Birth Of A Superpower

By Paul Kennedy

The facts were blindingly obvious, claimed the precocious Harvard graduate in his book The Naval War of 1812, or the History of the United States Navy During the Last War with Great Britain. First, in the eternal Darwinian struggle that took place between calculating, egoistic nation-states, it was essential for one country--in this case, the U.S. at the close of the 19th century--to avoid "a miserly economy in preparation for war." And for a state as dependent on sea power as America, it was unthinkable that the nation "rely for defence [sic] upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks, and partly of new vessels rather more worthless than the old." The U.S. was rising to world-power status, but it could do so only on the back of a powerful and efficient Navy.

Phew! Who was saying this? The writer in question was none other than Theodore Roosevelt, then a mere 24 years old. He was just a short time out of college when his book was first published, in 1882, but already making waves. Here is one of the few examples in recent history--Churchill is another--of a young, highly ambitious man who could foresee his own impact on the future international order. From early on, Churchill seemed to have possessed a premonition that he would lead his nation and empire in an age of great peril. In much the same way, T.R. appeared destined--and felt destined--to preside over, and manage, the U.S.'s emergence as one of the global great powers. He believed also that his leadership would be decisive because he had understood, before many of his contemporary political rivals and friends, the importance of naval power in buttressing the international position of the U.S.

Roosevelt was, for an American, unusually familiar with naval history. Two of his uncles, brothers of his Southern-born mother, had been involved in the Confederate navy in the Civil War. (One of them, James D. Bulloch, was a Confederate naval agent who commissioned the C.S.S. Alabama, the famous commerce raider on which his younger brother Irvine served.) The young Theodore had grown up with stories about earlier naval battles and eagerly read works on the history of war. Yet it would be fair to say that his notions about sea power--build bigger warships, concentrate the fleet--were primitive until the late 1880s, when he was introduced to one of the greatest luminaries of naval thought, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. At the time of their first meeting, Mahan, then in his late 40s, was giving lectures at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., lectures that would culminate in the 1890 publication of his international best seller, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783.

Mahan's book, which Roosevelt devoured in one reading, is at first sight a detailed account of the many battles fought by the British Royal Navy as it rose to become sovereign of the seas. But it is much more than that, for Mahan claimed to have detected the principles that underlay the workings of sea power, and had determined the rise and fall of nations. With great skill, the author showed the intimate relationships among productive industry, flourishing seaborne commerce, strong national finances and enlightened national purpose. Great navies did not arise out of thin air; they had to be built up over time with the most modern warships, well-trained crews and decisive admirals. Ultimately, though, it was the man or the men at the top--those steering the nation through war and peace--who had to understand the great influence that navies could exert on international politics. Sea power, if properly applied by such leaders, was the vital tool for any country aspiring to play on the world stage.

Here was a road map for the rest of T.R.'s life, or at least the part of it that would be focused on foreign affairs. In Roosevelt's future naval policies we see the embodiment of Mahan's larger principles. Moreover, this conjuncture of Mahan the theoretician and Roosevelt the man of action arrived at just the right time in the history of the U.S. Its industries were booming, its commerce thriving and its merchants fighting to gain markets overseas in the face of tough foreign competition. All of that pointed to the need for a strong Navy. And, to be sure, the nation was getting one. The fleet was no longer the dilapidated collection of small warships it had been when Roosevelt wrote his book about the War of 1812. By the late 1890s, it could be reckoned among the top four or five in the world.

But it was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who turned U.S. sea power into the manifestation of the nation's outward thrust. His first demonstration of that counts among his most famous decisions. By 1897 he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position in which he could act out his ambitions, especially since the Secretary, John D. Long, was a rather sick man and President William McKinley had no great interest in naval matters. On Feb. 15, 1898, when news arrived of the sinking in Havana harbor of the U.S.S. Maine--the event that effectively set off the Spanish-American War--Roosevelt had his opportunity.

