It is only in relation to
the Monroe Doctrine that we still make much of the essential
incompatibility between European and American institutions, and by so
doing we distort and misinterpret the valid meaning of a national
democratic foreign policy. The existing domestic institutions of the
European nations are for the most part irrelevant to such a policy.
The one way in which the foreign policy of the United States can make
for democracy is by strengthening and encouraging those political
forces which make for international peace. The one respect in which the
political system, represented by the United States, is still
antagonistic to the European political system is that the European
nation, whatever its ultimate tendency, is actually organized for
aggressive war, that the cherished purposes of some of its states cannot
be realized without war, and that the forces which hope to benefit by
war are stronger than the forces which hope to benefit by peace. That is
the indubitable reason why the United States must remain aloof from the
European system and must avoid scrupulously any entanglements in the
complicated web of European international affairs.
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