Americans and Their Foreign Entanglements

IT IS NOT unusual for intellectuals who study U.S. history to conflate the views of political leaders with those of all Americans. This is how Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the National Security Council, convinces himself in Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts To Shield Itself From the World that from the founding until the Second World War, “Americans” were dangerously, consistently, and almost universally opposed to foreign interventions—with the “notable departures” of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the subsequent decadeslong occupation of the Philippines, and U.S. entry into the killing fields of the First World War.

Since the intervention against the Axis in the 1940s, Kupchan argues that Americans have vacillated between a reluctance to intervene outside the national borders and a desire to remake the world in their image. But throughout our history,