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Book Reviews
A Benign Big Stick: Theodore Roosevelt and Global Policing
| HOLMES, JAMES R. Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations. Washington: Potomac Books, 2006. 327 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-57488-883-8.
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In December 2001, after the start of the war in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush announced at a press conference that he had just finished reading, in his words, "my book": Edmund Morris's Theodore Rex. Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain has called Theodore Roosevelt his "ultimate hero." American politicians from both parties regularly quote Roosevelt's "Walk softly and carry a big stick" maxim and cite the twenty-sixth president as an example to follow, particularly in foreign affairs. It is fitting, then, that Roosevelt's ideas on American power are newly explored in the age of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war. |
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James R. Holmes, a senior research associate at the University of Georgia Center for International Trade and Security, studies the origins of Roosevelt's ideas about the United States exercising "police power" in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Holmes finds these origins in Roosevelt's experiences as United States Civil Service commissioner, New York City Police commissioner, and governor of New York. Roosevelt's willingness to use state power to intervene in domestic labor disputes, Holmes believes, gave Roosevelt "a ready-made conceptual tool, the police power, to cope with events not only on American soil but also in the Caribbean littoral" (50). After looking at how Roosevelt developed this idea of police power, one that Holmes sees as a consistent "common thread" in Roosevelt's foreign policy, Holmes dedicates the largest section of his book to a series of "Case Studies"—the Philippines, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Santo Domingo, and Morocco—to prove his point. Holmes concludes by crediting Roosevelt with crafting an American form of "imperial policing" superior to Europe's and speculates as to how Roosevelt's understanding of police power might guide current policy-makers. |
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Readers of international relations and military strategy may find this book valuable. Holmes sprinkles his prose with contemporary terms like "failed states" and "terrorism" and discusses the development of American "small-wars doctrine" at length. Students of Theodore Roosevelt or the Progressive Era, however, will find that Holmes's book adds little to the works of Howard Beale, Richard Collin, or Frederick Marks.1 |
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Foremost among Holmes's challenges is that of causation: proving that Roosevelt's early life and career gave him the framework with which to think about American police power in the world. "Exactly how he made the intellectual leap from the domestic to the international realm is not entirely clear," Holmes concedes (63). By starting with the idea of police power and working backwards, Holmes falls into the trap of trying to establish a causal connection between every facet of Roosevelt's life and this idea: Even Roosevelt's The Winning of the West is a portrayal of federal "police power" in the American West. By trying to establish this as a broad unifying concept, Holmes assumes a level of consistency in Roosevelt's thinking and actions that simply did not exist. For instance, Holmes asserts that Roosevelt's backing away from police-power rhetoric in the later years of his presidency did not represent a significant shift in his thinking. "For one thing, such a retrenchment would be out of character," Holmes asserts. "Roosevelt held clear views on most subjects and clung to them tenaciously" (117). This is a caricature of Roosevelt that does the veteran politician little justice. While readers of Rooseveltian rhetoric are often blinded by his self-righteousness, in fact Roosevelt was a savvy politico who knew when to bend as the political winds blew. Holmes overlooks times that Roosevelt changed his mind—he advocated annexing the Philippines but almost immediately saw them as the United States' Achilles heel in Asia—and ignores immediate causes for Roosevelt's foreign policy, such as domestic politics, the presidential election of 1904, and public opinion. When reading Holmes, it seems that Roosevelt made his foreign policy decisions in a vacuum. |
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