Sublime

From the beginning of its existence, the United States was engaged in diplomacy, power politics, wars, and every foreign entanglement imaginable.

Roosevelt was just getting started. In 1903 the Dominican Republic’s finances collapsed. Its president, Carlos Morales, intimated that he would welcome annexation by the United States—the second time that country had offered itself up. A decade earlier, Roosevelt would have jumped at Morales’s offer. But now, exhausted by the Philippine War, he was

American power should be used to protect and spread American principles. At the root of this position is the view that the United States has an obligation to itself and the world to advocate and defend the moral principles on which it was founded, and the belief that behaving like any other country and defending its economic and strategic interests

In the post-war period, much of the non-communist world was opened up to US domination by tactics of this sort. This became the method of choice to fight off the threat of communist insurgencies and revolution, entailing an anti-democratic (and even more emphatically anti-populist and anti-socialist/communist) strategy on the part of the US that pu

The policy of the Americans in relation to the whole world is exceedingly simple; for it may almost be said that no country stands in need of them, nor do they require the co-operation of any other people. Their independence is never threatened.