scholarly journals ‘‘The Council has been your Creation'': Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Paradigm of the American Foreign Policy Establishment?

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
PRISCILLA ROBERTS

He was born in 1893 in the New York brownstone house near Washington Square where he lived all his adult life, a member of Edith Wharton's settled, circumscribed world of ordered privilege whose affluent, well-travelled, and sophisticated men and women traced their lineage back to the Founding Fathers and their principles to the American Revolution. His father was an artist who served as Consul General to Italy, and Armstrong was brought up in a milieu which took for granted the fact that there existed a world outside the United States. He died in 1973, as the United States finally withdrew from the Vietnam War, a conflict which deeply distressed him and shattered the foreign policy elite and its controlling consensus, whose creation had been a major part of his life's work. In an obituary notice Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., described him as “a New York gentleman of a vanishing school,” who “treated every one, old or young, famous or unknown, with the same generous courtesy and concern.”

Author(s):  
Feng Zhang

This chapter examines US foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific region. It first considers America’s rise as an major power and the introduction of the Open Door policy that became a major component of US policy during the period 1899–1941. It then shows how, with the conclusion of World War II, the United States achieved maritime hegemony in the Asia-Pacific and the historic policy of Open Door was rendered irrelevant by American preponderance. It also discusses the Korean War of 1950 and how it prompted the United States aggressively to apply the containment doctrine in Asia by establishing the so-called ‘hub-and-spokes’ bilateral alliance system; the outbreak of the Vietnam War; the Richard Nixon–Henry Kissinger opening to China in the early 1970s; and American foreign policy under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.


1953 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Channing B. Richardson

It has now become quite axiomatic to say that United States participation in the United Nations system is having an effect upon the substance I of United States foreign policy. What is not so well known as yet is that this participation is the cause for the creation of a new piece of machinery I for aiding the conduct of our foreign policy. Established in 1946 as the United States Delegation to the United Nations, this new outpost of the Department of State illustrates in its organization and operation many of the changes which have come about as bilateral diplomacy has given way to multilateral, “conference-type” United Nations diplomacy. Located at the headquarters of the international organization in New York City, the permanent Mission and its work are symbols of the importance and endless variety of problems posed for American foreign policy by our membership in and support for the United Nations. Since it is still in the process of development, the following study of the organization and role of the United States Mission to the United Nations should be taken as a preliminary analysis.


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-450
Author(s):  
Linda B. Miller

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002).Ivo H. Daadler and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003).Did 11 September 2001 change everything about the United States including its foreign policy? Have the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the scholarly calculus of what should be studied and how? Must authors determined to assert the continuing importance of history, geopolitics or domestic factors as explanatory variables recast or abandon their existing conclusions to highlight the newer realities after the terrorist attacks and their aftermath? If so, how? These questions lead to others. Is there a usable American past that helps illuminate the dilemmas of the present? If so, where is it found? Is there a sustainable future role for the US in the world, beyond ideology or improvisation? If so, what are its contours? Is the Bush administration truly ‘radical’ or even ‘revolutionary’ in its imperial thrusts? After Afghanistan and Iraq, is American foreign policy still largely a success story? Or is the United States en route to becoming an ordinary country, albeit one with extraordinary resources in both hard and soft power?


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