America, Europe, and the International System

1969 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-341
Author(s):  
Linda B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
United States Policy

A useful consequence of America's deepening involvement in Asian affairs is the widespread questioning of the premises that arc assumed to underlie United States policy, but debate stressing the weaknesses of American strategy in Vietnam without placing present dilemmas in a broader perspective is deficient. Similarly, discussion that ignores the distinctive features of the American historical experience, especially its influence on the processes of policy-making, courts irrelevance. Failure to look beyond the confines of the Vietnam predicament may prove as detrimental to observers as to officialdom, yet both find the process of distinguishing the relative importance of internal and external constraints increasingly arduous. In an era of contagious domestic unrest in industrialized countries and ambiguous conflicts in less developed geographical areas, both may be tempted to generalize too broadly from a dominant though still restricted series of events. Such, such are the joys of appraising American foreign policy during the Vietnam anguish.

1. Theories of US foreign policy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Offensive Realism ◽  
Defensive Realism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines some of the competing theories that have been advanced to explain U.S. foreign policy. In trying to explain the foreign policy of the United States, a number of competing theories have been developed by International Relations scholars. Some theories focus on the role of the international system in shaping American foreign policy while others argue that various domestic factors are the driving force. The chapter first considers some of the obstacles to constructing a theory of foreign policy before discussing some of the competing theories of American foreign policy, including defensive realism, offensive realism, liberalism, Marxism, neoclassical realism, and constructivism. The chapter proceeds by reviewing the theoretical debate over the origins of the Cold War and the debate over the most appropriate grand strategy that the United States should follow in the post-Cold War era.

United States Policy Toward Regional Organization

1969 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Nye
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Regional Organization ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
United States Policy ◽  
The Past

Regionalism has a long history as an important instrument of American foreign policy. Yet such a statement does not do justice to the variations in goals, means, and settings that have affected United States policy toward participation in and cooperation with regional organizations. These differences have been the cause of serious debate in the past and are becoming so again as we approach the 1970's.

America's Departments of State: Irregular and Regular Syndromes of Policy Making

1981 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 911-927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bert A. Rockman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modal Characteristics ◽  
Policy Syndromes ◽  
General Explanation

This article (1) sketches a general explanation for the growth of coordinative machinery and of irregular personnel in modern governments; (2) identifies both general and specific reasons for this phenomenon in the United States with special reference to foreign policy making; (3) identifies within the American foreign policy-making context the modal characteristics of irregular and regular syndromes of policy making, and the conjunction between personnel and institutional base; (4) traces the implications arising from these different policy syndromes; and (5) evaluates some proposals for improving the coherence and knowledge base of American foreign policy making. The problems of defining foreign policy authority, assuring an integrated perspective, and effectively using specialized expertise are best seen in terms of the larger problem of governance in Washington against which all proposals for reform must be abraded.

The United States, Moral Norms, and Governing Ideas in World Politics: A Review Essay

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 223-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathal J. Nolan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Moral Principles

Nolan reviews three works describing the influence of ethics on modern international relations, namely Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of the Warlord States (Dorothy V. Jones); The Age of Rights (Louis Henkin); and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs (Robert W. McElroy). All present timely academic and historical arguments for existing opportunities to bring ethics into world politics. Jones and Henkin concern themselves most with moral principles involved in establishing international law and organizations, while McElroy discusses the same issues from the unique perspective of U.S. foreign policy. Nolan gives full recognition to the traditional role of democratic states, particularly the United States., in shaping the moral norms of the international system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through ethics that are Western in origin but certainly not in their inherent content.

scholarly journals La liberté est-elle divisible? Comment rapprocher les concepts de mission et de sécurité dans une politique étrangère américaine

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-531
Author(s):  
Cathal J. Nolan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
American Diplomacy ◽  
American Mission

