Hindsight: A Retrospective on American Foreign Policy from 1865-1912

The creating of narratives is essential to the study of history. They allow for better understanding of cause and effect, filtering out unnecessary details. These narratives fail, however, in their tendency to essentialize movements and processes, none so much, perhaps, as in the history of foreign relations. Rather than adhering exclusively to force or to negotiation, between 1865 and 1912, pragmatic Americans used a combination of both hard and soft power to extend their ideas and institutions. The approaches were not mutually exclusive; many foreign policy objectives were met using not only force and coercion, but also commerce and negotiation. What's more, each decision was the product of power struggles between businesses, interest groups, and even ideologies.

From 1865 to 1896, as the United States attempted to dominate the Western Hemisphere, foreign policy was decidedly mixed in its application. Despite clergyman Josiah Strong's insistence that his "powerful race will move down upon Mexico [1] Several policy decisions, however, stand out in their forcefulness.

Perhaps the greatest of these hard power decisions takes root as far back as Colonial

America. US relations with its indigenous population had never been good, but as the frontier shrunk, policymakers, trying to consolidate the western territories, ceased treating Native American tribes as foreign nations in 1871.[2] Ditching treaties for forced moves onto Government land, resistance was crushed mercilessly as at Wounded Knee. Of the expansion, Theodore Roosevelt would later write that "the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not".[3]