Guy Zuv's US Foreign Policy

The first chapters of Guy Zuv’s U.S. Foreign Policy and Hook & Spaniers American Foreign Policy Since World War II talk about the ideology behind the way the United States engages in it’s foreign policy. These chapters show the basis of our thinking when it comes to interactions with different countries either through diplomacy or military actions. They also show the history of our foreign policy and the influencing environment it was founded in. Reflecting on these chapters gives insight into why the U.S. has this unusual behavior when dealing with foreign policy as well as to why we have such a problematic relationship with many countries around the world. One of the major observations we see in our foreign policy is how it’s fluctuates

This started with Washington who was influenced by Thomas Paine’s book title Common Sense. In this book Paine stated, “it is the true interest of America to steer clear of European intentions” to which Washington summarized with his statement that the United States needed to “act for ourselves and not others”. These ideals of non-interventionism grew prevalent in foreign policy with each president adding their own legislation to help show the philosophy. The most known being the Monroe Doctrine that could be summed up saying America and Europe would not intervene with each other’s affairs. Due to this long lasting philosophy, America’s foreign policy and the attitudes about it today still have heavily influence of the non-interventionist philosophy. This could be seen why we seem to shut down any communication or diplomacy with other countries especially when the nation itself is facing an inner crisis. However, it is this reason why when America does become involved in global interest and activities it’s usually from an internal event first. This can be seen in WWII with the U.S. showing little interest at all in the war. However, this soon changed

Before this event, President George W. Bush had little involvement in the terrorist groups and inhumane behaviors going on in the Middle East. This tragedy led to a large majority of people to want some kind of military involvement in the Middle East, either for justice on the attacks or the belief the U.S. was morally obligated to end the cruelties in this area. We saw this again after Obama had the troops returned home, and became more concerned with internal affairs than foreign affairs. Soon afterwards near the end of 2014 we saw the rise of ISIS, Russian occupation of the Ukraine and Chinese leaders taking other countries territories. This lead to major changes in opinion and forced Obama to take a military route against ISIS in Syria, stating that it was our moral obligation to do