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Back in 1899, the naturalist, historian, politician, sometime soldier, and future president Theodore Roosevelt neatly summarized the events of the century then drawing to a close: “Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion.” When T.R. uttered this truth, a fresh round of expansionism was under way, this time reaching beyond the fastness of North America into the surrounding seas and oceans. The United States was joining with Europeans in a profit-motivated intercontinental imperialism.

The previous year, U.S. forces had invaded and occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Pacific island of Luzon, and annexed Hawaii as an official territory. Within the next two years, the Stars and Stripes was flying over the entire Philippine archipelago. Within four years, with Roosevelt now in the White House, American troops arrived to garrison the Isthmus of Panama, where the United States, employing considerable chicanery, was setting out to build a canal. Thereafter, to preempt any threats to that canal and other American business interests, successive U.S. administrations embarked on a series of interventions throughout the Caribbean. Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson had no desire to annex Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; they merely wanted the United States to control what happened in those small countries, as it already did in nearby Cuba. Though President Trump’s recent bid to purchase Greenland from Denmark may have failed, Wilson—perhaps demonstrating greater skill in the art of the deal—did persuade the Danes in 1917 to part with the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) for the bargain price of $25 million. At least until Trump moved into the White House, Wilson’s purchase of the Virgin Islands appeared to have sated the American appetite for territorial acquisition. With that purchase, the epic narrative of a small republic becoming an imperial behemoth concluded and was promptly filed away under the heading of Destiny, manifest or otherwise—a useful turn, since Americans were and still are disinclined to question those dictates of God or Providence that work to their benefit.

Yet rather than accept the nation’s fate as achieved, President Wilson radically reconfigured American ambitions. Expansion was to continue but was henceforth to emphasize hegemony rather than formal empire. This shift included a seldom-noticed racial dimension. Prior to 1917, the United States had mostly contented itself with flexing its muscles among non-white peoples. Wilson sought to encroach into an arena where the principal competitors were white. Pacifying “little brown brothers” (Taft’s disparaging term for Filipinos) was like playing baseball in Rochester or Pawtucket. Now the United States was ready to break into the big leagues.

For Americans today, it is next to impossible to appreciate the immensity of the departure from tradition that President Wilson engineered in 1917. Until that year, steering clear of foreign rivalries had constituted a sacred precept of American statecraft. The barrier of the Atlantic was sacrosanct, to be breached by merchants but not by soldiers.

“The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations,” George Washington had counseled in his Farewell Address, “is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” This dictum had applied in particular to U.S. relations with Europe. Washington had explicitly warned against allowing the United States to be dragged into “the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”

The Great War persuaded President Wilson to disregard Washington’s advice. At the war’s outset, in 1914, Wilson had declared that the United States would be “neutral in fact, as well as in name.” In reality, as the conflict settled into a bloody stalemate, his administration tilted in favor of the Allies. By the spring of 1917, with Germany having renewed U-boat attacks on U.S. shipping, he tilted further, petitioning Congress to declare war on the Reich. Congress complied, and in short order over a million doughboys were headed to the Western Front. In terms of sheer roll-the-dice boldness, Wilson’s decision to go to war against Germany dwarfs Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War and George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was an action utterly without precedent.

And as with Vietnam and Iraq, the results were costly and disillusioning. Although U.S. forces entered the fight in large numbers only weeks before the armistice in November 1918, American deaths exceeded 116,000—this when the total U.S. population was less than one third what it is today. Happy to accept American help in defeating the Hun, British and French leaders wasted little time once the fighting had stopped in rejecting Wilson’s grandiose vision of a peaceful world order based on his famous Fourteen Points. By the time the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty, in November 1919 and again in March 1920, it had become evident that Wilson’s stated war aims would remain unfulfilled. In return for rallying to the Allies in their hour of need, the United States had gained precious little. In Europe itself, meanwhile, the seeds of further conflict were already being planted.

A deeply disenchanted American public concluded, not without reason, that the U.S. entry into the war had been a mistake, an assessment that found powerful expression in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and other interwar writers. The man who followed Wilson in the White House, Warren G. Harding, agreed. The principal lesson to be drawn from the war, “ringing” in his ears, “like an admonition eternal, an insistent call,” Harding declared, was, “It must not be again!” His was not a controversial judgment. During the 1920s, therefore, George Washington’s charge to give Europe wide berth found renewed favor. According to legend, the United States then succumbed to two decades of unmitigated isolationism.