American intervention overseas
American intervention overseas refers to the United States' involvement in international conflicts and crises, which has evolved significantly since the late 18th century. Initially, the U.S. focused primarily on domestic issues and largely avoided foreign entanglement. This changed at the turn of the 20th century, as the U.S. began to engage more actively in global affairs, influenced by its desire to protect political and economic interests. Key interventions include the Spanish-American War in 1898, World Wars I and II, and numerous conflicts throughout the Cold War, such as the Vietnam War and the Korean War, aimed at combating the spread of communism. In the 21st century, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were justified as efforts to combat terrorism and promote democracy, following significant events like the September 11 attacks. Despite these intentions, many of these interventions have faced criticism and have led to complex outcomes, often resulting in ongoing challenges in the regions involved. Overall, American intervention overseas reflects a complex narrative of shifting policies, driven by national interests and evolving global dynamics.
American intervention overseas
From the late 1700s through the 1800s, the United States mostly restrained itself from intervening in foreign conflicts, preferring to focus on domestic issues instead. But the turn of the twentieth century marked a shift in American foreign policy as the United States became more liberally invested in securing its own international interests by settling the disputes of other countries. This shift led to American involvement in a number of large-scale conflicts in the 1900s and 2000s, including World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The First 100 Years: 1798-1898
For about the first hundred years of its existence, the United States avoided committing to foreign alliances or making overseas enemies. The wars the United States fought in this era were either responses to foreign aggression—such as the Barbary Wars with Tripoli and the War of 1812 with England—or purely domestic conflicts such as the Civil War. The United States' first major overseas intervention took place in 1898 with the Spanish-American War. Cuba had been attempting for three years to gain its independence from Spain, which had colonized the island four hundred years earlier. The United States supported Cuban independence and in April of 1898 proposed that Spain peacefully relinquish control of Cuba.
Spain responded to this by declaring war on the United States. Over the next four months, American and Spanish forces clashed in Cuba and the Philippines until the two nations agreed to a cease-fire in August. The Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war that December, granted Cuba its independence and secured for the United States the former Spanish possessions of Guam and Puerto Rico.
The Twentieth Century
United States foreign policy fundamentally changed with the arrival of the 1900s, as the United States now viewed foreign intervention as vital to securing its own political and economic interests around the world. In 1912, this resulted in the US occupation of Nicaragua, undertaken to prevent a dictatorship from taking hold, and in the American invasion of Haiti in 1915. There, US marines stopped the country's recent political crises from descending into despotism and anarchy.
But the United States' first major foreign intervention of the twentieth century was the American entry into World War I in 1917. For the previous three years, the United States had remained neutral in the intense global conflict brought on by German and Austro-Hungarian expansionism in Europe. But when German submarines began sinking American merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean, the United States declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary.
America and its allies had defeated Germany and ended the war by 1918. But it was this very defeat that in the 1930s gave rise to the revolutionary leader Adolf Hitler. As chancellor of Germany, Hitler wanted to glorify his country by once again conquering Europe and establishing a global German state. In 1939, Hitler's Nazi army invaded Poland, officially beginning World War II.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to maintain American neutrality during the war, but the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 forced him to intervene. The United States and its allies spent the next three-and-a-half years containing the threat of the expanding Japanese Empire in the Pacific region while driving the Nazis' of Hitler's Third Reich out of their territorial holdings in Europe. The American intervention in World War II ultimately resulted in the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire.
Most of the United States' post-World War II foreign interventions were undertaken to prevent the global spread of dictatorial communism, an economic system in which money and property are owned by the state and shared among people equally. These interventions included the Korean War (1950-1953), the invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs (1961), and the Vietnam War (1955-1973). These American efforts all failed to eradicate communism in their respective areas of the world.
In 1990, the United States and its allies began the Persian Gulf War in response to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invasion of the neighboring country of Kuwait. By 1991, the US-led coalition in Iraq had defeated Hussein but left him in power as president. In the remainder of the 1990s, the United States also intervened in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia for various peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
The Twenty-First Century
In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan to defeat the al-Qaeda terrorist group, which had destroyed the American World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. American forces remained in Afghanistan into the mid-2010s, attempting to defeat Islamic terrorism there and fashion the nation into a free democracy. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq to topple the oppressive, ongoing regime of Hussein and, as in Afghanistan, install a Western-style democracy. Hussein was eventually tried and executed for his crimes against humanity.
Soon after the United States left Iraq in 2011, the country returned to the formerly chaotic environment of its past as al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups reorganized and overtook the country. The most prominent of these organizations was known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, which emerged under that moniker in Syria and Iraq in the early 2010s. In 2014, ISIS swept across northern Iraq, destroying cities and killing civilians as it progressed. To prevent the terror group from overtaking the Iraqi government, the United States intervened by launching a large-scale bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. By the end of 2014, the bombings had failed to diminish ISIS's power significantly.
In its early years, the United States chose not to intervene in the matters of other countries. But time and circumstances changed this policy into one of frequent overseas intervention to secure democracy around the world. The American record in this area has been diverse, with numerous successes and failures over many years.
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