Continuity, Not Coincidence: The Historical Roots of US Foreign Policy Tendencies from 1898 to the Present

In 1941, the media magnate Henry Luce declared in Life magazine that the twentieth century had become “America's first century as a dominant power in the world.”^[1] Luce's proclamation was a statement of fact; the United States, in his view, had both the right and the obligation to shape the world in its image. Yet what Luce omitted was that this dominance had never been purely idealistic. From the naval expansionism of the 1890s through the containment strategies of the Cold War, US foreign policy was driven by recurring structural tendencies, the prioritization of economic self-interest, the reservation of the right to act unilaterally, and the treatment of decolonizing nations as arenas for great-power competition.

The statement under consideration, that Donald Trump's second-term foreign policy is “remarkably in keeping” with this historical pattern, is largely correct. Economic self-interest, unilateralism, and paternalism toward the developing world are not Trumpian innovations but deep structural features of American foreign policy, visible from Alfred Thayer Mahan's arguments for naval power in the 1890s to the Nixon Doctrine of the 1970s.^[2] Yet, the statement requires one important qualification. Running alongside these tendencies throughout the twentieth century was a countervailing multilateralist impulse, Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods institutions, that the United States constructed, dominated, and on occasion genuinely valued. This essay will examine each of the three tendencies identified in the statement, economic interest over global welfare, unilateralism over multilateralism, and the instrumental treatment of the decolonizing world, through the arc of twentieth century US foreign policy.

The claim that US foreign policy prioritized economic interest over global welfare was, historically, the easiest to substantiate, because the pattern was visible from the very origins of American overseas expansion. When Alfred Thayer Mahan made the case for a powerful United States navy in the 1890s, his argument was explicitly commercial: American prosperity depended on access to foreign markets, and access to foreign markets depended on control of the seas.^[3]Mahan contended that without naval power, the United States would be unable to project and protect its economic interests beyond its own coastline.^[4] This was not a conventional security argument but a case for the militarization of commercial expansion, a logic that would animate US foreign policy for over a century.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the subsequent occupation of the Philippines rendered this logic concrete. When President William McKinley justified the decision to retain the Philippines rather than grant independence, his public rationale was humanitarian: the United States had a duty to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”^[5] Yet, as George C. Herring documents, the strategic and commercial calculus was equally decisive: the Philippines offered a naval base for projecting power into Asian markets at a moment when American commercial ambitions in China were intensifying.^[6]

The Atlantic Charter of 1941 is conventionally read as one of the great idealistic documents of twentieth-century diplomacy: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill committed the signatory powers to self-determination, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.^[7] Yet point IV of the Charter also committed its authors to non-discriminatory access to trade and raw materials, a provision that directly served American commercial interests at a time when British imperial preference locked American goods out of vast global markets. Herring notes that Roosevelt's multilateralism was never separable from the ambition to construct a post-war world in which American economic power could operate freely and without restriction.^[8]

This dynamic was reproduced, and in some respects intensified, in the early Cold War. National Security Council (NSC-68), the pivotal 1950 policy document that called for dramatic rearmament, framed the Soviet threat in apocalyptic terms and argued that the survival of “the free world” demanded military expenditure on a scale never before seen in peacetime.^[9] Yet, as Herring observes, NSC-68 was also a document that served powerful domestic economic constituencies: the permanent mobilization it prescribed sustained the military-industrial complex and helped justify the defence spending that underpinned American prosperity during the postwar economic boom.^[10]

By the 1970s, the pattern had taken a more explicitly fiscal form. The Nixon Doctrine, announced in 1969, held that the United States would “furnish military and economic assistance” to allies threatened by external aggression but would no longer commit ground troops to fight their wars.^[11] The doctrine was partly a strategic adjustment following the catastrophe in Vietnam, but it was equally a response to the unsustainable economic costs of open-ended military intervention. As Herring documents, the combination of Great Society social spending and Vietnam War expenditure had produced severe inflationary pressures and balance-of-payments crises that ultimately forced Nixon to abandon the gold standard in 1971.^[12] Retrenchment was as much a fiscal imperative as a strategic one. This willingness to subordinate strategic commitments to economic calculations, and to pass the costs of global order maintenance onto client states, is precisely the logic that Trump's second term demands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) burden-sharing.

The history of American ambivalence toward multilateral institutions is at least as old as Wilson's failed attempt to bring the United States into the League of Nations. Wilson had made the League the centrepiece of his post-war vision, arguing in his public defence of the organization that it represented the only mechanism by which the catastrophe of 1914-18 could be prevented from recurring.^[13] Yet the opposition marshalled by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge articulated a structural argument that would recur in American political culture for the remainder of the century: that binding multilateral commitments threatened sovereign discretion, potentially obligating the United States to act in situations where its interests were not directly at stake.^[14] The Senate's refusal established a precedent; the US could set the terms of international order without fully submitting it.

