Neutrality

Neutrality was among the predominant principles of U.S. foreign policy from the Revolutionary War until 1941, reflecting a national determination to avoid involvement in other nations' wars. In the twentieth century, and particularly since U.S. entry into World War II, rigid neutrality has been seen as bad, even “immoral,” as the United States has sought to exercise world leadership. The definitions of neutrality have varied as the United States has sought to integrate it with other policies.

The first English settlers in North America found themselves constantly at war under the doctrine of “no peace beyond the line,” a diplomatic principle that allowed European states to remain at peace to the east of a north‐south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, while placing no restrictions on military action to the west of that boundary. Those engaged in Spanish, French, and Dutch privateering held that the English colonies were fair game even when their nations were officially at peace. When King William's War began in 1689, many colonists were indifferent to whether William III or James II ruled England, but reciprocal raids made neutrality difficult. There were local live‐and‐let‐live agreements, the most successful between New York and Canada during Queen Anne's and King George's Wars. Generally, however, the colonists rallied to king and country as war followed war in Europe from 1689 to 1763.

Benjamin Franklin was among the first to note that the British North American colonies had developed common interests distinct from those of London. The colonists hardly objected to fighting: when the Seven Years War began officially in Europe in 1756 it had been going on for two years in the Ohio Valley. But Americans, who saw every reason to destroy the French empire in America, saw no reason to fight so that Prussia could rule Saxony in Europe.

Thus, a decade before independence, the colonists had developed a concept of neutrality in regard to European wars. This idea had many roots: a realpolitik definition of national interest; a commitment to trade; a notion of American exceptionalism; a legalist view of the rule of law among nations. Yet these emerged from the central idea that Americans, while ready to fight in causes that concerned them, should recognize that most world disputes did not. Instead, America would benefit by detachment from such conflicts while trading under a broad definition of neutral shipping rights.

By 1775, neutrality was a fundamental assumption of revolutionary ideology. The Continental Congress's Model Treaty of 1776 called for commerce and neutral rights without political commitments. Congress abandoned this ideal to sign an alliance with France in 1778, but the goal of isolation from European conflicts remained. When Russia organized an “armed neutrality” in 1780, the United States failed to join only because a belligerent, by definition, would not join a league of neutrals.

International recognition of U.S. independence in 1783 after the Revolutionary War left the new nation with contradictory commitments to neutrality and to France. This contradiction became critical in 1793, when Europe again went to war. On 22 April, President George Washington proclaimed neutrality, then set out to define it. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton favored restricting neutral rights to ease relations with Britain, while Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson favored strict enforcement of neutral rights, which would aid France.

Washington tried to navigate between belligerents, publicly claiming to honor the French alliance while violating its definitions of neutrality by concluding Jay's Treaty in 1795. He insisted that the United States had a right to noncontraband trade despite friction with Britain. In his farewell address of 1796, Washington argued that Europeans had interests distinct from those of the United States: the proper policy of which was to trade widely, have as little political connection to Europe as possible, and grow strong by avoiding Europe's inevitable quarrels.

Washington's advice guided his successors. John Adams fought the Undeclared Naval War with France; Thomas Jefferson conducted economic warfare while warning against “entangling alliances”; and James Madison fought the War of 1812. Each showed tactical flexibility, but upheld the principle of neutrality. Adams allowed British and American warships to cooperate, but rejected high Federalist demands for an Anglo‐American alliance to conquer a Caribbean Empire. Jefferson threatened a British alliance, but purchased Louisiana instead. Madison went to war with Britain, but refused alliance with Napoleon. Even when they used force, they did so to defend American neutrality.

James Monroe redefined this policy in 1823 with a doctrine that divided the world into an eastern hemisphere, where European rules would apply, and a western hemisphere, where American rules would prevail. America's rules included an end to European colonization and interference. The United States welcomed trade with the Old World, but not political ties with it. In Europe's conflicts the United States would remain neutral, trading with all according to its broad definition of neutral rights.

The American Civil War caused some rethinking for a United States concerned not with avoiding involvement in the wars of other nations but rather with preventing European intervention in its own internal conflict. President Abraham Lincoln initiated a blockade of the South that disregarded a century of maritime rights precedents. The success of the blockade played a major role in preservation of the Union.

