FOREIGN POLICY

FOREIGN POLICY, broadly defined, is the course set at given times determining the relationships, policies, and actions of the United States with or toward other states and international entities. Its legitimacy derives ultimately from popular will, but formally and immediately from the Constitution, which divides authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. In practice it is mostly formulated in the White House and the Departments of State and Defense and executed by diverse diplomatic, economic, and military agencies. The guiding principle of foreign policy is always stated to be the national interest, but interpretations of this are often controversial. Religious and ethnic groups, corporations, and the media are influential, and expressions of public opinion, variously mediated, are often politically decisive in what is, overall, a remarkably effusive, democratic culture.

The persistent domestic influence in American foreign policy has been further encouraged by the nation's immunity through most of its history (especially 1815–1941) from mortal threat. Its diplomacy, therefore, proceeding from choice rather than necessity, tends to invite debates that often devolve to arguments about moral values. Presidential administrations tend to navigate cautiously, hemmed in by strong constitutional constraints and often introspective but volatile public opinion. American foreign policy has sometimes been remarkably vigorous (especially since 1941), supportive in the nineteenth century of expansionary territorial impulses and, more recently, of broader economic extensions. Yet it has nevertheless tended historically to be managerial in character and moralistic in tone, often expressing itself in congenially concise formulas (Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, Good Neighbor Policy) rather than in geopolitical initiatives of the kind familiar to students of state practice in the more contentious European arena.

Among historians two general viewpoints predominate. A mainstream outlook posits a well-intentioned if sometimes flawed American diplomacy that oscillates between international engagement and detachment but is mostly guided by a desire for peace, stability, and progressive development. A more critical revisionist view typically portrays an essentially expansionist, hegemonic state. Between these two outlooks a wide range of other scholarly assessments, most notably a more conservative "realist" critique of perceived liberal tendencies, invigorates the field intellectually.

Establishment and Consolidation, 1776–1815

The American diplomatic tradition arguably begins in the colonial period. The revolutionaries were heir to a well-informed, politically self-conscious citizenry. Their initial concern was survival. The Continental Congress secured the indispensable alliance with France (1778) that eventually helped bring independence. But it preferred to stress economic rather than political relations, presenting prospective partners with the so-called Model Treaty (1776) emphasizing commerce. After the Treaty of Peace, 1783, and the creation of the Constitution, the administration of President George Washington restored trade with Britain through Jay's Treaty (1794). Pinckney's Treaty (1795) recorded a southern boundary agreement with Spain. Washington's Farewell Address (1796) also stressed trade and warned against "entangling alliances." But European politics persistently intruded, inspiring Congress to break with revolutionary France over the XYZ Affair (1798), which led to the termination of the alliance and to a naval "quasi-war" in 1798–1800 (see France, Quasi-War with). The Francophile President Thomas Jefferson, similarly beset, responded to French and British violations of America's neutral rights at sea with a trade embargo (1807) and the Nonintercourse Act (1809). These neoisolationist policies failed, and ensuing maritime and continental tensions led to the inconclusive War of 1812 with Britain (1812–1815). The agreement signed by the two countries in 1814 (see Ghent, Treaty of) registered the resulting stalemate and closed this first era of intense but finally profitable political engagement with a Europe that was conveniently preoccupied with the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

Continental Expansion, 1803–1867

This period of dramatic enlargement is framed by the Louisiana Purchase (1803)—bought for $15 million from Napoleon and allowing a westward leap that doubled the size of the United States—and by the purchase of Alaska in 1867. It saw the acquisition of West Florida from Spain (1810) and the Adams-Onís Treaty (1819), which brought in East Florida, Spanish confirmation of the Louisiana Purchase, and a first window on the Pacific by cession of Spain's claims in the Northwest. The Rush-Bagot Treaty (1817) and other subsequent boundary agreements with Britain consolidated a demilitarized northern border. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) declared against both further European colonization in the Americas and any renewed projection of the European system in the Western Hemisphere. While this reflected rising American self-confidence, the doctrine's nineteenth-century viability rested with British naval power.

