China’s Maritime Provocations Are Nothing Next To America’s Adventurism A Century Ago

On May 24, for the first time in Donald Trump’s presidency, a U.S. Navy destroyer conducted a freedom-of-navigation operation in the South China Sea, cruising within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef, a disputed island in the Spratly archipelago. The operation, the fifth in the last two years, contested Chinese claims of sovereignty over such islands in the South China Sea, which an international tribunal had ruled in 2016 to be in violation of international law. As U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis argued earlier this year, “China has shredded the trust of nations in the region. … the point behind a rules-based international order — what those words mean — is that we all play by the rules.”

American leaders enjoy lecturing the Chinese on “maintaining the rules-based international order.” The message is clear: China should be more like us. But Americans should be careful what they wish for. In the United States of Amnesia, very few Americans have any inkling of how we behaved at an analogous period in our history.

Just over a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt led a rapidly growing U.S. into what he was supremely confident would be an American century. In the decade that followed Roosevelt’s arrival in Washington, the U.S. drove Spain from the Western Hemisphere, threatened Germany and Britain with war, supported an insurrection in Colombia to create the new country of Panama and declared itself the policeman of the Western Hemisphere, asserting the right to intervene whenever and wherever it judged necessary.