Ideologies of American Foreign Policy

John Callaghan, Brendon O'Connor, Mark Phythian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive account of ideology and its role in the foreign policy of the United States of America, this book investigates the way United States foreign policy has been understood, debated and explained in the period since the US emerged as a global force, on its way to becoming the world power.

Starting from the premise that ideologies facilitate understanding by providing explanatory patterns or frameworks from which meaning can be derived, the authors study the relationship between ideology and foreign policy, demonstrating the important role ideas have played in US foreign policy. Drawing on a range of US administrations, they consider key speeches and doctrines, as well as private conversations, and compare rhetoric to actions in order to demonstrate how particular sets of ideas – that is, ideologies – from anti-colonialism and anti-communism to neo-conservatism mattered during specific presidencies and how US foreign policy was projected, explained and sustained from one administration to another.

Bringing a neglected dimension into the study of US foreign policy, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of US foreign policy, ideology and politics.

1 The question of ideology

This is a book about ideology and its role in the foreign policy of the United States of America. Specifically, it is about the way United States foreign policy has been understood, debated and explained in the period since the US emerged as a world power, on its way to becoming the world power. It is therefore about ideas, but ideas of a particular character. The ideas, values, opinions and beliefs in question are those that are held by significant groups and that exhibit recurring patterns. These sets of ideas compete with rival ways of understanding by seeking to control political language and plans for public policy; they do this in order to justify the political arrangements that they deem necessary for the realisation of their objectives.

We start from two premises. First, that ideologies facilitate understanding by providing explanatory patterns or frameworks from which meaning can be derived. As Michael Freeden puts it, ideologies

map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the world we inhabit. Making sense, let it be said, does not always mean making good or right sense. But ideologies will often contain a lot of common sense.¹

The more complex the context, the more important ideological understanding becomes; it serves as a tool-kit via the application of which everything can make sense. Arguably, no context is more complex than the landscape confronting the foreign policy decision-maker, where uncertainty is the norm. For example, key but complex questions confronting US foreign policy decision-makers in the 1960s included: what are the aims of Soviet foreign policy? How do we understand revolutionary nationalism in the developing world? What is the nature of the Sino-Soviet split? Are we losing influence over an increasingly integrated Western Europe? The answers to these questions were inevitably arrived at and understood via the filtering mechanism of ideology. Hence, the study of the relationship between ideology and foreign policy is important.

Our second premise, though, is that the role of ideology in US foreign policy is under-studied and only poorly understood. In part, this reflects the fact that the nature and functions of ideology are themselves often poorly understood. It also reflects the extent to which academics have baulked at giving ideas a prominent role in the study of foreign policy because their influence is hard to measure precisely. In the field of political science tracing the exact consequences of ideas on policies and outcomes is seen as complicated and messy. We would argue, however, that just because such a tracing can be contested and difficult that does not mean it is not worth attempting. Our aim in this book is to demonstrate the important role ideas have played in US foreign policy. Drawing on a range of US administrations we consider key speeches and doctrines, as well as private conversations, and compare rhetoric to actions in order to demonstrate how particular sets of ideas – that is, ideologies – from anti-colonialism and anti-communism to neoconservatism mattered during specific presidencies. This, then, is the rationale for this book; to bring what otherwise risks being a neglected dimension into the study of US foreign policy. But before we go on to discuss the role of ideology in US foreign policy we should begin with a discussion of ideology itself.

Understanding political ideology

Ideology is a much misunderstood term that tends to be misused and underutilised in academic scholarship. The stigmatising of ideology is not entirely surprising given that from the time of the Russian revolution ideologies have been presented (and caricatured) as pernicious closed systems of thought designed to explain the world according to the dictates of a single, totalising theory. Communism and fascism were the prime examples. In this reckoning, ideologues – the high priests of such ‘political religions’ – sought to change the world in accordance with abstract visions of the world both as it was supposed to be and as it was destined to become. Much of the violence of the twentieth century derived from the attempt to fit or socially engineer societies into these ideologically prescribed moulds. Thinking of ideology in this way would clearly suggest that while the Soviet Union was based on and guided by ideology, the US (and the liberal West more broadly) was not.² This depiction was at the heart of the ‘end of ideology’ thesis.³ In this version, ideology was always explicit, systematic, coherent and rigid.⁴ Hence, conservatism, liberalism and even socialism were said to be un-ideological in so far as they eschewed such totalising ambitions and embraced more open, flexible, sceptical and pragmatic ways of thinking about the pros and cons of piecemeal change.

This no more than reflects how the experiences of fascism and communism in the twentieth century led to ideology becoming strongly associated with extremes and with rigid dogma and brutality. The word itself became suggestive of something inflexible, dangerous and threatening. It developed into a term of abuse, with its implied opposite being sensible, pragmatic behaviour and dispassionate analysis. Although the origins of the term are usually traced to Antoine Destutt de Tracy,⁵ who wished to create a branch of study concerned with the study of ideas, ideology soon became associated with distortion, deception and propaganda. The influential writings of both Karl Marx and later Karl Mannheim created the ever-popular dichotomy between ideology and truth. Mannheim agreed with Marx that a non-ideological standpoint could be identified. Whereas Marx thought this standpoint was that of the proletariat, Mannheim believed it could be occupied by the intelligentsia. For anyone familiar with debates about epistemology, or anyone who has studied the course of twentieth century politics, Mannheim’s appeal to a political truth that goes beyond ideology has no more support today than the Marxist-Leninist case for ‘scientific socialism’ as the standpoint of the proletariat. Nevertheless, despite the naivety and philosophical and experiential sophism of the position, the negative framings of the term ideology associated with Mannheim and Marx remain. As Terry Eagleton contends: “Roughly speaking, one central lineage, from Hegel and Marx to Georg Lukács and some later Marxist thinkers, has been much preoccupied with ideas of true and false cognition, with ideology as illusion, distortion and mystification.”⁶ For Marx, ideology was the smokescreen that legitimised the capitalist system and communism was the post-ideological scientific truth that was there to be uncovered by the forces of history (this being in Marx’s term the difference between false consciousness and true consciousness).

