FP
Essay
America, the Once Global Nation
At 250, the country is struggling to come to terms with the world it created.
July 2, 2026, 12:30 PM
By Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history and global affairs at Yale University and the director of Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.
An illustration of a vintage-style map featuring North America and parts of Europe and Africa. Overlaid on the map are 3D red brick walls shaped exactly like the borders of the contiguous United States and Alaska, casting long shadows to the right.
Pep Montserrat illustration for Foreign Policy
Ever since its inception, the United States has been remaking the world in its image. Driven by relatively high economic growth rates, increasing predominance in its own hemisphere, and a peculiar knack for making useful innovations, the country has become not only powerful, but an object of emulation for many others. The expanding global influence of the United States was created not just by its own power in military and diplomatic terms, but by its economic, social, and cultural influence.
By the 20th century, the U.S. position in the world was unique. Not only was it powerful enough to act on its own inclinations, it was attractive and popular on a global scale in ways that many Americans have never fully understood.
An illustration with a weathered, textured look on a beige background. In the center is a blue, sketch-style globe showing the Western Hemisphere, primarily focusing on North and South America. A stylized red eagle with its wings spread is flying across the upper right portion of the globe, facing toward the right. The words "America Retold" are at left.
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The United States is, in many ways, the first empire that is also a global nation. Founded by European settlers, it has had close to 85 million immigrants arrive since 1870. Of its current population, roughly 51 million are immigrants, and close to half the U.S. population has at least one foreign-born grandparent.
Immigration has been America’s greatest strength and attraction. But it has also been politically troublesome at home. Americans have constantly worried about what new waves of immigrants were doing to the country—even if those doing the worrying only arrived on a slightly earlier boat.
A historic black-and-white photograph showing a group of immigrants, mostly women and children wearing headscarves and heavy coats, walking down a wooden gangplank from a ferry. A man in a cap stands at the bottom of the ramp next to them, with a large brick building in the background across the water.
Immigrants arrive to Ellis Island in New York circa 1880. Fotosearch/Getty Images
For the world at large, America’s openness has been its most significant appeal. Anyone could become an American, whether through consumption, culture, or migration. Someone growing up in India could aspire to one day, through hard work, become a U.S. citizen. Someone at school in Lebanon could form a band playing music by Americans and imagine themselves in Los Angeles or Nashville.
The U.S. remaking of the world has been as much about these values as it has been about economic or military power. Moreover, no other country has had even close to this kind of appeal, at least not in modern times.
Of course, the United States has also intervened abroad in far more direct ways. U.S. presidents generally did so in what they viewed as the cause of freedom, however contested that concept may be both at home and elsewhere. The major U.S. interventions were against trade restrictions, authoritarianism, and expansionism—against Germany (twice), against Japan, and against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. World War I was a dividing line. It was the first time the United States sent its own soldiers to fight other major powers overseas. Even though the number of casualties were light compared to other powers—just over 300,000, compared to nearly 3 million Brits and over 7 million Russians—the psychological impact at home was severe, splitting the country between interventionists and anti-interventionists for almost a generation.
The combination of World War II and the Cold War that followed proved significantly more deadly. These conflicts saw about a million American dead and wounded in the world war and more than 300,000 in the Cold War, mainly in Korea and Vietnam.
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An illustration in a detailed woodcut style depicts a large tornado swirling violently under a dark, heavy blanket of storm clouds. Caught in the outer winds of the vortex are two historical flags on broken poles: a Confederate battle flag on the left and a historical American flag with a circle of stars on the right. Swirling in the debris field below the flags are several silhouettes of rifles and pistols scattered by the force of the storm against a light tan background.
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An illustration in an engraved, woodcut style portrays a landscape scene divided by water under a sepia-toned sky. In the left foreground, a prominent flagpole holds a waving American flag over a grassy shoreline. Attached to the base of the flagpole is a heavy metal chain that stretches across the dirt path but ends abruptly with an open, broken link. Across a body of water in the distance, low rolling hills are visible. On the right side, a second flagpole flies the Mexican flag. Next to it, a small silhouette of a person stands looking toward a large, stylized sun with a human face that radiates beams of light across the sky.
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An illustration in a woodcut engraving style showing a large brown American bison standing on a stylized, vintage map of the United States. Dark, heavy smoke billows out from an oil pumpjack and a drilling derrick on the map, enveloping the bison and filling the upper sky.
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An illustration in a detailed woodcut or engraved style depicts a vintage brown leather suitcase adorned with several international travel stickers. The stickers include a Mexican flag, an "Aeronaves de Mexico" airline logo, an "Italia" shield sticker, a "Sicilia" sticker next to an Italian flag, a French flag, and vintage hotel labels from Paris and Marseille. Resting on the top right corner of the suitcase is a grey fedora hat turned upside down. Inside the hat, an American flag pattern lines the interior, and a black revolver rests tucked into the brim with its handle protruding out. The background is a textured tan color.
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The Cold War and its aftermath made the United States into the world’s hegemon. It was a global empire in all but name, with alliances, interests, and preoccupations spread across the world. The successful rebuilding of Europe and Japan, and their integration into a U.S.-led economic and political world order, formed the center of this enterprise, contributing to a rapidly globalizing, or Americanizing, international system.
