How the US shaped the world: 250 years of power and policies

Published 1 July 2026 · india

The United States declared its independence from Britain 250 years ago. Here's how the US's relations with other nations — and its global image

The United States declared its independence from Britain 250 years ago. Here's how the US's relations with other nations — and its global image — have changed since. "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" were the "unalienable Rights" centered when the founders of the United States declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. In the 250 years since, US governments have claimed that preserving the ideals of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms are the main motivators of the country's foreign policy. The Charters of Freedom, or three foundational documents of the United States, are the US Constitution (top, written in 1787), the Declaration of Independence (center, 1776) and the Bill of Rights (bottom, 1789) Image: Valentyn Semenov/Shotshop/picture alliance Americans, however, have growing doubts about whether the United States has lived up to its founding values. In 2024, 72% of Americans surveyed agreed with the statement that democracy in the United States "used to be a good example, but has not been in recent years." DW examined how the country's foreign policy objectives and tactics have changed over 250 years — showing how US governments have increasingly pursued goals through military force rather than diplomacy. US prioritizes military power over diplomacy Political scientists Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi have identified more than 500 US military interventions in the past 250 years. "While in the past the US assumed rationality for many of its rivals, in the post-9/11 era, that belief in the rationality of their enemies seemed to have dissipated," said Kushi, an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, a private liberal arts university in Massachusetts. On September 11, 2001, extremists hijacked two commercial airplanes and flew them into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York Image: Seth McCallister/AFPI/dpa/picture alliance "The idea was then: 'If we cannot reason with our enemies, if we cannot use diplomacy with our enemies, all we have is violence — all we have is the use of force,'" Kushi said. "And, with a dramatically growing Department of Defense budget and a withering Department of State budget in the post-9/11 world, what happened is: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Though Latin America has most consistently been the site of US interventions since the early 19th century, countries in Asia, including the Middle East, have been an increasing focus of military intervention in recent decades.

"There is a clear shift in our data in the US moving towards the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa for many of its interventions," Kushi said. "Arguably, much of that can be explained by the post-9/11 global war on terror. It can also be explained by the US's power projection capabilities as the unipolar power. After the end of the Cold War, with a growing military capacity, the US could afford to project more of its power all over the world and, of course, redefine its interests so that the world at large becomes related to US interests." US objectives: nation-building, regime change It's not only that the regional interested shifted, the objectives, too, changed with time. The 1990s were "the humanitarian interventionism era of US foreign policy: The expansion of national interest to incorporate the US fighting against the worst humanitarian atrocities all over the world — Balkans, Somalia, so on," Kushi said. "Many of these interventions in the data set do paint the picture of other countries calling upon the US to intervene militaristically." The US provided the bulk of the troops for Operation Restore Hope, an early-1990s UN-sanctioned mission to Somalia Image: Joel Robine/AFP Since 2001, "maintaining or building foreign regime authority" has been a major motivator of US military interventions, according to the data compiled by Kushi and Toft. And this year alone has offered two examples of US military intervention with the objective of removing a foreign regime: the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and the launch of the war against Iran in February. Another objective shows the opposite trend: Though "economic protection" was once the primary objective of military interventions, it has declined in importance since World War II. Diplomacy to achieve economic objectives It's not that economic interests weren't relevant or worth protecting anymore, but it seems the strategy on how to pursue that objective changed: From the 1960s though '80s especially, the US government increasingly signed trade treaties, according to the Measuring American Diplomacy project by political scientists Calvin Thrall and Matt Malis. "Diplomats are very good at promoting exports abroad when they're given resources and personnel to do so," said Thrall, a professor of political science at Columbia University.