In the 1840s the Manifest Destiny concept expressed an intensified impulse toward western expansion. After the incorporation of Texas (1845), President James Polk's administration negotiated a favorable Oregon boundary settlement with Britain (1846) and, after a shrewdly manipulated crisis led to a successful war with Mexico, the 1848 peace agreement (see Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of) brought California and a vast southwestern domain into the union. The Gadsen Purchase in Arizona (1853) and the later Alaska purchase completed the continental framework.

The impression of success in all these accomplishments is real; the appearance of inevitability is not. European machinations, Mexican resistance, and divisions at home had to all be surmounted or finessed. The desire for incorporation of larger parts of Mexico and Canada, and of certain Caribbean territories coveted by the southern slave states, were all frustrated for various reasons.

The Rise and Maturation of a World Power, 1860–1941

The Civil War inspired a vigorous diplomacy. The Confederacy tried to translate British and French establishment sympathy (not shared by the European working classes, which favored the Union) into recognition and support. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward successfully prevented this. Northern wheat and sea power trumped Southern cotton in European calculations.

The rapid industrialization of the late-nineteenth-century United States produced at first a self-absorbed politics. Seward, a visionary, Pacific-focused expansionist, acquired Alaska and Midway Island. He called for an isthmian canal, but various executive initiatives in the Caribbean failed to gain support. In the early 1890s, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's propagation of an imperial vision based on sea power heralded a revived expansionary mood. But it took the triumphant 1898 war with Spain, arising more directly out of the long Cuban rebellion, to propel the United States into world politics with subsequent control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, new positions in the Caribbean, and the formal acquisition of Hawaii. Substantial domestic opposition to this new American "empire" was overcome, and Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door notes to other powers in 1899–1900 signified a fresh American determination to share commercial opportunities and, by implication, political influence in China (see Open Door Policy).

President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), an ardent nationalist, embodied the new activist tendency. In the Caribbean region, always a primary American interest, he created political conditions for the future Panama Canal at Columbia's expense, and closed the area to European military action by undertaking in the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to be their self-appointed debt collector. He sent marines to quell various regional disturbances. More widely he mediated the Russo-Japanese peace settlement of 1905 and the Franco-German dispute over Morocco in 1907. His advocacy of a stronger navy and of an extended international law signified a commitment to both power and moral order, reflecting the self-confidence of the Progressive era.

The fuller implications emerged in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. A supposed "idealist," the high-minded Wilson is perhaps better described as a passionate moralist and visionary. His multiple Caribbean interventions (most dramatically in the Mexican civil war), suggest continuity. He responded to the outbreak of World War I in Europe (August 1914) with two dangerously contradictory policies: neutrality but also, behind a show of legal impartiality, an opportunistically profitable economic relationship with Britain and France. The eventual German response of unrestricted submarine warfare forced America into the war. Wilson championed a rational, just peace. His Fourteen Points (1918) called inter alia for freedom of the seas, free trade, a wide degree of self-determination in Europe, and a postwar League of Nations. Having successfully orchestrated the armistice, he personally attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. His rigidly principled diplomatic style and his failure to collaborate with the resurgent Republicans at home or to win a liberal settlement from the war-embittered Allies contributed to a flawed peace agreement (see Versailles, Treaty of) and subsequently a failed campaign to secure congressional approval of American participation in the League. Wilson, incapacitated by illness during the final struggle with the Republican-dominated Senate, had nonetheless set a course for future American liberal internationalism.

