Lack of control over foreign policy During the early 19th century, general
Andrew Jackson exceeded his authority on numerous occasions and attacked
American Indian tribes as well as invaded the Spanish territory of
Florida without official government permission. Jackson was not reprimanded or punished for exceeding his authority. Some accounts blame newspaper journalism called
yellow journalism for whipping up virulent pro-war sentiment to help instigate the
Spanish–American War. This was not the only undeclared war the U.S. has fought. There have been hundreds of "imperfect wars" fought without proper declarations in a tradition that began with President
George Washington. Some critics suggest foreign policy is manipulated by lobbies, such as the
pro-Israel lobby or the
Arab one, although there is disagreement about the influence of such lobbies. In 1893, a decision to back a plot to overthrow the
Kingdom of Hawaii by President
Benjamin Harrison was clearly motivated by business interests; it was an effort to prevent a proposed tariff increase on sugar. As a result,
Hawaii became a
U.S. state. Some critics assert the U.S. decision to support the separatists in Colombia in 1903 was motivated largely by business interests centered on
Panama Canal despite declarations that it aimed to "spread democracy" and "end oppression". Currently, there is a debate over implications of imperial tendencies of U.S. foreign policy on democracy and social order. In 2002, conservative political commentator
Charles Krauthammer declared cultural, economical, technological and military superiority of the U.S. in the world a given fact. In his opinion, people were "coming out of the closet on the word
empire". According to
Newsweek reporter
Fareed Zakaria, the Washington establishment has "gotten comfortable with the exercise of American
hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement", and added, "This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy." Emily Eakin reflecting the intellectual trends of the time, summarized in
The New York Times that, "America is no mere superpower or hegemon but a full-blown empire in the Roman and British sense. That, at any rate, is the consensus of some of the nation's most notable commentators and scholars." Many allies of the U.S. were critical of a new, unilateral sensibility tone in its foreign policy, and showed displeasure by voting, for example, against the U.S. in the
United Nations in 2001. and agricultural products. The U.S. has also been criticized for advocating concern for
human rights while refusing to ratify the
Convention on the Rights of the Child. The U.S.
has publicly stated that it is opposed to torture, but has been criticized for condoning it in the
School of the Americas. The U.S. has advocated a respect for national sovereignty but has supported internal guerrilla movements and paramilitary organizations, such as the
Contras in
Nicaragua. They have also supported the unilateral independence of Kosovo
(see here) while also condemning other countries for unilateral independence, citing territorial integrity (
Abkhazia,
Crimea). The U.S. has been criticized for voicing concern about narcotics production in countries such as
Bolivia and
Venezuela but does not follow through on cutting certain bilateral aid programs. The U.S. has been criticized for not maintaining a consistent policy; it has been accused of denouncing
alleged rights violations in China while supporting
alleged human rights abuses by Israel. However, some defenders argue that a policy of rhetoric while doing things counter to the rhetoric was necessary in the sense of
realpolitik and helped secure victory against the dangers of
tyranny and
totalitarianism.
Support of dictatorships and state terrorism shaking hands with
Henry Kissinger in 1976 The U.S. has been criticized for supporting dictatorships with economic assistance and military hardware. Particular dictatorships have included the
Shah of Iran,
Yoweri Museveni of
Uganda, warlords in
Somalia,
Alfredo Stroessner of
Paraguay,
Carlos Castillo Armas and
Efraín Ríos Montt of
Guatemala,
Jorge Rafael Videla of
Argentina,
Suharto of
Indonesia, and
Hissène Habré of
Chad. Ruth J Blakeley and
Vincent Bevins posit that the United States and its allies sponsored and facilitated
state terrorism and mass killings on a significant scale during the
Cold War. The justification given for this was to contain Communism, but Blakeley says it was also a means by which to buttress the interests of US business elites and to promote the expansion of capitalism and
neoliberalism in the
Global South.
