America's foreign relations were determined by a unique combination of geography and history. The relative isolation of the United States from the rest of the world allowed the nation to develop its interior spaces with little direct interference from the major European powers. Hence the United States was able to concentrate its military resources against the various Native American tribes with little concern over a direct military threat to its borders. Successive governments in Washington followed a formula whereby they pursued commercial relations with other nations but avoided direct formal ties.
The United States also endeavored to establish itself as the hegemonic power in the hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) asserted that the United States would oppose any European efforts to establish new colonies in North or South America or to interfere with the internal domestic affairs of the newly independent nations of the region. In exchange, the United States also pledged noninterference in European matters. The Monroe Doctrine became a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. With the exception of French interference in Mexico, which occurred concurrently with the American Civil War and the continuing British colonial expansion in Canada, the doctrine was remarkably successful in preventing new colonization in the Western Hemisphere during the height of imperialism in the late nineteenth century. However, considerable credit for the doctrine's enforcement belongs to Great Britain, which pursued similar noncolonization policies toward Central and South America in order to promote free trade.
During the nineteenth century U.S. foreign policy was characterized by the promotion of American trade and commerce and efforts to expand the nation's territory. Economic initiatives resulted in the establishment of trade relations with China in 1844 and the opening of Japan to foreign trade in 1853. Territorial expansion came through diplomatic efforts and conflict. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, and in 1819 the Adams-Onis Treaty led to the acquisition of Florida. Expansion into the Mexican territory of Texas led to the founding of the Republic of Texas in 1835 and annexation by the United States in 1845. Conflict over the future of Texas ultimately brought the United States and Mexico to war in 1846, and as a result of the war the United States gained California and other territory in the Southwest. In one of the shrewdest foreign policy initiatives, Secretary of State William Seward convinced a reluctant Congress to approve the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 for the equivalent of some three cents an acre.
American imperialism reached its height toward the end of the nineteenth century. In 1898 Congress approved the annexation of Hawaii after American planters there overthrew the legitimate queen and government�and in spite of the fact that the previous administration under Grover Cleveland had rejected annexation. The Spanish-American War marked the end of direct U.S. efforts to gain territory. As a result of the conflict, the United States gained the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In addition, Cuba became a U.S. protectorate in 1901.
Concurrent with its policies of expansion, the United States continued to promote free trade. In 1900 Secretary of State John Hay promulgated the Open Door Policy toward Asia, which called for free trade and for American businesses to be treated with the same privileges as occupying nations within their spheres of influence or colonial possessions. By the turn of the century the United States was clearly the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere and policies by the administration of Theodore Roosevelt exploited this power differential. For instance, the 1903 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine gave the nation the self-appointed power to intervene in Central and South America in order to forestall European intervention. Furthermore, when Colombia sought to renegotiate an agreement to build a canal through the Panama Isthmus, Roosevelt used military force to support a revolution in Panama, which installed a pro-Washington government eager to sign a canal agreement. Much of the history of U.S. relations with the Caribbean and Central America in the first thirty years of the twentieth century was marked by U.S. military interventions in nations such as Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, among others. Successive administrations in Washington, both Republican and Democratic, sought to broadly build democratic institutions and stable economies in these nations. Nonetheless, these goals were often undermined as Washington pursued narrow policies to gain short-term stability, including support for dictators, in order to protect U.S. business interests. This undermined relations between the nation and its neighbors to the south and set the stage for later tensions and mistrust.
The United States sought to avoid participation in World War I, although President Woodrow Wilson supported the Allied democracies. However, unrestricted German submarine warfare and the 1917 Zimmermann telegram, which promised German support for Mexico should it attack the United States in order to retake territories lost during the Mexican-American War, brought the nation into the conflict in 1917. Wilson endeavored to implement a new internationalism in American foreign policy. An idealist, he sought to use the nation's power to promote democracy and self-determination. After World War I, Wilson wanted an active role for the nation in world affairs. His Fourteen-Point Peace Plan laid the foundation for the establishment or reestablishment of nations such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and so forth. However, the centerpiece of Wilson's internationalist policy, the League of Nations, failed in a wave of isolationism as the Senate rejected U.S. participation in the collective security organization.
