Empires Apart (47 page)

Russia then followed another American model. At the time Hawaii was being annexed, as the culmination of secret plans drawn up largely by the former American minister to Hawaii, the Russian minister to Korea proposed something similar. An East Asiatic Company would be set up ostensibly to acquire commercial timber concessions along the Tumen and Yalu rivers, but really to act as the first step in a plan to annexe Korea to Russia. Whereas in Hawaii commercial pressures drove territorial aggrandisement, in Yalu the territorial imperative was driving commerce. The tsar supported the idea and put up the initial funds. Active consideration was given to attracting American investors into the project to deflect international concerns, but it was decided that Americans would be too impatient for profit. Russian timber concessions were obtained on the Manchurian side of the Yalu and soon extended into Korea, but these operations were fronts; most of the Russian workers were in fact soldiers, and the main objective of the Russian ‘businessmen' was to survey the region and establish an infrastructure that could be used in future military campaigns. In 1903 Russian soldiers in civilian clothes entered the harbour at Yongampo and began to construct barracks and port facilities.

Korea, and more importantly China, seemed ripe for foreign exploitation. America, in the throes of fighting a guerrilla war in the Philippines, had no wish to annexe territory on the Asian mainland, but it was determined to protect its own commercial interests. US Secretary of State Hay therefore announced an ‘open door policy', under which the Chinese economy was to be open for grabs but further annexation of Chinese territory was forbidden. America's growing military power in the region gave weight to Hay's declaration, and when the antiforeigner Boxer Rebellion erupted in China in 1900 US marines played a key role in ensuring the victory of the Eight Nation Alliance of Britain, America, Russia, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Japan
and Italy. Under cover of the rebellion Germany, quickly followed by Britain and France, moved to seize Chinese territory and Russia occupied all of Manchuria. Nicholas, however, faced bitter opposition from America, Britain and, especially, Japan, and was eventually forced to recognise Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria and agree to a phased troop withdrawal, which soon stalled.

In 1902 Russia started to reinforce its far eastern fleet, and at the same time Japan completed a programme of naval expansion, helped by Britain. The next year Russia made clear it would not honour its commitment to withdraw from Manchuria, and started strengthening its forces there. If there had been a real willingness to arrive at a peaceful settlement one might have been achieved, but Japan was in expansionist mode and Nicholas was convinced his army could defeat any forces Japan could muster (a conviction expressed in what today would be regarded as amazingly racist terms). Nicholas was wrong.

In February 1904, six years after America's attack on Spain's Pacific fleet, the Japanese without formally declaring war launched a devastating surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, sinking the battleship
Tsarevich
and cruiser
Pallada
. When Japan later attacked Pearl Harbor America was able to regroup and harness its overwhelming economic superiority to reverse the initial Japanese gains. The tsar was unable to do the same. His dismay was compounded the following year when the Russian Baltic fleet arrived in the Pacific, having travelled halfway round the globe (Japan's British allies had refused to let it pass through the Suez canal), only to be annihilated by the Japanese. By then Port Arthur itself had fallen. Russia's forces were as appallingly commanded as they had been in the Crimea. In sailing to the far east, the Russian Baltic fleet managed to create a diplomatic incident by firing on British trawlers in the North Sea – apparently mistaking them for a Japanese fleet!

The war was only concluded by the intervention of Theodore Roosevelt. Less than a century earlier it had been the Russian tsar, Alexander I, who had tried to use his superpower status to end the 1812 War between America and Britain; now it was the American president
who brought Russia and Japan together in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to hammer out a peace treaty. Russia had to give up all claims to Port Arthur, Korea and Manchuria. A secret agreement between America and Japan guaranteed Japan a free hand in Korea in return for Japanese acquiescence in the American occupation of the Philippines. Russia was by now in the military second division of imperial powers, relegated not just by Japan but by the United States and its president.

From the first Muscovite princes, through to Stalin and beyond, the Russian empire expanded sometimes at a gallop, sometimes more hesitantly, sometimes even pulling back a little but throughout using its military might to push out the frontiers. American imperialism demonstrated the same continuity of military expansion from the nation's inception up to the twentieth century, but then it changed: ‘imperialism' became a bad word and military conquest ceased to be the cornerstone of imperial policy. It is difficult now to remember how fundamental the ideology of empire used to be to the psyche of the American people. Well into the twentieth century a significant body of American opinion was not only openly imperialist but used that term to mean territorial aggrandisement in exactly the form that had characterised American expansion since Independence. Men like the ideologue of empire Senator Albert Beveridge argued that conquests beyond America's existing boundaries should be treated in the same way that Texas or Florida had been treated. ‘The Philippines are ours forever, “territory belonging to the United States”, as the Constitution calls them,' he declared. In quoting that phrase the senator adduced in the Founding Fathers an imperialist motivation that has now been largely forgotten. He continued:

The founders of the nation were not provincial. Theirs was the geography of the world. They were soldiers as well as landsmen, and they knew that where our ships should go our flag might follow. They had the logic
of progress, and they knew that the republic they were planting must, in obedience to the laws of our expanding race, necessarily develop into the greater republic which the world beholds today, and into the still mightier republic which the world will finally acknowledge as the arbiter, under God, of the destinies of mankind. And so our fathers wrote into the Constitution these words of growth, of expansion, of empire, if you will, unlimited by geography or climate or by anything but the vitality and possibilities of the American people.

