ABSTRACT
World War II, it is widely understood, brought the United States into a new relationship with the rest of the world, opening an era of internationalism and ending permanently the isolationism of the past. While America had been consistently involved in wars throughout its history (as other chapters in this volume make clear), the postwar period brought the first sustained era of stable international engagement. As leaders of a selfacknowledged global power, American presidents and their advisors found themselves faced with a variety of questions and concerns that their predecessors could ignore, or deal with only sporadically. Thus, while the postwar period did not usher in a new era of American military interventionism (as some have argued), it did introduce new dimensions to America’s relationship with war.