The interwar period confirmed this tendency. Brooke L. Blower has argued that American foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s was never straightforwardly “isolationist,” the United States remained deeply engaged in international trade, investment, and cultural exchange throughout the period. What it resisted was political and military commitment, the binding entanglements that would constrain its freedom of action. Blower characterized this as a posture of “neutrality” rather than isolation: selective withdrawal from political obligation while maintaining economic engagement.^[15] The “America First” movement of the late 1930s made this logic explicit, arguing that European conflicts were alien to American interests and that participation would drag the country into wars serving British and French imperial designs rather than American ones.^[16] The phrase's deliberate revival by Trump was not rhetorical coincidence; it was a conscious invocation of this tradition.

The post-1945 multilateral architecture did not resolve this ambivalence so much as reframe it on more favourable terms. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and NATO were conceived, designed, and headquartered largely in the United States, and they operated on terms broadly favourable to American interests and power. Herring described the postwar order as one in which the United States exercised hegemonic leadership within multilateral frameworks rather than genuinely submitting to shared governance.^[17] In this sense, even the most multilateralist period in American foreign policy was a form of managed unilateralism: the institutions existed to extend and legitimate American power, not fundamentally to constrain it. The Ronald Reagan administration demonstrated that this dynamic persisted into the Cold War's final decade. Reagan's 1982 Westminster speech delivered soaring multilateral rhetoric about the global advance of democracy and freedom, presenting the United States as the champion of a universal aspiration rather than a self-interested great power.^[18] Yet Reagan's actual foreign policy repeatedly bypassed multilateral frameworks, funding the Nicaraguan Contras and supporting authoritarian regimes across Central America, aligning with Beth Fischer's analysis demonstrating the persistent gap between multilateral rhetoric and unilateral practice.^[19]

Nevertheless, the qualification must be stated clearly. Even when the United States acted unilaterally, previous administrations maintained the institutional infrastructure of multilateralism as a resource to which they expected to return and which they expected others to respect. NATO was dominated by Washington, but it was also genuinely valued as a mechanism for distributing the costs and political burdens of European security.

Of the three tendencies identified in the statement, the instrumental treatment of decolonizing nations has perhaps the deepest historical roots in American foreign policy. It was embedded in the ideological foundations of the American empire from the outset.^[20] McKinley's justification for the Philippine occupation deployed the same racial logic that the British poet Rudyard Kipling had articulated in “The White Man's Burden,” ^[21] that colonized peoples required civilizational uplift, not self-governance, presenting American domination as an act of benevolent guidance.^[22]

Wilson's wartime rhetoric of self-determination appeared to break with this tradition. His commitment to the principle that all peoples should have the right to determine their own political destinies seemed to offer a genuinely universalist alternative to the racial hierarchies of nineteenth-century imperialism.^[23] Yet the appeal submitted by the young Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, requesting that Wilson's principles be applied to French Indochina, was not merely ignored but was never seriously entertained.^[24] As Erez Manela has demonstrated, Wilsonian self-determination generated genuine expectations among anti-colonial activists across Asia and Africa. The disappointment of these hopes at Paris was, Manela argues, a formative moment in the global history of anti-colonial nationalism.^[25]

The Cold War reproduced and, in some respects, intensified this pattern. Thomas Borstelmann's authoritative study of American race relations and foreign policy demonstrates that US engagement with decolonizing Africa and Asia was governed almost entirely by Cold War strategic calculations rather than by genuine commitment to racial equality or national self-determination.^[26] Newly independent states were evaluated primarily in terms of their likely alignment in the superpower competition; governments that threatened to nationalize American-linked industries or showed sympathy for socialist models were subjected to covert intervention, economic pressure, or outright regime change. Herring documents numerous instances of this logic across the Global South during the 1950s and 1960s, from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954.^[27]

The correspondence between the American scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and the Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah in February 1957, written as Ghana prepared to take its place on the international stage, offers a vivid contemporary perspective on this dynamic from within the African diaspora.^[28] Du Bois expressed both pride in the achievement of Ghanaian independence and deep scepticism about the terms on which newly decolonized states would be admitted to a world order still structured by Western economic power.^[29] Formal independence was granted or acknowledged, but the economic and strategic relationships that had characterized colonialism were reconstituted in new forms under the auspices of the Cold War competition. Borstelmann further demonstrates that the domestic civil rights movement was itself instrumentalized within this framework. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration officials recognized that racial segregation in the United States was a propaganda liability in the competition for the loyalties of newly independent nations across Africa and Asia; the Soviet Union actively exploited American racial violence in its international messaging. Civil rights reform was therefore pursued partly as a Cold War necessity, a means of making American democratic rhetoric credible to non-white global audiences, rather than exclusively as a matter of domestic justice.^[30] The genuine moral commitments of civil rights activists were thus enrolled in a foreign policy calculus that was itself fundamentally instrumental toward the very populations it claimed to champion.