In Beveridge's view America was unique. ‘Almighty God', he said, ‘has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world', adding ‘We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.'For him the question of America's role in the world was not a political one but something far more fundamental. In one congressional speech he declaimed:

Mr President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even;deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organisers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: ‘Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.'

It should not be thought that such views were the rantings of a few on the reactionary right. Beveridge himself eventually left the Republican party and unsuccessfully ran for Senate again as a ‘progressive'. His views on the conquest of the Philippines were shared by millions of Americans, from Theodore Roosevelt down. He believed that the occupation of the Philippines ‘was one of the noblest examples of patriotic devotion to duty in the history of the world' and laid out a detailed blueprint for the American government of the islands. His only concession to democracy was the suggestion that there might ‘possibly' be ‘an advisory council with no power except that of discussing measures with the governor-general'. The governor-general, along with the heads of all provincial and district authorities, would of course be American. ‘Self-government and internal development have been the dominant notes of our first century,' noted Beveridge; ‘administration and the development of other lands will be the dominant notes of our second century.' Only in the very long term would the people of the Philippines be ready for statehood alongside his own Indiana. A more immediate element of Beveridge's plan was ‘the establishment of import duties on a revenue basis, with such discrimination in favour of American imports as will prevent the cheaper goods of other nations from destroying American trade'. The empire was to be more about protecting American corporations than spreading democracy.

The ideology of democracy was not replaced by the ideology of imperialism but fused with it. It was precisely because of its democracy that America was justified in imposing its empire on others. Again Beveridge spelt out the ideological justification for imposing servitude in the name of freedom in words that could have been applied to Iraq a century later. There was no contradiction, in his view, in the Founding Fathers espousing self-government for America while denying it to others:

Let men beware how they employ the term ‘self-government'. It is a sacred term. It is the watchword at the door of the inner temple of liberty, for liberty does not always mean self-government. Self-government is a method of liberty – the highest, simplest, best – and it is acquired only
after centuries of study and struggle and experiment and instruction and all the elements of the progress of man. Self-government is no base and common thing to be bestowed on the merely audacious. It is the degree which crowns the graduate of liberty, not the name of liberty's infant class, who have not yet mastered the alphabet of freedom.

The inherent contradictions in this argument may not have been apparent to Beveridge but they became increasingly obvious to others. For many Americans their nation's conquests during the Spanish-American War seemed more to resemble the actions of the British empire that the Founding Fathers had fought against than the society they had fought to create. The corporations who were becoming the nation's economic driving force did not need military conquests to gain global market share, and the mass of the American population did not need new territories to settle. The American empire had come of age and from now on would develop rapidly in new directions. What could not be transformed so quickly was the ideology that underlay the old imperialism. Beveridge's traditional vision of empire, in which the United States simply kept expanding, disappeared, but the popular belief that America has a unique global destiny remained.

The distinguishing characteristic of American imperialism has been its extreme flexibility. America's democratic ideology always had a global dimension, but how that universal vision manifested itself depended on the circumstances of the time. Kagan's phrase ‘determined opportunism' was particularly apposite as American imperialism moved from the continental to the global and adjusted to the age of corporate capitalism. The United States had none of the problems Nicholas encountered in his drive to expand his empire. As Japan and Russia were engaged in full-scale war in the far east the United States was flexing its imperial muscle on the other side of the world. US marines were called in to protect America's imperial business interests by invading the Dominican Republic and reestablishing the control the US business community was in danger of losing. The invasion gave rise to America's most explicit statement yet
of its imperial ‘rights' in the western hemisphere: Theodore Roosevelt's development of the Monroe Doctrine known as the Roosevelt Corollary. The government of the Dominican Republic was bankrupt and Roosevelt feared that foreign nations, especially Germany, might intervene forcibly to collect their debts. In his annual message to Congress in December 1904 he declared that ‘chronic wrongdoing' anywhere in what today would be called the Third World would ‘ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation'. From this he concluded that ‘in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power'.

What Roosevelt meant by chronic wrongdoing had been illustrated the previous year. The United States wanted to build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific through northern Colombia. The Colombian Senate demanded what Roosevelt considered to be an unreasonable rent for the proposed 100-year lease, so a US navy gunboat was dispatched to support a secessionist revolt. The newly formed nation of Panama promptly leased the land to the United States in perpetuity for a ‘reasonable' rent.

US marines were soon in action again, in Nicaragua in 1912, and then, having already occupied Cuba, American eyes turned to the other large Caribbean island, Hispaniola. In 1915 the French-speaking half of the island, Haiti, descended into chaos. After a mob hacked the president and the head of the Haitian army to pieces a French naval lieutenant and nine French marines landed to protect the French legation. Claiming that this violated the Monroe Declaration, the United States sent in its own marines who, acting on instructions from Washington, immediately seized $500,000 in gold from the Haitian National Bank. The US occupation lasted nineteen years and provoked bitter resistance; 3,250 Haitians were killed for the loss of just thirteen US troops. The occupation mirrored the brutality witnessed at Abu Ghraib in Iraq less than ninety years later. On one occasion US troops were ordered to shoot all prisoners, and a marine general later testified that many of the Haitian deaths were ‘indiscriminate killings' designed to discourage resistance. Despite a
presidential commission of enquiry, the only person to be found guilty of any crime was a marine lieutenant, who was convicted of torture and committed to an asylum.