Long before I became a college history professor, I was a schoolboy. I have been thinking a lot about a picture in one of my public-school history textbooks of the 1960s. The textbook picture originally appeared in 1905 in a popular American satirical magazine called Judge.

Titled “The World’s Constable,” the cartoon depicted President Theodore Roosevelt dressed up as a policeman, grasping a document that read, “Tell yer troubles to a policeman,” wielding a night stick and surrounded by supplicating figures representing the countries of the world. 

Judge was reacting to President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 message to Congress. He wrote that if a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence that results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, ultimately requires intervention by some civilized nation, and, in the western hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. We would interfere with countries in Central America or South America only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.

Some historians call this speech the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Roosevelt and his presidential successors, for the next 121 years, sent the U.S. military or the CIA to act as the world’s policeman, without a Congressional Declaration of War. They have invaded countries, overturned governments, or snatched the rulers of Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Granada, Chile and installed the Shah as ruler of Iran. President Harry Truman initially called the Korean War “a police action." How’s that for an understatement.

Now President Donald Trump has attacked Venezuela and Iran, blown motorboats and their occupants, probably including fisherman, into oblivion without an arrest and trial, and is threatening to attack Cuba and Greenland whilst denigrating any other country that disagrees with him. For someone miffed that he has not gotten the Nobel Peace Prize, this is surely the most mismanaged campaign for it in world history.

The contradiction of the world’s policeman is that a domestic cop-on-the-beat is governed by laws. Trump self-appointing himself as the world’s policeman, unconstrained by Congress, is an ungoverned loose cannon — including his lack of interest in public opinion. He is following his personal definitions of international law and America’s best interests; and imposing his definitions of right-and-wrong on other nations. If another country did what the U.S. is doing, we’d denounce it as an imperialist aggressor. It reminds me of another lesson I learned as a schoolboy: If the shoe fits, wear it.

When J.D. Vance was running to be Trump’s vice president, he campaigned on a platform of studied indifference to world conflicts.

"I gotta be honest with you,” he said, “I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

Trump told us the idea of creating regime change in other countries was a failed strategy. I guess they didn’t get their own memo.

I think there are two memos we all got when we were schoolchildren. We learned in civics class that the U.S. Constitution vests the Congress with the power to declare war. They also taught us a lesson attributed to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis: “The most important political office is that of the private citizen.” That is true only if citizens take their responsibility seriously and exercise the powers both of public opinion and the ballot.

Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A., teaches history of medicine at New York Medical College, where he is also chancellor and CEO. This essay represents his opinion and not that of the college.

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