The United States of America’s foreign policy is a doctrine that states that America will try to protect American values, advance democracy, enforce the understanding of American values into other countries, and protect human rights. Despite its simple nature, America’s foreign policy has drawn a lot of criticism due to how terrible it has been over the last few decades. A lot of the criticism stems from the poor execution of a lot of the plans that America tried to advance. Thankfully, there are a lot of ways that America can fix its foreign policy for the future.
First, America needs to stop trying to be an overprotective big brother to the rest of the world. Ever since the 1970s, America has intervened in almost every conflict in the world in one way or another. Take Syria as an example. What started as a relatively small conflict between the two factions of the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Syrian government quickly became a much larger conflict as soon as America dipped its toe into the war. America’s intervention in the war caused a lot more death and destruction due to America’s immense military power. Staying out of Syria could have allowed Syrians to settle the war themselves. America’s intervention only dragged on the war and made it more bloody than it needed to be.
Perhaps the most popular example of American foreign policy going wrong was the intervention in the Vietnam War. America’s intervention, rather than ending the civil war, very quickly escalated the war into one of the most brutal wars of the Twentieth Century. American soldiers very quickly found themselves fighting an enemy that had no issue using civilians as cover from fire. This caused soldiers to become paranoid to the point of killing civilians out of fear of them being enemy soldiers. This resulted in the war’s death rate rapidly rising. By the end of the war, around two million civilians died on both sides of the war. More than fifty thousand American soldiers died, which is around half of those who died in the First World War. Despite all the death, America didn’t even achieve its goal of kicking communism out of Vietnam. Over fifty thousand American casualties later, the communists took over Vietnam anyways. America’s intervention didn’t lead to anything meaningful or positive. All it did was kill millions of people who otherwise wouldn’t have been touched by the war prior to America’s intervention. If nothing positive or meaningful comes out of your presence, why be there in the first place?
An easy fix for this predicament is simply scaling back how we supply a country we want to support. The recent war in Ukraine is an example of this. America has learned from its campaign in Afghanistan and now knows that aiding a country by giving them bombers only increases the damage and death. Instead, America has aided Ukraine with training, money, and weapons that can help them attain air superiority. With a larger focus on strategic victory, rather than destruction of Russia, Ukrainian casualties have been relatively minimal compared to Russia’s casualties. This allows America to enforce its foreign policy without the death and destruction it amplified in Syria, Iraq, and Vietnam.
American foreign policy is, on paper, a great idea. While it isn’t perfect, America is one of the wealthiest, safest, and most powerful countries in the world. Promoting its policies in other nations, while sounding great in concept, rarely ever works. Not every country can function the way America does, and forcing it onto them won’t help any. It’s best America supports the side it likes but largely allows other countries to dictate their futures themselves. Historically speaking, it’s what has worked best for us. At the very least, it’s better than tens of thousands of Americans dying.
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