The 10 Best and 10 Worst

U.S. Foreign Policy Decisions

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. That first-ever use of an atomic weapon killed an estimated 140,000 people in all, most of whom were civilians. Three days later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Some 40,000 people, again mostly civilians, died instantly. Another 34,000 died agonizing deaths in the weeks that followed. President Harry S. Truman argued that the bombings were necessary to compel Japan’s surrender and to avoid what likely would have been a far deadlier U.S. invasion. Truman’s decisions, and particularly the decision to bomb Nagasaki, remain hotly debated. The attacks subjected civilian populations to horrific devastation with long-lasting effects. The bombing of Nagasaki was launched two days earlier than planned to avoid bad weather, leaving the Japanese government less time to assess what had happened to Hiroshima and possibly quit fighting. Truman’s private comments suggest that his decision to bomb Nagasaki went beyond forcing Japan’s surrender to include intimidating the Soviet Union. SHAFR historians ranked the bombing of Nagasaki as the tenth-worst decision in U.S. foreign policy history.

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the USS Maddox, a destroyer operating in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. Two nights later, the Maddox reported that it had come under fire again. President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to the news by ordering airstrikes on North Vietnam—the first overt U.S. attack on the country. Johnson also asked Congress to endorse his decision to confront North Vietnamese aggression. Congress complied in less than seventy-two hours by passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. What members of Congress did not know was that much of what the Johnson administration told them about why the Maddox was in the Gulf of Tonkin was untrue and that the second attack likely never occurred. Acting in haste and with bad information, Congress approved deepening U.S. involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. SHAFR historians ranked the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as the ninth-worst U.S. foreign-policy decision.

Nazi Germany’s persecution of so-called non-Aryans in the 1930s pushed Jews, first in Germany and then in the countries that Germany seized, to seek refuge elsewhere. Many refugees hoped to find safety in the United States. Yet even as Nazi control over Europe expanded, the United States strictly limited immigration. The refusal to address the growing humanitarian crisis reflected antisemitism, nativism, bureaucratic red tape, and unfounded fears that refugees would become a burden on the government or work as German spies. The United States stuck to its restrictive immigration policy even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leading U.S. officials condemned Germany’s treatment of Jews, and U.S. newspapers frequently covered the plight of refugees. The U.S. refusal to admit more refugees meant that tens of thousands of people who might have been saved instead perished in the Holocaust. SHAFR historians ranked the U.S. insistence on limiting the number of Jewish refugees in the years before World War II as the eighth-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

The signing of the Paris Agreement in December 2015 marked a breakthrough in climate diplomacy. After numerous prior failed attempts, 194 countries agreed to work to reduce the emission of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane that are changing the climate. The United States, the world’s second largest emitter annually and the largest emitter cumulatively, was among the countries that signed the Paris Agreement, which is also known as the Paris climate accord. On June 1, 2017, President Donald Trump, who had come to office five months earlier, fulfilled a campaign promise by announcing that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. He argued that the agreement would hamstring the U.S. energy industry and cost millions of American jobs while doing little to limit climate change, something he had repeatedly called a “hoax.” No other country followed Trump’s lead, leaving the United States diplomatically isolated as average global temperatures climbed and extreme weather events multiplied. SHAFR historians ranked the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement as the seventh-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

In the early nineteenth century, white settlers in the eastern United States increasingly encroached upon the lands of Native Americans. Although the U.S. government had signed treaties demarcating native territory, political pressure grew to disregard them. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi River to Native American tribes that gave up their lands east of the river. In 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans constituted “separate nations” who were not subject to state law. President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling. On May 23, 1838, the first members of the Cherokee Nation were pushed out of their lands in what is now the southeastern United States and forced to walk to their new territory in northeastern Oklahoma. Four thousand of the sixteen thousand Cherokee who began the journey died on what became known as the Trail of Tears. SHAFR historians ranked the forcible removal of the Cherokee Nation as the sixth-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

