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The Spanish-American War of 1898 (that “splendid little war,” as Theodore Roosevelt and other nationalists called it), is noted by some historians as a watershed event in America’s shift toward internationalism,2 but even this was followed by a national reaction, and it was not until Woodrow Wilson that America’s foreign policy became systematically internationalist, and even interventionist. Wilson had always regarded America as exceptional, a democratic prototype which could serve as a working model for other nations. “This is the one country which has founded its policy upon dreams,” he said in 1901, “which has seen and told the world that it saw visions that were to come to pass through its instrumentality.”3
The impact of that involvement has been overwhelmingly to the good. Individual freedom and well-being has increased more during the twentieth century than in any previous era. The United States played a central role in that transformation. According to Freedom House’s tally of global democracy by the end of the twentieth century, 120 of the world’s 192 nations (with sixty-three percent of its population) were democratic, up from only six nations just a hundred years earlier. The world has been made, if not fully democratic, then safe for democracy.
Freedom has been the exception in history, not the rule. It was not inevitable that things would turn out the way they did. The aggressive authoritarianism commonplace in the 20th century might well have become predominant, and totalitarianism might have taken deep root. This is the story of the epic transformation of the United States, from isolationism to becoming a central actor in global affairs.