American Foreign Policy: The Interventionist Debate
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss American foreign policy in the wake of World War One before introducing Michael Anton.
We often treat foreign policy as a mystery that can only be understood by an enlightened few who have committed their lives to understanding the complexities of international life. This view is dangerous because it encourages citizens to ignore a critical aspect of American political life that it’s our duty to understand. And it’s false because the basics of foreign policy are commonsense and a joy to learn. For the Founders, the basic premise of foreign policy is simple—we must make every decision with a view towards securing the equal, natural rights of American citizens. This understanding requires that America’s leaders remain accountable to the people, and it places essential limits on our interventions abroad. Yet, for over a century, this traditional understanding of American foreign policy has been challenged by new and more ambitious doctrines that argue for increased American involvement and leadership abroad.
World War One marks the rise of the new progressive foreign policy among American elites who sought to spread American principles abroad and make the world safe for democracy. But the American public still largely opposed foreign interventions, and after the Great War, they elected presidents who promised to avoid foreign entanglements and return to a noninterventionist policy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. |
| 0:11.8 | I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:13.2 | And I'm Juan Davalos. |
| 0:14.2 | We're back with American Foreign Policy. |
| 0:16.2 | On to lecture number four today, the interventionist debate. |
| 0:19.9 | In the last lecture, we saw how progressive |
| 0:21.7 | theory began to change the ideas of American foreign policy, just as it did American domestic |
| 0:26.9 | policy. Now those thinkers, those idea men, that includes academics like Woodrow Wilson, |
| 0:33.0 | are beginning to take political power. They're actually in office, and so ideas start |
| 0:37.3 | coming into practice. |
| 0:38.7 | We start seeing the results of those ideas. And one of those ways that we see that is in the League |
| 0:45.6 | of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles following World War I and how we started getting involved |
| 0:51.5 | into the affairs of other nations, into the internal affairs |
| 0:55.0 | of other nations. If we think back to Lecture 1 and Washington's Farewell Address, |
| 0:59.8 | he recommends that Americans enjoy diplomatic and commercial relations with other nations, |
| 1:04.8 | but avoid as far as possible entangling ourselves in the politics of other nations. |
| 1:10.0 | But the League of Nations represents a perpetual and extensive entangling ourselves in the politics of other nations. But the League of Nations represents a perpetual and extensive entanglement of nations in the |
| 1:16.1 | business of others. |
| 1:17.3 | It's the beginning of the idea that there will be a world government. |
| 1:21.5 | Nations won't be governed any longer by the law of nations, which is the law of nature |
| 1:26.4 | applied to nations, and that instructs nations to not rule others without consent. It instructs nations to use their own resources to protect their own citizens. That's replaced by the idea of a government run by the civilized nations of the world. And government is a loose term. It's not a formal government, but it's an idea that |
| 1:44.9 | instead of taking cues from nature and natural rights, we'll come up with expert consensus on how |
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