Cohen Blog 3

    For this blog I wanted to compare the desires of many of our Founding Fathers during the creation of our 

countries in regards to foreign policy to the position of the world stage that the United States finds itself in 

the present day. More specifically how many of our Founders supported a general attitude in 

noninterference in the affairs of other sovereign nations. Independence was the biggest pillar of the 

American Revolution, unfair influence and taxation from Great Britain stirred the revolutionaries to call 

for not only separation, but complete independence and autonomy from its mother country. During the 

drafting of our Constitution, and at the very least into our first presidency, the general attitude towards 

interfering with the affairs of other countries was one that supported a complete isolation of the country, 

minus trade and commercial agreements of course. So while not completely isolationist the founders 

supported a strategy of very strategic independence.


    This is extremely contrary to the modern day foreign policies that the United States has adopted, 

essentially since 1920, but certainly since the 1940s. In pushing for and supporting the Nuremberg Trials, 

the United States helped to establish what would be the basis for international law and enforcement 

standards for countries across the world. Establishing the precedent that not only could another sovereign 

nation call for the prosecution of a member or members of another sovereign nation, but that such persons 

could be but on trial and prosecuted for their perceived offenses. The Geneva convention and the creation 

of the UN furthered these ideas; that a body existed that could potentially be above that of any one nation, 

and that the nations of the world, in order to participate on the International level, had to subscribe to 

certain standard and rules. 


    I say "could potentially" for a specific reason. Because even though the UN, the international court 

systems, the World Bank, and other organizations like it, have been established and continue to operate in 

earnest to this day, the United States continuously finds itself in very powerful positions within these 

groups. American Exceptionalism finds itself in play on almost every level of international affairs, as the 

United States continues to dictate and influence the terms of the governing bodies of the entire world. The 

very rules that the United States help to create actually help the United States maintain its positions of 

power, as it so often finds itself except from these rules, or with the very tools necessary to bend them. So 

while at first glance it seems that we have strayed from the ideas put forth by the Founding Fathers, that 

the United States should stay completely autonomous and independent from the world, I would argue the 

opposite. American Exceptionalism is, in my opinion, a modern day form of the very strategic 

independence that many of the Founders sought so long ago. 

Comments

  1. Brian CoteMarch 29, 2022 at 11:58 AM

    I appreciate your contrast between the foreign policy views of the founders of the United States versus the modern United States’ stance on foreign policy. The current U.S. position (although fading) as the world’s “police” could not stray further from the founding fathers’ views on how the United States should operate, and I believe you did a great job capturing that. Your inclusion of how the U.S. helped to establish a basis for international law through their position during the Nuremberg Trials was very helpful for me just to pinpoint a time period where the United States really took that leap from isolationism to globalism. I see your view on how one might believe that such measures are necessary in order for the United States to maintain its interests and positions, but one must ask whether U.S. involvement and continued intervention in the Middle East, for example, is/was worth all of the lost lives and resources used to keep such a global position.

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