Odd Arne Westad's analysis of American Cold War interventionism in the Global South provides the broadest synthesis of this pattern. Westad argued that US interventions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America consistently prioritized the maintenance of friendly governments over the welfare of local populations, and that the long-term consequence of this approach was to associate American power with authoritarianism, inequality, and the suppression of popular aspirations across the decolonizing world.^[31] This is the historical record against which Trump's dismissive treatment of nations across the Global South must be assessed, not as a departure from American tradition but as its continuation, stripped of the diplomatic language that previously softened its edges.

The historical record examined in this essay broadly confirmed the statement. The prioritization of economic self-interest over global welfare, the preference for unilateral action over multilateral commitment, and the instrumental treatment of decolonizing nations are not inventions of Trump's second term. They were structural tendencies present from the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan's call for naval power in the 1890s through the Richard Nixon Doctrine of the 1970s, embedded in every administration across the twentieth century with varying degrees of intensity. The statement, precisely because it is correct about continuity, risks obscuring what is at stake. Yet running alongside this strand was a genuine, if imperfect, multilateralist impulse, the League, the Atlantic Charter, frameworks through which collective problems could be addressed and American power held to at least nominal account.

Frank Ninkovich has argued that Trumpism reveals rather than creates the contradictions latent in American foreign policy, that the tensions between liberal internationalism and nationalist unilateralism have always been present, and that the current moment represents their open resolution in favour of the latter.^[32] This is persuasive, but it cannot fully capture the significance of timing; the multilateral institutions built over a century are being actively dismantled at precisely the moment when the structural challenges of the twenty-first century, climate change, pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation, demand collective rather than unilateral responses. The more pressing question is whether the multilateral constraints that historically tempered American unilateralism can survive their most sustained assault.

Bibliography

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"The Atlantic Charter." In Engel et al. (eds.), America in the World. Doc. 5.13.

Du Bois, W.E.B. to Kwame Nkrumah, 7 February 1957. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

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Footnotes

^[1] Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, 17 February 1941.

^[2] Alfred Thayer Mahan, “A Call for Naval Power,” in America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Andrew Preston (Princeton University Press, 2014), doc. 1.5; “The Nixon Doctrine,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 12.3.

^[3] Mahan, “A Call for Naval Power,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 1.5.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] William McKinley, “McKinley Explains U.S. Occupation of the Philippines,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 2.10, p.56.

^[6] George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 326-340.

^[7] “The Atlantic Charter,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 5.13.

^[8] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 538-555.

^[9] “NSC-68,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 8.6.

^[10] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 635-650.

^[11] “The Nixon Doctrine,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 12.3.

^[12] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 760-790.

^[13] Woodrow Wilson, “Wilson’s Defense of the League,” in Engel et al., America in the World”, doc. 4.13.

^[14] Henry Cabot Lodge, “Opposition from Henry Cabot Lodge,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 4.11.

^[15] Brooke L. Blower, “From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919-1941,” Diplomatic History 38, no.2 (2014): 345-376.

^[16] “America First,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 5.11.

^[17] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 595-650.

^[18] “Reagan at Westminster,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 13.5.

^[19] Beth Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

^[20] “The White Man’s Burden as Prophecy,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 2.15.

^[21] Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 2.12.

^[22] McKinley, “McKinley Explains U.S. Occupation of the Philippines,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 2.10, p.56.

^[23] Woodrow Wilson, “Wilson’s Defense of the League,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 4.13.

^[24] Ho Chin Minh, “Ho Chi Minh’s Appeal for Self-Determination,” in Engel et al., America in the World, doc. 4.10.

^[25] Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt Against Empire in 1919,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1327-1351.

^[26] Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 85-134.

^[27] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 656-700.

^[28] W.E.B. Du Bois to Kwame Nkrumah, 7 February 1957, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

^[29] Ibid.

^[30] Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 85-134.

^[31] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

^[32] Frank Ninkovich, “Trumpism, History and the Future of US Foreign Relations,” in Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert Jervis et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 395.