American involvement in foreign affairs, and particularly major wars, has had a significant and often even dominating influence on the state and domestic politics. It is surprising, then, that these major wars and conflicts are so frequently left out of analyses of U.S. politics. This project has been an effort to systematically explore this relationship in a broad context.

Disciplinary boundaries likely account for much of the underappreciation of war's influence on domestic American politics. Political science departments are split into subfields that often do not speak to one another (sometimes literally as well as metaphorically). With few exceptions, political scientists studying the United States focus solely on the domestic realm, leaving foreign affairs and wars to international relations specialists. As such, the role wars play in U.S. domestic politics has often fallen through the cracks and been lost amidst the acronyms and jargon separating American politics and international relations scholars. Other factors might also help to explain the frequent absence of international influences in the American politics literature. For example, the professional norms that reward building on already accumulated knowledge and the formation of sub-subfields might serve to reinforce and perpetuate the domestic focus. Additionally, the notion of American exceptionalism may have subtly and inadvertently pushed scholars studying the United States to turn inward.

Whatever the reason, and with a full appreciation of the plentiful knowledge this domestic orientation has yielded, the failure to adequately account for the role of foreign affairs in American politics is glaring and creates a serious barrier to a full understanding of U.S. politics for two reasons.