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A wide ocean once gave the United States an opening few nations ever receive: the chance to become a neutral power on a continental scale, influencing the world by example rather than intervention. But from the Mexican-American War to the Cold War and beyond, the country repeatedly chose expansion, entanglement, and global management instead of distance. This essay explores the early philosophical roots of American neutrality, the internal contradictions that undermined it, and the long chain of decisions that made intervention the default setting. It also revisits the 1990s “end of history” moment to show why that stability was built on fragile foundations. Imagining the neutral America that never emerged helps reveal the tensions built into the United States from the beginning—and what might still be reclaimed.
If geography shapes national destiny, the United States began with an advantage few nations in history have ever enjoyed. A wide ocean buffering it from Europe’s old rivalries, a political experiment unburdened by monarchies or inherited wars, and a sense of mission rooted more in ideas than in borders—this combination placed America in a unique position. It could have become a neutral power on a continental scale: a republic that influenced the world not through force, but through example.
That wasn’t the path it took. The United States chose expansion, intervention, and global entanglement. The choice wasn’t inevitable, but it became self-reinforcing. And while the late 1990s briefly gave the illusion that the American-led order had produced a stable and conflict-free world—the so-called “end of history”—that stability was built atop decades of interventions and unresolved tensions that would resurface soon after.
This essay explores the neutrality that could have been, the path that was chosen instead, and the consequences of that divergence.
In its early years, the United States stood before two plausible futures:
Geographic insulation as a shield: A distant republic refusing foreign entanglements, maintaining a limited military, and becoming a steady, predictable mediator in global affairs.
Geographic insulation as a springboard: A budding power expanding across the continent, projecting influence abroad, and eventually shaping world affairs through force, alliances, and economic reach.
The first path would have required restraint and consistency. The second path offered opportunity and advantage.
The country chose the second with increasing enthusiasm.
Neutrality wasn’t an afterthought in American political philosophy; it was central.
Washington’s Farewell Address warned directly against entangling alliances. Jefferson envisioned the U.S. as a moral example—a republic that spread its influence by being different. Madison imagined a New World republic insulated from Old World chaos.
Even the early Monroe Doctrine was pitched as hemispheric neutrality: Europe would stay out of the Americas, and the U.S. would stay out of Europe.
For several decades, this vision held real weight. The U.S. lacked both the appetite and the infrastructure for overseas adventures, and neutrality seemed not only coherent but strategically sound.
But this vision coexisted with its opposite.
The United States was born of an anti-imperial revolution—yet it was also born inside a settler-colonial framework. This contradiction shaped everything that followed.
The ideological pillars of the republic emphasized liberty, consent, and sovereignty. The material foundations of the republic depended on land acquisition, resource extraction, and population expansion.
As the nation pushed westward, expansion became politically rewarding, economically advantageous, and culturally normalized. The logic of Manifest Destiny fused idealism with conquest, allowing Americans to see territorial growth not as empire-building, but as the natural expansion of a free people.
When opportunities arose to project power abroad, the habits formed on the continent carried into foreign policy.
Several moments represent clear breaks with the neutral path the U.S. once claimed to value.
The Mexican-American War (1846–48): A voluntary war driven by territorial appetite. It expanded the nation dramatically and signaled the death of any consistent neutrality doctrine.
The Spanish-American War (1898): The United States left the continent, acquired overseas colonies, and embraced the logic of global ambition. Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines—this was not a defensive posture but a transformation.
World War I: Woodrow Wilson framed American intervention as a moral enterprise, but the act of entering the war destroyed the credibility of long-term neutrality. After 1917, global involvement became structurally difficult to unwind.
World War II and the Cold War: By the late 1940s, the U.S. was the central pillar of a global security system. Bases, alliances, covert operations, and economic leverage replaced any notion of neutral distance. The transformation was complete.
Although the long arc tilted toward expansion, neutrality made several return attempts:
The Early Republic (1790s–1820s): The clearest window, when restraint had both philosophical and political momentum.
Post–Civil War Isolation (1870s–1890s): A period of internal focus and relative disinterest in foreign adventures.
The Interwar Years (1920–1939): The Neutrality Acts attempted, however imperfectly, to legislate disengagement from future conflicts. Pearl Harbor brought the experiment to an abrupt end.
These episodes matter because they prove neutrality was not a fantasy. It simply lost out to the pressures of expansion and global opportunity.
Neutrality is often associated with moral clarity or national restraint, but its success usually depends on something more structural: strong, nearby powers whose presence discourages expansion. Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland managed neutrality partly because they were surrounded by states capable of checking their ambitions. The United States faced the opposite dynamic—a vast continent with weak neighbors and enormous incentives to push outward. Neutrality is easiest for small states hemmed in by force; it is hardest for large states surrounded by opportunity.
The period between 1989 and 2001 felt like a victory lap for the American project. Without the Soviet Union, with globalization accelerating, and with no major rival powers in sight, many believed the U.S. had presided over a new, stable world order.
But this stability was deceptive.
Many “stable” regions were built on authoritarian allies maintained through covert support or military assistance. Markets integrated not through organic liberalization, but through pressure, sanctions, and force. Conflicts appeared dormant only because they had been suppressed or displaced, not resolved. The global system depended heavily on U.S. intervention to maintain its shape.
A concrete example is the 1994–95 Mexican peso crisis. NAFTA had just taken effect, and the promise of seamless North American integration seemed like proof of a peaceful, post–Cold War global economy. But when Mexico’s currency collapsed, the U.S. felt compelled to intervene with a massive emergency stabilization package—not out of neutrality, but because the new economic architecture required active management. The episode revealed that much of the 1990s “stability” depended on U.S. involvement to prevent systemic shocks.
This was not the peace of a neutral power. It was the quiet of a heavily managed system.
Had the U.S. taken a neutral path earlier in its history, it would not have been entangled in many of the pressures that erupted in the 21st century. Neutral states absorb fewer geopolitical shocks precisely because they generate fewer geopolitical stresses.
The stability of the 1990s was not the absence of conflict—it was the accumulation of unresolved tensions.
Historians tend to split into two camps.
Geographic isolation provided unusual insulation from foreign threats. A large, neutral republic could have provided moral leadership rather than military dominance. Mediation, development, and example-setting might have replaced intervention. Domestic political identity might have remained more cohesive without global entanglements.
Settler colonialism made expansion inevitable. Economic growth depended on new land and new markets. Territorial acquisition was politically celebrated. Industrial capitalism pushed the country toward global reach whether it wanted it or not.
The plausible truth is that neutrality was possible—but less likely than it appeared, given the structure of the country from the beginning.
The greatest loss was not innocence. It was coherence.
A neutral America might have:
Instead, the U.S. became the architect, manager, and sometimes enforcer of a global system that required constant maintenance and generated backlash. The cost was a permanent tension between America’s founding ideals and its foreign policy realities.
Neutrality was not impossible. It was simply the road the republic never committed to taking.
And imagining that alternative now is not wishful thinking. It is a way of measuring what the country became—and what it might still reclaim in the future.
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