ABSTRACT
The US has come a long way since 1945. Its foreign policy has responded to immense foreign, domestic and technological challenges. The rapid transition from wartime planning for a UN-based security system to the Cold War forced a radical rethink of US strategy. Threatened again by totalitarianism, Americans drew lessons from the prelude to the Second World War. There must be no appeasement. The US must be strong and prepared to defend itself. And liberal democracies should not be divided as they had been by the dual threat of Nazi Germany in Europe and of Japanese militarism in Asia: the US would have to assume the mantle of leadership. In exercising that leadership, isolationism was pushed to the margins as the US crafted a grand strategy of containment that grew fitfully through stages, but all of them confronting the need to justify a willingness to use varying levels of force in order to ensure the survival of liberal democracy and capitalism. In doing so, it often adopted tactics that rested on the argument that the end justified the means and took decisions that skirted on, or occasionally transgressed, the borders of constitutionality. Cold War stakes were so high that they provided justification for such tactics and decision-making. But means-ends arguments that compromise civil and human rights and inadequately constrain executive power do not sit comfortably for long with liberal democracy and the value it places on the sanctity of the individual. By the end of the Cold War civil rights and constitutional integrity remained largely intact, but they had been periodically and severely battered.
