From Atlanticism to Pacificism

Since the founding of our country, Atlanticists have dominated our foreign/defense policy community. At that time, most of our citizens were transplanted Europeans, and our initial immigrant population came largely from Europe. Our early wars were fought against a European power—Great Britain—and our allies in those wars were other European powers. The nation’s trade and economic relations were largely European. During the Civil War, our diplomacy was aimed at preventing European powers from recognizing the Confederacy as a separate country. It is true that in the second half of the 19^th century, our foreign/defense outlook included pursuing interests in Asia and the Pacific, but Europe remained the focus of our foreign/defense policymakers. 

In the 20^th century, our Atlanticist outlook continued. Our troops fought on the Western European front near the end of the First World War and intervened briefly in northwest Russia. In the Second World War, even though we were attacked in the Pacific by Japan, our wartime strategy was Europe first. The most influential of our military commanders in World War II fought in the European theater. The wartime conferences between the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union were dominated by European issues. The architects of our early Cold War foreign/defense policies were largely Atlanticists, like Harry Truman, George Marshall, George Kennan, and Dean Acheson. Even though we fought two large and costly land wars in east Asia, Atlanticists continued to shape our foreign/defense policy priorities.

When the Cold War ended and with it the Soviet threat to dominate Western Europe, the NATO alliance—whose very existence was a response to the Soviet threat—looked for ways to survive and found them in peacekeeping missions, conflicts in the Middle East and the Balkans, and most especially in geographically expanding into Eastern Europe. The Atlanticists that still dominated U.S. foreign policy, as Jonathan Haslam noted in Hubris, sought to maintain and expand America’s role in Europe even as the Soviet/Russian geopolitical threat receded.