WASHINGTON—As Americans celebrate their 250th anniversary, it’s worth broadening our gaze. The nation’s birth shapes not just who Americans are but also America’s purposes in the world. The United States was founded in universal values and has tended, albeit inconsistently, to bring the ideals articulated by its founders to its foreign policy and grand strategy, including by supporting an international order that favors freedom.
That approach—linking values and interests—was a radical departure from the rule of how nations behaved. The United States has never been consistent in applying this form of American exceptionalism. And Americans have argued about it from the first, with objections and alternatives pushed from the right, left, and center. But it has deep roots.
Applicable to all
President Abraham Lincoln, for example, taught that the United States was “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The US, in Lincoln’s explicit view, was a nation established by belief rather than blood. Immigrants, as Abraham Lincoln argued in 1858, may have nothing in common by blood with the Americans who preceded them—and they need not, because when they discover the Declaration of Independence’s foundational statement of human equality they find “that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are.” Moreover, Lincoln insisted that America’s founding principle is an “abstract truth applicable to all men and all times … a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” According to Lincoln, the principles that form the American nation are universal.
Emerging from its Civil War with unmatched industrial strength, the US came to favor an open world without empires and ordered by rules.
Because the United States was founded on the principle of human equality with universal application, it has been inclined to draw from that principle in its conduct in the world. That sense of the American nation as based on principles applicable to all and for all time has served as the foundation of US grand strategy.
Following the emergence of the United States as a world power at the end of the 19th century, the US self-consciously (and sometimes extravagantly) acted as a different kind of power. Without abandoning the Monroe Doctrine, the US started to oppose spheres of influence and the closed European empires of the time. Emerging from its Civil War with unmatched industrial strength, the US came to favor an open world without empires and ordered by rules. Secretary of State John Hay, who once served as Lincoln’s secretary, articulated this strategy through his Open Door policy, launched in 1899 and 1900 and designed to oppose the European imperial division of China in favor of equal trading access.
The calculated logic was that US values and interests, business and otherwise, could advance together. In abundant self-confidence, the crafters of this strategy assumed that Yankee ingenuity would prevail in a fair playing field and that US values would follow. The United States could shape the world in its own democratic image and get rich in the process. Unlike the imperialist systems the Americans hoped to supplant, this new grand strategy was based on a positive-sum approach. US prosperity and success would grow with, and depend on, the prosperity and success of other countries in an international order founded on rights and rules.
President Woodrow Wilson fleshed out this new approach in his “Fourteen Points” speech to Congress in January 1918. But it had a short and unhappy life, quickly eclipsed by the wave of isolationism (with right- and left-wing variations) and nationalism that overtook the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. It was then expressed again by President Franklin Roosevelt in the “Atlantic Charter” of 1941, issued with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and finally put into practice as a cornerstone of the post-1945 order that President Harry Truman helped establish. It could be termed a “free-world strategy.”
The strategy was a logical extension for a nation whose origin story revolved around a belief in universal human equality. Wilson drew on the language of the Declaration of Independence as the basis for his rules-based approach, declaring in a 1917 speech to the US Senate, “No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.”
The free-world strategy was neither clueless idealism nor empty posturing. Instead, it was a canny achievement and success. Notwithstanding the many inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and blunders of US foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—and the list of those is long—the order that the United States built and championed after 1945 brought the longest period of general peace in Europe since Roman times and decades of global prosperity around the world. The world Washington set in order after 1945 looks far better than the nineteenth-century imperialist world of carve-ups of Africa and Asia or the era of world wars from 1914 to 1945.
Lincoln had a point about the principles of the Declaration of Independence applying to all people.
The Atlantic Council was founded in 1961 to consolidate the United States’ new free-world internationalism, backed from the start by the Kennedy administration, which sought to rally Republican and Democratic foreign policy leaders who were devoted to it. Their convictions had the fervor of bitter experience, having witnessed the consequences of US isolationism and withdrawal from European security that opened the door to the aggressions of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and World War II. Speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 1962, US President John F. Kennedy—like Wilson before him—rooted US foreign policy in the Declaration of Independence: “[T]his nation—conceived in revolution, nurtured in liberty, maturing in independence—has no intention of abdicating its leadership in that worldwide movement for independence to any nation or society committed to systematic human oppression.”
