President Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress, December
6, 1904
Foreign Policy
In treating of our foreign policy and of the attitude that this great Nation should assume in the world at large, it is absolutely necessary to consider the Army and the Navy, and the Congress, through which the thought of the Nation finds its expression, should keep ever vividly in mind the fundamental fact that it is impossible to treat our foreign policy, whether this policy takes shape in the effort to secure justice for others or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.
The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations,
should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail
throughout the world the peace of
justice. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which
are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have
many times made a
wilderness and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful
or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury,
or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing
duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to
hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by
calling them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of
craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as
we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal
which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment of the peace
of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not merely safe-guarded
in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs its duty toward
others. Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if there is conflict
between the two, then our fealty is due first to the cause of righteousness.
Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both should
be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise
of that right can not be divorced. One of our great poets has well and
finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of
cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful,
too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance
which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against
outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own
selfish or thoughtless shortcomings.
If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are
so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy
in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation
has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than
an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same
moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we must also remember
that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and its
own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to do. Within the
Nation the individual has now delegated this right to the State, that is,
to the representative of all the individuals, and it is a maxim of the
law that for every wrong there is a remedy. But in international law we
have not advanced by any means as far as we have advanced in municipal
law. There is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international
law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no
tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought. Either it is necessary
supinely to acquiesce in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality
and aggression, or else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly
to stand up for its rights. Until some method is devised by which there
shall be a degree of international control over offending nations, it would
be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with most sense
of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation
of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm. If the great civilized
nations of the present day should completely disarm, the result would mean
an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form or another. Under any
circumstances a sufficient armament would have to be kept up to serve the
purposes of international police; and until international cohesion and
the sense of international duties and rights are far more advanced than
at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of
doing good to others must have a force adequate for the work which it feels
is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows
that a self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand
endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various movements
which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to render nations
in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward their own peoples,
more responsive to the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind;
and on the other hand that it
should keep prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself,
to repel any wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a
more advanced stage of
international relations would come under the head of the exercise of
the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to
all mankind not to sink into
helplessness before the powers of evil.
Arbitration Treaties--Second Hague Conference
In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken
in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe
the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China,
we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity
at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are
not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily
it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with
striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to
concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other
nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary
circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving
with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness
and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions and
wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed
on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether
it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval
of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases
must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no
effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove
the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and
proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances
of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power
to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as
we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily
very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, which in
spite of certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows
by its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil and religious
liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the worst crime,
like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic, so that individuals
and not classes are molested in their fundamental rights--it is inevitable
that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression to its horror
on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishenef, or when
it witnesses such systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression as
the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims,
and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.