This analysis of governing ideas in US foreign policy aims to show how they arise, are sustained and challenged both domestically and internationally, and become part of the world order. Nolan assesses the problems of reconciling concerns for individual rights and liberal principles with national security interests in US foreign policy over the course of the 20th century. This interpretive survey seeks to redefine the key components in the makeup of US diplomacy and provides reading for students of American government, international relations and US foreign policy, American and world history, defence, and human rights policy. This short history traces the notions that liberty is indivisible and that security depends ultimately on the establishment and success of liberal-democratic norms between and within states. It shows how US policy vacillates between giving active or passive expression to these ideas, always relying on a basic assumption about the presumed pacific character of democracy. Utilising a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, it looks at how these ideas became manifest in two major policy settings: regarding the Soviet Union, and towards the UN. Through these case studies, the book strives to show how these ideas become progressively embedded in US policy; how they have been challenged by different interests and events; how they were disseminated among, and accepted by, allies (and even several former adversaries); and how, as a result, they now permeate the structures of major international organisations, and even underlie the emerging post-Cold War international system as a whole. The conclusion offers a perspective for the future.