After having rejected the membership in the League of Nations after the First World War, the United States had to found its foreign policy on a new basis. On one hand, the new Republican administration succeeding President Wilson could not reintroduce the League membership to the Senate due to the reasons related to domestic politics, but on the other, it could not adopt the foreign policy of national isolation either as the most nationalist elements in the American society demanded due to increasing interconnectedness. In the 1921-1922 Washington Conference, the Republican administration laid the groundwork for new postwar American foreign policy as the conference functioned as a model for the future administrations in the interwar era. In my master’s thesis, I seek to reconstruct and analyze the political discourses that surrounded the international treaties of the Washington Conference as they entered the Senate’s deliberation in March 1922. The aim is to reconstruct and analyze how the contemporaries conceptualized the ideal structure for the postwar world order and what should be the position of the United States in it at the beginning of the 1920s. This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the tense relationship between internationalism and nationalism; on how the country should approach international relations on the most general level. The second chapter explores what type of international commitments were acceptable to the contemporaries, while the third part looks into the various contemporary understandings on democracy and public opinion as guarantors of peace. The key finding of this thesis is that, through the Washington Conference, the Republicans laid the basis for the limited form of internationalism and new conservative foreign policy consensus. Methodologically, this thesis combines conceptual-, intellectual- and political history and discourse analysis. The primary source material for this thesis includes party platforms from 1920 and 1924, and both Senate debates and newspaper articles from three different newspapers: the New York Times, the New York Tribune, and the New York World. The period of time under consideration in this research extends from the week before the first of the international treaties entered the deliberation of the Senate on March 2, 1922, to the week after the Senate finally voted in favor of the last of the treaties at the end of March.