The Study of International Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows: Theories of the Radical Right and the Radical Left

1974 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole R. Holsti
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
International Politics ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Right

The political spectrum has often been viewed as a linear continuum on which the extremes of the right and left occupy the most antithetical positions. The alternative hypothesis is that there are some dimensions on which the extremes resemble each other. This essay examines the theories of international politics and foreign policy espoused by scholars of the radical right and left. Two dozen points of convergence are grouped under five headings: Understanding history and politics, the causes of war, the nature of the enemy, the conditions of peace, and ends and means in politics. Because the essay is focused on studies of international politics since the outbreak of World War II, considerable attention is devoted to the parallels between rightwing theories of the USSR and Soviet foreign policy, and left wing explanations of the United States and American foreign policy. The conclusion suggests that both theories are fundamentally flawed in two respects: (1) As employed by their proponents, the theories appear incapable of being falsified; and (2) studies employing them are marred by serious methodological flaws that violate the canons of systematic inquiry.

scholarly journals German Question in the Foreign Policy Strategy of the USA in the Second Half of the 1940s – 1980s

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-92
Author(s):  
Dmytro Lakishyk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
German Question ◽  
The Usa

The article examines US policy towards West Germany after World War II, covering a historical span from the second half of the 1940s to the 1980s. It was US policy in Europe, and in West Germany in particular, that determined the dynamics and nature of US-German relations that arose on a long-term basis after the formation of Germany in September 1949. One of the peculiarities of US-German relations was the fact that both partners found themselves embroiled in a rapidly escalating international situation after 1945. The Cold War, which broke out after the seemingly inviolable Potsdam Accords, forced the United States and Germany to be on one side of the conflict. Despite the fact that both states were yesterday’s opponents and came out of the war with completely different, at that time, incomparable, statuses. A characteristic feature of US policy on the German question in the postwar years was its controversial evolution. The American leadership had neither a conceptual plan for development, nor a clear idea of Germany’s place in the world, nor an idea of how to plan the country’s future. However, the deterioration of relations between the USA and the USSR and the birth of the two blocs forced the US government to resort to economic revival (the Marshall Plan) and military-political consolidation of Western Europe and Germany (NATO creation). US policy toward Germany has been at the heart of its wider European policy. The United States favored a strong and united Western Europe over American hegemony, trying to prevent the spread of Soviet influence. Joint participation in the suppression of communism, however, could not prevent the periodic exacerbation of relations between the United States and Germany, and at the same time did not lead to an unconditional follow-up of the West Germans in the fairway of American foreign policy.

The United States, The United Nations and Bi-Polar Politics

1950 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward H. Buehrig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
United Nations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Actual Effect ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Natural Expression

The United Nations cannot be expected to abolish the balancing process, which is the natural expression of the struggle for advantage and influence in international politics. It does, however, endeavor to modify the process. What are the methods which it employs? What actual effect have they had in promoting security? Above all, what relevance do they have for the conduct of American foreign policy?

The “Skeleton Key” — American Foreign Policy, European Unity, and German Rearmament, 1949–54

1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
World War ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
European Unity

An older colleague recently observed to me that today we stand further removed in time from the end of World War II than Americans at the beginning of that conflict were from the Spanish American War. To those Americans of 1939, he said, the war with Spain seemed almost antediluvian, while to us World War II lives vividly in memory, and its consequences still shape our lives. As a student of modern American foreign policy, I found my colleague's observation particularly appropriate. American and Soviet soldiers still face each other in the middle of Germany, and Europe remains divided along the lines roughly set by the liberating armies. Yet could we now be facing major changes? Will an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons in Europe, and glasnost in the Soviet Union transform this environment? Will the postwar division of Europe come to an end? What will be the consequences for the United States?

scholarly journals Colonial empires and USA policy in the South-East Asia after the 1945

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 252-255
Author(s):  
Stanislav Gennadyevich Malkin ◽  
Sergey Olegovich Buranok ◽  
Dmitriy Aleksandrovich Nesterov
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Military

The following paper analyzes the characteristics of the US foreign policy decision-making process at the beginning of the Cold War, due to the active appeal of representatives of the political establishment, the military and the countrys expert community to the colonial experience of the European powers in terms of the prospects of applying their experience in ensuring colonial control in Southeast Asia before and after the end of the World War II as part of the US political course in this region. In addition, it is concluded that more attention should be paid to the role and, therefore, to the prosopographic profile of the experts (in the broad sense of the word), who collaborated with the departments responsible for the development of American foreign policy, such as the Department of State and the Pentagon, and formulated many of the conclusions, which, at least rhetorically, formed the basis of Washingtons course in Southeast Asia after 1945. Special attention is paid to interpretations of the role of colonial knowledge in the light of the unfolding Cold War in the third world, proposed by British diplomats and the military to their American colleagues in the logic of the special relations between Great Britain and the United States.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-242
Author(s):  
David F. Schmitz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The One ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
Second Chance

The crisis of the 1930s made changes in American foreign policy a necessity, and events demonstrated that Franklin Roosevelt made the correct decisions on the major issues to protect American interests and meet the challenges. For FDR, World War II was the second chance for the United States to create a lasting peace, one based on the Grand Alliance, collective security, and the United Nations. Beyond just the defeat of Germany and Japan, it was an opportunity to build a world order that would produce peace and prosperity through a cooperative, multilateral international system. This was Roosevelt's great legacy, to envision a different world than the one that proceeded the war and to begin to establish the values and institutions it would be built on. In doing so, he transformed American foreign policy. Roosevelt was the most important and most successful foreign policymaker in the nation's history.