Roosevelt had previously confided in Mahan his belief that the U.S. should push Spain out of not only Cuba but also the Philippines, though at the time acquiring the Philippines was by no means a goal of the McKinley Administration. Ten days after the Maine went down, on a late Friday afternoon when Long was temporarily out of the office, his dynamic assistant cabled instructions to Admiral William T. Sampson in the Caribbean and Commodore George Dewey in Hong Kong to prepare for decisive action. Long, though by his own account somewhat bemused, did nothing later to counter those orders. So when Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, the U.S. squadrons in both theaters had been heavily reinforced. The results--the destruction of the Spanish fleets in Manila Bay and, two months later, off Santiago, Cuba--were decisive. Spain had been reduced to the rank of a minor power, and the deeply troubled lands of Cuba and the Philippines came under U.S. sway.

The naval war of 1898 provided the nation with a complete justification of Mahan's theories. The firepower of the American battleships had clearly been overwhelming--a great relief to Roosevelt, who had feared voices in Congress calling instead for lots of small, coastal-defense vessels. Most impressive of all was the performance of the new battleship U.S.S. Oregon, which had steamed from San Francisco to Cuba to partake in the final battle. In fact, so enthusiastic was Congress about the importance of the Navy that it authorized the construction of many more battleships and heavy cruisers.

But the lesson that most impressed itself on Roosevelt was that it had taken the Oregon, steaming at high speed, a full 67 days to complete the 14,700-mile journey around Cape Horn. American navalists and expansionists--and Roosevelt was both--began clamoring for the construction of a canal across Central America, one that, given the turbulent nature of international politics, must be completely under U.S. control. Facing large potential threats in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the U.S. had no choice but to shorten the route between the East and West coasts.

The matter was urgent because Roosevelt and his circle were not the only people who had discovered the influence of sea power on world affairs. Mahan's lessons from history had had an almost universal resonance. Under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany was building a battle fleet as large as the U.S. one and equally fast. France and Russia, now in alliance, were also pouring resources into new construction, as were Italy and Austria-Hungary in the Mediterranean. The most amazing growth, from virtually nowhere, was that of the Japanese navy in the Far East. And all these growing fleets caused the British to spend unprecedented amounts on the Royal Navy in an effort to maintain its centuries-old naval supremacy. The U.S. could not afford to slacken its pace.

The U.S. navalists need not have worried. Within a short while, in March 1901, Roosevelt was elected Vice President under McKinley; six months later, following McKinley's assassination, he was catapulted into the highest office. As early as 1902 he demonstrated the growing clout of the U.S. Navy during the so-called Venezuelan crisis. Venezuela's feckless financial policies and its refusal to pay international debts had led to a blockade of its coastline by various European navies, notably Germany's. Urged on by the nationalist wing of the U.S. press, Roosevelt had instructed Dewey, now an admiral, to patrol with a large force in waters nearby, ostensibly on seasonal fleet maneuvers but with an intent that was clear to all.

It was a tactic that seemed to fit perfectly with the President's motto, "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." Whether it was fully true, as Roosevelt later claimed, that it was U.S. sea power that compelled the Germans to back down, is open to some doubt. But with a compromise debt settlement reached at the Hague, it was becoming clear that the era of European interventions in the western hemisphere had come to an end. Long an empty declaration, the Monroe Doctrine, which had warned Europeans not to interfere in the Americas, was now a reality as a result of American sea power.

But so, too, as the Latin American states discovered to their dismay, was the Roosevelt Corollary to that doctrine, which the President proclaimed in 1904. If we do not want third powers to take action against wrongdoing regimes in our hemisphere, the President stated, "then sooner or later we must keep order ourselves." What that meant was that the U.S. was claiming for itself the right to intervene in the affairs of hemispheric nations when those nations aroused the displeasure of Washington.

It was not just the misbehavior of Central and South American governments that concerned Roosevelt in this volatile region. He was also eager to prevent any foreigners from gaining a concession to build the canal that he wanted the U.S. to build. When the Colombian government turned down a proposed deal for a 100-year lease of territory in its province of Panama, the President threw his weight--and the weight of a naval landing party--in favor of one of the perennial Panamanian uprisings aimed at gaining independence from Colombia. Twelve days after Washington recognized the new nation of Panama, in November 1903, it signed with deep satisfaction a canal treaty with Panama that was identical to the one rejected by Colombia.

