WWI US Interests

3 Pages 716 Words

From 1898 to 1919, the United States failed to recognize that it had vital interest at stakes in Europe, where it tried to stay aloof. At the same time, it had few or no such interests in Latin America where it eagerly became involved. Assess the validity of this statement.

The United States, at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, began to emerge on the world stage as a full-fledged nation. As a nation, it needed to be in contact with the current events happening around it. From 1898 to 1919, the US was eagerly involved in both Europe and Latin America because it found vital stakes in both spheres.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first presidents who moved America onto an international stage. The world saw his big stick, his great white fleet and his artful maneuvering of the Russo-Japanese treatise. Later, Woodrow Wilson was charged with continuing America’s influence on a moral basis, as well as tying America into the First World War in Europe. These two presidents set the stage for America in the western hemisphere and the eastern hemisphere, respectively.

As the United States navy grew at the prodding of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s writing and Roosevelt’s insistence, it became necessary to move her large ships efficiently about the world. This necessity was brought into the limelight when a United States ship had to travel the lengthy passage around Latin America in order to reach the revolution in Cuba. Such a fiasco of stopping to re-coal and traveling the distance forced the president to recognize the need for a canal, more notably through Panama. Once the Panama Canal was built, it saved US shipping and travel thousands of dollars because it need not pay in order to pass through—dubiously acquired—United States soil.

Beyond the Panamanian strip, America found the constant revolutions, unpaid debts and general instability in its own backyard to be a magnet for European interference. To pr...