John Bassett Moore on the American empire

There can hardly be room for doubt that the Founding Fathers of the United States, when they vested in Congress the power to declare war, never imagined that they were leaving it to the executive to use the military and naval forces of the United States all over the world for the purpose of actually coercing other nations, occupying their territory, and killing their soldiers and citizens, all according to his own notions of the fitness of things, as long as he refrained from calling his action war or persisted in calling it peace.

~ John Bassett Moore, Secretary of State in 1898, authority on international law, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 60, 1921