American Foreign Policy

ZACH P. MESSITTE

Much ink has been spilled in recent years about whether or not the United States will remain the world's sole superpower. The rise of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), American imperial overstretch in the Middle East, and economic and political problems at home have led many observers to question whether or not America's "unipolar moment" that began with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is now coming to an end. This chapter examines the broad trends in American foreign policy and looks at the challenges facing President Barack Obama and his team of foreign policy advisers. Beginning with an overview of the theoretical currents that underpin American foreign policy, the chapter proceeds to a short history of presidential leadership in shaping America's role in the world. It concludes with a review of the Obama administration's foreign policy and poses some questions about the global challenges facing the United States in the next decade.

IDEALISM AND REALISM IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

There is a general misperception that the United States had little in the way of foreign policy design before the end of the nineteenth century. Many introductory classes spend very little time examining the country's relations with the world prior to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Branding the Republic isolationist, or focusing instead on manifest destiny and the rush to populate the continent from coast to coast, simplifies an analysis of the first 125 years of America's relations with the rest of the world. George Washington's famous farewell address that warned his countrymen to stay away from the intrigue of European politics and "avoid entangling alliances" is part of a trinity of pre–Civil War pronouncements that guide most students of the discipline. The big questions Washington asked are as relevant today as they were when he was leaving the presidency in 1796. "Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?" (Washington 1796). When Washington's admonitions are matched up with John Quincy Adams's statement in 1821 that America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy" and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned Europeans from messing around with the Americas, a very real perception emerges that the new nation had bigger issues than foreign policy (i.e., slavery, states' rights, immigration, and industrial expansion) to deal with during the 1800s. There is some truth in this straightforward analysis of American foreign policy; the pre-1945 global reach of America pales by comparison to the past sixty-five years. The American foreign policy tradition, however, and the basic theory that provides its foundations, stretches back much further than the World War II era.

Idealism and realism were at the core of the emerging discipline of international relations that came out of the political failure to stop World War I. The two schools of thought have a long tradition in the conduct of American foreign policy that predates the twentieth century and colors the nation's thinking about the world from the beginning of U.S. history (Mead 2002). Idealism and realism helped shape the three great eras that marked American foreign policy prior to the Second World War: expansionism, imperialism, and isolationism. They also guided the two major periods that followed 1945: containment and the still undefined post–Cold War decades of the 1990s and 2000s. For most of the nineteenth century, however, American foreign policy focused on expansionism (the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Mexican Cession of 1848, and the purchase of Alaska following the Civil War). By the later stages of the 1800s, and into the twentieth century, American imperial adventures dominated foreign policy in places as diverse as Cuba, China, and Honduras and on the battlefields of Belgium and France during World War I. I. Following the Treaty of Versailles, the United States, while still professing a more idealist response to world problems, ultimately cocooned itself from Europe's growing political and economic woes. The U.S. Senate never ratified the League of Nations and later made the Great Depression even worse by enacting the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariff that led to a severe reduction of U.S. exports and imports and largely ignored the rise of Nazi Germany.

Historically the American foreign policy realists were fundamentally concerned with the power of the United States and how best to advance the security and economic well-being of the country. Leaders such as Alexander Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt fall into this category. Financial stability, credit-worthiness, and the health of defense-related industry preoccupied Hamilton from the birth of the Republic (Harper 2004). Teddy Roosevelt's muscular foreign policy ushered in a twentieth century of occasionally brilliant diplomacy, frequent American military involvement, and protection of business interests abroad. The (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine called for American intervention in any Latin American country that had economic troubles in order to preempt European meddling. Theodore Roosevelt also supported the creation of the great white fleet, making the U.S. Navy one of the largest and most mobile in the world.

The idealists, on the other hand, emphasized the legal and moral aspects of the world order. They also made an impact on the scope of American foreign policy prior to World War II by calling on the United States "to help make the world safe for democracy" and, by proxy, to buttress free trade and capitalism. Most famously embodied by Woodrow Wilson, the idealists saw the lessons of World War I as a way to "vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power" (Wilson 1917). The idealists initially took the lead after World War I with the creation of the League of Nations and put forth impossibly utopian ideas like the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war and the Washington Conference on Disarmament in the 1920s. These lofty goals testified to an idyllic vision of American foreign policy that had its roots in the nation's missionary spirit to conquer and civilize North America (Turner 1920). By the...