In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter to his great friend and admirer Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. (As well as being Roosevelt’s best man at his wedding, and British ambassador to Washington during the Great War, it was Spring-Rice who wrote that most sublime of hymns, “I Vow to Thee My Country,” which is now being banned by the Church of England for being too patriotic.) “If new nations come to power,” he wrote, “the attitude of we who speak English should be one of ready recognition of the rights of the newcomers, of desire to avoid giving them just offense, and at the same time of preparedness in body and mind to hold our own if our interests are menaced.”[1]

Of course, the most recent newcomer nation that was arriving at Great Power status was the United States herself, bursting on to the international scene through her policy of translating her vast industrial wealth into raw military, especially naval, power. By 1904, she could have bought the assets of her nearest rival, Great Britain, outright and paid off Britain’s national debt into the bargain. And by the time Spring-Rice left Washington in 1918, the United States was capable of putting 430,000 men on one battlefield on the Western Front. Of the credit for this explosion of American power and influence in the world—which I believe to be the most positive phenomenon in human history since the British Empire—the lion’s share must go to Teddy Roosevelt.