General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Foreign policy

Foreign policy is the set of purposes, commitments, and strategies a state pursues toward other states and international actors to protect and advance its national interests, values, or both.¹ It is carried out through a recognized set of instruments, of which diplomacy is the oldest and most continuous, and it is shaped both by the international environment and by domestic politics inside each state.

Key fact	Detail
Core categories of tools	Political, economic, and military instruments, including diplomacy, trade policy, economic sanctions, arms control, and intelligence.¹
Economic statecraft	The use of lending, foreign assistance, sanctions, and trade agreements to advance foreign policy priorities.²
Early US doctrine	For the republic's first 50 years, diplomats pursued political isolation from European powers in peacetime and strict neutrality in war.³
Scholarly subfield	Comparative foreign policy analysis studies decision-making across nearly 200 states and thousands of international and nongovernmental organizations.⁴
Sanctions status	Sanctions have become a key instrument of foreign policy for the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, applied with increasing frequency.⁵
Contemporary environment	The 2025 Global Peace Index records more state-based armed conflicts than at any time since World War II, and only 6% of Global Risks Report respondents expect a reinvigoration of the previous unipolar, rules-based order.⁶

Definition and tools

Foreign policy describes how countries influence one another to protect and advance their interests and values. The instruments fall into three broad categories: political, economic, and military. The primary political tool is diplomacy, covering both leader-level meetings and the regular work of ambassadors and envoys, in public or in private, from consultation to negotiation. Economic tools include foreign assistance and humanitarian development, trade policy, and sanctions, which restrict a target's ability to trade and grow. Military tools range from armed force to deterrence, the practice of convincing a potential attacker that the costs of attacking would outweigh the gains, and arms control agreements, which increase transparency and limit the development and deployment of dangerous weapons.¹

Two further instruments cut across these categories. Intelligence involves gathering information about other countries and can include covert action to influence conditions abroad without attribution. Soft power, a term for getting other countries to adopt the same goals by demonstrating that one's domestic and foreign policies are successful and worth following, operates through cultural and political attraction rather than payment or force.¹

Economic statecraft

Economic statecraft describes the economic tools countries use to advance foreign policy priorities: lending, foreign assistance, sanctions, and trade agreements. Some work through coercion, as sanctions pressure or punish countries that violate international norms or threaten a government's interests. Others work through attraction, as trade agreements lower tariffs, loans finance infrastructure, and foreign assistance builds goodwill.²

The Belt and Road Initiative. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, is a large-scale example of lending as statecraft. It has been endorsed by nearly 140 countries whose populations together account for two-thirds of the world's total, and Chinese banks have funded power plants, railways, ports, and telecommunications networks. Chinese companies win nearly 90 percent of BRI construction contracts, so much of the money lent returns to Chinese firms. Political effects follow the money: BRI recipients have refrained from criticizing China's mass detention of Muslims, and China has used economic measures to punish countries contesting its South China Sea claims, halting fruit shipments from the Philippines after Manila pursued legal action in 2012. In Laos, China seized the country's power grid after the government could not repay BRI loans.² Infrastructure can also serve security ends: Chinese firms now own, partially own, or operate at least 93 ports worldwide, and China has used port access to diversify energy supply routes away from the Strait of Malacca, through which 83 percent of its crude oil imports passed as of 2016 and where a US military presence could cut off its energy access in a conflict.²

Economic coercion has costs for the user as well as the target. An analysis by the economist Jeffry A. Frieden, professor of government at Harvard University, in IMF Finance & Development notes that sanctions, embargoes, and tariffs move an economy away from its most productive purposes, and concludes that a clear, comprehensive assessment of costs is necessary to determine the net benefits of geoeconomic policies.⁷

Sanctions and their limits

Sanctions have become a central instrument of foreign policy for the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, encompassing asset freezes, travel bans, arms embargoes, and controls on imports and exports. Chatham House, a London-based international affairs research institute, reports mounting concerns about their efficacy, enforcement, and unintended consequences, and about hyperbolic language that places unrealistic expectations on their outcomes.⁵

Research finds that sanctions face structural limits. Research published in International Studies Quarterly contends that suspending aid works better as an instrument of foreign policy leverage than imposing economic sanctions, since pressuring a state economically seldom forces a major power into swift, sweeping shifts in policy, like pulling back from an invasion of another country's territory.⁸ Aided by these findings, practitioners treat sanctions as one option among alternatives that include doing nothing, diplomacy, or military action.⁸

Decision-making and domestic politics

Foreign policy is made by governments, but the conditions that shape it lie substantially at home. Comparative foreign policy analysis, a subfield of international relations, examines decision-making processes and patterns of foreign interaction across nearly 200 states, and identifies the key internal actors as individual leaders, institutions and legislatures, bureaucratic organizations and government agencies, and public opinion and nongovernmental organizations.⁴

Several findings structure this literature. The two-level games (leaders negotiate abroad while bargaining simultaneously with domestic constituencies) perspective treats government leaders as gatekeepers who negotiate simultaneously at the international table and with domestic constituencies, reintegrating the study of comparative politics and international relations.⁹ Comparisons of the United States, France, West Germany, and Japan by Thomas Risse-Kappen, professor of international politics, found that the policy impact of public opinion differs according to each country's domestic structures rather than its international status.¹⁰ Recent work in International Organization proposes that all governments face an institutionally defined default level of domestic audience constraint, generally higher in democracies, while leaders can strategically increase their exposure to or insulation from that constraint.¹¹

Historical example: early American neutrality

For its first 50 years, the United States pursued a foreign policy of political isolation from European powers in peacetime and strict neutrality in periods of war. President George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address stated the rule: to have with foreign nations as little political, as distinct from commercial, connection as possible, and to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. Thomas Jefferson, despite differing political views, agreed that isolation and neutrality served the country best, and in his 1801 First Inaugural Address called for peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.³

Foreign policy as strategy documents

Governments codify foreign policy in strategy documents, which reveal how priorities change. The United Kingdom's 2023 Integrated Review Refresh described China as posing an epoch-defining systemic challenge, identified Russia as the most acute threat to UK security, committed £2.3 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine in 2022/23 with at least the same level in 2023/24, added £5 billion of defense funding over two years, and set for the first time an aspiration to spend 2.5% of GDP on defense over time.¹² The subsequent National Security Strategy 2025 set out a Strategic Framework covering all aspects of national security and international policy, completed a cross-government audit of UK interests with respect to China, and recommended increasing China capabilities across the national security system through deeper knowledge and training.¹³^•¹⁴

The contemporary environment

The conditions under which foreign policy is made have shifted measurably. The 2025 Global Peace Index reports more state-based armed conflicts ongoing than at any time since World War II, with key conflict-risk indicators at their worst levels since that war and several dozen countries experiencing worsening relations with neighbors. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 describes a world of rising protectionism and strategic industrial policy, and finds that only 6% of surveyed experts expect a reinvigoration of the previous unipolar, rules-based international order.⁶ In this environment, trade and global value chains are undergoing their most significant disruption in decades, and transnational threats from climate change to pandemics have become harder to manage.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Politics and government › International relations › Foreign policy and state relations › Foreign policy by country › Foreign policy by country — overview and comparison

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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