Unfocused Contention: Senate Debates on Early Overseas Expansion and Diplomatic Muscle-Flexes

This paper will address the messy and oft ill-considered process by which the US Senate debated and enacted the emergence of the United States onto the world stage as a peer competitor. In an effort to align growing national potential with tentative foreign expansion, the diplomatic exertions from 1890 to the US entrance into WWI was by turns overly exuberant and then reticent, an unease only settled by its relative rise after the destruction of four empires by WWI. These gyrations were amplified in Senate debates on overseas expansion, American imperialism, hemispheric hegemony, and trans-Pacific trade as the Senate and Executive contested foreign policy primacy. The presentation will argue that what often passed as measured, informed debate on merits was actually rife with misinformation, influenced primarily by domestic politics, and generally lacked in any farsighted coherent concept of trajectory management or desired end state relative to the United States’ ascent to major power status.