How has America's foreign policy changed Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

How has America's foreign policy changed - Essay Example That is a foreign policy which determinedly aims towards the isolation of a country’s national and international interests from world events. It is, to a large extent, an unrealistic foreign policy insofar as it ignores the extent to which national interests are ultimately intermingled with both international ones and those of other nations. World War I, according to this interpretation, exposed the extent to which the United States’ foreign policy had oversimplified the extent to which national interests, largely economic ones, were predicated on the well-being and stability of other nations, specifically the European ones. Realization of the aforementioned, therefore, forced the United States, largely out of concern for its own national interests and welfare, to break with its non-interventionist foreign policy and embrace a more interventionist one in which the US engaged in the affairs of other nations for the promotion and protection of its own interests. The United States refusal to sign the Versailles Treaty was consistent with its pre-World War I foreign policy. Quite simply stated, prior to World War I, the United States had pursued a non interventionist foreign policy and had, upon the outbreak and prolongation of the aforementioned event, only temporarily broken with that policy. It broke with it in order to restore stability to Europe and, by association, the United States’ economic interests in the continent. As is evident from Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the United States had assumed that following the conclusion of World War I and the subsequent restoration of stability to Europe, it would be able to revert to its earlier foreign policy strategy. Accordingly, the very last thing that it wanted was another European war. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, however, appeared to threaten just that. Certainly, it should have included