That was a century characterized by Europe’s global preeminence, Britain’s naval superiority and financial dominance, and a stabilizing equilibrium of power on the European continent. It was also an era of robust nationalism, European imperial expansionism, and an Enlightenment faith in human improvement and progress. Peace and prosperity seemed secure. 

But that era died with the Great War, and the world entered a “crisis of the old order,” as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it. This 25-year period of drift and disruption gave the world the Great Depression and World War II, as well as the American ascendancy. The drift period finally ended in 1945 with the emergence of a new world order, the postwar Franklin Delano Roosevelt era, characterized by America’s global military reach, the strength of the dollar, and a balance of power between the U.S.-led West and an expansionist Soviet empire poised in the ashes of war to threaten Western Europe. And after the bipolar Western-Soviet standoff dissolved into an American-led unipolar world, the FDR era continued to hold sway throughout the world.

Over time, the postwar Western power centers produced a fundamental transformation in outlook and civic influence. The old nationalism gave way to an increasingly powerful globalist ethos. Universalist humanitarianism drove foreign policy to an ever greater extent. Multicultural sensibilities became widespread and strident. A new meritocratic elite gained sway in America along with new institutions of civic power, such as governmental bureaucracies, nongovernmental organizations, public employee unions, big media, and prestigious universities. America’s industrial vigor waned.

All this led, decades later, to Donald Trump’s rise and his assault on the elite and its power sources. The president seems bent on taking America back to that pre-World War I era of peace, prosperity, national pride, and the American ascendancy. And it is perhaps appropriate that, in pursuing his heady aims, he should single out for praise and guidance William McKinley of Ohio — a Civil War hero, congressman, and governor twice elected to the presidency. McKinley, after all, presided over America’s 1898 emergence as a colonial empire. 

But while McKinley’s story may provide insight into Trump’s expansive presidential ambitions, the Ohioan and his era also illustrate vast differences between McKinley’s time and our own. Further, McKinley didn’t display the kind of expansionist zeal or martial fervor that would correspond to Trump’s call for the U.S. acquisition of Greenland, for example, or his resolve to take back the Panama Canal and secure the wrecked land of Gaza. Such bold talk was more likely to come from McKinley contemporaries Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, all advocates of what Lodge called a “large policy” of imperial expansion. “The United States,” he declared, “must not fall out of the line of march.”

McKinley was not that kind of visionary. “Ah, you may be sure,” the president told the prominent anti-imperialist Carl Schurz, “there will be no jingo nonsense under my administration.” 

But, while no visionary and no jingoist, McKinley distinguished himself as a particularly adept managerial leader, perceptive in his assessment of events as they unfolded, bold in seizing opportunities as they emerged, and deft in maneuvering for the desired outcome. Consider his actions leading to the U.S. annexation of Hawaii. During the Benjamin Harrison presidency, from 1889 to 1893, a U.S. diplomat to the islands joined forces with a U.S. naval captain to force upon the royal family a new Hawaiian constitution (quickly labeled the Bayonet Constitution) that favored the islands’ white establishment over the monarchy. The emboldened whites, fabulously wealthy from the sugar trade, promptly sought U.S. annexation. A pleased President Harrison sent the matter to the U.S. Senate for ratification. 

But Harrison’s anti-expansionist successor, Grover Cleveland, abhorred the ruthless U.S. meddling in Hawaiian affairs. He yanked the ratification document from the Senate and suppressed the annexation movement.

By the beginning of McKinley’s presidency four years later, however, a new development had emerged. Japan, a rising Asian power, was making noises of wanting those islands, and Japan had a reasonable claim based on the mass influx of Japanese sugar-harvest workers, who now represented a quarter of the Hawaiian population. To ensure that Hawaii’s native Japanese were well treated, Japan demanded voting rights for them. If that happened, the islands would fall inevitably to Japan. 

McKinley said no. Hawaii represented one of the most significant strategic spots on the globe, enhancing power projection across the Pacific, east or west, and bolstering the defensive perimeter of any Pacific nation that controlled it. McKinley worked quietly behind the scenes in his usual way to grease the skids for an annexation treaty. Then, at the right moment, he boldly sent the document to the Senate for ratification. 

The next day, Japan’s minister to Washington, Hoshi Toru, recommended to his government that Japan send a fleet to Hawaii to seize the islands. Japan’s foreign minister, Count Okuma Shigenobu, replied, “It is too late.” Japan, outfoxed by the stealthy maneuverer in the White House, had to recede.

McKinley took a similar approach in dealing with Spain during its brutal effort to suppress an insurrection in Cuba against Spanish imperial rule. A wave of humanitarian outrage swept across America and agitated Congress in response to Spanish atrocities. Besides, the Caribbean strife was thwarting trade and endangering American lives and livelihoods in the region. 

McKinley, sympathetic toward the rebels but not wanting war with Spain, dispatched a prominent Illinois trial lawyer to Cuba to study the situation and report back. His conclusion: Spain would never manage to subdue the insurgency, and the insurgents would never accept a negotiated outcome short of complete independence. 

Despite the mounting pressure to demonstrate leadership on the matter, the president maintained his usual incremental approach. He told Spanish officials they must quickly end the destabilizing Caribbean conflict, either through victory (highly unlikely, as he well knew) or by negotiating an end to hostilities (also doubtful). When they wavered and stalled, he issued an ultimatum. Spain promptly broke off diplomatic relations with Washington and declared war. Employing subdued language and shunning overt jingoism, McKinley took his country to war.