J. Patrice McSherry, a professor of political science at
Long Island University, states that "hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans were tortured, abducted or killed by right-wing military regimes as part of the US-led anti-communist crusade", which included US support for
Operation Condor and the Guatemalan military during the
Guatemalan Civil War. According to Latin Americanist
John Henry Coatsworth, the number of repression victims in Latin America alone far surpassed that of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites during the period 1960 to 1990. Mark Aarons asserts that the atrocities carried out by Western-backed dictatorships rival those of the communist world. Contemporary research and declassified documents demonstrate that the US and some of its Western allies directly facilitated and encouraged the
mass murder of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists in Indonesia during the mid-1960s. Bradley Simpson, Director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the
National Security Archive, says "Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of alleged
Communist Party of Indonesia members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party's unarmed supporters might not go far enough, permitting Sukarno to return to power and frustrate the [Johnson] Administration's emerging plans for a post-Sukarno Indonesia." According to Simpson, the terror in Indonesia was an "essential building block of the quasi neo-liberal policies the West would attempt to impose on Indonesia in the years to come". Historian John Roosa, commenting on documents released from the
US embassy in Jakarta in 2017, says they confirm that "the U.S. was part and parcel of the operation, strategizing with the Indonesian army and encouraging them to go after the PKI." Geoffrey B. Robinson, historian at UCLA, argues that without the support of the U.S. and other powerful Western states, the
Indonesian Army's program of mass killings would not have occurred.
Vincent Bevins writes the mass killings in Indonesia served as the apex of a loose network of US-backed
anti-communist mass killing campaigns in the
Global South during the Cold War. , New York City, 2017 According to journalist
Glenn Greenwald, the strategic rationale for U.S. support of brutal and even genocidal dictatorships around the globe has been consistent since the end of World War II: "In a world where anti-American sentiment is prevalent, democracy often produces leaders who impede rather than serve U.S. interests ... None of this is remotely controversial or even debatable. U.S. support for tyrants has largely been conducted out in the open, and has been expressly defended and affirmed for decades by the most mainstream and influential U.S. policy experts and media outlets." The U.S. has been accused of complicity in war crimes for backing the
Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, which has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe, including a
cholera outbreak and
millions facing starvation. Many of
Saudi Arabia's airstrikes on Yemen have relied on U.S. support. After
International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister,
Yoav Gallant, over suspected war crimes in Gaza, American politicians have threatened to impose sanctions on officials at the ICC.
Sanctions Numerous US unilateral sanctions against various countries around the world have been criticized by different commentators. Since 1998 the United States has imposed economic sanctions on more than 20 countries. These sanctions, according to
Daniel T. Griswold, failed to change the behavior of sanctioned countries; but they have barred American companies from economic opportunities, and harmed the poorest people in the countries under sanctions. Secondary sanctions, according to
Rawi Abdelal, often separate the United States and Europe because they reflect US interference in the affairs and interests of the European Union. Since Trump became the president of the United States, Abdelal believes, sanctions have been seen not only as an expression of Washington's preferences and whims, but also as a tool for US economic warfare that has angered historical allies such as the European Union.
Interference in internal affairs The United States was criticized for manipulating the internal affairs of foreign nations, including
Ukraine,
Guatemala,
Colombia,
Promotion of democracy Some critics argue that America's policy of advocating democracy may be ineffective and even counterproductive.
Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that "[t]he coming to power of
Hamas is a very good example of excessive pressure for democratization" and argued that
George W. Bush's attempts to use democracy as an instrument against terrorism were risky and dangerous. Analyst
Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace agreed that imposing democracy "from scratch" was unwise, and did not work.
Realist critics such as
George F. Kennan argued U.S. responsibility is only to protect its own citizens and that Washington should deal with other governments on that basis alone; they criticize president
Woodrow Wilson's emphasis on
democratization and
nation-building although it was not mentioned in Wilson's
Fourteen Points, and the failure of the
League of Nations to enforce international will regarding
Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy, and
Imperial Japan in the 1930s. Realist critics attacked the
idealism of
Wilson as being ill-suited for weak states created at the
Paris Peace Conference. Others, however, criticize the U.S. Senate's decision not to join the League of Nations which was based on isolationist public sentiment as being one cause for the organization's ineffectiveness. in
Qatar According to
The Huffington Post, "The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S. bases. ... Research by political scientist
Kent Calder confirms what's come to be known as the 'dictatorship hypothesis': The United States tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities."
