FOREIGN POLICYThe Middle Road: Why the United States Needs a Dynamic Approach to Its Foreign Policy

By Karishma R. Mehta and Hunter Stoll

The world finds itself in a precarious calm before a potential storm of great power rivalry. The United States is in yet another crucial presidential election cycle. Both tickets offer largely contrasting stances for America’s position on the international stage. However, must America’s approach to its role on the international stage be one of two extremes, or can it be more nuanced?

America’s History of Complex Foreign Policy
Examining American history reveals various ways in which the country has approached its foreign policy. In his farewell address, President George Washington advocated for a noninterventionist approach to European affairs. And thanks to two massive oceans serving as menacing barriers to would-be belligerents, the United States was largely able to refrain from bloody wars and colonial clashes across the globe. The twentieth century, however, would challenge the United States’ relative abstention from international affairs.

In the lead up to both world wars, as in today’s America, the United States was largely divided into two camps: interventionists (also referred to as internationalists throughout this article) and isolationists. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson narrowly won re-election, thanks in part to the slogan “he kept us out of the war.” Less than a year later, the United States would find itself sending its doughboys across the Atlantic to support the Allied cause, and Wilson changed his tune, going from ardent isolationist to American peacekeeper. After the Great War, his emphasis on American shaping of the international order led to the creation of the short-lived League of Nations. The U.S. Congress never ratified American membership in the League, leading it to become an ineffective international body while the United States retreated once more into relative isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s.

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“Examining American history reveals various ways in which the country has approached its foreign policy.”

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Prior to U.S. involvement in the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt’s internationalist ambitions were often at odds with the greater American public, leading him to curtail these efforts to a large degree. Despite this, Roosevelt demonstrated early on that he was keen on broadening U.S. foreign policy. Within his first term alone, he established official ties with the Soviet Union and made a failed bid for U.S. membership in the World Court—while also enacting the Good Neighbor policy, which reinforced the United States’ noninterventionist position towards Latin America.