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He also added, “It is impossible not to sense that we are acting for all mankind.”
Until 1789 in Philadelphia, the foundation of most political systems was as John Adams had said, fear. Now there was a new model: the consent of the governed. The American impact was immediate and far-reaching. French drafters of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man referred to the influence of the Americans; one early draft bears in its margins the editing of Jefferson, then the American ambassador in Paris. Poland adopted a short-lived constitution in 1791. Subsequently France, Spain, and Portugal, then later Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela. Today, nearly every nation in the world has a written constitution, all of which bear the imprint of the American model. The American constitution “has made as great a change in all the relations and balances and gravitations of power, as the appearance of a new planet in the system of the solar world,” wrote the British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke.
Americans had from the beginning regarded their national project as a “shining light upon a hill,” a democratic model for the world, but for most of their history they were content to influence by example rather than by direct involvement or “entangling alliances” with other nations. Only in the twentieth century did this turn, gradually at first and then more aggressively, into an active involvement in international affairs. The idea of a coalition of nations united to preserve world peace was not a new one with Woodrow Wilson. Teddy Roosevelt had proposed such an association in 1910, with the United States and Britain at its core, “righteousness” as its motive force and, if necessary, military power to achieve its ends. In 1915 William Howard Taft, the former president, headed the League to Enforce the Peace, which advocated the resolution of international disputes through mediation, supported by force.1
Long before then, of course, America had been an international trading power whose cultural and commercial ties spanned the globe. But it was not until the twentieth century that these were matched by a concomitant degree of systematic political activity.