Primacy Deferred: American Grand Strategy in the 1920s and the Illusion of the “Empire Without Tears”

Abstract

The rejection of Wilson’s design did not mean the rejection of American engagement with the world. Rather, as this chapter demonstrates, it signposted a broader argument about how the United States could maintain and extend its power in a fundamentally altered world. This period constituted a transitional one in which political leaders, intellectuals, and public opinion attempted to navigate between honoring long-established principles of statecraft (e.g. Washington’s “non-entanglement” doctrine) and the new realities of the country’s now undeniably global strategic and economic interests and interconnections. Of particular note was the manner in which some of the “isolationist” arguments of the period drew on the “exemplarist” traditions and practices of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian statecraft to justify their calls for a focus on resolving domestic problems and warnings against the strategic, material and moral costs of imperial expansion and over-reach abroad.