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.  The policy of isolation is in this respect as wise to-day as it was in the time of its enunciation by Washington and Hamilton; and nobody seriously proposes to depart from it.  On the other hand, the basis for this policy is wholly independent of the domestic institutions of the European nations.  It derives from the fact that at any time those nations may go to war about questions in which the United States has no vital interest.  The geographical situation of the United States emancipates her from these conflicts, and enables her to stand for the ultimate democratic interest in international peace.

This justifiable policy of isolation has, moreover, certain important consequences in respect to the foreign policy of the United States in the two Americas.  In this field, also, the United States must stand in every practicable way for a peaceful international system, and whatever validity the Monroe Doctrine may have in its relation to the European nations is the outcome of that obligation.  If South and Central America were thrown open to European colonial ambitions, they would be involved very much more than they are at present in the consequences of European wars.  In this sense the increase of European political influence in the two Americas would be an undesirable thing which the United States would have good reason to oppose.  In this sense the extension of the European system to the American hemisphere would involve consequences inimical to democracy.  In 1801 the North was fighting, not merely to preserve American national integrity, but to prevent the formation of a state on its southern frontier which could persist only by virtue of a European alliance, and which would consequently have entangled the free republic of the Northern states in the network of irrelevant European complications.  Such would be the result of any attempt on the part of the European states to seek alliances or to pursue an aggressive policy on this side of the Atlantic.