No strategy guarantees against mistakes of application. The record of the free-world strategy was rough from the start. The Truman administration, routinely lauded today for strategic foresight and skill, was condemned in its time as the USSR took over Central and Eastern Europe, Communists triumphed in China, and Stalin developed atomic weapons. In the name of its free-world strategy, the United States defended South Korea against Soviet-backed North Korean aggression but advanced far into North Korea, triggering Chinese intervention and two more bloody years of war. Kennedy and Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon committed the US to years of war in Vietnam, first in the name of the free-world strategy and later in the name of not losing face. That war failed at the cost of 58,000 US soldiers and far higher numbers of Vietnamese.
Shaken by the debacle in Vietnam, the left in the United States turned toward isolationism (“Come Home, America” was the slogan of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.) On the other side, seeking a new realism in foreign affairs, Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought out regional strongmen as bulwarks against communism and thought they had found one in the shah of Iran, whom the US supported even as Iranian society turned against him, creating another debacle still with us today. They pursued détente with the Soviet Union, also in the name of realism, in the process marginalizing human rights and ignoring rising signs of dissent within the Soviet Empire. Nothing seemed to work. By the late 1970s, accumulated mistakes by Republican and Democratic administrations alike seemed to point toward US failure in the Cold War.
Yet the free-world grand strategy came back. President Jimmy Carter and his chief strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski pivoted toward support for human rights and democracy, especially in Soviet-dominated Europe. President Ronald Reagan pressed that forward, seeking not merely to manage relations with the USSR, as Nixon and Kissinger had attempted, but to see democracy prevail. Reagan, like Wilson, made his case for a freedom-based foreign policy, citing the Declaration and its universalism: “The US declared its independence with a document that proclaimed rights to be inalienable gifts from God, not just those who could make it to our shores but to all people everywhere.”
The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 was, to a large extent, the result of patriotic and democratic resistance movements throughout Soviet-controlled Europe, supported by the US in the name of its values and interests. Poland’s great opposition movement, Solidarity, derived its strength from its combination of universal principles and national patriotism. Lincoln had a point about the principles of the Declaration of Independence applying to all people. The democratic and patriotic wave that started in Poland spread across Central and Eastern Europe and helped take down the Soviet Empire. Backing abstract principles, as it turned out, was key to winning the Cold War.
A turn toward transactionalism
This lesson, though, has again been overtaken. Bitter experience more recently in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, fought in part in the name of a free-world strategy, has triggered another national reaction similar to those after the Vietnam War and World War I. It has resulted in many Americans across the political spectrum recoiling from what they perceive as extravagant US objectives overseas.
Some on the political left, particularly in the progressive wing, argue that the United States has undermined the international order it claims to lead through the ways it has wielded military power and selectively or hypocritically enforced the order’s rules. Recent decades have taught that the US ability to “export democracy” and “rights and freedom” are “more limited” than “many past US governments have imagined,” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), has observed. While the US should continue to “promote certain values and principles,” including upholding the universal rights enshrined in the Declaration, it should above all “endeavor not to export harm.” At this year’s Munich Security Conference, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declared that “when you have a rules-based order where you carve out exceptions to our values, exceptions to our rules, eventually the exceptions become the rules.”
Scholars such as Stephen Walt, Stephen Wertheim, and Andrew Bacevich, meanwhile, argue that a values-based, free-world strategy is too ambitious and an overextension of commitments at a time of limited resources. As Walt puts it, “foreign policy elites abandoned realism in favor of an unrealistic grand strategy—liberal hegemony—that has weakened the country and caused considerable harm at home and abroad.”
