250 Years of an American Foreign Policy of Ideas
Following is the text of an essay on the American tradition of a foreign policy of ideas, adapted from the just-published “The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy” and posted in The National Interest.
American foreign policy has derived much of its power and sense of direction from liberal ideals.
Over the 250 years of its independence, America’s place in the world has changed dramatically. Having begun in the last quarter of the 18th century as a collection of small European settlements along the eastern coast of North America, it had grown, by the first quarter of the 21st century, into a global colossus.
Yet for all that change, one feature of American foreign policy has remained constant: the country has consistently sought to promote its major political ideas and values beyond its borders. These include individual liberty, national self-determination, democracy, and peace. They are often described as “liberal” because they all have to do with liberty—the paramount American political value.
Its foreign policy of ideas has set the United States apart from other countries. Throughout history, the foreign policies of most states most of the time have revolved around power, above all military power, and the uses to which they have put it. Military power has also played a significant role in the foreign policy of the United States. Still, the propagation of liberal ideas abroad has always accompanied and supplemented, and occasionally even replaced, the familiar routines of power politics.
Why have liberal ideas and values held such significance for America’s relations with other countries? The memory of the nation’s founding as an independent country has always loomed large in American public life, and liberty played a central role. Thomas Jefferson said at the time that the defense of liberty was “the whole object of the present controversy [with Great Britain].” George Washington described his mission as “the maintenance and preservation of American liberties.” The defense and promotion of liberty have pervaded all aspects of American public life ever since, including American foreign policy.
Another reason for the prominence of liberal ideas in American foreign policy is the major role religion has played in national life from the colonial period onward. The religious tradition that shaped America was the Protestantism derived from the northern European Reformation of the 16th century, and in particular its English and Scottish offshoots. Religious concepts seeped into political activities. In his classic 1835 study Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”
Finally, the United States has conducted a foreign policy of ideas because it has had the luxury of doing so. Considerations of power crowd out the promotion of ideas in the foreign policies of countries that face imminent threats and must concentrate on defending themselves. Unusually among sovereign states, for most of its history, America did not face urgent threats to its political independence and thus enjoyed the freedom to make the propagation of its own political ideas a major part of its relations with other countries.
Although liberal ideas infused American foreign policy from the beginning, the specific ways that the United States attempted to spread them evolved. At first, the country lacked the power to take active, effective steps to implant those ideas outside North America. This did not, however, mean that the new republic forswore international influence. On the contrary, it hoped—indeed expected—that other countries would adopt American political ideas, and the institutions and practices to which they gave rise, through the power of the American example. By the success of its political system in protecting and promoting life, liberty, and human happiness, Americans believed, the United States would inspire other peoples and their governments to emulate it.
The foreign policy of exemplarism gave way to one of more active promotion of American political ideas with the war of 1898, when the United States, which had become more powerful in the 19th century, fought and defeated Spain. In that war, America pursued two liberal goals. It went to Cuba to rescue the Cubans from the repression of their colonial masters, the Spanish—that is, for the sake of liberty.
This marked America’s first venture in what came to be known a century later as humanitarian intervention. Then, having assumed responsibility for governing the Philippines, the United States undertook to implant modern liberal institutions of governance there, making it the first instance of another practice that would recur in the 20th century: nation-building.
At the same time, the United States adopted another liberal practice abroad. It engaged in arbitration between countries at odds with each other to achieve the liberal goal of peace. President Theodore Roosevelt undertook two successful mediation efforts. In the wake of the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, he brought representatives of the two countries to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and assisted them in reaching a settlement. In 1906, he helped convene a conference at Algeciras, Spain, that defused a dispute between France and Germany in Morocco.
Subsequent presidents and other officials followed in Roosevelt’s footsteps. During both world wars, before the United States entered the fighting, the president at the time—Woodrow Wilson in the first instance and Franklin Roosevelt in the second—sent trusted envoys to Europe to try to mediate between the belligerent powers, albeit without success.
