The US and the world: from isolation to superpower
America's arc from the Monroe Doctrine and isolationism to Cold War superpower: the doctrines, wars, and institutions FSOT tests.
The early posture: avoiding entanglement
The foundational instinct of American foreign policy was avoidance of European quarrels. George Washington's Farewell Address (September 19, 1796) warned against "permanent alliances," and Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural (1801) echoed it with "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." This was not pacifism but a calculated husbanding of strength behind two oceans. The young republic nonetheless fought the Quasi-War with France (1798-1800), the Barbary Wars (1801-1805, 1815), and the War of 1812 against Britain.
The Monroe Doctrine and continental expansion
President James Monroe's annual message of December 2, 1823, drafted substantially by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, declared the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonization and pledged American non-interference in European affairs. Initially enforced by the Royal Navy more than the United States, the Monroe Doctrine became the cornerstone of hemispheric policy. Its logic of expansion fused with the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the term coined by John O'Sullivan in 1845. The annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the Oregon settlement (1846) carried the United States to the Pacific.
Imperial overture: 1898
The Spanish-American War (1898), triggered by the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor and inflamed by yellow journalism, transformed the United States into an overseas empire. The Treaty of Paris (1898) transferred Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; Cuba became a protectorate under the Platt Amendment (1901). Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door Notes (1899-1900) asserted equal commercial access to China. Theodore Roosevelt's Roosevelt Corollary (1904) recast the Monroe Doctrine to justify the United States acting as hemispheric "police power," and his "Big Stick" diplomacy secured the Panama Canal Zone (1903). Roosevelt won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War (Treaty of Portsmouth, 1905). By 1900 the United States was an industrial colossus with a two-ocean reach, but its political class remained reluctant to bind itself to the European balance of power, a tension that would define the next half-century.