FDR and World Order: Globalizing the Monroe Doctrine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Smith
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Security ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
Liberal Democratic

This chapter examines Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal democratic internationalism and his efforts to assure American national security by constructing a stable world order based on the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which the United States sought to globalize in the aftermath of the Axis defeat in World War II. It first considers how FDR infused American liberalism with a healthy dose of realism about the appropriateness of democracy for other countries in the aftermath of World War II before discussing anti-imperialism as a component of American foreign policy. It also explores the United States's promotion of democracy and pursuit of a liberal world order as a means of countering Soviet imperialism. It argues that liberal democratic internationalism has been the American way of practicing balance-of-power politics in world affairs, and that the dominant logic of American foreign policy was dictated by concerns for national security.

Thomas Jefferson and US Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis D. Cogliano
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Vice President ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Early American ◽  
Louisiana Purchase ◽  
The Right

Thomas Jefferson was a key architect of early American foreign policy. He had a clear vision of the place of the new republic in the world, which he articulated in a number of writings and state papers. The key elements to his strategic vision were geographic expansion and free trade. Throughout his long public career Jefferson sought to realize these ends, particularly during his time as US minister to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president. He believed that the United States should expand westward and that its citizens should be free to trade globally. He sought to maintain the right of the United States to trade freely during the wars arising from the French Revolution and its aftermath. This led to his greatest achievement, the Louisiana Purchase, but also to conflicts with the Barbary States and, ultimately, Great Britain. He believed that the United States should usher in a new world of republican diplomacy and that it would be in the vanguard of the global republican movement. In the literature on US foreign policy, historians have tended to identify two main schools of practice dividing practitioners into idealists and realists. Jefferson is often regarded as the founder of the idealist tradition. This somewhat misreads him. While he pursued clear idealistic ends—a world dominated by republics freely trading with each other—he did so using a variety of methods including diplomacy, war, and economic coercion.

The New Deal, Cuba, and the Rise of a Global Foreign Economic Policy

1977 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jules R. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Foreign Economic Policy ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
The North ◽  
Sugar Market ◽  
The Right

By early 1933 President Roosevelt's advisors concluded that the United States Government would have to play a direct role in the Cuban economy. That nation, economically dependent upon the North American sugar market and politically dependent through the Platt amendment that gave the United States the right to intervene in its internal affairs, was economically prostrate and on the verge of civil war. The United States proceeded to abandon both the free trade and protectionist doctrines that had divided the President's advisors for a program that structurally integrated United States-Cuban trade and employed federal funds to support cooperative Cuban leaders. All of this, Professor Benjamin believes, foreshadowed the massive foreign trade and lending programs so common to American foreign policy after World War II.

Colombian Foreign Policy in the 1980s: The Search for Leverage

1985 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Michael Bagley ◽  
Juan Gabriel Totkatlian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Year ◽  
World War ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Profile Approach

During 1981 and early 1982 - the first year and a half of Reagan's first term in office - Colombia, under the leadership of Liberal President Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978-82), surfaced as one of the staunchest U.S. allies in the turbulent Caribbean Basin. That Colombia would endorse the broad outlines of Reagan's policies came as no surprise to anyone, for the country had pursued a consistently pro-North American foreign policy throughout the post-World War II period. What did surprise many observers was the extent to which President Turbay abandoned his country's traditional low-profile approach to Caribbean and hemispheric affairs and replaced it with an activist foreign policy closely identified with the Reagan Administration.Colombia is structurally dependent upon the United States in economic, technological and military terms. While the country's industrial capacity has grown substantially in recent decades, the economy still relies heavily on agro-exports-, coffee alone accounts for two-fifths of the country's foreign exchange earnings.

Right-Wing Populism and International Issues

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Christiane Lemke
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
International Issues ◽  
Right Wing Populism ◽  
The Right ◽  
European Parliament Elections

Most studies analyze right-wing populism in the framework of the nation state, while its impact on foreign policy is understudied. This article focuses on the German Alternative for Germany (AfD) to highlight its foreign policy stance. How is the AfD deliberately operating not only nationally but also on the European level? What are their aims and goals? How has the surge in right-wing populism impacted international issues and what does the rise of the right mean for Germany’s role in Europe and in world politics? In the first part of the paper, I contextualize the rise and significance of right-wing populism in Germany within the framework of social and political theory. Second, I address the AfD’s position to European affairs more specifically, including its stance in the European Parliament elections in 2019. Third, I highlight key topoi of the AfD’ s position regarding the eu, the United States and nato by drawing on critical discourse analysis. The analysis shows that the AfD is aiming to redefine Germany's foreign policy consensus based on the special responsibility paradigm that has characterized Germany's foreign policy after World War II. The party is not only nationalistic in outlook but moreover aiming to revise key paradigms of Germany's foreign and European policies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document