It is not surprising that the pejorative conception of ideology has left a negative legacy, placing ‘scholarly blinkers’ on how the term has come to be viewed.⁷ Ironically (given Marx’s view that communism was post-ideological), this negative view of ideology was compounded a hundred times over by the experience of Marxist ideology in practice in the form of communist states. As Michael Freeden has observed, “the emergence of these totalitarian ideologies reinforced the widespread view of ideology as doctrinaire, dogmatic, closed, and inflicted on an unwilling populace.”⁸ A similar view of ideology as totalising drives the more recent post-structuralist critique of ideology. As Eagleton points out: “If the ‘end-of-ideology’ theorists viewed all ideology as inherently closed, dogmatic and inflexible, postmodernist thought tends to see all ideology as teleological, ‘totalitarian’ and metaphysically grounded. Grossly travestied in this way, the concept of ideology obediently writes itself off.”⁹ Freeden makes a similar point noting that:

An ‘ism’ is a slightly familiar, faintly derogatory term – in the United States even ‘liberalism’ is tainted with that brush. It suggests that artificially constructed sets of ideas, somewhat removed from everyday life, are manipulated by the powers that be – and the powers that want to be. They attempt to control the world of politics and to force us into a rut of doctrinaire thinking and conduct …¹⁰

One consequence of this is the promotion of pragmatism over ideology. Today Realism in International Relations is often claimed to be a system of describing the way the world works that is non-ideological (claims that sound rather like those made by scientific Marxism in an earlier era).¹¹ Conservatives, most notably Russell Kirk, have contended that the conservative (pragmatic) mind is the exact opposite of the ideological mind which seeks, unrealistically, to bring heaven to earth. Here ideology is conflated with a utopianism that can be both dangerous and naive. American liberals never seem to tire of calling their conservative opponents from Goldwater through to George W. Bush ‘ideological’, while painting themselves as more practical and pragmatic (a rhetorical stance particularly favoured by Barack Obama during his time as President). As Eagleton has written, “nobody would claim that their own thinking was ideological, just as nobody would habitually refer to themselves as Fatso. Ideology, like halitosis, is in this sense what the other person has.”¹²

Hence, it is important for us to separate actuality from caricature in thinking about the role of ideology; to take ideology seriously. In most instances, ideologies are not all-embracing, self-sufficient dogmas (totalitarian ideologies were the exception to the rule in this respect), but rather systems of ideas competing for the attention of citizens and this requires of them significant flexibility and adaptability. We can see these attributes very clearly with reference to one of the most successful of all ideologies, liberalism.

Though the term ‘liberalism’ was not coined until 1815 and did not become associated with a political party until the mid-nineteenth century, we can trace its roots to the Reformation and the writings of seventeenth century thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. At the core of this new thinking was the idea of individual rights. The individual was said to be possessed of natural rights – for example, the right to acquire and own property – and the ability to reason. Upon this foundation Locke argued for government by consent and toleration of opposing (religious) viewpoints. Good government in this view protected the rights and liberty of the individual and concerned itself only with “life, liberty and estate” (property). Liberty was understood as the absence of external constraints. Good government was essentially minimal government, permitting the individual maximum freedom to pursue his own interests as he saw fit. Later thinkers built on these foundations to stress the possibility of social progress through a questioning and empirical approach to knowledge and scepticism in relation to received truths, whether religious or otherwise. Social progress was possible, in this view, on the basis of reason and the removal of obstacles in the form of dogma, privilege and superstition. In the American War of Independence and the French Revolution such thinking led to the assertion of universal rights, the legal and political equality of citizens, and the foundation of government on the basis of consent. Adam Smith applied elements of this reasoning to political economy, arguing that as the individual was the best judge of his own interests the most efficient allocation of resources would result from removing barriers to the exercise of individual liberty. This also pointed to the virtues of minimal government and sweeping away all forms of arbitrary interferences such as those associated with monarchy, aristocracy, privilege and earlier systems of wealth creation such as mercantilism. But by the end of the nineteenth century many liberals had come to question the idea that liberty was simply the absence of external constraints. An increasing number of liberals saw that state intervention was necessary to supply correctives to the evident failin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The question of ideology
• 2. The age of ideology in foreign policy
• 3. Anti-communism fixed
• 4. The Johnson administration and the defence of freedom in Vietnam
• 5. Doctrine, dominoes and democracy in the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy
• 6. The exceptionalism of Ronald Reagan: ideology and Cold War, from intensification to end
• 7. George W. Bush administration: terrorism, Iraq and freedom
• 8. Ideological framings of American foreign policy: the domestic legacy
• Index