“This most Delightful Country to Possess, / And forward with Industrious speed we press / Upon the Virgin Stream who had as yet, / Never been Violated with a Ship.”—Roger Wolcott, Esq., 1725

Sex, in U.S. culture, is often framed as a private matter, insulated from the public sphere, and certainly from international politics. Yet since before the founding of the United States, sex has been a part of the country’s foreign policy. Americans developed a deep belief in their own sexual exceptionalism. And they sought to spread it throughout the world, using—as it were—both hard and soft power.

From settlers’ early efforts to promote more seemingly “Christian” family arrangements among Native Americans to anti-prostitution efforts around U.S. military bases, the United States has long attempted to police the practice of sex beyond its borders. One result is that today’s global regulatory regime is highly focused on prohibiting prostitution—at the expense of more humane and effective polices.

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As Europeans arrived in North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, they focused on sexual behavior to articulate their differences with Indigenous peoples and decide who was civilized and who wasn’t. As the poem above—written by a man who later become governor of the colony of Connecticut—indicates, European colonizers often conceived of their mission in sexual terms. And just as they saw the land as ripe for the taking, so were the Indigenous women who inhabited it. Colonists understood Native Americans as naturally licentious because of many tribes’ apparent comfort with nudity and sex outside of monogamous marriage.

This conception of native hypersexuality shaped formal United States Indian policy from the American Revolution onward. As part of the assimilationist policies of the 1880s, for example, Office of Indian Affairs agents targeted women for having sex outside of marriage, cohabitating with lovers, and becoming plural wives, all as a means of supposedly civilizing them. These weren’t minor matters; prohibiting these activities would upend Native societies. Nevertheless, government agents insisted that sex was a separate—and highly important—category of conduct and were obsessed with reforming it.

Americans continued to focus on sex when they took U.S. empire overseas. When U.S. soldiers arrived in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, debates about prostitution followed. Much like Native Americans, U.S. officials saw Filipinas as both alluring “dusky Venuses” and dangerous vectors of venereal disease, who could infect soldiers and, eventually, those soldiers’ wives and children at home. At the same time, officials believed the thousands of troops stationed in the sultry tropics required sex. So, like European imperialists, the United States started licensing brothels and requiring the women working there to submit to weekly venereal disease exams. U.S. leaders believed this policy would make sex safe for soldiers, even as they showed distinctly less concern for the women who remained at risk of infection.

But what happens in Manila doesn’t always stay in Manila. Social reformers on the U.S. mainland had long criticized the European approach to prostitution and argued that it was incompatible with the superior sexual morality of the United States. When they traveled to the Philippines and discovered brothels draped with U.S. flags, run by U.S. officers, and full of U.S. troops, they hit the roof.

Newspapers around the country decried the arrangement as “un-American.” In response, the Senate convened hearings and in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt demanded that the military actively “diminish the vice” of prostitution in U.S. colonies. “It is criminal folly to believe that sexual indulgence is necessary to health,” Roosevelt proclaimed. U.S. troops must demonstrate “self-restraint, self-respect, and self-control.”

That was the theory. In practice, little changed; military officials just learned to sweep prostitution under the rug. Still, U.S. social reformers doubled down on the idea that the United States fundamentally abhorred prostitution, even if officials in U.S. colonies continued to quietly register, inspect, and license sex workers.

This vision of U.S. sexual exceptionalism became ascendant by the 1910s. Organizations like the American Social Hygiene Association, funded by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr., were staffed by doctors, lawyers, and academics who argued that prostitution should be eradicated because it spread venereal disease and social disorder.

As the United States entered World War I, these views inspired legislation that made selling sex near a military training camp a federal crime, and criminalized the sale of sex—indeed, even acts of extramarital sex not for pay—in nearly every state. They eventually termed this policy the “American Plan” to stress the unique approach of prohibiting prostitution rather than regulating it, as the unsavory Europeans did.

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It might have ended there. But social hygienists were not content just to purify the United States; they wanted to spread the American Plan around the world. And, luckily for them, at that moment the United States was acquiring unprecedented global power. President Woodrow Wilson envisioned the United States not only dictating terms of the post-World War I political order, but imposing sexual morality, too. Self-control was critical, he believed, to democratic self-rule.

Along with making the world “safe for democracy,” Wilson charged U.S. “soldiers of freedom” with “keeping yourselves fit and straight in everything and pure and clean through and through.” The irony was lost on them that the American Plan made men sexually “pure” only by arresting all the women who might have sex with them.

When U.S. troops landed in France in World War I, French military officials offered to accommodate them by opening new brothels. The Americans were horrified. They wanted the alliance to go the other way: U.S. officials would convince the French to close brothels. A baffled French doctor remarked that the Americans were so different from the French that “we would not know how to compare the mentality and the genital habits of the two.”

