The foreign policy "elite" in Washington are Neo-Con imperialists. [I wrote "elite" with the quotation marks because, when all is said and done, these people are imbeciles. Their stupid delusions conform to and sustain the narrative of imperialism and this accounts for their rise within the establishment. But to believe in the filth that they believe in, they have to be intellectually and morally stunted freaks.] There is no truly anti-imperialist faction in Washington. The closest viable ideology to anti-imperialism are the isolationist nationalists. This is mainly a right-wing, often right-libertarian set of politicians. Its spokesman today is Senator Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul, who named him after Ayn Rand). Ron and Rand Paul at least play footsie with racists, but their main hobby horse is libertarianism. Slightly earlier, the social conservative/quasi-fascist, Nixon advisor, Reagan speech writer Patrick Buchanan was the spokesperson for isolationist nationalism. They often refer to the resistance to "entangling alliances" expressed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Wars were expensive in the 18th Century. And the USA was militarily weak. There's no doubt that the carnage of the US-American Civil War probably soured USians against getting involved in foreign wars as well.
As US-American industrial power began to leak into military power during the 1890's to 1914, genuine imperialism began to creep into the Washington mindset. As a result of the Spanish-American War the USA took Puerto Rico, dominated Cuba and conquered the Philippines (from the indigenous independence fighters who tried to take power after Spain's defeat). There was such a thing as the Anti-Imperialist League that formed in response to this new development. But, obviously, it had limited effect.
The USA entered WWI late in the game due to lingering isolationist sentiments, and voted to stay out of that war in their 1916 elections, But it's elites had long been subsidizing the British-French allied war effort. For reasons noble and ignoble, the US President, Woodrow Wilson, took the country into the war in 1917. This would later be described as nascent "liberal internationalism." The term "liberal internationalism" gradually came to describe the efforts of political liberals to create (what is now called) a "rules-based international order" that encompasses free trade, international arbitration of disputes between nations, and other vehicles for international cooperation. But this was international cooperation to maintain US-led capitalist hegemony.
Let me put it this way: The United States of Ameria's ruling class was divided about international covenants and institutions such as the League of Nations (1920-1946) because they all understood that the USA could not yet dominate these instituions. But by the 1930's, and especially after 1945, the USA was by far the strongest country on the face of the earth. It's nearest rival, the USSR, was a battered, war-weary country with little ability or desire to threaten the USA or the nations controlled by the USA and its allies in Europe. China was a weak, un-industrial country engaged in a civil war and ruined by the Japanese occupation. Japan was demolished. Europe was demolished. The world was America's to dominate for the foreseeable future and thus we had the US-created United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (and other regional alliances such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and, of more recent vintage, the World Trade Organization.
Isolationism had suffered a public relations defeat by 1945 because many of its advocates based their opposition to participation in the Second World War on either their hatred of Britain (felt by many USians of Irish descent such as Joseph Kennedy, or for their admiration for Hitler and his "scientific" racism, as was the case with Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford), or for both anglophobia and Hitlerism together. And this continued to stain US-isolationism at least as far as the aforementioned Patrick Buchanan. [There are probably better links to establish Buchanan's admiration for Hitler but I can't be bothered to find one.]
The long and the short of it is that Neo-Cons are in the driver's seat. This is a school of thought that believes in the furtherance of US-American Imperialism for its own sake. They wish to maintain the USA's dominance of the world, not necessarily for any global benefit, but rather for some abstract idea they have of the USA's "national interest." They have studied foreign relations and have absorbed the tenets of "Realist" foreign policy which is that international affairs are an amoral struggle for national advantage and that no country has permanent alliances or values, but only permanent "self-interest." As such, they have advocated for a self-perpetuating world of amoral, cynical, violent, destructive, insane and stupid game of diplomacy. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, John Bolton, Richard Perlse, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams, etc., while occasionally mouthing platitudes about the moral leadership of the USA, are really talking about crushing the USA's enemies (both real and imagined) and stealing resources of weaker countries to deny them to stronger countries (mainly Russia and China). More recently, Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have shown that neo-cons work just as well in the Democratic Party with such leaders as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
There is a tension between the openly cyncial and amoral neo-cons and the pretensions of the liberal internaionalists, but it is fairly unimportant. As well, there are moments when the tiny minority of anti-war Democrats can ally with (generally racist) Republican libertarian isolationists. But these moments are few and far between.
Anyway, these are the folks that brought us the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine and all the misery and slaughter and danger of Armageddon that that entails.
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