Lists are “an invitation for a conversation,” says James Lindsay at the Council on Foreign Relations. So he drew up two lists, one for the 10 best decisions in American foreign policy over the past 250 years and one for the 10 worst. Present company and headlines — the second presidency of Donald Trump, that is — were excluded by design. And yet, how could any conversation about those lists ignore what Trump is doing to the world and to America’s role in it?
The lists go back to surveys conducted in 2023, during the previous administration. First, an advisory committee of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, an august body in this field, made a master list of 120 weighty foreign-policy decisions taken between the American Revolution and the first Trump administration. Then SHAFR historians were asked to rank the 10 best and worst.
Many historians, amateur or professional, tend to feel more comfortable the further back in time they venture. (I found my life lessons in ancient Carthage and Rome, for instance.) So it’s unsurprising, say, that America’s oldest alliance — with France, dating to 1778 — clocked in at number three in the top 10 (without it, the U.S. probably wouldn’t have existed for long). Or that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced expulsion of the Cherokee in 1838 rank three and six among the worst decisions. (Those count as “foreign” policy because the Native tribes were sovereign nations.)
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