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.Consequently there was a public backlash against this old diplomacy conducted by aristocrats behind closed doors in a web of secret treaties designed to make war.Critics demanded a new diplomacy that took into account the demands of democratic electorates and, instead of promoting narrow national interest, sought lasting international peace.These ideas were promulgated in Britain by left-wing intellectuals such as Norman Angell and BertrandRussell but, across the Atlantic, they were adopted with messianic fervor in the White House.Throughout the nineteenth century the United States re-mained outside the main orbit of international diplomacy.To a country three thousand miles from the feuding states of Europe, diplomacy seemed like an old-world affectation, irrelevant to national security.Nonprofessionals ran missions and consulates and the top jobs were part of the spoils system—a payback from the president for political or financial support during an election campaign.Until the twentieth century the U.S.government did not own any diplomatic buildings abroad and a new ambassador had to find and rent something suitable when he took up his post.30Things began to change in the 1900s, both in the professional-ization of diplomacy—competitive exams on the Europeanmodel—and also through new American involvement in world af-fairs after the Spanish-American War of 1898.In August 1905, following intricate secret exchanges, President Theodore Roosevelt brought together the belligerent parties in the Russo-Japanese war at the U.S.naval base at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.The president did not attend the conference in person, but he monitored the negotiations assiduously, on several occasions summoning the negotiators down to his home on Long Island.The eventual Treaty of 24reynolds_01.qxd 8/31/07 10:30 AM Page 25toward th e sum m i tPortsmouth owed a great deal to TR’s personal diplomacy andearned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.31Although Roosevelt’s goal was similar to that of his Europeancounterparts—a regional balance of power—he did not simplyadopt the old-world approach to diplomacy.On the contrary, he conceived himself as playing a distinctively American role in world affairs.“The more I see of the Czar, Kaiser, and the Mikado,” he declared,“the better I am content with democracy.”32Woodrow Wilson, Democratic president from 1913 to 1921, hada particularly profound sense of America’s moral mission.He kept his country neutral in 1914 as “the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation.”33 Wilson did not believe that Germany was solely to blame for the conflict.Even after its all-out U-boat warfare forced him to enter the war in April 1917, he did so self-consciously as an “Associate”power—joining the Allies to eliminate German militarism but determined to impose a new world order on them as well.“England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means,” he told his advisor Colonel Edward House in July 1917.“When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.”34Wilson’s agenda for a new international order, adumbrated in his Fourteen Points of January 1918, centered on a “League of Nations” to keep the peace.Instead of old-world power politics, he wanted open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, and the maximumpossible disarmament “consistent with domestic security.” There should also be “a free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” in which “the interests of the populations concerned” would be weighed equally against the de-mands of the imperial powers.35 Wilson’s vision captured theimagination of liberals around the world, but Allied leaders were skeptical.“God gave us Ten Commandments, and we broke them,”remarked Georges Clemenceau, the French premier, dryly.“Wilson gives us Fourteen Points.We shall see.”3625reynolds_01 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]