Human rights problems President
George W. Bush has been criticized for neglecting
democracy and
human rights by focusing exclusively on an effort to fight
terrorism. In response, the U.S. government claimed incidents of abuse were isolated incidents which did not reflect U.S. policy. In May 2023,
The New York Times reported that declassified documents confirm that, regarding irregular warfare, US Special Operations forces "are not required to vet for past human rights violations by the foreign troops they arm and train as surrogates." The report notes that while there is no vetting of these foreign troops for crimes including "rape, torture or extrajudicial killings," potential candidates are vetted for political views that might make them a threat to U.S. forces, with "phone call logs, travel histories, social media posts, and social contacts" being thoroughly screened. In September 2025, the US State Department sanctioned three Palestinian human rights groups that asked the International Criminal Court to investigate allegations of Israel's war crimes in
Gaza war.
Marco Rubio said the US would sanction NGOs "Al Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Al Mezan), and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)" for engaging in "illegitimate targeting of Israel."
Militarism speaking on the
military intervention in Libya at the National Defense University, March 2011 In the 1960s,
Martin Luther King Jr. criticized excessive U.S. spending on military projects, and suggested a linkage between its foreign policy abroad and
racism at home. The
Iraq war, lasting from 2003 to 2011, was especially costly. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have, from their beginning in 2001 through the end of the 2019 fiscal year, cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion.
Andrew Bacevich argues that the U.S. has a tendency to resort to military means to try to solve diplomatic problems. The U.S. involvement in the
Vietnam War was a $111 billion, decade-long military engagement which ended in a military victory but strategic defeat due to the public's loss of support for the war. Radhika Desai, director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the
University of Manitoba, states that when the
Soviet Union existed it was "critical in defeating and deterring US military action and confining it to proxy wars" and that only after the breakup of the
Socialist Bloc "did the United States shift to ever more unilateral military aggression," citing the war on terror, the Iraq War, and the wars in Yugoslavia, Libya and Syria as examples.
Violation of international law The U.S. does not always follow
international law. For example, some critics assert the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was not a proper response to an imminent threat, but an act of aggression which violated international law. For example,
Benjamin Ferencz, a chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with
Saddam Hussein for starting aggressive wars—Saddam for his 1990 attack on
Kuwait and Bush for his
2003 invasion of Iraq. Critics point out that the
United Nations Charter, ratified by the U.S., prohibits members from using force against fellow members except against imminent attack or pursuant to an explicit Security Council authorization. However, U.S. defenders argue there was such an authorization according to
UN Security Council Resolution 1441. The U.S. has also supported Kosovo's independence even though it is strictly written in UN Security Council Resolution 1244 that Kosovo cannot be independent and it is stated as a Serbian province. However the International Court of Justice ruled the declaration of independence was legal because the Security Council Resolution did not specify the final status of Kosovo. The U.S. has actively supported and pressured other countries to recognize Kosovo's independence.
Manipulation of U.S. foreign policy Some political scientists maintained that setting economic interdependence as a foreign policy goal may have exposed the United States to manipulation. As a result, the U.S. trading partners gained an ability to influence the U.S. foreign policy decision-making process by manipulating, for example, the currency exchange rate, or restricting the flow of goods and raw materials. In addition, more than 40% of the U.S. foreign debt is currently owned by the big institutional investors from overseas, who continue to accumulate the
Treasury bonds. A reporter for
The Washington Post wrote that "several less-than-democratic African leaders have skillfully played the anti-terrorism card to earn a relationship with the United States that has helped keep them in power", and suggested, in effect, that therefore foreign dictators could manipulate U.S. foreign policy for their own benefit. It is also possible for foreign governments to channel money through
political action committees to buy influence in
Congress.
Commitment to foreign aid Some critics charge that U.S. government aid should be higher given the high levels of
gross domestic product. They claim other countries give more money on a per capita basis, including both government and charitable contributions. By one index which ranked charitable giving as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. ranked 21 of 22
OECD countries by giving 0.17% of GDP to overseas aid, and compared the U.S. to Sweden which gave 1.03% of its GDP, according to different estimates. The U.S. pledged 0.7% of GDP at a global conference in
Mexico. According to one estimate, U.S. overseas aid fell 16% from 2005 to 2006. However, since the U.S. grants tax breaks to nonprofits, it subsidizes relief efforts abroad, although other nations also subsidize charitable activity abroad. Most foreign aid (79%) came not from government sources but from private foundations, corporations, voluntary organizations, universities, religious organizations and individuals. According to the Index of Global Philanthropy, the United States is the top donor in absolute amounts.
Environmental policy The U.S. has been criticized for failure to support the 1997
Kyoto Protocol.