During the Republican ascendancy (1921–1933), economic impulses (notably government retrenchment and active trade promotion) dominated foreign policy. War debt and reparations prolonged international tensions until the stabilizing United States–sponsored Dawes Planbr (1924) and Young Plan (1929) effected a short-term recovery. Politically the United States remained detached. The Washington Treaties of 1921–1922 fashioned a new Pacific geopolitics, but the real spur was the prospect of reduced naval spending. The illusory Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) supposedly outlawing war, the largely rhetorical Stimson Doctrine (1931) denying recognition of Japanese conquests in China, and the spasmodic interest in joining the World Court were all characteristically gestural initiatives. After 1929 the deep and widespread economic depression produced dislocation, protectionism, and a politically radicalizing international system. But although President Franklin D. Roosevelt was comparatively active from 1933—announcing a Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, recognizing the Soviet Union, pushing through a Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act—his freedom to act in the developing European crisis was inhibited by encumbering neutrality legislation that reflected congressional and public opinion. The quasi-isolationist mood persisted after the outbreak of war in Europe (September 1939), but internationalist sentiment strengthened after the shocking fall of France, the encouraging survival of Britain, and the reelection of Roosevelt. American Lend-Lease to Britain (later to the Soviet Union and other countries) was followed by intensified economic pressure on Japan and a policy of naval harassment against Germany in the Atlantic. Roosevelt's proclamation with British prime minister Winston Churchill of the Atlantic Charter (August 1941), emphasizing freedom and democracy, reflected a growing sense of engagement that crystallized when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and Adolf Hitler's soon thereafter declaration of war, brought the United States into World War II.

From Great Power to Superpower, 1941–1991

The United States supported Britain materially during their successful military-strategic wartime partnership, while steadily committing it to open postwar imperial markets and to permit currency convertibility. Relations with the Soviet Union (also receiving American aid) were distantly collaborative but were undermined by the United States' resentment at delays in creating a second front and, as victory neared, the Soviet Union's increasingly exclusionary policies in eastern Europe, which clashed with Roosevelt's more universalistic visions. The crucial Yalta Conference (February 1945) left basic misunderstandings over Poland and eastern Europe, though the following Potsdam Conference produced tentative agreements over German administration and reparations. But in early 1946, persisting differences—intensified after the Hiroshima atom bomb led to the end of the Pacific war and by fresh Soviet expansionary political thrusts threatening Turkey and Iran—led to a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations. What came to be known as the "containment" policy, maintained throughout the Cold War, was inspired by the American diplomat George F. Kennan (who formulated it) and more generally by Churchill in his March 1946 Iron Curtain speech. The containment policy aimed to quell Russia's expansive tendencies, and it developed institutionally through the Truman Doctrine of 1947 promising aid to Greece and Turkey; the Marshall Plan of the same year offering aid for European economic recovery; and, finally, after a series of crises in 1948, through the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, committing the United States to protecting western Europe.

The containment policy endured as the Cold War enlarged to east Asia with the communist victory in China (1949) and the Korean War (1950–1953), which brought American commitments to protect South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan and to support France against nationalist and communist insurgency in Indochina. During Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency, the Cold War expanded globally. From 1953 to 1954 the United States effectively deposed communist-supported governments in Iran and Guatemala. It declined to participate in the international Indochina settlement (see Geneva Accords of 1954) and launched an anticommunist regime in South Vietnam. New multilateral treaties—SEATO in 1954 covering Southeast Asia, and CENTO in 1959 focusing on the Middle East—completed the "containment" chain around the largely communist Eurasia.

Eisenhower proclaimed "liberation" but actually practiced containment. His "New Look" strategy, emphasizing nuclear rather than conventional weaponry, led to epidemic testing and a vastly enlarged arsenal. It helped prompt a nuclear arms race with the Soviets who responded in kind. U.S.–Soviet relations were erratic. Ameliorations after Stalin's death (1953), during the 1955 Geneva summit, and again with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States, had their counterpoints in tensions over German membership in NATO, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Cuban revolution in 1959, and the U-2 spy plane affair in 1960.

The brief but significant presidency of John F. Kennedy brought generational change, the Alliance for Progress (in Latin America), and the Peace Corps. A new "flexible response" based on augmented conventional forces replaced the atomic strategic emphasis. A crisis developed over Berlin, culminating in the creation of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 came the Cuban Missile Crisis, the dramatic confrontation of October 1962 between the Soviet Union and the United States over Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. The successfully resolved crisis led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963) and, arguably, to a more assertive policy in Indochina, with troop levels reaching approximately 16,000 by November 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated.

