ABSTRACT
Critics of realism, the doctrine underlying the grand strategy of restraint, often cast it as modern import adverse to U.S. liberalism. This chapter shows how realism was present at the founding of U.S. grand strategy and served to protect liberal values. Tension always existed between liberal interventionists and those who favored non-intervention in the old world. But the approach to foreign policy that the United States followed from the Revolutionary War through at least the Spanish-American War was both realist and classically liberal. The strategy of limiting military alliances and military non-interventionism abroad meant that the United States did little besides trade outside the western hemisphere in this period. Military interventions occurred primarily to protect trade and did not involve long land wars. The ideological underpinning for this approach to foreign policy is well known: U.S. leaders feared that war and entanglement in foreign conflicts would centralize power and harm the nation’s experiment in liberal democracy. The realist rationale for early U.S. non-interventionism is less appreciated. As Eric Nordlinger argues, U.S. foreign policy was then a product of a “studied appreciation of the fit between American interests and international realities.” Early U.S. grand strategy then followed from an understanding that non-interventionism was consistent with the nation’s security requirements and its liberalism. It was realism in the service of liberal ends.