This article seeks to outline the complex pattern of liberty and national security in international relations through a survey of the historical relationship between those concerns in the foreign policy of what is still the world's most important democratic country, the United States. This study is not a history per se of American diplomacy concerning this cluster of issues, although it is historical in approach. Nor is it directly concerned with an on-going theoretical debate over whether or not democracies are inherently more peaceful than other types of states, despite drawing upon elements of that debate and having implications for it. Instead, what is presented here is an interpretive survey of the importance in U.S. foreign policy of a set of key ideas about international order — specifically, the attempt to resolve ideas of "American mission " with the requirements of security, through increasingly active linkage of U.S. national security to the internal character of foreign regimes. It then explores how that tension became manifest in two policy settings : the United Nations, one of America's major multilateral relationship s, and the Soviet Union, its principal bilateral relationship. In short, this study is concerned with governing ideas in American diplomacy; with how such ideas arise and are sustained or challenged; with how they have been disseminated among allies (and even adversaries) ; and the implications of the reality that the United States have succeeded in imbedding these notions in the structures of the international System. The essay concludes with what should prove a controversial, qualified approval of the new 'liberal realism' evident in American foreign policy in the early 1990s.

Colonialism as a Problem in American Foreign Policy

1952 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip W. Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
United States Policy ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Political Status

Colonialism has been a sore spot in the handling of American foreign policy in the post-World War II period largely because of ambivalent forces, domestic and foreign, which have been tugging at the United States. At the heart of the colonial problem which has faced this country is the central issue of eventual political status for colonial territories. On this question United States policy has traditionally been and continues to be one of condemnation of colonialism and in favor of independence for colonial peoples, with certain reservations added in small print—the grant of independence should not be too hurried and it should be given only to peoples who desire it and are capable of assuming the responsibilities involved.

Finding Faith in Foreign Policy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregorio Bettiza
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sacred Landscapes ◽  
Muslim Politics ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, religion has been systematically brought to the fore of American foreign policy. US foreign policymakers have been increasingly tasked with promoting religious freedom globally, delivering humanitarian and development aid abroad through faith-based channels, pacifying Muslim politics and reforming Islamic theologies in the context of fighting terrorism, and engaging religious actors to solve multiple conflicts and crises around the world. Across a range of different domains, religion has progressively become an explicit and organized subject and object of US foreign policy in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. If God was supposed to be vanquished by the forces of modernity and secularization, why has the United States increasingly sought to understand and manage religion abroad? In what ways have the boundaries between faith and state been redefined as religion has become operationalized in American foreign policy? What kind of world order is emerging in the twenty-first century as the most powerful state in the international system has come to intervene in sustained and systematic ways in sacred landscapes around the globe? This book addresses these questions by developing an original theoretical framework and drawing upon extensive empirical research and interviews. It argues that American foreign policy and religious forces have become ever more inextricably entangled in an age witnessing a global resurgence of religion and the emergence of a postsecular world society.

Anglo-american policy in Greece (1946-50)

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spero Simeon Zachary Paravantes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Current Financial Crisis ◽  
Post War

While trying to understand and explain the origins and dynamics of Anglo-American foreign policy in the pre and early years of the Cold War, the role thatperception played in the design and implementation of foreign policy became acentral focus. From this point came the realization of a general lack of emphasisand research into the ways in which the British government managed to convincethe United States government to assume support for worldwide British strategicobjectives. How this support was achieved is the central theme of this dissertation.This work attempts to provide a new analysis of the role that the British played in the dramatic shift in American foreign policy from 1946 to 1950. Toachieve this shift (which also included support of British strategic interests in theEastern Mediterranean) this dissertation argues that the British used Greece, first asa way to draw the United States further into European affairs, and then as a way toanchor the United States in Europe, achieving a guarantee of security of theEastern Mediterranean and of Western Europe.To support these hypotheses, this work uses mainly the British andAmerican documents relating to Greece from 1946 to 1950 in an attempt to clearlyexplain how these nations made and implemented policy towards Greece duringthis crucial period in history. In so doing it also tries to explain how Americanforeign policy in general changed from its pre-war focus on non-intervention, to the American foreign policy to which the world has become accustomed since 1950. To answer these questions, I, like the occupying (and later intervening)powers did, must use Greece as an example. In this, I hope that I may be forgivensince unlike them, I intend not to make of it one. My objectives for doing so lie notin justifying policy, but rather in explaining it. This study would appear to havespecial relevance now, not only for the current financial crisis which has placedGreece once again in world headlines, but also for the legacy of the Second WorldWar and the post-war strife the country experienced which is still playing out todaywith examples like the Distomo massacre, German war reparations and on-goingsocial, academic and political strife over the legacy of the Greek Civil War.

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