Theodore Roosevelt's Naval Diplomacy: The U.S. Navy and the Birth of the American Century

Abstract

Commander Henry J. Hendrix has writ- ten a neat monograph based on his doctoral work. He makes two related arguments: first, that one cannot understand the diplomatic style of President Theodore Roosevelt without first understanding his attitude toward the efficacy and use of naval power; and second, that the existing literature has not adequately integrated naval and military historical methods of analysis with existing diplomatic historical approaches. Consequently, previous interpretations of Roosevelt's foreign policy decisions, as they relate to incidents that involved the use of naval power, are incomplete, precisely because they do not fuse the diplomatic and political with the naval—especially the perspective reflected by the navalist attitudes of Theodore Roosevelt.