The Holocaust There has been sharp criticism about the
U.S. response to the Holocaust: That it failed to admit Jews fleeing persecution from Europe at the beginning of
World War II, and that it did not act decisively enough to prevent or stop the Holocaust.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the President at the time, was well-informed about the
Hitler regime and its anti-Jewish policies, but the U.S. State Department policies made it very difficult for Jewish refugees to obtain entry visas. Roosevelt similarly took no action on the
Wagner–Rogers Bill, which could have saved 20,000
Jewish refugee children, following the arrival of 936 Jewish refugees on the
MS St. Louis, who were denied asylum and were not allowed into the United States because of strict laws passed by Congress. During the era, the American press did not always publicize reports of Nazi atrocities in full or with prominent placement. By 1942, after newspapers began to report details of the Holocaust, articles were extremely short and were buried deep in the newspaper. These reports were either denied or unconfirmed by the United States government. When it did receive irrefutable evidence that the reports were true (and photographs of mass graves and murder in
Birkenau camp in 1943, with victims moving into the gas chambers), U.S. officials suppressed the information and classified it as secret. It is possible lives of European Jews could have been saved.
Alienation of allies There is evidence that many U.S. allies have been alienated by a unilateral approach. Allies signaled dissatisfaction with U.S. policy in a vote at the
U.N. Analyst
Jessica Tuchman Mathews writes that it appears to much of the Arab world that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, regardless of the accuracy of that motive. The U.S. has been accused by some U.N. officials of condoning actions by
Israel against
Palestinians.
Ineffective prosecution of war One estimate is that the second Iraq War along with the so-called
war on terror cost $551 billion, or $597 billion in 2009 dollars.
Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich has criticized American profligacy In the
War of 1812, the U.S. was unable to conquer
British North America (modern-day Canada) despite several attempts. The
Vietnam War (1955-1975) and the
War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) both resulted in enemy forces taking over the governments of those countries, despite many years of warfighting to prevent that. Some critics point to American disregard for
civilian casualties as counterproductive, generating pervasive anti-Americanism in affected countries, recruiting enemy fighters and terrorists.
Ineffective strategy against terrorism The U.S. practice of extrajudicial
targeted killing by
combat drone has drawn conflicting opinions about whether it is effective in eliminating threats or simply serves to recruit more terrorists due to its perceived injustice and
civilian casualties. Critic Cordesman criticized U.S. strategy to combat terrorism as not having enough emphasis on getting Islamic republics to fight terrorism themselves. Sometimes visitors have been misidentified as "terrorists".
Mathews suggests the risk of nuclear terrorism remains unprevented.
Small role of Congress in foreign policy Critic Robert McMahon thinks
Congress has been excluded from foreign policy decision making, and that this is detrimental. Other writers suggest a need for greater Congressional participation. Since that time, Webb thinks Congress has become largely irrelevant in shaping and executing of U.S. foreign policy. He cites the
Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA), the
U.S.–Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement, and the
2011 military intervention in Libya as examples of growing legislative irrelevance. Regarding the SFA, "Congress was not consulted in any meaningful way. Once the document was finalized, Congress was not given the opportunity to debate the merits of the agreement, which was specifically designed to shape the structure of our long-term relations in Iraq" (11). "Congress did not debate or vote on this agreement, which set U.S. policy toward an unstable regime in an unstable region of the world." Former director of operations for the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Lt. Gen.
Gregory S. Newbold commented that, "There's a broad naïvete in the political class about America's obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve".
Allegations of arrogance Some commentators have thought the United States became arrogant, particularly after its victory in World War II. Foreign policy experts such as Zbigniew Brzezinski counsel a policy of self-restraint and not pressing every advantage, and listening to other nations. A government official called the U.S. policy in Iraq "arrogant and stupid", according to one report.
Problem areas festering Critics point to a list of countries or regions where continuing foreign policy problems continue to present problems. These areas include
South America, including
Ecuador,
Bolivia,
Uruguay, and
Brazil. There are difficulties with
Central American nations such as
Honduras. Iraq has continuing troubles. In
Afghanistan, the US 20-year war failed and the country fell into the Taliban regime. The Middle East in general continues to fester, Policy towards
Russia remains uncertain.
China also presents a challenge. There are difficulties in other regions too. In addition, there are problems not confined to particular regions, but regarding new technologies.
Cyberspace is a constantly changing technological area with foreign policy repercussions. ==See also==