scholarly journals American Realism Versus American Imperialism

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Campbell Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Policy

This article reviews three recent books critical of America's new “imperial” foreign policy, examines whether the United States can properly be compared to empires of the past, and identifies three aspects of contemporary American policy that may well be called imperialist. It also addresses some of the main objections to recent U.S. foreign policy made by American realist scholars and argues that traditional interstate realism can no longer readily apply to the problem ofAmerican unipolar preponderance over an anarchical, nuclear-armed world.

Understanding and Improving U.S. Financial Sanctions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Harris ◽  
Robert B. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Tools ◽  
The Past

This chapter uses the Iran and Russia cases to understand how modern U.S. financial sanctions operate (including how they interact with traditional tools of foreign policy) and how to better incorporate them into the United States’ standing arsenal of foreign policy tools. It does so by considering three broad sets of questions: First, how has the use of financial sanctions evolved over the past fifteen years? Second, what are the main ways in which financial sanctions impose costs on sanctioned countries? Finally, how should U.S. policymakers alter the use of financial sanctions to maximize their impact, sustain their strength, and minimize problematic side effects?

US Foreign Policy toward Latin America in the 19th Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Loveman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Central America ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
American Policy ◽  
The 19Th Century

U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America in the 19th century initially focused on excluding or limiting the military and economic influence of European powers, territorial expansion, and encouraging American commerce. These objectives were expressed in the No Transfer Principle (1811) and the Monroe Doctrine (1823). American policy was unilateralist (not isolationist); it gradually became more aggressive and interventionist as the idea of Manifest Destiny contributed to wars and military conflicts against indigenous peoples, France, Britain, Spain, and Mexico in the Western Hemisphere. Expansionist sentiments and U.S. domestic politics inspired annexationist impulses and filibuster expeditions to Mexico, Cuba, and parts of Central America. Civil war in the United States put a temporary halt to interventionism and imperial dreams in Latin America. From the 1870s until the end of the century, U.S. policy intensified efforts to establish political and military hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, including periodic naval interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, reaching even to Brazil in the 1890s. By the end of the century Secretary of State Richard Olney added the Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (“Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition . . .”), and President Theodore Roosevelt contributed his own corollary in 1904 (“in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to exercise an international police power”). American policy toward Latin America, at the turn of the century, explicitly justified unilateral intervention, military occupation, and transformation of sovereign states into political and economic protectorates in order to defend U.S. economic interests and an expanding concept of national security.

The Curious Case of Cuba in American Foreign Policy

1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bernell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Fidel Castro ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Issue ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
International Behavior

The bitter rivalry between the United States and Cuba has occupied a position as one of the principal political disputes in the Western Hemisphere for the past 35 years. Since the rise of Fidel Castro, the governments of these two countries have placed themselves on opposite sides of almost every major regional and global issue. They have long held vastly different ideas about what constitutes a good and just government, what kind of international behavior is legitimate, and the ends that foreign policy should serve. Moreover, they have not only harbored political differences but also maintained a very intense dislike of one another. The United States has attempted to sustain a picture of Cuba as an international outlaw, the source of much turmoil, crisis, and mischief in the world. Adding a personal dimension to the attacks, the United States has also sought to demonize Castro, creating and continually portraying an image of him as the embodiment of evil.

Elections will sharpen US focus on Libya

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Relative Influence ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
External Actors

Subject The Trump administration's policy on the Libya conflict. Significance In recent weeks, the United States has pursued a more active foreign policy towards Libya. This is a departure from its position of the past eight years of ‘leading from the back’ on Libya and comes as US President Donald Trump faces an impeachment investigation and elections in November 2020. With the vote approaching, Trump's opponents have increasingly criticised his position on Moscow, drawing attention to the presence of Russian mercenaries in Libya. Impacts Ties with Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the relative influence Russia has with them, will weigh on the administration’s thinking. The State Department may push more actively for a ceasefire when a conference of external actors in Libya takes place in Berlin. A ceasefire could fragment the forces fighting Haftar without robust external guarantees that his forces would not violate it.

The United States and Chilean Politics in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Foreign Policy ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
American Policy ◽  
The 1960S

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty and the United States. For the United States foreign policy apparatus, the Christian Democratic Party of Chile appeared to be a model partner in the realization of the goals of the Alliance for Progress, the Latin American policy conceived by President John F. Kennedy and continued, though without the same level of enthusiasm and hope, by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In its original conception, Kennedy's Latin American policy had ambitious economic, social, and political goals. The channeling of aid from the United States to Latin American countries in the 1960s sought to reflect the interplay between those aims, even if the implementation of the Alliance for Progress sorely lacked in consistency and constancy. In the case of Chile and Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty, the exceptionally generous provision of aid by the United States went hand in hand with a deep involvement of agents of U.S. foreign policy, especially the political staff of the embassy in Santiago, in the day-to-day functioning of Chilean politics—welcomed and, in many cases, invited by local actors.