He was a 19th-century man, and the 19th century was a time of empires. And so McKinley pondered the fate of Spain’s tattered possessions around the world and wondered if they should fall to the U.S. He certainly didn’t shy away from the idea. He scribbled a note to himself that he kept in his pocket through the war’s brief duration. It read: “While we are conducting the war … we must keep all we get; when the war is over, we must keep all we want.”

In the end, he kept Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, while Cuba was placed on a track to independence. It was a signal geopolitical achievement, but it extracted a high price as America soon found itself with an intractable Philippine insurgency that claimed the lives of 4,200 U.S. military men and some 20,000 Filipino combatants. Such was the cost of 19th-century Western colonialism. 

Nevertheless, these strategically located possessions provided coaling stations for America’s burgeoning navy, enabling the zestful nation to extend its defensive perimeter far from its shores and to project power and protect U.S. trade routes throughout Asia. Within a decade, U.S. exports to the region shot up to $73 million from just $26 million. 

But the 19th-century era of colonial imperialism was nearing its end, and McKinley helped signal its demise with his audacious 1900 “Open Door” policy in China. The aim was to ensure equal treatment for countries pursuing trade and economic development in the Middle Kingdom and halt the industrial powers’ frenzy of carving China into competing spheres of dominance. The frenzy threatened not only to destroy China’s ruling Qing dynasty, struggling with rampant societal chaos, but also to worsen tensions among Western nations seeking strategic harbors, coaling stations, and economic exploitation in that Asian land. 

Under McKinley, the U.S. not only refrained from the vicious China land grab but employed its growing diplomatic influence to discourage its continuance and to deprecate the 19th-century imperialist credo. Of course, the president’s four 1898 acquisitions seemed to reflect the imperialist sensibility of the time. But he saw these actions not as part of a general imperialist zeal but as products of distinct geopolitical imperatives. He frequently draped those actions in gauzy language about giving uneducated and underprivileged people the gifts of modern economics and democratic practice.  

It would take decades for this inchoate world outlook, noncolonial imperialism based on unparalleled military and economic power and mixed with an underlying humanitarianism, to ripen into a coherent and resonant political philosophy for the era of American global ascendancy. But its early stirrings emerged in McKinley’s foreign policy and its philosophical underpinnings. During McKinley’s presidency, the New York Times noted and saluted the “anti-imperialistic … sentiments” of its foreign policy in China.

In looking at Trump through the prism of McKinley’s persona and legacy, we see vast differences between the two men. McKinley was a man whose probity, caution, and incrementalism shrouded his analytical adroitness and tactical boldness. Trump is a man whose bombast, sweeping actions, and slashing pronouncements accentuate his expansive instinctual drive. 

Big contrasts also can be seen in the times of their prominence, although both emerged at the end of their respective epochs and foreshadowed elements of what was to come. But McKinley governed when America stood at the threshold of great-power status, leading the world in industrial production, dominating international shipbuilding, experiencing explosive growth in foreign trade, filling federal coffers to overflowing (following a period of recession-induced budget deficits), and influencing world events as never before. 

Given all that, it wasn’t surprising that the McKinley tenure was marked by widespread civic satisfaction and tranquility. 

Trump governs at a far different time, with the nation uncertain of its place in a rapidly changing world and rent by bitter internal clashes between the country’s prevailing status quo elite and Trump forces bent on upending the elite. Meanwhile, many Americans seem loath to accept or even acknowledge one of the fundamental developments of our time: the transformation of America from a unipolar world behemoth to a lesser power in a multipolar environment. This contributes to today’s “crisis of the old order,” to borrow Schlesinger Jr.’s phrase describing the tumultuous interwar years. 

We haven’t experienced the kinds of disruptions seen in the interwar period, and maybe we won’t. But navigating the shoals of our time will require plenty of flexibility of mind to assess and interpret our changing times. Such flexibility was precisely what was lacking in the consciousness of former President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, who clung to the old unipolar days when the American president could hold sway throughout the world with no one to say him nay. Those days are gone, as the devastation in Ukraine attests. 

McKinley displayed plenty of intellectual flexibility, manifested not just in his Hawaii and Cuba maneuverings but also in his willingness to alter his longtime advocacy of high protective tariffs and craft a new policy more in keeping with a changing world. As noted frequently in the recent accounts of McKinley’s career, the longtime advocate of high tariffs eventually concluded that severe trade barriers were not the right formula when America’s productive capacity in both the agricultural and industrial spheres was outstripping the domestic market’s ability to absorb such a flood of goods. Thus, he crafted a new concept of trade “reciprocity” in which America would reduce its tariffs if other nations would do the same.

TRUMP TURNS TO FORMER CRITICS TO HELP BUILD OUT SECOND ADMINISTRATION

As for Trump, his expressions and those of some of his people indicate he has absorbed the reality of a multipolar world. And he sometimes seems interested in bilateral trade agreements along the lines of the McKinley concept, though he has also sought to use tariffs as a bludgeon to get other nations to do his bidding on non-trade matters (such as border control help from Mexico and Canada), an approach that would have been unthinkable in McKinley’s day. 

Trump’s challenge, as he pursues his unprecedented assault on the American establishment, is to conduct his political crusade strictly within the bounds of the Constitution. His freewheeling approach to political contention generates widespread skepticism about whether he will do so. He couldn’t find better guidance on how to alleviate those fears and remain within the spirit of America’s founding than the political style and personal rectitude of his presidential hero, William McKinley.  

Robert W. Merry, former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent and Congressional Quarterly CEO, is the author of six books on American history and foreign policy.