Final answer:
U.S. foreign policy includes strategies such as trade, diplomacy, sanctions, and military defense to achieve goals like protecting the nation, ensuring resource access, maintaining world balance, and promoting human rights.
Step-by-step explanation:
The components of U.S. foreign policy encompass the ways in which the United States interacts with the rest of the world. This includes a variety of strategies and objectives, such as trade, diplomacy, sanctions, military/defense, intelligence, foreign aid, and global environmental policy. The main goals of U.S. foreign policy are to protect the United States and its citizens, maintain access to key resources and markets, preserve a balance of power, and promote human rights and democracy.
Historically, U.S. foreign policy has shifted between isolationism and internationalism, with internationalism being dominant since World War II. During the Cold War, key policies included containment, deterrence, détente, arms control, and military intervention, as seen in Vietnam. Today, U.S. foreign policy also grapples with complex global issues such as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, economic upheavals, and the rise of China as a world economic and political power.