ABSTRACT
Contrary to enduring myth, Americans have never been an isolationist people. Since before there was even a United States, Americans have engaged the wider world vigorously and energetically. They have, however, often been a unilateralist people, a helpful distinction invented not by George W. Bush but by the historian Walter McDougall. Isolationism implies that Americans have attempted to seal themselves off from the outside world and limit their affairs to the United States, and perhaps other parts of the Western hemisphere. Such a state of geopolitical purity is obviously chimerical because it is impossible, even in theory, especially for a robustly commercial-industrial nation such as the United States. Unilateralism, on the other hand, more accurately describes the traditional parameters of US foreign policy: unilateralists do not deny the wider world or seek to avoid it; instead, they involve themselves deeply in world politics and economics but seek to do so strictly on their own terms, without obligation or binding commitment to any other nation or people. This, it is clear, is what George Washington meant in his famous 1796 Farewell Address, in which he warned Americans from involving themselves in “permanent alliances.”1
