US expectionalism

The foreign policy of the US throughout its history has been a reflection of the image
which it has had of itself.

The United States is not like any other nations as it is the result of a consecutive series of
acts of will. That is, the first Americans became Americans because they wanted to be Americans.
Throughout its history, the US enlarged and renewed itself through consecutive waves of
immigration, through people who decided that they should become Americans. From the 17 th
century onwards, the US expanded into politically empty or half-empty spaces organically, slowly,
until it reached the shores of the Pacific. So, instead of having a conception of foreign policy
applied to the purpose of territorial conquest, it acquired the conception of manifest destiny, of
an expansion which was the result of Providential design itself; a supposed inevitability of the
continued territorial expansion that served as a justification for US annexation.

When it reached the shores of the Pacific, it found its first dilemma. It had to ask itself
whether this was the consummation of manifest destiny or whether manifest destiny had
something else in store for it by way of territorial expansion. Monroe outlined two separate
spheres of influence: the Americas and Europe. The independent lands of the Western
Hemisphere would be solely the United States' domain. In exchange, the United States pledged to
avoid involvement in the political affairs of Europe. In the nineteenth century American clergymen
said that Providence had designed all of the Western Hemisphere for American domination. This
dilemma was resolved by the Spanish-American War of 1898. For it made it inevitable for the US
to come to a decision as to what to do with the remnants of the Spanish Empire. So US had to stop
at the territorial boundaries of the Western Hemisphere and give the conquered colonies back to
Spain or had to acquire them itself.

When President McKinley finally decided that the US ought to annex the Philippines, he
justified the decision by saying that he knelt down one night at the head of his bed and asked for
Divine guidance and heard the voice of God telling him to annex the territory.

When the Philippines were incorporated into the US and Cuba became a protectorate of
the US, the US made it its business to prepare to get rid of these new territories by trying to
prepare the indigenous population for self-government. These events had profound repercussions,
especially with regard to the American purpose in foreign policy. From the very beginning both the
Government and the people of the US, as well as the world outside, had been convince that theirs
was a new experiment in statecraft, that it was an attempt to create a political commonwealth
significant not only for Americans but the whole world.

And so the US from the very beginning of its history offered itself as a model for other
nations to emulate. What the US had achieved, other nations could also achieve if only they
would establish the same kind of social and political institutions. The Spanish-American War
brought a change in the conception of the American purpose abroad. Territorial expansion was
justified in terms of enlarging the domain of freedom and equality. But it was a different matter
when the Cubans and the Filipinos had to be governed, as it could not be claimed that equality and
freedom had been enlarged in these territories. The only they could proclaim was that the US had
a mission to teach less fortunate people how to create that equality in freedom. This is a second
type of purpose abroad, a missionary one. This was different from the conception of the US as a
model. In this case, this policy goes hand in hand with the policy of isolationism; the latter, with an
emphasis on the domestic development of the US. If the US is a model, then others can decide to
take it or leave it. If the US was convinced that he had a mission to fulfil, then he entered actively
into the domestic affairs of other people. In the Congress, it was declared that the US was obliged
to annex the Philippines because it had a duty to bring the blessings of Western civilization to it.
In short, after the Spanish-American War, the US appeared no longer as a nation limiting its
interests to the Western Hemisphere but as becoming an imperial power among others.

After WW1, President Wilson introduced a third conception in the relations between the
US and the rest of the world, a crusading one. This implies the duty to destroy the enemies of the
universal happiness for which the US stands, or to embark upon a crusade not only on behalf of
the positive values which the US represents, but also, in a negative sense, to destroy the enemies
of those values. This is a pattern in which the US enters a war not for the purpose of gaining a
particular national advantage but for the purpose of extirpating the enemies of the US who are
identified as enemies of mankind. Once they are defeated, the preconditions for the
establishment of universal happiness will have been established. The enemy is not only a political
or military enemy but a moral enemy, one who has to be not only defeated but also eliminated.
Thus, the US must wage war to preserve peace in South-East Asia, and it must try by force of arms
to create a new nation in South Vietnam.