The U.S. entry into World War I broke with the United States’ longstanding practice of keeping out of Europe’s political affairs. President Woodrow Wilson saw that shift as an opportunity to try to restructure world politics to make future conflict less likely. He went to Paris in December 1918 to negotiate the war’s end. There he negotiated the Treaty of Versailles, which embraced his vision to create a League of Nations that would work to preserve peace. Wilson did not have similar success, however, at home. In November 1919 and again in March 1920, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and with it, the League of Nations. The league began operating in 1920, but the absence of the United States handicapped its work. Declining to join the league also made it easier for the United States to ignore growing world crises over the next two decades, a decision it would come to regret. SHAFR historians ranked the Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles as the fifth-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

Mohammad Mosaddeq became prime minister of Iran in April 1951. An ardent nationalist, he rose to power by challenging Great Britain’s dominance of Iran’s economy and politics. A month before becoming prime minister, Mosaddeq led the effort by the Iranian Majlis (parliament) to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which the British government controlled. Rather than seek compromise with Tehran, London sought to reverse the law by crippling Iran’s oil exports, the main source of government revenue. President Harry S. Truman rejected British efforts to enlist the United States in pressuring Iran to return ownership of AIOC to Britain. British arguments that Mosaddeq was destabilizing Iran found a more friendly audience when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president. Fearing that a communist takeover of Iran was increasingly likely, Eisenhower authorized Operation Ajax to oust Mosaddeq. The coup came in August 1953. Its success encouraged subsequent U.S. efforts to destabilize governments Washington disliked, and Iranian nationalists used the coup to fuel anti-Americanism in Iran. SHAFR historians ranked the support for Mosaddeq’s overthrow as fourth-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

White settlers in the United States in the early nineteenth century coveted the land held by Native Americans. The U.S. government initially sought to limit the resulting conflict by treating Native American tribes as sovereign nations and negotiating treaties that established the boundaries of their lands. The U.S. government generally did little, however, to force settlers to respect the terms of treaties. Instead, Washington frequently imposed new treaties on Native Americans with even less favorable terms. With tensions between the two communities increasing, enthusiasm grew in the United States for expelling Native Americans from their ancestral lands. In 1830, Congress passed, at President Andrew Jackson’s request, the Indian Removal Act. Over the next two decades, the U.S. government repudiated its solemn treaty obligations and forced as many as one hundred thousand Native Americans living east of the Mississippi to relocate to smaller lands west of the Mississippi. SHAFR historians ranked the Indian Removal Act as the third-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

On March 8, 1965, 3,500 Marines from the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in Da Nang, South Vietnam. Their mission was to protect a U.S. air base from attacks by the self-proclaimed National Liberation Front (NLF), the guerrilla force seeking to overthrow the South Vietnamese government that was better known to Americans by the pejorative name Viet Cong. Six days earlier, the United States had begun Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would last for three years. Some U.S. officials opposed sending the Marines to Da Nang, predicting that President Lyndon B. Johnson would soon be pressed to send even more troops into a war that could not be easily won. Despite his own deep misgivings about the ability of the United States to win a conflict he called “the worst mess I ever saw in my life,” Johnson committed another 120,000 troops to South Vietnam over the next 5 months and more than a half million over the next three years. The war, however, remained unwinnable. SHAFR historians ranked the deployment of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam as the second-worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

The September 11, 2001, attacks heightened fears in the United States that Iraq might give terrorists weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although the United Nations had pressed Iraq to dismantle its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs after the 1991 Gulf War, President George W. Bush argued that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had continued to pursue them. The UN Security Council threatened Iraq with “serious consequences” in late 2002 if it failed to cooperate with weapons inspections, but it declined to authorize an invasion. The United States responded by organizing a “coalition of the willing” to oust Hussein. Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003, and quickly overran Iraqi forces. However, no evidence of any active Iraqi WMD programs was found. The United States became embroiled in a bloody war of occupation that lasted eight years and cost it dearly, damaging its global reputation and empowering anti-American forces throughout the Middle East and worldwide. SHAFR historians ranked the invasion of Iraq as the worst U.S. foreign policy decision.