Theodore Roosevelt the First President Of the US to Play a Role as World Statesman.
As in his domestic policy, where he was inhibited by political constraints, so in his ‘world’ diplomacy he was circumscribed by America’s lack of military power and the unwillingness of American people to make sacrifices to back up a ‘large’ American foreign policy.
Superficially Roosevelt succeeded in drawing international attention to the US and to his own role as diplomatist. In this respect his greatest achievement was to act in 1905 as mediator between the Japanese and Russians and to host the peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, ending the Russo-Japanese War.
The US next played a part in the international Moroccan conference at Algeciras in 1906. The following year, in a characteristically ostentatious gesture, Roosevelt sent the newly constructed US navy on a world cruise to show the flag. Roosevelt made America’s presence felt. But what really lay behind these great-power posturings was apprehension that the conditions that had given the US security for the past century were passing away.
For this feeling, which actually anticipated dangers that still lay in the future, there were two principal reasons: the likely direction of European imperialism and the consequences of America’s own flirtation with imperialism at the turn of the…
