Tom Barry, Laura Carlsen, and John Gershman: President Bush Needs to Change Course and Adopt the Good Neighbor Policy
President Bush says we must “stay the course” in Iraq , and he promises to continue during his second administration the radical foreign and domestic policies laid out during his first term. We believe it is time to change course.
But can the course of U.S. foreign policy ever truly be altered?
Has there ever been a model for a dramatic shift away from militarism and unilateralism toward international cooperation and peace?
The answer to these questions is yes.
In the late 1920s, the State Department, Commerce Department, and War Department were all weary of staying the course. Reacting to popular protest and rising concern from business, Washington and Wall Street began turning away from territorial acquisition and imperialism as preferred instruments of U.S. foreign policy. Instead of considering it the mission of a “master race” to manage the affairs of the “weaker races,” as Teddy Roosevelt had, leaders in politics and commerce now spoke about the need for nations to be good neighbors.
The Good Neighbor Policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency in the pre-World War II period marked a dramatic turn in U.S. foreign affairs. The new policy constituted a public repudiation of imperialism, cultural and racial stereotyping, and military interventions and occupations.
Can such a far-reaching reversal be replicated?
If history is a guide, then again the answer is yes.
U.S. foreign policy is once again at a crossroads, and its present course could be disastrous. One way out of the current morass is to look back to the inter-war period of history and see what lessons it holds for us today.
Can Roosevelt ’s Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s provide a model for a Global Good Neighbor Policy for the 21 st century?
The seeds of FDR’s new foreign policy had already been planted. By the early part of the 20 th century it was becoming clear that territorial conquests, military intervention, and occupations were proving costly and counterproductive. The Spanish-American War of 1898 had proved the new global reach of U.S. military power, but the Yanquis quickly found that the Cubans and Filipinos hated them as much as they hated the Spanish.
“Big Stick” policies did not stabilize and democratize intervened countries but instead incited armed popular rebellions. As in Iraq , post-intervention attempts to suppress these insurrections and impose order cost the United States more in lost lives and financial resources than the initial interventions.
As early as 1904, novelist and political humorist Mark Twain warned of the moral and political hazards to the United States if it continued to follow the imperialist path to progress. Twain observed that by occupying the Philippines the United States was committing “one grievous error, that irrevocable error,” playing the “European game” of imperialism and colonization.
By the late 1920s, a new consensus was emerging among Washington political leaders and Wall Street barons. After three decades of imperial conquest, followed by Gunboat Diplomacy of military occupations and the Dollar Diplomacy of heavy-handed financial control of other nations, the country’s elites found themselves agreeing with the popular wisdom of Mark Twain.
In election year 1928, both incumbent Herbert Hoover and Democratic Party leader Franklin D. Roosevelt advanced a new vision of international relations in which diplomacy and commerce would trump brute financial and military power. In a Foreign Affairs article in 1928, Roosevelt wrote that by seeking the “cooperation of others we shall have more order in this hemisphere and less dislike.”
Following his victory, President-elect Hoover undertook a goodwill trip to Central America . Citing complaints about Washington ’s overbearing and interventionist behavior, Hoover announced that a new policy was in the offing. “We have a desire to maintain not only the cordial relations of governments with each other,” he said, “but also the relations of good neighbors.”
As president, however, Hoover did little to pursue a new direction in foreign policy. Troop withdrawals did commence in Nicaragua and Haiti . After the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, however, Hoover only rarely addressed foreign policy issues.
It took FDR’s vision and political smarts—and the skills of his influential wife, Eleanor Roosevelt—to fashion a new policy agenda. Leveraging widespread dissatisfaction with existing directions in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, Roosevelt crafted a bold policy blueprint that addressed the crises both at home and abroad.
Roosevelt ’s view of international relations was a startling departure from the ideological frameworks that previously dominated foreign policy discourse. His perspectives on how nations should behave appealed to both common sense and moral values.
Two months after he moved into the White House, FDR promised to help “spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients.”
To replace this prevailing system, Roosevelt began to chart a new system guided by international cooperation. “Common ideals and a community of interest, together with a spirit of cooperation, have led to the realization that the well-being of one nation depends in large measure upon the well-being of its neighbors,” the new president asserted.
Being a good global neighbor for Roosevelt meant promoting peace and deglorifying war. As he put it: “I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen children starving… I have seen the agony of mothers and wives... I hate war.”
Roosevelt repeatedly alerted the nation about the rise of fascism and the new imperial ambitions of Germany and Japan . “We are not isolationists,” said FDR, “except so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. Yet we must remember that so long as war exists on earth there will be some danger that even the nation which most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.”
At the same time, though, Roosevelt was formulating a foreign policy doctrine of nonaggression and demilitarization that would ensure that the United States did not precipitate wars as it had in the recent past with Spain and Mexico . “We seek to dominate no other nation,” he declared. “We ask no territorial expansion. We oppose imperialism. We desire reduction in world armaments.”
President Roosevelt intended that his Good Neighbor Policy improve U.S. relations with nations around the world. But it was in the Western Hemisphere that FDR’s new foreign policy framework had its most dramatic impact....