American Imperialism - Imperialism at The Heart of U.S. Foreign Policy

Imperialism At The Heart of U.S. Foreign Policy

Further information: Military history of the United States, Overseas interventions of the United States

Historian Donald W. Meinig says that imperial behavior for the United States dates at least to the Louisiana Purchase, which he describes as an "imperial acquisition – imperial in the sense of the aggressive encroachment of one people upon the territory of another, resulting in the subjugation of that people to alien rule." The U.S. policies towards the Native Americans he said were "designed to remold them into a people more appropriately conformed to imperial desires."

Writers and academics of the early 20th century, like Charles A. Beard, in support of non-interventionism (sometimes referred to in a derogatory manner as "isolationism"), discussed American policy as being driven by self-interested expansionism going back as far as the writing of the Constitution. Some politicians today do not agree. Pat Buchanan claims that the modern United States' drive to empire is "far removed from what the Founding Fathers had intended the young Republic to become."

Andrew Bacevich argues that the U.S. did not fundamentally change its foreign policy after the Cold War, and remains focused on an effort to expand its control across the world. As the surviving superpower at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. could focus its assets in new directions, the future being "up for grabs" according to former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz in 1991.

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the political activist Noam Chomsky argues that exceptionalism and the denials of imperialism are the result of a systematic strategy of propaganda, to "manufacture opinion" as the process has long been described in other countries.