The Ayatollah in the Cathedral

1987 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-145
Author(s):  
Muhammad Arif
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Third World ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Psychological Impact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Basic Flaw

"The Ayatollah in the Cathedral," to borrow the term coined by ThomasKuhn, is a book that opens the gateway to paradigmatic tranformations in thetheory of international relations and the art of effectively handling foreignaffairs. Dr. Kennedy was one of the 50 hostages who went through the 444days' ordeal in Iran. He gives a detailed account of the events witnessed andexperienced by him as a hostage.The traumatic psychological impact of being a hostage in a revolution isnot easy for others fully to understand as outsiders; still the reader is able tosee that there were many occasions when Dr. Kennedy, as a hostage, thoughtthat his death was imminent.A mediocre author would easily have made his story of captivity a "bestseller' by capitalizing on hatred and by saying what the domestic opinionmakers in the United States want to hear. Instead, Dr. Kennedy defies thiscommon heritage of American scholarship on the Middle East. In this book,he emerges as a serious thinker with an outstanding ability to analyze the factswith scientific objectivity. What makes this book a remarkable multidisciplinarymasterpiece is Mr. Kennedy's professionally skillful and scientificanalysis of the process and factors that shape U. S. foreign policy at theState Department; the weaknesses of U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East;the causes of the U. S. failure to understand the Third World in general and theMuslim world in particular; and an alternative to U. S. foreign policy makingthat would ensure mutual respect and trust not only in the Middle East but inthe Third World in general, thereby restoring the effectiveness of the UnitedStates as a world leader.This book is unique and pivotal in the area of international relationsbecause Dr. Kennedy attempts to provide an alternative approach for U. S.foreign policy. This approach would enable policymakers to protect U. S. interestswhile at the same time winning mutual trust in the Muslim world; goalswhich, under present policy, seem to be mutually exclusive.The basic flaw in American foreign policy making, as pointed out by Dr.Kennedy, is that "our analyses of over-seas problems are too often based onabstraction - what the problem should be rather than what really is. We indulgeourselves in the luxury of seeing what we want to see and denying whatwe do not want to see." (p. 196). Elaborating on the dangers of this approachto foreign policy, he says: "The problem is not professional but cultural. And ...

American commitments in the Third World: theory vs. practice

1987 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce W. Jentleson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Third World ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
The Third ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
The Third World

Amidst their other differences, the defeats suffered by the United States in Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon have a common explanation. In all three cases American strategy was based on “global commitments theory.” Interests were to be defended and global credibility strengthened by the making, maintaining, reinforcing, and sustaining of American commitments to Third World allies. However, the core assumptions on which the logic of global commitments theory rests are plagued with inherent fallacies. These fallacies can be identified analytically as patterns of dysfunction along four dimensions of foreign policy: decision-making, diplomacy, military strategy, and domestic politics. They also can be shown empirically to have recurred across the Vietnam, Iran, and Lebanon cases. The central theoretical conclusion questions the fundamental validity of global commitments theory as it applies to the exercise of power and influence in the Third World. Important prescriptive implications for future American foreign policy are also discussed.

IR-Theory and Transformation in the Greater Middle East: the Role of the United States

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
Henk Houweling ◽  
Mehdi Parvizi Amineh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Liberal Theory ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Policy Choices

AbstractThis article analyzes why post-Cold War American foreign policy regarding the Greater Middle East (GME) changed course and why the United States having a virtual military monopoly fails to achieve its war aim in Iraq. To that end, the authors consult realist and liberal theory in international relations. Realists have a security-driven policy agenda. They fail to create a micro-level foundation in political man for the posited collective interest at the level of the state. Realists therefore produce indeterminate results. Liberal theory in international relations does have a micro-foundation in explanations of foreign policy choices in the form of the economic man. Liberal scholars therefore inquire into domestic sources of foreign policy decisions. However, the liberal national interest is not just a summation of private actor interests. These dominant approaches therefore fail to explain US foreign policy choices and policy outcomes in the region under study.The three quotations below create the problematic of this study:Today we are presented with a unique strategic opportunity. For more than 50 years we were constrained by a bipolar rivalry with a superpower adversary. Today and tomorrow, we have an opportunity to pursue a strategy of engagement and to design a military force to help the strategy succeed. I fully agree with the defense strategy of helping to shape the environment to promote US interests abroad.John Shalikashvili, Clinton's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1997)[Y]ou live now in the Mohammedan nation which, if the traveler's accounts are to be believed, is intelligent and even refined. What is this irredeemable decadence dragging it down through the centuries? Is it possible that we have risen while they remain static? I do not think so. I rather think that the dual movement has occurred in opposite directions […] European races are often the greatest rogues, but at least they are rogues to whom God gave the will and the power and whom he seems to have destined for some time to be at the head of mankind […] the European is to other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them.Alexis de Tocqueville (1962: 75-76)Why is it that we did not complete our cultural journey, and how is it that we have ended up today in the very worst of times? What is it that made our predecessor pore over their desks, writing down and recording the marvels of mathematics and sciences and searching out the skies with the stars and constellations in order to discover their secrets, and driven by the love of knowledge, to study medicine and to devise medicaments even from the stomachs of bees […] Andalus became a lost place, then Palestine became Andalus.Mahmud Darwish (2004)

4. American foreign policy during the Cold War

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Saull
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Third World ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter offers a theoretically informed overview of American foreign policy during the Cold War. It covers the main historical developments in U.S. policy: from the breakdown of the wartime alliance with the USSR and the emergence of the US–Soviet diplomatic hostility and geopolitical confrontation,to U.S. military interventions in the third world and the U.S. role in the ending of the Cold War. The chapter begins with a discussion of three main theoretical approaches to American foreign policy during the Cold War: realism, ideational approaches, and socio-economic approaches. It then considers the origins of the Cold War and containment of the Soviet Union, focusing on the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. It also examines the militarization of U.S. foreign policy with reference to the Korean War, Cold War in the third world, and the role of American foreign policy in the ending of the Cold War.

