“We cannot shirk our responsibility as the leader of the Free World, because we’re the only one that can do it. And therefore, the burden of maintaining the peace falls on us. And to maintain that peace requires strength.”
Ronald Reagan’s words from the 1980 presidential debate capture a core belief that has shaped American foreign policy for generations: that U.S. leadership and strength are essential to global stability and that this has helped define our rise as the world’s leading superpower.
But this ideology is not just a product of Reagan. It spans generations of American thinking and did not follow strict party lines.
In 1947, Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously declared that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” backing Democratic President Harry Truman’s foreign policy at a pivotal moment in world history. His stance reflected a broader bipartisan understanding that America’s role in the world transcends partisan divides.
For decades, ideas like peace through strength, democratic leadership, and cross‑party unity on foreign policy have been essential to America’s rise as the world’s leading superpower.
And while not always perfect, this approach has defined us as a democratic superpower, led to more prosperity than ever seen before, and has helped contribute to a more stable international order.
Yet in recent years, a growing sentiment has emerged against this long-standing consensus. Isolationist impulses on the extremes of both political parties threaten to unravel the principles that have guided U.S. leadership for generations, risking global instability and diminishing American prosperity and influence.
In this article, we’ll discuss how the United States became a superpower, why our foreign policy and leadership role remain vital, and why this trend toward isolationism could threaten international relations and our superpower status.
A Superpowered Democracy
Foreign policy is an expansive topic that covers a broad range of issues and has a vast history, so we won’t be able to cover everything in extreme detail.
However, the objective here is mainly to focus on U.S. foreign policy ideologies and why they are vital for global politics and a stable world.
To start, we need to look at how we got here.
In the early years of our country, we were an isolationist country, meaning we didn’t get involved in the affairs of other nations.
And this was mainly by necessity.
We were a new nation that was developing, and we needed to focus on our domestic issues and what our identity as a democratic country would be, especially in a world of monarchs.
Engaging in the wars and affairs of other nations might have damaged our country’s structure and distracted us from progressing domestically.
We also didn’t have the power to oppose other nations, predominantly European countries, even if we wanted to.
However, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 established that we wouldn’t accept European powers influencing affairs in the Western Hemisphere. Still, the European powers basically ignored it without us having a strong military, especially a strong navy.
We stayed out of the wars with Napoleon, and when we did participate in conflicts, they were issues that involved us directly and domestically and took place on American soil: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and, obviously, the Civil War.
But all this began to change in the 20th century.
After the victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States began to push to become a global power.
Our expanding economy and acquisition of territories began to put us on the map, and by Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, our global status was starting to come to fruition.
Roosevelt wanted to project our influence abroad, so he did many things, like creating a powerful navy that included new battleships nicknamed the Great White Fleet.
He believed we needed to protect our interests and grow the economy by becoming involved globally.
By World War I, the United States had become a world player. While initially maintaining a more isolationist position, President Woodrow Wilson eventually proclaimed that we needed to “make the world safe for democracy. “
Our influence brought a quick end to the war.
Wilson was a significant influence in the post-war agreements as well, as he tried to establish the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. However, the U.S. never joined the League because the isolationists in the Senate won out and didn’t allow the U.S. to join.
Then came World War II, which changed everything.
During the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in the 1930s, like the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy, the United States was more focused on domestic issues as the Great Depression was ongoing.
But obviously, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan changed all of that. And at the end of the most crucial event in human history, the United States emerged for the first time as a global superpower, along with the Soviet Union.
The United States was the leader in post-war terms and was a significant contributor to establishing the United Nations and world economic institutions like the World Bank.
The Cold War followed, and as the two global superpowers avoided direct confrontation, the United States maintained a policy of containment and deterrence toward the communist Soviet Union.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was established to bring the countries of Europe and the United States into an alliance to deter the Soviet Union from expanding.
This containment of communism usually meant aid to nations opposing communism as well as direct involvement, which wasn’t always the correct decision. The Vietnam War being the obvious example.
But by the 1980s, the policies of Ronald Reagan restored more faith in U.S. foreign policy, and by the early 1990s, the Soviet Union was dissolved. The United States became the sole superpower in the world and the first superpower that was a democracy in the modern world.
All our approaches to these events took place, especially after World War II, due to certain ideologies that the U.S. was committed to, and whether the leaders were Republicans or Democrats, they followed the foundational stance of interventionism in foreign policy.
And while interventionism can have its extreme ends, the United States has ultimately taken an approach in line with Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s beliefs; we need to protect our interests, expand our economy, and make the world more democratic and free.
Whether it was the good foreign policy decisions of presidents like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton or the poor choices of presidents like Lydon Johnson and George W. Bush, the ideological approach has been the same.
This is because U.S. foreign policy “stops at the water’s edge.”
As stated in the intro, bipartisan foreign policy is a foundational stance of the United States. After World War II, the question for the United States was not if but how we should intervene in global politics.
It didn’t matter if you were a Democrat or Republican. Being involved in global politics was a given. And while both parties may have general disagreements on the specifics of those ideologies, they are all based on a foundation of interventionism.
For example, liberal internationalism is a philosophy of multilateralism, meaning more global diplomacy and the use of international institutions, like the United Nations, as a vehicle to solve problems. Many Democrats align with this philosophy.
Realists follow a philosophy of unilateralism, meaning they feel the United States should act more independently in global affairs. They don’t trust the reliability of international institutions and international law because they think they can only be reliable if the nations involved are reliable, which isn’t always the case. Regardless, realists are still committed to these institutions and our role in them; they just want us to make decisions and take actions, at times, without seeking the approval of other nations or international institutions.
Neo-Conservatives have a philosophy similar to Realists, but focus more on getting involved for moral and ethical reasons and spreading democracy worldwide. Many Realists and Neo-Conservatives have traditionally been Republicans.
There are other variants of these ideologies as well, but they all share one commonality: they are interventionists and believe U.S. foreign policy should be one of involvement.
However, despite the fact that these ideologies have led to the creation of a superpower, the extreme wings of the parties are calling for more isolationism, and U.S. foreign policy is becoming more and more partisan.
