Ideology and U.S. Foreign Relations Essay

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McKinley, according to Herring (2008) was the first "modern commander." He worked to advance America's status as a power, using the war to advance America. His goals consisted of eliminating Spain from the Western Hemisphere, keeping rebel forces in Cuba and the Philippines at arm's length to ensure "maximum U.S. control and freedom of choice." Until the war finished, he said: "We must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want" (2008).

It seems that America had a sense that every other nation was (and is today) like itself in its imperialistic attitudes and goals. The pursuit of self-interest, especially when it comes to money and power, was used as a means not simply to judge people but to judge nations as well. A hierarchy of nations emerged when the world was seen through the lenses of early American foreign-policy-makers (Colorado Edu 2010).

Hunt (2009) argues that American foreign policy-decision-makers have always come from a rather narrow and elite base, coming from some of the most privileged American populations. Even after the Second World War, after the United States became a global superpower, foreign policy decision-makers were still mainly men from big business or corporate backgrounds who went to the same schools and worked in the areas familiar to John Quincy Adams and the founders of American foreign policy (Colorado Edu 2010).

Because of this, from 1776 to 1945 American foreign policy can be seen as "playing out a single script, 'The Rise of the Liberal Empire, written by the colonial elite that founded the American foreign policy system" (Colorado Edu 2010).

The script defined America as the white, Anglo-Saxon, republican commercial empire that the founders created, but it relied as much on older, Calvinist notions of how men should relate to each other as it did upon the liberal ideas of exchange and contract that could be found in Adam Smith.

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The Script could be played out for so long because it was so successful. The American empire did expand in just the way that Hamilton, or Washington, or John Quincy Adams imagined it would. As the young republic grew stronger it extended itself across the continent and then the Pacific and even acted as the paternal guardian of republican experiments of 'lesser' people who tried to follow the American example, from the Latin Americas in the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth (Colorado Edu 2010).

Why American foreign policy hasn't changed since the days of Hamilton, Washington, and John Quincy Adams is because it has been successful overall, as well as there is the fact that there haven't been many nations that have challenged it. Hunt's (1988) three core ideas as they relate to the history of foreign policy in the United States is right on target because American foreign policy-makers learned how to deal with the world and different cultures from business experiences rather than from the study of foreign nations and cultures (Colorado Edu 2010). The elite American universities where the foreign policy-makers went to school didn't do much to inform the students about the "modern world, the languages, cultures, and diplomatic practices of other nations" (2010). Therefore, the information that they were given had more to do with Europe -- especially England -- but not the places where the American empire was expanding -- like Latin America and East Asia......

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