Both the economic boom of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s contributed to a general domestic inclination toward isolationism. Nonetheless, various administrations supported broad multilateral efforts at disarmament and the stabilization of the global economy. Franklin D. Roosevelt endeavored to improve relations with Central and South America. As part of a "Good Neighbor Policy," he withdrew the last American troops from the region and promoted hemispheric trade.
World War II marked a turning point in U.S. foreign policy. Although the United States attempted to avert being drawn into World War II, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the nation into the war. As with World War I, Washington sought to develop policies that would prevent future conflict through multilateralism and the promotion of free trade and democracy. U.S. economic and military aid helped Great Britain survive a submarine blockade and heavy air campaign and aided the Soviet Union's defeat and rollback of Hitler's armies in the east. During the war the nation followed a Europe-first policy and concentrated on winning the war in the west before focusing on the Pacific theater.
Since the end of World War II, the nation has remained fully engaged in international affairs, usually in a leadership position. Many postwar U.S. programs, especially those designed to rebuild western Europe and Japan, were highly successful. The U.S. government gave these areas some fifteen billion dollars through the Marshall Plan and aid to Japan. The establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) helped promote security in western Europe and end centuries-old conflicts. On a global level, the United Nations provided a supranational organization to address global problems and conflict, although the politics of the cold war would constrain the potential of the organization. President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps was also highly successful, sending American college students to less-developed areas of the world in order to provide education and training in basic technologies and promote sustainable development. Other efforts by the United States to promote "American values," such as Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, had more mixed results. The alliance was designed to be a Marshall Plan for Central and South America, but the eighteen billion dollars provided by the government and private agencies was often misappropriated and the failure of successive U.S. governments to support democratic reform doomed the initiative.
The core component of U.S. foreign policy during the cold war (1945�1989) was containment of the Soviet Union through opposition to the spread of communism. There was a strong bipartisan consensus around containment and the policy was one of the most domestically successful features of U.S. foreign affairs. Efforts to combat the Soviet Union led to direct U.S. involvement in conflicts in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada, proxy conflicts around the globe, and enormous military and economic aid to those governments that opposed communism. The United States also sought to undermine Communist governments through covert actions by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and cultural means such as the establishment of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, to provide news and information to the heavily censored Communist states.
In the years following the end of the cold war, and with the demise of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, no new paradigm had emerged to guide American diplomacy. Although the George H. Bush administration deftly arranged a broad, multinational coalition against Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War, the post�cold war effort at a "New World Order," which emphasized democracy and free trade, disintegrated over events such as the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent ethnic cleansing and the Chinese crackdown on democracy in Tiananmen Square. The Clinton administration aggressively promoted global free trade and European stability, yet it did not develop any overarching new standards for American diplomacy at the end of the twentieth century.
The 1990s continued the dichotomous trends in American foreign policy and cultural diplomacy as the administration alternatively embraced hard-line, unilateral policies based on military force and multilateral efforts to promote human rights, democracy, and free trade. When he entered office in 1993, President Bill Clinton was faced with a range of foreign policy crises. In Somalia, the evolution of the UN mission, from humanitarian food distribution to nation-building, collapsed in the aftermath of the deaths of nineteen U.S. special operations forces involved in a mission to capture a Somali warlord. After initially agreeing to allow European institutions to endeavor to resolve the Yugoslav civil war, the United States was forced to lend its military and diplomatic credibility to the 1995 Dayton Accords, which established an independent Bosnia and paved the way for the deployment of a peacekeeping mission led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO forces also undertook subsequent operations in Macedonia and engaged in a seventy-seven-day air war with Serbia over Belgrade's support for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999. Throughout Clinton's term, Iraq continued to challenge the international community through its defiance of UN resolutions. In response, the United States maintained crippling sanctions against Iraq, which grew increasingly unpopular with Arab states and America's European allies because of the limited political impact of the sanctions, coupled with their widespread negative humanitarian impact.
