What do you call a corollary to a corollary?

BRICS

Theodore Roosevelt was more belligerently patriotic than any other American president. Yet it was precisely because he was so patriotic that he didn't fall for the delusions of American exceptionalism. He didn't confuse being patriotic with being right.

During a moment of American tension with Germany in the 1890s, Roosevelt wrote to a German friend to defend the American position. He did so most vigorously. Yet he allowed that if he had been German, he would have defended the German position with equal energy.

Significantly, Roosevelt wasn't so candid when he was president and speaking in public. Then he claimed that the American position was right, not simply that it was the American position. As president he could hardly do otherwise. Still, he didn't harbor illusions that foreign leaders could be persuaded to agree with him. They and their countries had their own interests and points of view.

Roosevelt was unusual in this regard. Most presidents have believed what they’ve said in declaring the American position the right one. Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt's bête noire, was the type specimen. Wilson was a devout Presbyterian and predestinarian. After his election in 1912, his campaign manager reminded him that there were many Democrats who had worked hard to make him president and expected to be rewarded with jobs in his administration. Wilson glared at the man and declared that God had made him president.

Wilson's foreign counterparts found him insufferable. Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France, was informed during World War I that Wilson had proposed a peace plan in fourteen points. Clemenceau remarked that ten points had sufficed for the plan God gave Moses on Mount Sinai.

When Clemenceau and Britain's David Lloyd George opposed Wilson at the the postwar Paris peace conference, Wilson thought they were pig-headed and perverse. His failure to disguise his opinion made for some difficult moments at the conference and contributed to the eventual refusal of the United States to ratify the treaty the conference produced.

The Roosevelt position—that foreign leaders should be expected to act in defense of their countries’ interests—is worth keeping in mind, perhaps now more than ever. Since World War II, American presidents and diplomats have spoken and acted as though foreign leaders should accept the sincerity and selflessness of American hegemony in the world. Those leaders who have not done so have been treated as bad people with evil designs. Stalin intended the conquest of Western Europe. Mao was a megalomaniac who would revolutionize the world. Ho was a Mao wannabe.

There was no evidence for the assertion about Stalin. The statement about Mao was a caricature. The last thing Ho wanted was for Vietnam to fall into China's orbit.

The leaders of the countries the United States is most worried about today are best understood as pursuing national interests—that is, as acting much as Theodore Roosevelt would have acted in their places. In 1904 Roosevelt proclaimed what soon was called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Expanding on that doctrine’s insistence that Europeans keep their hands off the Americas, Roosevelt declared that within the Americas, the United States would exercise a “police power” to enforce good behavior. As an illustration, Roosevelt underwrote the secession of Panama from uncooperative Colombia in order to secure America's right to construct a canal.

Roosevelt would have appreciated why China's Xi Jinping insists on keeping Taiwan within China's sphere. He would have understood Vladimir Putin's desire to hold Ukraine similarly close. He wouldn't have expected Iran's mullahs to act much differently than they have done.

Which is by no means to say he would have done nothing to oppose China, Russia and Iran. If he had inherited the global hegemony the United States acquired at the end of World War II, he would have been just as energetic in defending it as every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden, with the exception of Donald Trump. But he wouldn't have fooled himself into thinking he was doing the world's good, merely the good of the United States.

Nor would he have been surprised at the emergence of an opposition group. In the first decade of this century, Brazil, Russia, India and China gathered to consider how to offset America's dominance. They were joined by South Africa and came to be called the BRICS group. Several other countries have since joined, with a total population approaching half of humanity.

Nothing unites the members except a desire to resist American power. They include democracies and autocracies. They are secular and religious. They are resource-rich and resource-poor. With the exception of Brazil, they probably wouldn’t begrudge Washington the Americas bailiwick Roosevelt claimed. But the global sphere of influence defended by American leaders since 1945 is more than they are willing to accept.

Were Theodore Roosevelt alive today, he wouldn’t applaud BRICS. But neither would he take moral offense at it. Power begets challenge.

Yet challenge needn't escalate to war. Roosevelt had to deal with a rising Japan. Because he didn't moralize about such matters, he was able to calculate how far Japan could be contained and how much it had to be accommodated. After the Japanese launched a war against Russia with a stunningly successful surprise attack, he talked them out of pressing their luck and into a peace settlement that gave them more than they had started with but less than they desired. For his efforts, Roosevelt won the Nobel peace prize.

A Nobel might await a president who ends the war in Ukraine. Or averts one in the Taiwan Strait. A dose of TR’s realism would be a good way to start.