A Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Policy.
A Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Policy.
U.S. foreign policy is directed by the need for homeland security and defense. It also seeks to protect its national interests overseas. Non-intervention in global affairs, while maximizing U.S. interests had been the constant factor in U.S. Foreign policy ever since the country’s birth. The United States interacted with foreign countries like France and Spain to counter the British, whom it distrusted for a long time after independence. Foreign relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also limited to expansion on the continent, and trade with France and other countries.
In his farewell message in 1796, President George Washington cautioned against foreign entanglements: “Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relationHence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her (Britain’s) politicsOur detached & distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”
This general policy of non-intervention continued till 1913, when Woodrow Wilson came to power. When World War I broke out, he declared U.S. neutrality and tried to broker peace diplomatically. However, with repeated German attacks on U.S. commercial shipping, which involved loss of American civilian lives, most notably in the attack on RMS Lusitania, President Wilson asked for and obtained permission from Congress to enter the war. President Wilson shared Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the U.S. as an Empire of Liberty, engaging with other nations to promote democracy and equality in his fourteen points, which became the Wilsonialism
program. The Second World War and the Cold War eventually realized these shared ideals and ended U.S. isolationism.
America’s foreign policy covers a wide and complex range of functions. It involves all three branches of government, and a sophisticated system of bureaucrats and government agencies. The President and the executive branch normally spearhead foreign policy initiatives. The Senate advises the President on various aspects of foreign policy. As Commander-in-Chief of the military, the President has far-reaching executive powers. The President primarily relies on the National Security Council (NSC), comprising the Vice-President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the CIA. The public also influences foreign policy. Advocacy groups and lobbyists from foreign countries, often with strong opinions about U.S. military issues try to influence decisions.
At the outbreak of World War II, the country witnessed a great public debate of isolationism versus interventionism. To the isolationists, World War I had been an exception and did not favour American involvement in foreign conflicts. The isolationists allowed President Roosevelt to provide military and economic aid to Britain in the hope that it would prevent America from entering the war. But the President’s Lend-Lease program was a divergence from the ideal of neutrality, as it favored the Allies, But, Britain had to be supplied or it would be destroyed by the Fascists, and the Lend-Lease Bill was passed by both houses. As Germany attacked Atlantic shipping, the arms and equipment meant for the allies were destroyed before they could reach Europe, and the President was forced to send warships to escort British ships over an increasing stretch of ocean towards the Mediterranean.
President Roosevelt lobbied Congress to actively participate in the war, because if the Allies were defeated, Fascist Germany would threaten American democracy and its constitutional freedoms. In a 1940 speech, he argued, “Some, indeed, still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that wecan safely permit the United States to become a lone islandin a world dominated by the philosophy of force.
But the entire debate became an exercise in futility when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. The entire nation galvanized and came together in a war effort that not only rejuvenated the post-depression U.S. economy, but by the time the war was won, America had emerged on the global stage as a powerful nation, both militarily and economically. At the beginning of the Cold War, it was seen, or rather saw itself, as a superpower in a world of two superpowers.
If exogenous factors forced United States to abandon its policy of isolationism, the national reality of its new found prosperity and influence in the post-war world emboldened it to take a leading role in preventing the spread of communism.
Since America as a country, thrived as a capitalistic economy with an emphasis on domestic as well as foreign trade, the rise of communism was a direct threat to domestic corporations, as well as to the liberty and democracy of other countries. The Cold War served the twin purpose of advancing national commercial interests, while protecting citizens in other countries, from becoming subject to the whims of tyrannical regimes and communist governments. At the end of the war U.S. were deployed in France, Italy, Western Germany, South Korea, the Phillipines and Japan. The new President, Harry S. Truman’s doctrine
stipulated that America could survive and flourish only when surrounded by other free states. It also meant that the U.S. must intervene wherever and whenever free countries are subjugated, and democracies being threatened by totalitarian forces. This was a radical change in American Foreign Policy.
This meant that a large number of U.S. forces had to be stationed in friendly countries, and demanded the restructuring of the country’s military. But the Truman doctrine became irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. But by now there was a new generation of politicians who identified the United States with the policy of intervention. Even other countries saw the U.S. as a permanent presence in various international affairs. With troops deployed on every continent except Antarctica, withdrawal was difficult even had the American authorities had desired it.
The Gulf War and the World Trade Center Attacks brought a new American enemy. Terrorism had replaced communism as the arch American enemy. With the Patriot Act, George Bush Jr. effectively freezed American Foreign Policy for generations to come. As terrorism also targets many other countries, including friendly nations, military co-operation with other countries became critical. More and more U.S. Special Operations Forces are operating around the world than ever before. The war in Afghanistan and on Pakistani soil has seen a new combative unilateralism in the form of drone attacks and the covert landing in Osama Bin Laden’s compound. American policy makers have rendered interventionism as a natural, innate feature of the nation’s foreign policy, as a self-mandated mission to shape international events, as the creators of a better world order.
References.
- Nicolas Klar. Essay: The U.S. From Isolationism to Interventionism, 2008. Klar Books. http://klarbooks.com/academic/isolate.html
- Jenny Wilson. Roosevelt’s Path to the Second World War: Interventionist or Isolationist?2012.e-International Relations Students. http://www.e-ir.info/2012/05/20/roosevelts-path-to-the-second-world-war-interventionist-or-isolationist/
- Casper Ian Zajac From Isolationism to Interventionism: Truman’s Legacy 2013 IN POLITICS, US, WORLD http://the-libertarian.co.uk/from-isolationism-to-interventionism-trumans-legacy/
- United States’ Non-Interventionism. From Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia.
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