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“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” were the “unalienable Rights” centered when the founders of the United States declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776.
In the 250 years since, US governments have claimed that preserving the ideals of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms are the main motivators of the country’s foreign policy.
Over 250 years, US foreign policy has shifted from prioritizing diplomacy to emphasizing military force, particularly in the Middle East post-9/11, while American confidence in their democracy and the nation’s global image have declined.
Americans, however, have growing doubts about whether the United States has lived up to its founding values. In 2024, 72% of Americans surveyed agreed with the statement that democracy in the United States “used to be a good example, but has not been in recent years.”
DW examined how the country’s foreign policy objectives and tactics have changed over 250 years — showing how US governments have increasingly pursued goals through military force rather than diplomacy.
US prioritizes military power over diplomacy
Political scientists Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi have identified more than 500 US military interventions in the past 250 years.
“While in the past the US assumed rationality for many of its rivals, in the post-9/11 era, that belief in the rationality of their enemies seemed to have dissipated,” said Kushi, an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, a private liberal arts university in Massachusetts.
“The idea was then: ‘If we cannot reason with our enemies, if we cannot use diplomacy with our enemies, all we have is violence — all we have is the use of force,'” Kushi said. “And, with a dramatically growing Department of Defense budget and a withering Department of State budget in the post-9/11 world, what happened is: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Though Latin America has most consistently been the site of US interventions since the early 19th century, countries in Asia, including the Middle East, have been an increasing focus of military intervention in recent decades.
“There is a clear shift in our data in the US moving towards the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa for many of its interventions,” Kushi said. “Arguably, much of that can be explained by the post-9/11 global war on terror. It can also be explained by the US’s power projection capabilities as the unipolar power. After the end of the Cold War, with a growing military capacity, the US could afford to project more of its power all over the world and, of course, redefine its interests so that the world at large becomes related to US interests.”
US objectives: nation-building, regime change
It’s not only that the regional interested shifted, the objectives, too, changed with time.
The 1990s were “the humanitarian interventionism era of US foreign policy: The expansion of national interest to incorporate the US fighting against the worst humanitarian atrocities all over the world — Balkans, Somalia, so on,” Kushi said. “Many of these interventions in the data set do paint the picture of other countries calling upon the US to intervene militaristically.”
Since 2001, “maintaining or building foreign regime authority” has been a major motivator of US military interventions, according to the data compiled by Kushi and Toft.
And this year alone has offered two examples of US military intervention with the objective of removing a foreign regime: the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and the launch of the war against Iran in February.
Another objective shows the opposite trend: Though “economic protection” was once the primary objective of military interventions, it has declined in importance since World War II.
Diplomacy to achieve economic objectives
It’s not that economic interests weren’t relevant or worth protecting anymore, but it seems the strategy on how to pursue that objective changed: From the 1960s though ’80s especially, the US government increasingly signed trade treaties, according to the Measuring American Diplomacy project by political scientists Calvin Thrall and Matt Malis.
“Diplomats are very good at promoting exports abroad when they’re given resources and personnel to do so,” said Thrall, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “They’re very good at negotiating investment deals and also resolving commercial disputes.”
Thrall said the United States tended to engage less with countries where the US government had not identified significant commercial interest.
“Currently, we don’t have ambassadors to places like Bolivia, Pakistan, Malawi,” Thrall said. “If you look at the African continent in particular, frequently these relationships are treated inconsistently by the United States. But the places that are large destinations for US exports, places that are important for US multinational corporations, those are places that are going to get consistent attention regardless of the administration.”
According to the data Thrall and Malis compiled, the number of new US treaties has declined since the 1980s — under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
US presidents have increasingly preferred executive agreements with other heads of state over treaties, which must be ratified by Congress. However, these agreements, too, show a decline across administrations, particularly over the past decade.
US has increasingly preferred bilateral over multilateral agreements
This coincides with another trend: The United States has increasingly withdrawn from multilateral agreements. Thrall and his colleagues have observed that US governments since the 1980s have preferred forging bilateral — often commercial — agreements.
“With bilateral agreements, the more powerful state in the partnership, which, for the United States, is almost always the United States, gets to dictate the terms of the agreement,” Thrall said.
“The really notable thing that we’re seeing this administration do, breaking with previous ones, is that it’s not even paying lip service to the so-called liberal international order or values-based order,” Thrall said. “President Trump is more willing to come out and say: ‘We’re in it for our financial interests. This is not about values or propping up an international order.'”
Thrall and Malis found that there have never been as many unfilled US ambassador posts as there are now. This might put the United States and its interests at a disadvantage.
“There is a growing body of academic literature that demonstrates just how important not only ambassadors but rank and file diplomats are, bringing about the outcomes that states want to have happen. What we’re seeing in the US case is a historic underinvestment in the actual bureaucratic capacity to get the things done internationally that they might want to do.”
Even more, it might also lead to more conflicts. Malis found that the United States is more likely to enter into military conflicts with countries where it does not have an ambassador.
Kushi said there had been a clear transition from diplomacy to force in the US’s relations with many governments.
“It seems that the balance between tools of statecraft for the United States has shifted in favor of militaristic tools,” Kushi said. “And this is not necessarily a benefit for US security and for global security.”
Deteriorating US image
Sixty-two percent of US respondents to a Pew Research survey in April said they were not confident that President Donald Trump was using military force wisely or making good decisions about foreign policy.
This aligns with a longer-term trend: Since the early 1960s, the market insights company Gallup has asked Americans how satisfied they are with the US’s position in the world. After a record high of 71% in 2002, the share of American adults happy with where the United States stands is now just 38%.
Recent history also appears to have changed how other countries look at the United States. Surveys by Pew Research in 2025 and the Danish organization the Alliance of Democracies and polling firm Nira Data this year show how the US’s image abroad has worsened compared with previous years.
According to the Alliance of Democracies, the US’s image improved in just three of the 48 countries surveyed: Israel, Russia and China.
Source: DW