Since at least the start of the 20th century, United States has wrestled with the question of how to employ its global power and attraction. Some of the answers were, if not given, then at least over-determined by America’s own historical experience. Spreading capitalism and consumerism reflected the 19th century U.S. experience—while also advancing U.S. economic interests abroad.
Promoting trade also fit with America’s experience and interests. U.S. leaders consistently pushed for access to foreign markets, opening the doors (sometimes by force) to countries and regions that had not previously been fully available to foreign commerce. Ironically, America only proved willing to open its own markets much later, starting in the 1930s. Despite Washington’s recommendations to others, the United States itself arguably did not truly practice free trade until the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Some other elements of the U.S. approach to the world were more contingent, though here too there was a strong connection to the country’s own historical experience. U.S. foreign policy showed a consistent tendency to fear and oppose social revolution. At the end of the 1700s, many U.S. leaders saw the French Revolution, with its emphasis on equality and social justice, as the evil twin of their own revolution. A century or more later, their successors viewed socialism in Europe or the developing world as the antithesis of Americanism. For Americans, an emphasis on individual liberty trumped social improvements. They often viewed systematic attempts at abating poverty and inequality as threats to the existence of freedom everywhere. Certainly, 20th century revolutionaries provided more than enough crimes and atrocities to turn people against them, not just in the United States. But the U.S. resistance to revolution was more instinctive, not just based on the terrible experience of some radical experiments.
A bright, outdoor close-up shot of a smiling woman sitting in a stadium crowd, holding a young toddler who is waving a small American flag. In the foreground, the blurred profile of a man wearing a blue military uniform cap is visible, looking back toward them.
U.S. Air Force Airman Michael Drah, originally from Ghana, smiles with his wife, Akosua Yeboah-Drah, and daughter Rashana Drah before his naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles on Aug. 29, 2022.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Another preoccupation of U.S. foreign policy, rooted in the country’s own history, has been race. America’s founding contradiction, between freedom and slavery, has proven remarkably persistent, even after Americans began to seriously confront their own past in the latter part of the 20th century. The legacy of racism, alongside the resistance against social revolution, made the United States reluctant to support the anti-colonial struggles that in many ways defined the past 100 years. This shortfall helped tarnish the United States in the eyes of many post-colonial leaders, with consequences that are still in place today.
At the same time, America’s history of interventionism has produced a counter-reaction at home as well. This is not isolationism, but a widespread disengagement from overall currents in the world at large. Americans are not just tired of their country’s global role, which a significant number believe has brought little but forever wars, unfair competition, job losses, and unwanted immigration. They are also in many ways rebelling against the global system that the United States itself has put in place.
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On matters ranging from security to trade to climate change and pandemics, the opinions of a large number of Americans—and a thumping majority among those who support the current administration—are out of whack with those in other countries. Less than one-third of Republican voters believe in human-driven climate change, or in electric vehicles, or in lowering tariffs. What’s more, relatively few believe that social inequality, whether at home or abroad, is a problem. On a global scale, an average of close to 80 percent see inequality as a “very big” or “moderately big” issue.
In addition to these many divergences, the question of race has again come to the fore. The United States made remarkable progress in how it was perceived abroad on matters of racial equality during the late Cold War and after. However, the current president is widely viewed as unapologetically racist, due in large part to his approach toward immigration. At a December 2025 rally, President Donald Trump elaborated on what he first said in 2018: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries[?] Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark. … We always take people from Somalia, [places that] are filthy, dirty, disgusting.”
Trump’s prioritization of white South Africans as refugees has also produced a unique degree of global disgust. Of the small number of refugees resettled in the United States between October 2025 and April 2026, 99 percent were from South Africa, a country where whites control the vast majority of the national wealth. Only three refugees were admitted from Afghanistan, a country where the United States fought a war for 20 years.
A low-angle shot of several law enforcement officers in tactical gear, vests labeled "ERO," and face coverings standing in the foreground. Behind them is a tall chain-link fence topped with multiple rows of coiled razor wire against a blue sky with light clouds.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gather outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, on May 28.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
These changing attitudes and policies should be understood in relation to the way the world is changing. For the first time since 1945, the United States has real rivals both in economic and strategic terms. As a result, U.S. power to shape the world is becoming increasingly limited. The country’s ever narrower fixation on pet issues, often informed by domestic policy divides or personal resentments, is characteristic of great powers that see their positions as under threat.
What is most curious about the current administration’s policies is that they do constitute a revolution of sorts, a symbolic rebellion against the world that the United States has created. Trump has forged a policy based on the performance of grievance. It is intended to deliver instantaneous gratification to partisan positions at home, with little or no strategic cohesion.
The country, of course, remains very divided on the president’s approach, with Trump’s current approval rating at around 36 percent. This makes it increasingly likely that the Democrats will soon return to power. More long term, the country will undoubtedly recover from its current division and crisis. But when it does so, the world will be fundamentally transformed, with increasing economic diversity and great power multipolarity.
Ironically, this will also be a world that the United States helped bring into being—by denial and omission more than design.
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Odd Arne Westad is a professor of history and global affairs at Yale University and the director of Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. His most recent book is The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings From History.
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