President Lyndon B. Johnson enlarged the Vietnam War commitment in early 1965 to about 200,000 troops (later to nearly 550,000). The escalation, reinforced by systematic bombing, probably prevented a communist victory and was initially popular at home. But as troop levels and casualties rose from 1965 to 1968 without visible improvement, Americans became divided. The politically successful communist Tet Offensive in January 1968 forced profound reconsiderations. Peace talks began and continued sporadically under President Richard M. Nixon as fighting persisted. Nixon's Vietnamization policy allowed the steady extrication of American troops balanced by intensified bombing. The American withdrawal in 1973 and the communist victory in 1975 registered this regional failure.

Meanwhile, Nixon and his chief diplomatic adviser, Henry Kissinger, had developed an innovative triangular political strategy of détente with China and the Soviet Union. Groundbreaking agreements were signed in Moscow on strategic arms limitation and a range of economic, political, and cultural accords. The containment framework continued but was tempered now by increasing acceptance of Soviet legitimacy, manifest in further summits and in the Helsinki Accords (1975) accepting the dominant Soviet role in eastern Europe in exchange for commitments to enhanced human rights. This set the stage for the "human rights" foreign policy orientation from 1977 of President Jimmy Carter, a rationally oriented idealist who began with a treaty ceding the Panama Canal to Panama at a later date (with qualifying safeguards); Carter hoped to move American diplomacy from Cold War preoccupations toward broader socioeconomic global issues. He successfully brokered the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt and intervened effectively in several Latin American issues. He negotiated a second strategic arms limitation treaty with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. But the provocative Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 ended détente. Carter responded with economic sanctions and plans for a rapid military buildup. But the revived tension, together with domestic economic problems largely caused by steeply higher oil prices and an Islamic revolution in Iran that led to the incarceration of American hostages, brought Republican Ronald Reagan to power in 1981.

In the 1980s we see two distinct phases. Within the context of renewed Cold War tensions, the primary emphasis was on refurbishing American military strength and morale. The comprehensive buildup was accompanied by a successful campaign to place Pershing missiles in Europe (countering Soviet targeting there) and low-risk but significant resistance to perceived Soviet or other communist expansion in Africa, Central Asia, and (especially) Central America. In that region, active subversion of the radical Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, support for conservative elements in El Salvador, and the Grenada Invasion of 1983 signified the new militance.

The 1985 emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, a new Soviet leader, had profound consequences. Bent on diverting resources to domestic change, he engaged a steadily more receptive Reagan in a series of summit meetings from 1985 to 1989. Slowed by Reagan's insistence on developing a defensive nuclear shield (see Strategic Defense Initiative), these meetings produced a treaty in 1987 banning intermediate-range missiles, and another in 1989 looking to strategic arms reductions. Meanwhile, Gorbachev reduced conventional force levels in eastern Europe and permitted, during 1989, a remarkable series of political transformations to democratic rule in the region. He also allowed German reunification and continuing membership in NATO in exchange for economic assistance. The United States supported these moves, which ended the Cold War on a successful note. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

The Post–Cold War Search for Definition, 1991–2001

The first post–Cold War decade brought widespread political democracy and market capitalism but produced no striking new American conceptual or policy definition. President George H. W. Bush, successful in the Persian Gulf War of! 1991 against Iraq, anticipated a "new world order." The Muslim revival inspired notions of cultural-political confrontation. Subsequent references to "modernization" and "globalization" were similarly resonant but diffuse.

New political problems forced policy improvisations. Much of eastern Europe developed ties with NATO and the European Union. But Russia, still nuclear-armed, and undermined by weak leadership and corruption, was a principal object of American concern. The collapse of Yugoslavia and ensuing violence prompted President Bill Clinton's administration to intervene effectively in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. Diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East and Colombia were less successful. The principal emphasis was on the creation of enlarged, liberal trading regimes, notably through the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the World Trade Organization (1995), and the United States–China agreement (2000). President George W. Bush's initially more unilateralist approach (a nuclear defensive shield, suspicion of international environmentalism) was transformed by the terrorist assaults upon New York City and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001 into actively coalitional diplomacy and a commitment to "war on terrorism."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Combs, Jerald A. American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing Interpretations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Graebner, Norman A. Ideas and Diplomacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Hogan, Michael J., and Thomas G. Paterson. Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

FraserHarbutt

See alsovol. 9:American Diplomacy ; The Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary .