Changing US Foreign Policy

Theres no denying that, even in the midst of a recession, the United States is one of the most influential powers on the world stage. But the national mindset in terms of how we interact with other nations is undergoing a major paradigm shift with the onset of the Obama administration, and US foreign policy is shifting with his new mandate. In this article, Ill examine the changing attitudes in national security and try to predict where the latest events in Iran and elsewhere mean for global stability.

The development of US foreign policy over the last century is a fascinating one, and its wise to go back to the key fulcrum point at the end of World War II. Americas participation in the so-called War to End All Wars was the deciding factor in beating back the Axis, and the deployment of the first nuclear bomb on Japan sealed our military might in the eyes of the world. But what really made America the worlds first superpower after WWII was our relative distance from the killing fields while England, Germany, Italy, Japan and the other major players found their infrastructure devastated and economies adrift after the end of hostilities, America was strong, stable, and had an industrial complex ready to go. Its easy to see how the US foreign policy of "policeman to the world" would grow out of that situation.

With the dawn of the Cold War, US foreign policy became focused on combating the Communist menace wherever it raised its head. Its funny to look back on the spectre of the Red Menace in light of the utter failure of most of the Communist nations, but at the time there was a very real panic that Khrushchev was really going to bury us, and Mao would throw the first shovelful of dirt. The Cold War cast things in a "with us or against us" light, bolstered by the cowboy politics of JFK and Ronald Reagan. The world teetered on the brink of nuclear Armageddon a number of times, but it was economic forces, not military, that brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Commie threat to our way of life.

Unfortunately, that threat was replaced by something a lot harder to combat, and US foreign policy since September 11, 2001 has been focused on fighting the global war on terrorism in a number of ways militarily, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and economically, in developing nations where civil unrest could easily open the door for an anti-American bloc to polarize the populace. Whether we will emerge victorious in this phase is up to History to decide, but for all of our sakes, I hope we will.