The end of the Civil War left the United States reunited, still committed to neutrality in the abstract, and eager to forget its recent enforcement of broad belligerent rights. The nation maintained its neutrality through Europe's late‐nineteenth‐century wars, but found itself drawn into great power rivalries in East Asia as its economic interest in China conflicted with its determination to avoid political entanglements. Annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898 carried the American flag across the Pacific, and Secretary of State John Hay's “open door” notes of 1899 and 1900 reaffirmed U.S. policies of commerce with all, political involvement with none. But with U.S. troops helping Europeans and the Japanese to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China, the strains between neutrality and reality were obvious.

These strains became even more evident under President Theodore Roosevelt. His definition of U.S. neutrality during the Russo‐Japanese War favored Japan. His personal intervention with German Kaiser Wilhelm II helped to determine the outcome of the 1906 Moroccan crisis in favor of France. Roosevelt talked of neutrality but believed a balance of power in Europe and Asia served the national interest, and he acted on that belief even when it violated traditional policies.

This pattern of neutral rhetoric but unneutral action continued under President Woodrow Wilson. Though he proclaimed U.S. neutrality in August 1914, Wilson's policies favored Britain over Germany in World War I, allowing sales of munitions, credits to belligerents, and travel on belligerent ships, but restricting German submarine warfare. Wilson protested but did not take similar action against British violations of U.S. neutral rights, such as the illegal seizure of food, cotton, and other American exports to the central powers and European neutrals. By recognizing the British blockades but not those of Germany, Wilson placed the United States from 1914 to April 1917 in legal limbo, as a non‐neutral nonbelligerent.

World War I left the United States caught between two visions of the world. One was its traditional policy: trade with all but political entanglement with none outside the Americas. Wilson presented another: the United States must lead a new international order in which neutrality would be inconceivable. The heart of this order would be the League of Nations, which Wilson wrote into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

The American people received the League's covenant with deep ambivalence. Many were simply confused. The popular groundswell the administration counted on to push the treaty through a partisan Senate never developed. Wilson himself killed any compromise. The Senate defeated the treaty and the people sealed its defeat in the 1920 election.

The Republican administrations of 1921–33 publicly reaffirmed their commitment to neutrality, repudiating the League in favor of a policy of commercial expansion and political nonintervention. Yet they found themselves caught in a web of existing commitments. Commerce and politics were not so easily separated in an increasingly interdependent global economy.

While the difficulties of returning to neutrality were becoming evident to American statesmen, the demand for such a return was growing among the American people. By the 1930s, many Americans believed that participation in World War I had been a mistake. To avoid a repetition, many supported congressional passage of neutrality laws. Wars in Spain, Ethiopia, and the Far East raised moral questions about U.S. neutrality, however, and disagreement between those who favored a return to traditional definitions of neutral rights and those who favored abandonment of neutrality altogether divided the movement, allowing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to eliminate many objectionable provisions. But the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937 nevertheless represented a repudiation of Wilsonianism.

Although Roosevelt publicly supported these acts, he complained privately that they limited his authority. In November 1939 he secured passage of a modified Neutrality Act, which allowed him to begin supplying arms to nations fighting Germany and Japan in World War II. Over the next two years he eroded neutrality by trading surplus destroyers to the British, providing massive amounts of equipment under the Lend‐Lease Destroyers‐for‐Bases Agreement, and using the U.S. Navy to convoy Allied ships in the North Atlantic. By 1940, U.S. policy was again in a legal limbo, neither belligerent nor neutral.

World War II saw the end of neutrality as a principle of U.S. foreign policy. President Roosevelt forged a bipartisan coalition behind U.S. membership in the United Nations. Under the UN charter, the major powers have an obligation to maintain or restore peace, by collective force if necessary. In the postwar world, the United States emerged as the major economic and military power. During the Cold War confrontation with communism, particularly in the Soviet Union and China, the U.S. government abandoned neutrality for an active policy of containment. In pursuit of that policy, it ended the century‐old policy of avoiding prewar military alliances by organizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and pledging U.S. military forces to defend Western Europe and, through other commitments, numerous regions of the globe in defense of U.S. national security in the nuclear age.
[See also Isolationism; Truman Doctrine.]

Bibliography

John Bassett Moore , A Digest of International Law, 8 vols., 1906.
Philip C. Jessup, ed., Neutrality, 4 vols., 1935–36.
Ernest R. May , The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917, 1959.
Max Savelle , The Origins of American Diplomacy, 1967.
Stephen E. Ambrose , Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 1971; 7th rev. ed., 1993.
Charles DeBenedetti , The Peace Reform in American History, 1980.
John W. Coogan , The End of Neutrality, 1981.
Lawrence S. Kaplan , Entangling Alliances with None, 1987.
J. M. Gabriel , The American Conception of Neutrality After 1941, 1989.

John W. Coogan