[Wonder Warthog]

"1) TR was an “aggressive expansionist”, who saw American power finally able to assert itself on the world stage. He saw the US as being far too ‘federal’, a union of powerful states, instead of ruled by a powerful central government like other nations, which he wanted. International colonialism was like the game of Risk, a way to enlarge power and influence."

Sorry. Your starting point/president is half a century late. Try Lincoln, who also wanted a "strong central government", and went to war to get it. TR was only emulating the first Republican president.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Different philosophies involved. Lincoln could be described as a “classicalist”, best described by the Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa, in ‘Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates’ (1959)(a very good read, btw):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_V._Jaffa

Whereas T. Roosevelt was strongly Progressive. H.L. Mencken, at their height of T. Roosevelt’s popularity, wrote a vanity press book, just for his friends, that could have gotten him into serious trouble. On one page, it had a transcript from speeches by TR, opposing it, translated (by Mencken himself) text from Friedrich Nietzsche; clearly demonstrating that TR had plagiarized Nietzsche wholesale.

In that Nietzsche’s greatest influences have been in the subjects of existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism, this casts some very peculiar lights onto TR’s beliefs and actions.