Intervention and American Foreign Policy

2350 Words5 Pages

Communism and democracy have been considered political opposites and obvious opponents in the realm of nationwide government. The United States has a clear stance on both: quite simply, the latter is ideal and the former is the worst form of government that can be utilized in the state. Communism was viewed as the enemy of democracy and thus of the United States and any state allowed to prosper as a communist nation posed not only a threat to the United States but to democracies everywhere. For years, the United States adopted a strong proclivity for fighting all forms of communism, foreign or domestic, and attempting to install a democratic environment. We saw the fight against communism take place in Korea, Greece and ultimately culminated with the Vietnam war. Although the “falling domino principle” has since been proven nothing more than rhetoric and the threat of communism is no longer pressing, the United States has seemed to retain an interesting ideology – the need to intervene.
It seems as though we have translated our ideology of intervening in communist nations to intervening in nations that harbor, are victims of and continue to be troubled with terrorists. Many argue that after 9/11 there was “a new age of U.S. foreign policy that sought to use the power of the planet’s sole surviving superpower to remake the world in its own image” (Hower), however the seed for this policy was planted long before the attacks on the Twin Towers. This paper will analyze the actions taken by the United States under their two seemingly separate ideologies, decipher similarities and differences and, by the end, hope to assert that the ideology of intervention has always been a crucial implication of the American government, only the ...

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