American Foreign Policy

The Founders believed that sovereign nations, like individuals, cannot be ruled without their consent. The aim of American foreign policy is to secure the nation, the rights of our citizens, and our national honor. 

American foreign policy remained fairly consistent throughout the first century of the republic. The early policies centered on growing into a strong nation and maintaining our unique position by preventing European powers from becoming powerful threats in the Western Hemisphere.  

In the Spanish-American War, America intervened in the internal affairs of a European colony in the Western Hemisphere. As a result of the war, America acquired territories that it ruled with no intention of admitting to statehood, fundamentally changing the nature of American foreign policy. 

World War One marks the rise of the new progressive foreign policy among American elites who sought to spread American principles abroad and make the world safe for democracy. But the American public still largely opposed foreign interventions, and after the Great War, they elected presidents who promised to avoid foreign entanglements and return to a noninterventionist policy. 

America was officially neutral during the first two years of World War Two, but in many important ways our “neutrality” violated the nonintervention principles of the American Founders. The attack on Pearl Harbor led Americans to accept war. And with the rising Soviet threat at the end of the War, American public opinion accepted interventionist policies. 

After World War Two, Europe was weakened and America was the only power capable of standing against Soviet communism. We pursued a policy of containment and intervened in smaller nations to stop the spread of communism rather than directly confront the Soviet Union. 

The rise of nuclear power and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War from erupting into outright war between the great powers. The superior industrial and technological capacity of the United States enabled America to outlast the Soviet Union. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America was left as the sole great power on the world stage, which led many Americans to expect a return to noninterventionist policies. But the foreign policy establishment argued that America as the sole great power left in the world had a responsibility of leading in a new international order. The threat of global terrorism entrenched this new role.  

After 9/11, the Bush Administration definitively became interventionist in pursuing the global war on terror. American public opinion has consistently opposed making this international role permanent, but it has persisted within the foreign policy establishment. Donald Trump’s America First campaign was the first serious challenge to America’s role as the leader of an international order, but the foreign policy establishment largely still pursued international interventionist policies during his administration and continues to do so under Biden.