In the face of vocal French protests, U.S. military police harassed and arrested women who they believed might sleep with U.S. soldiers. For example, after a soldier accused a young women named Aline Legros of giving him gonorrhea, U.S. military police detained her and forced her to undergo a vaginal examination. When her test came back negative, her family wrote to U.S. headquarters protesting her treatment and likening it to rape. In response, the commander argued that the U.S. military had every right to examine Legros and, indeed, any woman. The perception of France as sexually immoral led the U.S. military to treat the country—and its women—more like a colony than an ally.

The U.S. government remained committed to prohibiting prostitution in World War II, and prohibition has been the policy around overseas U.S. bases ever since—at least on paper. Officially, the military prohibits prostitution. Unofficially, commanders have often tolerated and even encouraged soldiers to visit prostitutes, so long as the public at home doesn’t find out. Indeed, the U.S. military is imbricated in the very fabric of the commercial sex districts that surround bases: They are there because of, not in spite of, U.S. military presence.

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The American Plan has left its mark on international law. After the World War I, the League of Nations—an intergovernmental organization tasked with maintaining the fragile peace—took up the issue of “the traffic in women.” The United States didn’t join the League of Nations, but U.S. reformers nevertheless took part in this campaign. With funding from Rockefeller, in the 1920s and 1930s, they conducted investigations in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to define the problem of trafficking, its scope, and its solutions.

These investigators discovered a world of women who were crossing borders and selling sex. Like millions of other migrants at the time, these women were looking for jobs that paid, and sex work almost always paid more than any other employment available to them. For the Americans, this was sex trafficking—which they essentially defined as all commercial sex—and it had to be stopped. U.S. reformers wanted strict border control and wanted prostitutes to be arrested as criminals, even as their clients were generally ignored. Despite the fact that such policies often made vulnerable women’s lives more difficult, Americans framed them as a form of protection. In deference to the powerful Americans, the League largely adopted this conception of trafficking and its solutions and implemented them through international conventions.

World War II cut short the League’s work. But in the post-war period, the newly formed United Nations adopted the League’s anti-trafficking conventions verbatim. In this way, Americans managed to set the terms of international trafficking policy so that it mirrored U.S. policy. The views of reformers from the 1920s would remain dominant for a century—they are still the dominant views today in the United States and, to some degree, in the UN.

In the early 2000s, sex trafficking and prostitution emerged again as key issues for the United States. A coalition of conservative Christians, anti-prostitution feminists, and politicians across the political spectrum sought to make the United States the world’s self-appointed sexual sentinel. This attention to both sex work and exploitation could have actually helped women by promoting health and labor rights policies advocated by sex workers; instead, it largely ignored and silenced them.

In 2001, the State Department began to issue the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries based on their commitment to fighting trafficking. With a particular focus on sex trafficking, the report rewards counties that criminalize and punish commercial sex, while disincentivizing things like poverty reduction, improved labor conditions, and better healthcare—the types of programs that sex workers themselves say would make them less vulnerable to trafficking. Countries deemed to be noncompliant with U.S. standards and making no effort to change that may have various forms of aid suspended as result. This pressure has led countries in Asia to criminalize and prohibit prostitution.

In 2003, President George W. Bush instituted the “anti-prostitution pledge,” which prevented certain U.S.-based or foreign non-governmental organizations from receiving funds if they in any way “promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution.” Additionally, the administration pushed prostitution prohibition through public health measures. NGOs that work on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria can only receive funding if they “have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” In simple terms, they must reject sex work as a legitimate form of work.

In 2005, the Brazilian sexually transmitted disease commissioner rejected $40 million from the U.S. government, arguing that sex workers were key “partners” in AIDS prevention. “How could we ask prostitutes to take a position against themselves?” he asked.

Indeed, many sex workers have stated that they do not, in fact, like the “protection” of prostitution prohibition. They argue that criminalizing commercial sex, whether its sale or purchase, stigmatizes them and makes them more vulnerable to violence and trafficking. They point to the ways that the U.S. government helps to create the very commercial sex industry it decries, from the global presence of U.S. military bases to domestic policies that leave marginalized people without access to jobs that pay living wages or a social safety net.

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Today, sex workers around the world are organizing against the U.S. vision of prohibition. In Belgium, for example, sex workers recently achieved full decriminalization, enabling them to unionize and secure benefits such as pensions, parental leave, and healthcare.

These efforts may get easier as the United States becomes less influential, particularly in the kind of international bodies that set trafficking policy. Moreover, the country’s self-proclaimed position as the world’s sexual protector feels even more absurd under a president who has boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

Yet if the Trump administration seems less invested in shaping sexual policy on the international level, domestically it has been deeply preoccupied with sex. The president has deemed himself the protector of U.S. women—“whether the women like it or not”—while his party has attacked women’s rights, abortion access, and the LGBTQ+ community. The Trump administration is now making the United States exceptional, at least among Western democracies, through its efforts to roll back sexual, bodily, and reproductive rights.