1
What struck me in the United States was, the difficulty of shaking the majority in an
opinion once conceived, or of drawing it off from a leader once adopted.
Neither
speaking nor writing can accomplish it; nothing but experience will avail, and even
experience must be repeated…
Alexis de Tocqueville
I
NTRODUCTION
As surprising as it may seem to recent generations, the United States adhered to a
doctrine of foreign policy isolationism from before its founding well into the 20
th
century. Yet
since 1945, America has chosen to depart from this established tradition and instead commit
itself to an internationalist foreign policy, exemplified for more than fifty years by its leading
role in the North Atlantic Alliance. Although the experience of two world wars and a rising
Soviet threat are most often cited as the origins of this fundamental shift – and were indeed
significant factors in establishing it – its political justification cannot be reduced simply to a
matter of threat perception. How then was the United States able to embark on a sustained path
of internationalism, lasting beyond the 1990s, and ultimately champion what it had once so
vigorously avoided: an entangling alliance in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO)?
To address this question, I will briefly first outline the historical background of American
isolationism. Second, I will examine and analyze Senatorial hearings and debates during two
critical points in postwar U.S. foreign policy – the 1949 founding of NATO and its 1998
expansion – in which the United States could have, but significantly did not, revert to its
isolationism of the past. I argue that these votes, while groundbreaking, were both logical and
legitimate courses of action, based on a growing precedent of internationalist programs and
legislation, over time building momentum and making longer-term, deeper commitments more
acceptable to American sensibilities. On the one hand, the founding and enlargement of NATO
transformed the basic foundations of American foreign policy, shifting isolationism firmly to the
Convention