While the U.S. was secure now in its Atlantic realms, it was being forced to increase its attention to China and the Pacific. The U.S. had long possessed trading and missionary interests in East Asia and now of course occupied the Philippines, so it naturally had cruisers and gunboats in those waters. But it was not the biggest player in the region. Russia, France and Britain had significant battleship squadrons in the Far East. The fastest-growing naval force of all belonged to Japan, which was increasingly suspicious of Russia's creeping territorial controls in Manchuria. In February 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet anchored at Port Arthur on the coast of China. The 20th century struggle for dominance of East Asia had begun in earnest.

The Russo-Japanese War was another gift from the gods to Roosevelt. He had long worried about czarist ambitions in Asia, as he worried about German ambitions in the Atlantic. He was full of admiration for the Japanese armed services as they steadily vanquished the larger Russian armies on land and smashed the Russian fleet in the epic battle of Tsushima in May 1905. But the President did not want complete Japanese domination of the Far East either, and so he actively lobbied both sides to turn to the peace table. Since Britain was diplomatically allied to Japan, and France to Russia, neither was an acceptable arbitrator. And the Kaiser's Germany was trusted by no one. By default the U.S. became the natural mediator. Roosevelt persuaded the two nations to send representatives to the U.S. for negotiations to be conducted in Portsmouth, N.H., where he took the deepest interest in cajoling, often bullying, the two belligerents into ending the war. For his role, T.R. was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.

All the same, the world remained a dangerous place. There were the German threat to France, the Anglo-German rivalry in the North Sea, the Balkan tinderbox and the unanswered question of Japan's ultimate ambitions. Roosevelt decided a bold move was required to send a message that the U.S. was a global player. In December 1907 he dispatched from Hampton Roads, Va., the "Great White Fleet," consisting of all 16 of the U.S. Navy's modern battleships. They were embarked on what would be a 46,000-mile, 14-month cruise around the world. Here was showing the flag, indeed. Almost a century later, that voyage is still regarded as the apotheosis of Roosevelt's belief in naval power as an instrument of national policy. The stately procession across the Pacific and then through the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal and Mediterranean before returning to the Atlantic seaboard was an impressive logistical feat, even if it confirmed to the U.S. Navy the limited endurance of the older battleships and produced a remarkable number of desertions in Australian ports. But the world public was not to know of that. A million people had assembled in San Francisco harbor to watch the fleet depart; half a million Australians greeted it in Sydney. Even the anxiously prepared visit to Tokyo Bay had gone well.

A short while after the Great White Fleet's return, Roosevelt relinquished the presidency. To his successor, William Howard Taft, he had one message: Do not divide the fleet. The Mahanian principle of concentrating the main battle fleet in one theater remained in place. It would still be there in 1914 when the Panama Canal, instigated by T.R., finally opened. Only during the Second World War, when the U.S. Navy became the largest in the world, would the U.S. possess a two-ocean fleet.

But the foundations of its maritime supremacy had been laid, and firmly, by this most energetic of U.S. Presidents. It is true that after 1909, the U.S. took a bit of a breather in world affairs, retreating to the side of the stage as the European crisis unfolded. But it never stopped building warships. And the country would be summoned back to the center of international politics in 1917. Despite the isolationist pressures of the interwar years, the U.S. would never be able, or willing, to abandon its pivotal role. The country's later trajectory would have made T.R. feel justified, and proud. He had always been convinced that it was impossible for the U.S. to avoid becoming the greatest world power of the 20th century; the only choice was whether it would do so well or poorly. And the trick was to turn the theory of Mahan's principles about sea power into effective practice, for the furtherance of American interests and values. No U.S. President did that better.

Kennedy is director of International Security Studies at Yale. His latest book is The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations (Random House)