Worldmaking (17 page)

Wilson's Mexican intervention inaugurated a tradition in U.S. foreign policy—a militarized approach to “bad” or “evil” regimes in the name of democracy promotion—that endures to this day. It is difficult to view Wilson's policies toward the Mexican Revolution, and subsequent civil war, as anything but maladroit, leaving a legacy of distrust and animosity in U.S.-Mexican relations that still lingers. While Wilson resisted calls made by Lodge, Root, Roosevelt, and the Hearst press for all-out war, his Mexican intervention was a case study in how fine-sounding intentions can go badly awry. It was ironic that Wilson drew from the military engagement in Mexico a skepticism about the ability of the United States to effect regime change and produce a stable aftermath. This experience colored his later desire to avoid a large-scale intervention in the Russian Civil War. Wilson's caution in this instance is often lost on his modern-day devotees on both sides of the political divide.

Foreseeing problems at the end of 1913, Mahan had dismissed Wilson's democracy-promoting rationale for toppling Huerta as “amateurish diplomacy,” which failed to “recognize that self-government is not practicable for all peoples, merely because the English-speaking peoples have made it work.”
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This was precisely the type of adventure that the United States should shun, Mahan's geopolitical philosophy held, as it depleted resources, undercut business, and constituted something of a blow to America's global reputation—for the conflict ended not in victory but in stalemate. Mahan feared the negative, unpredictable repercussions that accompanied leaps into the unknown. He felt that Wilson had departed from historical precedent with these ambitious plans to democratize and improve other nations. The president was leading with theory rather than framing policy on the basis of observed reality and an appropriately sober view of what constituted America's core interests.

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In an address in Cincinnati on October 26, 1916, President Wilson offered a succinct account of the origins of the First World War: “Nothing in particular started it, but everything in general.” Later in the campaign speech, he distilled the essence of the disastrous alliance system that led to a conflict that few of the great powers really wanted but that none believed they could escape without losing critical diplomatic face: “There had been growing up in Europe a mutual suspicion, an interchange of conjectures about what this government and that government was going to do, an interlacing of alliances and understandings, a complex web of intrigue and spying, that presently was sure to entangle the whole of the family of mankind on that side of the water in its meshes.”
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War came to Europe because its powers were fixed in an alliance system that precluded flexibility and thus portended disaster.
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Yet there were more specific grievances that caused the balance-of-power system—devised by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Viscount Castlereagh, and Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna in 1814—to tumble down after a century of relative stability. First, France and Germany were still engaged in a dispute over the status of Alsace-Lorraine, the border region wrested from Paris following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 (an action that the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck opposed in anticipation of inspiring French antipathy). Second, there was the continuing crisis in the Balkans provoked by the efforts of various ethnic groups to secure independence from either the Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) or Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Third, there existed a long-standing dispute among the major European powers over competing colonial aspirations in the Third World, particularly in Africa, the only continent with much land still available to grab. Finally, Germany and Great Britain were engaged in a hotly contested naval race to outdo each other in the provision of dreadnought-class battleships. Here it is possible to identify the influence of Mahan's theories on the centrality of naval dominance, even though he was personally slow to appreciate the revolution in military affairs catalyzed by these technological advances. For the influence exerted by his belief in vigilant military preparedness, the British diplomat and historian Sir Charles Webster opined that “Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War,” which does seem unduly harsh.
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Europe was divided into two camps at the start of 1914: the Entente Powers, principally composed of Great Britain, France, and Russia, and the Central Powers, composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. All parties were bound to their allies by treaty commitments. While there were various points of friction that made a European-wide war a distinct possibility, the trigger point was an assassin's bullet. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, was shot dead in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Austria-Hungary interpreted this as an act of war, secured a “blank check” from Berlin on July 6 that promised unconditional German support, and then made ten demands of Serbia that were purposefully unacceptable. When Serbia refused to sign two of the demands, on July 28 Austria-Hungary declared war. Rising indignantly in support of its Slavic cousins, the next day Russia offered its support when Tsar Nicholas II ordered a partial mobilization, an act designed to deter German involvement. The warning shot did not work, however; Berlin mobilized in response, which then led France, Russia's ally, to do the same on August 1. Germany declared war on Russia that very same day, leaving just one major power unaccounted for. Playing its usual historic role as a counterweight in European disputes, Great Britain entered the fray on August 4, when it declared war on Germany for refusing to honor Belgium's neutrality. With such speed and asininity began the cataclysm that was the First World War. During the next five years, more than fifteen million people would die. The war marked the beginning of the end of European primacy in global affairs.

Alfred Mahan was surprised by the speed in which war engulfed Europe, but he had few doubts about which side bore principal responsibility. On August 3, 1914, Mahan gave an interview to the
New York Evening Post
in which he argued that Vienna had used the assassination as a pretext for Austria and Germany to attack Russia, to which the essential corollary was the invasion of France to prevent a two-front war. In those circumstances Mahan believed that Britain had no choice but to “declare war at once,” which it did a day later. Anticipating the inevitability of war from the events of August 1–3, Mahan had been working on an article for
Leslie's Weekly
in which he argued that Britain could defeat Germany by imposing a naval blockade, choking the nation into submission—just as the Union navy had done against the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Sensing an opportunity to rally Americans behind a pro-British stance, Mahan began working on another piece, provisionally titled “About What Is the War?” which dismissed the notion that effective international arbitration would have prevented this war and might do so in the future—a clear attack on the proclivities of the sitting president. Mahan's hardheaded analyses were in huge demand. The Wood Newspaper Syndicate, Pulitzer Publishing Company, Paul R. Reynolds literary agency, Charles Scribner's Sons,
The Independent
, and
Leslie's
all enticed Mahan to write for them with significant financial inducements—the latter two publications offered him $100 a week for the duration of the conflict for short dispatches on military developments as they happened.
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But this promise of rapt nationwide attention and a significant payday was ended abruptly by Woodrow Wilson. Concerned that Mahan's august reputation, pro-British sympathies, and gifts of literary persuasion would whip up support for the Entente, and constrain his freedom of action, the president silenced Mahan. He sent the following letter to his secretary of war, Lindley Miller Garrison:

I write to suggest that you request and advise all officers of the service, whether active or retired, to refrain from public comment of any kind upon the military or political situation on the other side of the water … It seems to me highly unwise and improper that officers of the Army and the Navy of the United States should make any public utterances to which any color of political or military criticism can be given where other nations are involved.
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There is no doubt that Mahan was Wilson's primary target, and he was furious. He was compelled to return a $100 fee from
The Independent
. Worse, Wilson had suppressed a message that was vital to America's national security. Mahan was convinced that German control of the European continent would allow Kaiser Wilhelm to project power into the Caribbean, thus threatening U.S. interests and making a mockery of the Monroe Doctrine. He composed two letters to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, both dated August 15, urging him to ask Wilson to reconsider:

Public opinion being in the last analysis the determining force in our national polity, the effect of the Order is to disable a class of men best qualified by their past occupation, and present position, to put before the public considerations which would tend to base public opinion in matters of current public interest, upon sound professional grounds … At the age of seventy-four, I find myself silenced at a moment when the particular pursuits of nearly thirty-five years … might be utilized for the public. I admit a strong feeling of personal disappointment … When I was in France eighteen months ago, a leading French statesman, a member of the present cabinet, told me that Germans had said to him that if they got France down again they would bleed her white. If a nation of that temper gets full control on the continent, which is what she is trying for, do you suppose it will long respect the Monroe Doctrine? At this moment Germany suffers from a lack of coaling stations here. If she downs France, why not take Martinique? Or if Great Britain, some Canadian port?
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Having been encouraged by McKinley to write on the Spanish-American War and by Roosevelt on the Russo-Japanese War and Second Hague Conference, Mahan was being silenced by a Democratic president determined to keep America out of what he viewed as Europe's descent into senseless conflict—in which all sides shared culpability—and who opposed Mahan's rationale for assisting Britain, France, and Russia. Daniels replied tersely, noting that Mahan's well-established pro-British affinities would “trench upon the line of American neutrality.”
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The president's muzzling order would stand and there was to be no future debate on the matter.

With no choice but to cease writing on the war, Mahan continued to attack those who argued that greater military preparedness, in the form of high defense spending, increased the prospects of future conflict, a misguided view to which Democrats were particularly susceptible. In a letter to
The New York Times
on August 31, Mahan wrote, “The hackneyed phrase, ‘Vital interests or national honor,' really sums up the motives that lead nations to war. Armament is simply the instrument of which such motives avail themselves. If there be no armament, there is war all the same.”
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Unfortunately, this was one of Mahan's final public pronouncements on foreign policy. He passed away on December 1, 1914, after suffering a heart attack. He was eulogized by Theodore Roosevelt, in a reference to the halcyon era in which he and like-minded Republicans had been ascendant, as “one of the greatest and most useful influences in American life.”
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He died during a presidency that was utterly hostile to his views.

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Wilson's reaction to the onset of war in Europe was complex. Just two days after the British declaration of war on Germany, Ellen Axson Wilson, the president's beloved wife, died suddenly. Wilson was consumed by grief, leading him to reduce meetings and speaking engagements to the barest minimum required. His statements during this critical time in world affairs were thus spare, somber, and typically eloquent. Wilson affirmed that the United States' position was one of scrupulous neutrality and called on his fellow Americans to display “the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control.” The president believed that “the United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls.”
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That this was a difficult task to achieve in a multiethnic, hyphenated America was not lost on Wilson. A third of America's citizens in 1914 had been born overseas. The majority, including the elite northeastern establishment, favored Britain and France (forgiving their alliance of convenience with tsarist Russia) due to a shared ethnic and cultural heritage, and a belief that Prussian militarism was at the root of Europe's problems. German Americans naturally supported the Central Powers, as did Irish Americans, through their enmity toward Britain, and some Jewish and Scandinavian Americans, who despised tsarist Russia for its institutionalized anti-Semitism and territorial ambitions to its western borders. In such a volatile national environment, Wilson sincerely believed that “we have to be neutral since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other.”
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Accompanying Wilson's strongly declared neutrality was an aversion to ordering any significant increases in the defense budget, the course urged by Mahan up to his death, and by Roosevelt and Lodge thereafter. In his State of the Union address of December 8, 1914, Wilson rebuffed those advocates of military preparedness, whose expensive contingency plans would “mean merely that we had lost our self-possession, that we had been thrown off our balance by a war with which we have nothing to do, whose causes can not touch us, whose very existence affords us opportunities of friendship and disinterested service which should make us ashamed of any thought of hostility or fearful preparation for trouble.”
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The opportunity to which Wilson referred was the possibility that the war would be stalemated, allowing the United States to serve as arbiter, affording Wilson increased leverage to preside over peace negotiations that would refashion international relations on more collaborative grounds. With prescience, Wilson remarked to the journalist Herbert B. Brougham that the best opportunity for “a just and equitable peace, and of the only possible peace that will be lasting, will be happiest if no nation gets the decision by arms; and the danger of an unjust peace, one that will be sure to invite further calamities, will be if some one nation or group of nations succeeds in enforcing its will upon the others.”
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Wilson's assessment combined unimpeachable reasoning with a corresponding reluctance to consider how nations' hearts can be hardened in time of war.