American Foreign Policy Is Broken; Time for a New Approach

Albert Beveridge was a promising politician in his 30s when he stood up to speak in favor of war and the promotion of democracy to his peers in the U.S. Senate. A historian, Beveridge unabashedly called for the United States to remake the globe. "We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world," Beveridge proclaimed. "And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world."

Stripped of its more racist rhetoric, Beveridge's 1900 speech to justify the U.S. war and colonization of the Philippines could have been made on Capitol Hill a century later in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the larger "global war on terror." Beveridge, too, tried to make an ugly war into a necessary and uplifting venture. There are the same invocations of religious certainty and civilizing missions. The Republican senator from Indiana even had words for those who would voice skepticism about U.S. military actions. "All this has aided the enemy more than climate, arms and battle," the senator concluded.

The attempt by the Bush administration to expand U.S. military power and "lead in the regeneration of the world" has roots in U.S. foreign policy that extend further back than even Albert Beveridge. Justifications for preemptive war to safeguard U.S. security can be found in the words of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. The doctrine of manifest destiny helped expand the territorial limits of America. Only at the end of the 19th century, when it stretched from "sea to shining sea," did the United States have to make a choice: Leave well enough alone or expand overseas.

Although the two major parties might bicker over any particular flexing of military muscle, the maintenance and expansion of U.S. power has been decidedly a bipartisan project. Anti-imperialists such as William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie and Robert Taft have raised objections. But a bipartisan chorus in favor of America's global expansion has drowned out these populist, libertarian and isolationist voices.

At the end of World War II, the United States had a chance to step away from its expansionist past. Again it faced two distinct choices. There was the option of peace and international human rights presided over by the newly established United Nations and inspired by the vision of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The second option was the construction of a national security state anchored in a growing military-industrial complex at home and sustained by covert, militarized policies abroad.

In the late 1940s, after the United States largely abandoned the FDR approach of principled internationalism, the Cold War leadership debated over two strategies: rollback and containment. The partisans of rollback wanted to use the dominant military force of the United States to roll back Communist influence and ultimately topple the Soviet Union itself. The Truman administration eventually settled on the alternative of containment: the deployment of U.S. troops and bases, and the construction of strategic alliances in Europe and Asia, to rein in Soviet and then Chinese influence. Cold War realists shied away from direct military confrontation with the Communist superpowers.

Today, with its doctrine of preventive war and an all-out military assault on terrorism, the Bush administration continues to advocate its own version of rollback. Since these military strategies have only overstretched U.S. capabilities and increased U.S. insecurity, it is not surprising that some Democrats and Republicans have recommended replacing the Bush doctrine with an updated version of the Truman doctrine of containment. This "new and improved" containment strategy would be deployed against transnational terrorism, threatening regimes, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The United States would strengthen its existing military alliances and maintain high levels of military spending. But it would be more discriminating about the use of military force.