Clinton attempted to develop a "Clinton Doctrine" that was based on support for democracy and human rights, but the doctrine was never formally implemented. The administration did pledge support for global environmental efforts through the 1997 Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming and for women's rights at the 1995 Fourth UN Conference on Women in Beijing. However, the rhetoric of the Clinton administration often did not match its policies. For instance, the administration called for increased international support for efforts to promote democracy, yet the United States supported an antidemocratic coup in Algeria and provided substantial aid to totalitarian regimes in Central Asia and Africa. In addition, the focus of U.S. foreign policy remained fixed on Europe and important trade partners in Asia. As a result, the administration did not support multilateral action to end the genocide in Rwanda or the civil wars in Congo and the Sudan. The growing globalization of the world's economy resulted in significant disparities in wealth and standards of living between the developed and developing nations, but throughout the 1990s there were no major American policy initiatives to address resource and wealth inequities.
The end of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy also constrained U.S. diplomacy. The Clinton administration was forced to turn to the Republicans in Congress for support on key initiatives such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the air war in Kosovo. Concurrently, however, the Republican Congress prevented U.S. ascension to the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to end nuclear testing and to the 1997 Land Mine Treaty.
Although Europe remained the focus of U.S. foreign and diplomatic policy throughout the 1990s, tensions between the United States and its key transatlantic partners emerged. Many European states were displeased with U.S. unilateralism toward specific issues such as Iraq and Kosovo and broader areas such as globalization and environmental policy. Domestic policies in the United States, such as capital punishment, exacerbated the rift. Meanwhile, U.S. support for Israel and for moderate Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf region fueled growing Arab antipathy toward America. The failure of the Clinton administration to take strong action against India and Pakistan following their twin nuclear tests in 1998 was seen by many states as an abrogation of U.S. leadership on nuclear nonproliferation (a sentiment reinforced by the U.S. rejection of the CTBT).
The administration of George W. Bush, elected in 2000, was perceived as one of the most unilateral American governments in the post-World War II era. Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Treaty and his renunciation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty reinforced perceptions that Bush favored neoisolationist policies (especially since the abrogation of the ABM Treaty was tied to efforts to develop antimissile defense systems to protect the American homeland).
The terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, created an outpouring of global support for the United States. The Bush administration received pledges of support from every major global organization, including, the United Nations, NATO, the Arab League, and the Organization of American States, and the majority of the world's countries. This support extended to Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The decision to escalate the "War on Terror" beyond Afghanistan and Al Qaeda led to a dramatic erosion of global support for the United States, especially after Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union Address. Many countries expressed reservations about the expansion of the scope of the War on Terror and the implementation of a preemption strategy as articulated in what became known as the "Bush Doctrine."
The good will and sympathy toward the United States created by the September 11 attacks were largely dissipated by the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. The coalition of nations that supported the United States was a shadow of that which had supported Operation Enduring Freedom and it lacked key powers such as France, Germany, and Russia. Efforts by the United States to justify the war because of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program were undermined by the previous failure of the country to lead on nonproliferation efforts and by a lack of specific evidence of WMDs in Iraq. Although the military campaign in Iraq succeeded in toppling the regime and capturing Saddam Hussein, the subsequent insurgency against America-led coalition forces further undermined America's prestige and international standing. By 2004, the broad efforts to promote multilateralism, which had marked U.S. foreign policy and cultural diplomacy since World War II, had been seriously undermined by the Bush Doctrine and the war in Iraq.
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian
USC Center on Public Diplomacy
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Foreign Policy and Cultural Diplomacy" (by Tom M. Lansford), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=607 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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