The story of how the United States emerged--reluctantly and
belatedly--to lead the world has long since acquired the weight of a
well-known parable. Like any good parable, this one aims chiefly to
admonish, to warn against the recurrence of error, to suppress
wayward and irresponsible urgings to which Americans are thought
susceptible.
It is a melodrama in two acts turning on the pivot of the Second
World War. In Act I, encompassing the period from the founding of the
republic until the onset of World War II, internal and hemispheric
matters preoccupied the United States. American diplomacy was
"immature." Although the United States early on acquired immense
wealth and possessed the potential to be a great power, it played a
role in world affairs that was fitful, if not capricious. From time
to time, rising out of the vagaries of politics, a prophet --most
famously Woodrow Wilson--might rouse his countrymen, stirring up
their yearnings to save the world and exhorting them to assume
responsibilities commensurate with their power and moral pretensions.
Yet, although not above flirting with such notions, Americans
rejected both prophet and summons and--apart from a pronounced
tendency to issue unsolicited moralizing advice--turned their backs
on the wider world.
Events of the 1930s changed all that. Faced with the rise of Nazism
and Japanese militarism, the American people struggled throughout
much of that decade first to ignore and then to insulate themselves
from the dual threat. But the enormity of the danger posed by Germany
and Japan defeated that effort. Swept into war, Americans were
likewise swept to the forefront of world leadership and the curtain
dropped on Act I.
