An excellent essay at The American Thinker:
The Essential Nobility of US Foreign Policy
Now that the Left, in the shape of the Academic Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, has decided that the Nazis were right, and the United States really is controlled by a Jewish cabal, it is useful to remind ourselves of the essential nobility of US foreign policy since Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, and the continuity of this essence.
The United States could have stayed out of the European theatre of World War Two, and left the British to die against the Nazis. America-Firsters and the Stalinist Left (which only switched to a pro-war line after Hitler invaded Russia) had demanded the USA stay out of Europe's ugly morass. The public likely would have preferred focusing on the Japanese who had attacked us and treating Hitler's declaration of war as a minor matter, to be dealt with later. Almost any other country in the world would have done just that.
FDR's policy of fighting the Nazis first combined American idealism with pragmatism. Just think what would have happened if the Nazis and Japanese had obtained ICBMs and nuclear weapons, as they would have within a decade, had Britain lost. American foreign policy was in our long-term interest, but at great sacrifice of lives and treasure. Our policy then was noble and yet practical.
One more taste:
The French hated US policy in World War Two. They couldn�t understand it, especially since their impotent fleet was sunk in the process. Stalin hated it, and demanded that the Western Allies send waves upon waves of troops into Europe to sacrifice their lives, as millions of Russian moozhiks were doing in the East.
It was Churchill and Roosevelt who decided on North Africa, just as it was Bush and Blair who saw the strategic logic of moving against Saddam's Iraq, fully aware of the risks. Iraq is the keystone to the Middle East. Overthrowing Saddam cut down one threat, and simultaneously put the hair-raising Iranian fanatics at a strategic disadvantage.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
