The interpretation of America's ‘futile’ quest for French security, German rehabilitation and wider European stability after World War I has undergone many revisions. Early indictments of ‘fatal American isolationism’ have been rejected. For any less than superficial research showed that the United States never completely withdrew from Europe after 1919; and recent research has even emphasised underlying continuity between Wilson's internationalism and Republican policy in the ‘Wilsonian century’. Yet the nature and implications of America's selective involvement in stabilising, or destabilising, the Old World remain the subject of controversy.

Arguably, the still most substantial attempt at synthesis interprets post-Wilsonian policy as a ‘corporatist’ bid for American commercial expansion and European reconstruction. It accounts for its dynamics, and limits, by pointing to a strong consensus emerging among the ‘new era's’ political and commercial elites. It was the consensus that America's interest was served best by relying almost exclusively on US financial leverage, economic practices and private agents to stabilise Europe and reform the world economy. Both were to be remade after the example of the ‘corporatist order’ of liberal capitalism underpinning America's return to ‘normalcy’ – or, in fact, ‘Republican restoration’ – under Harding and Coolidge. Still prevalent, then, is the view that these were also the remedies Wilson's successors applied, in vain, to the Franco-German dilemma, seeking ‘to revitalise Germany's productive power without restoring its prewar hegemony’.

Undoubtedly, the ‘corporatist synthesis’ reveals one important dimension of interwar American foreign relations: its domestic determinants and constraints.