The Unilateralist Temptation in American Foreign Policy
The Unilateralist Temptation in American Foreign Policy

Author: David Skidmore

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-03-21

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1136886621

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The pattern of multilateral engagement and unilateral retrenchment in American foreign policy from the Cold War through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years presents a puzzle. What accounts for the unilateralist turn? Is it a passing aberration attributable to the neoconservative ideology of the Bush administration? What then of the disengagement evident earlier during Clinton’s presidency, or its continuation under Obama? Was the U.S. investment in multilateral institutions following World War II an anomaly? Or is the more recent retreat from international institutions the irregularity? Skidmore traces U.S. unilateralism to the structural effects of the end of the Cold War, both domestically and abroad, to argue that the United States was more hegemonic than multilateralist—a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. An "institutional bargain" existed under the Cold War threat from the Soviets, but absent those imperatives the United States has been less willing to provide collective goods through strong international institutions and other states are less willing to defer to U.S. exemptions. On the home front, the post-Cold War political environment has made it more difficult for presidents to resist the appeals of powerful interests who are threatened by multilateral commitments. This book demonstrates that American unilateralism has deeper roots and more resilience than many expect. The unilateral temptation can only be overcome through new political bargains domestically and internationally that permit multilateral engagement, even the absence of great power rivalry.

American Foreign Policy
American Foreign Policy

Author: Glenn P. Hastedt

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2020-02-17

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1538136139

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The twelfth edition of American Foreign Policy comes at a time when Donald Trump’s presidency is breaking away from many of the traditional foundation points in American foreign policy in terms of how foreign policy is made and its content. The results have pleased some and angered others but almost uniformly raised political tensions at home and abroad. This text does not try to present students with an answer on how best to move American foreign policy forward. Rather, it is designed to help students cultivate the critical thinking skills they need to develop their own answers and participate in current and future debates about the conduct and content of U.S. foreign policy. New to this Edition The twelfth edition introduces students to key facets of Trump’s foreign policy style and the content of his decisions. It adds to the previous edition more extensive discussions of China trade policy, the conflict with Iran, relations with Russia, U.S. involvement in Africa, and arms control talks with North Korea, as well as providing a foundation for understanding the Congressional move to impeachment. Critical Thinking Features Dateline sections open each chapter and introduces students to the material via a short contemporary case study Historical Lessons provides a historical context for students to understand current U.S. foreign policy issues and is linked to the Dateline feature Over the Horizon sections conclude each chapter with a speculative view to the future to spur student thinking about how American foreign policy might evolve in the coming years

American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks
American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks

Author: Bastiaan Van Apeldoorn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-23

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1135011206

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This book presents a novel analysis of how US grand strategy has evolved from the end of the Cold War to the present, offering an integrated analysis of both continuity and change. The post-Cold War American grand strategy has continued to be oriented to securing an ‘open door’ to US capital around the globe. This book will show that the three different administrations that have been in office in the post-Cold War era have pursued this goal with varying means: from Clinton’s promotion of neoliberal globalization to Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and Obama’s search to maintain US primacy in the face of a declining economy and a rising Asia. In seeking to make sense of both these strong continuities and these significant variations the book takes as its point of departure the social sources of grand strategy (making), with the aim to relate state (public) power to social (private) power. While developing its own theoretical framework to make sense of the evolution of US grand strategy, it offers a rich and rigorous empirical analysis based on extensive primary data that have been collected over the past years. It draws on a unique data-set that consists of extensive biographical data of 30 cabinet members and other senior foreign policy officials of each of the past three administrations of Clinton, G.W. Bush and Obama. This book is of great use to specialists in International Relations – within International Political Economy, International Security and Foreign Policy Analysis, as well as students of US Politics.

Prospect Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis in the Asia Pacific
Prospect Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis in the Asia Pacific

Author: Kai He

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 0415656214

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By examining major events in Asian security, this book investigates why and how leaders make risky and seemingly irrational decisions in international politics. The authors take the innovative step of integrating the neoclassical realist framework in political science and prospect theory in psychology. Their analysis suggests that political leaders are more likely to take risky actions when their vital interests and political legitimacy are seriously threatened. This pioneering book tests and expands prospect theory to the study of Asian security and challenges traditional, expected-utility-based, rationalist theories of foreign policy behavior.

China’s Challenges and International Order Transition
China’s Challenges and International Order Transition

Author: Huiyun Feng

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-01-30

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0472126458

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China’s Challenges and International Order Transition introduces an integrated conceptual framework of “international order” categorized by three levels (power, rules, and norms) and three issue-areas (security, political, and economic). Each contributor engages one or more of these analytical dimensions to examine two questions: (1) Has China already challenged this dimension of international order? (2) How will China challenge this dimension of international order in the future? The contested views and perspectives in this volume suggest it is too simple to assume an inevitable conflict between China and the outside world. With different strategies to challenge or reform the many dimensions of international order, China’s role is not a one-way street. It is an interactive process in which the world may change China as much as China may change the world. The aim of the book is to broaden the debate beyond the “Thucydides Trap” perspective currently popular in the West. Rather than offering a single argument, this volume offers a platform for scholars, especially Chinese scholars vs. Western scholars, to exchange and debate their different views and perspectives on China and the potential transition of international order.

Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations
Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations

Author: Christopher McKnight Nichols

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 725

ISBN-13: 0231554273

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Winner, 2023 Joseph Fletcher Prize for Best Edited Book in Historical International Relations, History Section, International Studies Association Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often explain success and failure. How does the history of U.S. foreign relations appear differently when viewed through the lens of ideology? This book explores the ideological landscape of international relations from the colonial era to the present. Contributors examine ideologies developed to justify—or resist—white settler colonialism and free-trade imperialism, and they discuss the role of nationalism in immigration policy. The book reveals new insights on the role of ideas at the intersection of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and politics. It shows how the ideals coded as “civilization,” “freedom,” and “democracy” legitimized U.S. military interventions and enabled foreign leaders to turn American power to their benefit. The book traces the ideological struggle over competing visions of democracy and of American democracy’s place in the world and in history. It highlights sources beyond the realm of traditional diplomatic history, including nonstate actors and historically marginalized voices. Featuring the foremost specialists as well as rising stars, this book offers a foundational statement on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.

The Transformation of American Political Culture and the Impact on Foreign Strategy
The Transformation of American Political Culture and the Impact on Foreign Strategy

Author: PAN Yaling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1000519996

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This book examines the interplay between political culture and diplomatic strategy in the U.S., revealing the transformation of American political culture and its impact on the country’s foreign strategy. The theoretical pivot of this study is an analysis of the dynamics of political culture and the mechanisms of the interaction between political culture and diplomatic strategy. Given this premise, the core chapters revisit the historical transformations of American political culture and analyze the responses and countermeasures taken to attempt to reverse the perceived decline in American hegemony during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, factors interwoven with security, economic, and institutional crises. The discussion describes the landscape and evolution of contemporary American political culture and the correlated adjustments of U.S. global strategy over the course of the twenty-first century. Given the myriad of challenges and political legacies left by its predecessors, the author gives a pessimistic prognosis of the prospect of resolving America’s political plight by the Joe Biden administration. The title will be a valuable reference for academic and general readers interested in American politics, U.S. diplomatic strategy, and international relations.

American Trade Politics and the Triumph of Globalism
American Trade Politics and the Triumph of Globalism

Author: Orin Kirshner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1317804120

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A deep and unresolved tension exists within American trade politics between the nation’s promotion of an open world trading system and the operations of its democratic domestic political regime. Whereas most scholarly attention has focused on how domestic politics has interfered with the United States’ global economic leadership, Orin Kirshner offers here an analysis of the ways in which U.S. leadership in the arena of global trade has affected American democracy and the domestic political regime. By participating in multilateral trade agreements, the U.S. Congress has transferred its trade policymaking authority to the president and, through international trade negotiations, from the American state to the GATT/WTO regime. This reorganization of policymaking authority has resulted in the "triumph of globalism," and fundamentally alters the citizen-state relationship assumed in democratic theory. Kirshner illustrates this process through four case studies: The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1945, The Trade Expansion Act of 1962, The Trade Act of 1974, The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, and further examines the impact of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 on the political and institutional structure of American trade politics up to the current period. American Trade Politics and the Triumph of Globalism makes a significant contribution to the study of both international trade and domestic American politics. This is essential reading for students and scholars of trade policy, international political economy, American politics, and democratic theory.

Trump and the Remaking of American Grand Strategy
Trump and the Remaking of American Grand Strategy

Author: Bastiaan van Apeldoorn

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-08-28

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 3031346920

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This book offers a comprehensive explanatory account of Trump's foreign policy by assessing its nature, determining the extent to which it broke with the policy of preceding presidencies, and explaining how this shift came about. We argue that Trump has succeeded in remaking America’s grand strategy by unmaking its long-standing strategy of what we call Open Door Globalism, a strategy of economic expansionism through the promotion of open markets across the globe and its institutionalization into a US-led liberal world order. Trump has broken with Open Door Globalism in probably lasting ways by adopting an outlook and strategy of neo-mercantilist economic nationalism based upon an ‘America First’ redefinition of US sovereignty and national interests. We explain this Trumpian shift in US foreign policy by focusing on the social sources of Trump’s foreign policy-making elite’s agency, analysing it both in terms of foreign policy-makers’ embeddedness in elite networks and within the changing global and domestic context. The latter, coupled with a crisis of established elite power, also indicates why Biden has not returned to Open Door Globalism but doubled down on some aspects of the Trumpian economic nationalist break.

The Politics of Resilience and Transatlantic Order
The Politics of Resilience and Transatlantic Order

Author: Gordon Friedrichs

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-17

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 042964745X

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This edited volume bridges the "analytical divide" between studies of transatlantic relations, democratic peace theory, and foreign policy analysis, and improves our theoretical understanding of the logic of crises prevention and resolution. The recent rise of populism and polarization in both the U.S.A and Europe adds to a host of foreign policy crises that have emerged in transatlantic relations over the last two decades. Through examining how democracies can manage to sustain and maintain mechanisms of crisis resilience that are embedded in the democratic peace, and particularly transatlantic relations, this book helps enhance the understanding of inter-democratic crisis resolution across issue areas. In doing so, it addresses some of the most important and prevalent crises of our time, such as anti-terrorism intervention in Afghanistan; Iran’s nuclear program; burden-sharing within North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO; key aspects of the international order, such as binding norms for cyber security and the integration of China into the Western-led international economic order; as well as domestic order shifts, such as the British vote to leave the European Union (EU) and the impact of the Trump administration populist foreign policy on transatlantic crisis resolution. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Transatlantic Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, and Comparative Politics.