American World Policies. Walter Edward Weyl
themselves. The completion of the Panama Canal increased our sense of international danger and international responsibility. Finally the revolution in Mexico proved to us that whatever our positive action we could not remain passive.
Our Monroe Doctrine also, which had always seemed our charter of independence of Europe, forces us in the end to come to an understanding with Europe. We had set our faces against European conquest in the Americas, and therefore against any punitive expedition, likely to lead to permanent occupation. But if we protected Hayti and San Domingo from Europe, we assumed a certain responsibility for the actions of these countries. In the existing state of international law, a nation assumes the right to protect its citizens from spoliation and to compel debtor countries to meet their obligations. In this right to collect debts by force of arms, which has been the excuse for innumerable imperialistic extensions, all the great creditor nations are interested. Had the United States refused to intervene in San Domingo, while forbidding the great powers to secure redress by threats, we might possibly have been forced to fight against overwhelming odds in defence of a people and cause, for which we had little sympathy. By its very prohibitions the Monroe Doctrine compels us increasingly to intervene between the weaker Latin-American countries and the warlike creditor nations of Europe.
The gradual extension of the Doctrine, moreover, vastly increases our possible area of friction with Europe. Originally planned to prevent European nations from conquering parts of the Americas, the Doctrine has now been extended to forbid foreign corporations subsidised or controlled by an Old World government to acquire any land in the Americas which might menace the safety or communications of the United States. Our action in Mexico indicates that we are determined not only to prevent Europe from introducing monarchical institutions into American countries, but to insist that those countries themselves adhere to the outward forms of popular government. Secretary Olney was speaking no doubt largely for home consumption when he declared that "the United States is practical sovereign on this continent (hemisphere), and its fiat is law upon the subject to which it confines its interpretation." Nevertheless the extension of control either by the United States or some group of powers is almost inevitable, and with the widening of the Monroe Doctrine, as a result of closer relations between Latin America and the Old World, the necessity for some arrangement between the United States and the great European powers becomes increasingly obvious.
Our possession of Hawaii and the Philippines acts in the same manner. In a military sense the Philippines are indefensible; we cannot secure them against a near-lying military power. Nor can we in the present stage of national feeling permit them to be conquered. Consequently we watch the actions of Japan with quite different feelings than if we had not given her provocation and a bait. The building of the Panama Canal equally increases our international liabilities. It contributes a vast new importance to the Caribbean Sea and adds a new weak point to American territory. Having built and fortified the canal, we are compelled to think of ways and means of defending it, of armies, navies, ententes and alliances.
While all these factors, however, have contributed to our changed point of view, it was the World War which most completely revealed to Americans the necessity of accommodating our national development to that of other countries. The war proved that we were in a military sense vulnerable; that undisciplined citizen soldiery was no match for trained armies; that mere distance is no complete safety, and that the initial advantage, which accrues to the prepared nation is out of all proportion more valuable than later victories. The war showed that unarmed neutrality and a mere lack of hostile intention does not always save a nation from invasion. Moreover, we discovered that our interests were affected favourably or adversely by a conflict, in which we had no direct part. We, who had always conceived ourselves as a supremely disinterested nation, a remote island in the blue sea, began to ask whether it was to our advantage to have France defeated, Belgium destroyed, Germany crushed, the British Empire disintegrated. We began to ask how our national interest was affected by the international competition for colonies, by the freedom or unfreedom of the seas, by the extension of the right of blockade, by the abrogation of established laws of warfare; and what the effect upon us would be of an economic alliance against Germany by the Allied Western Powers. In other words, we discovered a real national interest in international arrangements created by the war or to be established after the war.
Our first preoccupation was naturally one of defence. We looked outward, but only saw armed nations ready to seize upon our wealth and territory. Responsible authors predicted that the victor in this war would at his leisure move across the ocean and despoil the United States. From ponderous puerilities of this sort to the lurid descriptions of massacre and pillage, vouchsafed us by magazine and moving picture writers, was a short step. More serious arguments prevailed, and in the end a large addition was made to our military and naval forces. But the whole campaign was based solely upon the theory of defence, and the theory so formulated, was merely a continuation of the policy of isolation. It involved the idea that we were to act alone and protect ourselves alone against all nations. It did not concern itself with our national aims. It was not based upon a definition of our relations to Europe and to the several nations of Europe.
As our preparations increase, however, and as we realise how insufficient our force must be against a European coalition, we shall be faced with the alternative of entering into agreements or alliances (to make our defence real) or into some other policy, which might make defence unnecessary. In either case we must face outward, must look at the world as it is and is to be, and define our relation to Europe. We must substitute a positive for a negative policy.
This we are forced to do even though we may have no immediate friction points with Europe. The economic interpenetration of all nations involves us in conflicts of interest and adjustments, which require a positive national policy.
It is our economic development that most strongly pushes us in this direction. We are gradually destroying the complementary industrial system which formerly held us to Europe; we are competing with European countries for world markets and have even begun to compete for investment opportunities in backward countries. We are exporting manufactures, and this exportation is likely to increase. Of the six chief requisites of a great manufacturing nation—coal, iron, copper, wood, cotton and wool—we are the greatest single producer of all except the last, and to this advantage of cheap raw materials, there is added an efficient manufacturing organisation and a large manufacturing capital. From 1880 to 1910 that capital increased six and a half fold (from 2.8 to 18.4 billions of dollars). It is therefore no wonder that we are exporting tools, sewing-machines, locomotives, typewriters, automobiles and electrical apparatus. These products compete increasingly with similar products from England and Germany and invade the markets which Europe desires for herself. Our total exports to Latin America, for example, have almost quadrupled in twenty-two years, increasing from 77 millions of dollars in 1890 to 296 millions in 1912.
The significance of this competition, as it exists to-day and will exist to-morrow, is greater for Europe than for us. Our fundamental welfare does not absolutely depend upon this exportation; we could lose a part of this trade, as we lost our shipping, without fatal results, for we should still have our cotton and many half-finished products to exchange for our imports. Were Great Britain, however, to lose her markets for manufactured goods, she would shrink into insignificance, if she did not literally starve. In 1913 the United Kingdom spent $1,400,000,000 on imported foods, drink and tobacco, and for this, as for her importation of raw materials, she must pay. While our export of manufactures still forms but a trifling part (perhaps one thirtieth) of our total product, the British and the German export constitutes an immensely larger proportion. Our export of finished wares, despite its rapid increase, was in 1914 only some seven dollars per capita, while that of the United Kingdom was about forty-five dollars per capita.9 It will therefore not be wondered at if our increasing export of manufactures both to Europe and to the countries to which Europe exports, causes us to be involved, as we have not been for over a century, in the ambitions, conflicts and life-interests of the great European nations.
For at bottom a commercial war is an industrial war, a struggle for national prosperity. If, for example, Germany fails to hold her foreign markets, she must shut down factories. Her industrial problem is to buy raw materials from abroad cheap, ship to Germany, manufacture into finished products, transport to a country willing to buy, and from this enterprise secure
This comparison is not exact, since the British statistics include articles under manufactures which we do not include, and exclude articles which we include. I cite these figures merely to show that there is a vast difference in the relative importance to the United Kingdom and the United States of their export of manufactures, but not to show exactly what that difference is. Similarly the comparison above between the total product of American manufacturing and our export of manufactures is approximate.