Many in the Trump administration also have issued critiques. In his 2024 Republican Convention speech, JD Vance, then the nominee for vice president, spoke movingly of his family’s seven generations resting in a small mountain cemetery in Eastern Kentucky. He asserted that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” Distinguishing American ideas and principles from the American nation, he went on to note that “people will not for fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” Vance essentially was arguing that the United States is a nation with hard and material interests. He makes an eloquent and powerful case, but that’s not Lincoln’s definition of America as the new nation rooted in the “abstract truth” of the Declaration’s assertion of human equality that applies to all.
Other administration strategists have been sharper in dismissing the role of values in the American worldview, articulating a foreign policy of might makes right. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently claimed that “you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has frequently rejected what he terms “globalist rhetoric about the rules-based international order.”
Some of the Trump administration’s complaints about a free-world strategy seem based on concerns that the US is bearing too much of the burden. They have a point and the administration’s current push for greater European contributions to the common defense through NATO is a valid way to address these concerns. But some administration messages publicly and privately to allies—that NATO is dead, or a paper tiger, or a mere “legacy institution,” or that the US may not defend Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or other NATO allies from Russian attack—suggest a harsh, strategic turn from support for a free world.
A sphere-of-influence system would not bring stability.
In its place, the United States would calculate its interests in terms of immediate, material gain such as control of resources or territory—grabbing what it can. Consider the consequences: a strategy of unilateral transactionalism severed from values would diminish the US to just another grasping eighteenth or nineteenth-century great power, like the England of King George III from whom the American colonialists broke over his violation of basic rights as he pursued the logic of empire.
Realism in foreign affairs is critical as an operational principle. Failure in Afghanistan and frustration in Iraq reflected a mismatch between objectives and power. The Iran war seems to be concluding in similar fashion. Pursuit of principles without the power to advance them risks becoming mere sloganeering, cant, or cover for bad policy. But elevating power without principles risks degenerating into power worship. The US successfully removed a dictator from Venezuela but now seems to back the dictator’s regime to gain commercial advantage—something that the United States may come to regret, as it has in cases of past support for Latin American authoritarian regimes.
Some realists embrace spheres of influence and great-power deals. Throughout Donald Trump’s terms in office, some in the administration have privately speculated about a deal with Russia at Ukraine’s expense in order to entice the Kremlin to distance itself from China. Such a goal is unlikely and its pursuit damaging. Spheres of influence would mean US acquiescence when great powers, starting with Russia and China, seek to dominate their neighbors by fire and sword, creating empires both cruel and closed.
Were the US to accept such actions, and perhaps participate through its own empire in the Americas, it would have to abandon its foundational principles and turn its back on those who still turn to the United States in hope. And the US would have to accept permanent commercial disadvantage as it retreated from large parts of East Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe to cede those spheres to China and Russia. More retreat would follow as other emerging great powers carved out their own spheres.
A sphere-of-influence system would not bring stability. It would lead to cycles of rebellion and repression and, if the past thousand years is any guide, to regular wars between the great powers, because no power would be satisfied with its sphere. They never are. In 1940, Germany offered Great Britain recognition of the British Empire in exchange for London’s recognition of German control of continental Europe. Churchill didn’t take that deal then; the US should not make similar deals now.
Values that still apply everywhere
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence seems like a good time for the United States to rededicate itself to its founding principles and to a strategy in the world that seeks to advance those principles and thereby advance US interests. A free-world strategy—when wisely rather than blindly pursued—has shown itself to yield good results. That means in practice backing US allies, in NATO and beyond, even while insisting that they step up. That means backing Taiwan, rather than suggesting that it is just too far away to assist. And that means backing Ukraine.
Ukraine’s cause of national survival, sovereignty, and democracy fits the precepts of the US free-world grand strategy. Ukraine is fighting to escape a rapacious empire; it seeks to join the larger European and free-world community that the US has supported; it accepts, despite its own flaws, US foundational principles of individual rights and human equality. Vance observed that people will fight for their homes but not for abstractions. But Ukrainians tell me—sometimes when we are checking apps for details of Russian air assaults—that they are fighting for both.