrive when the two divergent political systems must meet and fight; and plenty of occasions for such a conflict will arise, as soon as the policy of isolation begins to conflict with the establishment of that political relation between Europe and South America demanded by fundamental economic and social interests. ”

“ Yet unless such better relations are established, the United States will lose an indispensable ally in the making of a satisfactory political system in the Western hemisphere while at the same time the American people will be in the sorry situation for a sincere democracy of having created only apprehension and enmity on the part of their nearest and most intelligent neighbors. ”

“ And the service which the very intensity of modern international competition renders to a living nation arises precisely from the searching character of the tests to which it subjects the several national organizations. Austria-Hungary has been forced to assume a secondary position in Europe, because the want of national cohesion and vitality deprived her political advance of all momentum. Russia has suddenly discovered that a corrupt bureaucracy is incapable of a national organization as efficient as modern military and political competition requires. ”

“ It is easy enough to enunciate such a policy, just as it is easy to proclaim a Monroe Doctrine which no European Power has any sufficient immediate interest to dispute; but it is wholly improbable that China can be protected in its territorial integrity and its political independence without a great deal of diplomacy and more or less fighting. ”

“ A general European interest would be involved. The United States might well find her policy of America for the Americans result in an attempt on the part of a European coalition to bring about a really effectual isolation. We might find ourselves involved in a war against a substantially united Europe. Such a danger seems sufficiently remote at present; but in the long run a policy which carries isolation too far is bound to provoke justifiable attempts to break it down. ”

“ The only possible foundation of Pan-Americanism is an ideal democratic purpose—which, when translated into terms of international relations, demands, in the first place, the establishment of a pacific system of public law in the two Americas, and in the second place, an alliance with the pacific European Powers, just in so far as a similar system has become in that continent one of the possibilities of practical politics. ”

“ Sooner than ever before in the history of the world do a nation's sins and deficiencies find it out. Under modern conditions a country which takes its responsibilities lightly, and will not submit to the discipline necessary to political efficiency, does not gradually decline, as Spain did in the seventeenth century. It usually goes down with a crash, as France did in 1870, or as Russia has just done. The effect of diminishing economic efficiency is not as suddenly and dramatically exhibited ”

“ A remote colony is, under existing international conditions, even more of a responsibility than it is a source of national power and efficiency; and it is always a grave question how far the assumption of any particular responsibility is worth while.
Without entering into any specific discussion, there can, I think, be little doubt that the United States was justified in assuming its existing responsibilities in respect to Cuba and its much more abundant responsibilities in respect to Porto Rico. ”

“ Hitherto, the American preference and desire for peace has constituted the chief justification for its isolation. At some future time the same purpose, just in so far as it is sincere and rational, may demand intervention. The American responsibility in this respect is similar to that of any peace-preferring European Power. If it wants peace, it must be spiritually and physically prepared to fight for it. ”

“ Thus the distance between America and Europe is being diminished; and Americans in their individual behavior bear the most abundant and generous testimony to the benefits which American democracy can derive from association with the European nations. ”

“ The increasingly strenuous nature of international competition and the constantly higher standards of international economic, technical, and political efficiency prescribe a constantly improving domestic political and economic organization. The geographical isolation which affords the United States its military security against foreign attack should not blind Americans to the merely comparative nature of their isolation. ”

“ But while it will be impossible to make an arrangement as advantageous as the one which might have been made twenty-five years ago, the national interest plainly demands the negotiation of the most satisfactory treaty possible at the present time; and if the special interests of a few industries are allowed to stand indefinitely in the way, we shall be plainly exhibiting our incompetence to carry out an enlightened and a truly national foreign policy. ”

“ The American people have too easily evaded them in the past, but in the future they cannot be evaded; and it is better so. The irresponsible attitude of Americans in respect to their national domestic problems may in part be traced to freedom from equally grave international responsibilities. In truth, the work of internal reconstruction and amelioration, so far from being opposed to that of the vigorous assertion of a valid foreign policy, is really correlative and supplementary thereto ”

“ The experience of the American people in foreign affairs is only beginning, and during the next few generations the growth of their traffic with Asia and Europe will afford them every reason and every opportunity to ponder seriously the great international problem of peace in its relation to the American national democratic interest. ”

“ Great Britain has, perhaps, tacitly accepted it, but no other European country has done so, and a number of them have expressly stated that it entails consequences against which they might sometime be obliged strenuously and forcibly to protest. No forcible protest has as yet been made, because no European country has had anything to gain from such a protest, comparable to the inevitable cost of a war with the United States. ”

“ During the life of the coming generation there will be brought home clearly to the American people how much it will cost to assert its own essential interests in China; and the peculiar value of the Philippines as an American colony will consist largely in the fact that they will help American public opinion to realize more quickly than it otherwise would the complications and responsibilities created by Chinese political development and by Japanese ambition. ”

“ The emigration from several European states and from Japan to South America is already considerable, and is likely to increase rather than diminish. European commercial interests in South America are greater than ours, and in the future will become greater still. The South Americans have already borrowed large quantities of European capital, and will need more. The industrial and agricultural development of the South American states is constantly tying them more closely to Europe than it is to the United States. ”

“ Hence there is no shibboleth that patriotic Americans should fight more tenaciously and more fiercely than of America for the Americans, and Europe for the Europeans. To make Pan-Americanism merely a matter of geography is to deprive it of all serious meaning. ”

“ Countries with so appalling a record of domestic violence and instability could apparently be converted to a permanently peaceable behavior in respect to their neighbors only by the use of force. But recently several niches have been built into the American political structure on which a foothold may eventually be obtained. In general the political condition of the more powerful Latin-American states, such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, has become more stable and more wholesome. ”

“ Peace will prevail in international relations, just as order prevails within a nation, because of the righteous use of superior force—because the power which makes for pacific organization is stronger than the power which makes for a warlike organization. ”