Teddy Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was explicit in his assertion of an American right to use military force against other countries for ethical reasons. For Roosevelt, it wasn’t necessary that the miscreant country had first slaughtered large numbers of its own people. The Monroe Doctrine had famously proclaimed an American right to use force to prevent (or reverse) European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt went further, enunciating an American right to land soldiers anywhere to avert “chronic wrongdoing.” Although this justification might appear a bit expansive, the question remains: Where was Teddy Roosevelt when we so needed him in the past few weeks? Wherever he was, he wasn’t in the White House.