When asked about foreign policy Hillary Clinton said it's not enough to "not do stupid things", it's important for great countries to have "an organizing principle". I agree, though I would have expressed it as "having a grand strategy" or "having a vision for the future" or something like that.
In the case of the recent American foreign policy I do believe there is an "organizing principle" and it has to do with two fundamental elements which existed from the 1980s onward: Europe has been lazy on security issues due to WWII fatigue & habit and America has growing debts which hobble us.
How this impacts our foreign policy is that we have worked more on developing international partnerships or coalitions to spread the cost of doing important things (like destroying bin Laden's al Qaeda) and this in turn requires Europeans to act more on issues of importance to themselves. This isn't a call for them to reassert themselves as conquistadors or to bring forth new Napoleons, but it requires them to wake up more to their security duties. The recent cases of the break-up of Yugoslavia and the genocide which followed and the difficulties between Ukraine and Russia come to mind. In neither have the Western European countries shown brightly.
Extrapolating this kernel of an idea leads America to demand local participants in activities they want America to help with. This limits the costs to America and establishes a rhythm and pattern to our behavior which the rest of the world can accept and work with. It also establishes the limits of power we will assert which may allow rogues like Vladimir Putin to exploit openings. Oddly, in the case of Putin and Ukraine it exercised the Western Europeans and may have helped develop their understanding of a stronger role for their military and diplomatic efforts in their part of the world. In some other places like the Middle-East they have wanted to use America to serve their purposes and wrt Saudi Arabia and oil states this has been destructive. It is all the better that we can move to an all-of-the-above energy policy (which we have) in order to demonstrate clearly we aren't anyone's toy and can't be bullied over energy. Incidentally, during recent months the price of gasoline has been declining despite the violence in the Middle-East. That wouldn't have been the normal order of things a few years ago.
Another benefit of this strategy is that America's humanitarian efforts, whether because of natural disaster or the costs of war, needn't always be one-sided -- we can more easily expect coalitions and group efforts as there are fewer human costs to other nations.
Hopefully the net effect of this many-sided organizing principle is to produce a future where America can focus more on domestic issues, avoid going so far into debt or of spending so much on our military or of being blackmailed on energy issues. This is a vision of a future where many countries cooperate on many issues and there needn't be super-powers when every country knows their own local region will be dominated mostly by local people and their interests. It's a more democratic vision.
Of course, I may be imagining too much and it's just that we're trillions of dollars in debt and the easiest way to get through that is to spend less. Sometimes the obvious is the truth.
