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The end of the frontier in 1890 coincided with, but only partly caused, a growing attention by the U.S. government to foreign policy. Before the 1890s the U.S. had no distinct foreign policy other than an adherence to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine³（that pronounced all of the Americas to be within the U.S. sphere of interest） and a wish to support U.S. economic investment abroad. The latter point combined with westward expansion in the late nineteenth century to produce a growing U.S. interest in the Pacific. There was territorial expansion（Alaska and Midway） but growing economic domination of independent states such as Hawaii was more typical of U.S. activity. This was accompanied by a Christian missionary zeal and a wish to bring civilised U.S. attitudes to less enlightened parts of the world. As a result, U.S. visitors, traders and settlers were to be found all over the Pacific, the Caribbean and Latin America. While the government had no specific foreign policy to regulate this, in the 1880s it began to build a modern navy to protect U.S. interests. The U.S. was not willing to allow a potential major trading partner fall under complete European domination, and declared itself hostile to European-style colonial expansion （having formerly been a set of British colonies itself）. Presidents Harrison （1889–93） and Cleveland （1893–7） contrasted U.S. tolerance and freedom to European empire-building. It was in the Caribbean, however, that U.S. world power status, and its own colonial empire, was established in the 1890s. Cuba had long been a Spanish colony but had been open to U.S. trade. However, a native uprising led to brutal Spanish suppression and commitment of troops to the island. U.S. sympathy was with the uprising and a chain of provocative events in early 1898 led to President McKinley declaring war on Spain. The war itself was brief and showed the limits of U.S. military might. However, Spain was unable to maintain the war and agreed to a peace deal that made Cuba independent and thus likely to fall even more under U.S. influence. More significantly, the U.S. received the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. When added to existing territorial possessions and the U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898 and American Samoa in 1900, the U.S. entered the twentieth century as a Great Power comparable to the major European empires.

Democrat candidate James Cox of Ohio and his running mate Franklin Delano Roosevelt made membership of the League of Nations their key issue in the election of 1920. The census of 1920 indicated that for the first time more people lived in urban areas than elsewhere, and this election was the first time that women had voted on a national scale. The League was rejected by the Republicans and people generally at that time seemed weary of idealism and reform, and more concerned about rising prices and strikes. Warren Harding the Republican candidate, also from Ohio, was strengthened by his running mate Calvin Coolidge who had, as governor of Massachusetts, helped to stop the strike by Boston police. The Republicans favoured higher tariffs, low taxes, the restriction of immigration and aid to farmers, but Harding was kept away from speech making as far as possible during the campaign. He did however manage to coin the slogan “Let us return to normalcy”, and, whatever it meant, it seemed to suit the mood of the country. His victory was by a greater margin than any previous candidate had achieved and it marked a move away from Progressivism back to laissez-faire. The Republicans would retain control of the executive and generally Congress as well until 1933 when Roosevelt himself became President.

The period 1937–41 saw the U.S. first gradually, and then dramatically, pulled into world conflict. An internationalist foreign policy evolved in response to the aggression of Japan and Germany. Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in July 1937 was far more significant than their occupation of Manchuria in 1931. U.S. interests were now directly threatened and Roosevelt sent an extra 1 200 marines to Shanghai to increase U.S. military presence in China to 3 200. He also began to educate U.S. public opinion against neutrality, but did not yet feel that collective action against Japan was possible. As a result the U.S. refused to support a League of Nations initiative against Japan, and even considered withdrawing from China altogether when U.S. gunboat Panay was sunk by Japan in December 1937. In Europe Germany began to extend its borders in 1938, but Britain and France chose a policy of appeasement rather than military resistance. Roosevelt was dubious about this policy but did not try to intervene. Appeasement failed in 1939, and Germany’s invasion of Poland triggered the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The U.S. looked on with concern, but did not take resolute action. Instead the U.S. defence budget was increased, an open plea to Germany and Italy tocease aggression was brushed aside and the U.S. embargo on arms sales was lifted, but only to allow the Allies to pay up front and transport U.S. arms themselves—a “cash and carry”principle. The U.S. therefore took a more neutral stance in the first months of the Second World War than in the corresponding months of the First World War, even though in the second war it was much clearer which side was the aggressor.

A Japanese attack on southern Indo-China in July 1941 started the countdown to U.S. intervention. Final attempts at diplomatic agreement between Japan and the U.S. failed in November, making war inevitable in Japan’s eyes. Japan then launched a pre-emptive attack at the U.S. naval base in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, in December. The U.S. immediately declared war in response and Germany in turn declared war on the U.S. a few days later. The U.S., therefore, did not enter the Second World War at a time of its choosing and it was to be nearly a year before it was able to make an impact on the outcome of the war. As with Britain and France, U.S. foreign policy in the 1930s represented a failure. The Second World War was only won nearly four years after U.S. entry to the war, and at tremendous cost.

The “Roosevelt Corollary” of 1904 was a more assertive version of the Monroe Doctrine, by which the U.S. would seek to oppose any attempt at European imperialism in the Americas, taking pre-emptive action if necessary, even if it meant intervening in the domestic affairs of its neighbours in certain cases. The Corollary was first put into action with regard to the Dominican Republic, and was basically a response to the expansion of European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reflected Roosevelt’s “big stick” approach to foreign relations, and was marked by an increase in the size of the U.S. navy.

In both the Far East and Latin America, Roosevelt had a common motive, to stop any world power from gaining the ascendancy over others. This motivated other areas of his foreign policy and, later, led to the U.S.’s steps to intervention in both world wars.

“Isolationism” refers to the refusal of the United States to join the League of Nations in the 1920s or enter binding alliances to counter the threat of the dictators in the 1930s. Compared to the post-1941 period, the U.S. was certainly isolated in the 1920s and 1930s; however there was still plenty of interest in world affairs and various conferences and treaties. The U.S. was never truly isolationist, just relatively so during this period. Isolationismdeepened in the 1930s as new reasons for avoiding commitments elsewhere emerged—in particular the impact of the Great Depression.

In conclusion, the reasons for U.S. “isolationism” did change during the 1920s and 1930s, but always seemed to be underpinned by the belief that the U.S. had no part to play in “Old World” diplomatic intrigue. Such intrigue had led to the tragic First World War. As was the case in the European democracies, the effects of world war and then the Great Depression led to an upsurge of pacifism and distrust of binding international commitments. The U.S. was not the only country to reject the League of Nations or fail to face up to the threat of the dictators during this period and in many respects the U.S. was no more isolated or neutral than some other major powers. It was its refusal to join the League and the wave of 1930s neutralism that gave the U.S. an isolationist image between the world wars.