American Foreign Policy and European Integration

1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajo Holborn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
European Integration ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent History ◽  
European Federation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Policy ◽  
The Moment

The prospect of a European federation has aroused great enthusiasm in the United States, but at the same time the difficulties encountered in its realization have generated a host of frustrations. It is not unusual, after five years of costly effort, to hear that the moment of crisis has arrived; that we must either push ruthlessly toward the goal, or abandon not only integration but possibly assistance to Europe as well. Perhaps these are the only alternatives that confront the United States. But before we fasten on to them irrevocably, it may be well to ask once more: What is the nature of the area that we are attempting to integrate, and how has our thought on the subject developed? Some appreciation of the recent history and problems of Europe, and of the circumstances that inspired postwar American policy, may help to determine whether or not the range of choice is as narrow as it looks at present to the United States.

scholarly journals SKYHAWK, SKYSHIELD, AND THE SOVIETS: REVISITING CANADA'S COLD WAR

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-475
Author(s):  
ASA MCKERCHER ◽  
TIMOTHY ANDREWS SAYLE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Account ◽  
The Past ◽  
Canadian Foreign Policy ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractFor the past two decades, Canadian international historians have largely missed the Cold War, or at least a significant portion of it. Certainly, there has been no shortage of studies of Canadian foreign policy featuring the bipolar struggle, and yet historians have largely confined their attention to Canada's admittedly crucial relationship with the United States, while Canadian–Soviet relations have been ignored. Indeed, in the historiography of Canada's Cold War international relations, the communist powers are largely missing. Hoping to challenge this limited focus, we frame our article around two Canada–US air defence exercises held in 1959 and 1960. While historians have viewed these exercises within the context of Canada's relationship with the United States, we highlight the wider Cold War framework in which Canadian policy was formed. After all, these exercises occurred during the mini-détente of the late 1950s and the collapse of the Paris summit in May 1960. As we demonstrate, the failure to take full account of the Cold War is a shortcoming of much of the writing on Canadian international relations, and so we offer an example of the need to take seriously Canada's foreign policy toward the communist bloc.

The Crisis in French Foreign Policy

1954 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-437
Author(s):  
J. B. Duroselle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Short Distance ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
French Foreign Policy

We are living at a time when events move more rapidly than in the past. It is therefore very difficult, even in an article for a review, to sum up the situation, and still more difficult to see even a short distance into the future. This is true for any country, even for those, like the United States and the Soviet Union, which have greater autonomy and greater power in the bipolar world in which we live. But it is probably in the case of France that the task is most difficult of all, for in this country the general problems are complicated by a particular kind of crisis growing out of internal conditions. As I write these lines, it is impossible for me to have the slightest idea as to what French foreign policy will be when the article is published.

Economic Interdependence and Foreign Policy in the Seventies

1972 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard N. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
European Economic Community ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The United States ◽  
Agricultural Trade ◽  
Economic Community ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Past

A Casual reading of contemporary news reports suggests that during the past decade economic issues have taken on growing importance in the relations of non-Communist developed countries. The disputes between the United States and Japan over textiles, between the United States and the European Economic Community over agricultural trade, and between France and Germany over currency alignments come readily to mind. It is perhaps symbolic of the enormous success of early postwar foreign policy that issues no graver than these play such a prominent part in relations among countries that, earlier in the century, were sporadically at each other's throats.

The United States, Belgium, and the Congo Crisis of 1960

1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Congo Crisis ◽  
The Government

Involvement in the Congo crisis of 1960 illustrates dramatically an American dilemma in foreign policy: the apparent incompatibility between the nation's emotional rejection of colonialism and the burdens of world leadership which include the consequences of anticolonialism. In 1960 the United States joined the Soviet Union in expediting the removal of the NATO partner, Belgium, from the Congo, helped to increase the power of the United Nations in the Congo at the expense of Belgian interests, and used its influence to destroy the Western-oriented regime of Moise Tshombe of secessionist Katanga. But in 1964 the United States was largely responsible for replacing the United Nations' forces in the Congo with Belgian troops; in 1965 the United States supported Tshombe's government in Leopoldville; and in 1966 and 1967 the United States joined Belgium in an uneasy vigil over the government of General Joseph Mobutu. It is not surprising that its efforts should have been interpreted by communists as American imperialism, by Africans as neocolonialism, and by many allies either as incorrigible naiveté or as hypocrisy.

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