After World War II, President Harry Truman dispatched General George Marshall to China to end the civil war between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Dezong’s Communists, a mission that also failed. In 1973, after a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States began efforts to broker an end to their conflict. This effort continued well into the 21st century and yielded Israeli peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
With American participation in World War I, the United States came into its own as a major force in international affairs. At the peace conference that followed that war, President Wilson became the most influential architect of the postwar settlement, and his design featured two liberal ideas. One was the principle of national self-determination as the basis for apportioning sovereignty. It arose from the conviction that states incorporating single homogeneous nations were likely to be governed democratically and to protect liberty. The other was an association of sovereign states—the League of Nations—that would, Wilson believed, ensure international peace.
Still, the ideas that Wilson espoused have lived on in foreign policy. However, their persistence has had less to do with admiration of him personally than with the fact that those liberal ideas are deeply embedded in American political culture. All of his successors have at least paid lip service to them, and most have gone further and tried to put them into practice.
In World War II the United States fought not only to curb the power of dangerous adversaries, as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan certainly were, but also to defend its own political ideas. In August 1941, even before America entered the war, President Roosevelt, along with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, issued what came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, which endorsed, among other principles, self-determination and international cooperation. Roosevelt was able to mobilize the country for a strenuous war effort over four years in no small part because Americans understood that they were fighting not only for geopolitical advantage—or, more accurately, to avoid geopolitical disaster—but also in defense of the political ideas that dominated their public life.
The Cold War that followed World War II was a contest of power, but also a conflict between political and economic systems that embodied distinctive and radically different ideas. The end of that conflict, after four decades, represented the triumph—albeit indirectly—of American political ideas, perhaps the greatest success of a foreign policy grounded in liberal ideas in all of American history.
The Soviet Union and the communist governments of Central and Eastern Europe collapsed from within, and this collapse was made decisive by the idea and practice of liberty in both politics and economics, as well as the aspiration to national self-determination in the territories where communism held sway. It was the American (and more broadly the Western) example of democracy and free markets that subverted European communism.
The demise of communism in Europe ushered in a golden age of the American foreign policy of liberal ideas in the sense that, as a governing principle of America’s relations with the rest of the world, it had no serious competition. The United States did not have to concentrate on defending its security as it had in the past because, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, threats to its security had evaporated.
Taking advantage of this freedom, the American government sought to encourage the adoption around the world, and in particular in Russia and China, of institutions embodying its own political ideas, above all, democracy. President George W. Bush demonstrated the importance he imputed to promoting democracy abroad, making it the subject of his second inaugural address in January 2005.
In the post-Cold War period, the United States used military force to protect people whose governments were assaulting them. It undertook military interventions for humanitarian rather than power-political purposes in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, , reprising the intervention in Cuba in 1898. As a result, America found itself occupying the places where it had intervened and thus took on the responsibility for governing them.
True to its liberal principles, it sought to provide them with the institutions of democratic government. It did this as well in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it had gone to war for other than strictly humanitarian reasons. In the end, all of these places turned out to lack the social, economic, and political foundations upon which liberty and democracy must rest. For that reason, none was fully realized.
By 2015, the post-Cold War era had come to an end, and with it an era in which the United States could conduct a foreign policy dominated by its political ideas. Power politics returned. The new world more closely resembled the world of most of recorded history before the end of the Cold War, marked as it was by geopolitical rivalries and the constant threat of war. Still, in this new world, the foreign policy of ideas did not disappear. Indeed, it has surfaced in the administration of President Donald Trump.
One of its slogans, “America First” suggests a determination to avoid the kinds of entanglements abroad that the promotion of American political ideas has typically involved. Yet the administration’s vice president, J.D. Vance, and its secretary of state, Marco Rubio, each made major foreign-policy speeches in Germany about a year apart that emphasized the shared political ideas and political values that form the basis of the American alliance with Europe, while chiding the Europeans for insufficient fidelity to them.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the president initiated a war against Iran, partly in the spirit of humanitarian intervention—in response to the massacre of Iranian civilians by the repressive, murderous government of that country—and with the hope of overthrowing that government and replacing it with one more committed to liberty. These initiatives place the Trump administration squarely within the oldest tradition of American foreign policy.