Surveying the Revolutionary Arc

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-325
Author(s):  
Guy Laron
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Population ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

In the last decade, influenced by current economic trends, Cold War historians have made an effort to de-center the story of the Cold War. They have shifted their gaze from the center of the conflict—the face-offs in Europe between the Soviet Union and the United States—and cast an observing eye on the Third World. Unlike many Middle East historians who seek to understand the Middle East in terms of its unique cultures, languages, and religions, Cold War historians treat that area as part of a revolutionary arc that stretched from the jungles of Latin America to the jungles of Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the region's singularity, they focus on the themes that united guerilla fighters in the West Bank and the Makong Delta as well as leaders from Havana to Damascus: anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles, the yearning for self-definition, and the fight against what Third World revolutionaries perceived as economic exploitation. The sudden interest in what was considered, until recently, the periphery of the Cold War has undoubtedly been fueled by the zeitgeist of a new century in which the so-called peripheral regions are set to become more dominant economically. Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have a surplus of young skilled workers who are increasingly in demand by the global economy as the growth of world population slows and more prosperous countries in West Europe and North America are graying fast. The Third World consists today of the very regions where most of the economic growth in coming decades will take place. Dependency theory has gone topsy-turvy: leading economists now look with hope at countries such as China, India, Turkey, and Egypt and expect them to become the new engines of global growth. It is not surprising, then, that historians are now taking a stronger interest in the tangled history of the Cold War in the Third World and discovering the agency that these countries always had.

Dynamics of India's Strategic Environment

1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Indian Foreign Policy

India's strategic environment has undergone significant changes in recent years, especially in the seventies. From the point of view of Indian foreign policy, the strategic environment and its dynamics can be studied in three different spheres: (1) the global strategic environment, particularly consisting of the strategic confrontation between the United States and its allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other; (2) the immediate strategic environment, consisting mainly of Pakistan and China; and (3) the intermediate strategic environment, consisting of the non-aligned movement and the Third World. Needless to say, there is considerable and inevitable overlap and feedback among these three spheres of the strategic environment. They are, nevertheless, conceptually and operationally different spheres. The purpose of this article is to analyse the recent changes in these three different spheres of our strategic environment and the implications of these changes for our foreign policy in the foreseeable future.

scholarly journals Trump, Populism, and American Foreign Policy

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thorsten Wojczewski
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Self And Other

Abstract Employing a discursive understanding of populism and combing it with insights of poststructuralist international relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article examines the conceptual links between foreign policy and populist forms of identity construction, as well as the ideological force that populism can unfold in the realm of foreign policy. It conceptualizes populism and foreign policy as distinct discourses that constitute collective identities by relating Self and Other. Identifying different modes of Othering, the article illustrates its arguments with a case study on the United States under Donald Trump and shows how the Trumpian discourse has used foreign policy as a platform for the (re)production of a populist-nationalist electoral coalition. Unlike common conceptions of populism as an ideology that misrepresents reality, the article argues that the discourse develops its ideological appeal by obscuring the discursive construction of social reality and thereby promising to satisfy the subject's desire for a complete and secure identity.

American foreign policy in Middle East: new transformations under W. Bush and Obama administrations

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Abdulkhaliq Shamel Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
General Principle ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Middle East Countries ◽  
Syrian Revolution ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The U.S

This study attempts to diagnose the changes witnessed by the American foreign policy in the Middle East, in both of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, this phase witnessed shift at the level of the visions, beliefs and attitudes. which reflected on the nature of the of dealing with the issues of the region , and embodied the most prominent features of change to adopt the U.S. policy toward the countries of the region in a general principle encapsulates policies , texture pressure in order to establish the values of democracy and human rights as a philosophy and a general principle , and inwardly save its interests in the Middle East , the United States sought for six decades in middle east countries  to achieve stability on the expense of democracy , and through the support of totalitarian existing regimes , and cracking down on the opposition .but the events of September 11 forced them to change the approach to foreign policy encouraging democracy and claim to impose reforms. the study exposed to the George W. Bush hard doctrine, unilateral, military tool that give superiority to the implementation of the objectives of its foreign policy, on the contrast of president Obama doctrine with its realistic approach, which sees the need to combine all the tools of foreign policy to implement its objectives, Also this study return to realistic policy in its alliances and legitimacy, as well as dealt approach U.S. political discourse towards the Muslim world, and seek the main topics like, the war on Iraq in 2003and its impact on reformation in the Middle East .And the U.S. position on the Arab Spring, specifically the Syrian revolution. Also this study deals with U.S policy towards Iran Nuclear file, and The Arab-Israeli conflict .The study concluded that foreign policy changes occurred in George W. Bush second presidency is differ from his first presidency, and this transformation take a wider dimension and more comprehensive in Barack Obama's presidency.

Angola: The Present Opportunity

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
John A. Marcum
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Third World ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Henry Kissinger ◽  
The Third ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
Gulf Of Tonkin ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Present Opportunity

As remote and improbable a venue for a crisis in American foreign policy as Quemoy or the Gulf of Tonkin, Angola (1975) came to assume a Munich-like symbolism in the calculations of Americans who perceived a threat of Soviet expansionism into the third world during the latter years of the Brezhnev era. Smarting from a political/military shutout in Angola that came on the heels of a humiliating American exodus from Saigon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pointed to Angola as the “principal” cause of a deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations. Subsequent policy confrontations over Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Cambodia reinforced this perception of Angola as the beginning of the end of detente.

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