Question

How did militaraism threaten the peace in early 20th century europe

Answer 1

Nationalism, an effort to exert greater influence beyond the country's borders, and a willingness to threaten or use force, while not new in United States foreign policy, seemed more apparent as the country moved into the twentieth century. Several episodes of American foreign and military policy highlight this trend.

Deficiencies of the U.S. Army in the Spanish war necessitated a revamping of the military organization. Using European precedents, Secretary of War Elihu Root proposed several changes, including creation of the Army War College and a general staff. Much opposition came from entrenched interests in the army and the state militias, but through compromise Root's proposals passed. America's participation in World War I was more effective because of these changes. For some people development of the general staff raised a specter of militarism. Walter Millis, a student of militarism, writing in 1958 commented on Root's contribution and mused that without it American participation in the Great War might not have occurred. "But Root, like all large figures," Millis said, "was only a reflection of his times. There were many other architects of the great disaster of militarism which was to supervene in 1914–18."

The new navy was begun under the administrations of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur. In 1883, Congress approved four steel vessels, and the building program continued through subsequent administrations, especially the Mahan-influenced presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, when emphasis was on battleship construction. A major turn came after war broke out in Europe. Since Roosevelt's presidency, American naval policy had called for a navy second only to Great Britain. In 1915 policy proclaimed a navy second to none. The naval appropriations act of 1916 had no precedent for its naval construction plans. A strong opponent, House majority leader Claude Kitchin, argued futilely that approval would make the United States "the greatest military-naval Nation the world has ever seen." The act reveals an interesting dichotomy, showing the uneasy American attitude toward military measures by combining large appropriations for warships with a renunciation of armed aggression, and an endorsement, in principle, of disarmament. Wilson's support for a strong navy shows his realization of the interaction of military power and diplomacy. The navy would allow the United States to meet existing challenges and to perform the international tasks it expected after the war.

In Latin American policy and in implementation of the Monroe Doctrine, Americans showed a new assertiveness resulting, particularly in the twentieth century, in frequent military interventions, intervention to remain a standard response to political instability until the 1930s. In 1896, Secretary of State Richard Olney and President Grover Cleveland confronted the British with "the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." A few years later, Theodore Roosevelt, fearful of European intervention (perhaps a German naval base in the debt-ridden Dominican Republic), accepted for the United States the role of international policeman in the Caribbean. From the Roosevelt Corollary, the Platt Amendment with Cuba, the responsibilities of dollar diplomacy, and the 1903 canal treaty with Panama, whose independence Roosevelt assured by timely naval maneuvers, there emerged a Caribbean foreign policy often characterized by the big stick. American troops and tutelage countered political and economic chaos. Clashes were bound to occur: in 1912, U.S. forces in the Caribbean for the first time went into battle to suppress revolutionaries, this time in Nicaragua. In ensuing years, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Nicaragua experienced extensive interventions, often with violence and with a full-scale guerrilla war in Nicaragua in the 1920s and early 1930s. Guerrilla opposition was not new to Americans, who had faced it in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.