Never has the question of intervention-how the United States should face the world-been so trenchantly argued. It was arguably even more momentous than the debate over slavery, because its outcome affected many countries, not just one. In 1898, Americans plunged into the farthest-reaching debate in our history. That brought the United States to the edge of the world stage. Only after the frontier was officially declared closed in 1890 did some begin to think of the advantages that might lie in lands beyond their own continent. Over the decades that followed, Americans concentrated on binding their national wounds and settling the West. After both of them, troops returned home.Ĭivil war enveloped the United States from 1861 to 1865. Those were isolated episodes, though, and not part of a larger plan to spread American power. Half a century later, President Millard Fillmore sent a fleet of “black ships” to force Japan to open its ports to American traders. In 1805 a fleet dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson defeated a Barbary Coast pasha who was extorting money from American vessels entering the Mediterranean.
All are pale shadows of the first one.Įven before that debate broke out, the power of the United States was felt beyond North America. None of it was original.įor generations, every debate over foreign intervention has been repetition. They were debating the central question of our foreign policy: Should the United States intervene to shape the fate of other nations? Much of what they said was profound. Our inability to choose between them shapes our conflicted approach to the world.Įminent figures have led the United States into conflicts from Indochina to Central America to the Middle East. At different times, according to circumstances, these contrary impulses emerge in different proportions. We want to guide the world, but we also believe every nation should guide itself. Americans are imperialists and also isolationists. When we love the idea of intervening abroad and then hate it, we are not changing our minds. Then, chastened, we retreat-until the cycle begins again.Īmerica’s interventionist urge, however, is not truly cyclical. Confident in our power, we launch wars and depose governments. At some moments we are aflame with righteous anger. Our enthusiasm for foreign intervention seems to ebb and flow like the tides, or swing back and forth like a pendulum.
Put differently: Should we charge violently into faraway lands, or allow others to work out their own destinies? Put one way: Should we defend our freedom, or turn inward and ignore growing threats? For more than a century we have debated with ourselves. How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide.
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