New Atlanticist March 12, 2025 • 3:07 pm ET Print this page
Note to Trump: McKinley’s legacy is about more than tariffs and territory
By Daniel Fried
When in his second inaugural address US President Donald Trump praised his predecessor William McKinley, first elected in 1896, his purpose seemed clear. Trump lauded McKinley’s support for high tariffs and his setting the stage for the United States to seize a piece of Panama to build the Panama Canal, an expansionist move. Though Trump did not refer to it explicitly, McKinley is perhaps best remembered for his role in using the Spanish-American War of 1898 to acquire the Philippines and Puerto Rico and to annex Hawaii. But in mentioning McKinley, Trump was forecasting his future moves more than admiring the past.
In its first weeks, the new administration has followed what Trump suggested was McKinley’s model. The US president has famously—and notoriously, given the punishing stock market reaction—pushed for new tariffs. Trump also keeps making nineteenth-century-style imperial claims against Panama, Greenland, and Canada (a country the United States in its early years twice tried to conquer, only to be beaten back both times).
Is Trump right about McKinley as a high-tariff and imperialist president? Not quite, as it turns out.
As a Republican member of Congress, McKinley was a tariff hawk who pushed through the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890. That helped trigger a financial crisis and proved so damaging to American workers that the Republicans lost ninety-three seats in the next congressional election and Democrat Grover Cleveland beat incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison. Having been burnt, McKinley then softened his stance and tried a more flexible approach to trade negotiations. His last speech before his assassination revealed his shift from protectionism to freer trade. “The period of exclusiveness is past,” McKinley told the crowd in Buffalo, New York, on September 5, 1901. “The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.”
As often in US history, moral sense and the bottom line fit nicely together.
As for McKinley’s imperial actions, they must be set against another, different legacy of his administration, one once celebrated and now largely forgotten: the Open Door policy with respect to China. By the late-nineteenth century, Europe’s imperial powers were circling a weak China, seemingly ready to carve it up into spheres of influence or even outright colonies, as they had been doing with Africa. The United States, having conquered the Philippines, was now itself a power in the Western Pacific. But instead of trying to elbow its way into the ranks of imperialist European powers vying for position in China, the United States offered another way.
In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay issued a diplomatic note to the great powers that were threatening China—the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia. Hay’s message was in effect to call for equal access to the Chinese market and no closed or exclusive spheres of influence or imperial carve up. This met with mixed success, but Hay stuck with it. In 1900, the nationalist Boxer Rebellion attacked foreigners in Beijing, and European and Japanese troops marched on the capital. In response, Hay issued a second Open Door Note, which called for the great powers to respect China’s territorial and administrative integrity, even under the conditions of violent attacks on foreigners. This set the United States against European and Japanese temptations to use the Boxer Rebellion as an excuse to carve up China into colonies or exclusive spheres of influence.
The United States, the rising power of its age, thus took its new-found power in the Pacific, immediately after victory in its war with Spain, and used it to advance a rough vision of a rules-based, rather than imperial, international system. At the time, Americans took pride in what they saw as a more moral and principled position of their country than that of the imperial powers. The Open Door policy matched the prevailing American sense of righteousness, and it fit the United States’ growing commercial power. It supported US interests and potential more than a closed imperial system. As often in US history, moral sense and the bottom line fit nicely together.
The McKinley-Hay Open Door was not dispositive. It did not, for example, dissuade the Japanese from dropping their imperial designs against China. But the Open Door was an early, rough, and partial but revealing sketch of US grand strategy of the twentieth century, which was the “American century,” as TIME magazine’s publisher Henry Luce put it in 1941.
The core of the Open Door policy was a vision of an open world rather than one of closed empires. In his Fourteen Points speech to Congress in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson essentially expanded on the Open Door by outlining an ambitious rules-based world order that would supplant the imperial system then prevailing. The Atlantic Charter of 1941, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, built upon the Fourteen Points speech. The long peace established in 1945 was built on this foundation; it put US power in the service of a rules-based world that favored freedom. That free world contended successfully with the Soviet Union and prevailed during the Cold War, amid decades of rising prosperity, decolonization, and no third World War. And the United States grew very rich in the process.
Today, many associated with Trump’s political camp reject the notion of a rules-based order. Trump himself seemed to hold up McKinley as a champion of high tariffs and American empire, a countermodel. But the real record of McKinley is more interesting: he started in support of high tariffs and seized the Kingdom of Hawaii and several Spanish colonies. But he also presided over something new: a rising power that saw its interests best served not through empire but through a more open world. McKinley was not the father of the free-world strategy, but that strategy had its first expression on his watch.
Daniel Fried is the Weiser Family distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US assistant secretary of state for Europe.
Further reading
Image: Image: William McKinley delivers his inaugural address as outgoing President Cleveland listens in Washington, D.C., U.S. March 1897. McKinley's address was recorded by Edison's new motion picture camera and a gramophone. Library of Congress/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. EDITORIAL USE ONLY.