Roosevelt's Foreign Policy Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

Roosevelts Foreign Policy - Case Study typeDuring the twenties the the Statesn people showed in elections that they were unwilling to join the alliance, and Roosevelt himself came to distrust it as a spin of Wilsons project. Advocates of collective security held the United States partly responsible for this distortion because its absence encouraged use of the League for narrowly nationalist purposes by the other victorious Allies. In any case, isolationist sentiment in the Democratic Party became so strong that, in 1932, it was politically expedient for Roosevelt as a presidential candidate to reject United States entry into the League, and this he did forwards he was nominated.The most important flavour of the United States government towards collective security before 1933 was the Stimson Doctrine. By it the United States led the world in its first action against an aggression by a first-class power, Japan. It carried into practice the revolution in external law which had occu rred since pre First World War days, when the rule had been gen geological eral consent by the other powers to conquests by one nation and demands for shares in the spoils as compensation. Even the United States had on occasion played that game. When it took the Filipino Islands for itself, it threw a few other Spanish Pacific islands to Germany to quiet its complaints. Japan was always ready to cook up the powers, and particularly the United States, for its own gains in Manchuria and China, but the Stimson Doctrine marked a young era in which an aggressor became a criminal who could not bribe the jury. Its ultimate importance may be gauged by the fact that Beard points to Roosevelts pre-Inauguration agreement to maintain it as a fateful step direct in the direction of Pearl Harbour. 1 A supporter of the policy would call it the first of the serial publication of actions which led the United States into the United Nations.That a Republican administration should abandon imperialis m in Latin America and move towards collective security in Asia has puzzled observers and historians. The development of public opinion was basic. The personal pacifism of President Hoover was doubtless influential. The Hoover administration was divided between internationalists led by Stimson, who advocated the new policies as steps towards full cooperation with the League of Nations, and imperialists who wished to checkmate Japan as a trade compete and to sacrifice the small gains of direct intervention in the Caribbean republics for the sake of large gains in Latin American good will and trade.Roosevelt and Hull, like Stimson, regarded the new policies as minimum steps. But these renovations of foreign policy passed virtually unnoticed by the public at large as the depression caused painful absorption in domestic affairs. The Hoover administration, with its gift for boring the public, had failed to dramatize the issues. Roosevelt, after he was elected President and before he wa s inaugurated, found in the Stimson Doctrine the only area in which he could cooperate with the extravert administration. He promised Stimson to maintain his policy and confirmed the promise in a public statement. 2 This tie-in was the only one Roosevelt was willing to establish with the Hoover administration after the bitter election campaign, and it is emblematical of continuity in favour of collective securi