As the years went by, however, Americans came to see that the isolation proclaimed by President Monroe was no longer real, and that isolation even as a tradition could not, either for good or for ill, long endure.
All thoughtful men saw that a new era needed a new policy; the wiser, however, were not willing to give up all that they had acquired in the experience of the past.

They remembered that the separation of the continents was not proclaimed as an end in itself but as a means of securing American purposes.

Those national purposes had been: first, the securing of the right of self-government on the part of the United States; second, the securing of the right of other nations to govern themselves.

Both of these aims rested on the belief that one nation should not interfere with the domestic affairs of another.

These fundamental American purposes remained, but it was plain that the situation would force the nation to find some different method of realizing them.